Star

3

It’s useless trying to explain what it feels like in the spotlight. The very thing that makes a star spectacular is the same thing that strikes him from the world at large and makes him an outsider.

I forgot almost everything about Yuri Asano’s attempted suicide, but over and over, frame by frame, my mind replayed her gestures and the faces that she made when they revived her with the saline. The Yuri who jumped in front of the camera still stood in the shadows, but the Yuri who screamed “It hurts! It hurts!” and flailed her limbs lay wholly, incandescently before me.

Her success was absolute◦— a success no one could contest. The men were sweating. Holding down her mighty limbs, they watched the flesh of her white thighs twitch and recoil under their weight. The other men gathered around and took in every detail, from the flaring of her nostrils to the flash of her tongue between her parted lips. As if it were their duty, as if following an order, they watched her from all sides.

The position of her body made the spectacle supreme. With her eyes firmly shut, fake eyelashes and all, and undistracted by her senses, Yuri was submerged. That’s right. Her mind was underwater. Her senses had been caught in the blurred grayness at the bottom of the sea, but her body had made it to the surface, its every curve and crevice bathed in the violent light. When Yuri yelled “It hurts!” her voice was aimed at the abyss. This was not a cry out into the world, and certainly not a message. It was a frank display of physicality, expressed through pure presence and pure flesh, unburdened by the weight of consciousness.

I wanted to study her, to watch her do it all over again. She had managed to attain the sublime state that actors always dream of. That two-bit actress had really pulled it off… without even knowing she had done it.

Among yesterday’s fan letters was a painstaking confession from a teenage girl, who wrote to say she used a photograph of me each night to masturbate. Kayo read every word of it aloud.

Listening from the sofa, I imagined the girl’s changing body.

Alone in her room, completely out of sight, she wove her hand between her legs, her thin fingers like a deft and agile comb. Her handiwork was pointless, harmless, lovable, and ladylike. Her fingers were precise, their motions practiced. She was the figure of rapture, and the cloth she wove so small, no wider than a handkerchief.

But the girl was anything but dreaming. She wove her cloth with steady focus and fastidious attention.

Nobody was watching. There was no way my photograph was looking back at her. But there I was, under her voracious gaze!

Through this sort of exchange, a man and woman can consummate a pure and timeless intimacy without ever actually meeting. In some deserted square, in the middle of a sunny day◦— it would manifest and consummate, without either of us ever knowing.

Given the choice, I’d much rather have a girl masturbating somewhere to my picture than actually trying to sleep with me. Real love always plays out at a distance.

Despite billing the film as a grand production shot in lifelike color on Cinemascope, the studio only gave us twenty-five days to shoot, forcing us as usual to move at a grueling pace, working each day late into the night. Every morning I woke before seven, headed to the set, and didn’t come home till past eleven. But that wasn’t the end of it. To film the night scenes on location, we sometimes worked until dawn three nights in a row. All the while there were heaps of conversations, photo shoots, and interviews for magazines. The PR Office scheduled meetings with the newspapers during my lunch breaks. I barely had a chance to chew my food, much less taste it. The other day I looked down and saw red in the toilet bowl, but didn’t tell a soul.

I was outside, pacing in the brutal sunlight while they were switching out the sets, when the producer clapped me on the shoulder.

“Your name’s getting bigger and bigger, kid. Pretty soon we’re gonna have to get you doing one a month.”

“Great. I can’t wait.”

“Whenever the president goes out to have some fun, he always takes along a few photographs of you to hand out to the geisha girls, to see how they react. In his mind, geisha are the most self-centered and honest type of girl. ‘A geisha never lies.’ That’s his motto. Could be worse. But listen to this. When he pulls out the photos of you, the girls fight over who gets to keep them. He said it makes him feel like Mr. Moneybags, throwing coins into a crowd.”

“You don’t say.”

“I guess the geisha got pretty worked up last time.”

The producer was an amicably cynical man, but it wasn’t until recently that he’d begun to speak with me this casually.

It was strange to have a day this clear. The rainy season had come early, with almost daily showers since the start of May. Lucky for us, we were done with most of the location shooting. Inside, the studio was unbelievably humid, the air thick with a promise of mold.

Here’s how things progress after the scene I mentioned earlier, where I head out to confront my enemy in the face of certain death. Keep in mind that some of the later scenes had actually already been filmed, to accommodate the schedules of certain members of the cast: I bid farewell to Neriko and leave the dress shop. Off into the city lights, as if we’ll never meet again. Once she’s alone, Neriko finally realizes how much she loves me. She runs out after me, grabs ahold of me, confesses her love, and tries to get me to abandon my mission. Eventually I give in and put it off for one more day, to spend the night with Neriko in our first “passionate embrace.” Things get pretty hot and heavy.

Trouble is, the next morning, the guy dies anyway, in a car accident. You’d think I’d be relieved to hear he died without my intervention◦— Neriko sure thought so◦— but instead I resent her for stripping me of my life’s purpose. After just one night together, I toss Neriko aside and set my sights on the runaway girls who hang around Ueno Station. I lure them in, set them up as streetwalkers, and make a living as their manager. That’s where Neriko finds me.

On this particular morning, the scene was set in a dingy hotel room in Ueno, where I’ve taken one of the runaways to bed. Everyone was saying that these next fifteen shots could take all afternoon.

Ken, the wizard of the lighting crew, was sure of it.

“It’s our first day on set. No matter how fast he tries to go there’s no way we’re finishing this morning.”

