The chime that was positioned above the entrance of the bookstore barely had enough time to complete its delightful and cheerful ringing sound before the entire room descended into an unsettling and eerie silence. He quickly ducked down in order to successfully clear the frame of the doorway.
Crimson eyes. Sun-kissed skin. Silver hair that shimmered like an ancient blade under morning light.
Shotaro Mugyiwara towered over him, a giant come to life, exuding an ominous presence. He was close to eight feet in height, his stature all the more imposing because he wore a plain, unadorned black hoodie. With his hands casually stuffed into the hoodie pockets, he walked into a small, cramped bookstore in Tokyo.
A person standing by the shelf of mangas released an audible gasp. "Holy shit… that's him."
In the background, the clerk swallowed hard. "A—what?"
He moved along like the long shadow of a dying sun—slow, heavy, waiting. By the time he reached the counter, he didn't lean forward, didn't blink, but just stated, flatly, "You got the detective comic set?
The girl who stood behind the counter found herself in a frantic effort to regain her composure and clarity. "Uhh… could you please clarify which one you are referring to? Are you talking about Sherlock Holmes and the Martians? Or perhaps Detective Conan? Maybe you are alluding to Finding Arsène Lupin?" She let out a nervous laugh as she essentially threw her dignity into the flames of embarrassment.
Shotaro simply stared at her. Not furious. Just disappointed.
"DC Comics," he said in a totally expressionless tone. "The 'DC' supposedly stands for 'Detective Comics,' you actual dipsh—wait a minute… Might it be that nobody even has any idea what DC is actually about?
He looked around the store—at the blank expressions, the hunched shoulders of youth defeated by things that didn't matter. Empty faces. The stillness of nothing. Crickets.
A whole beat had gone by.
He pushed two fingers hard into his temple, as if he was experiencing a flesh-and-blood pain that he could not withstand. "Our generation is lost," Shotaro growled to himself, his eyes clenching shut in despair, massaging the bridge of his nose in an exasperated manner, as if he had just witnessed a child foolishly lick an electrical outlet, something that was appalling and terrifying.
From the packed manga aisle, a man, noticing his presence, attempted to toss a lifeline in his direction in a polite manner. "Aren't you our generation as well?" he inquired, attempting to establish a connection. Shotaro turned toward him. Slowly. With the measured finality of a solar eclipse blotting out daylight.
He raised one lone finger and kissed it against his lips in a vow of silence. His red eyes, piercing and battle-scarred, looked sharp enough to slice through even the strongest of bones.
Not a single word," he breathed very softly, his voice barely audible.
The fellow sat down. Just sat.
Shotaro walked deeper into the maze of shelves, flipping idly through different covers with a look of disinterested awe, as if he was offering tribute to the infinite stories within. Then he spotted something, something that rose out of the ocean of books. There was a flash of red on a black cover, bold and self-assured.
"Yummers," he murmured to himself as he opened the glistening pages of the magazine with an avid interest. "So, the new Batgirl is a redhead? That's absolutely great!"
A kid from around there suddenly materialized with great enthusiasm. "Uhh, sir? That isn't Batgirl. That's Batwoman."
Wait, what?" Shotaro blinked. "Batwoman?
"His cousin clarified, announced in a contented tone, as if having just aced a pop quiz, 'Batman's cousin.'"
"Are you saying Batman has cousins now?" Shotaro cried out with a mocking sneer, obviously shocked. "Damn, that's basically nepotism right there. I always believed that the rich and dirty do stuff like that." He shook the comic book hard as if it were a human being who was in debt to him for answers and explanations. "And what is the point of introducing another female character to take over the Batman mantle? We already got to see Batgirl in action. Why not just have her take over the job full-time? What is the point of coming up with a completely new character?"
He paused. Something evil flickered behind his eyes.
"What's next… Batcow?"
A moment of silence. Short. Heavy. Enough to knock the air out of the aisle.
There is a Batcow," the boy answered, his head bobbing in sheer sincerity. "Canonically."
Shotaro turned toward him as if he had just witnessed the complete collapse of society unfolding right before his very eyes in real time. His crimson eyes became glazed over with an overwhelming sense of dread and fear. His mouth opened slightly, betraying the shock and disbelief he felt.
Holy shit," he groaned. "I didn't know Batman was Hindu."
Then—"Based."
The kid furrowed his brow. "Sir, uh… why are you even reading American comics to begin with? You're Japanese. This is Japan. That's a shelf of manga."
Shotaro gradually opened his eyes, hesitating for a moment to think about the preposterousness of the question asked. On this hesitation, he stood up straighter, shifting his stance as if the plain preposterousness of the question required him to stand up straighter. "Oh, so we're at that point now with our conversation? The cultural appropriation of reading? Gatekeeping much?" he said with plenty of sass.
