quiet talk #9: Yes and No -another side- / ep.2
“Kotone, you have no core.”
The words her great senior had left behind at the end of his life echoed through the emptiness inside me.
In one word, he was disliked.
In two words, he was a difficult old veteran.
That was why hardly anyone went near him.
“That’s the Three Non-Nuclear Principles1 though.”
“Not the nuclear kind of core. I mean the core of a person. The will that lets you move forward, thinking, ‘This is what I want to do. This is what I want to be.’ Something that becomes the driving force of your life.”
“Hm.”
“You just let yourself be carried along, don’t you? Like a boat drifting down a river.”
When someone strikes at the heart of the matter, words fail you.
I never imagined I would one day experience one of those hackneyed expressions that appear so often in stories and scripts. Or perhaps even my reaction to having the truth hit home was borrowed from somewhere else. It made me doubt myself all over again, wondering whether I really was so devoid of ingenuity, so completely lacking in originality.
“If you’re not interested, then that’s the end of the conversation.”
It went back three years.
It was the night after the final performance of a stage production, when the entire cast had gathered for the wrap party. By coincidence, the role I had played was fairly close to the real me, so during the run I had not needed to put on the skin of me, the actress. The other cast members laughed and said I was still in character, but that great senior accepted me exactly as I was.
It was as though he had seen straight through to my true nature.
That frightened me.
And it made me happy.
“Well, now that you’ve put it like that, I’m curious. Tell me.”
The elderly veteran who had played my grandfather onstage sat at the far end of the banquet hall, drinking in our conversation. Smoke from the cigarette pinched between his wrinkled fingers rose straight into the air.
Neither of us could drink alcohol.
“So, why did you choose the path of an actress?”
“Well, I suppose I admired it…? I was one of those girls who wanted to be Audrey Hepburn.”
“That’s a script your agency gave you, isn’t it? Then let me put the question differently. What made you become an actress?”
Were his words a sharp blade, or a heavy blunt instrument?
Either way, the blow was both sharp and heavy, digging into the emptiness I knew painfully well within myself.
Should I hide it?
Should I protect myself with the lies and acting that only an actress is permitted to use, as I always did?
But I could not imagine any such thing working on the great senior sitting beside me.
“I was scouted in Shibuya. When I was a first-year university student.”
“So you didn’t decide you wanted to stand onstage and then become an actress.”
I was already sick of the idea of another lecture.
Whenever I told other actors I had worked with something like that, what usually followed was either envy and resentment, or some direct or indirect interrogation of my aspirations as an actress.
Things like the usual clichés.
Must be nice, being so talented.
I wish you wouldn’t treat this like some kind of game.
Do you have any idea how many actors would kill to stand where you are?
So where’s the finish line? Some rich man’s marriage?
Words that made me want to spit in their faces and say, Who cares?
Every one of them exposed their humanity, caring not one bit about me, the person playing the role of actress Kurosu Kotone.
Though perhaps expecting consideration from actors was a mistake in the first place. Their job was to express human nature vividly, after all.
“I’m sick of lectures already, Grandpa.”
I borrowed my great senior’s cigarette and copied the way he lit it, then took a drag.
The magic words I used when sending my manager out to buy them were, “A pack of Seven Stars, fourteen.” I had no idea what the words actually meant, but I knew that if I recited that spell, these were the cigarettes they would bring back.
The moment I took a puff, however, my body violently rejected it.
“Hahaha. Your sulky little performance is terrible.”
“You’ll get lung cancer smoking those.”
“Gaaaah!”
Having gone beyond some shitty old-man joke and graduated all the way to a shitty old-geezer joke, he blew the punchline out with the smoke before continuing.
“That monster called Kurosu Kotone is just too young and too good at everything. That’s why everyone around you finds it irritating. They want to see you stumble.”
“Then I’ll never stumble. I’ll act perfectly, relentlessly, and knock every single person who criticised me straight into the swamp of their own self-esteem.”
“Is that your core?”
I realised, because he had pointed it out, that I had become exactly the same kind of person as those actors whose naked humanity I had despised.
This old actor was dangerous.
First he had shaken me by telling me I had no core, only to dig up the real core of the matter afterwards.
“Is it fun tearing into an innocent young actress’s true feelings? People are going to hate you, Grandpa.”
“The world goes round because there are people everyone hates. Humans only become good friends once they have a common enemy.”
