Star

2

Kayo loved sorting through my fan letters. She worked quickly, but we never made much progress◦— whenever she found a real sidesplitter, she stopped to read it aloud. These letters were usually from widows, like the woman who described her fantasies of sex with me in pimply detail, or from perverts, like the guy who desperately wanted me to send him my underwear.

When Kayo was tired of the letters, she helped me think up tales of young romance to prepare me for the interviews. To keep things interesting, she insisted that I always tell a different story, with a first love at age seven, another at ten, one for fifteen, one for seventeen. It goes without saying that each account had to be innocent and pure, in keeping with the vision of the PR Office.

My job was to come up with a backstory of violence. I’d been a shy kid. All I did was draw. I never came close to fighting anybody. Instead of gambling with the other kids, I chose the blue sky, and treasured not the gold leaf on their playing cards, but the golden sundown rimming actual young leaves. Looking back, I can say that loving nature was an error. Not seeing my affection for the weakness that it was, I put a stain upon my youth.

This hour before sleep was my only break during the entire day. After bathing, I wrapped myself in a bathrobe and lay on the sofa by the window, where I listened to the late-night jazz programs and occasionally exchanged a few words with Kayo, who sat on the floor with the letters fanned around her.

Sometimes Kayo came over to the sofa and snuggled up beside me.

“Who should I do tonight? Natsuko Suzaku? Remember that ravishing kiss?”

“Let’s see it.”

Kayo did her impression of the famous actress in the one kiss scene we’d shot together. Coming from Kayo, it was pure caricature. She flared her modest nostrils to mimic Natsuko’s grand nose, bared her silver teeth, and let her mouth fall open, as if dreaming. Quivering her lips, she drifted her hand to the back of my head and pulled me in, stopping just a breath away, but not for long. When the time was ripe, she lowered her fake eyelashes, gazed down her nose, and snapped her lips to mine with the pull of a magnet.

“The End.”

We both laughed.

“Want me to do Misao Yawata?”

“Sure.”

Misao was a popular young actress I’d starred opposite recently.

With a pinch of her bun, Kayo undid her impossibly long hair. Kneeling beside the sofa, she buried her face in her hands and heaved her shoulders in torment. At the decisive moment, she showed her face and closed her eyes, puckered her lips, made her eyelids twitch, and faltered with each coming breath, waiting for my kiss. When I leaned out for a casual peck, “Misao” tilted her head, clasped her hands around my neck, and sucked my lips profoundly. Then Kayo looked me in the eye.

“So young and pure, right? Who’s she think she’s fooling?”

We both laughed.

It occurred to me that tomorrow I was turning twenty-four.

“You send out invitations yet?” My college buddies had been bugging me to throw a birthday party, as an excuse to get the gang together. To shut them up, we were asking ten of them over for dinner.

“Of course. Everyone’s already said yes. It seems like your mother’s gotten a head start on the cooking, too. But tomorrow’s another long day for you. You might not make it home.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I knew it all too well.

By the next afternoon, it was clear that we would probably be shooting well into the night, but I didn’t ask Kayo to call my mother and say that we’d be late. If anticipating my arrival was a part of the festivities, then surely my absence was part of the feast. That’s right. It’s better for a star to be completely absent. No matter how serious the obligation, a star is more of a star if he never arrives. Absence is his forte. The question of whether he’ll show up gives the event a ceaseless undercurrent of suspense. But a true star never arrives. Showing up is for second-rate actors who need to seek attention. Tonight I’d come home to find the table heaped with dirty plates, a sign that everyone had gone home satisfied, and then I’d climb the stairs and fall asleep.

The people wait for me, checking their watches, standing at their doorsteps, but I am a speeding car that never stops. I’m huge, shiny, and new, coming from the other side of midnight. My gliding mass is strangely solid for a phantom, clad in a metal that’s lighter than air. Vaulting from the abyss of my garage, deep in the deepest folds of night, I blast forth, almost floating off the ground, and rattle the sky with a crash of silver. Trees damp with dew sag and weep as I race past them, and the nocturnal birds flocking after me lay screaming in my wake. One by one, I overturn the traffic signs that line the road like white memorials. The gas stations I pass erupt in flames, leaving pocks of fire on the expanse of night… I ride and ride and never arrive.

Something strange happened that night during filming, an unlikely tragedy that did not feel like an accident. It was the perfect birthday present.

Takahama moved us into Studio 3. The space was packed wall-to-wall with scenery for the edge of town.

We were filming Scene 65, Shot 9.

Neriko Fukai was playing a seamstress from a local dress shop. Her brother, a gangster, was murdered. Neriko hates everything about the yakuza. Her brother was like a brother to me, too, and when I get out of jail and hear about his death I vow to take revenge. The scene before this, where Neriko finds me walking home from jail and breaks the news to me, is the one we shot out by the tracks.

