#105: Camp Fire / ep.1
The Special Missions Office, 26th floor, Hibiya Trading.
Sanae sat in the section chief’s compact office chair, spinning round and round. Not out of boredom, and not for fun. Her workload was piled higher than a mountain, its severity deeper than the ocean floor. Without spinning her brain like a propeller, or a screw, there was no hope of solving any of it.
And yet, she couldn’t get a single thing done.
“Sanae-san’s spinning. Looks fun~”
“Ah, Michelle…”
She answered in a voice on the verge of vanishing, to Michelle, who’d started spinning her own chair in imitation.
“Could I trouble you for some painkillers? I’ll pay you back later.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine~ Where’s it hurting? Your head? Your stomach?”
“…Something for everywhere would be appreciated.”
Even with a head that refused to spin the way the chair did, Sanae could hazard a guess as to why the work wasn’t going anywhere.
The maddeningly erratic swings between cold and mild spells, spring’s usual cruelty. Merciless low-pressure systems. Cedar pollen drifting thick through the air. And the excruciating, gut-clenching agony unique to day two of her cycle. A quadruple affliction, stripping every last scrap of motivation from her.
She’d hoped spinning in the chair might distract her a little, but the dizziness and nausea that followed only piled her personal hell five, six layers deeper. Entirely counterproductive.
“And some travel-sickness tablets, if you have them…”
“Got some~”
Michelle said it while digging through her cardigan pocket. That pocket surely connected to some fourth dimension. It contained, apparently, almost anything.
“Senpai, why don’t you go lie down in the nap room?”
With even Iida expressing concern now, Sanae hauled herself up on unsteady legs. A wave of dizziness nearly knocked her back down; this might genuinely be her limit.
“…I’ll do that.”
“Want a sleeping pill too?”
Michelle, looking increasingly likely to start prescribing actual pharmaceuticals, left Sanae too drained to respond. She simply walked off toward the nap room.
“Why on earth are we camping…”
Gazing out over the endless sprawl of forest, Mikoto muttered, half in disbelief.
“Well, turns out I’ve never actually done it. Glamping, technically.”
Kotone, the actress currently at the centre of a media scandal, grinned without a shred of remorse, treating her enforced suspension like something happening to someone else entirely.
“Timing works out for you too, sis, don’t it? Bit awkward seeing Shan-nee right now, isn’t it?”
“…Well, that’s true enough.”
Mikoto thought back to their venue viewing the other day. She’d finally pushed forward, only for Shandy to sidestep it, and the whole thing had dissolved into an awkward non-answer, stretched thin by her own overreaching. Not wanting to misjudge the distance by pushing too hard again, Mikoto found herself genuinely grateful for this trip.
All she could do now was wait for Shandy’s heart to settle on its own. Nothing left but to stand beside a woman carrying the complicated weight of a former-actress-turned-bartender past. The current state of things felt like swaying atop a stalled trapeze, unsteady and anxious, but she’d decided to hang on until the time was right.
“Forget about that woman, don’t you have a fire to help start?”
“Nah, bored of it already. Also my arm hurts.”
“Mine hurts too!”
No matter how many times Rinko struck the metal match, the campfire refused to catch, and her fury alone burned bright enough to look like it had been doused in petrol.
Minakami Kogen, Gunma. Four hours’ drive from the city centre, at the foot of the infamous Mount Tanigawa — holder of the unenviable title of the world’s deadliest peak for mountaineering deaths — sat a scattering of cottages at a thousand metres’ elevation, entirely devoid of human presence. Paparazzi surely wouldn’t chase them out this far, but a posted “Bear Sighting” sign hinted at a different sort of danger altogether.
“It’s not catching at all!?”
“Maybe you’re just not trying hard enough?”
“I’m scraping this thing like my life depends on it! This stupid stick!”
“Weird. In the video it lit first try.”
The sun was already sinking. At a thousand metres, the temperature dropped hard, well past chilly and into genuine midwinter cold. And if the fire wouldn’t catch, there’d be no cooking anything either.
Cold enough that even Mikoto leaned in toward the fire pit.
“Can I see that video?”
“Nah, don’t watch it. Camping’s about enjoying the inconvenience anyway, y’know.”
“Like you’d know, you amateur…”
Beside Kotone, still delivering her half-baked lecture, Rinko continued wrestling with the metal match.
A metal match is basically a magnesium rod. You’re supposed to scrape the surface to build up a pile of easily-flammable magnesium shavings, then strike sparks flint-style into it, and it goes up in a burst — or so the instructions claimed. If a burst was really coming, an hour of scraping should have been more than enough.
