Юкио Мисима: Star

“She’ll make it,” he stated.

We gave the doctor space, assuming he was going to have to pump her stomach.

“I’m going to give her an injection. I’ll need you gentlemen to hold her down. She’s not going to like this.”

The men exchanged obscene glances and giggles. A group of them went over and held Yuri by the wrists and ankles.

The doctor drove a shot of saline into her left arm. Soon she began to writhe, like a snake working its skin free. We watched the twitches grow more violent. An anguished voice escaped her throat.

“It… it hurts!”

Kayo looked my way and for an instant let a smirk show at the corner of her mouth. But just as soon, as if forgetting I was there, she turned to watch the body of the girl revive.

Yuri’s chest arched sharply, her breasts threatening to burst from her dress. Her left arm snapped free, slapping the syringe out of the doctor’s hand.

“Hold her down, get that wrist.”

An actor in a windbreaker knelt by Yuri and pinned her arm down. The fury of her shoulders revealed the outrage of her muscle.

Each time she sent the syringe flying, she squealed “It hurts! It hurts!” at a higher and raspier pitch. It was all so natural. Having shaken off the stiffness that had temporarily constrained her on set, she reclaimed the natural presence of her first appearance. It was as if the overdose was not about her death at all, but the death of the woman who had been so rigid during the test run. Eventually the doctor grew impatient and slipped the tip of the syringe into a vein on the back of her delicate hand. She had a silver manicure. Absorbing the injection, the thin layer of muscle under her skin convulsed. A ribbon of blood dribbled from the needle. Her voice grew shriller still. The yells were real. She gritted her clean, straight teeth. All eyes were on Yuri! Her expression was shameless, every inch of her exposed. But with her return to consciousness, she found herself back in the disgraces of this bright and garish world.

Kayo’s eyes were twinkling. With her lips parted to reveal her silver teeth, she stared on drunkenly as Yuri’s body jerked with life.

That night, back in my bedroom, Kayo did something awful that the average person would never allow. But I was fine with it and did more than just allow it.

“Yuri Asano, right? She’s pretty. Too pretty to make it as a star.”

Lying faceup in the dim light, Kayo said those last few words like she was singing me a song.

“Hey watch this. Watch for a sec.”

I sat up from the sofa to see what she would do.

Kayo closed her eyes and made herself uncomfortably rigid. A thin screech, like a baby pigeon’s, left her lips. Her voice grew louder and clearer, and as the words “It hurts” took shape, what began as subtle twitches swelled into waves of energy. She screamed “It hurts!” and thrashed her arm through the air. Her silver teeth glimmered when she squealed. To me it looked like she was laughing, and eventually she did.

“It hurts! It hurts!”

She whipped her hair and clawed at her breasts with a passion that was almost sacrificial. The laughter driving the performance spun out of control.

“… Oh my god!… Oh my god!”

Kayo sat up, convulsing with laughter, only to fall back flat and start in with “It hurts! It hurts!” again.

There’s something about Kayo in these fits of delirium that shoots me through the heart. At times like these, she’s truly at her best. Every move she makes is resolute, a vow to resist the pull of tragedy, to poke fun at every situation, no matter how painful or grave, like someone flicking a watermelon to hear the sound it makes before they buy it. Her laughter was potent enough to scorch the grass for miles around, to putrefy a field of ripe red strawberries.

Watching Kayo sucked me in. I jumped on top of her, laughing so hard I almost cried. She screamed “Get off of me!” but I refused and sprawled over her convulsing body. Her laughter spattered at my chest like oil roaring in a pan.

By the next morning, the PR Office had reworked the story of attempted suicide into a pure romance. A minor actress, so blinded by her love for me she couldn’t keep herself off of the set, chose to take her own life rather than live a lifetime without me, but thanks to my intervention she was spared. To preserve the beauty of this memory, she had given up acting for good. They’d even written a response for me to read when the reporters asked about what happened.

“Of course I never saw her before. I was simply overcome with a sense of duty, as her colleague, to do anything I could to save her life. If you saw a woman drowning in the water, would you make sure she was beautiful before diving in to save her?”

It’s useless trying to explain what it feels like in the spotlight. The very thing that makes a star spectacular is the same thing that strikes him from the world at large and makes him an outsider.

I forgot almost everything about Yuri Asano’s attempted suicide, but over and over, frame by frame, my mind replayed her gestures and the faces that she made when they revived her with the saline. The Yuri who jumped in front of the camera still stood in the shadows, but the Yuri who screamed “It hurts! It hurts!” and flailed her limbs lay wholly, incandescently before me.

Her success was absolute◦— a success no one could contest. The men were sweating. Holding down her mighty limbs, they watched the flesh of her white thighs twitch and recoil under their weight. The other men gathered around and took in every detail, from the flaring of her nostrils to the flash of her tongue between her parted lips. As if it were their duty, as if following an order, they watched her from all sides.

The position of her body made the spectacle supreme. With her eyes firmly shut, fake eyelashes and all, and undistracted by her senses, Yuri was submerged. That’s right. Her mind was underwater. Her senses had been caught in the blurred grayness at the bottom of the sea, but her body had made it to the surface, its every curve and crevice bathed in the violent light. When Yuri yelled “It hurts!” her voice was aimed at the abyss. This was not a cry out into the world, and certainly not a message. It was a frank display of physicality, expressed through pure presence and pure flesh, unburdened by the weight of consciousness.

I wanted to study her, to watch her do it all over again. She had managed to attain the sublime state that actors always dream of. That two-bit actress had really pulled it off… without even knowing she had done it.

Among yesterday’s fan letters was a painstaking confession from a teenage girl, who wrote to say she used a photograph of me each night to masturbate. Kayo read every word of it aloud.

Listening from the sofa, I imagined the girl’s changing body.

Alone in her room, completely out of sight, she wove her hand between her legs, her thin fingers like a deft and agile comb. Her handiwork was pointless, harmless, lovable, and ladylike. Her fingers were precise, their motions practiced. She was the figure of rapture, and the cloth she wove so small, no wider than a handkerchief.

But the girl was anything but dreaming. She wove her cloth with steady focus and fastidious attention.

Nobody was watching. There was no way my photograph was looking back at her. But there I was, under her voracious gaze!

Through this sort of exchange, a man and woman can consummate a pure and timeless intimacy without ever actually meeting. In some deserted square, in the middle of a sunny day◦— it would manifest and consummate, without either of us ever knowing.

Given the choice, I’d much rather have a girl masturbating somewhere to my picture than actually trying to sleep with me. Real love always plays out at a distance.