Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis

by Yoshikazu Takeuchi

  The man laughed, gurgling through the blood in his throat. “This is the end, Mima,” he said. “What a delight this is. At last, my dream is coming true. You look surprised, Mima. Are you wondering how I’m still alive? My skin has been cut off, I’ve lost all this blood, and a knife is even in my throat, and yet I still live. You have to be wondering how that’s possible. I bet you are.”

  Mima nodded once. She really was wondering that.

  “Well, Mima, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you how I’m still alive, even like this. It’s because I want your skin. That’s what’s keeping me alive. I won’t die until I’ve cut off your skin!”

  The man put both hands around the hilt of the knife and yanked it free. His throat made an inhuman, burbling, choking sound, and a blob of congealed blood came out along with the knife. The blood slid down the blade, plopping to the stage.

  Grunting in a sound that wasn’t quite a voice, the man staggered toward Mima, as if mustering the last vestiges of his strength.

  In the basement below the stage, Tadokoro and Yuji came running.

  “Look out!” Tadokoro shouted.

  Mima looked down at them.

  “Mima!” Tadokoro called out. “In front of you!”

  Mima looked back up. Knife in hand, the man was trudging inexorably closer.

  Mima was out of time. She yelled, “Bon-chan, switch on that fan. Switch on the fan below the stage!”

  Tadokoro went to the fan and threw the lever with a loud ka-chunk.

  The machine roared to noisy life. All six of its one-meter blades began to spin, sending up years of accumulated dust along with tiny paper cherry blossoms.

  Behind Mima, several blossoms danced in the air.

  The man stopped. For one moment, he saw Kirigoe Mima as she had been in her debut. Tears began to stream from his eyes.

  Mima spoke to him. “I understand now,” she said. “I won’t ever change. I’m still that same woman.”

  The man gave her a small nod, but the next moment his was shaking his head furiously.

  “No,” he said. “You’re not her anymore. Only your face is still her. On the inside, you’re rotten.” The man glared at her. He gripped the knife with both hands and pointed the weapon at her face. “Stand still! I’m going to cut off your skin.”

  Then he was charging toward her with terrible force.

  Mima threw herself onto her side as the knife’s tip passed her by. As she fell, she hooked her leg around his, tripping him, and his momentum carried him onto his back. As he landed on the stage, the knife clattered from his hand, just beyond reach.

  Mima got to her feet, then straddled atop the man as she reached for the knife. Just as her fingers were nearly on the weapon, the man grabbed her by the waist and pulled her into him.

  Her face was right up against his; her nose touched his darkening red flesh and off-yellow fat. The man’s teeth chattered in an approximation of a laugh.

  He wrapped his arms around her back. His lipless mouth closed in on her lips.

  Mima stretched out her arm, blindly feeling for the knife. His mouth brushed against hers, and his sickly, foul breath enveloped her.

  Mima’s fingertips found the knife.

  Quickly, she took it in hand and thrust its blade into the exposed meat of his shoulder.

  The man’s arms went limp.

  Keeping the knife in her grasp, Mima stood up.

  The man held a hand over his shoulder, swaying as he rose.

  Mima shouted, “Stay away from me! If you come any closer, I’ll stab you.” She held the knife at the ready.

  Ignoring her command, the man lunged toward her with outstretched arms.

  Mima thrust the knife into his face. The blade sunk deeply into his right eye, spraying blood while the man coughed and burbled.

  Mima wrenched the knife free and let out a startled gasp. The man’s eyeball had come out along with it, a gelatinous orb skewered on the tip of the blade, tendrils of its optical nerves clinging to the metal.

  Reflexively, Mima dropped the knife. Her guts began to twitch, threatening to send up whatever was in her stomach. As she fought against the urge, Mima couldn’t help but ask, “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  The man took up the knife, eyeball and all. “Of course it hurts. But what’s a little more pain? Just look at me. My face is torn off. I took a knife to the throat. The pain all runs together.”

  His teeth chattered again. He shook his eyeball from the knife, before stabbing the blade into his own side.

  He groaned a little, then said, “See? I can do that, and it hardly hurts at all. It won’t kill me, either. I couldn’t die now, even if I wanted to. Not until I have your skin.”

  The man stepped toward Mima and spread out his arms in a magnanimous gesture. “I’ll make this quick and painless for you. So, no more running.” He held the knife aloft. “I’ll aim for your heart, since I’ll still have to take your skin off. I wouldn’t want to damage your face, after all.”

  The knife came down at her as if in slow motion.

  Mima took one step back, and her feet found the edge of the stage. She had nowhere left to run, no way to dodge his attack. The knife’s tip bore down. The man loomed tall above her. There was no slipping past him, now.

  “Mima and I will be one!” the man shouted.

