The fluorescent light above Fujimoto Haruki's desk had been flickering for three days.
He kept telling himself that he will replace it soon, tomorrow or the day after it, after rejection letters stop piling on his desk. That's what he told himself, yet that day never came. The lights kept flickering, the letters kept arriving, and Haruki kept drawing.
It was 3:46 AM. In his apartment, manuscripts, sketches, and rejection letters are scattered, with rubbish piled up at the corner of his room.
Haruki lifted his pen and stared at the page. A girl standing beneath the train platform bathed in the golden melancholic autumn light; behind her, the world seems to blur.
The art was breathtaking, hyper-detailed, and photorealistic, with a spark of vibrant, saturated colors. Haruki put the pen down. He picked up the letter at the corner of his desk.
Dear Fujimoto Sensei,
Thank you for your submission of Natsu no Omokage to Oshikawa Monthly. After careful review by our editorial team, we regret to inform you that we are unable to offer serialization at this time.
We wish you the best in your future creative endeavors and encourage you to consider submissions that more closely reflect contemporary market trends.
Warm Regards, Takeda Shoichi,
Deputy Editor of Oshikawa Monthly.
He put the letter back and looked around his apartment. On the wall above his desk, pinned with thumbtacks, were his inspirations. Printed frames from Makoto Shinkai's films, 5 Centimeters Per Second, The Garden of Words, and Your Name. Breathtaking paintings of Tokyo skies: rain falls in the gardens and on train windows, reflecting worlds hidden inside it.
He'd built his entire artistic identity around it. Five years of his life, ever since dropping out of Tama Art University at the age of 18 to pursue manga full-time. Five years of developing a style that mirrored Shinkai's luminous backgrounds. Five years of wasting his life.
Haruki gripped the edge of his desk, head hung low while staring at the pages of his sketch.
'Five years? '
Tears slipped through his lashes, dropping to the sketches, and then slowly, drop after drop, began to fall; his shoulders began to tremble, and something gripped his chest.
"How did I get here?"
"When did I become so miserable?"
The words hung in the air for a single, fragile moment, and then something inside him shattered. A sound escaped from his throat that didn't even sound human, a raw, harsh sob that he had been swallowing for years, pressing down into the deepest part of himself where he thought it couldn't reach him. But it had always been there, and now it came flooding out all at once.
His fingers released the desk and moved to his face, pressing hard against his eyes as if he could somehow push the tears back in, as if he could shove the grief back down where it belonged. But he couldn't. Not anymore.
His body folded, forehead crashing against the scattered pages as sob after sob ripped through him, each one dragging out something he had buried. every sleepless night spent staring at a blank page, begging his mind to give him something, anything.
Every forced smile when someone asked how the manga was going; every quiet night he lay in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering if he had made the worst mistake of his life.
He cried not because he is weak; he cried because he finally realized that in those five years he told himself that he was fine; it turns out it was all just a lie, and he was never really fine.The pages beneath his face grew damp and warped, ink mixing into ink, and Haruki did not lift his head. He just wept, alone, in a tiny apartment, under a flickering light that nobody had ever bothered to fix.