Scene 1
You arrive at the sliding door with wet shoes and a vague sense of defeat. The hallway smells like dust and lemon cleaner, and the floor squeaks under your socks. On your left, a rack lined with three pairs of slippers, all the same size, all the same checked blue-and-gray.
Your own shoes, ugly and slumped, are left to the mercy of the entry mat. You toe into a pair of slippers—they’re too short, your heel hangs over, but the ritual matters to Yuki. You always comply with rituals.
The door to Yuki’s room is already open, like he’s been waiting. You stand in the frame and watch him: cross-legged at a foot-high table, eyes down on his phone, thumb flicking through something with the mechanical precision of a bored nurse. There’s a single lamp, the yellow light fuzzy and weak, but it catches Yuki’s sweater—a chunky-knit, the color of hospital oatmeal—and makes his skin look almost translucent. You catch a whiff of him, too: green tea and old smoke.
Yuki looks up, smiling, the sort of smile you can’t tell is genuine or just part of his customer service setting. He gestures to the pillow across from him, palm up like a card dealer.
You nod, take two steps, and lower yourself. Your knees ache. This isn’t even your thirtieth birthday, but the tatami mats make your bones hurt.
He pours tea from a tiny cast iron pot. There’s a frog figurine next to the pot, a glossy little thing with bug eyes, always staring at you no matter where you sit. Yuki’s hand brushes the frog as he sets your cup down. It’s definitely on purpose.
“Today, you look tired,” Yuki says.
You shrug. “Same as always.”
“Not same,” he says, putting his phone away. “Very tired. Here, drink.”
The tea is a murky green, almost brown, and bitter in a way that makes your tongue sting. You stare at the frog instead of Yuki. He’s not watching you anyway; he’s leaned back, arms crossed, looking at your shoes left at the entry like they might run away if unsupervised.
You take a second sip. Silence grows and grows, until it’s the only thing happening in the room. Yuki never rushes to fill the dead air. If you said nothing for an hour, he’d just sit there, blinking, until you broke down or left.
You finally say, “Long week.”
He tilts his head, considering this like a poem. “Work is bad?”
“Work is stupid. Life is stupid.” You’re already regretting coming here, and you haven’t even finished your tea.
Yuki doesn’t argue. He never does. He just pushes a plate of plain crackers your way and taps the frog’s head once, lightly. “Sometimes,” he says, “stupid is safe.”
You laugh, a sharp noise that startles both of you. “Yeah. I’m living proof.”
He smiles again, this time for real, and sips his own tea. For a while, that’s all that happens: two tired kids in a small, cold room, drinking something that tastes like pond water, with a frog watching every move.
And that’s the arrival, same as always, except for the part where it isn’t.
Scene 2
The tea is worse than usual. It’s thick and coats your tongue like paint primer.
“Seriously, Yuki, I’m good.” You try to slide the cup back.
He just smiles, palms it, and sets it back in front of you. “Tea good for spirit.”
You consider standing your ground, making a scene, but the energy is gone. Maybe you left it in your shoes. Maybe it never existed. You drink.
There’s a moment where you think you’ll just get through it, that the bitterness will pass and you’ll be awake and hyper and full of caffeine regret. Then the edges of the room start to bend. The lamp gets brighter, then softer, then blinks out like a dying eye. Your head is underwater. You can see Yuki’s mouth moving, but the sound is in another room, or another timeline.
You want to put your cup down, but your arm doesn’t respond. It’s like falling asleep while falling. You hear the clink of the frog figurine. You hear Yuki say, “Good for you,” and it echoes as if shouted through a sewer pipe.
At first it’s just darkness. You drift for what feels like hours, a body floating in tar. There are no thoughts, just the itch of your own brain being scraped out and replaced with static. You can hear a faraway melody—old Japanese folk songs, but not any you recognize. The voices are warped, sometimes too slow, sometimes screaming fast, all of them ending in a wet splat, like a finger poking mud.
Then: fields. It’s day, probably, but the sky is every color and none. You are standing in thigh-high rice, water around your shins, mud between your toes. Your hands are dirty. They look like someone else’s hands.
You hear the song again. This time it’s close, almost inside your skull. A record player skips behind you. When you turn, there’s nobody, just an old phonograph stuck in the middle of the paddy, spinning nothing. The air smells like ozone and mold.
