#86: On the Radio / ep.2
The drive towards the outskirts was so quiet that it hardly seemed as though they were heading somewhere to make love. The only thing filling the strained silence was Kotone’s radio programme, where she was unusually stumbling over her words from beginning to end.
Rinko might be subjected to something without her consent. The situation was as bad as it could possibly be.
Even so, Rinko remained calm because she had decided to trust the person who continued broadcasting her existence from the small studio in Yokohama, on the other side of the radio waves.
Besides, Kaya’s destination was bound to be a love hotel somewhere on the outskirts. If so, Rinko could simply escape when Kaya stopped the car. Fortunately, she had confidence in her running speed, and it had only been the other day that she had sprinted full-pelt down a television station corridor.
“Can’t we just stop this? All of it.”
No matter how much she struggled, Rinko’s heart would never return to Kaya.
She tried to reason with her with a sigh, but Kaya gave no answer. Her profile reflected in the passenger-side window was frozen, and she was in no state to listen to reason.
That profile told a painful story of desperation.
She would have Rinko, even if she had to force the issue.
She would use Rinko as an outlet for her own stress.
Rinko had no idea what had driven Kaya to such extremes. Could living in the countryside, with one’s parents-in-law, and starting a family really cause such a profound change of heart?
Rinko did not know what had changed, nor would there ever come a day when she could empathise with it.
The two lives that had taken different paths would never intersect again.
“Where are you going? If you’re looking for a hotel, it’s the other way.”
Their paths had diverged in more than just life. The car turned off the national road leading into the outskirts and onto a side road. It was going uphill. The kei car’s engine rose sharply in pitch, screaming as it strained.
“You’ll just try to escape in the car park anyway. I know you that well.”
“Oh, really.”
With nothing but a nasty smile curling at the corners of her mouth, Kaya drove the moving prison up into the mountains.
There was nowhere left to run. Kaya’s next destination was probably some deserted car park in the mountains. The mere thought made Rinko’s skin crawl.
“And now, let’s introduce our next email. From Yokohama City, a radio name… or perhaps her real name. This one comes from Takahashi Mikoto-san.”
“Ahaha. I wonder if this Takahashi Mikoto is the one Rinko likes.”
Rinko listened intently to the name that had suddenly been read out.
“Hello, Kotone-san. This doesn’t have anything to do with today’s lighthouse theme, but there’s something I wanted to ask, so I sent you an email.”
The volume was barely loud enough to make out. They must have been beginning to leave the radio station’s broadcast range, because static was creeping into the transmission.
Rinko immediately turned up the car stereo.
At last, she was ready to listen to the truth hidden beneath Kotone’s static-ridden actress voice.
“The other day, I had a fight with someone I love, and she won’t speak to me. I really want to go and see her right now and apologise, but I can’t just abandon my work, so in the end I can’t concentrate on my job either. What do you think I should do, Kotone-san?”
There was no doubt about it. The sender of the email was Kurosu Kotone herself. She was improvising, speaking directly to Rinko.
She was abusing the airwaves for her own purposes. As her former manager, Rinko could only groan inwardly.
But only two people in the world knew the truth.
A radio message meant for one person alone.
“That’s a difficult problem. Is it the sort of thing where you’re thinking, “Which is more important, me or your work?””
Having her own feelings laid bare made Rinko swallow hard.
“There are jobs you simply can’t walk out on, even if you desperately want to rush over, aren’t there? If I had someone like that, I think they’d be someone who could love me together with my work. So I guess it can’t be helped.”
Rinko threw herself back against the passenger seat and curled in on herself.
She knew, rationally, that she did not want Kotone to throw away her work for her. And yet, somewhere in her heart, she had been hoping for exactly that.
She wanted Kotone to run out of that radio booth in Yokohama right now.
To abandon all thought of the consequences, leave a hole in her schedule, and come and pick her up.
She did not even need to apologise.
Rinko had already forgiven her. She just wanted Kotone to come and save her.
She was lonely and frightened, and she wanted to be rescued from this cramped, suffocating situation.
“That’s right. She’s a celebrity, after all.”
Her words of resignation overlapped with Kotone’s voice.
“…But rather than just brushing it off by saying it can’t be helped, if I really wanted to make up with someone, I’d do everything I could. I’d keep calling until they spoke to me. Oh, but if people find out Kurosu Kotone does something this embarrassing, I might be in trouble, huh?”
After inserting a little laugh in her capacity as a radio DJ, Kotone continued.
“So I really understand how Takahashi Mikoto-san feels. Which is why I think I’ll properly tell her how I feel. Over the phone.”
“What…?”
One of the regular features on Kotone’s weekly radio show was calling a listener live on air whenever she found an email she particularly liked.