I ask Neriko for help, but her disavowal of the yakuza makes her want no part in the revenge. Before long, I fall in love with her. She rebuffs my numerous advances◦— she’s had enough of the yakuza, myself included. But deep inside, I know she loves me, too, and only pushes me away because she fears my passion is a calculated step in my revenge.

Once I confirm the whereabouts of my enemy, I resolve to take him down alone. I stop by Neriko’s dress shop to say goodbye. She’s busy tidying up before closing. I lean in for a goodbye kiss, but she puts up a fight. If I want to die so badly, she says, I should go ahead and die already. She kicks me out. With a knife in my waistband, I leave to face my death. Neriko rushes out to stop me but I don’t look back. Scene 65, Shot 9 opens with the camera behind me as I’m heading off into the night.

There are too many movies like this to count. From this snippet alone you probably get the feeling that you’ve seen this one a couple times at least. But there’s something timeless about the mediocrity of the story, no matter how many times I find myself inside it. The yakuza with his simplistic attitude toward death and the pretty woman who resists him, hiding her true feelings, are bearers of a special kind of vulgar, trifling poetry. A hidden poetry that will be lost if any mediocrity is shed. Genius is a casualty. The poetry must never be conspicuous◦— its scent is only detectable when subtle. What makes the majority of these films so great is that they’re shot in a way that overlooks the poetry entirely.

In the pale light of midnight’s foggy street,

I’m haunted by the goodbye in your eyes.

Who would ever notice that this cheap and tired lyric has terms so rigid not a single word could be replaced? People permit its existence because they think it’s harmless and derivative, with the lifespan of a mayfly, but in fact it’s the only thing that’s certain to survive. Just as evil never dies, neither does the sentimental. Like suckerfish clinging to the belly of a shark, threads of permanence cling to the underbelly of all formulaic poetry. It comes as a false shadow, the refuse of originality, the body dragged around by genius. It’s the light that flashes from a tin roof with a tawdry grace. A tragic swiftness only the superficial can possess. That elaborate beauty and pathos offered only by an undiscerning soul. A crude confession, like a sunset that backlights clumsy silhouettes. I love any story guarded by these principles, with this poetry at its core.

When the film starts rolling, I’ll open the curtained door of the dress shop and look over my shoulder to this girl I may never see again. As I lean into the doorframe, I look out upon the neon of the empty street. This, too, perhaps for the last time. Touching the handle of the knife in my jacket, I walk out into the town.

The camera was behind me. The test run had been quick, a matter of adjusting how I prop my hand against the doorframe.

“Action!”

The clapper snapped and the buzzer rang. Despite the mass of people present, you could feel the silence ripple through the set.

Unreal time resumed its flow. I was stripped bare◦— deep inside a dream.

I cast a parting glance at the girl and leaned into the doorframe, with my back turned to the camera. For a time it films my back in silence, capturing the scenery of night. Once I walk out the door, the camera will slide along a wooden rail and follow me down into the street.

With my back squarely to the lens, an uncanny landscape spread before me.

It was unlike anything I’d ever expected. A normal town at night, but through the eyes of a man who had resolved to die. What town it was, I couldn’t say. I had no idea where it had come from. All I knew was that these were the lights of someplace special, someplace dear to me. They had to be.

The town was still, no one in sight. I faced three forking alleys. Willows drooped; neon signs glowed high and low across the cramped façades. Light spilled from the window of a garret apartment, of all places. Red neon gently strobed the half-torn movie posters on the telephone poles.

The neon signs flashed out of sync, and the jumbo lanterns outside the bars hung still. The doors to the bars were conspicuously dark and snugly shut. Through the glass doors of the cafes, the shadows of potted rubber trees loomed across the walls. In the window of a townhouse, mostly blocked by a partition, I spotted a red cloth covering a mirror.

What had made this town so quiet? And what had made these people hold their breath? They must have resigned themselves to the blinking of neon, the green light that the letters “lido” cast from the second floor of the neighboring building into the shadows of their eaves. What had left the ominous grime on the glass storefront of the realtor, papered from the inside with flyers for apartments? And what had set the door askew at such a subtle, damning angle?

The piercing fidelity of the landscape must have meant that I was watching from the gates of death. What I saw was as comprehensive as a memory, poor and wretched as a memory, as quiet, as fluorescent. I was putting it together in the way you would before you die, a last attempt to connect the life flashing before you with an acute vision of the future. I let the neon wash over me, knowing this was something I could never see again. I was no longer on a set, but in an undeniable reality, a layer within the strata of my memory.

In my short career in film, I’d never felt anything like this. Not once had I been able to completely forget that a cityscape was hollow◦— all façades and make-believe.

