“You really are pretty, Seina.”

“Huh?”

“That guy, he was checking you out. He didn’t take his eyes off you all night, not even when that drunk girl’s tits fell out.” She continued, taking another drag of her cigarette.

“Surprised he didn’t ask for your number. Men these days are too cowardly.” Another girl chimed in jokingly.

The first girl eyed me up and down, inspecting my outfit as if she were a strict school teacher. “Maybe it's that uniform, they always look better on you than us.” She smiled half-heartedly, a hint of jealousy laced into her lips.

“Speak for yourself, Nao.” The second girl hopped in, “Your chest is wrapped up tighter than a present in that, and we all know exactly who you want to unwrap it.” She teased before breaking into a giggle.

“Mikako, you bitch.” She retorted playfully, “Not all of us can get a fiancé at 26. Some of us still have to market ourselves, and these-” She pushed up her chest with an exaggerated motion, “Happen to be my best asset!”

“That’s so not true, we both know your best asset is your personality. After all, who else would drive me home after our shift?”

Nao put on an act of feigned shock, “Oh my, so this is what you were angling for you demoness. More favours!”

“I prefer the term, acts of love.” Mikako joked back, and the two of them fell into more laughter.

This is my life, every evening like clockwork some different variation of this would play out. Shift ends, we go out the back of the club, Nao lights a cigarette, and we all engage in small talk till they both leave and I walk home.

We all work as hostesses at the Ha:Yami Club, a fairly popular location on the outskirts of Shinjuku. Nao, with her trendy short hazel hair cut above her shoulders with a neat fringe outlining her youthful complexion and bubbly smile. Mikako with her long side parted black hair that paired with her soft and calm-looking face.

And me.

“Seina, you coming with this time?” Nao asked, shaking her car keys in one hand and holding a cigarette in the other.

“I prefer walking.” I replied, earning a tut from her.

“Ah, you always do this. Come hang out with us just this once.” She paused for effect, before adding with a put-on flirty voice, “Or maybe it's all that walking that keeps you so pretty? Hehe.”

Nao always pushed and rarely took no for an answer. I know she wants me to get closer to her and Mikako; be more than coworkers. I give in sometimes when going along with them would be easier than fighting, but not this time. This time I just want to go home, if that room can even be called home.

“Maybe…” I echoed.

She waited for a bit, assuming I was going to say more, but when it was apparent I wasn’t, she sighed, “Alright, next time then?”

“Sure, next time.”

Nao took in a final puff from her cigarette, blew the smoke away from me, dropped it on the ground, and put it out with the sole of her shoe.

She thought she was the only one who smoked. It was considerate that she never forced her lifestyle choices on us, even going so far as to ensure we didn’t get a face full of smoke after she exhaled.

Considerate… but pointless. I started smoking long before I met her, it's rare, but sometimes I need the poison.

“Great.” She clapped her hands, “See you then, ok? Have a safe walk, Seina!”

“Stay safe, Seina.” Mikako added on.

“Thank you.” I replied softly.

Turning around, I begin the trek to my apartment, leaving the two behind in the dim streetlights behind Ha:Yami Club.

With Seina outside of earshot, Mikako let out a breath of air and said, “Another no? When are you going to give up, Nao?”

“Hey, she said yes last month!” Nao said with a fake excited voice, continuing the tone from earlier.

“That was for a shopping trip, though. It was just convenient for her. She doesn’t care about us.” Mikako replied with a hint of exhaustion, quickly putting an end to the joyous mood.

“She does… I know it. She’s just not very good at showing it…” Nao said defensively, turning around to face Mikako.

“Except when she’s on the job? She’s great at showing it then, always smiling, laughing, flirting. Yet the moment she’s with us, she acts as if she’s dead inside.”

Nao let out an awkward laugh and looked towards the ground. “Come on- it's not that bad.”

Mikako stood up from the wall of the club she was leaning on, the neon on the sign illuminating her face, “Four years, Nao. When are you going to give up on your project?”

“You’re so catty today, what’s up?” She tried a joke in an attempt to steer the conversation into a lighter area while subconsciously tucking her arms around her body.

“The truth. Give up on her, we’re coworkers to her, nothing more.”

The attempt clearly failed.

Nao gazed toward the direction Seina had left in as if searching for a sailor lost at sea. “I can’t, you know that.”

