living with someone is nothing but friction, the collision of incompatible ideals. It takes trust to make it viable. I mean, love is basically a drug, right? Without love and trust, resentment is all you’ve got. And that’s where we found ourselves, real fast.”

We grew up on the third floor of a little apartment building near the ocean. Just two rooms, one more cramped than the other, no wall or anything between them. Izakaya on the ground floor.

The brochure for her favorite place was glossy black, printed on thick card stock. It had something the other brochures lacked. You could say it looked expensive, but I thought it looked aggressive. The lettering was thick and gold. No trace of the cutesy, happy, undemanding purity normally found in ads for clinics geared toward average women. Its

So I look away and try to rid them from my mind. But that only makes it hard to tell if I’ve escaped my demons or invited them to stay.

How many more times in my life would I sit back like this and find myself transfixed by the blue of the evening? Is this what it means to live and die alone? That you’ll always be in the same place, no matter where you are?

Shobashi comes alive at night. From appearances, it’s a dump. And from sundown to sun-up, on the third floor of a building throbbing with karaoke reverb, you’ll find the bar where Makiko works, five nights a week, from seven until around midnight.

After we had that other fight, the big one, it hit me. It was because of her job. It all started when she was riding on her bike, in that stupid purple dress she wears for work, the one with the gold fringe, and a boy from my class saw her and made fun of her in front of everybody. I wanted to say shut up or I’ll make you shut up, but all I could

Fourteen. I remember when I was fourteen. The first year I wrote up a CV. I lied and said that I was in high school and got a job at a local factory. On my way to work I put on lipstick at the pharmacy, using a sample tube that had been worn down to the plastic.

People like pretty things. When you’re pretty, everybody wants to look at you, they want to touch you. I wanted that for myself. Prettiness means value. But some people never experience that personally.