I stroked the knife in my jacket, left the dress shop, and stepped out into the town. The camera followed, soundless down the wooden rail. It was nothing short of a miracle that I’d stepped into this textured landscape, a living version of memory. It may sound contradictory, but it felt like I had stepped into a painting on the wall and was standing, dumbfounded, inside its panorama.

As I walked along, it became impossible to deny that these empty streets would eventually open onto sprawling tracks where trains came rushing in and out of town, extending naturally to a grand city, and a harbor, and beyond the sea to other countries with their own cities and harbors.

When this strange suggestion of reality bumped up against unquestionable proof, I couldn’t believe my eyes: the black door of the nearest bar swung open, and before me stood a beautiful young woman in a periwinkle cocktail dress.

In the flow of unreal time, I expect things to proceed as planned. The future is fixed; I know its every detail and can see the route ahead of me, like a car negotiating a winding slope. This girl was not part of the plan.

She stood in the shadow of the doorway, smiling brightly. Her skin looked awfully pale. It could have been her makeup, or the neon washing over us. Her nose and eyebrows were obscured; only her sad eyes and tiny lips were clearly defined. All I could see of her petite and slender body was where her cleavage met her dress. Her black hair blended with the darkness of the eaves. I completely forgot about acting and fell head over heels in love with this mysterious beauty.

Her arrival made the town’s sense of reality complete. I was convinced that I had slipped into another dimension, an actual place◦— all of it was real! The neon, the lanterns, the signboards, the willows, the telephone poles, and the glass door of the realtor. I’d been imagining they were all artificial, but now I was awake. I was positive that in about ten hours the sun would sweep the landscape, a newborn sun rising between the hunkered roofs.

She came toward me, arms outstretched, and in a strident, forlorn voice called out my name.

“Richie! Richie Mizuno!”

My real name. Not the name of my role. Her arms slapped my sides and closed around me in a bear hug.

A grenade of vitriol went off behind us.

“Cut!” screamed Takahama.

Everyone looked furious. Soon the entire cast was visible, peeking from the scenery. One guy threw open the glass door of the realtor. Another jumped out of a low window. The faces of the lighting crew poked out from the catwalks in the ceiling.

Kayo rushed over to my side.

The assistant director started screaming.

“What’s going on here◦— who the hell are you? Thanks to you, everybody’s gone nuts.” He grabbed at the bosom of the girl’s cocktail dress. She shrieked but couldn’t speak.

The grumblings of the veteran actors helped clarify the situation. This girl was a “new face” who had joined the studio a year ago. In her impatience to land a decent role, she ran herself ragged and wound up with some kind of an infection that led to a nervous breakdown. Desperate, she concluded that the only way to make it was to pull some bizarre stunt, anything to appear alongside none other than yours truly◦— and she was ready to resort to measures no sane actor would chance.

But this incident didn’t follow the usual course of events, with her removal from the set. What happened next was comical, all too typical of the film industry, and it sickens me just thinking about it. Takahama’s anger didn’t last. As he looked into the new girl’s eyes, he felt a gust of inspiration.

He wrote her into the scene as a crazy girl who jumps inexplicably in front of me, embraces me, and refuses to let go. Meanwhile, Neriko, who has been watching from the dress shop, is spurred by jealousy and rushes up to pull me away.

“Doesn’t that turn it into a comedy?” the assistant director asked.

Takahama responded with a glare. That settled things.

“What’s your name?” the director finally asked.

“Yuri Asano.”

Yuri had landed an unbelievable role, and the stable of actors◦— who despite waiting all day had not even been cast as extras◦— observed this injustice with icy stares. They dispersed, muttering nonsense about how unfair it was.

We jumped headfirst into the test run.

Yuri was petrified and tightened up. Her arms and legs were stiff, as if caught in plaster. I absorbed the icy glares they cast upon this actress who had overstepped her bounds. Yuri’s body would not regain the fluid liberty of that moment. That sense of living realness, felt only once, was gone for good. The sentiment had shriveled up. Her body was clammy, quaking from her center, her feet unsteady, unable to move even a few steps.

We kept trying, but anyone could see that it was over. Takahama heaved a sigh and announced that Yuri was no longer needed. We were returning to the original plan. When the casting director, whose job it was to pick our roles, heard Takahama make this announcement he rushed onto the set after the producer.

During Yuri’s impromptu audition, the casting director’s reaction had been so palpable I could almost hold it in my hands. His face was saying, “Here we go. If she pulls this off it’s gonna be a disaster.”

But to his relief, Yuri couldn’t pull it off, and like a pair of detectives, he and the producer escorted her off set. It drained the last of the blood from her face. She looked back, as if to say goodbye, but I didn’t even bother to return her glance.

The producer resolved to cut her on the spot. Nevertheless, she lingered in the greenroom, refusing to go home.

