Prologue
Buried Alive
Kenji
Grief was a burial that came with no ceremony nor folded hands.
No earth disturbed once and left to settle.
While the dead rest in peace, the survivors were buried alive.
Lying flat on their backs in the darkness of sorrow. Dirt shoveling over their faces. Pressure pressing the air from their lungs and the light from their eyes.
Standing became a performance and existing became the bravest and most exhausting thing a man could do.
Tonight, I was buried alive under Yoshiwara.
Lying right next to Hiroko and every name Hiro had spoken aloud at that table in his toast to the dead.
I was buried under the weight of what I'd ordered, what I'd permitted, and what I could undo by no act of will regardless of how necessary it had been.
I should have been incapable of standing.
Incapable of eating.
Incapable of laughing at Reo's story or pressing sake to my lips or feeling anything other than the particular suffocation of a man swallowing his dead.
But the Dragon refused to grieve where anyone could see it. I was the very skeleton of this massive body called the Yakuza. The beast who hovered over Japan—jaw set, eyes calm, spine straight.
My stillness was the only thing standing between my men and their own fracturing.
They ate because I ate. They laughed because I laughed. They believed the war was survivable because I looked like a man who was already victorious.
This was the silent burden I held close to my chest.
The Dragon's strength lived inside the pain—managed, compressed, driven down through the body and stored below the sternum where it could never reach my face, voice, or hands.
Where it could burn quietly and privately.
Anxiety lived alongside the grief.
Was Yoshiwara only the first shovelful of dirt over my face?
Was more death coming?
Heavier ones.
Suffocatingly sorrowful ones that would strip away my breath and everything I thought I understood about the man I was?
I had no way of knowing.
All I could do was keep walking forward into the dark and trust that my feet knew the floor.
But I had my Tora, my sweet loving Tiger who had thought enough through her grief to welcome our return with food and comfort. She gave us space to eat together.
She had fed us all and asked for nothing back.
My Tiger.
