This goes out to Tsuki, whose challenge to write a Trowa fic around a New Year's tradition made my mind go like clockwork to NHK's New Year's Eve Red and White Song Competition (aka Kohaku Uta Gassen) and enka --even though an AU was not high on the list. That's my excuse, though, and I'm sticking to it.
Maboroshi means phantom, vision, illusion, dream, chimera. Knowledge of enka should not be necessary to enjoy the fic, just that it is a style of music that was insanely popular in the 1960s. Lyrics from the classic "Tsugaru Kaikyou Fuyugeshiki" ("Tsugaru Strait Winterscape") sung by Ishikawa Sayuri.
Happy New Year! (Akai-gumi, ganbatte!)
maboroshi
*
They call her Lady now.
The Lady of Enka.
Her stage presence is like that of royalty. Her poise, the tilt of her head, her every movement of hand Classical poetry. The slight turn of her body beneath the kimono perfect. A voice to make people recall the old days and sigh. Now making old folks long for the carefree days of youth in a mountain hometown, now making those just past their prime weep as they think of the lonely times. Everyone knows her in a song; when she sings their stories become her life.
That is what everyone thinks. That is what the illusion makes them think. But they do not know her.
He isn't sure if he even knows her now. The caramel-brown hair swept up away from her face is pierced with silver combs and silk flowers, her lips red, the kimono she wears the lightest lavender it looks like woven snow: these things his brain fills in over the unfaithful black and white television picture. She smiles a pained smile, looking at someone who is not there— the kind of smile she was used to giving him since she left, her thin brows rising in the center. But he wonders if she means it, or if it is just the mournful cry of the sax prompting this stock response.
Is this the same woman he knew long ago? She had been his lady once. At least, that was what he had thought.
The date is 31 December. Vietnam and corporate scandal in the news. Downtown the air is body-soaking cold, but there is no snow on the ground. In a bar, a few people sit over their drinks. Lonely people mostly. Or just alone. Among them is the gangly young man, a poet with his overgrown hair brushed into his eyes, hunched into his turtleneck. He sits on his stool like a shade, interacting with no one and noticed by no one. The small television behind the bar is tuned to a national station. The annual Red and White Song Competition.
When she comes on, the backdrop behind her a dimly-lit, wintry hint of a landscape, no one in the establishment seems to notice but him. He is startled from his own demons when he hears the first few violent bars of her song, and turns his attention to the television screen. He has heard this a thousand times before. He has seen the performance at least a dozen, each time a little different. That doesn't matter. He watches rapt as she begins to sing.
*
From the moment I got off the night train out of Ueno
Aomori Station, in the middle of snow
The crowd of people returning to the north were all silent
Just listening to the roar of the sea
*
The bell jingles as the door opens and he automatically turns around. A young woman in a fur coat, her hair done up for the holiday under her hat, enters the bar, looks about once, and walks over to a man at the other end of the counter from him. No, at a second glance, she is not that young. Nor is she old, but his brain must have added the correct features involuntarily. Perhaps it was something as simple as the same shade of lipstick.
She orders a glass of wine and speaks to the man in a bright voice, but he does not pay attention. Behind the curling cigarette smoke his Lady appears out of the coastal fog like a spirit. The haunting snap of the threshold between chest and head voice, subtle vibrato carrying over the airwaves.
*
I was all by myself riding the connecting line
Nearly freezing and watching the seagulls and crying
Ah-ah . . . the Tsugaru Strait winter seascape
*
"Fancy meeting you here," she said, and her voice was rich and her manner short just like he remembered it. Her small lips were the color of red wine, roses, New Year's cards. "How long has it been?"
"Almost two years."
"Really that long?"
"I remember the day."
"So do I. But it doesn't seem that long ago."
That time it had been a noodle stand, and the sound of people passing on the street overwhelmed the music playing in the establishment even though it was late at night. She only ordered a drink, he another round. For a moment it felt like old times, her shoulder next to his, sitting like a tomboy on the stool with her elbows on the counter. Her scent was the same as he remembered, the one that was burned into his memory. It rose up like dust stirred into the air as she said, "Mind if I smoke?"
"It's okay." To be honest, he liked the smell. An ordinary brand, but, like her perfume, irreversibly tied to her.
He glanced at her as she held a cigarette between her painted lips. Her eyes downcast as he lit it for her with a paper match from one of the books on the counter.
"What's with the fur?" he said, turning to the back wall.
She lowered her eyes and smiled at her drink, hiding a blush. "Do you think it's too girly?"
"It doesn't matter what I think."
"I think it's too girly. But Mr. Treize bought it, so I guess I should wear it."
"You look like a million bucks in it."
"That's what he said, too."
