Юкио Мисима - Star

“Alright, start shooting when it hits the overpass.”

The assistant director hushed the crowd with his megaphone.

“Quiet down, please, we’re about to begin.”

Kayo came over with the little mirror. Her shoddy black slacks, snug at the thighs, barely contained her ample hips. I glanced in the mirror and then gave it back to her. She looked over my face as if inspecting fabric for imperfections.

The train appeared, tiny in the distance, riding through the liquid sunlight. The tracks above began to hum.

“Ready!”

The assistant director stood in front of the camera and fanned open a clapperboard with scene 16, shot 6 written on it in chalk.

The train rumbled across the overpass.

“Action!”

There was the whir of silent film, like vapor hissing from a leak. The clapper slapped and pulled away.

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.

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?”