Mikoto found herself thinking of the fire starter and lighter the campsite manager had handed them.
“Just use science already. It’s freezing.”
“Huh? And you call yourself a camper, sis? Playing civilised.”
“We’re both civilised. Thank you, modern technology. I’m using the fire starter.”
“Wait!”
Just as Mikoto reached to break off a block of the fire starter, Rinko shouted. Nothing good ever followed that tone.
“I’m actually mad now! I’m lighting this out of sheer spite!”
“That’s my manager! Burn! Burn it all down!”
“Oh dear…”
Watching Rinko scrape away endlessly in the deepening dark, Mikoto flopped sullenly into a camping chair. Warmth, and dinner, were both looking a long way off. The turbulent first night of camping had officially begun.
“Yes! It caught!”
Well after full nightfall, a fire finally took hold at the campsite. A lucky spark had finally landed in the pile of built-up magnesium shavings, catching the hemp twine and tissue paper tinder. From there, all that remained was feeding it twigs and thin kindling, coaxing it along.
“Right, Rinko-chan, your turn’s up. Leave it to me.”
“You blew it out earlier!”
“I’ll get it right this time, promise.”
“Absolutely not!”
Tuning out the two of them squabbling, Mikoto kept splitting firewood with a hand axe. This, in fact, was the third time a coal had actually caught. The real cause of their repeated failures had been assuming they could jump straight from tinder to thick logs. Probably a classic beginner’s mistake.
“No fighting. If it goes out again, we’re using the fire starter for real this time.”
For three total novices with zero fire-lighting experience, even a simple campfire turned out to be back-breaking labour, nothing like the breezy version in popular manga. Mikoto found herself genuinely appalled at their collective lack of survival skills.
Somehow following the process by the book, the flame finally steadied. It burned less like a campfire and more like a full ceremonial bonfire, but the light tearing through the darkness was reassuring all the same. Surely no bear would come near this, probably.
“I’m exhausted, going to have a bath…”
With that, Rinko vanished into the cottage. The glamping cottage came fully equipped with a bath, toilet, heating and air conditioning, even a gas stove. On top of that, Wi-Fi. Mikoto genuinely couldn’t tell which part of this qualified as “enjoying the inconvenience.”
Toasting a bawloo-pressed sandwich stuffed with a pork bun over the fire, Kotone spoke up.
“Man, things have gotten pretty crazy, huh.”
“You’re acting like it’s someone else’s problem.”
“Gotta act like that or I can’t cope.”
The handed-over sandwich was exactly what was needed to warm an empty stomach and a chilled body, and the two sisters ate it together, huffing white steam. Somehow it tasted better than anything microwaved back in Kyodo — maybe that was just the magic of camping.
“Hey, sis?”
In the babied, youngest-child tone she used, Kotone dragged her whole camping chair closer. Her profile, lit by the firelight, was beautiful even setting aside sisterly bias — but right now it wasn’t the actress’s face.
It was the face of the Kurosu family’s second daughter. The little sister who’d tagged along her whole life.
“Mm?”
Without answering, Kotone wrapped an arm around her. The world’s Kotone fans would probably burn with jealousy, but this was blood, after all. Mikoto knew Kotone better than any fan ever could — from long before she ever entered showbiz.
Quietly gloating a little over Kotone’s fanbase in her head, Mikoto listened as Kotone finally murmured something.
“Wanna work together? In showbiz.”
“Doing your scout impression?”
“Nah, for real. You look kinda like me, sis, and that’s really all you got going for you looks-wise. Sisters acting together, whaddaya think? Sounds good, right?”
Mikoto’s acting ability spoke for itself, or rather, didn’t. Anyone with a sharp eye would see through her instantly. Someone like Charlotte, the former actress herself, for instance.
“No thanks.”
“Why not?”
“Wouldn’t you lose work once I debuted? I’m the pretty one, after all.”
“Ha, as if.”
They laughed together over nothing in particular, and cracked open cans of beer. Glancing up, Mikoto found the night sky scattered with a full field of stars.
A starry sky is a lot like the entertainment industry. The dazzling first-magnitude stars can hold their own even against city lights, but most stars get drowned out by that brightness entirely. In reality there are far more of them out there, but only a handful ever get acknowledged as stars.
An unforgivingly harsh world. And even if you did succeed, a different kind of harshness waited on the other side.
“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“You’ve got me all figured out, huh?”
“How many years d’you think I’ve been your sister?”
