#67: Blue Bird / ep.2
“We’re almost there.”
“Yay!”
Watching Aoi humming cheerfully beside her, Mikoto sank deeper into the back seat of the red SUV.
Late April. FM Minato, a radio station in Yokohama.
They got out of the SUV, collected their visitor passes, and Mikoto stepped into the workplace where Kotone did her job, a place she had never seen before.
Today’s assignment was what Shandy had dubbed “Hello Work for Twenty-Three-Year-Olds”: accompanying the recording of Cheer Up, the lunchtime weekday programme on which actress Kurosu Kotone was a regular every Wednesday. It was essentially a grown-up social-studies field trip.
Following Kotone at the front and Rinko, her manager, behind her, Mikoto and Aoi walked along together. For today, Mikoto was technically acting as Kotone’s one-day manager.
“Thank you for having me again today.”
Kotone spoke to the radio staff she knew well in her actress mode. The moment she stepped out of the SUV, she had switched herself on as an actress, or rather, as a professional.
Mikoto knew how fiercely Kotone protected her public image, so she said nothing and kept quiet.
Aoi, naturally, knew nothing of the effort involved.
“Sis Kotone, you’re totally different from usual!”
“Aoi-chan!?”
Aoi had chosen the worst possible way to tease Kotone, practically threatening to expose the truth in front of staff she knew well. Rinko looked aghast.
Kotone, meanwhile, did not so much as blink. She simply laughed softly and sweetly, as though to say, “Hehe.”
It was probably that false mask she had stolen from Shandy.
Perhaps because of what had just happened, the moment Kotone closed the door to the dressing room they had been given, she switched modes.
“Hey. Is Aoi trying to ruin me?”
“Huh? Why?”
“You wouldn’t get it, but I’ve got an image to maintain. If that gets messed up carelessly, that’s the sort of work I’ll start getting.”
“I don’t get it!”
“Explain it to her, Rin-chan. Tell her how precious your oshi is.”
“I hate the way you put that.”
Rinko sulked, but nevertheless proceeded to explain Kotone’s image strategy in painstaking detail.
She spoke so quickly and jumped between topics so often that she sounded less like a manager and more like an enthusiastic fan delivering a passionate speech about her oshi.
What she was trying to say, however, was that an actor’s image could become fixed in the public eye, and consequently limit the roles they were offered.
There were countless examples.
An actor who had once played a cheerful character happily drinking highballs might thereafter find themselves offered nothing but cheerful roles.
Or an actor who had played a bank employee fighting their way through the promotion race and giving their boss a taste of their own medicine might take time away from acting afterwards, simply to avoid becoming trapped by the image of that role.
“…That’s why Kotone takes her image so seriously. If she can maintain the image of a beautiful woman who is pure and unblemished, yet capable of taking on any colour, she can always play up the contrast between herself and her roles.”
“Whoa…”
“You’ve got absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
Kotone shook her head wearily and began checking the script for the live broadcast.
There was still an hour to go.
Until then, there was nothing for Mikoto or Aoi to do.
Still, if she was going to be a one-day manager, Mikoto wanted to feel as though she had done at least a little work.
“Is there anything you need? I can go and get it.”
“Then throat lozenges and apple juice. No fizzy drinks.”
“Mikoto-san, you don’t have to. That’s the manager’s job. I’ll go.”
“No, if I don’t, I’ll just be someone who tagged along.”
“In that case, could I ask you to?”
“Sorry!”
Rinko clasped her hands together apologetically before entrusting Kotone to Mikoto and Aoi. The two of them left the station for a moment to buy supplies at a nearby convenience store.
After dragging Aoi away from the magazine rack, where she had settled in for some leisurely browsing, Mikoto returned to the dressing room.
A young female staff member was there, going over the programme arrangements with Kotone.
“Whoa, Sis Kotone. You’ve got such a serious face. You’re totally different.”
“Aoi-chan, listen…”
“Eep…”
Aoi fell silent before Mikoto could intervene, cowed by the devastating glare Rinko had sent her.
If anything, Rinko probably cared about Kotone’s image strategy even more fiercely than Kotone herself.
Still, Mikoto had to admit Aoi was right.
From the corner of the roughly eight-tatami-mat dressing room, Mikoto watched Kotone’s profile.
It belonged to someone facing her work with complete seriousness.
The bright, cheerful woman Mikoto had heard on the radio before had been built on years of brutal effort.
“…Mikoto-san, can I talk to you alone for a moment?”
“Sure, but…”
Leaving Aoi in the dressing room to watch Kotone work, Mikoto accompanied Rinko to a lounge elsewhere in the station.
