The air in the neon-drenched izakaya was thick with the smell of yakitori smoke and spilled beer. It was our place, a tiny, loud box tucked under the railway arches where salarymen went to scream their woes into the void. Leo loved it. He said it felt “authentically Tokyo,” though we were a forty-minute train ride from Shinjuku. He always had a take, a theory, a way of framing reality that was just slightly off-kilter, like a picture hanging crooked on a wall. That night, he was nursing a highball, the ice long melted, and he was deep in one of his ponderous, unsettling monologues.
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“It’s the ultimate power dynamic, when you really think about it,” he said, his voice a low, conspiratorial hum that cut through the din. He wasn’t looking at me; he was studying the condensation on his glass as if it held the secrets of the universe. “Society never talks about it. The capacity for it. The… mechanics of female predation.”
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I swirled the dregs of my umeshu. “Predation? That’s a strong word, Leo.”
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“But accurate!” he insisted, finally turning his gaze on me. His eyes were a startlingly light hazel, fringed with lashes too long for a man. They gave him a perpetually surprised, almost innocent look, which was the first and most effective of his many deceptions. “I’ve been reading about it. The psychological underpinnings. It’s not about sex, not really. It’s about power. A violation of agency. I am a very shy guy, you know. Vulnerable.”
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I knew this script. I took a slow sip, the plum wine sour on my tongue. “Are you now?”
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He leaned in closer, the scent of his cheap cologne and whisky breath forming a nauseating cloud. His voice dropped to a whisper, a intimate tickle against my ear that made my skin crawl. “Please don’ rape me.”
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There it was. The mantra.
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He drew back, his expression a perfect pantomime of wide-eyed, coquettish fear. “Pleaseee don’t,” he whispered, elongating the word into a sibilant hiss. “Please don’ttt.”
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A laugh, sharp and involuntary, escaped my lips. It was either that or scream. The sheer absurdity of it—him, a six-foot man built like a lanky rugby player, pretending to cower from me, five-foot-four in my chunky boots—was so bizarre it looped back around to being funny. For a nanosecond.
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The amusement curdled instantly into a deep, cold disgust. It was the disgust of watching a bad actor in a distasteful play, one where you’re forced to be both audience and unwilling co-star. This was his ritual, his twisted little game. Jelly Beans. That’s what I’d christened him in my head. Not Leo. Jelly Beans. Because he was a bag of contradictory, garishly coloured flavours. One moment sweet and thoughtful, bringing me a book he thought I’d like. The next, this acrid, artificial concoction of performative victimhood and seedy suggestion.
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“Your face,” he murmured, a smirk playing on his lips. He loved that he could elicit a reaction. Any reaction. “You look like you’re actually considering it.”
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“I’m considering throwing my drink at you,” I said flatly.
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He leaned in again, his mouth grazing my earlobe. The shift was instantaneous. The faux-scared whisper was replaced by a low, gravelly, and utterly different tone. It was a voice meant for dark rooms and rumpled sheets. “You know you want to pin me down. Make me yours. Teach the shy boy a lesson.”
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I recoiled, my shoulder hitting the wooden booth with a thud. The whiplash was breathtaking. The pretense of gender role reversal wasn’t just a joke to him; it was a full-blown fantasy, a circuitous and dishonest route to arousal. He got to play the innocent, the prey, while simultaneously being the one whispering the filth, orchestrating the entire degrading scene. He was the damsel in distress and the dragon, all in one.
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I remembered the first time it happened. We’d been on maybe our third date, walking through the damp, quiet streets after a movie. It had been a nice night. He’d been funny, engaging, seemingly normal. Then, as we paused under a flickering streetlamp, he’d suddenly clutched his jacket closed at the collar like a Victorian maiden.
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“You’re looking at me like you want to have your way with me,” he’d said, his voice trembling with mock fear. “I’m defenceless, you know. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t take advantage.”
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I’d been so stunned I’d just stood there, my mind scrambling to process the code. Was this a joke? A weird test? Before I could form a response, he’d dipped his head and breathed into my ear, his voice dropping an octave into something hungry and crude, describing exactly what he imagined my “advantage-taking” would look like. The disconnect was so violent it left me feeling dizzy and soiled. He’d then straightened up, resumed his normal voice, and said, “Shall we get ramen?” as if nothing had happened.
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That was the pattern. The “please don’t rape me” was the key that unlocked the door to his own lurid imagination. It was a disclaimer, a get-out-of-jail-free card that allowed him to voice his own desires while attributing their origin to me. I’m not being horny, the logic seemed to go. I’m just desperately defending my virtue from your uncontrollable lust.
