Chapter 1
BEGINNING
Yumiko gazed at the western sky, where cinnabar slowly consumed the blue.
Sitting in the playground sandbox, Yumiko looked around with a wide, youthful gaze, her eyes colored by the sunset—and by worry. The swings and the slide sat vacant. The jungle gym lay emptied of its swarming climbers. Cold metal bars stood against the sunset sky in stark relief.
Eri-chan, Hitoshi-kun, and Megu-chan had all left. Everyone had gone home.
Yumiko hurriedly got to her feet, then straightened her sweater and brushed the sand from her white socks and plaid pleated skirt. I was almost done, too, she thought.
Before her in the sandbox stood a nearly complete European-style castle. The sculpture lacked only one detail—a moat—that kept her from feeling satisfied with her creation. The scoop in her hand would put one there easily.
The girl stared at the sand castle for a moment. Then she made up her mind—she tossed her scoop back into the sand. Despite the temptation, Yumiko felt too alone, too vulnerable to stay. She pictured her mother’s worried face and thought, I have to get home.
Another evening not so long ago, Yumiko had come home late. Her mother’s scolding had been especially severe. “You need to learn to be more responsible!” she’d said, eyebrows pulled so tight together that wrinkles formed between them. “You’ll be going to grade school next year.”
Hastened by the memory of that expression, she headed for the park’s entrance. She knew the way. First, under the flower-laden arbor, then past the small fountain. She saw the entrance just ahead. Her pace picked up to a jog.
And then it happened.
A man appeared, blocking the entrance before her. Yumiko stopped in her tracks.
The sky had darkened, but not so much that she couldn’t see what he looked like. The man was dressed in a whitish T-shirt and baggy jeans. He wore faintly dirty leather shoes. On the front of his T-shirt, a cute, anime-style girl looked back at her. The girl was from a TV show Yumiko had watched many times, but she couldn’t remember the character’s name. The setting sun, directly behind the stranger’s face, obscured his features in
relative darkness. The effect only made him more unnerving.
Yumiko looked down to avoid meeting the man’s eyes and started to trot past him.
But, in an instant, he bent over, put his hand on her shoulder—and then he was behind her, his arms pinning her against his body. Yumiko grunted. He tightened his grip. The animal stench of his breath assaulted her nostrils.
Yumiko knew she was in danger. She kicked with her legs and tried to shake free from the stranger’s grasp. But the more she struggled, the deeper his hands dug into the softness of her skin.
“Ojouchan,”—little girl—he said, his voice weak and unimpressive, oddly scratchy and high pitched. “Ojouchan.”
Yumiko felt she had heard that voice before. But where?
“Ojouchan,” the stranger said again.
In the darkness, Yumiko thought, the memory sending shivers through her. I heard it in the dark. I heard it in the dark of night.
The night she had heard that voice counted among her earliest memories. The voice had made her so scared that she cried. When her mother came into her room to see what was wrong, Yumiko flung herself against her and sobbed, “Mama, I heard a strange voice.”
Her mother switched on the nightstand light and tried to reassure her with a gentle smile. “Yumiko,” she said, hugging her child tight, “that’s your grandfather’s voice. His spirit has come to be by your side.”
“No,” Yumiko said, shaking her head. “It’s not Grandpa.”
Her grandfather had passed away the year she was born, and she didn’t know what his voice had sounded like—but she knew that the scratchy, high-pitched voice in the dark wasn’t his.
“It’s not him,” Yumiko said, now shaking her head more forcefully. “It’s a monster, Mama. It’s a monster! I know it is!”
Her mother’s arms tightened around her. “Yumiko, Yumiko, calm down.”
Yumiko tried to wriggle free. “Mama, you’re hurting me! Let me go! You’re hurting me!”
Her mother’s arms gripped her even tighter.
“Don’t struggle. Don’t struggle!” Suddenly, her mother’s voice was scratchy and high-pitched. “Don’t struggle!”