“It's because of Rin, isn’t it?” Mikako spoke understandingly, her tone morphed into one of past pain rather than exasperation.

She returned her eyes back to Mikako and flashed a pained smile, “Yeah.”

There was silence between them for a moment, just enough time for a distant car horn to ring out and knock them out of their reminiscence.

“Hey, let's get going. I want to be home before one, wouldn’t want to miss my show on account of you, would I?” Nao chirped, forcefully kicking herself back into her previous cheery attitude.

“Sure, let's get moving.”

The walk to my apartment is the same as always.

Lonely, dead, and quiet.

People lined the streets, half of them intoxicated, stumbling home laughing in gangs of similarity. A few zealous office workers mixed in among them, forced to work overtime either by pushy bosses or weighty expectations. All of them blended in with the pilgrimage to Shinjuku Station, and I am no different.

Life clung to the streets, neon, posters, billboards, and stores yet to close buzzed with energy. The clubs were all closed or closing at this time, yet their signs and lights lit up the roads regardless, an illusion of activity.

Chatter, shouting, laughter, machinery, sirens, and music still lingered in between the stores. A billboard lit up, displaying a movie poster for ‘Is It Wrong To Live’, with an image of one of the main characters played by the rising star actress, ‘Akari Umi’, a name I’d only just heard for the first time spoken aloud by a group of drunken young men who were currently debating ‘how nice her tits would feel in your face’.

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Shinjuku Station was calmer compared to the outside, more orderly, kept in line by the few loitering police officers at the sidelines. There was still the rare empty beer bottle or chewed piece of gum dropped to the floor when the perpetrator thought no one was looking. But other than that, it was uneventful.

The train pulled away from the station, the night chill kept at bay by the carriage’s heaters pulling double shifts to keep the seated few passengers passably warm. Eight hours earlier and the heaters would be unnecessary thanks to the combined body heat of all the packed-in passengers, but here, right now, it’s empty enough to be cold.

I left the train once we reached Akabane Station, from here the journey was a short walk away. My apartment is located in Kita City, one of the many wards within Tokyo. It's a decent place, but I can’t say it's ever felt like home to me.

Not many places have to be truthful.

The doorknob to my apartment was cold, and the room colder still.

I fell into the bed, the purity of its white enveloping me. In this moment, I like to imagine myself as a mirror; the whiteness reflected in me is the sole way I can appear clean.

But I am not a mirror- no, I am Seina Kanemoto.

And I want to die.

Or at least I did, back when I was still alive. Now I don’t even have the will to die.

What is better? Suicide, or never being alive?

Anything is better than this indifference I exist in.

My room is pure white, the bed, the curtains, the drawers and chests. The entire thing is the same shade of white. Like a hospital room, and my disease is terminal. I am the nurse, the doctor, the carer, the surgeon, and the patient.

And the diagnosis is apathy. Non-critical apathy… perhaps if it’d kill me, I’d be happier for it. But I am unable to die and unable to live.

I’m trapped in this corpse of a body as it ages towards rot, drifting ever-so-slowly away from the childhood I want to return to. Idealisation, I know, but I was alive then, maybe even happy, and if I wasn’t happy, at least I felt something.

I desire to chase a youth that once existed, but I know this is impossible, so instead I do nothing as time pushes it further and further away from me. My beauty degrades, and it is not my vanity that highlights this, but the longing for past years.

So painfully, life drags me kicking and screaming into adulthood, broken and battered, I gave up.

I’ve given up.

I exist, just to exist.

I was Seina Kanemoto.

A long time ago.

Blue eyes that stared back at me in the mirror. Long waterfall-flowing blonde hair that covered my back. Silm, with a tall figure rounded through an hourglass with breasts that sit like petals atop the flower I was, not large, but not small. And soft white skin like silk that layered my once perfect face, foreign, yet distinctly Japanese.

I was a beauty, pure, clean and white. Now my mirror cracks more and more; the reflection muddy.

My parents were a mixed-race couple. My father Japanese, and my mother Finnish. An odd pairing; it happened when my father visited Finland when he was 23, I’m not sure why, it never came up in the stories my mother would tell me. What I do know is they met at a bar she worked at. They clicked, got together, and after three weeks he went back to Japan.

He returned six months later. He never returned again.