“So you’re saying, ‘I am the hidden hero who made it all possible!’?”
“That’s about all there is left for an old man like me to do.”
He slowly exhaled a stream of smoke and murmured:
“…Kotone. An actor is a ship.”
“A ship?”
I searched through my memories, trying to work out what he meant.
Nothing like that had appeared in the play whose final performance we had just completed.
So I lined up the works from my great senior’s past in the theatre of my mind. I made a point of checking the works my fellow cast members had appeared in, as preparation for working with them.
Perhaps he was talking about the series of war films in which he had played everything from an ordinary soldier half a century ago to a captain in more recent years.
“The war stuff? Didn’t you play a captain?”
“Yeah. Captain of the battleship Kongō. But that’s not what I mean. What do you think it means to be a ship?”
“First a lecture, and now a riddle…?”
“Don’t make that face. You’ll make Grandpa cry.”
At the time, I had absolutely no idea what he was trying to tell me.
A ship was simply something that floated on the waves.
A rowboat moved by oars.
A sailing ship moved by catching the wind.
A steamship moved through steam pressure.
A turbine ship converted that steam into electricity and used it to turn a propeller, carrying itself across the water.
“You’re talking about the driving force behind being an actor, aren’t you? You were just talking about that. About having a core as a person and all that.”
“Bzzzt. Wrong.”
For a man supposedly so disliked, he pursed his lips with an almost mischievous expression.
“A ship crosses the sea. Sure, the engine matters, but being carried along by the current is part of a voyage too, isn’t it?”
“If you’re only being carried along, you’re a raft.”
“You are. But even a raft is a perfectly good ship. Thousands, tens of thousands of spectators are eagerly awaiting the great adventure of the raft called Kurosu Kotone, drifting along with the current of public opinion.”
I pictured myself sitting on a raft made from nothing more than lashed-together logs, drifting among the waves.
The raft floated along on the current of public opinion.
No matter how desperately I paddled with my hands and feet, I could not fight the current. All I could do was drift in whatever direction society wanted me to go.
I understood why the other actors were jealous and resentful.
Being a star whom the public had favoured was, by its very nature, an enormous advantage.
“But if you keep doing that, you’ll lose sight of where you are. You’ll be shipwrecked in the great ocean that is show business.”
He was right.
And I realised I was already close to being shipwrecked.
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“You young people always want an answer straight away…”
“What? I’m listening to your lecture disguised as advice, so stop being coy and tell me. I’ll decide whether to use it or not.”
He immediately gave a cackling, spiteful laugh.
Disliked.
Difficult.
That had been his reputation.
But this carefree, elusive man was nothing like the person I had seen backstage during the performances.
This was probably the real him.
Perhaps we were alike.
Unlike me, who played the beloved, pure-hearted Kurosu Kotone, the direction of the feelings people had towards him was the exact opposite.
Being loved. Being hated.
Both were equally difficult.
“All right. Here’s Grandpa’s dying advice. Listen carefully, Mari.”
He called me by the name of my stage character, Suzuki Mari, and put on the skin of my grandfather’s character before speaking.
Looking back, I think perhaps he was too embarrassed to say it as himself.
“…A lighthouse. Find a lighthouse. Something that will shine a light on you, something that can be a place for you to return to. It can be an object, but preferably a person. Better yet, someone outside the entertainment industry.”
“Can’t family count?”
“You don’t see family all that often, do you? So make lots of other people you can see regularly. Friends, lovers, whatever. As many lighthouses as you can, people who make you feel as though you can return to where you belong when you’re with them. They’ll become nourishment for you too.”
His teaching struck straight into my heart.
Not because it was some precious pearl of wisdom from a great veteran.
It was because the slightly embarrassed way he spoke overlapped with the situation I found myself in now.
An actor is a ship; other people are lighthouses.
They are the signposts I need, for the sake of me, who gets swept along wherever the world wants me, the actress to go.
“Friends, huh…? I haven’t seen them much lately… Our schedules and interests don’t line up.”
“Haha. Might be a bit difficult for a big star.”
I will never forget that embarrassed smile.
Because those were the last words I ever exchanged with him, a veteran actor who had spent fifty years devoted to his craft, captivating audiences from an era when films and theatre were still the kings of entertainment.
“I wish I’d heard more of Motohashi-san’s philosophy of acting. Did you hear anything when you worked with him, Koto-chan?”
After the incense had been offered and the sutras recited, I was speaking quietly with some fellow actors while waiting for the funeral procession to depart.