He fell silent, wanting to change the subject but not knowing where to start. Noting his discomfort, she did it for him.
"How is everyone?"
"We don't keep in touch much anymore." He raised his glass to his lips. "Not since you left."
"Ah." She frowned as she blew a stream of smoke. "So, it was my fault."
"You seemed to be in an awful hurry to get out of there."
"I was given an opportunity to live out a dream. Who wouldn't take the same opportunity if they had it?"
"Enka wasn't your dream," he said, his voice low but the emotions unclear. "You used to say you hated enka. That it was too depressing."
"You hated enka. I bet you haven't even listened to my albums."
"We used to dance to boogie."
"Nobody dances to boogie anymore."
"Nobody dances to enka either. They just drink and dream. And drink some more."
They were silent for a moment. He watched the smoke from her cigarette curl into the air in front of him, dancing in time with the upbeat American record that played behind the counter. The acrid smell mixed with the aroma of the buckwheat noodles.
"I do listen to your albums," he admitted.
He listens to her albums over and over again. He watches her televised performances. He feels something inside when she tilts her head and looks into the distance, and it seems that she is not looking at the stage lights or the back rows but at that distant, misty Tappi Cape, reaching through that window pane frosted by her breath toward something that is waiting there. Something left unfulfilled.
"Mr. Treize says I should be doing movies," she said out of the blue. As though she wanted his approval.
"This Mr. Treize seems to say a lot of things."
"He's the best in the business. I'm lucky to have a manager as generous and as concerned about my future as he is."
"Do you love him?"
She fell silent. The question seemed to take her aback. It could not have been that she had never asked herself the same question. But she took her time before answering. A very generic answer.
"He's a rather sentimental man. Chivalrous. You just don't meet many men like that these days. So it's hard to say how he really feels about me. I guess my answer would depend on that."
Slowly he let out the breath he had been holding, realizing he had never actually wanted to know the answer to his question. Realizing she didn't either.
"It's like you're two different people," he said. "When you're here like this, it feels like nothing's changed, that the whole gang is still together. Not like that Lady Une up on the stage. She's not the Une I know. She takes her cues from others instead of making them herself. She's always trying to impress someone."
She nods with a small humming sound. "She doesn't dance to boogie."
"She doesn't seem happy."
"What made you think she was happy before?"
He turned his head to look at her and somewhere under the surface caught the same mournful look in her eyes that stuck to the television Lady's. Or perhaps it was a remnant of a small piece of the old Une, hair down and bookish glasses and men's trousers, which no one ever got to see. The record changed to a slower song, led by a sultry sax.
She said, as though he were as distant as that cape pointed out by a stranger, "Maybe this world just isn't built for people like us, Trowa Barton."
"Nichol always warned me not to get hung up on an enka singer."
She snorted, her mascaraed lashes blinking and mouth turning up at one corner. "He always was full of good advice, after the fact."
"Is."
"Sorry."
The night deepened. They listened to the record, each recalling fond times long passed. Bonfires on the beach and swing clubs. He hardly heard it, but at one point she did say softly over the rim of her glass, "You never did come after me, though."
*
Sayonara, my dear, I'm on my way back
The sound of the wind, swaying my heart, trying to make me cry
Ah-ah . . . the Tsugaru Strait winter seascape
*
He manages to shake his gaze away from the woman in the furs and her companion, and remembers the envelope that sits on the bar counter under his elbow. With elbows still planted firmly on the counter, he holds it up and carefully removes the red and white card from inside.
He ignores the calligraphy on the outside and stares at her handwriting on the inside. There is nothing poetic there. There is nothing genuine. Perhaps it is fair to say that she genuinely wishes him happiness, but the words themselves may as well have been written by someone else.
Instead of dwelling on them, he stares at the signature, and marvels at the simplicity of her name. Two small, neat kana.
Then he lowers the card a few centimeters, and gazes at her image on the television screen. Artificial snow is falling in the background. It appears gray rather than white. The same pale shades of gray as each layer of her kimono, and of her brightly-lit face and her slender throat and wrists where they disappear under the fabric. Compared to the bright red paper, the warmth and presence of her lips as she formed the words of the song must have been mere illusions.
Whether the passion in her voice as she sings them is real, he should know well enough to tell. But he finds he can't.
*
Sayonara, my dear, I'm on my way back
The sound of the wind, swaying my heart, trying to make me cry
Ah-ah . . . the Tsugaru Strait winter seascape
*
A lonely sax cries out across the night airwaves over the roar of a man-made ocean wind. She folds the microphone to her chest as the lights dim all around her figure. In her downcast face bleached by the spotlight and the unfaithful reception, only a vestige of regret remains.
*
2004.12.25