Yumiko opened her eyes in shock and saw the reality in front of her—long greasy hair and a craggy face every bit as real as the foul, bestial smell that accompanied them.
“Don’t struggle. Be a good girl.” He drew his face closer to her, and the fierce stench enveloped her. His eyes, timid yet vulgar, blinked rapidly. His oversized nose flared with every breath. “If you behave, I won’t hurt you.”
He pushed out his tongue and ran it across the surface of his lips. That red, swollen organ could have been a mollusk at the bottom of a sea.
Yumiko felt her body go slack. Deep down, she realized that no matter how hard she resisted, she would never escape his grip.
He scooped up her body with ease and carried her into the thicket.
Yumiko’s mind, distant now, wondered where she was being taken. For some reason, she felt oddly calm—like she was no longer herself.
Chapter 2
SQUIRM
I
Kirigoe Mima turned off the shower and listened. Her phone was ringing.
She shrugged, as if to say, What can you do? Then she took a towel off the rack and wrapped it around her body. She opened the glass door to the shower; the phone’s ringing became louder.
Who’s calling at this hour?
Mima glanced at the clock. It was after two in the morning. The caller was likely her manager, perhaps to tell her about a change in the next day’s schedule. I wish he wouldn’t call me so late, Mima thought, irritation etching a tiny crease between her eyebrows.
She stepped into the combined bedroom/living room of her studio apartment and put her hand on the phone beside her bed. She lifted the receiver and spoke in a tone that hid none of her annoyance. “Yes, who is it?”
She expected to hear her manager’s familiar rough voice—but instead, all she heard was soft breathing. Huff. Huff.
Mima let out an exasperated sigh. Not this again.
“Hello?” She spoke firmly. “Who is this?”
Huff. Huff. Huff. The breathing grew heavier.
For over the past week or so, she’d been getting harassed incessantly by calls like these. Mima wondered how this person had found her personal number. As far as she knew, it hadn’t been published anywhere. She clicked her tongue in exasperation.
Then, a faint voice came over the line. “Mi-Mima-san… Mima-san…”
The man’s muffled voice reverberated in her ears. Something in it sounded desperate.
“Mima-san…” Huff. Huff. Now the man seemed to be crying, too.
Fear urged Mima to hang up the phone, but the next thing she knew, she was pressing the receiver tightly to her ear. “Mima-san,” the man began. Agitation strengthened his voice; it took on a strange, raspy edge. “Do you understand how I feel? Do you? I want to save you, Mima-san. Mima-san, Mima-san!”
Fear put a tremor in her, but she felt compelled to speak—as if something still more frightful would happen to her if she didn’t. “Just who are you?” she asked her unknown caller. “What do you mean, you’ll save me?”
The man, caught off guard by her reaction, choked out a weak “Urp!” but then continued. “I’m… I’m your fan. I’m a huge fan of yours, Kirigoe Mima.” Huff. Huff.
From the sound of his voice, even talking to her was a great ordeal. Mima threw force behind her words. “If you’re my fan, th
en why do you keep harassing me with these calls?”
Perhaps intimidated into silence, the man said nothing. The receiver went quiet, save for the faint sound of his breathing.
Her voice rose to an angry shout. “If you don’t have anything else to say, I’m hanging up!”
“I-I… I want to save you,” the man mumbled. “I want to save you before you go down the wrong path. I’m not trying to bother you. Honestly, I’m not.”
She’d had enough of this. His cowering tone rubbed her the wrong way, and besides, with only a bath towel wrapped around her, she was starting to get cold. “Listen, whoever you are.” Mima spoke with finality. “I don’t need you to save me. I’ll decide my ‘path’ on my own. So please, just stop calling me.”
She was about to hang up the phone when the man shouted, “Wait! Don’t hang up!”
Then, words spilling out quickly, he went on. His voice was shrilly pitched now, and he rambled like a sick man, a man taken by malarial fever dreams. “I’m coming to meet you. I promise I’ll come to you soon. I’ll come to you, and I’ll save you. I promise I will.”
