The week moved fast, not that Rui would complain, and Saturday rolled around.
Saturdays belonged to the market and the market belonged to everyone and no one, which was exactly the kind of arrangement Nishinari specialized in.
It ran the length of the covered shopping street behind the station, a low tin roof holding back whatever the sky was doing that week, stalls packed so close together that the smell of grilled squid and cheap detergent and somebody’s fish guts all mixed into one smell that Rui had stopped noticing years ago the way you stop noticing your own house.
Half the stalls were legitimate — vegetables trucked in a day too old to sell anywhere with better lighting, secondhand clothes sorted into piles by size rather than season, a woman who sharpened knives for a hundred yen and told fortunes for free if she liked your face.
The other half ran on a looser understanding with the law, which mostly left them alone because leaving them alone was easier than the alternative and nobody with real power particularly cared what happened on this side of the tracks as long as it stayed on this side of the tracks.
“Oi, Rui!”
Haru was already halfway up the street when he spotted him, weaving between a fruit stall and a man selling batteries of uncertain origin off a blue tarp.
He was small for thirteen, all elbows, with the particular energy of a kid who’d learned early that being loud was cheaper than being anything else.
He’d grown up two doors down at the orphanage annex — the one Rui himself had spent two years in, before Sora — and the two of them had the kind of friendship that didn’t need explaining because it had never needed anything except proximity and mutual survival.
“You get paid yet?” Haru fell into step beside him, already counting coins in his pocket by feel.
“Paid for what?”
“Kimura’s letting kids carry crates again. Fifty yen a trip, hundred if you don’t drop anything.” Haru grinned, gap-toothed, missing the same molar he’d been missing for two years because nobody had gotten around to a dentist.
“You in?”
Rui glanced back down the street toward the fish stall, where old man Kimura was already hauling crates off the back of a truck, sweat cutting lines through the grime on his forearms .
It wasn’t real money, not the kind that mattered, but it was Rui’s own money, earned with his own back, which was worth something to him.
“I’m in.”
They spent two hours hauling crates of ice-packed mackerel from the truck to the stall, backs bent, hands going numb from the cold seeping through cardboard, and Kimura paid out at the end in crumpled bills he counted twice like he was daring them to argue, and neither of them argued because a hundred and fifty yen each was a hundred and fifty yen each, and Haru immediately spent half of his on a skewer of grilled chicken skin from the stall two down, eating it while it was still too hot, grinning through the pain of it.
“You should just ask your old man for money,” Haru said, around a mouthful.
“Everybody knows he’s got it.”
“Everybody knows wrong, then.”
“Sure.” Haru didn’t push it, because pushing it wasn’t really the point — it was just the kind of thing you said to a friend whose situation didn’t quite add up, a way of naming the strangeness without demanding an answer to it.
“You still going to Nishinari Rec tonight?”
“I try to go every night.”
“You’re gonna wear a hole straight through that concrete.”
“Better than wearing a hole through my hands like you,” Rui said, and shoved him sideways into a stack of empty crates, and Haru went down laughing, and for a while — the rest of the walk back through the covered street, past the knife-sharpening woman who called out that Rui had a lucky face today, past the battery man repacking his tarp — nothing about either of their lives felt like a problem that needed solving.
It just felt like a Saturday.
The trouble, when it came, came small, the way it usually did in this neighborhood — not a shout, not a fight, just a shift in the air outside Aunt Reiko’s counter that Rui clocked before he understood what was happening.
Two men were standing too close to the doorway when he and Sora came around the corner that evening, neither of them local — suits a size too sharp for this street, the kind of stillness that wasn’t Sora’s kind, wasn’t watchful, was just posture, a performance of menace aimed at an audience of one.
Reiko stood behind her counter with her arms crossed, jaw set, saying nothing, which for Reiko was its own kind of alarm bell.
Sora didn’t slow down.
Didn’t speed up either.
He walked toward the doorway with the same unhurried gait he used for everything, and Rui, twelve years old and half a step behind, felt something in the air change the moment the taller of the two men clocked who was approaching — a flicker, gone almost before it registered, the kind of look men gave a dog they’d been told, secondhand, not to provoke.
“Evening,” Sora said, mild as weather.
“This isn’t your business,” the taller one said, though something in how he said it suggested he already suspected that argument wasn’t going to hold.
“Everything on this street’s my business.” Sora’s voice hadn’t changed pitch at all, which was somehow worse than if it had.
“Reiko’s been feeding half this ward since before either of you had a collection route. Whatever she owes, it’s not owed to whoever sent you.”
Nobody moved for a long three seconds.
Rui found he’d stopped breathing without deciding to.
Then the shorter man muttered something to the taller one, low, and they left not fast, not slow, careful to make it look like their own decision and not a retreat, the particular walk of men who needed to preserve the fiction of having chosen this and Sora watched them go all the way to the corner before he turned back toward the counter like nothing at all had happened.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Reiko said, already pulling two stools out, already reaching for the rice.
“I know.” Sora sat.
Patted the stool beside him for Rui, same as always.
“Put an extra egg on his.”
Rui sat, and ate, and didn’t ask the question sitting right behind his teeth ‘who were they, what did they want, why did they look at you like that’ because he’d learned by now exactly which doors Sora made sure stayed shut no matter how you knocked, and this, he understood without being told, was one of them.
But he noticed.
He was always noticing especially these days, the way Sora’s calm had a weight to it that other men’s calm didn’t, the way strangers in sharp suits knew his name before anyone said it.
He stored it away with everything else he didn’t have an explanation nor understanding for, the same safe where the missing finger lived, the same safe where the money that shouldn’t exist given where they are living, and went back to his rice because that was what you did with things that were not yours to pry open.
You let them sit and trusted that someday the elephant in the room would sit down and explain to make sense of everything.
It didn’t happen that night.
That night it was just dinner as usual, and Reiko complaining about the price of mackerel as usual with Sora, unbothered and immovable as he’d been every night of Rui’s life so far.
(Author)
Thank you for reading.
Constructive feedback to improve appreciated.