  Death was barreling toward her. She had only one move left to make.

  Mima ducked down quickly. The man leaned forward.

  Mima planted her face into his stomach. He slumped across her back, and she took his weight, then twisted to the side.

  The man rolled from her back and off the stage, where he plummeted down to the basement.

  The man screamed as the giant fan-blades caught him.

  The machine groaned. It shredded through flesh and bone, turning the man’s arms into pulp. A moment later, the blades chopped his legs into a frothing slop. Then his waist was gone, then his stomach, then his chest.

  For a brief eternity, his bloodstained head hung in the air.

  To Mima’s horror, his mouth opened wide and cried out, “Mi… ma….”

  But then the head was sucked into the fan, butchered by its spinning blades.

  The man’s blood and flesh scattered everywhere, staining the white paper flowers red. Mima watched the bloodstained petals dance through the wind. As they passed by, they no longer resembled cherry blossoms. Instead, they looked like vivid red roses.

  The passion, the obsession, of the so-called Darling Rose—stalker, freak, and monster—had been so strange that he had transformed the blossoms into rose petals.

  At least, in that moment, that was how Mima saw it.

  END

  AFTERWORD ‘91

  For several years now, I’ve had an idea in my head—of a battle between a young pop idol and a twisted, obsessive fan.

  As it happens, I’m a pop idol superfan (though not twisted and obsessive, of course…) and that gives me a particular understanding of how fanatics can become emotionally attached to idols.

  The point I most wanted to emphasize in writing this story was what would happen if that devotion deepened to the utmost extreme. I especially wanted to write about what would result if that devotion was directed against one individual idol.

  Kirigoe Mima, the main character of this story, represents a certain style of pure and innocent idol, while the antagonist, only referred to as “the man,” symbolizes the end result of a fan whose attachment grows unchecked.

  Idol singers are constantly striving to improve their craft, hoping to graduate into the next phase of their career, while their devoted fans are drawn to and fixated on the idols’ youthful innocence. I wanted to speculate on the consequences of a head-on collision between those two conflicting ideals.

  Because this story takes the form of a horror novel, that collision of aspirations manifests as a larger-than-life spectacle of violence and action, but the driving intent was to call to attention the vulnerability of an idol who has to deal with
the all too plausible scenario of a fan becoming too obsessed to ignore.

  As a writer, I hope that readers will approach this book with that layer of the story in mind. That said, the development of the plot is compelling enough on its own; if a reader simply enjoys this work as a straight thriller, that’s fine, too.

  I look forward to hearing what people think after reading it.

  —Yoshikazu Takeuchi

  (while listening to

  Noriko Sakai’s White Girl)

  March 25, 1991

  AFTERWORD ‘98

  In the fall of last year (1997), I watched the anime adaptation of Perfect Blue at the Tokyo International Fantastic Film Festival.

  I was deeply impressed by the beautiful, high quality animation projected on the big screen of the Shibuya Pantheon Theater, and the delight at seeing my own work nurtured and transformed into something so splendid brought tears to my eyes.

  Of course, the journey from novel to motion picture came with many difficulties and took plenty of twists and turns along the way.

  Thanks to the efforts of my esteemed friend Koichi Okamoto during development, the excellent script written by Sadayuki Murai, the presence of the brilliant up-and-coming director Satoshi Kon, the powerful backing of ONIRO and MADHOUSE studios, and the financial support of Rex Entertainment (without which none of it would have been possible), an outstanding psychological thriller was brought to life.

  I came up with the plot for Perfect Blue more than ten years ago.

  I’ve always been somewhat of a geeky type of guy. In my school days, I loved things like idols and kaiju. As they say about birds of a feather, I attracted a startling amount of fellow enthusiasts. We were the kind of guys who naturally got along well with each other, but no matter how much fun we had talking, I always felt somewhat out of place.

  Looking back, I suspect it was a difference in intensity, a different level of passion for our shared interests. Some loved Godzilla, some saw Japanese ghost story movies as the pinnacle of artistic expression, some had an unusual affection for the young women who hosted children’s programs—and so on.

  The deeper and more focused their enthusiasm became, the more genuine it got—and the more intensely I felt out of place. I started to wonder what unimaginable catastrophe would come about if their passions became as sharply pointed as the T-1000’s blade arm in Terminator 2, aimed at the subjects of their obsessions.

  In that way, the seeds for the basic motif of Perfect Blue—the confrontation between idol and fanatic-turned-stalker—were planted in me more than twenty years ago.

  —Yoshikazu Takeuchi

  January 24, 1998

  AUTHOR BIO

  Yoshikazu Takeuchi was born in 1955 in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan. He began working in publishing before becoming a columnist and an author. In addition to having his creations adapted into film and video games, he is a successful radio and TV personality.

  Thank you for reading!

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