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  We were back in the surge of imaginary time. No matter how many scenes we’d already filmed, once I was behind the camera with the film unspooling, time flowed like the cool, clear waters of a high ravine, where I could swim my way upstream. My body took on buoyancy, and even walking the same ground as before felt like something more than walking. I became the force of time incarnate, following a steady rhythm, passing through the scripted motions one by one like they were floating weeds that curled around my body and slipped off of me and drifted away. Compared to this variety of time, the hours of ordinary life were no more than a worn and tattered obi unwinding from the waist.

  Now I could be seen completely. Being seen made me their king. It gave me my authority, and all the people watching were my subjects.

  Eyes, countless as the gravel at a shrine, pressed in all around me. They found their center — my image coalesced. In that moment, dressed as a yakuza, I became a sparkling apparition, like a scepter thrust against the sky.

  This apparition is ravaged by the business of the performance. The lines, the gestures, the way I touch the props, the point in the dialog where I adjust my posture . . . each delicate move is crammed into a few seconds, with no choice but for me to go from this to that, moving nimbly and naturally as a butterfly inspecting a bed of flowers.

  In elementary school, we had to take an IQ test just like this.

  “Ready? Pick up this book, head over to that desk, open up the drawer, put the book inside, take the paperweight and the hat off of the desk, hang the hat on that hook, and bring me just the paperweight. Sound good?”

  I kicked the can. The toe of my shoe sent it flying, in a clean arc. Water flew like sparks. The camera tilted up. As I watched the angle shift from high to low, I let my body burn with energy, and prepared my expression, the scowl before I click my tongue and deliver “Damn . . .”

  You can’t rush through your lines. Especially when you’re on location. If you get worked up and start jabbering away, it’s impossible to add them in during the overdub.

  “Damn, even that trash rolls better than me . . .”

  I said the line with a hollow stare and knew I’d nailed it. On cue, the train rushed overhead, crackling like a shower of steel. I had decided that before I squinted, I would look up toward the train out of the corner of my eye, and did just that — squeezing my left eye just a little harder than the right.

  “Cut!” yelled Takahama.

  The set was silent.

  “OK!”

  When Takahama said OK but didn’t mean it, the word would barely leave his throat. Those within his circle understood that even a mumbled OK could have a multitude of nuances. This time around, however, his OK didn’t sound so bad.

  The tension dissipated. When I sauntered back over to the folding chair that Kayo pushed toward me, the crowd rejoiced like I had just returned from war.

  “That last take was just great. Two shots left. Want some tea?”

  Kayo held out a metal thermos. Its polished surface was smeared with the faces of the crowd. She popped it open for me. Steam huffed from the bottle and fogged the metal around its mouth. I felt my confidence about the last take fogging over.

  “It was a great take,” Kayo repeated unconcernedly. “The way you squinted when the train went by was absolutely perfect. If you can keep it up I’m sure we’ll be OK.”

  “Two more shots . . .”

  And after that another night of filming. At this point it felt like my body was coming apart from lack of sleep.

  “Richie! Richie! Sign mine!”

  Girls were yelling from the crowd. I smiled at them and gave a little wave.

  “He saw me!”

  “Over here!”

  I was exhausted. The girls could scream like hell for all I cared — their shrill voices splashed over me like rancid oil. If only I could line them up and march them all into the mouth of an incinerator. Except they’d probably crawl out of the ashes gawking at me, so I’d have to pluck their eyes out first.

  “Two more shots . . .”

  I lost control and yawned.

  “Look! He’s yawning!”

  Neriko Fukai, who was acting opposite me, had gone home hours earlier, leaving me on my own for the two remaining shots. Lately she was in such high demand that we had to film all of our scenes together in the first half of the day.

  The shot right after this one, where Neriko shows up and says — “What, talking to yourself again?” — had been over and done with since morning. It’d only been a few hours, but the little I remembered was already starting to fade.

