Chapter Text
“What if your mom died?”
Kana Arima said it with a snicker and a tilt of the head. He was stricken for a half-second, and Kana knew she’d touched on something she wasn’t supposed to. She’d shuffled on, leaving him to ruminate on how he would force that expressionless face to bear tears in front of a thousand strangers coming to see Tokyo Blade.
Until a few years ago, imagining her mother's death was her go-to technique for crying. Despite the pressure her mother piled atop her, Kana loved her mother, enough that the thought of her dying would bring tears, even when she wondered if those tears would be reciprocated were they to switch places. All Kana needed was a faint trembling of the heart at the thought of her mother’s death, and her eyes would do the rest, bawling, sniffling, weeping.
Nowadays, her thoughts went to someone else when the Director needed waterworks from the girl who could cry in ten seconds. She wouldn't have believed it when she was younger, but tears were easier to fake at thirty than at nineteen.
She needed to cry. She was a teacher. Her favourite student was dead, by his own hand. His death is a shock; why would he want to die now, when everything in his life was going so well?
She held her hand to her mouth, feeling warm tears carving her cheeks, her face otherwise frozen in a wide-eyed stare.
“Cut! That’s good, Arima,” the Director said, in English.
She was on the set of an American production. She’d learned English for the sake of expanding her acting career, taking to it better than anything else in the last decade. Learning English didn’t remind her of him. She’d moved to other continents to escape him and his wretched memory. Hollywood, Broadway, the West End.
The set dispersed, leaving Kana trembling in her chair. The other actors ignored her. It was standard practice between actors; they gave each other space to recover from mining whatever memory they needed for a melodramatic scene like this. Kana had always found it easy to cry, but harder to stop, and she needed some time to gather herself after an emotional scene.
Kana wished one of the other actors would ask her what was wrong. She could regale them for hours with tales of him. A man who’d changed her life, who taught her the value of love, who was long dead and rotten in the ground, the maggots having long devoured his bones along with all the intangible things enmeshed within them that made him him: his memory, his soul, his personality.
The director noticed her brooding. “Take five, Arima.”
“Thank you, Director.”
Tiara might get nominated for a few awards, considering the names attached to the billing, including Kana's. Though the adult Kana, wealthy and independent of her parents, could be pickier about her roles as an adult, she'd let herself be pressured by her agent into taking a role in some dramatic movie with other veteran actors to maximise her chances of another award. Awards beget awards, so went the industry logic, and Kana was on the hottest streak she might ever have. She knew the English adage: opportunity knocks once.
And Tiara looked like a decent bet at first. The director had a few commercial hits under his belt. The producer had secured a hefty budget. But the script writer was at the tail end of his career, staggering through one more story, his mind and soul already wasting his fortune in the casinos of Monaco.
Actor’s regret only set in once she got to the filming stage and saw how even an experienced director could flounder with – or on some days, without – the script. Some shows were just crippled by one fatal flaw. Kana shrugged off bad luck. Dysfunction on the set was within her experience.
But the problem was the story, about a popular male high-schooler who committed suicide, and the resulting fallout. Kana played his teacher in a scandalous role sure to attract the eyes of the award season judges. She’d taken it on to prove something to herself, not that she'd say out loud what it was to the late-night hosts on the press tour.
So she relived those final weeks when Aqua was in her life. Over and over, diving into that same pool to mine the same memories, the cursed ore reflecting his lilting half-smile, his blue eyes and golden hair into her mind’s eye.
Still, Kana was a professional.
It was easy at first to power through the shoots. But the actor playing the boy was too good at brooding, too supportive of his fellow actors off-set, much like the real tragic boy whose death nobody saw coming until his body washed on the beach and Miyako had stumbled down to the morgue to identify the corpse. In the next scene they filmed, at the boy’s funeral, Kana broke out in sweats, white lights swam amidst a sea of static, and when she came to, she was surrounded by an extra pressing water into her hand, and the director yelling at her to get off set.
Kana could never find it in herself to lash Mem-cho with the same acid she reserved for everyone else. It was an unspoken acknowledgement that Kana called whenever she had a particularly bad memory of Aqua. Mem had lots of practice soothing people as a mother, a decade into her happy marriage. Kana picked over Mem’s words or tone for any signs of irritation or insincerity at every call. Kana wanted her to slip up; Mem was too genuine to.
