Audition

by Ryu Murakami

  ‘Wait. I don’t mean it like that. We’re not going to be deceiving anyone. I’m just saying that the motivation for taking the bait, for buying into the dream, wouldn’t be as strong for an office worker. Single girls living at home, that’s our real target. The euphemism is “househelpers”, but there aren’t any who actually help out with the cooking and cleaning. The longest hours for them are in the afternoon. They’re up and showered and have nothing to do. It’s too early for a movie or a concert or a date, nothing decent on TV, so instead of playing with their own nipples and masturbating they start twiddling the switches and dials on the radio. The day’s just starting for them, so they look for something light and calming. Why not listen to Tomorrow’s Heroine? The lady personality hosting the show has a smoky, soothing voice. “What’s more romantic than a rose still in bud?” she says. “Imagine for a moment. How do you suppose Audrey Hepburn spent her days before her acting debut? Or Vivien Leigh? Or Julia Roberts? They were just like you. Living each day unaware that soon they’d shine on the silver screen, and in the hearts of millions. That’s right. They were all just being themselves, the people they were before they were heroines. And today, the heroines of tomorrow are also simply being themselves, living their lives, just like you. In fact, tomorrow’s heroine just might be you!” ’

  Summer vacation was nearly over for Shige. It had been stiflingly hot in Tokyo this summer, and what with travelling with friends, a camping trip with the ski club from school and a long visit with Ryoko’s parents, he hadn’t been home much. Aoyama, for his part, had had several presentations for TV commercials just before and after the o-bon holidays, so it was late August before they had a chance to travel together, as they did almost every year, to the little hotel near Lake Yamanaka. Back when he was with the agency, Aoyama had once used this hotel as a setting for photo-shoots featuring an imported whisky, and he’d liked the privacy and the quiet atmosphere of the place so much that he’d started making regular yearly visits.

  He’d gone there with Ryoko alone at first. Later Shige had accompanied them as a babe in arms, as a toddler and as a little boy. And for the past seven years, during each of which Shige seemed to have grown at least a head taller, the two of them had continued the trips on their own.

  The hotel was in a densely wooded area, about fifteen minutes by car from the lake. It wasn’t particularly luxurious, the food was nothing to get excited about and regulars weren’t given any special treatment. But the building, made of stone and wood and stucco, blended seamlessly into the surrounding woods; the two tennis courts were well maintained; and each of the rooms – of which there were fewer than twenty – was spacious and pleasant. Best of all was the privacy, and the fact that there was none of the forced interaction with other guests that you found in so many highland resorts and bed-and-breakfasts. Aoyama had countless memories of his days and nights here with Ryoko. They’d travelled a lot together in the period just before and after their marriage, but this was the only place they’d made a point of returning to every year. The car they’d taken the first time was a Bluebird 3S borrowed from a friend, and the late-summer drive down the Chuo Expressway to Lake Yamanaka was something they both enjoyed so much that it led to the purchase of their own first car, a used Audi they got with a thirty-month loan. From the used Audi they’d graduated to a new one, and then a Mercedes 190, although since Ryoko’s death Aoyama had downgraded to plain domestic sedans.

  The summer following Ryoko’s death, Aoyama had decided, after some hesitation, to go ahead and spend a few days at the hotel with Shige. Shige was in third or fourth grade at the time. The manager of the hotel, a Schumann fanatic, was unaware that Ryoko had passed away. He came out to the driveway to greet them and opened the door of the passenger side only to find the seat empty. ‘Will the missus be joining you afterwards?’ he asked, and from the rear seat Shige, in an oddly sunny voice, said, ‘Mama died.’ The cries of cicadas and birds pierced the cool air, and Aoyama thought, She’ll never stand on the gravel of this parking lot again. How many times had she climbed out of the car at this very spot, in how many different colours and styles of shoes, and said, as she always did, ‘Up here you can really feel summer slipping away, can’t you?’ He had to face the fact that he would never hear her say those words again and never again see her slender feet tread this gravel. The death of someone close to you, he realised at that moment, was something you came to accept one concrete fact at a time. For four days, during which he and Shige played endless games of tennis, he worried whether an eight-year-old child was capable of such acceptance. They were both terrible at the game back then, which meant that they spent more time chasing balls than hitting them, but Shige never complained of boredom or asked if they could stop. Even he, at eight years old, seemed to realise there really wasn’t anything else they could do.

  Now Shige was fifteen.

  ‘I hope Gangsta gets along all right with Rie-san,’ he said from the passenger seat. It was a weekday in late August, and the westbound lanes on the Chuo Expressway were practically empty. The sky was clear and blue, and once they’d passed Lake Sagami they could see the profile of a snowless Mount Fuji. ‘He doesn’t seem to like her much, even though she’s the one who feeds him every day.’