  2

  Kayo loved sorting through my fan letters. She worked quickly, but we never made much progress — whenever she found a real sidesplitter, she stopped to read it aloud. These letters were usually from widows, like the woman who described her fantasies of sex with me in pimply detail, or from perverts, like the guy who desperately wanted me to send him my underwear.

  When Kayo was tired of the letters, she helped me think up tales of young romance to prepare me for the interviews. To keep things interesting, she insisted that I always tell a different story, with a first love at age seven, another at ten, one for fifteen, one for seventeen. It goes without saying that each account had to be innocent and pure, in keeping with the vision of the PR Office.

  My job was to come up with a backstory of violence. I’d been a shy kid. All I did was draw. I never came close to fighting anybody. Instead of gambling with the other kids, I chose the blue sky, and treasured not the gold leaf on their playing cards, but the golden sundown rimming actual young leaves. Looking back, I can say that loving nature was an error. Not seeing my affection for the weakness that it was, I put a stain upon my youth.

  This hour before sleep was my only break during the entire day. After bathing, I wrapped myself in a bathrobe and lay on the sofa by the window, where I listened to the late-night jazz programs and occasionally exchanged a few words with Kayo, who sat on the floor with the letters fanned around her.

  Sometimes Kayo came over to the sofa and snuggled up beside me.

  “Who should I do tonight? Natsuko Suzaku? Remember that ravishing kiss?”

  “Let’s see it.”

  Kayo did her impression of the famous actress in the one kiss scene we’d shot together. Coming from Kayo, it was pure caricature. She flared her modest nostrils to mimic Natsuko’s grand nose, bared her silver teeth, and let her mouth fall open, as if dreaming. Quivering her lips, she drifted her hand to the back of my head and pulled me in, stopping just a breath away, but not for long. When the time was ripe, she lowered her fake eyelashes, gazed down her nose, and snapped her lips to mine with the pull of a magnet.

  “The End.”

  We both laughed.

  “Want me to do Misao Yawata?”

  “Sure.”

  Misao was a popular young actress I’d starred opposite recently.

  With a pinch of her bun, Kayo undid her impossibly long hair. Kneeling beside the sofa, she buried her face in her hands and heaved her shoulders in torment. At the decisive moment, she showed her face and closed her eyes, puckered her lips, made her eyelids twitch, and faltered with each coming breath, waiting for my kiss. When I leaned out for a casual peck, “Misao” tilted her head, clasped her hands around my neck, and sucked my lips profoundly. Then Kayo looked me in the eye.

  “So young and pure, right? Who’s she think she’s fooling?”

  We both laughed.

  It occurred to me that tomorrow I was turning twenty-four.

  “You send out invitations yet?” My college buddies had been bugging me to throw a birthday party, as an excuse to get the gang together. To shut them up, we were asking ten of them over for dinner.

  “Of course. Everyone’s already said yes. It seems like your mother’s gotten a head start on the cooking, too. But tomorrow�
��s another long day for you. You might not make it home.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  I knew it all too well.

  By the next afternoon, it was clear that we would probably be shooting well into the night, but I didn’t ask Kayo to call my mother and say that we’d be late. If anticipating my arrival was a part of the festivities, then surely my absence was part of the feast. That’s right. It’s better for a star to be completely absent. No matter how serious the obligation, a star is more of a star if he never arrives. Absence is his forte. The question of whether he’ll show up gives the event a ceaseless undercurrent of suspense. But a true star never arrives. Showing up is for second-rate actors who need to seek attention. Tonight I’d come home to find the table heaped with dirty plates, a sign that everyone had gone home satisfied, and then I’d climb the stairs and fall asleep.