On the altar was the trademark scowl of my great senior, Motohashi Tetsuya.
Beside it were his beloved fishing rod and models of a ship and a lighthouse.
“No. He never gave any indication. I was surprised too…”
“That sounds like him…”
All the actors who had come to pay their respects gazed towards the photograph displayed at the back of the hall.
Funeral staff and family members continued preparing for the departure.
“I heard Motohashi-san didn’t even tell his fellow actors or his children about his lung cancer.”
“I heard he only had a month to live by the time he did his final work. It’s amazing he managed to hold on that long.”
“Like a bird taking flight and leaving nothing behind, huh? Honestly, he even directed his own death.”
The image I had heard of him as a disliked man collapsed in an instant beneath the words spoken by the actors gathered at the funeral.
Every mourner was united in grieving the difficult old veteran’s death.
The actors who had whispered behind his back during his final production were not here.
Only famous names, actors renowned as greats and as consummate professionals, had gathered.
Motohashi Tetsuya had played the role of Motohashi Tetsuya right to the very end, then died.
He had brought the story of his own life to its conclusion here.
Perhaps there was no greater reward for an actor than that.
“…Come on. We should do our best too. So we don’t get an ashtray thrown at us from heaven… no, from hell.”
“Right.”
As I watched the black hearse carry him away to the theme song from one of his old starring films, I remembered the relationship between ships and lighthouses.
I am a ship. More specifically, a raft. If I simply let myself drift, I will be shipwrecked.
What I need is a signpost that allows me to remain myself. Something I can call a lighthouse.
“Well then, it’s your turn, Kotone-san. Hehe.”
Her voice brought me back to reality.
This was Kyōdō.
For some reason, I had ended up in the love nest of my sister, who had decided to marry a woman, and her fiancée.
My sister had agonised over it, no doubt, but she was not a celebrity, so she had no scandal to worry about.
In this day and age, if someone still wanted to throw stones at a same-sex marriage and make a fuss about it, all she had to do was ignore them.
But as a celebrity, I couldn’t do that.
I was terribly jealous of my sister, who had made it almost all the way to the finish line.
Because what my sister had obtained was the thing I wanted most, and the thing I was least capable of obtaining.
A lighthouse illuminating the entire pitch-black ocean.
Like the Pharos of Alexandria, built on the island of Pharos in antiquity.
Something I could find no matter where I was, something that would find me no matter where I drifted.
I had finally found someone who seemed capable of becoming that for me, and yet—
“I’m not answering anything!”
—my lighthouse always rejected me, sending its lovely fragrance drifting towards me as it did.
“Well, then I’ll just have to make you answer.”
But I couldn’t give up.
I didn’t want to give up.
These feelings could not be tidied away with something as simple as the word love.
Wanting someone to become the signpost that allowed me to remain myself was not an emotion I could swallow down and neatly contain, no matter how I tried to digest it.
So I didn’t understand.
How was I supposed to interact with a lighthouse?
How could I make her become my lighthouse?
And what exactly were these feelings I carried inside me?
This emotion that lay beyond love, that was neither quite trust nor anything else I could name.
—What do you see when you look at me/me?
“Because you’re my oshi, that’s impossible!”
—Why can’t you talk to the person who is your oshi?
Why do you think that way?
“…I want to know more about you, Rinko-chan. Hehehe.”
“That’s why I refuse recognition!”
In the privacy of my heart, I thanked my sister’s fiancée, Shandy-nee.
By using her Game as an excuse, I could investigate the internal structure of my lighthouse.
If a lighthouse would not shine its light on me, then I wanted to make it shine.
No matter how selfish that was.
No matter how much I trampled over the other person’s heart.
No matter how much she came to hate or despise me.
Even if she told me she was quitting as my manager, even if she told me she was quitting as my fan, I didn’t care.
“Nope. I want you, Rinko-chan.”
Both versions of Kurosu Kotone need a lighthouse.
So help me, me who is sleeping for now.
—If it’s me asking, I suppose it can’t be helped.
This Game is not a one-on-one Game.
It is a two-against-one battle between both versions of me, both searching for a lighthouse, and Rinko.
I’ll make you mine, me.
Yes. Me.
-
Japan’s “Three Non-Nuclear Principles”: not possessing, not producing, and not permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons. The veteran deliberately puns on kaku (“nuclear” / “core”). ↩