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.

Kayo never gave a thought to jealousy.

Every day she went through the entertainment magazines and weeklies strewn about my bedroom, cut out every column or interview that I appeared in, and diligently pasted the clippings into a scrapbook. Her favorites were the photographs of me chatting with gorgeous actresses, the gossip columns about me and gorgeous models, and the endless debates over who I was going to marry.

“This one says you’re engaged to Midori Masaki. Hah! That’s a laugh. Everybody knows her uterus is chronically inflamed.”

Most of all she loved the interviews where I was asked about the type of woman I preferred. She found one called “A Dreamboat’s Musings on the Ideal Girl” and began to read aloud: “I’m a sucker for a pretty face, but I’m especially drawn to slimmer pixie types. And there’s something irresistible about a woman’s ankles…”

“Perfect!” she said. “Stick with that. There’s no need to be hopelessly romantic. Modern stars need to speak in a way that clearly frames the woman as a sex object.”

“Watch out, or they’ll switch you to the PR Office.”

“How about my ankles, Rikio?”

Kayo shook off one of her slippers, gestured her leg in the air like an Indian dancer, and presented me with her bare foot. The knob of her girthy ankle was tough, rugged, and discolored. If the ankle of a girl is like an almond in a thin, delicate skin, Kayo’s was a big brown chestnut. What makes a woman’s ankles beautiful is this immodesty, the sudden appearance of something animalistic along the otherwise smooth leg, yet Kayo’s ankles were like knots in old wood, the evidence of some oppressive natural law.

But I can’t say I felt anything like disgust◦— that was for the real world, the world I had forsaken.

I lifted Kayo’s foot with one hand and met her ankle with my lips. It went limp, lost its stiffness and its dryness, and became a giant yellow rose, or the face, carved from boxwood, of a meditative buddha. It gave off a smoldering light and took on subtle undulations. The presence of cool bone was palpable beneath the skin, and I imagined it was bare bone I was kissing.

At that moment I kissed the essence of my fallacy. This was the very core of my existence, and the ultimate expression of the world that I had chosen, the world where I belonged. It was something no one else had ever tasted.

Kayo squealed and pulled her foot away◦— she saw straight through my most obscure emotions.

“Playtime’s over, little prince,” she said. “You’ll always be my handsome little prince, even when you’re sixty.”

“Let’s do it, Richie.”

The second assistant director walked over to where I sat. “Richie” was the cutesy nickname favored on set and among my fans.

I looked away from the little mirror, handed it to Kayo, and stood up.

We were shooting at the busy center of a suburb, in a neighborhood along one side of an elevated railroad. The embankments leading up to the tracks were covered with grass, but trash was piled at the bottom of the slope, and scraps of litter tangled in the shallow roots. The sunlight inside of a tin can shimmered on a little pool of yesterday’s rain.

On this side of the tracks there were cheap bars and saloons. It was the middle of the day; everything was closed, but the windows were full of faces, locals peeking out to catch a free show whenever the camera was pointed away. Outside, the fans pushed and shoved behind the ropes strung up on both sides of the street.

With my striped shirt barely buttoned, I slung my jacket over my shoulder.

The cinemascope camera was perched on a wooden tripod, its lens pointed at the road.

When we were filming, Takahama was always squatting by the camera. He was lanky, skeletal, and had a long, hyperactive nose and a tiny little mouth. His whole face was darkened from incessant exposure to the brutal world of dreams. Habitually dismissing the commotion of his surroundings to give himself the space to think, his gaze was lonely and parched, a gaze most people could never wear in public. It felt so private, like something I was never meant to see. He had the eyes of a child locked naked in a secret room.

“We’ll open with you over there,” he said, almost talking to himself, and stood from his crouch, clutching the script.

“You kick the empty can into the air. Water goes flying. The camera tilts up. Then you say… what’d we say?”

“Damn, even that trash rolls better than me.”

“Right. At the end of the line, on ‘better than me,’ we’ll dub in the whoosh of the train. Squint like you’re annoyed. That’ll do it.”

We got ready for the test run. Because the camera couldn’t catch the water in the can effectively, the assistant director had to crouch down on the ground and painstakingly adjust the way it pointed. There were peaches on the label. With its jagged lid flipped up, the blown-out can looked awfully solemn.

It should come as no surprise, but whenever we’re filming on location, whether in a town like this or somewhere way off in the mountains, “nature” is nowhere to be found. After passing through the camera, the scenery is no more than a dense collection of objects. Alluring forests or mesmerizing temples separate into their various constituents, with every scene a garbage dump of information, another miscellaneous, wild heap of things that are cold, or dark, or twinkling, or stagnant, a confusion of unmanageable shapes. Amid all this, some trivial or unlikely object◦— like a broken bottle in a wall of garbage◦— declares its splendor.

“Try not to hit this thing with your foot during the test run,” the assistant director told me.

“Which direction am I supposed to kick it?”

“That depends…”

“Up!” cried Takahama. “It’s gotta be up! Otherwise the water won’t go anywhere. Alright! Test!”

Takahama was already on edge. Maybe he’d been cursed by the tumbling scraps of paper.

Every time the train whooshed above us during the test run, I squinted in a way that failed to satisfy.

“It doesn’t look like you’re annoyed. Looks like you’re squinting at a light that’s shining in your face. That’s not gonna cut it. Try not to let your eyes close. It’s not like you’ve suddenly gone blind or something. Alright?… You’re squinting because of the train, but your face has to make sense with the previous line. You’re not even thinking about the train. What train?”