Mima hung up the phone frantically. Her body trembled down to the core.
II
“This is just awful,” Mima said, batting her wide, round eyes. She raised a hand to her slender nose and took in a deep, stuffed-up snuffle. “Of all the times to catch a cold, why now?”
Mima’s assistant, Yasuda Rumi, had been keeping an eye on the singer. Now Rumi hurried to her in the corner of the studio. “Mima-san,” Rumi said, “would you like me to bring you some hot coffee?”
Mima gave her a pleasant smile. “That would be great, Rumi-chan. With plenty of milk, please.”
“Will do!” Rumi replied. She jogged over to the vending machine in the back of the room and soon returned with the drink.
As Mima drank her coffee, her manager, Tadokoro Bon, entered the studio, bleary-eyed.
Mima put her hand in the shape of a glass and mimed drinking. “Out late again, Bon-chan?”
Tadokoro tossed her an embarrassed grin and ran a hand through his hair, already thinning at the ripe old age of thirty-six. “I can’t help it,” he said. “It’s part of the job.”
With a teasing smile, Mima said, “Working day and night for me, is that it?”
Tadokoro winked a long-lashed eye at her. “Rumi-chan, get me a coffee too, please.” The manager brought a metal folding chair beside Mima and plopped himself down. The cheap metal seat protested with a shrill and dubious creak. More serious now, Tadokoro said, “I hear you’re feeling under the weather.”
“I think it’s a cold,” Mima said with another loud sniff. “But that’s not all that’s bothering me—I got a strange call last night.”
Tadokoro frowned. “A strange call?”
“You remember how I told you about those troubling phone calls I’ve been getting?”
The manager nodded. “You mean the guy who doesn’t say anything?”
“Yeah, him. But this time, he spoke.”
“Well, now. That’s bold.” Tadokoro leaned forward, his eyes glimmering with interest. “What did he say?”
“He told me he wanted to save me,” Mima said.
“To save you?” Tadokoro echoed, bewildered.
“Apparently, he’s worried I’m headed in the ‘wrong direction.’ He said he’s going to prevent it.”
Tadokoro scowled. “Sounds like a nutcase to me.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I remember thinking something in his voice wasn’t right.” Just remembering sent a shiver through her.
“An overexcited fan,” Tadokoro said dismissively. One corner of his mouth turned up in a wry, long-suffering smile.
“He said he’s coming to meet me.”
Tadokoro’s eyes widened, and he exclaimed, “He said what?”
“He wants to meet me,” Mima said. “To talk to me.”
“Now that we can’t ignore. When did he say he was coming?”
“He didn’t. But he promised it would be soon.”
The manager put a hand to his chin, closed his eyes, and hummed in thought, but Mima couldn’t be sure just what he was thinking.
III
It happened when Yasuda Rumi was on her way back to Mima’s green room to retrieve something she’d left behind.
In the hallway just outside, the metal door to the emergency exit stood half open, allowing a bar of sunlight to pierce into the darkened hallway. Rumi had never seen that door open, and the anomaly caught the assistant’s attention.
Then she saw the figure lurking in the door’s shadow.
“Who’s there?” Rumi said in a low shout.
Within the pool of shadow, the figure made an even darker shape, save for two glimmering points—the eyes. Someone’s eyes, staring right at Rumi.
The figure watched but didn’t speak a word.
Rumi’s pulse begin to race. Reflexively, she took a step back. Then another. As if following her, the figure stepped out of the shadows, suddenly revealed by the slash of sunlight. It was a man. She could tell that he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, but his face was harshly backlit and impossible to discern.
For a moment, Rumi wondered if he was the assistant director. But an AD would have given some kind of greeting—and besides, the green room was for talent; an AD had no particular business loitering there.
Again, Rumi asked, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
The man muttered something deep in his throat.
“Tell me your name!” Rumi demanded, as bravely as she could muster. “If you don’t, I’ll call for help.” She knew that an approach that confrontational might jolt the man to attack. She tensed her muscles, ready for the worst.