It was not difficult to guess who she was going to call.
“A live call? Sounds good. Shall we find out what sort of person this Takahashi Mikoto is, Rinko?”
“No, Takahashi Mikoto is…”
As though she intended to see the face of her rival for herself, Kaya pulled over onto the roadside. She switched off the engine and listened intently to the static-filled radio.
Then, just as expected, Rinko’s smartphone lit up inside her bag.
An unfamiliar number. The area code was Yokohama. It must have been the studio calling.
The phone displayed red and green buttons, forcing Rinko to make a choice.
Press red, and everything would end.
Press green, and—
“Oh, I think she’s away. Can I keep trying for a little longer? I want to tell Takahashi Mikoto-san directly.”
It was an extraordinary persistence.
Normally, if a listener did not answer after a few rings, the live call would be passed on to someone else. Even when the answering machine message began playing, Kotone simply kept trying.
If the call did not connect soon, this would become a broadcasting disaster. Rinko could picture the grim faces of the radio staff she had met several times before.
—The only person who could do something about Kotone right now was—
“Looks like Takahashi Mikoto isn’t answering. Well, maybe she can’t answer. She probably has more important things to worry about than the radio right now.”
“That’s not it.”
“What?”
“…Takahashi Mikoto will answer the phone. Listen.”
Her fingertip touched green.
“Ah, we’re connected. Hello? Ah, there’s some feedback. Could you turn down the volume on the radio, please?”
Rinko smoothly lowered the volume of the car stereo.
Kaya still had not realised. She probably did not even know what feedback was, since she never listened to the radio. She leaned forward, bringing her ear close to the speaker.
“Am I speaking to Takahashi Mikoto-san?”
What would happen if Rinko said no?
Or what if she told Kotone to stop abusing the airwaves, stop abusing her position, and stop pursuing her so relentlessly?
What would Kotone do?
Perhaps Rinko still had not forgiven her.
Perhaps she genuinely hated her now, hated the thought of seeing her face or hearing her voice ever again.
Kotone charged straight at her without considering any of those possibilities.
Kurosu Kotone was arrogant, self-centred, and utterly unreasonable.
As though Rinko’s circumstances were none of her concern, she was single-mindedly trying to convey her own feelings with force and arrogance, and with absolute honesty.
She probably was not thinking about Rinko at all.
She was simply determined to keep her lighthouse close at hand, and so she kept forcing her way forward.
“…Yes.”
“Thank goodness! I thought you might not answer!”
It was like being subjected to a hard sell for love.
But that was understandable. She was a child who knew no other way to love.
“So, about the email you sent me. Do you remember what you wrote?”
For some reason, Rinko began to smile at the thought that she was taking part in Kotone’s desperate little piece of self-fabrication, live on a nationwide broadcast.
“I remember. I suppose I really am Takahashi Mikoto.”
“What does that mean? You’re a funny one, Takahashi-san!”
So Rinko decided to play along.
In return, she would make it clear that she had no intention of accepting Kotone’s feelings without a fight.
A little revenge, at least.
Kotone had brushed it off smoothly, but she must have been panicking inside. Imagining what was going on in her head made Rinko feel as though something that had been weighing on her chest had finally been lifted.
“Rinko…?”
Beside her, Kaya’s eyes widened.
The same words she had just heard from the passenger seat came through the radio a moment later.
There was no way to hide it from Kaya anymore.
If she was going to find out anyway, Rinko wanted to make her see it for herself.
“Tough luck. The person I love is…”
She covered the phone’s microphone and said to Kaya:
“…I love Kurosu Kotone.”
The words she had finally spoken sank through her entire body.
The heart that had resisted the possibility of her love for her oshi becoming something more was swept away in an instant.
Their disastrous first meeting. The dance floor where she had wept herself sick after heartbreak. The time she had compromised by setting five conditions. The day Kotone had gone wild at the workplace. The days she had barricaded herself inside the apartment.
Those colourless memories, like monochrome photographs, were suddenly filled with colour, warming her heart.
Love really was such an unreliable thing.
Even Rinko was exasperated with herself.
She still could not quite accept that she had been pushed into admitting it like this. It was infuriating.
It pissed her off.
It was impossible.
“Takahashi-san? Takahashi-saaaan? Are you still there?”
“Ah, yes.”
“Then, can I tell you how I feel? It might take a little while, though.”
“Please keep it short. I think you’re running over your allotted time.”
“Haha. You sound just like a manager.”
After taking a breath, Kotone announced her feelings, leaving a generous pause before doing so. She must have been choosing her words, but she could not quite hide the panic between them.
“If it were me, and I had a fight with someone, I’d absolutely go and pick them up. And if I really couldn’t go, I’d find some other way to get my feelings across.”