She told him she was pregnant, and he whisked her off to Japan to get married. They liked each other at first, maybe it was even love? But she was a fish out of water, couldn’t even speak Japanese. And like a fish, she became hooked and forgot how to swim, completely reliant on the line, the one man she could talk to, never realising that the hook was connected to a fishing pole and that she was trapped.

Seina managed to keep them together for a while, it's how I learnt Finnish, and later English, all from my mother who needed someone who wasn’t just a face on the phone to speak to in her mother tongue.

She wasn’t an idiot and figured out Japanese fairly quickly, and once I was seven she was able to hold a conversation. But it was too late by then.

My father was stubborn, selfish and controlling.

My mother was argumentative, manipulative and lacked empathy.

They were both arrogant.

It was never too late for her, but it was too late for Seina.

My mother viewed me as a mirror for herself, she pushed me to do the things she never could. All those failures of hers, she believed I could succeed at them. She saw me as an improved version of her, claimed I had the perfect blend of looks to do whatever- and that ‘whatever’ meant whatever it took to improve her status.

An old friend told me once, that on rare occasions a mother will feel threatened and jealous of their daughter, as the daughter is a younger, more beautiful version of them.

I found out later that she said that based on her own relationship with her mother, and I remember thinking to myself that I wish my mother was like hers, at least then she’d be more normal, and I’d have someone to talk to about it.

Instead, I had a puppet master of a mother, a woman who treated me like a mini-her. If she had the choice to take my body for her own, she would have without a second thought.

That’s all Seina was to her. A mirror of her perceived perfection, and it splintered and broke more and more.

My father was kinder, in the same way being stabbed is kinder than being shot. He was controlling of my mother, which meant by proxy he was controlling of me.

He never cared about me beyond my health and outward appearance. I was to look good for him, to perform when asked to perform. Whether it be smiles, or singing, or playing the piano. As long as the guests had a good view of us, that’s all that matters.

A pretty doll, one that looked Japanese, yet with the hair and eyes of a foreigner. A perfect, beautiful specimen to display.

I hate them, but I couldn’t hate them as much as they hated each other.

They were supposed to have loved each other at one point, and I’ve never understood love because of that. How it can rot and degrade, much like youth, it turns to poison.

Poison

Yes, I could use a cigarette.

Second draw on the right of my bed, the only flash of colour in this room is the red brand name across the top of the cigarette package. I took one out and lit it. Letting the poison seep into my body.

I don’t smoke often, I love the poison, each breath I take is like a slap across my mother’s face, destroying what she craved. But I am scared of its effect. Each puff takes minutes away from my youth. How many more of these will it take before I no longer appear young, before I look in the broken mirror and see my mother?

They’re still married, even today. I don’t think they’ll ever split, it’d look too bad. No one would care if they did outside of close family, but they seem to have deluded themselves into thinking they’re upstanding members of the community rather than another broken example of an unhappy middle-class family.

I ran away when I was 16, left behind a million loose threads that I’m still trying to chase to this day. I never finished high school or went to university, instead, I leaned on what my mother had taught me, I followed her example.

I used people, manipulated them for my own gain.

She taught me I was beautiful, perfect, and my father taught me I was talented, refined.

Those traits became my face and my body, and I sold both to survive. Burnt them away for a chance of living, and this is what I got in return.

Seina escaped away with her first high school boyfriend, lived hidden in his room for three weeks till his mother found us and kicked me out. Three weeks was all I needed, though. As by the fourth, I had hooked up with a 24-year-old and was living with him.

He wanted more than my high school boyfriend, so I tore off my flesh and offered it to him, and he took it happily, believing I was loving it just as much as he was.

Love has never made sense to me.

That lasted six months till he could no longer support me, but I already had the next one lined up. Another year and the second one wanted marriage, and after him the third one became violent one night and I had to escape to the fourth one. The fourth one died two months in thanks to a car accident. So I landed the fifth and final one, and at age 19, I was able to escape them all with the money I’d saved up working at the Ha:Yami Club in secret since the moment I turned 18.

And all it cost me was my purity, youth, cleanliness, beauty, and name.

Other than that high school boyfriend, all the others had known me by fake names, but that didn’t stop the taint from spreading and the mirror from shattering.

Seina Kanemoto is dead, and I am the twisted rot that remains. A void of nothingness.

The mirror can’t save me from this, my delusion of a reflection that does not exist.

I do not exist.

The patient in her hospital bed. Waiting for the doctor to pull the plug. But the doctor is a coward.