With a sharp and tight motion, he closed the comic book with a bright and sharp snap.
"I read comics to hate-read."
The child paused. "You what?
Hate-read, replied Shotaro once more matter-of-factly, as if discussing the weather. "They'll do anything now. Some guy named Paul gets some girl away from you. Folks die and come back to life, and when writers can't fix 'em, they grant 'em a minority label and dare you to hate 'em."
I am not opposed to inclusivity. Storm? Iceman? Classics." He flicked the comic. "But now it's nothing but a cop-out for bad writing. Sloppy storytelling with a rainbow sticker.
The eyelid of the boy twitched. "That's a tad homophobic, not going to lie."
Shotaro did not bat an eye. "I'm not homophobic. I'm a lesbian."
"Excuse me?"
"I like women," he said as he began to drift away from the conversation.
He vanished from sight as he sped quickly around the next aisle, thoughtlessly flipping the next issue of the comic.
"Hey, is The Winds of Winter out yet?" a child asked, hope shining behind his glasses.
The cashier didn't even glance up. She just leaned her head to one side with the sort of despair that comes from years of false hopes and shattered promises.
A gentle, collective groan spread through the store like a pressure wave. Three separate corners, three audible reactions. One of the guys slapped himself on the forehead with the back of a comic book, cursing under his breath. Another slumped dramatically against a shelf, as if the news had physically hurt him. Someone else whispered, awed and hollow, "It's been a decade, man," as if he was at the tomb of hope itself.
Near the fantasy aisle, someone muttered, "I'm starting to think George R. R. Martin was just a hallucination. Like the Mandela Effect for nerds."
It was a tiny shop—narrow aisles, golden light, paper-smelling air—and suddenly the atmosphere fell like a curtain. The frustration wasn't loud, wasn't violent. It was static. Delicate and cutting and pervasive, trapped between book spines, swept in the air ducts. The kind of exhaustion that made you glance at a hardback and think if it was laughing at you.
Shotaro Mugyiwara flipped a comic without glancing up. Silver hair glinted in a languid flash as he spoke.
"He doesn't have to write it any longer, right?" he asked, not asking. "Pushing 90. Sitting on a mountain of gold large enough to drown in. What's there? He doesn't need the work. Not when HBO already paid him in blood and cultural memory."
An interval of silence. Someone nervously laughed.
"He'll likely croak before it falls," someone chimed in. Bitter. Real.
Shotaro flipped through the page. "We'll see Winds of Winter once he's dead. Another author filling in, doing the best grave-robbing homage. Like Berserk."
A flip of another page.
"Or perhaps AI will be clever enough to complete it by then," he added, careless, as if speaking about the weather. "Could be better than we would've received anyway."
"Big deal, that's all?" One kid sighed. "Stay with Season 8's finale?"
A hush descended. Not the comforting kind. The emptying kind.
A person in the back was heard coughing on their soda. A manga cover thudded to the floor. Even the air hung back.
Shotaro dropped his comic, staring up with a fiery crimson stare, lips curling with unspoken amusement. "I know the ending," he stated.
All the heads swung like puppets pulled by the same string.
"I didn't use my godlike abilities, of course, to coerce George into revealing it to me." He knocked on the spine of the comic, relaxed and unconcerned. "I like artists too much for that."
Another pause. A person whispered, "Bullshit."
"Or did I?" he continued, eyes narrowing into mock menace.
The kid closest to the register grumbled, "Bro… what."
In the background, from the cracked phone speaker of someone, leaked the faint melody of that creepy Vsauce music.
He leaned back in his chair, that grin creeping wider—half myth, half meme. "Let's just say. Bran was only one of the endings. But there was a worse one. One was so cursed that even the author himself deleted it from his brain using a ritual called drinking whiskey."
"You're lying," a girl said near the graphic novel aisle.
Of course I am," Shotaro answered, already turning another page. "Or maybe I'm not."
He spoke as if he didn't care if they believed him or not.
That made it worse.
.....
Shotaro Mugyiwara floated down Musashi-no-Yamato's streets like a specter everybody saw. Not because he sought attention—far from it—but because the city breathed different when he passed. Old men froze in the middle of the street, hands clasped behind their backs bowing slightly. Shopkeepers nodded discreetly like silent prayers. Teenagers paused mid-sentence, and even the cool kids added a "yo, Mugyiwara" under their breath. Mothers pushed baby strollers at slightly slower speeds, looking at him out of the corner of their eyes.
Shotaro responded like water to shape. A nod here. A pat on the shoulder for the local kids who looked up at him like he was made of myth. To those younger or near his age, he offered firm claps on the back and simple words—"Keep going" or "You're doing good"—and it was enough to make them stand a little straighter.