They chose drinks at random from a cup vending machine, and after taking a sip, Rinko let out a long sigh.
Mikoto had a pretty good idea why, so she spoke first.
“Sorry. I dragged Aoi-chan into this.”
“I’m really annoyed that this was Charlotte’s idea, but Kotone already agreed to it, so there’s nothing we can do…”
There was a great deal of irritation in Rinko’s voice.
Her words carried an implicit reproach towards the source of this whole manager-game mess: Aoi.
Indeed, during the five-point interview Game with Shandy the other day, Rinko had spent the entire time looking suspiciously at Aoi. Whenever Aoi gave another hopelessly naïve answer, Rinko had sometimes tried to change the score on her tablet before Shandy had even ordered her to deduct a point.
Like Kotone, Rinko did not have particularly warm feelings towards Aoi.
Mikoto could understand why.
But Aoi had reasons of her own, too.
Mikoto could not bring herself to dismiss her outright.
“Do you think she’ll be okay?”
“I don’t know. I only just saw her again for the first time in over ten years. Though, well, she hasn’t changed much.”
“Over ten years means she was still in primary school, right? If she really hasn’t changed since then, she’s grown up far too innocent…”
Aoi had acted as though Kotone wearing a cat’s disguise was none of her concern, doing her best to tear off the mask in public.
Rinko’s irritation seemed perfectly justified.
And yet—
“…I’m worried because she’s too naïve. What do you think, Mikoto-san?”
With that, Rinko glanced at her phone.
There was still plenty of time before the live broadcast.
“I think people that age are probably all like that. And I can sort of understand wanting to work in Tokyo.”
“For people who grew up outside the city, Tokyo is a dream. But saying that anything is fine as long as she can work isn’t good. She looks like the kind of person who’d believe whatever anyone told her. She could get picked up by a bad person and end up doing some shady job.”
“Yeah…”
Rinko’s irritation towards Aoi was not really anger at her inability to read the room.
If anything, it was closer to a parent’s instinct to protect a child.
“It’d be a problem if Kotone’s cousin ended up working in the sex industry. As her manager, and as your friend.”
“There’s no such thing as respectable or unrespectable work.”
Rinko’s mouth stopped dead.
“The world doesn’t see it that way. I’m glad you don’t think I’m some dirty woman, Mikoto-san, but…”
She gave a wry smile before continuing.
“She’s free to do whatever work she wants, but I want her to be just a little careful. That woman said something too, didn’t she?”
“She wants to show Aoi-chan how different people work, so she can find something she actually wants to do… I think? She wouldn’t tell me because she was embarrassed.”
“So that’s why she called it Hello Work for Twenty-Three-Year-Olds…”
“Sounds like Shandy.”
With a heavy sigh, as though finally satisfied that things made sense, Rinko opened her business planner.
“I’ve got another recording in Shiodome after this. So could you keep an eye on Aoi-chan too, Mikoto-san? I really don’t want to be dragged around by another Kurosu woman any more than I already have.”
“I’m a Kurosu woman too, you know.”
“You’ve been the one who dragged me around the most, haven’t you?”
Rinko gave her a resentful look.
Mikoto had far too much evidence against her to argue, and found herself at a loss for words.
But then Rinko broke into a grin.
“I’m joking.”
“…Actually, lately, I think I’m finally starting to get over you, Mikoto-san. Though, really, it’s more that I’ve been put in a situation where I have no choice but to give up.”
“Do you resent Shandy-san?”
“I wanted to kill her, but… honestly, I don’t care any more. I lost to her, but I don’t think she’s someone I can’t compete with. If you two ever break up, I’ll go all out until you say yes to me.”
“Well, well. It seems you really do like me.”
“There it is. The worst thing about Kurosu women. When they get embarrassed, they put on some weirdly detached act and try to change the subject. I know your type.”
Rinko had hit far too close to home with her accusation that Mikoto was putting on airs.
Mikoto froze, unable to think of a response.
Considering that Kotone lived with Rinko, perhaps she had let something slip. Or perhaps Kotone had tried the same trick herself and ended up exposing the whole family trait.
Either way, it was a thoroughly dispiriting thought.
“Anyway, I’m counting on you with Aoi-chan. I have to go through Kotone’s ritual soon.”
“She’s still doing that?”
“I’ll work hard enough for both her and her devoted big sister.”
Rinko smiled.
They returned to the dressing room together.
Aoi had been banished to the corridor outside because she was “getting in the way of the ritual”. She stood there with them, and her expression was utterly different from before, suddenly deadly serious.