What did it feel like to date another? Did Mem have the same strong feelings for her guy that she had when she married? Or had they decayed in a way Kana wished hers would and still hadn’t? She wanted to ask every time she rang Mem, but never found the courage. It felt bitter and ungracious to even think such thoughts, but they'd pop into her mind while in the bath or in the empty and cold bed, or the back seat of the limousine she was currently riding in.
“How’re the kids?” Kana opened the call with the most torturous of small talk questions.
“They’re my everything!"
What could Kana say to Mem? She couldn’t relate. Kana felt happy for her senior. That was enough.
“How's the new movie?” Mem asked. “Get me some free tickets to the premiere, yeah?”
“You taking money out of my pocket? No thanks.”
So went on their pointless banter.
"Nice car, by the way."
"I'm being driven to the airport. I’m coming back to Japan for-I don't know how long.”
Mem-cho’s face darkened just long enough for Kana to notice. A blink, then Mem was smiling again.
“You better stop by Tokyo, then.”
“I’d never pass up the opportunity to see you, senpai.”
One of Mem’s children ran in between Mem and the phone camera. Cooing at the child, Mem-cho winked through the screen, looking every bit of thirty-eight years. Age had finally caught up, her skin was creasing and her cheeks starting to sink, but still, she was the chirpy and devilish Mem-cho, real name unknown.
When Mem was twenty-five, she thought herself too old and unmarriageable, stupid as that sounded. Her thirtieth year was another year of highlights in a life full of them. Livestreamer awards, more TV roles, a solo album that topped Oricon, a kid on the way, and a loving husband. Mem never brought up her complex about her age after she married. She was too old for frivolous concerns.
The same year, Kana won an Oscar. She would be the first Japanese actress to be EGOT, so said the blogs, and all Kana’s acquaintances - even Mem - were envious. After the awards season was over, Kana stared at her collection of acting trophies, and wondered which one of them would make the best doorstop.
They chatted for a few minutes more. But Mem had responsibilities of child-rearing to deal with, and after they exchanged kisses and waves, Kana was left staring at the black mirror, the warmth of seeing a friend tussling with the coldness of being alone.
Despite how busy Mem-cho was, she always made time for Kana's call.
“Thanks for being a friend."
Kana dropped the phone onto the plush leather seat, letting the crackle of the car’s radio take over the cabin.
“And latest in celeb gossip, Kana Arima has reportedly left the set of Tiara after a nervous breakdown! Our sources don’t really know what caused it, but my theory is the poor girl is overworked!”
“The Japanese always work too hard! Poor Arima!”
“Is it Arima Kana? Or Kana Arima? I always forget how the Japanese order their names…”
“It’s the opposite order of us. They’re so odd, aren’t they?”
“Oh, of course you’d know. You Japan fanatic!”
“Look, I’ve only been to Japan twice. They had a nice resort in Kooshoo or however it’s pronounced, and I-
She ordered the driver to switch the radio off.
Kana's first destination was Fukuoka. Kyushu was muggy and warm and everybody was sweating too hard to recognise a famous actress in American aviators and beret (all red, like her hair). Her agent had directed her to a peaceful mental health retreat in northern Kyushu, while the cameras and paparazzi were waiting for her at Osaka, five hundred kilometres away. Amazing what a competent agent could do with a bit of well-placed disinformation.
She boarded another chartered car to spirit her away. As they sped along the coast, she gave listless answers to her driver’s questions, preferring to focus instead on the legions of egrets staring into muddy ponds. He shut up, and before she knew it, she was at the resort.
Nobody knew she was here. An assumed name, a shorter haircut, one of many early-to-mid thirty-something women alone at a retreat. Any strangers who saw her would guess her story, be satisfied with their own deductions, and leave their narrative at that. It suited her fine.
Soon Kana was indulging in massages, spa, then a margarita under the afternoon sun. She pressed her white camisole against her belly, reclined in her deckchair, and hummed instinctually, an old song she used to perform for thousands.
“I’ve been stumbling more, but nothing will change…”
She didn’t realise what she was humming was until the woman in the neighbouring chair joined in.
“I’ve been crying more, but nothing will change…”
Our voices harmonise well, Kana thought as she felt her consciousness turn hazy. As they finished the first verse, she felt the warm sun obstructed by something leaning over her.
“You’re in my light,” Kana murmured.
“There's plenty of sun to go around. Idols are competitive, but you shouldn’t hog the light, Loli-senpai.”
And any thoughts of sleep were banished.