  The people wait for me, checking their watches, standing at their doorsteps, but I am a speeding car that never stops. I’m huge, shiny, and new, coming from the other side of midnight. My gliding mass is strangely solid for a phantom, clad in a metal that’s lighter than air. Vaulting from the abyss of my garage, deep in the deepest folds of night, I blast forth, almost floating off the ground, and rattle the sky with a crash of silver. Trees damp with dew sag and weep as I race past them, and the nocturnal birds flocking after me lay screaming in my wake. One by one, I overturn the traffic signs that line the road like white memorials. The gas stations I pass erupt in flames, leaving pocks of fire on the expanse of night . . . I ride and ride and never arrive.

  Something strange happened that night during filming, an unlikely tragedy that did not feel like an accident. It was the perfect birthday present.

  Takahama moved us into Studio 3. The space was packed wall-to-wall with scenery for the edge of town.

  We were filming Scene 65, Shot 9.

  Neriko Fukai was playing a seamstress from a local dress shop. Her brother, a gangster, was murdered. Neriko hates everything about the yakuza. Her brother was like a brother to me, too, and when I get out of jail and hear about his death I vow to take revenge. The scene before this, where Neriko finds me walking home from jail and breaks the news to me, is the one we shot out by the tracks.

  I ask Neriko for help, but her disavowal of the yakuza makes her want no part in the revenge. Before long, I fall in love with her. She rebuffs my numerous advances — she’s had enough of the yakuza, myself included. But deep inside, I know she loves me, too, and only pushes me away because she fears my passion is a calculated step in my revenge.

  Once I confirm the whereabouts of my enemy, I resolve to take him down alone. I stop by Neriko’s dress shop to say goodbye. She’s busy tidying up before closing. I lean in for a goodbye kiss, but she puts up a fight. If I want to die so badly, she says, I should go ahead and die already. She kicks me out. With a knife in my waistband, I leave to face my death. Neriko rushes out to stop me but I don’t look back. Scene 65, Shot 9 opens with the camera behind me as I’m heading off into the night.

  There are too many movies like this to count. From this snippet alone you probably get the feeling that you’ve seen this one a couple times at least. But there’s something timeless about the mediocrity of the story, no matter how many times I find myself inside it. The yakuza with his simplistic attitude toward death and the pretty woman who resists him, hiding her true feelings, are bearers of a special kind of vulgar, trifling poetry. A hidden poetry that will be lost if any mediocrity is shed. Genius is a casualty. The poetry must never be conspicuous — its scent is only detectable when subtle. What makes the majority of these films so great is that they’re shot in a way that overlooks the poetry entirely.

  In the pale light of midnight’s foggy street,

  I’m haunted by the goodbye in your eyes.

  Who would ever notice that this cheap and tired lyric has terms so rigid not a single word could be replaced? People permit its existence because they think it’s harmless and derivative, with the lifespan of a mayfly, but in fact it’s the only thing that’s certain to survive. Just as evil never dies, neither does the sentimental. Like suckerfish clinging to the belly of a shark, threads of permanence cling to the underbelly of all formulaic poetry. It comes as a false shadow, the refuse of originality, the body dragged around by genius. It’s the light that flashes from a tin roof with a tawdry grace. A tragic swiftness only the superficial can possess. That elaborate beauty and pathos offered only by an undiscerning soul. A crude confession, like a sunset that backlights clumsy silhouettes. I love any story guarded by these principles, with this poetry at its core.

  When the film starts rolling, I’ll open the curtained door of the dress shop and look over my shoulder to this girl I may never see again. As I lean into the doorframe, I look out upon the neon of the empty street. This, too, perhaps for the last time. Touching the handle of the knife in my jacket, I walk out into the town.

  The camera was behind me. The test run had been quick, a matter of adjusting how I prop my hand against the doorframe.

  “Action!”

  The clapper snapped and the buzzer rang. Despite the mass of people present, you could feel the silence ripple through the set.

  Unreal time resumed its flow. I was stripped bare — deep inside a dream.

  I cast a parting glance at the girl and leaned into the doorframe, with my back turned to the camera. For a time it films my back in silence, capturing the scenery of night. Once I walk out the door, the camera will slide along a wooden rail and follow me down into the street.

