“Maybe she’s just being coquettish,” I thought. “The neck thing is just a tease.”
But I wasn’t going to fall for it. I bet she thought pretending that she’d never heard of me was certain to entice me. Most stars would take the bait. Not me. If she didn’t recognize my face or know my name, I didn’t exist, at least not to her◦— but a girl has to be pretty damn arrogant to try and seduce you by denying your existence, and I’m not some dreamer who would chase a girl like that, since I meant nothing to her. Maybe Kayo really was the only one for me.
After filming the last scene, our days were spent taking care of little bits and pieces and dubbing in the dialog. All the serious dramatic work was done. We shot all seven of the remaining phone call scenes in just one day. I grew weary of holding the receiver, and tired of the clever ways that Takahama captured every phone call from a different angle. Out of pride, he refused to rely on the old standby of cutting to a close-up of the telephone as it begins to ring.
In the afternoon, I stepped out into the sun and went for a walk on the studio grounds. There was nothing to see. It may as well have been the compound of a factory. On the other side, at the building where the producer had his office, I spotted the studio’s sapphire flag flapping from a pole at the peak of the roof. It must have been there all along, but this was the first time that I’d noticed it.
The flag spasmed in the breeze. Just as it would fall limp, it whipped against the sky, snapping between shadow and light, as if any moment it would tear free and fly away. I don’t know why, but watching it infused me with a sadness that ran down to the deepest limits of my soul and made me think of suicide. There are so many ways to die.
By the guardhouse at the main gate, I was surrounded by another crowd of fans begging for autographs, but was so absurdly tired I could barely write my own name. Shameless fans waved their autograph books over the outstretched books of other fans, the pages piling from my chest to my chin. The hand that held its book most desperately above the others was half-consumed by a violet birthmark. Tracing the arm to its body, I discovered an oafish woman with a tiny, sour face, proudly thrusting this violet hand at me, her birthmark nearly pressed against my cheek.
I was once more overtaken by a deep fatigue; my thoughts returned to death. If I was going to die, now would be as good a time as any. Rather than a death cushioned by pleasure, I would die embracing a despicable filth. Cheek in the gutter, curled up against the corpse of a stray cat.
That night, I finally confessed to Kayo my unreasonable urge to die.
“In that case, stick your head in there and get it over with.” She gestured toward the green electric fan we’d just bought to fight the heat. Its blades were metal.
“I’m not kidding,” I said, staring into the handsome blur.
I was drawn to the cool whir coming from its bluish vortex. It commanded the airflow of our little room, making it feel like time was moving in the way that I know best, the artificial flow when the camera is rolling. Only there could I breathe easy, talk of death without fear, and die without suffering.
From her usual position, sitting with her legs out to the side, wearing nothing but a slip, Kayo flashed her silver teeth and gazed at me reclining on the sofa.
“Of course you’re going to die. I wouldn’t be the least surprised. You call it unreasonable, but you don’t need a reason.”
“Right. I don’t need a reason,” I agreed, striking a grave tone. I was stretched out on the sofa like a cadaver, my fingers interwoven at my chest.
“You’re twenty-four, at the top of your game. A heartthrob. A movie star, more famous by the day. No poor relatives to take care of, in perfect health. Everything is set for you to die. If you died today, maybe everybody would forget you. Not like you’re James Dean or anything, but maybe they’d love you even more, and pile so many flowers on your grave that there’d be no more room to leave them. But what difference does it make?”
“You’re right. It makes none.”
In the midnight air, churned by the fan, jazz streamed out of the radio like an excited swarm of golden flies. I was absurdly tired.
So tired I didn’t know if I wanted to sleep or if I wanted to die.
“Listen, Rikio. It’s only human that you want to die. And when you do, instead of eulogizing you, I’ll write a thousand-page memoir to set the story straight. Then your ‘assistant’ Kayo will finally take off her mask.”
“Sounds fun. I’ll just sit back in my grave and watch their jaws drop.”
“But Ri-ki-oh…”
Kayo sat up and crossed her bare legs. The sight of her plump thighs would have jolted anyone who’d only seen her during the day. “At least my thighs are still young,” she said to herself, pinching at her skin.
“Ri-ki-oh…”
She uncrossed her legs and crawled across the floor to the sofa, where I lay in just my underwear. Leaning close, she traced a finger up my thigh. “Hah. Our thighs are the only part of us that matches.”
“Get off me! I want to die!”
“Of course you do◦— who wouldn’t, with a life like this? So go ahead and die. But listen, Rikio. It has to be an accident. Something that catches you totally off-guard. If you’re thinking about dying in some fantastic blaze of your own making, forget about it. Has the ‘gaze of reality’ you’re so fixated on finally started getting to you? Do you want to be human now like everybody else? Stop being so predictable. The real world can’t wait for you to die. And maybe for me, too… . That’s its plan. It wants to cleanse the planet by eradicating everything that contradicts its vision.
“Consider why you’re still alive. This power you get out of ‘being seen’ is just a way of playing by reality’s rules and doing what they ask of you. In exchange, they let us have our secret life together, our passionate artifice, and especially the faith behind the artifice, because they know that a convincing sense of reality can only be born from an unholy faith.
“For a star, being seen is everything. But the powers that be are well aware that being seen is no more than a symptom of the gaze. They know that the reality everyone thinks they see and feel draws from the spring of artifice that you and I are guarding. To keep the public pacified, the spring must always be shielded from the world by masks. And these masks are worn by stars.
“But the real world is always waiting for its stars to die. If you never cycle out the masks, you run the risk of poisoning the well. The demand for new masks is insatiable.
“If you want to stay new in the eyes of the world, do what I say. Run this mystic vein, scorn the real world, curse it with all your heart, but trust the artifice. To put it in more human terms, don’t ever lift a finger. From the moment I first saw you, I knew that you could take it. I knew that you…”
That’s basically what I remember hearing Kayo say, but at some point I drifted off to sleep.
5
The day after we called it a wrap was the first day the sun was harsh enough to feel like summer. It was almost like a holiday for me, but in my usual masochistic way I went to the studio early for a haircut.
Kayo had a meeting with the PR Office, and I walked clear across the studio grounds toward the old squat building that was the barber shop. The vast lawn was banded with islands of light. On the other side, next to a row of tour buses, squads of extras waited to be shuttled off-site for location shoots.
Someone gave directions through a megaphone: “All those assigned to head into the city with Director Takeuchi, please proceed to your designated bus.”