  They’d bought Gangsta at a neighbourhood pet shop five years ago. Before that they’d had a dachshund, and when Ryoko was alive a Scottish terrier. Shige had chosen and named the beagle, but being a kid of shifting enthusiasms he soon relinquished to Rie-san the pleasure of feeding him twice a day, and Aoyama was the one who usually took the dog out for walks. But Shige still thought of Gangsta as his.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Aoyama said. ‘They’re always playing together in the yard.’

  He was in a complex but elated mood. Yoshikawa had laid the groundwork for the audition with dazzling speed and an almost baffling fervour. He’d told Aoyama that the radio programme had been approved in no time. And now it was already on the air.

  ‘My own team did all the planning,’ Yoshikawa had said. ‘The title is Tomorrow’s Heroine, just like I said at first – what a laugh, eh?’

  He had gone on to describe the female personality hosting the show as a thirty-something jazz singer just back from a long stint in the US, and said that the idea of disclosing the movie’s storyline bit by bit had gone over big and the ratings were excellent.

  ‘I thought I was indebting myself to Yokota, but the numbers are so good that he ended up thanking me. Most of the young guys on my team are movie fanatics, so the project has developed momentum all by itself. They’re taking meetings with major distributors and potential investors every day, and the radio scripts are getting written without me even having to ask. It’s taken on a life of its own – so much so that it’s got to the point where people might wonder why you should be at the audition. So here’s my idea. Remember that documentary you were telling me about, that you did in collaboration with German TV a while ago? About a ballerina with a bad back and her wealthy patron, and an autistic boy, wasn’t it? We could use that as the basis for our story, and then it would be perfectly natural for you to be one of the producers. Besides, it’s a story with a lot of potential. In addition to finding the perfect bride for you, it’s possible we could actually end up making a movie and pocketing a good chunk of change. Of course, if everything went that well, the gods would probably have to compensate by frying us all, but . . . Anyway, the programme’s only aired three times so far, but get this: we’ve already received over two thousand applications. Two thousand women to choose your bride from. The wide age-range doesn’t hurt, but, you know something? Maybe having an ulterior motive is the way to go when you want to get a film made.’

  ‘Gangsta may not look it,’ Shige said, ‘but he’s pretty delicate and sensitive. Kind of like, bashful. He doesn’t warm up to just anybody. And Rie-san can be fairly rough around the edges, right? Like the way she’s always breaking those expensive dishes Mum bought?’

  ‘It’s just thre
e days. I’m sure they’ll both survive.’

  Before setting out, Shige had rented videos of ten or twelve war films and packed them, along with an eighteen-inch TV with a built-in VCR, in the trunk of the car. He was saying something about the Viet Cong now, but Aoyama wasn’t doing a very good job of listening. All he could really think about were the two thousand applicants. Two thousand was a figure he couldn’t even get his mind around, but it lent him a euphoric sense of unlimited possibility. How different this was from his mood that summer after Ryoko’s death! All he’d been thinking as he made the drive that summer was that he mustn’t let his eight-year-old son see him cry. Eventually even the deepest wounds can heal, and new possibilities can manifest all around you. It was an obvious truth, perhaps, but it struck him now as something profound and liberating. After checking in, he and Shige would play three sets of singles, take turns soaking in the big cypress bathtub, go out to the Chinese restaurant overlooking the lake, where the shark-fin soup and abalone were outstanding, then come back to watch Hamburger Hill or Platoon or Rambo . . . It was all very simple and healthy and gratifying.

  ‘Not that I know that much about the Viet Cong,’ Shige was saying. ‘But were they really that strong?’

  ‘In the jungle?’ Aoyama said. ‘Unbeatable.’

  ‘Not even the Green Berets were any match for them, right? How about Spetsnaz?’

  ‘Spetsnaz never fought the Viet Cong.’

  ‘But I mean, if they did fight, Spetsnaz would probably lose too?’

  ‘I don’t think anybody could’ve defeated the Cong in their own jungle.’

  ‘Incredible booby traps and things, right?’

  ‘Mm. Shallow pits with sharpened bamboo poles planted under a layer of leaves. Smaller holes to shred your leg. Boards with spikes sticking out that would fly up and stab you in the chest.’

  ‘And I heard they’d smear the spikes with poison, or with human poop.’

  ‘Shit is free, after all, unlike bullets and helicopters.’

  ‘Pretty scary. I bet they used the filthiest poop they could find, too. Get everyone to present a sample, and choose the one with the most bacteria and stuff.’

  They were listening to middle-period Beatles as they drove. This was the result of a compromise: Aoyama would have preferred classical but Shige had lobbied for early Komuro Tetsuya. ‘All You Need Is Love’ had just ended. Aoyama looked at his watch, then turned off the CD player and tuned the radio to FM 1. A soft female voice purred out of the speakers, and Shige said, ‘What’s this? Why are we listening to the radio?’

  Tomorrow’s heroine. Where is she right now? Dreams really do come true, you know. All it takes is a little courage . . .