Takahama liked filming out of order. Say, for example, the camera setup is the same for Shot 5, Shot 8, and Shot 10 of a given scene. His method is to shoot all three in quick succession, out of sequence. In a pinch, he has no qualms about burning through shots from completely different sections of the movie. If Scene 60, Shot 5 and Scene 75, Shot 5 use the same setup, he shoots them back-to-back. When the cast for the scenes is identical, the effect can disorient the uninitiated. Without actually going anywhere, you hop into a time machine and blast into the future, then back into the past, then back to the future, forced all the while to keep track of where you are in the script.

Habitually deferring to efficiency and economy can make life start to seem less consequential. Let’s say somebody’s just cut me up and I’m in serious pain. In the next shot, without moving an inch, I’m miraculously healed, but in the shot after that, I’ll have to start wincing again from the freshness of the wound.

If you get too used to living life this way, the steady flow of real time◦— where there is no turning back◦— begins to feel boring and stale. Let’s say I meet a girl. I want to skip ahead to when we’re sleeping together, but I can’t, which makes me antsy, and it feels absurd that I can’t jump ahead to where I’m sick of her, or back to the freedom that I had before we met.

I recall a rare afternoon off: I went shopping on the Ginza, where I witnessed a man being arrested for stealing a pair of cufflinks, under the cover of the crowd gathered there to see me. It felt like we were in a dream: a star and a shoplifter is each a rare encounter, but seeing us together cracked the superstructure of reality. Everyone was watching. The shoplifter was a grungy middle-aged man, and at the time I was still twenty-three, a burning beacon of youth. When they arrested him, the crowd cheered and our eyes met. His face was in agony.

At that moment, it felt like this middle-aged man and I were pulled loose from reality, from the gleaming store displays, from the racks lined with shirts of every color, from the uproar of the crowd. Like a rose being plucked down to its stem, the world tore back before my eyes and showed me its interior. It felt like we were in a scene being shot out of order, at the mercy of some unseen director.

That shoplifter was me, only twenty years older! The moment he reached out to touch those handsome cufflinks with their precious stones, reality began to slip away, and he and I switched places. The next shot in the scene was rolling, only he was playing me.

“Please forgive us for all the excitement,” the store manager begged me, once the shoplifter had been apprehended and taken away. “There’s such a crowd today that I’m afraid you won’t be able to have a proper look around. Why not make yourself comfortable upstairs? It’s a bit of a mess, but at least up there you can take your time and look things over.”

We walked through towers of cardboard boxes and up a steep and narrow staircase to a disorderly office area on the second floor, where I was offered a chair. Since I’d come to find a necktie, the manager personally fetched me a selection of skinny club ties from America, Germany, and Italy. A girl from the shop brought tea and asked me for an autograph. I signed her piece of paper and she slinked off. The manager told me to take my time and disappeared, leaving me alone with my decision.

Up there in the office, the bustle of Ginza kept its distance, and the music and the people dancing at the neighboring cabaret, separated only by a window, felt like they were in another world. I was alone, my head cocked staring at a mirror on the wall◦— if there’s a mirror in the room, I notice it right away and answer its passionate gaze. In that messy little room, it was like the ratty burlap sack of Ginza had been emptied inside out.

Again I felt the strange sensation of filming out of order. I stroked the fabric of a German tie in an elegant silvery gray and ran its length between my fingers… through the mirror, head still cocked, I took a careful look around the room.

But when I heard the manager climbing the stairs, I pulled the necktie from my pocket and carefully returned it to its box. Even if I’d really stolen it, no one would have labeled me a thief. The manager would merely have sent along an invoice and had a blast telling his friends about the funny trick I’d played.

Three rookie actresses◦— Aiko, Baba, and Chie◦— stood around me, dressed up in fancy outfits that gave them away as country girls too far from home. Soon each of them would “taste my venom.” They were trembling, eyes fixed on their scripts, no time to listen to the jokes I made.

When me and the first one, Aiko, were called to the lofted upper level of the set, Aiko almost lost her footing on the shoddy ladder.

“Hey babe, watch your step!” Ken said, touching her hips as if to catch her. “Tokyo is a dangerous place.”

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.

“Alright. Action!”

The clapper snapped and the buzzer rang. Silence rippled through the set.

When I cradled Aiko in my arms, she flung my hands away and threw herself decisively against the wall, whipping back her pale jaw. The shock made her nod mechanically, like a doll someone had tossed. Her teeth clacked like ceramic.

“No, no! Stay away from me!”

I was sitting with my feet free, ready to stand, before she’d even spoken. I sprang up flawlessly and towered over her. The camera shot us from the side, filming Aiko’s trembling face as she watched me with an expression that the script described as “full of fear and anticipation.”

I turned toward the camera and dropped my hands onto her shoulders, to push her down. Aiko was too stiff and didn’t understand how to go down gracefully. It felt like I was yanking on the handle of a creaky pump that badly needed greasing. But I had to make my movements fluid, effortless, and strong.

Once Aiko had fallen to the bed and started crying (though in a way that left much to be desired), I took center stage. Finally, I was able to move without resistance.

I looked down at the crying woman at my feet and smirked. She arched her back, pushing her chest out just enough to accentuate her breasts. I twisted up my lips, shiny with lip balm, ran my fingers through my hair, and tugged apart the tie, in the rakish way I’d worked out during the test run. I took care not to rush, loosening the knot in three deliberate motions, each gesture dripping with my readiness to enjoy this woman’s body.

But I had to keep from appearing to be a villain. A heartthrob must always be supple; his face must never lose its natural innocence. I ripped open my shirt, nearly popping off the buttons. The amber muscles of my chest, prepped earlier with body makeup, gleamed lustrously before the camera.

I freed my arms from my sleeves and delivered my line: “Quit crying. You know I’m gonna treat you right.”

“Cut!”

Takahama took a sharp breath. In the usual sulking way, he let out his reluctant signal of approval.

“OK.”