  With my back squarely to the lens, an uncanny landscape spread before me.

  It was unlike anything I’d ever expected. A normal town at night, but through the eyes of a man who had resolved to die. What town it was, I couldn’t say. I had no idea where it had come from. All I knew was that these were the lights of someplace special, someplace dear to me. They had to be.

  The town was still, no one in sight. I faced three forking alleys. Willows drooped; neon signs glowed high and low across the cramped façades. Light spilled from the window of a garret apartment, of all places. Red neon gently strobed the half-torn movie posters on the telephone poles.

  The neon signs flashed out of sync, and the jumbo lanterns outside the bars hung still. The doors to the bars were conspicuously dark and snugly shut. Through the glass doors of the cafes, the shadows of potted rubber trees loomed across the walls. In the window of a townhouse, mostly blocked by a partition, I spotted a red cloth covering a mirror.

  What had made this town so quiet? And what had made these people hold their breath? They must have resigned themselves to the blinking of neon, the green light that the letters “lido” cast from the second floor of the neighboring building into the shadows of their eaves. What had left the ominous grime on the glass storefront of the realtor, papered from the inside with flyers for apartments? And what had set the door askew at such a subtle, damning angle?

  The piercing fidelity of the landscape must have meant that I was watching from the gates of death. What I saw was as comprehensive as a memory, poor and wretched as a memory, as quiet, as fluorescent. I was putting it together in the way you would before you die, a last attempt to connect the life flashing before you with an acute vision of the future. I let the neon wash over me, knowing this was something I could never see again. I was no longer on a set, but in an undeniable reality, a layer within the strata of my memory.

  In my short career in film, I’d never felt anything like this. Not once had I been able to completely forget that a cityscape was hollow — all façades and make-believe.

  I stroked the knife in my jacket, left the dress shop, and stepped out into the town. The camera followed, soundless down the wooden rail. It was nothing short of a miracle that I’d stepped into this textured landscape, a living version of memory. It may sound contradictory, but it felt like I had stepped into a painting on the wall and was standing, dumbf
ounded, inside its panorama.

  As I walked along, it became impossible to deny that these empty streets would eventually open onto sprawling tracks where trains came rushing in and out of town, extending naturally to a grand city, and a harbor, and beyond the sea to other countries with their own cities and harbors.

  When this strange suggestion of reality bumped up against unquestionable proof, I couldn’t believe my eyes: the black door of the nearest bar swung open, and before me stood a beautiful young woman in a periwinkle cocktail dress.

  In the flow of unreal time, I expect things to proceed as planned. The future is fixed; I know its every detail and can see the route ahead of me, like a car negotiating a winding slope. This girl was not part of the plan.

  She stood in the shadow of the doorway, smiling brightly. Her skin looked awfully pale. It could have been her makeup, or the neon washing over us. Her nose and eyebrows were obscured; only her sad eyes and tiny lips were clearly defined. All I could see of her petite and slender body was where her cleavage met her dress. Her black hair blended with the darkness of the eaves. I completely forgot about acting and fell head over heels in love with this mysterious beauty.

  Her arrival made the town’s sense of reality complete. I was convinced that I had slipped into another dimension, an actual place — all of it was real! The neon, the lanterns, the signboards, the willows, the telephone poles, and the glass door of the realtor. I’d been imagining they were all artificial, but now I was awake. I was positive that in about ten hours the sun would sweep the landscape, a newborn sun rising between the hunkered roofs.

  She came toward me, arms outstretched, and in a strident, forlorn voice called out my name.

  “Richie! Richie Mizuno!”

  My real name. Not the name of my role. Her arms slapped my sides and closed around me in a bear hug.

  A grenade of vitriol went off behind us.

  “Cut!” screamed Takahama.

  Everyone looked furious. Soon the entire cast was visible, peeking from the scenery. One guy threw open the glass door of the realtor. Another jumped out of a low window. The faces of the lighting crew poked out from the catwalks in the ceiling.