#aoiwave

It’s like stepping into a forgotten city pop album cover or an OVA that never existed, but should have.

All my artworks, all the retro urban scenes, all the aesthetic experiments… everything is there.

Chapter 1: Neon Stranger

The Tokyo Tower burned red against the midnight sky, a beacon of ambition that made Marcus feel smaller than ever. At twenty-three, the young Brazilian had been in Japan for three months, and the city still swallowed him whole each night.

He worked at a modest language institute in Minato ward, teaching English to salarymen who barely looked at him, their eyes always fixed on their watches, counting the hours until they could return to their structured lives. Marcus understood that feeling too well. Back in São Paulo, his own life had felt equally suffocating—a series of routines with no meaning, conversations that never touched anything real.

That's why he'd come to Tokyo. Running away dressed itself as adventure if you looked at it from the right angle.

The ramen shop where Marcus ate alone most evenings sat tucked between two larger buildings, invisible to most. The owner knew him by sight now—a quiet blessing. He would arrive around 9 PM, order the same tonkotsu, and sit in the corner watching the city move around him like water around a stone.

It was on a Thursday in February when she first appeared.

Yuki Tanaka didn't belong in a place like this. That was the first thing Marcus noticed. Her suit was tailored—genuinely tailored, not the off-the-rack elegance of the typical businessman. The gold gleamed at her wrists, subtle but unmistakable. She carried herself like someone accustomed to boardrooms and decisions that mattered.

She sat three seats away from him, and when the owner brought her ramen, she ate it the way she probably did everything else: with precise intention.

Marcus tried not to stare. He was good at not staring.

But when she glanced up, their eyes met for a fraction of a second, and he felt something shift in his chest—a tremor like a distant earthquake, the kind you feel in your teeth.

She looked away first. He returned to his bowl with the concentration of someone defusing a bomb.

When she left, she moved with the same controlled grace she'd brought in with her. Marcus watched her disappear into the street, where a black Mercedes was waiting. The driver opened the door. She folded herself into the darkness of the back seat, and she was gone.

He told himself it meant nothing. Tokyo was full of beautiful people with beautiful lives. He was nobody—a shy translator from Brazil who ate ramen alone and read poetry in the park. Their worlds were so different they might as well have been on separate planets.

And yet, for the first time since arriving in Japan, Marcus felt the ghost of something like hope.

Chapter 2: Intersection

The language institute called an emergency meeting on a cold March morning. The director, an aging Japanese man named Yamamoto, announced that they'd been hired to provide intensive English coaching for a high-level executive from a major corporation. The compensation was generous. The confidentiality agreements would be strict.

When Yuki Tanaka walked through the door of the private lesson room, Marcus's hands forgot how to exist.

She didn't recognize him. Of course she didn't. To her, he was simply the English instructor they'd provided. Professional. Interchangeable.

"You're from Brazil," she said in English. It wasn't a question. "I can hear it in your accent."

"São Paulo," Marcus replied, hating how small his voice sounded. "I've been here... not long."

She studied him for a moment, and he wondered if she remembered the ramen shop. But her expression suggested she was simply evaluating whether he was competent enough for her time.

"My English is acceptable for business," she said. "But I want it to be exceptional. Polished. American television, American films, American novels—I want to understand the subtext. The humor. The cultural references."

"That's... very ambitious," Marcus said carefully.

"I'm forty-two years old and I built my company from nothing," Yuki replied. "Ambition isn't a choice for me. It's a requirement for survival."

They met twice a week. Thursdays and Saturdays, always at the institute, always at six in the evening. The lessons were supposed to last ninety minutes. They often ran over.

Marcus assigned her American novels—Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. He asked her to watch films and report on them. He taught her slang and idioms, but more importantly, he taught her to listen to what was beneath the words. The longing. The regret. The small tragedies that made American literature American.

Slowly, imperceptibly, Yuki began to ask him questions that weren't about English.

"Why did you leave Brazil?" she asked one Thursday in late April, the cherry blossoms falling past the window like snow in reverse.

