DISCLAIMER: SKIP BEAT! and its associated characters are the creations of Yoshiki Nakamura. This author claims no ownership of Skip Beat or any of its characters. All other rights reserved.
MASSIVE thank you to Miss Mika Namariya for the beta read.
era-romance: I hope you like this chapter. :)
A Brief Note on Macbeth:I heard that some may like a short summary of Macbeth. There's a lot out there on the Internet, including thorough articles on Wikipedia and summaries on Youtube, etc. etc., so I'm going to keep this as short as possible. The premise: A victorious Scottish general is given a prophecy by three witches after a battle, telling him (among other things) that he will eventually become King. When part of the prophecy comes true, he tells his wife, the Lady Macbeth, who then plots with him to murder King Duncan, who is staying at their castle that night. They murder the king, framing his servants for the crime, and Macbeth assumes power. Macbeth sits uneasily on the throne, murdering his rivals. He receives further prophecies from the three witches, but he and the Lady Macbeth are still wracked by guilt over the crimes they've committed. A battle ensues, and Macbeth is defeated. The excerpts quoted here are taken from Act I, as Lady Macbeth contemplates the murder and talks her husband into continuing with the plot.
Author's Notes at bottom of the page.
Chapter XII: Truthfully Against Imaginary Circumstances
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
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"This...this isn't working."
Kuon looked up from Lady Macbeth's Act I soliloquy at a frustrated Kyoko, pacing back and forth on the tatami. The thundering storm had calmed into a steady downpour and the power had come back on, but he'd talked her into staying in his room.
"Oh you can't possibly move back out to the dining room now," he'd said. "After we've moved everything here. And you'll have to move it all again if you take it there, anyway."
Kyoko stayed and sighed and admitted he had a point, telling herself she didn't know why she'd allowed him to talk her into staying. Though...that wasn't quite true, was it? She knew exactly why she stayed, and it added to the uneasy amalgamation of mess that arose in her mind every time he smiled at her. Though she'd tried to use the chores to dislodge him from her side, they'd had the opposite effect. His tenacity endeared him to her, and she felt a little bit like a ridiculous shoujo tsundere with the antics she had pulled over the last few days. Most of the projects weren't even necessary, and his help had put them so far in advance of the maintenance schedule she truly was running out of projects for him to do.
She looked at his eager face and thought keep it together. Enjoy his company, Kyoko, she told herself, but remember he's leaving. She could be his friend without letting him know that the assault he'd begun under the matsuri fireworks was eroding her defenses. Never never never never never, she thought, and looked down again at her Macbeth.
He was 'helping her with her English,' but Kuon had different ideas of what studying Shakespeare was, and she wasn't quite sure whether she liked them. He insisted on reading the lines back and forth with her. It was awkward—her, stuttering over the words, him, reciting them back like the seasoned actor he was. "I just don't get it," Kyoko said. She knew her conversational English was good—she'd had a lot of practice speaking it with foreigners and switched readily between Japanese and English with Kuon. But it was difficult to read Shakespeare without stopping at every other word and phrase and looking it up.
"It's OK," he said. "No one talks like that anymore. It's a strange way of speaking, and no one can blame you. Even American high schoolers have a lot of trouble with Shakespeare."
Starting with Macbeth may not have been the best idea. Kyoko was entirely too focused on a close reading of the words, intent on having a mechanical understanding of the text. It wasn't so much that it was in English, it was simply...its complexity. Even knowing the basic outline of the plot, it would never do. Eventually he made her put down the book. He wanted her to see the play in its living form. Too many American kids read these plays and hate them, he thought, because they never see them.
"I have an idea," he said.
"Eh?" Kyoko responded. Kuon looked excited, which worried her. During the last few days, she'd realized that Kuon looking excited was a precursor to a new bout of flirting...which was something she'd secretly come to relish but didn't quite want to admit yet.
"You need to watch the Shakespeare."
"Isn't that cheating, though?"
"Definitely not. It's hard to just read the plays when you have to look up every other word. But if you watch, especially a good actor, it's much easier to understand what the words mean."
