Chapter One – The Glow of Ordinary Days
The apartment wasn't much — two rooms stacked one atop the other, with walls thin enough that Kenji could hear the couple next door argue about money and children almost every night. The windows rattled whenever the freight trains passed the factory yards, and in summer the heat trapped between the concrete towers made the nights sticky and sleepless. But Aiko had found a way to make it bearable.
She filled the space with little touches that softened the edges: a vase of cheap plastic flowers on the sill that caught the morning light, cushions sewn from scraps of fabric she brought home from the shop, a small shrine in the corner where incense curled in lazy ribbons of smoke. She had a way of making things feel alive, even when they were second-hand or broken.
Kenji would come home from his shift at the warehouse, clothes reeking of dust and iron, shoulders aching from lifting crates, and the sight of her waiting in that dim little apartment was enough to drain the weight from him. She wasn't beautiful in the way magazines sold — her hair was always tied back with whatever ribbon was at hand, her cheeks dusted with flour or oil from cooking, her hands roughened from work — but to Kenji, she was the only thing that kept the world from collapsing inward.
"Smoke again?" she said one evening, wrinkling her nose as he came through the door. The scent clung to him even before he lit the next cigarette.
Kenji shrugged, dropping his bag by the wall. "It keeps me awake."
"It's killing you," she replied, not unkindly. She reached over, plucked the box of cigarettes from his breast pocket, and set it on the counter out of his reach. "Dinner first. Then if you really need it, you can have one."
He sighed but didn't argue. That was how it always went. Aiko had the kind of stubbornness that could bend steel beams if she pushed long enough. He used to joke that she'd been born a foreman in another life, and she would just laugh, swatting at him with her dish towel.
Dinner that night was fried mackerel, miso soup, and pickled daikon — simple, cheap, and perfect. They ate cross-legged on the tatami, the clatter of chopsticks filling the silence between them. Outside, the factory horns groaned, signaling another shift change, another tide of men spilling into the yards.
"You should eat more fish," Aiko said, pointing at his bowl with her chopsticks. "It's good for your heart."
"My heart's fine," Kenji muttered.
"Your lungs aren't."
He smirked at that, but it was a tired smirk, one he wore to cover the ache that never quite left his chest. She saw through it, of course. She always did.
Later that night, after the dishes were washed and the fan creaked overhead, they lay together in the narrow bed. Aiko curled against him, her hand on his chest.
"Promise me," she whispered.
"Promise you what?"
"That you'll take care of yourself. Even if I'm not here to nag you about it."
Kenji frowned in the dark, his hand tightening around hers. "Don't talk like that. You're not going anywhere."
But she only smiled, that soft, knowing smile of hers, and kissed his shoulder. "Still. Promise me."
He didn't answer. Couldn't. The words stuck in his throat, heavy as stones.
Days blurred into weeks, weeks into months. The factory kept pulling at them — long hours, dangerous shifts, foremen barking orders while machines screamed. Kenji worked nights hauling cargo, his back straining under steel beams and heavy crates, while Aiko took shifts at the textile mill. They rarely had full days together, but when they did, they treated them like treasures: walks to the market, stolen afternoons at the riverbank, bowls of ramen shared in silence.
Aiko laughed often, laughed at things that didn't deserve laughter. She laughed when the roof leaked and they had to put pots out to catch the drips. She laughed when Kenji burned the rice one night trying to surprise her with dinner. She even laughed when she caught him sneaking a cigarette in the stairwell, though she cuffed him for it afterward.
Her laughter was the only thing in Osaka that felt untouched by smoke and steel.
One night, during the rainy season, Kenji came home soaked through, his boots squelching water across the floor. The sky had torn itself open on his walk back, and he was shivering by the time he slid the door shut. Aiko clucked her tongue and immediately set about fussing over him, peeling his wet shirt off, rubbing him down with an old towel, and scolding him all the while.
"You'll catch your death out there. Didn't you have the sense to wait for it to pass?"
"It was passing straight into morning," Kenji grumbled, but secretly he liked the attention.
She lit incense, set a kettle on the stove, and soon the little apartment smelled of tea and warmth again. He sat cross-legged, watching her bustle about, and felt the ache in his bones ease. For a fleeting moment, the world outside — the endless shifts, the machines, the factory accidents that whispered through the news every few months — all of it vanished.
It was just them, their little fortress of light in the middle of the storm.
Kenji would never forget those days, not because they were extraordinary, but because they weren't. They were ordinary in the best way: quiet, fragile, precious. Aiko teasing him about his cigarettes, her hand brushing his as she handed him tea, her head resting on his shoulder during the late news broadcast.
If he had known how little time they had, he might have held onto those moments harder. But men rarely know the measure of what they have until it's already gone.