Saito-san and the Radiation in My Heart

There was an app called Saito-san.

It was like Chatroulette for phone calls — you could talk to a random stranger, voice to voice.

While I was studying abroad, I sometimes opened it when I missed Japanese.

Late at night, when I wanted to talk in my mother tongue,

the time difference made it impossible to call my friends back home.

One night, I talked with a boy about my age.

He wasn’t like the usual horny types who rush straight into sleazy talk.

Of course, he had some of that too.

But beneath it, there was a loneliness — a wish to connect with someone.

His tone was strangely fluent, familiar somehow.

So I asked him:

“Hey, do you stream or something?”

He laughed and said he talks on a small live-streaming platform.

Almost no listeners, he said.

But for him, speaking into the void still meant something —

maybe it was a way to prove he existed.

He told me a bit about his life.

His father worked at TEPCO — Tokyo Electric Power Company.

An elite, but a stingy one.

He’d told his son to join a Self-Defense Forces academy after high school.

His mother was a housewife, too timid to take his side.

Then he said:

“Do you know how the SDF entrance exam works?

They come pick you up at your house by car, drive you to the test site.

Not many people want to join, so they treat you well.

The test’s multiple choice — really easy.

But I hated it so much, I answered everything wrong on purpose.”

Even though I was only listening through a screen,

I felt the plutonium inside my heart begin to glow — faintly, painfully warm.

It must have been a few years after the 2011 earthquake.

He wasn’t from Tohoku.

But maybe his house still carried an invisible kind of radiation.