You start to walk. The mud sucks at your feet, but you move anyway. Every step is wrong: your muscles twitch out of order, your knees bend at sick angles, but it doesn’t hurt. You know if you stop, you’ll drown, so you keep going.
Ahead, there’s a shape. At first, just a blur in the haze, but it gets clearer with each impossible step. It’s a figure—human, probably. It doesn’t move. You can’t see a face, just a silhouette that seems to absorb the light.
You try to call out, but your mouth is full of pond water. The figure remains still, except now it feels like it’s watching you. It might be Yuki. It might be you. You can’t decide which is worse.
The fields stretch on forever, but the shape never gets closer, no matter how much you walk. Your legs start to dissolve, then your arms. You look down and see frog skin growing over your hands, slick and bright, until there’s nothing left of you at all.
The phonograph is still spinning. The song keeps playing.
Then the dark comes back and swallows you whole.
Scene 3
Coming back was worse than going under.
You clawed your way up from blackness, but it fought back, sticky and hungry. Your eyelids were glued shut. Your hands, when they worked, just flopped around like dead fish. You heard footsteps. Something cold pressed your shoulder.
“Not yet,” someone whispered. It might have been Yuki. It might have been the echo of your own voice, distorted, fed through a blender.
You tried again. This time your eyes opened. Everything was dim and doubled, like someone had smeared Vaseline on your corneas. The lamp was off, but dawn came through the window, pale and thick as old milk.
Your head throbbed. Your tongue was a dry rag in your mouth.
You looked down: you were still cross-legged at the table. The frog figurine stared you down. It was smiling, or maybe it just always looked that way. Yuki sat in front of you, unmoved, as if he’d been there for hours. His sweater was the same. His face was blank and soft and moon-pale.
“Good nap?” Yuki said.
You coughed. It sounded like a dying animal. “What—what time is it?”
“Morning,” he said. “You sleep long time.”
You tried to move, but your legs screamed. You’d probably been sitting like this for hours. The window glass was fogged. You tried to remember what happened, but it was all mud and flashes: rice fields, broken music, a figure in the distance.
Yuki pushed a cup toward you. The tea inside was still warm, like nothing had happened at all. You didn’t want to drink, but you took it anyway, the weight of habit.
The frog had moved. It was now between you and Yuki, positioned like a referee, staring with infinite patience.
Yuki picked up a cracker, broke it in half, and ate. He didn’t offer you any. He didn’t need to.
You sipped the tea and felt your throat unclog. “How long?” you asked.
He shrugged. “Little while. You looked tired.”
You nodded. It was all you could do. The world felt slow, like someone had set the gravity higher in this room than the rest of the planet.
Yuki smiled, soft and unbothered. “Nap good for spirit, too.”
You almost believed him.
Scene 4
You slid your arms into your jacket. Your hands still shook a little. Yuki followed you to the door, silent as a shadow. The slippers waited, empty and expectant, by the entry mat.
He didn’t say goodbye. He just bowed, once, and shut the door behind you. The sound echoed all the way down the apartment stairs.
Outside, the world was the same but rawer. The air felt new-made, too cold for April, full of traffic and leaf smoke. Your phone buzzed against your thigh. You checked it, expecting missed calls, maybe a few texts, but the real shock was the time.
Seventeen hours. You had lost seventeen hours.
Your contacts were bone-dry. Your emails unread, piled up like trash in a storm drain. You scrolled through them with a numb thumb. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a frog croaked.
You thought about going back, knocking on Yuki’s door, demanding to know what the fuck he did to you, but you already knew how that would go. He’d open the door, hand you a cup, and tell you it was good for your spirit. Maybe he’d even believe it.
You walked, the city spinning past, too bright and too loud. Every car sounded like the phonograph, every face in the crowd a foggy shape you couldn’t pin down. You stopped at a convenience store, bought a bottle of water and a rice ball, and ate them in the alley behind the building.
As you chewed, you tried to remember what happened in those seventeen hours. All you got was flashes: the taste of pond, the weight of mud, the shape of something standing just out of reach.
You finished the rice ball and wiped your hands on your jeans. The sun was already sliding behind clouds. A part of you wanted to sleep again, to just let Yuki’s tea erase the rest of your problems, but you knew where that ended.
You checked your phone one more time. The frog sticker on your case looked back at you, smiling the way it always had.
Peace, you realized, was just a beautiful prison you walked into willingly.
And you were already planning your next visit.