But as the elders bowed, he came running. A flick of his wrist, a soft wave. A soft "don't," and his own bow, made them uncomfortable. Age to him was not a number.
No bodyguard. No escort. Just him—Shotaro Mugyiwara, silver-haired and sun-kissed, a walking contradiction dressed in silence. His eyes weren't just crimson; they were storied. They'd gazed into abysses and flames no ordinary mind could endure. And yet here he was, striding these streets like an off-duty local god, received with nods, bows, respectful looks, or murmurs of admiration. He didn't adorn himself with power; he bore it, sewn into the fabric of his darkness. He exuded authority—not from the state, but from doing the hard work of lifting shattered things and declining to turn away from suffering.
"Damn, today's strangely peacefu—"
"HELP! That man is going to kill himself!" a voice cut through the air like a pulled-taut wire. A panicky woman was pointing upwards—way up.
Shotaro's head snapped towards the sky.
Top floor. Edge. A figure standing on concrete despair.
"Damn it," Shotaro grumbled. "My damned tongue."
And in the time before another breath could be drawn, the air snapped.
He was gone—sent flying upward with a blast that sent a bike over and loose papers fluttering like frightened birds. His body blurred through the hazy afternoon, silver hair streaming like fire from a comet, and in the space of a heartbeat, he was a rooftop silhouette descending before a man on the edge.
.....
Konru Nakamura stood on the ledge like a man practicing silence. Thirty-three years of miserable quiet folded under him—an all-too-complete life of poor timing and poorer fortune. He was born in 1990, a year that meant nothing and was now the beginning of a long, gradual wearing down. His father wrecked into a highway median when he was seven; his mother declined from breast cancer when he was thirteen. Then, there was the aunt. The drugs. The fists. The cigarette burns nobody saw.
He managed to get through college—not the fancy sort, just the one you get to if you don't die or go crazy. Got a job. Not wonderful, not awful. That "I can finally breathe" kind of job. Met a girl who appreciated that he listened and laughed at her jokes. Married her. Created a miniature citadel of normal.
Then the Elvis-looking son of a bitch. The affair. The hotel bills. The acid laughter in her voice as she said, "He makes me feel alive."
Konru looked down at the seething concrete far beneath his feet. His life flashed—not in hollywood-style dramatics, but like receipts scattered in the breeze. Lackluster moments. Toothpaste tubes. Frozen meals. The pain of being an afterthought.
And then—
A gust. A glimmer of silver.
Shotaro Mugyiwara fell onto the rooftop as gently as a deity who had tired of seeing mortals ruin themselves.
"Yo," Shotaro replied, pocketing his hands, stare blazing like embers of dying stars. "Finished monologuing, or do I return in five?"
Konru remained still. Didn't blink. Wind clawed at his sleeves, eyes parched but smoldering as if they held salt.
"Don't make jokes," he whispered, his voice barely his own.
"I'm not," Shotaro said quietly.
And instead of stepping forward, instead of dragging him back, he sat. Right there, on the edge beside him, legs hanging off like this was some rooftop café.
"Funny," Shotaro murmured, eyes cast down over the city. "This reminds me of a story. About a dragon and a goat."
Konru didn't answer, didn't respond. But his silence evolved. It moved from emptiness to listening.
"A goat once lost allllll of his horns," Shotaro spoke, stretching the word like a drunken artist. "Got bullied, beat down, laughed at. He finally climbed a mountain. As high as he could. No horns. No pride. Just bones and wind."
He fell silent. Let the wind speak where silence couldn't.
"He thought—perhaps he was correct. Perhaps nothing was important. Perhaps the most that a shattered goat could do is disappear."
Konru's grip on the railing tightened.
"Then," Shotaro went on, his voice dropping, "out of the clouds overhead, a red dragon descended. Great. Booming. Smelled like cinnamon and crimes of war."
Konru snorted—almost not. A gasp. A crack.
"The dragon made one pass and alighted beside him, just as I did," Shotaro continued, his legs over the rooftop edge. "And the dragon gazed at the goat—tired, battered, shaking—and queried, 'Oh goat, oh bleating goat, why hast thou ascended this sacred peak of mine?'"
Konru did not respond, but something in his breathing caught—like a hesitation that almost dared to hope.
Shotaro turned, crimson eyes not blinking. Not mocking. Just there.
"And you know what the goat said?"
He leaned forward slightly, voice low, like the crackle of fire under words.
"'Oh great governor of the sky,'" Shotaro spoke now in role, like a tale-teller from some remote time, "'I have lost my horns. There is no meaning left on the ground. No reason to keep moving forward. I have climbed only to leave.'"
The silence lingered with them, heavy but listen-ing. The wind did not dare to break it.
