The rain begins at 6:47 AM.
Shinji Minakawa knows this because he's been awake for three hours already, sitting at the cramped kitchen table in their apartment, watching the digital clock on the microwave count forward with the kind of attention people give to things they wish would move faster. His school uniform hangs on his thin frame like borrowed clothes. There's a bruise on his left forearm, fresh from two nights ago, turning that particular shade of purple-yellow that makes him think of rotting fruit.
His father snores in the other room. The sound comes through the paper-thin walls like a chainsaw cutting through his thoughts.
The rain starts as a whisper against the window, then builds to a steady percussion. Shinji watches the droplets race down the glass, merging and separating, and thinks about how water always finds a way down. Always descending. Never rising on its own.
He should leave for school in twenty minutes. He won't.
The convenience store manager texted him at 4 AM, angry about a register shortage from Shinji's shift. Forty yen. Shinji had counted three times, but numbers blur when you're that tired, when your hands shake from more than just exhaustion. The message glows on his phone: This comes from your next paycheck. Stop making mistakes.
Forty yen is half a meal. Or a quarter of his monthly art supplies. Or nothing at all, depending on how you measure worth.
His mother left for her first job at five-thirty, before the sun even thought about rising. She works at a cleaning company, then a lunch cafe, then an evening grocery store. Shinji sees her for maybe an hour a day. Yesterday, she'd touched his shoulder as she passed—just once, barely pressure—and he'd wanted to cry from that small mercy alone.
His father's snoring stops. Shinji's entire body goes rigid, listening. Waiting. The silence feels heavier than sound. Then the snoring resumes, and Shinji releases a breath he didn't know he was holding.
He stands, picks up his school bag, and walks to the apartment door as quietly as someone defusing a bomb. The rain is louder now. He can hear it calling from outside, promising something he can't name. Escape, maybe. Or just a different kind of drowning.
The door closes behind him with a soft click that still sounds too loud. Tokyo in the rain is a different city entirely.
Shinji walks away from the station, away from school, toward the old district where the buildings crouch lower and the trees grow taller. His uniform grows heavy with water. Other students hurry past with umbrellas, their faces turned down, and no one asks why he's going the wrong direction. In a city of millions, you can disappear just by walking slowly enough.
He's heard about the garden from whispers at school—the abandoned estate near Sendagaya, where some old research facility used to be. No one goes there anymore. Something about a family dying, a scandal, the property falling apart. Tokyo is full of these forgotten spaces, pockets of green that the concrete hasn't swallowed yet.
Shinji doesn't know why he's going there. Just that his feet carry him forward, and the rain makes everything else seem less important.
His sketchbook is wrapped in plastic in his bag. The pencils are cheap, the erasers nearly worn to nothing, but they're his. The only things in the world that are purely his.
The garden appears between two buildings like a secret.
At first, Shinji thinks he's walked to the wrong place. The entrance is barely visible—an old wooden gate, partially rotted, with vines growing through the slats. A rusted sign hangs crooked: Shizu Botanical Research - Private Property.
But beyond the gate, through the gaps in the wood, he can see green. Impossible, vibrant green, even though it's December. Even though everything should be dead.
The gate isn't locked. It opens with a sound like joints cracking. Inside, the world changes.
The garden spreads before him in a way that defies the cramped Tokyo geography he knows. Trees arch overhead, their branches heavy with rain. Flowers bloom in clusters—winter camellias, Christmas roses, paper-whites—their petals collecting droplets like jewels. Stone pathways wind through the greenery, cracked and moss-covered but still visible. And beyond, he can see structures: a greenhouse with half its glass panels intact, a small pond with a broken fountain, benches scattered like forgotten prayers.
It's beautiful in the way abandoned things sometimes are. Beautiful and profoundly sad.
Shinji steps forward, and the rain becomes a different sound here—softer, more musical, filtered through layers of leaves. His shoes squelch in the mud. He doesn't care.
He finds a covered pavilion near the pond, its roof mostly whole, and sits on the dry wooden floor. His bag comes off his shoulders like a weight he's been carrying for years. He pulls out his sketchbook, unwraps it with careful hands, and stares at the blank page.
What do you draw when everything inside you feels like this?
He starts with the rain. Just lines, falling diagonally across the paper. Then the pond, its surface stippled with impact points. The broken fountain, its crane sculpture missing a wing. His hand moves without thinking, and for the first time in days, maybe weeks, the shaking stops.
Time passes the way it does when you're lost in something. Minutes or hours—Shinji can't tell. "You're sitting in my spot." The voice comes from behind him, quiet and flat, and Shinji jumps so hard his pencil tears across the page.
A kid stands at the edge of the pavilion, maybe a year older than Shinji, wearing a mud-stained work jacket and gloves. His hair is dark and wet, plastered to his forehead. His eyes are the color of storm clouds, and they hold the same kind of emptiness.