I found myself adrift in the lonely expanse that an actor enters upon being criticized, but I remained enveloped in my role as if it were an invisible skin, close and protective. It traced the contours of my mind and body, wafted up like ether, shielding me from reality. I may as well have been behind a castle wall. Even if the director lost his temper and threw a punch at me, his fist would swim through unreal air and never actually hit me. I knew this, I was certain, but the real world has no parallel for such certainty.

After the test run, we were finally ready to shoot. Everything depended on the train, and since I had to do the lead-up with my back turned to the tracks, it was going to be difficult to time. I had measured it by listening to the train as it crossed the overpass and approached the tracks above us.

“What time’s the next one?” Takahama asked.

“3:18, on the dot,” the assistant director answered. “Or rather, that’s when it reaches the station. It should hit the overpass at 3:16 and thirty seconds.”

“Alright, start shooting when it hits the overpass.”

The assistant director hushed the crowd with his megaphone.

“Quiet down, please, we’re about to begin.”

Kayo came over with the little mirror. Her shoddy black slacks, snug at the thighs, barely contained her ample hips. I glanced in the mirror and then gave it back to her. She looked over my face as if inspecting fabric for imperfections.

The train appeared, tiny in the distance, riding through the liquid sunlight. The tracks above began to hum.

“Ready!”

The assistant director stood in front of the camera and fanned open a clapperboard with scene 16, shot 6 written on it in chalk.

The train rumbled across the overpass.

“Action!”

There was the whir of silent film, like vapor hissing from a leak. The clapper slapped and pulled away.

We were back in the surge of imaginary time. No matter how many scenes we’d already filmed, once I was behind the camera with the film unspooling, time flowed like the cool, clear waters of a high ravine, where I could swim my way upstream. My body took on buoyancy, and even walking the same ground as before felt like something more than walking. I became the force of time incarnate, following a steady rhythm, passing through the scripted motions one by one like they were floating weeds that curled around my body and slipped off of me and drifted away. Compared to this variety of time, the hours of ordinary life were no more than a worn and tattered obi unwinding from the waist.

Now I could be seen completely. Being seen made me their king. It gave me my authority, and all the people watching were my subjects.

Eyes, countless as the gravel at a shrine, pressed in all around me. They found their center◦— my image coalesced. In that moment, dressed as a yakuza, I became a sparkling apparition, like a scepter thrust against the sky.

This apparition is ravaged by the business of the performance. The lines, the gestures, the way I touch the props, the point in the dialog where I adjust my posture… each delicate move is crammed into a few seconds, with no choice but for me to go from this to that, moving nimbly and naturally as a butterfly inspecting a bed of flowers.

In elementary school, we had to take an IQ test just like this.

“Ready? Pick up this book, head over to that desk, open up the drawer, put the book inside, take the paperweight and the hat off of the desk, hang the hat on that hook, and bring me just the paperweight. Sound good?”

I kicked the can. The toe of my shoe sent it flying, in a clean arc. Water flew like sparks. The camera tilted up. As I watched the angle shift from high to low, I let my body burn with energy, and prepared my expression, the scowl before I click my tongue and deliver “Damn…”

You can’t rush through your lines. Especially when you’re on location. If you get worked up and start jabbering away, it’s impossible to add them in during the overdub.

“Damn, even that trash rolls better than me…”

I said the line with a hollow stare and knew I’d nailed it. On cue, the train rushed overhead, crackling like a shower of steel. I had decided that before I squinted, I would look up toward the train out of the corner of my eye, and did just that◦— squeezing my left eye just a little harder than the right.

“Cut!” yelled Takahama.

The set was silent.

“OK!”

When Takahama said OK but didn’t mean it, the word would barely leave his throat. Those within his circle understood that even a mumbled OK could have a multitude of nuances. This time around, however, his OK didn’t sound so bad.

The tension dissipated. When I sauntered back over to the folding chair that Kayo pushed toward me, the crowd rejoiced like I had just returned from war.

“That last take was just great. Two shots left. Want some tea?”

Kayo held out a metal thermos. Its polished surface was smeared with the faces of the crowd. She popped it open for me. Steam huffed from the bottle and fogged the metal around its mouth. I felt my confidence about the last take fogging over.

“It was a great take,” Kayo repeated unconcernedly. “The way you squinted when the train went by was absolutely perfect. If you can keep it up I’m sure we’ll be OK.”

“Two more shots…”

And after that another night of filming. At this point it felt like my body was coming apart from lack of sleep.

“Richie! Richie! Sign mine!”

Girls were yelling from the crowd. I smiled at them and gave a little wave.

“He saw me!”

“Over here!”

I was exhausted. The girls could scream like hell for all I cared◦— their shrill voices splashed over me like rancid oil. If only I could line them up and march them all into the mouth of an incinerator. Except they’d probably crawl out of the ashes gawking at me, so I’d have to pluck their eyes out first.

“Two more shots…”

I lost control and yawned.

“Look! He’s yawning!”

Neriko Fukai, who was acting opposite me, had gone home hours earlier, leaving me on my own for the two remaining shots. Lately she was in such high demand that we had to film all of our scenes together in the first half of the day.

The shot right after this one, where Neriko shows up and says◦— “What, talking to yourself again?”◦— had been over and done with since morning. It’d only been a few hours, but the little I remembered was already starting to fade.