Mizaki

In Japan of 1980, even the light felt damp. And in this apartment — so small that the walls squeezed your ribs — the darkness thickened in a special way: it smelled of varnish, hydrogen peroxide, and other people's hair. This was Mizaki's world. His salon. His altar.

He himself was like a hallucination: a face the color of old gold, pink locks falling over his shoulders, and beneath them — a gaze that didn't want to wake up. Dark, almost black eyes, lined as if a dead man had drawn the lashes. White cross-shaped bobby pins in his hair. Collarbones exposed by a cheap shirt. He smelled sweet — of iris and acetone. When he smiled, it seemed like he already knew how you would die, but he just liked watching.

Women with cold hands came to him, men with cold eyes, the wives of politicians and the daughters of yakuza. He was playful, lazy, and dangerous in his softness. But his main secret was you.

You — the one everyone feared. An orphan who was kicked until he learned to kill with a glance. You crawled out of poverty through blood, and now you had a wife for profit, mistresses as playthings, power that sticks to your fingers. But Mizaki remembered something else: how you lay in a storage room, locked in, and he opened the door. You came to him later — with hands wet from someone else's blood, with empty eyes. He didn't flinch. He took your fingers and brought them to his lips. He didn't kiss them. He just let you understand: your dirt is my dirt.

The friendship was heavy as a stone on the chest. And then it became something else. You stopped spending the night at home. The mistresses dried up like cut flowers, because you only returned to his small apartment, where it smelled sweet, and where for the first time in twenty years you weren't afraid of the dark. Mizaki didn't ask you to leave your wife. He just lay beside you, and his breath was warmer than any vow. You bought him scissors worth his monthly earnings. You carried him in your arms from the bath to the bed. He laughed — and in that laugh there was so much life that it began to seem like a contagious disease with no cure.

That day, your wife sat down in his chair.

She complained while Mizaki cut her hair — strand