Yukio Mishima
STAR
1
I glanced into my assistant’s little mirror at the crowd gathered in the street.
The fans were relentless. They leaned with all their weight against the ropes, reaching to get just a little closer to me, cheering and screaming to catch my attention.
It was a good crowd, full of pretty girls and boys alike who were skipping work or school to stand here in the bright May sun. Each and every one of them had shown up in the uniform◦— an ensemble of my own design that I’d singlehandedly popularized. They loved dressing in this uniform for me: the straw hat with a garish ribbon; the short-sleeved shirt with epaulets, stripes taut across the chest, and all three buttons undone to reveal a glinting pendant; slim pants that left no curve or bulge to the imagination, front or back, down to the ankles showing through their sheer black socks. The kids were more or less my age, young and spunky, broke and bored, and flaunting a doomed surplus of energy.
I was their model and their aspiration, the mold that gave them shape. I made a point of remembering this whenever I peeked into my assistant’s little mirror. My reflection was boyish and alive, but all the life was in the makeup. Since my face looked a little greasy, I applied some more powder, but I knew that there was nothing shining underneath. My physique was rugged and my build was solid, but the old power was escaping me. Once a mold has finished casting its share of copies, it cools and becomes deformed and useless.
Here I was at twenty-three, an age when nothing is impossible. Yet I knew for certain that the last six months of working days on end with barely any sleep would be the farewell to my youth.
But such foresight came courtesy of the real world. Not my world. Thinking ahead was basically useless to me◦— no more than a fantasy. I had long since cut ties with that world, like a yakuza stepping out of the game and washing his hands of it once and for all. I had no more use for dreams. Dreaming was for the moviegoers, fingering their pulpy paper tickets. Not for me.
The farmer’s daughters in the fan clubs were always asking me, “What’s it like to be a star?” It amazed me how these clubs managed to attract so many ugly girls. Sometimes they even had cripples. You’d have a real hard time going out on the street and rounding up a group of girls that ugly. All I’m saying is they could carry on about their own dreams all they wanted, but there was no way I could tell them how it felt to live inside one.
“What shot are we on?”
“Looks like Shot 6.”
My assistant showed me a page of the script, marked up with camera blocking in red pencil.
Takahama was the sort of director who blocked things out precisely. He always planned his scenes the night before, but once we got going he started hoarding details. If something on the sidewalk caught his eye, he forced it into the scene. At the moment he was hung up on getting some scraps of paper to roll and drift down the street artistically, giving me the chance to take a breather.
“Damn, even that trash rolls better than me…”
I practiced my line for Shot 6 under my breath, trying out different facial expressions in the little mirror. Thanks to these American eye drops I was using to rid the signs of sleep deprivation, my eyes were clear and sharp, in tune with the cheap nihilism of a young yakuza.
“No autographs in the street, please,” the assistant director shouted, pushing back against the crowd.
One of the girls yelled “Lighten up!” and everybody laughed. In the corner of the little mirror, the white pages of their autograph books shimmered in the sun.
The mirror darkened: the part of it unoccupied by my reflection was filled in by the sad face of my assistant, Kayo Futoda◦— my constant companion, day in day out, always ready with my makeup kit and chair. She looked at least forty but was barely even thirty. Her two front teeth were silver, and she wore her hair in a messy bun, with no regard for her appearance. While she let on like she was a moron quite convincingly and pretended not to get things, Kayo was in fact my accomplice, my partner in this artifice. To be honest, she was probably the better actor.
I saw the moon in Kayo’s silver teeth. When she laughed in the dark they flashed like tabs of moonlight. Sometimes I had to touch them, to be sure of what they were, and felt better confirming they were fakes.
Then again, I’d never touched the moon. For all I knew, its surface felt the same as Kayo’s teeth. If the moon were actually silver, these could be pieces of the real thing. But fakes were what I really wanted.
“Don’t make fun of my teeth. I owe everything to them. Who would ever want to kiss me after seeing these?”
She boasted of her flaws as if they were assets, but Kayo would never tell you being ugly made her safe.
Kayo believed in me more than I believed in myself. She was the one who quenched my thirst for love. One night, back home after a long evening of filming, I was sitting on my bed in tears, reliving the reaming the director had given me that day. Kayo came in and soothed me, cried with me, and began to rub my shoulders, then started working all around my body. Before I knew it, we were sleeping together.
From then on, our intimacy required no emotion. We were in on the same joke and basked in the shared pleasure of mocking and backstabbing the world around us. But Kayo still gave me those massages. She made a game of it, like she was sizing me up.
“And here we have Rikio Mizuno’s shins! So smooth, so hard.”
Sometimes, just to tease me, Kayo called me her “Little White Lily Bud.” If anyone else messed with me like that I’d kill the asshole straightaway, but from Kayo it was nothing. She was certain that my “little lily bud” was what made me so insecure in our affair. She wasn’t altogether wrong.
When we were done in bed, we would gaze through the gap in the curtains onto the dark street below the house.
Even late at night, it wasn’t strange to see a half-crazed fan hiding in the shadow of a telephone pole, peering up at the light of my bedroom window. They knew the whole layout of the house, from where my parents slept, to Kayo’s room, down to the kitchen. Because we couldn’t let ourselves be seen, not even as a shadow on the shades, we stood the lamp up just inside the window.
All we could do was poke our faces through the tiny gap between the curtains and sip away at the night air, heady with the smell of new leaves. This was my meager daily dose of nature, but like strong sake it didn’t take much to make me tipsy.
“That pavement’s the border of the world. As long as they can’t see us from down there, they can’t see us from anywhere. It’s funny, really. We’re safe inside this big old lie.”
Our relationship was actually very abstract. Of course the world was partially to blame, but there was also something inside of me, a tendency that egged it on. And Kayo had it too, in the dim light of the bedroom, drunk off her own ugliness and our charade. Sometimes she gave voice to the absurdity: “And here we have Rikio Mizuno’s chest, and here I am, Ms. Futoda, with my cheek nuzzled up against it. Who’d ever believe that?”
We were different people, and there was nothing remotely natural or even plausible in our partnership, but operating contrary to expectations and remaining ever-conscious of the act gave both of us a mainline to euphoria. This made the secrecy of the affair absolutely crucial. My parents looked the other way, but Kayo still took every precaution in maintaining the ruse. Not because she feared a scandal, but for the pure satisfaction of consummate deceit.
The fact that every woman out there wanted me but couldn’t have me gave Kayo, in her secretive monopoly, the sick pleasure of being the exception. Her ugliness was everything, and she made it plain. Like a saint, she showed her age without apology, not hiding it from me or anybody else. The lie was all we ever needed.