“…Yes.”
“Maybe I’d even talk to them through the radio, like I’m doing now. Would a woman like that be too much?”
“No way.”
“Too much, huh? But, you know, I think truly falling for someone means being like that.”
The casual tone came from speaking as an equal.
The listeners would probably interpret Kotone’s slight change in manner as simply another role she was playing. Only a handful of people knew that this was her genuine self.
“I can only do things that I’d be happy to have done to me. I’m clumsy that way. My friends even tell me I’m like an elementary-school boy sometimes.”
“I see. That’s surprising.”
For an instant, Rinko heard a dry laugh that sounded almost malicious, but Kotone quickly pulled herself together.
“So, well…”
Perhaps she was finally approaching the heart of the question.
Kotone began hesitating conspicuously.
Maybe, as someone who had effectively hijacked the radio waves, she simply could not find wording suitable for broadcast.
Or perhaps she had only just now become embarrassed.
“I can’t hear you very well. Could you tell me your feelings a little more clearly, Kotone-san?”
“No, I mean, when you say something like this, it’s not really something you say over the radio…”
“I’m waiting. I’m curious what you’re going to say.”
“Ah… I’m saying it now!”
Kotone gave a small cough before speaking.
“Do you dislike people who are that clumsy?”
The words she had been able to say so many times before were nowhere to be found now.
Her little revenge, involving listeners across the entire country, had gone far enough.
Rinko was about to give her the answer she needed, ready to let her swallow her pride and be satisfied, when she remembered that this was a live broadcast.
Some listeners might have picked up on Kotone’s earlier words. Some might even start imagining things they should not.
In that case, protecting Kotone after her panic had caused her true self to slip out was also part of Rinko’s job as her manager.
She only needed to remain the pure, beautiful woman everyone believed her to be.
It was enough for Rinko to be the only person in the world who knew the real Kotone.
“So you mean that I should show them my weaknesses, everything about myself, and then ask whether they can still love me?”
“Ah, yes, exactly. Sorry for making you sum it up for me.”
“No, I heard a very useful piece of advice. I’ll take it to heart. Thank you very much.”
“Ah, Rin—Takahashi-san. By the way, do you like me?”
A childish question, rushing her for an answer.
Her own face in the rear-view mirror naturally wore a smile.
“I wouldn’t be listening to the radio if I didn’t like you.”
“Ah…”
“I’m waiting.”
She ended the call and switched off the car stereo.
Her fingertips were trembling because she had appeared on a live broadcast.
For now, she wanted to believe that was the reason.
She wanted to save the answer to the pounding in her chest for when she and Kotone were alone together.
“I’ve never seen you make a face like that, Rinko.”
Resting her chin on the steering wheel, Kaya stared into the distance.
“So that’s how it is. I’m not the same person I used to be.”
“You can’t go back?”
“I’m not going back. Not to the past, not to those feelings, and not to my parents’ home.”
“Hmm.”
There was a soft click.
Rinko tried the passenger-side door handle, and the door that had been locked shut finally opened.
“Why don’t you get out here?”
With Kaya’s emotionless voice behind her, Rinko stepped outside.
She had no idea where she was. It was a mountain road somewhere, with dense trees swaying in the wind and rustling overhead.
“You’d rather get out here, in the middle of the mountains, than stay with me?”
“Yes.”
“You really hate me now.”
“I don’t hate you. I just don’t care about you anymore.”
“Oh, right.”
Kaya turned the key. The kei car that had just climbed the mountain road deftly made a U-turn.
Rinko met Kaya’s gaze from the driver’s seat.
“Anything you want me to tell your parents?”
“Not really.”
“What an ungrateful daughter.”
“Good luck, Sis-in-law. Look after my brother.”
Kaya drove away, leaving Rinko behind.
It was almost anticlimactic.
Nothing had changed from when Kaya had abandoned her back when they were students.
If nothing else, that was very much like Kaya.
“So this is what all my love affairs amount to…”
She breathed out a long, heavy sigh towards the overcast sky.
The senior she had loved had betrayed her.
She had never been able to enter into romantic relationships with the customers who loved her.
And when she finally steeled herself to commit to someone, that someone already had an utterly infuriating prior engagement.
Then, to top it all off, she had been showered with passionate advances by that woman’s younger sister.
Her feelings never reached the person she loved, while she was always loved by people she could not love.
In that case—
“I’m going to be happy, damn it!”
—Just you wait, Shirai Kaya. Kurosu Mikoto.
I’m going to live such a happy life that you’ll regret not choosing me.
Together with the person I love most, my number-one oshi, who loves me more than anyone else.
