Legions of unspoken affliction

Chapter 1 : Life

Nishimura Riki, 10. Born on 9th December 2005 in Okayama, Japan. A sweet, polite, loving little boy, but he is someone who owns a different form of love expression, one that no one agrees with and is far from the norm. His parents never liked him, never supported him, never trusted him.

All they ever gave him was pain, emotional and physical. His parents always wanted daughters, after they had their first child, they were expecting Riki to be a girl too when he was still a foetus, but well, that was not the case. Growing up, his parents would punish him by caning or slapping him for not getting good grades or making a mistake, while awarding his sisters for barely passing their exams. His parents also forces Riki to do the chores in the house like washing the dishes, cleaning the floor and doing the laundry. They do own a dishwasher, a vacuum cleaner and a washing machine but his parents never let him touch it, he had to do it by hand.

At such a young age, his skin should be soft and dewy. However, his was rough, broken, bruised and scared. The bias-ness could be easily noticed from the public eye but not to Riki and their relatives.

When relatives visit, they would always treat the three siblings as if they were equal, and the tone they speak to Riki in could never get softer and gentler. Before the guests arrive his parents would usually tell him what to do and how to act when the guests arrives. Riki had to obey as he serves the guests tea. "Wow he's such a sensible child." Praises like this floods in which makes his parents feel proud of themselves and that they are doing amazing as parents.

Riki'a parents told him that everything they were doing was for his own good, doing this out of their love for him, Riki, as a young, innocent and naive boy, believed what they told him. He thought this was the action of love, he thought maybe they do the same to his sisters when he isn’t around, he thought violence is love.

Over time, he started to develop a habit of hitting his siblings. He didn’t know what was wrong, he loved his siblings but each time he showed his love, he was sent away to his room and received a harsh scolding or beating. As the young child he was, he thought "maybe they just wanted to show me the proper ways to do it", to hit someone hard and harsh is to mean you love and care about them more.

Soon he got abusive, he would throw bottles or hit his friends which in turn he receives punishments for. The harder he was punished the harder he hit his schoolmates. He was sent to counselling in school but they couldn't seem to communicate with him and he just couldn’t understand what the problem was.

At one point, he remembered he got 49.5 marks for his mathematic exams, it was just half a mark to passing and his parents punished him with canes and whips in a locked room till the point he was bruised and bleeding. They shouted things such as : Why couldn't you be more careful?", "Why are you so stupid unlike your sisters?", "Why can't you do anything right!?"

His siblings stood outside the door, wanting to step in to put a stop what was going on inside, but the moment their toes touch the ground of the room, they were immediately pushed outside and their parents quickly locked the door to prevent them from coming in again.

By the time his parents finished the session, Riki was left alone in the room unconscious, bleeding, bruised, while his parents took his siblings out for dinner at a nice, fancy restaurant for top grade steak.

By the young age of 10, he got expelled from three different schools for his behaviour. The school counsellor also advised his parents to send Riki to therapy, but his parents didn’t feel the need to. They felt he was a disgrace, since all the relatives and neighbours are talking about Riki’s poor behaviour and insulting them for being bad parents. Yet they didn't at any point think about how they treated him and made him into what he was. They didn't think about how they were the ones who kept insulting and bringing down their own son in front of the relatives, then proceeded to blaming their own flesh and blood to be the one who brought shame to the family.
"If you didn't tell them about how i got expelled they wouldn't even insult us!" Riki argued, in which what he got in return was a hard slap on his face which left his cheek bright red and swollen.
"Now you learnt to talk back to your parents? You useless son. You should never have been born. You brought nothing but shame to us." Riki's father shouted.

They didn’t want him here anymore, they felt as though they had tolerated him for long enough and decided to kick him out of the house before he acts up again and gets sent into the boys’ home. His siblings tried to persuade their parents to at least find him a place to stay, a foster parent or maybe… the orphanage. However, their parents felt that it was unnecessary for a boy like Riki.
“For all I care, he could very well starve to death or get beaten up or eaten up by a bear.”

His siblings didn’t know what more to do. Actually…Riki has always had a good relationship with his siblings, Konon and Sola. It was always their parents who would never let them spend much time together, they saw his sisters as princesses while Riki was just a nobody.
Now, Riki has nowhere to go. He wandered the streets in his hoodie, shorts and slightly broken sneakers. He wanted to book a cheap hotel, but he didn’t have the money to. He wanted to wait on the streets to see if anyone he knew could help him but no one was willing to due to his poor reputation around the neighbourhood. He wanted to stay over with his friends but after the times he hit them, their parents didn’t allow that. He wanted to sleep at the nearby park but there was a case of murder there recently. As the sun began to set, he was getting hungry and cold. He knew a dark alley isn’t the best place to be at such an hour, but he had no choice, he had nowhere to go.