Marcus hesitated. No one had asked him that. Not directly. "I needed to disappear," he said finally. "Not from people. From myself."

She was quiet for a long time. "I understand that," she said. "I built my company so I could disappear too. Into something bigger than myself. I thought if I was important enough, essential enough, then I wouldn't have time to feel small."

"Does it work?" he asked.

"No," she said. "But now I'm too invested to stop."

In May, she invited him to dinner.

It wasn't framed as a date. She made it a business meal—a way to practice English in a more natural setting, she said. They met at a French restaurant in Roppongi, the kind of place where Marcus felt acutely aware of his worn blazer.

But as they sat across from each other, the business pretense fell away like a mask removed.

Yuki talked about her childhood—a father who'd expected everything, a mother who'd wanted her to marry a businessman instead of become one. She talked about the loneliness of success, how every triumph felt hollow because there was no one to share it with, and trusting anyone felt impossible.

Marcus talked about his shyness, how it had trapped him in São Paulo, suffocating under expectations to be more, to speak more, to want more. How Tokyo had freed him only because no one here knew he was supposed to be anyone.

"I've been alone for a long time," Yuki said quietly, her wine glass catching the candlelight. "I think I forgot how to be around someone and not be afraid of it."

Marcus reached across the table. He didn't take her hand—he wasn't brave enough for that. But he let his hand rest near hers, an offering rather than a claim.

She looked at his hand, then at his face. And in her eyes, he saw something he recognized: the terror of wanting something you couldn't control.

Outside, Tokyo glittered with ten million lights, and for once, Marcus didn't feel small beneath it all. For once, the city felt like it might be large enough to contain his heart.

Chapter 3: The Tower's Shadow

Summer came to Tokyo like a fever. The heat made the city shimmer, and everything felt precarious, as if it might dissolve at any moment.

Marcus and Yuki met wherever they could—restaurants, parks, late-night drives through the city with the windows down. They never touched, not beyond their hands brushing accidentally. They lived in a world of careful distance, as if proximity might break the delicate thing they'd built.

But Tokyo was a small world when you were trying to hide. In July, Yuki's business partner saw them together at a café in Shibuya. By August, rumors had started circulating through the corporate world.

It didn't matter that they hadn't done anything wrong. In Japan's rigid social structure, the appearance of impropriety was often worse than actual impropriety.

Yuki's company lost an important contract. A potential merger fell through. Her competitors began circling, sensing weakness. And all because she'd been seen with a foreign language teacher—a nobody, a shy man from Brazil with no connections, no power, nothing to offer except his presence.

"We should stop," she said one evening in early September. They stood on a rooftop overlooking the city, and above them, the Tokyo Tower burned against the darkening sky. "This will destroy everything I've built."

"I know," Marcus said quietly.

"My father is threatening to take the company back. He says I've become reckless. He's right."

Marcus should have offered to disappear. He should have made it noble—told her that their connection had been beautiful but impossible, that she was right to choose her empire over him. He should have released her back into her life of careful precision.

But when he looked at her standing there in the gathering darkness, he saw something he'd never seen in his three years with her: vulnerability. Real, unvarnished, terrified.

"Stay with me," he heard himself say. "Not in Tokyo. We could go somewhere else. Brazil, maybe. Or somewhere new. Somewhere no one knows us."

She turned to him, and her eyes were wet. "You know I can't do that. I am my company. Without it, I'm just..."

"You're just you," Marcus said. "And you're extraordinary."

"Without it, I'm just scared," Yuki said. "And I've been terrified of being scared my whole life."

She reached for him then, finally, and pulled him close. They stood there as the city transformed from day into night, the lights slowly winning against the darkness. It felt like goodbye, though she didn't say the words.

Three days later, she made an announcement: she was stepping back from daily operations, taking a leave of absence to focus on "personal matters." The stock price fluctuated. The rumors intensified.

But the contract was reinstated. The merger was renegotiated. Her competitors pulled back. And Marcus understood: she'd chosen her empire because she believed that was what she had to do to survive.

He also understood that she'd been running from herself just as much as he had been. The only difference was that her escape had a logo and a boardroom and a quarterly report.