  The first processing of the résumés would begin soon after they returned from Lake Yamanaka. Two thousand women, thought Aoyama . . .

  3

  That night, in the hotel room, they watched a triple bill of Rambo films. Midway through First Blood, Shige declared it a great movie, and he even shed a few tears at the ending. But with the second and third instalments he grew gradually disgruntled, and by the time they got to the final scene of Rambo III he was downright indignant.

  ‘What the hell is this? It’s ridiculous! How’s a guy on horseback gonna take down an attack helicopter with a bow and arrow? They must think we’re all morons watching this crap. What’s he supposed to be, Genghis Khan?’

  It was past two a.m. when the third film ended. Shige said he was going to get online and wanted the room to himself, because he couldn’t relax with a computer illiterate looking over his shoulder.

  ‘Go have a drink somewhere, why don’t you?’ he told his father.

  Aoyama obediently left the room with a glass and a bottle of cognac. The hotel was utterly quiet, but lights were on in the lounge next to the lobby, a cozy space with comfortable sofas and reading lamps. He sat in the soft light, thinking about the audition and about Ryoko and enjoying the liquid heat of the cognac sliding down his throat. Ryoko’s death, as he’d reflected many times before, had been a turning point for him. It certainly wasn’t anything he’d hoped for, and he wasn’t in any sense glad it had happened. But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you’ve worked towards, the life you’ve carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you’re left with a wound you can’t heal on your own and can’t believe you’ll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that – a lot of time – and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar. But you can’t expect children to understand that. For months after Ryoko’s death, Shige had behaved as if he were on a sort of manic mission. He took lessons at two different tennis clubs, played video games and messed about on the computer all night long, and even began getting into fights at school, sometimes coming home with a bloodied face. It was as if he’d abandoned himself to his despair, but in fact, Aoyama knew, he was fervently searching for something. Something that, once found, would keep him from having to feel the pain of his wound. To just entrust oneself to time was to exterminate oneself, to temporarily accept a kind of death. Children aren’t capable of that sort of detachment. For Shige it wasn’t a question of whether he could find what he was searching for or not: the very act of searching served to create distance from the wound. Obviously Aoyama’s own quest to bring the legendary pipe organist to Japan had served a similar purpose. If Ryoko’s death hadn’t occurred, he would never have undertaken the project. And if it weren’t for that project, the person he was now would never have come into existence.

  On the polished teak side-table was a copy of Newsweek, and he picked it up and leafed through the pages. It must have been left behind by some American guest, he thought; the manager here wasn’t the sort to scatter foreign weeklies around for atmosphere. One of the photographs in the magazine caught his eye. A homeless youth in New York City. At sixteen, the caption read, this boy has never been hugged. Aoyama gazed for some time at the kid’s face. It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds.

  The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.

  . . . When my father’s business failed, our family moved from the big house we’d been living in to a one-room apartment. He had a mountain of debt, but I remember being very happy because now he was spending a lot of time at home. At New Year’s that year, the streets were full of people dressed in their finest, but we had no nice clothes to wear and our room was dark and cold. We curled up in blankets and watched a film on TV. It was an old comedy, the kind that keeps you in stitches but then gets a little sad at the end and makes you cry. So all of us – Mum and Dad and my older brother and little sister and I – laughed and cried and spent a really beautiful time together. That experience meant so much to me that it awakened a powerful desire: to one day become an actress and appear in films . . .

  ‘Kinda gets you right here, doesn’t it?’ Yoshikawa said. Yoshikawa was now a section chief in marketing at the mega-agency Aoyama had once worked for, and they were in his office, facing each other across a coffee-table stacked with résumés. ‘Having them include a brief essay along with the résumé and photo was a brilliant idea. The essay, amazingly enough, gives you a clearer image of the person than even a photo does. But just look at all the applications – we ended up with four thousand, my friend. On the table here are maybe a hundred of the most promising, and we’d like to narrow it down to about thirty today. Whichever ones strike your fancy, just slip them into this file. All right?’

  There was a knock at the door. A young female employee came in with a cup of green tea for Aoyama. The office wasn’t that large, but it was private. Opp
osite this sofa set was a big desk and a wall of glass that overlooked Ginza. Aoyama’s eyes followed the young woman as she left the room. A photographer with whom he often worked had once said that when he reached forty he began to notice women’s legs more than their faces or breasts. He’d also proposed a theory: that the legs of young Japanese women epitomised the best of the changes that had occurred in the decades since World War II. Aoyama was inclined to agree.

  He gazed at the stack of résumés before him and sighed. There was no denying how discriminatory this process was. Out of four thousand applicants, the particulars on a mere one hundred stand-outs were piled on this table, while the résumés of the remaining three thousand nine hundred were packed away in cardboard boxes in the corner of the room. He now had to cull seventy from the hundred. Cull, he thought – what an unpleasant way to put it.