"I'm sorry," Shinji stammers, already gathering his things. "I didn't know anyone was here. I'll leave." "I didn't say leave." The teenager steps under the pavilion roof, water dripping from his clothes. "I said you're in my spot. You can move over."
Shinji slides to the side. The kid sits down with a heaviness that seems wrong for someone so young, and pulls off his gloves. His hands are covered in small cuts and dirt embedded in the creases. Working hands. Hands that have touched rough things repeatedly.
They sit in silence for a long moment, just the sound of rain around them. "You're not from around here," the teen says. It's not a question. "No. I go to school near Shinjuku. Or I'm supposed to." "Skipping?" "Yeah."
"Why?"
Shinji doesn't know how to answer that. Because his father's hands find new places to hurt. Because his mother's eyes are so tired they've forgotten how to see him. Because he works until 2 AM at a convenience store and still can't afford decent art supplies. Because he's fourteen and feels like he's already lived too long.
"I just needed to be somewhere else," he says instead. The teenager nods like this is the most reasonable thing in the world. "I get that." Another silence. This one feels less uncomfortable. "What are you drawing?" the kid asks.
Shinji shows him the page—the rain, the pond, the broken fountain. It's rough, unfinished, but there's something there. Something true.
The teenager stares at it for a long time. His expression doesn't change, but something in his eyes does. Something that might be pain or recognition or both.
"You're good," he says finally. "Really good." "Thanks." Shinji feels heat in his heart. "Are you the gardener here?" "Something like that." The teenager looks out at the rain-soaked garden. "This place used to be my parents' research facility. They studied winter-blooming plants. Trying to make flowers grow when everything else dies."
Used to be. Past tense. Shinji understands the weight of those words. "It's beautiful," he says. "It's falling apart." The kids voice is matter-of-fact, but there's something underneath it. "I'm trying to fix it, but it's just me, and there's only so much one person can do. Money's running out. Time's running out. In six months, I'll lose it completely."
Shinji doesn't know what to say to that. So he says nothing, and they sit together in the kind of comfortable silence that usually takes years to build. After a while, the kid speaks again. "How much do you charge?"
"What?" "For your art. The drawings. How much?" Shinji blinks. "I don't... I mean, I've never sold anything. These are just for me." "But if you did sell them. Hypothetically."
"I don't know. A few thousand yen? Depends on the size, the detail, I guess." The teen nods slowly, like he's doing calculations in his head. "What if I hired you?"
"Hired me?"
"To make paintings for me. Specific subjects. I'll tell you what to paint, and you paint it. I'll pay you five thousand yen per piece. I need at least one a week for the next few months."
Shinji's mind reels. Five thousand yen a week is more than he makes in three nights at the convenience store. That's food. That's art supplies. That's breathing room.
"Why?" he asks. "Why would you do that?"
The kid looks at him with those storm-cloud eyes. "Because I need the paintings to sell. To raise money for the garden. And because you look like someone who needs the work."
It's too honest. Too direct. Shinji feels exposed, like this stranger has seen through his skin to all the broken parts underneath. "What's your name?" Shinji asks.
"Hakurage. Hakurage Shizu." "I'm Shinji. Shinji Minakawa."
Hakurage extends a mud-stained hand. Shinji takes it. The handshake is brief, but something passes between them in that moment—something unspoken and vast, like recognizing someone you've been waiting for without knowing you were waiting.
"So?" Hakurage says. "Do we have a deal?"
Shinji thinks about his apartment, the snoring father, the absent mother. He thinks about the convenience store manager and the forty missing yen. He thinks about how his hands stop shaking when he draws, but only here, only in this rain-soaked garden that feels like a place outside of time.
"Yes," he says. "We have a deal." Hakurage almost smiles. Almost. "Good. Come back when it rains. Only when it rains. I'll have your first assignment ready."
"Why only when it rains?"
"Because that's when the garden is most alive. And when I can actually stop working long enough to think." Hakurage stands, pulling his gloves back on. "And because some things are only real in the rain."
He walks back out into the downpour without another word, disappearing into the green like a ghost returning to its haunt.
Shinji sits alone in the pavilion, watching the rain fall on the pond, and realizes he's already thinking about when he'll come back. Already planning his next escape. Already feeling the pull of this place, this teen, this broken beautiful garden that shouldn't exist but does.
His phone buzzes. A message from school about his absence. He deletes it without reading.
The rain continues falling, and Shinji draws until his hands cramp, filling page after page with images of flowers and water and stone. He draws until the rain stops, and when the sun finally breaks through the clouds in pale winter light, the garden seems to dim, becoming just a place again instead of a sanctuary.
He packs up his things and walks back toward his real life, toward the apartment and the convenience store and all the small violences of existing. But something has changed. Some small seed has been planted.
In three days, it will rain again. And Shinji will be waiting.
TO BE CONTINUED...