“Haaaa…”
She must have been tense.
The moment she hurled everything she was feeling at the mountains, all the strength left her body and she crouched down by the roadside.
She was alone on a mountain road deep among the trees, with nowhere to go.
Even so, her phone still had a signal.
Message notifications began flooding in one after another, as though a dam had burst. LINE, Instagram, SMS.
“Focus on your work, you hopeless woman.”
Of the countless notifications, Rinko replied with her location to just one of them, then opened the radio app.
There was still an hour until the programme ended.
You’re making me wait, so don’t you dare phone it in.
Rinko’s cheeks softened into a smile as she put her earphones in.
＊
“You took long enough!”
It was after eight in the evening, well after dark, when a red SUV with Yokohama number plates finally pulled up in front of Rinko.
She had spent all that time simply waiting in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wilderness without so much as a streetlight, let alone a house.
It was not that she had been playing a Game to see whether Kotone would come to get her.
She had simply been too lazy to walk down the mountain road.
“The first thing you say after opening your mouth is that? Sounds like you, Rinko-chan.”
“How did it take you three hours from Yokohama?! You could have taken the Shinkansen and rented a car. You’d have got here faster!”
“Yeah, that would’ve been smart. Never even occurred to me.”
Judging from the way she spoke, Kotone had probably driven straight here on the motorway the moment her radio programme ended.
Her voice had lost its usual energy, and the fuel gauge, already more than half empty, suggested that she had barely stopped to rest.
“But I’m glad you’re safe, Rinko-chan.”
The offhand words of the driver, Kurosu Kotone, kindled warmth deep inside Rinko’s body, chilled to the bone.
Not wanting Kotone to notice, Rinko turned her gaze towards the passenger-side window.
If their eyes met now, she knew she would probably forgive everything.
But she could not allow that. She told herself that teaching someone that wrong was wrong was also part of a manager’s job.
“…Don’t you have something to say first?”
“Something more important than worrying about you?”
“What caused all this!”
“Forgot.”
“Don’t think you can just brush it off. I’m telling you now, I won’t forgive you unless you apologise properly, and I won’t forgive you if I don’t like the way you apologise, and even if you do apologise, I’ll hold a grudge.”
“So you won’t forgive me either way.”
“I don’t particularly care. If you insist and bow your head properly, then maybe I’ll think about it.”
She regretted saying it the moment the words were out.
If Kotone refused to back down, the thin thread that still connected them might finally snap.
“Are you being tsundere?”
“…Pull over. Let me out.”
“I’m joking!”
Kotone pulled into the car park of a convenience store at the foot of the mountain.
She had probably driven non-stop all the way from Yokohama, because she stretched herself out dramatically and switched on the interior light.
The small orange light illuminated Kotone.
Her eye make-up had run, leaving her eyelids and the area around her eyes blackened and smudged.
She looked exactly like a panda.
“…I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For hurting you, Rinko-chan.”
“What did you do?”
Kotone hesitated.
She looked weaker and smaller than Rinko had ever seen her in any role.
What stood here was not the glamorous Kurosu Kotone with her dazzling wardrobe and impressive career, but the unvarnished Kotone she had spent all this time refusing to look at.
Childish, selfish, and impossibly self-centred.
She was nothing like the ideal lover Rinko had imagined.
But Rinko no longer cared.
If she was not ideal, then Rinko could simply make her into her ideal.
Fortunately, the woman in question was an actress, someone exceptionally good at changing herself.
If she wanted a lighthouse, Rinko would guide her exactly as requested.
Into the woman Rinko admired, the woman she herself wanted.
“Um, so…”
“It’s fine. You obviously don’t understand why I’m angry anyway. I’ll let it go.”
“You literally just told me not to think I could brush it off.”
“You don’t want me to let it go?”
“Then I’ll let it go.”
That was not important right now.
There was something else she wanted to talk about.
“Why don’t you take your make-up off? It’s ruining the face I like.”
“I don’t have anything with me.”
“I’ll buy you some at the convenience store.”
“Then coffee, and something to eat.”
“Low-sugar and salad.”
“And the dressing…”
“Japanese-style, right?”
Rinko opened the passenger door and met Kotone’s eyes.
There was no need to confirm what they felt for each other anymore.
“Rinko-chan, wait.”
“Hmm?”
Kotone smiled through her swollen, tear-stained eyes.
“I love you.”
Answering honestly made Rinko feel as though she would be admitting defeat, so she forced her facial muscles to stay as composed as possible, lest they soften on their own.
“I know.”
Make-up remover and a light meal for two.
A colourless, uneventful stretch of time spent listening to the car stereo and devouring the food in front of them.
The lives of two people that had never once crossed had finally become intertwined.