“What is that, some new flex?”
“Sisterly love.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Well, that’s that, then.”
“…Yeah. Sorry. Let me lean on you a bit.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Kotone had been caught by paparazzi — genuinely, completely private moments dug up and exposed. As a famous actress, she’d been secretly photographed before, near her apartment or in Shinjuku Ni-chōme, or Roppongi, but the articles that came of it had always been harmless — her off-duty outfits being called unfashionable, at worst a “secretly dating” piece over drinks with a male costar.
“You’re doing your best, you know.”
“I am doing my best. So why’s everyone gotta drag me down…”
Her resentment came out shaking, half-swallowed.
Celebrities have no private life. Especially not the successful ones. Just existing becomes content, a product to be consumed. To Mikoto, she was just a spoiled, aggravating little sister, but the public didn’t see her that way. They didn’t see her as a person at all.
“Isn’t there anyone in the industry you can talk to?”
“There was, but they died.”
Probably the veteran Shōwa-era actor Kotone had once shared a stage with. Judging by the way she talked and her Instagram posts, her relationships with the other actresses her age she photographed alongside so amiably were purely surface-level.
Kotone had been fighting this alone the entire time.
“Did I do something wrong? Am I not allowed to be happy?”
Mikoto found no answer to the question thrown out into the dark. Instead, she simply wrapped her arms around her sister’s small, trembling back. It was about all a big sister could do for her.
“…I envy you, sis.”
“Why’s that?”
“You get to be happy without agonising over it.”
Mikoto had agonised plenty, and would keep agonising, so the comment stung a little — but whatever Kotone meant by it clearly wasn’t about that. This was the particular anguish that came with being famous, the trouble waiting on the far side of coming out.
“Actually, I looked into stuff. What happened to actresses and models who came out publicly, in the past.”
No further words followed. After a silence heavy with everything left unsaid, Kotone continued.
“Happy marriage’s basically a pipe dream, honestly. I’d more or less given up on it, if I’m being real.”
And into that resignation, apparently, Rinko had appeared. Two people who’d each given up finding it, drawn together by whatever twist of fate — or rather, Kotone had done most of the dragging herself — and here they were.
“Why won’t Rinko-chan just register the marriage already…”
“She doesn’t seem interested in that sort of thing.”
“Then can’t she at least meet me halfway? I’ve given up plenty of ground myself.”
“She’s stubborn, that Rinko.”
“You’re calling her by name now without the -chan. What, you steal your little sister’s girl or something?”
Closer to nearly having her sister’s girl stolen from her, actually. It had only worked out because Rinko had shown restraint; if she’d crossed that line, who knows what would have happened.
But the very fact that restraint had been exercised proved, better than anything, that there was nothing romantic there.
“That’s a same-age friend thing.”
“Rubbing it in my face.”
A retaliatory nibble landed on Mikoto’s neck. Kotone had always had a biting habit. Eventually she’d probably leave countless little bite marks on Rinko’s body too.
“…I wonder why Shan-nee quit acting.”
Even after seeing that four-year-old article, Shandy’s past remained an unsolved mystery. If anything, having learned as much as they had, the mystery only stood out in sharper relief.
Charlotte Gabriel, Akutagawa Alice, why had she needed to fake her own death just to leave the theatre troupe? Those four blank years before she’d met Mikoto, how, and with what in her heart, had she lived through them?
“I want to know too.”
Honestly, the past didn’t matter one way or another. If Shandy only wanted to be seen in the present, Mikoto was happy to leave it there. Whoever she’d been involved with, whatever she’d done back then, the Shandy Mikoto loved was the one standing here now.
Even so, if the reason Shandy wouldn’t let her all the way in was rooted in that past, Mikoto wanted to know it, to hold it, whatever it turned out to be. Getting Shandy herself to talk seemed impossibly difficult, nearly hopeless.
“I showed her that article, y’know, and even though she’d talked with Rinko-chan about it she says absolutely nothing to me. I genuinely don’t get Shan-nee’s logic.”
“She’s a woman of many mysteries, that one.”
“Mystery’s a woman’s accessory, right? Not many people wear it that blatantly, though.”
“True.”
“Should I have laid on the sisterly threats a bit thicker? Like, ‘mess with my sister and I’ll wreck you’ vibes?”
She squeezed Mikoto tighter still.
“We’re sisters till we die, that’s plenty.”
“Ha, you’re blushing.”
“Of course I’m embarrassed, saying this kind of thing…”
“Guess we’ll just stay besties for life, then?”
