Chapter 1

The rolled-up college diploma on the passenger seat of Kenzo’s sedan felt like a dead weight. For four years, he had tried to outrun the shadow of the Yakamura estate, attempting to become a man of “reason” and “choice.” But as he turned onto the interlocking pavered driveway, he felt his own spine stiffen and his face harden into a mask he hadn’t worn since high school. The mirror was returning to its frame.

The house sat at the end of the lane, a multi-million dollar two-story estate colonial that still looked, from a distance, like the pride of the neighborhood. Tanaka Yakamura had been a man of iron-willed perfectionism, and the house he built was sturdy. But as Kenzo got closer, the small signs of neglect appeared: the lawn, usually meticulously manicured to a uniform two inches, was shaggy and uneven. Weed tendrils were beginning to choke the flowerbeds.

Kenzo pushed the front door open. The house was structurally sound, but the air inside was stagnant. The stench of rotting, spoiled food, overflowing trash, and unwashed bodies hit him like a physical wall. It was the paralysis of the living, not the decay of the building, that choked him.

In the kitchen, the high-end granite countertops were buried under a mountain of crusty cereal bowls and sticky takeout containers. He first found Mioki, the fourteen-year-old baby of the family wearing a pajama T-shirt, Miss Kitty panties and mismatched socks. In front of her was a single bowl of rice that had long since gone cold and sticky. She was staring at a spot on the granite counter about three inches from her hand.

“Mioki,” Kenzo said.

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t look up. Her breathing was shallow.

“The milk smelled funny,” she whispered, her voice sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “I didn’t know if I should use it or go to the store. I didn’t have a list. So I just ... waited.”

Kenzo looked at the sink behind her. It was a stagnant pool of oily water and submerged silverware. He felt a surge of that familiar, cold rage—the Vigilant Burden-Bearer seeing the “Standard” trampled. He didn’t comfort her. He couldn’t. To him, her paralysis was a breach of the Law.

“The blue bowl was dirty,” she whispered when Kenzo asked why she wasn’t in school. “I didn’t know if I should wash it or use the red one. Father said red was for soup.”

She had gone numb. Faced with a choice between two ceramic bowls, her brain had simply shut down to avoid the “danger” of a wrong decision. Kenzo felt a sickening wave of familiar shame. He remembered being six years old, standing frozen in front of his closet, unable to move until Tanaka’s belt clicked against its buckle. He knew Mioki wasn’t “lazy”—she was stalled.

The house was too still. It was the kind of silence that usually preceded a funeral, yet the body had been in the ground for two months.

He followed the silence upstairs. When he crested the stairs, he nearly collided with Hikari in the hallway. The middle sister, sixteen-years-old, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by hundreds of biology flashcards. She wasn’t reading them. She was using a plastic ruler and a fine-point pen to trace over the letters of words she had already written.

“Hikari? What are you doing? You’re missing school.”

She didn’t look up. Her pen hand was shaking so hard the nib was clicking against the card. “The margins, Kenzo. They have to be exactly half an inch. If they aren’t even, the teacher will think I’m sloppy. If I’m sloppy, I’ll fail. I’ve been trying to get this one card right since breakfast. I just need to ... I just need to get it perfect.”

She had traced the word Cell so many times the ink had bled through to the floorboard beneath. She was vibrating with a frantic, useless energy, trapped in a loop of terrifying precision.

Stepping past the mess on the floor, Kenzo pushed open the double doors to his parents’ room. The air was thick and smelled of unwashed bedding and old tea. In the middle of the massive king-sized bed, there was a heavy, motionless mound under the duvets.

“Mother?”

The covers shifted slightly. Midori peered out, her face pale and her eyes darting around the room as if looking for an exit that wasn’t there.

“Kenzo? Is it time for dinner?” she whispered.

“It’s noon, Mother. Why are you in bed? The mail is piling up on the porch. There’s a notice from the electric company.”

She pulled the duvet tighter around her neck, her knuckles white. “I went to the kitchen, Kenzo. I really did. I wanted to make tea. But I stood in front of the cupboard for an hour because I couldn’t remember if your father liked the green tin or the black tin on Tuesdays. I just ... I couldn’t pick one. If I picked the wrong one, the whole day would be ruined. So I came back here. It’s safer in the dark.”

Kenzo looked at her and felt a sickening drop in his stomach. She wasn’t sick; she was stuck.

Seeing my mother, now the supposed head of the house, buried under covers as if she was dead and buried herself really pissed him off! He yanked the heavy comforter from the bed to reveal her nude body. “Get your ass outta that bed and put some clothes on, then get downstairs. NOW!”

Storming out of his mother’s bedroom. He headed down the hall to Kioko’s bedroom. Kioko, the oldest of the girls at seventeen, was lying in bed, sprawled out on her bed in a sheer thong and a black demi-bra with her legs splayed wide open, the room a chaotic mess of laundry and assorted garbage. She was the only one moving, aggressively painting her fingernails a bright, crimson red.

“Oh, look,” she sneered, though her eyes were glassy. “The savior returns. You going to tell us what to do, Kenzo? You going to pick out our socks? Because these three have turned into dead, brainless twits.”

“And you?” Kenzo asked, gesturing to the mess. “You’re just going to lay here in this filth?”

“I’m not doing a fucking thing until someone makes me,” she snapped, her voice cracking. “I don’t care. Let the lights go out. Let the house rot. I’m staying right here.”

She was leaning into the chaos as a weapon, but as Kenzo looked at her trembling hands, he realized she was just as paralyzed as the rest of them—she was just using noise to hide it.

“Whether you like it or not, I’m the new boss. You’ve got five minutes to get outta that bed and down to the kitchen. Or there’s gonna be hell to pay.”

~ ~

The visual contrast in the kitchen was a map of the family’s ruin. Midori sat hunched at the head of the table, clutching her cardigan closed as if she were freezing in the mid-day sun. Mioki was a ghost, perched on the edge of her chair, while Hikari stood by the counter, her fingers still twitching in the rhythm of tracing margins.

Then there was Kioko.

She leaned against the doorframe, her skin pale and goose-fleshed, wearing nothing but a sheer thong that clearly showed her shaved pudenda and a sheer demi-bra. It wasn’t an act of seduction; it was an act of war. She was weaponizing her modesty—or the lack of it—to see if Kenzo would break. She was daring him to be the “Master” and tell her to cover up—or maybe more; just so she could have something to scream at.