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Tonight, in the izakaya, the game felt more toxic than ever.
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“Why do you do that, Leo?” I asked, my voice drained of all its earlier amusement. “Why that… particular bit?”
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He looked genuinely surprised, as if I’d asked why he breathed air. “Do what?”
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“The ‘please don’t rape me’ routine. Followed by the… graphic suggestions.”
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He shrugged, taking a casual sip of his watery whisky. “It’s just a joke. It’s funny. It’s flipping the script. You’re a strong, modern woman. I’m just a sensitive guy. It’s ironic.” He said “ironic” like it was a magic word that excused all sins.
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“It’s not ironic,” I said quietly. “It’s corrosive. And it’s not a joke when you’re the only one who knows the punchline.”
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His face changed then. The feigned innocence evaporated, replaced by a flicker of something colder, sharper. Annoyance. I had broken the fourth wall. I was refusing to play my part.
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“You’re overthinking it,” he said, his voice losing its playful lilt. “You always overthink everything. It’s just a bit of roleplay. It’s supposed to be… titillating.”
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“Titillating for who, Leo? For you? Because from where I’m sitting, you’re casting me as a predator to fuel your own kink without my consent. That’s not roleplay. That’s conscription.”
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The word ‘consent’ hung in the air between us. It seemed to irritate him profoundly.
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“Don’t be so dramatic,” he sneered, a flash of the real Leo—petty, dismissive, entitled—breaking through the carefully constructed “shy guy” persona. “You know you like it. You stick around, don’t you?”
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The accusation was a physical blow. It was my fault. My presence was my compliance. My failure to storm out in a righteous fury was a silent endorsement of his grotesque theatre. He was right, and that was the most disgusting part of all. I had stuck around. I had listened, I had laughed that shocked, uncomfortable laugh, I had let the moment pass because it was easier than confronting the profound weirdness of it. I had become a collaborator in my own discomfort.
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I thought of all the times. In the back of a taxi, him whispering “Please don’t take me home and have your way with me, I’m too weak to resist…” before describing, in graphic detail, what he hoped would happen. On my doorstep, after a date, him putting his hands up in mock surrender, saying “Don’t force me to come inside, I’m scared of what you’ll do to me…” his eyes gleaming with a excitement that had nothing to do with fear.
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It was never about a genuine fear of me. It was never about a thoughtful commentary on gender roles or power dynamics. That was just the intellectual veneer he slapped on it to make it palatable, to himself most of all. It was a sleight of hand. The pretense of victimhood was his aphrodisiac. He got off on the idea of being so irresistibly desirable that he would be taken, by force, thus absolving him of any responsibility for his own desire. He could be the blameless object of my overwhelming lust. His whispered horny things were the script he was forcing me to follow, the proof of my alleged criminal passion.
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I finally saw it with horrifying clarity. The shy guy act was his cage, but he was the one holding the lock, and he was trying to lure me inside with him.
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“I don’t like it,” I said, my voice clear and steady for the first time all night. There was no laughter in it now. No disgusted sigh. Just a simple, cold statement of fact. “It’s not funny. It’s not sexy. It’s pathetic and it’s insulting.”
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He stared at me, his jaw tight. The innocent hazel eyes had gone flat and hard. The Jelly Bean had revealed its final, bitter flavour: spite.
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“Whatever,” he said, throwing a few crumpled yen notes on the sticky table. “If you can’t take a joke, that’s your problem. I thought you were cooler than that. I thought you could play.”
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He stood up, his height suddenly seeming less lanky and more imposing. The rejected playwright, abandoning his failed production.
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“Find someone else to play your game, Leo,” I said, not looking up at him. “I’m resigning from the role.”
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He didn’t say another word. He just turned and walked out of the izakaya, leaving me alone with the smell of smoke and the profound, echoing silence he left in his wake. The silence was a gift. It was the first time in months that his voice—the pleading, the whispering, the pontificating—wasn’t crowding the inside of my head.
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I sat there for a long time, finishing my umeshu. The disgust was still there, but it was no longer mixed with amusement or confusion. It was a clean, pure disgust. And it was no longer just for him and his pathetic, twisted game. It was also for myself, for the part of me that had stayed in the audience for far too long, trying to decipher a plot that was never meant to make sense to anyone but its deranged author.
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I paid the bill, walked out into the cool night air, and took a deep breath. The city sounds—the distant rumble of a train, the murmur of other people’s conversations—washed over me. They were real sounds, not a staged performance. I started walking towards the station, and with every step, the phantom echo of his voice—“Please don’t… please don’ttt…”—grew fainter and fainter, until it was finally, blessedly, gone.
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and then Add to home screen.