The lighting crew always perked up for the bedroom scenes. You could hear them joking all around us, eyes peeled.
Takahama talked us through the scene.
“You two are sitting on the futon. Richie takes Aiko in his arms, but she jerks away, backs up against the wall, and says her line. Richie isn’t fazed and throws her down. Aiko lays on the futon crying. Watching her cry, Richie stands, casually undoes his tie, and takes his shirt off. Then he says his line. That’s it. Got it? Aiko puts up a front, but she’s already thrown open the castle gates. Alright. Lights!”
Aiko couldn’t get her part right, so we kept starting over. The clapper snapped and snapped. Working patiently beside her through take after take gave me a chance to reevaluate my own performance. I realized that when I tugged off the tie, I could wrap one end of it around my finger and fling the whole thing like a streamer through the air. I tried this out during the third test run and Takahama didn’t comment, meaning he approved.
“Hey, Kayo, grab my mints,” I yelled down to the lower level between takes. Kayo sat in a chair with the script open in her lap, quietly knitting her turquoise sweater, avoiding the banter between the set photographer and the guys from PR.
When people saw the sweater, they gave her a hard time, asking “Who’s the present for?” Kayo was ready with an evil eye and would tell them, deadpan, “It’s for me. Yarn’s cheap in bulk this time of year.”
From the upper level of the set, that turquoise sweater made a cheery blemish in the cloying blackness of the floor, which twinkled wet from everyone’s umbrellas.
Kayo knit the sweater sloppily on purpose. She made it fit wrong on her body, in a blousy shape long out of style. Knowing her, at some point later in the year, once everyone had forgotten all about her summer knitting project, she’d show up in the sweater and crouch down at the back of the studio, waiting to overhear their whispered laughter.
Because I knew what she was up to, that half-finished turquoise sweater seemed to me, from my vantage in the loft, like the very hue of her nefarious intentions.
This was apt knitting for summer. Her fingers maneuvered through the heart of it, as if secretly laboring to humiliate every worldly convention that the climate and the seasons had to offer.
But most of all this patch of turquoise yarn in the darkest corner of the set was a thing of beauty, like a virgin spring, a calm collection of her artifice.
I like to have a mint before I film a kissing scene. Kayo always had them at the ready, and I got a kick out of seeing the face she made when she came running with them in her hand.
That face was her strength. No matter how prickly the circumstance, she remained stern and officious, without a trace of jealousy. I loved seeing her this way.
Kayo sped to the top of the ladder, legs pumping in those cheap black slacks, and handed me the case of silver mints. It was small enough that I could easily have kept it in my pocket, but it was my policy not to spoil the crisp lines of my clothes with even the smallest object. The slimmest prop could compromise the way the cloth fell or the way I moved, and when I gestured passionately the mics could catch the mints rattling in their case.
I assumed a stoic air, knotted my tie, rolled up my sleeves, and shook a few mints into my palm. Against my skin, these prosaic pellets felt like currency, little symbols of the kisses I relied on for my livelihood.
But the scene we were filming had no kiss. I was giving Kayo a hard time
“Actually, I’m kind of thirsty.”
“Why didn’t you just say so then? I’ll get some tea.”
With a glare that cut right through my mischief, Kayo’s eyes, for just an instant, seemed to harbor a faint resentment◦— the type of look that she learned to hide so well when we were filming. I thought it was funny.
“It’s fine. But let’s have tea next time. The two of us,” I said. I even winked.
Just then Ken walked by.
“Hubba hubba! Tea for two.”
We cut that one a little too close.
When the director shouted “Ready?” Aiko was already on the verge of tears. The lighting crew, who had been leering at us through the test run of the bedroom scene, burst into action and screeched commands. They rushed to adjust the lighting, to make sure that the shadow of the boom mic dangling from its bamboo pole didn’t drop into the frame, and that none of the lights dispelled the fantasy of the hotel room’s lone bulb by casting a layered shadow on the wall.
This restlessness before the main event was like the thrill you get from hearing circus animals stomp the earth before they march into the ring.
“Lights: you ready?” Takahama asked. “Let me guess◦— you need a minute.”
He spoke sarcastically to hide his annoyance, but no one was going to laugh at a joke so clumsy and barbed.
Under the lights, dust kicked up from the corners of the set glinted and danced like flecks of gold. Kayo came over silently and held the tiny mirror before me. I took a quick peek and was pleased with the condition of my makeup. For a second I practiced the expression I was supposed to make when the camera cuts to me.
Hanging on the hotel wall were tacky signs advertising “naptime” for 200 yen and an overnight stay, breakfast included, for 700. Beside the signs there were dirty poems written on tall strips of paper. A traditional doll of a woman carrying a basket used for making salt stood in a little alcove at the edge of the tatami floor. The cramped space◦— only three tatami mats◦— was lined with red and blue embroidered satin pillows.
Conscious of her inexperience, Aiko bowed and said she’d follow my lead. Her calico dress had too many pleats and a sweeping hem, like something a country girl had copied from a fashion magazine. But she was far from petit, and it suited her pastoral figure perfectly. Staring off into space, her plump arms bare, she drew shapes on the tatami with her fingers and practiced her one line to herself over and over. I hate witnessing ambition, even in a woman. I had to look away.
“Action!” Takahama wailed.
The assistant director flashed and snapped a clapper with scene 71, shot 3 written on it in chalk. The buzzer rang, and the stream of artificial time gushed forth.
I took Aiko in my arms. In my embrace, her body quivered like a bowl of pudding. She was supposed to be writhing, but she wasn’t using enough force. I had to overcompensate and throw my hands back to make it look like she had flung me off. She bumped her back against the wall.
She was supposed to say —
“No, no! Stay away from me!”
— but instead said:
“No, no! Stay with me!”
“Cut!” the director yelled. “Cut! You’ve got it ass-backwards. Come on! I’ll cut you slack during the test runs, but once we’re using film, you’re accountable. Film ain’t free.”
“I’m sorry!”
Aiko’s voice was shaky, but I didn’t feel particularly sympathetic. When it was someone else’s fault, I breathed easy and sided with the director. Takahama’s displeasure could sometimes verge on the majestic. He towered over this trembling amateur actress, drowning her out like the crash of a symphony. Slip-ups like these, blunders that ruin a take, seemed to make him feel like the glass castle he was laboring to construct was shattering to pieces. He planned his scenes shot by shot, like a criminal plotting out the perfect crime. When he hit some obstacle along the way◦— a mouse, for instance, kicking a tin can off of a shelf onto the floor◦— he would reject this unsolicited detail, however realistic, as his sworn enemy.
I loved watching the agonized expression that came over Takahama’s face when he had to throw a scene because an actor flubbed a line or made the wrong expression: it was the grimace of swallowing the bitter reality of incompetence. And ruined celluloid.