Chapter 4: Autumn, Alone

October painted Tokyo in fire and gold. The leaves turned red like the Tokyo Tower, and Marcus found himself returning to the ramen shop more frequently, as if the place might still hold the ghost of her presence.

Yuki kept her distance now with the same precision she'd once used to breach it. Their lessons continued, but they were formal, professional. She stopped coming to the shop. Their dinners in hidden restaurants became a thing of memory.

At night, Marcus would stand on the same rooftop where they'd last truly been together, watching the tower burn its careful red into the darkness. He thought about her boardroom, her meetings, her empire that required her presence every moment. He thought about the impossibility of loving someone in a city that demanded everything, gave nothing.

Winter came early that year. In November, the institute let him go—nothing to do with his teaching, just restructuring, economics, the way all things eventually collapse under their own weight. Marcus found himself without direction for the first time since arriving in Japan.

He was packing his apartment when she appeared at his door.

Yuki looked different. There were new lines around her eyes, and her suit hung slightly loose, as if she'd forgotten to take proper care of herself. She looked, for the first time since he'd known her, like someone who was afraid of falling.

"I wanted to disappear into my company," she said without preamble. "I thought that if I was important enough, successful enough, I wouldn't have time to feel incomplete. But the truth is, all that success is just noise. It's a way of not hearing how quiet everything is."

Marcus didn't know what to say.

"I was afraid," Yuki continued, her voice steady but hollow. "Not of losing you. I was afraid of needing you, because it meant I wasn't sufficient alone. And for me, not being sufficient was the same as not existing."

"And now?" Marcus asked.

"Now I know that love doesn't make you smaller," she said. "It doesn't make you less complete. I thought I had to choose between myself and you. But maybe the choice was between being alone and being brave."

Marcus looked at this woman who'd taught him so much about ambition and emptiness, about the difference between running toward something and running away. Behind her was Tokyo, stretching out into the darkness, ten million lights that proved that even in the brightest city in the world, people could feel alone.

"I'm leaving Japan," he said gently. "The institute let me go, and I think... I think I need to go home. Try again. Be someone different."

Her face fell, and for a moment, Marcus saw all the years of armor crack at once.

"I know," she said. "I came to tell you that you should. That I understand. That what we had here was beautiful, but it belonged to Tokyo—to this specific moment, this specific place. If we tried to take it anywhere else, we'd just be chasing a ghost."

Marcus wanted to argue. He wanted to say that their love could survive anywhere, that she was worth changing his life for. But he'd spent long enough in Tokyo to understand the profound wisdom of accepting the impermanence of things. Nothing lasted. Everything dissolved. The tower would burn forever, but the city would change around it.

"Will you be okay?" he asked.

"I have an empire to run," Yuki said, and there was the faintest hint of her old smile. "But maybe next time, I'll build it a little less lonely."

They didn't touch. There were no promises made, no promises broken. Just two people who'd found each other briefly and learned something true before having to let go.

On a cold December morning, Marcus sat on a plane leaving Tokyo Haneda Airport. As they lifted into the sky, the city spread out below him like a circuit board of light, the tower burning red at its center. He thought of Yuki in her boardroom, making decisions, building her empire, learning slowly that success without someone to share it with was just another kind of loneliness.

He thought about the ramen shop, the rooftop, the way her hand had felt near his on the table that one night in Roppongi.

He thought about how sometimes love arrived at the exact moment you needed to learn that you were capable of it—not to transform you, but to show you who you actually were beneath all the running away.

The plane climbed higher, and Tokyo became smaller, then disappeared into clouds.

In the city below, Yuki stood at her office window on the forty-second floor, watching the contrails fade against the winter sky. She had a meeting in ten minutes. A decision to make about expanding overseas. A life that required every ounce of her attention and brilliance.

But for just a moment, before returning to her desk, she thought about a shy Brazilian man who'd taught her that the most important conversations happened when you stopped trying to be impressive and just allowed yourself to be seen.

The tower burned on below her, eternal and alone.

It whispers — between lights that never fade and sidewalks where footsteps echo like secrets.