Shotaro's voice changed once more, smooth and slow, taking on the dragon's form. "'Oh,' said the great red dragon, folding his wings and grinning, 'if nothing is meaningful, then why have you climbed so high? To die? Does death contain that meaning you say the world has lost?'"
Konru's lip quivered. His fingers retreated from the brink, involuntarily, but as a muscle recalling it still had a desire to live.
Shotaro rested back on his fists, the breeze pulling at his silver hair, rubicund eyes observing the sky as if the dragon of his tale were still soaring above them, casting an intangible shadow over the roof.
'If the climb didn't mean anything,'" he stated, his voice slow and weighted, "'you'd have lain down in the dirt with the rest. But you didn't. You hauled your bleeding hooves all the way up here. So don't tell me there isn't any meaning. You just haven't looked down in a while.'
The silence that followed wasn't empty—it was full. Out of breath. Of tension. Of the fragile weight of a man still deciding.
Then Shotaro spoke again, his tone quieter, less mythical, and more raw. "You think the sky holds any meaning?" His gaze stayed upward, as if daring it to answer. "I've flown in and beyond it. There's nothing up there. No truth. No God. Just more sky."
His voice sank. "My wings were weary… yet I flew."
He turned to Konru, his presence now a throb at the rooftop's edge. "That's what the dragon said. 'Yet I have yet to find anything worth all this nonsense.'"
Shotaro let the words sit there, bitter and strange and real. "Maybe you're right. Maybe in the grandest scheme of things, there is no meaning. But even if there isn't…"
He turned his head, crimson eyes catching the sun like stained glass catching blood. "There is no meaning on land, in ocean, or in sky."
His voice dropped into a rasp, like the dragon's breath curling into cold air.
You leap from here," he continued, his voice now taking on the monstrous figure, "and your body will bounce—snap—roll down this steel and concrete mountain, your bones pulverized, your head cracked open, your insides splattered upon the tiles like spilled soup."
Konru's lips parted.
"The pigeons may flutter," Shotaro went on, gentle but unyielding. "A stray dog may sniff your corpses. A handful of kids will weep. Then the sirens will arrive. They will clean up. And in a week? Another person will stand right here and look at his phone like you never lived."
His fists were balled behind him, the tension evident in his shoulders, in the jerk of his jaw. Shotaro did not shout. He did not lecture. He simply talked like a man slogging sorrow along shattered glass, every sentence raw with too much compassion to be kind.
"By surrendering," he said, "you'll betray only the you of every second you didn't."
His voice shattered the wind.
"Grounds for being awake after losing everything. Teenager who swallowed sorrow to get through his goddamn exams. Man who remained faithful while love died behind his back." He stopped. "I don't know what's happened to you. I don't need to."
Shotaro breathed like he could've overturned clouds.
"Those iterations of you didn't give up. So who the hell granted this one permission to?"
And then—like a dam collapsing—Konru cracked. Knees landed on concrete, shoulders shaking, hands clapped over his face as raw sobs ripped free from him, ugly and wet. "Will I ever be happy?" he gasped between ragged breaths, shame streaming down his cheeks.
"No," Shotaro said bluntly. "There's no promise you will. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Not ever."
Konru's breath caught, shocked by the truth.
"We all hurt. We all drown every now and then. Life's not fair by nature. Pain ain't punishment—it's just admission price."
Shotaro knelt, eye-level, low voice.
"Perhaps tomorrow a bus runs you down. Perhaps you get ill with cancer. Perhaps the world forgets your name before evening." Shotaro's tone was flat, unyielding. No consolation. No sugarcoating. Just raw, unadulterated truth. "We exist in doubt. And that's fine."
His hand came down on Konru's shoulder. Weighty, earthy—like a hook thrown into turmoil.
"There's a small, foolish, infinitesimal chance of redemption. But the instant you lose faith?" He crept in, his lips inches from Konru's ear. "That proportion turns to zero."
The wind did not howl. It breathed.
Then his voice changed—lower now, back into the parable, as if the mountain itself were attuned.".
"The goat gazed down from the pinnacle," he said, eyes far away. "He saw a withered lion too old to growl. A crocodile with a broken jaw. A snail moving across mud, half-devoured by its own worms."
His voice became sharper.
"And the goat realized—maybe moving forward holds no guarantees… but giving up guarantees nothing. So the goat lived."
He spun, fire blazing behind red eyes. "You don't think anyone believes in you?"
He held on tighter.
"Well, I do. I bet on you. I'm putting my chips on your life. So stand up. Breathe some more. Move ahead."
He stood him up, holding him steady on nothing but presence.
"Do it for the people who bet on you." A pause. Then, softer—like a vow not from a man, but from something larger—
"Tomorrow will be a good day.