Remaining silent, the man approached her on unsteady, drunk-like steps.
Rumi held a hand to her mouth, to keep her scream bottled up inside.
The man staggered closer. He waved a scrap of paper at her. On instinct, she took it.
He bobbed his head at her, then turned on his heels. The next moment, he was fleeing out the emergency exit. The metal door slammed shut behind him.
The hallway went dark.
IV
Mima watched Music Town on the in-house feed of the green room’s television monitor. The room was a small, dreary, tatami-matted affair, furnished with only the monitor and a vanity. Whenever work brought her to this station, she typically used the space as her personal lounge. Over time, she’d developed an unexpected fondness for the dingy place.
Music Town was doing a segment on this week’s hot songs. The program’s host was a snobbish, middle-aged man who had been a newscaster before jumping ship for the entertainment world. He was infamous for barraging his guests with bad jokes and fancied himself hilarious. That, however, couldn’t have been further from the truth; his guests only laughed out of courtesy.
In short, Mima hated him.
Appearing on the segment was Ochiai Eri, a new pop idol who debuted the year before; she had been an immediate hit. Her latest song, “Rock, Love, Dream!” claimed number three on the charts.
Apparently, according to an idol magazine interview, she viewed Kirigoe Mima as her rival.
“Good evening, Eri-chan,” the snobbish, middle-aged host said. “Your new song is a smash. Dare I say that you don’t need to worry about Kirigoe Mima anymore?” Behind his glasses, the host’s eyes glimmered in a way Mima didn’t care for.
“Oh, I don’t know about that…” Eri demurred, but her smile said otherwise.
Mima stuck out her tongue at the monitor. “Go fall off a bridge,” she muttered. She hated them both, the middle-aged host and the full-of-herself newcomer.
Ochiai Eri had supposedly turned sixteen this year, but Mima placed her at eighteen or even older—though, admittedly, the singer’s facial features and figure did still retain a girlish quality. She appeared innocent enough, but her eyes gave her away.
To put it positively, those eyes shined with a strong-willed ambition. Mo
re negatively, they were eyes that saw others not as people, but as tools to be used.
The one and only time Mima had appeared on the same TV show as her, she fell under the withering glare of those eyes. Though three years a veteran, when Mima saw the white-hot flames inside the newcomer’s gaze, she felt such a powerful aura of intimidation it was almost tangible. In that moment, Mima knew this woman would do anything to worm her way to the top—even if it meant putting her boot to those who stood in
her way.
On the television screen, however, those eyes appeared gentle and kind. It was no wonder her debut single carried the slogan, “Blue-Eyed Angel.”
Mima heard once that Eri had badmouthed her off the record. Supposedly she’d called her “old,” and asked, “How long is she going to keep up that innocent girl act?”
Mima generally ignored the rookie, instead choosing to keep on being herself, to follow her own path, no matter what anyone else said. But she couldn’t help but feel a loathing for that woman. The emotion bubbled up from somewhere deep inside. She’d never felt this way toward another idol before. On the whole, Mima’s nature was kind, and she did her best to try to keep less benign emotions from surfacing—but it was a futile effort.
On the monitor, Eri began performing “Rock, Love, Dream!”
Sulking, Mima switched off the monitor and laid her head on the vanity. She couldn’t help but feel a little disgusted with herself.
V
The office of Moon Kids Talent Agency occupied a single unit in a small but sleek apartment building recently built in Roppongi. Aside from the nearby elevated Shuto Expressway, where traffic never ceased, the neighborhood was quiet.
Tadokoro Bon approached the building’s entryway with an armful of books. Not very trendy digs, he thought with a wry grin. A small, flowering arch over the entrance evoked an atmosphere more akin to a love hotel than an apartment.
Reaching the doorway, Tadokoro sandwiched his books between chin and chest as he punched in his entry code. The indicator light went on, and the door opened smoothly. The manager entered the building’s single elevator and pressed the third floor button.
Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis Page 1