Shooting ended around ten. I went out back and found the other actors in a state of panic. Yuri had snuck into one of the starlet’s dressing rooms and overdosed.

Still wearing my costume and makeup, I charged over to her. Kayo, who loves this sort of chaos, had beat me there.

Yuri was doped up on Valamin. A group of actors laid her out on a bench and waited for the doctor to arrive.

Her eyes were closed, but the thickness of her makeup kept her from looking like she was really on the verge of death. The men gathered around her pliant body, and even those who’d spent the day fighting each other now seemed congenial in the presence of this dying girl, as if her body were exuding sensuality.

When the doctor arrived with a nurse, the producer asked him the most obvious question:

“Is she going to make it?”

The young doctor pulled back one of her eyelids and checked her pulse.

“She’ll make it,” he stated.

We gave the doctor space, assuming he was going to have to pump her stomach.

“I’m going to give her an injection. I’ll need you gentlemen to hold her down. She’s not going to like this.”

The men exchanged obscene glances and giggles. A group of them went over and held Yuri by the wrists and ankles.

The doctor drove a shot of saline into her left arm. Soon she began to writhe, like a snake working its skin free. We watched the twitches grow more violent. An anguished voice escaped her throat.

“It… it hurts!”

Kayo looked my way and for an instant let a smirk show at the corner of her mouth. But just as soon, as if forgetting I was there, she turned to watch the body of the girl revive.

Yuri’s chest arched sharply, her breasts threatening to burst from her dress. Her left arm snapped free, slapping the syringe out of the doctor’s hand.

“Hold her down, get that wrist.”

An actor in a windbreaker knelt by Yuri and pinned her arm down. The fury of her shoulders revealed the outrage of her muscle.

Each time she sent the syringe flying, she squealed “It hurts! It hurts!” at a higher and raspier pitch. It was all so natural. Having shaken off the stiffness that had temporarily constrained her on set, she reclaimed the natural presence of her first appearance. It was as if the overdose was not about her death at all, but the death of the woman who had been so rigid during the test run. Eventually the doctor grew impatient and slipped the tip of the syringe into a vein on the back of her delicate hand. She had a silver manicure. Absorbing the injection, the thin layer of muscle under her skin convulsed. A ribbon of blood dribbled from the needle. Her voice grew shriller still. The yells were real. She gritted her clean, straight teeth. All eyes were on Yuri! Her expression was shameless, every inch of her exposed. But with her return to consciousness, she found herself back in the disgraces of this bright and garish world.

Kayo’s eyes were twinkling. With her lips parted to reveal her silver teeth, she stared on drunkenly as Yuri’s body jerked with life.

That night, back in my bedroom, Kayo did something awful that the average person would never allow. But I was fine with it and did more than just allow it.

“Yuri Asano, right? She’s pretty. Too pretty to make it as a star.”

Lying faceup in the dim light, Kayo said those last few words like she was singing me a song.

“Hey watch this. Watch for a sec.”

I sat up from the sofa to see what she would do.

Kayo closed her eyes and made herself uncomfortably rigid. A thin screech, like a baby pigeon’s, left her lips. Her voice grew louder and clearer, and as the words “It hurts” took shape, what began as subtle twitches swelled into waves of energy. She screamed “It hurts!” and thrashed her arm through the air. Her silver teeth glimmered when she squealed. To me it looked like she was laughing, and eventually she did.

“It hurts! It hurts!”

She whipped her hair and clawed at her breasts with a passion that was almost sacrificial. The laughter driving the performance spun out of control.

“… Oh my god!… Oh my god!”

Kayo sat up, convulsing with laughter, only to fall back flat and start in with “It hurts! It hurts!” again.

There’s something about Kayo in these fits of delirium that shoots me through the heart. At times like these, she’s truly at her best. Every move she makes is resolute, a vow to resist the pull of tragedy, to poke fun at every situation, no matter how painful or grave, like someone flicking a watermelon to hear the sound it makes before they buy it. Her laughter was potent enough to scorch the grass for miles around, to putrefy a field of ripe red strawberries.

Watching Kayo sucked me in. I jumped on top of her, laughing so hard I almost cried. She screamed “Get off of me!” but I refused and sprawled over her convulsing body. Her laughter spattered at my chest like oil roaring in a pan.

By the next morning, the PR Office had reworked the story of attempted suicide into a pure romance. A minor actress, so blinded by her love for me she couldn’t keep herself off of the set, chose to take her own life rather than live a lifetime without me, but thanks to my intervention she was spared. To preserve the beauty of this memory, she had given up acting for good. They’d even written a response for me to read when the reporters asked about what happened.

“Of course I never saw her before. I was simply overcome with a sense of duty, as her colleague, to do anything I could to save her life. If you saw a woman drowning in the water, would you make sure she was beautiful before diving in to save her?”