“You’re blushing too, you know.”
“Heh.”
No solution to the scandal, no answer to the mystery of Shandy. And yet, just talking it out had eased the anxiety a little.
Maybe dragging her along on this trip had been Kotone’s own clumsy way of caring for her. Or maybe Kotone had simply wanted to vent. Probably both, honestly. Neither of them needed to say it outright for the feeling to come across.
“Rinko-chan, marry meee!”
Kotone howled it up at the night sky. Following her lead, Mikoto shouted too.
“Shandy-san, hurry up and make up your miiind!”
Turning it into a joke made everything feel a little lighter.
The coals thrown into the fire had finally started glowing red. Time to get moving. With nothing but a sandwich and a s’more to show for dinner so far, Mikoto steeled herself to throw in the mountain of meat they’d stocked up on.
“Right, let’s do this, meat festival!”
“Yeah!”
Moving the coals over to the barbecue grill, the first night’s proper dinner finally began.
“Hey, hey, Iida-kun. There’s an interview request for Sanae-san, what should I do with it?”
In the now-empty office, Iida was handed a tablet by his colleague and fellow new hire, Michelle. True to Sanae’s meticulous nature, her schedule was blocked out in ten-minute increments, right down to her break times, and this afternoon’s entry read “Reporter visit / interview.”
“What’s this interview for again?”
“Um, let’s see? Apparently it’s for a magazine’s ‘women at work’ feature, and they want to interview Mikoto-san. And since Sanae-san knows her well, they want her perspective too.”
“Hmm…”
Kurosu Mikoto. Caught up in Hibiya’s internal politics, and now, somehow, using that same mess to work her way into the company. For whatever reason, she and Sanae got on like a house on fire, apparently going out for drinks together outside of work fairly often.
That was about the extent of what Iida knew about her, though. Beyond that, all he knew was that her partner was some mysterious blonde beauty, and even that wasn’t information he could exactly hand over to a journalist.
“I’ll send a decline. Do you have contact details?”
“Says here it’s a Miyashita Kanade. Cute name, right~? Wonder what she’s like.”
He rang the number he’d been given. Reaching the reporter, Miyashita, who’d apparently already arrived at the head office, he apologised profusely for the last-minute cancellation, and she agreed, without much fuss, to reschedule.
Meanwhile, Michelle had been gazing out the window at the view below. She was, for some reason, holding a pair of binoculars.
“Why the binoculars?”
“Well, well, Miyashita-san’s here at the head office, right? So I figured maybe I could spot her!”
“No, what I’m asking is why you’re carrying binoculars around in the first pla—”
“Is that her!”
Michelle was practically bouncing, peering down through the binoculars. Iida found himself curious despite himself, watching her people-watch with such delight instead of getting back to work.
“Where?”
“There, there! The person standing outside the convenience store!”
Iida took the binoculars and scanned the area outside the convenience store. Too small to make out clearly, but there was a woman there who looked like she might be on the phone.
“Oh, big earrings. Looks kind of cool.”
No matter how hard he squinted, he couldn’t make out any earrings whatsoever. Wondering if Michelle had Maasai-tribe-level eyesight, he glanced over to find her already peering through a second pair of binoculars. No wonder Sanae called her pockets a fourth-dimensional pocket. There were entire dreams stuffed into that cardigan.
“Oh, we made eye contact. Hey! Miyashita-saaan!”
“I doubt she can tell, even if you wave.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
The woman visible through the binoculars, presumably Miyashita, of course showed no reaction to being called out to by Michelle. Then, a moment later, she raised a hand slightly. Someone she recognised must have appeared, and she rushed toward them.
“Ah! They just kissed, Iida-kun! Gotta tell Kuto-san!”
“Bold move, broad daylight…”
Losing interest, Iida returned to his desk. Michelle kept staring fixedly out the window below. He wanted to tell her to get back to work, but this was simply Michelle’s default state, so there wasn’t much to be done.
For the time being, Iida started typing up a note in the chat for Sanae.
Reporter: Miyashita Kanade.
Not knowing the kanji, he tried a general people-search out of habit.
“Hm…?”
His hand froze on the mouse.
Miyashita Kanade. The name did turn up a result in the search engine. But the job title attached to it didn’t match the publisher she’d claimed to represent.
“Miyashita Kanade, PR for… ‘Cheshire’…? Why would someone like that be—”
“Ahh, they’re kissing again! So niiice! I wanna do that too!”
Iida was already sprinting toward the nap room where Sanae lay sleeping.