It was almost as though Kotone’s intensity had rubbed off on her.
“So? What did you think of Kotone’s work?”
“…I didn’t understand a word of what they were talking about, but Sis Kotone looked really serious. Don’t celebrities just talk about whatever and call it a day?”
Mikoto answered while looking back into the past.
“Kotone was scouted and entered show business, but she was a complete wreck at first. Every day she cried because she couldn’t act and couldn’t do unscripted talk. Even so, she worked desperately hard and somehow made it to where she is now.”
“Sis Kotone cried?”
“Don’t tell her I told you. She gets seriously angry when I talk about this stuff.”
Kotone had the gift of beauty, but the entertainment industry was not forgiving enough to let someone survive for years on looks alone.
Show business was a crucible of beauty.
Some people competed purely on physical beauty. Others brought extraordinary forms of beauty to bear through their acting ability, their gift for conversation, and countless other talents.
To survive in such a world, you had to hone whatever made you remarkable.
For an actress, that meant not merely beauty, but acting.
It meant managing the image the public had of you.
It meant thinking about beauty, and only beauty, from beginning to end.
Mikoto, who had been the first person Kotone turned to when the pressure became unbearable, understood just how painful that could be.
“The more dazzling a world looks, the harder people have to work where nobody can see it. Like a beautiful swan paddling furiously beneath the water.”
“Doesn’t look like Sis Kotone works hard…”
“She just thinks it’s uncool to let other people see her working hard.”
“Why? Being able to work hard is amazing. She should tell people and let them praise her.”
“Huh…”
Aoi’s innocence continued to astonish Mikoto.
The contrast with her own jadedness was so stark, so dazzling, that she found herself unable to look directly at it and let out an odd little noise.
Work was all about results.
The effort and hardship that went into a job did not directly translate into how that work was evaluated.
Effort mattered less than achievement. Process mattered less than results.
In modern society, where those things were valued, the ability to handle a job efficiently was often prized more highly than dogged hard work.
And yet, learning how to work efficiently was itself a form of effort.
“I can’t do any of that. I don’t have anything I want to do. What about you, Big sis Miko?”
“Well… When I was doing planning, I hated it at first, but I suppose I worked hard.”
“That’s amazing! Being able to work hard is so cool!”
“But the idea that hard work is rewarded is just a nice story. It betrays people easily enough.”
Her first project had been a lucky punch.
Her second had been adopted, only to collapse.
Then Meiji Stationery had decided she was no longer wanted, leaving her searching for herself all over again in the hope of finding another job.
Mikoto’s hard work had betrayed her.
She felt as though that emptiness might swallow her whole.
“Mmm. Society’s such a pain…”
“Yeah. Life in this world is difficult, to put it mildly.”
Even so, Mikoto thought:
Effort may betray you, but without effort, you’ll never reach anything.
“…Maybe that’s what planning was for me.”
“What’s up, Big sis Miko?”
“Oh, no. It’s nothing…”
She had only just begun to take back her muttered thought when the dressing-room door opened.
She did not look like it, but the embodiment of hard work, actress Kurosu Kotone, was standing there with a gentle smile.
The ritual that separated me from my public self must have ended. Kotone’s face was bright and refreshed, while Rinko looked away with a faintly embarrassed expression.
It was hardly surprising, given that she had just been staring into Kotone’s eyes from close range.
“I heard you, Big sis and Aoi. From the part about my hard work.”
Faced with Kotone smiling cheerfully while simultaneously emanating menace, Aoi instinctively slipped behind Mikoto’s back.
She might as well have been hiding.
“Now, whatever could you mean? I was merely reflecting on the importance of hard work.”
“Oh? It’s been a while since you’ve shown me that side of you, my gentlemanly big sister. Shouldn’t you be saving your charming self for your precious wife?”
“Please, don’t concern yourself. At the moment, I happen to feel like putting on a little more height.”
Kotone smiled with satisfaction at Mikoto’s improvised attempt to put on airs.
“We can discuss the details later. First, there’s our first job of the day. Will you help me, you hopelessly unemployed one-day manager?”
“Certainly. I’d be delighted to accompany you, you hard-working actress.”
“Whoa… Big sis Miko and Sis Kotone are both weird…”
Aoi did not know.
She was too young to remember.
Kotone’s talent as an actress had blossomed in part because of the improvised theatre games she had played with Mikoto since childhood.
“What is wrong with these sisters…?”
Rinko shook her head in exasperation at the Kurosu sisters’ performance together, but she did not forget to take a photo with her phone.