Yes, Kuon thought. He would start with a Japanese adaptation of Macbeth—Throne of Blood. He'd always been a Kurosawa fan, and as one of the acknowledged masters of Japanese cinema in the States, he'd been the first Japanese director Kuon had ever heard of. Kuon had grown up with movies in his veins, his father was a movie star, his mother was a movie star, his grandparents were movie stars. For him, the craft of acting was the raft he'd clung onto when he lost himself. It was the one thing he considered himself to be proud of, the one thing he thought of as 'the thing he was meant to do.' And though his current schedule did not often permit it, he was a dedicated movie buff. He'd never had the chance to create a movie, being always on the other side of the lens, but he thought he'd enjoy directing someday. So he picked up information on cinematography, storyboarding, and directing whenever he could.
Kyoko raised an eyebrow, looking at the disc in his hand. "Throne of Blood isn't Macbeth," she said. Kyoko had never seen the movie—she'd grown up watching what Sho wanted to watch, and then later, what Etsuro-san and Yayoi-san had wanted to watch. The former tended to be comedy and variety shows. The latter tended towards taiga dramas and the occasional romance, like Dark Moon.
"But it is!" Kuon said. "Bear with me. Let's watch this one first, just so you get a feel for the characters, and then we'll move on to the classical English versions..."
Kuon kept talking about the movie, which surprised her. She realized that the excited look in his eye hadn't been over flirting after all, but over something she'd rarely heard him speak of during his time as Kuon in her ryokan—his craft. His enthusiasm fascinated her. Since returning to the ryokan, Kyoko had taken her joy in the small pleasures of a job well-done. She'd told herself she would be OK without a grand passion. And yet the Kuon who spoke so animatedly now about mise en scene and symbolism and staging and camera angles was clearly someone who had exactly that. She found herself a little jealous, remembering the rush and swoosh of the one time she'd found herself on stage and lost herself in reacting to the voice on that cell phone at the LME audition. It was a rush quickly followed by the mortification that memory inevitably brought, though, and she shut it up in the Other Box again. But the resulting quiet that she'd forced on herself felt more empty than ever, and so she filled it by nodding while he put the disc in the Blu-ray player.
Kyoko endured not just Throne of Blood, but the vast archive of Macbeths on record that the internet could provide. She saw footage of live productions, she saw productions done as movies, she saw excerpted Lady Macbeth monologues, where one actress read Lady Macbeth three different ways. "Here is Lady Macbeth where she doubts her husband's character," one interpretation would say. "Here is Lady Macbeth where she believes that the fates have preordained her success," said the second. "Here is Lady Macbeth where she's afraid of her ambition," was the third. And Macbeths were just as varied—cold ones who recited their lines with an iron calmness, weak, fearful ones dependent on Lady Macbeth's chastisement, power mad, lustful, angry ones—all different.
"Which one is the correct version?" she asked Kuon, after watching her fifteenth Lady Macbeth.
"All of them," he replied, and smiled.
"But…"
"Each Lady Macbeth comes from the actress herself. As an actress, you draw on your emotions and your experience to fuel your character…You have to think about what your character wants, who she is, what she has to do to get there…and sometimes that means going beyond the four corners of the script." He'd been enjoying watching Kyoko watching Lady Macbeths, a seed growing in his mind—a vision, even, of a Kyoko standing opposite him on a wide stage as an equal.
Kyoko was looking at him, unsure. "Umm…"
"OK, maybe we should talk about characters and character-building? Maybe some basic acting fundamentals?" But Macbeth was alien territory, and she seemed a little intimidated by the task at hand.
"Kuon, I really don't think…" Wasn't this getting a little far away from doing her summer homework? "I think watching all the film clips helped. I'm certain we can go back to reading the lines now."
He pouted. "It will be helpful for me, too, as an actor," he said. "To remind myself of the basics. And I think it'll be better if we do more than just read the lines, don't you? Won't you have to write essays about the characters and their motivations? This will help you with that."
He could see she was about to protest, but the persistent image of an actress-Kyoko in his mind was impossible to resist and made him more insistent. "Trust me. I told you we would act out Macbeth. Humor me on this—think of it as an exercise to help you understand the play as it is."
She looked unconvinced.
A last ditch effort, then. "I'll carry more rocks up the hill for you!"
"You signed up to carry them up there in the first place! You could have gone and toured Kyoto at any time."
"Would you have gone with me?"
"Probably not." I still need to talk to Yayoi-san about him, she thought, remembering that she'd yet to exonerate him to the Okami-san. If she knew that it was a huge misunderstanding, though, I'd be taking him around Kyoto as a tour guide. She decided he didn't need to know that she would've been reassigned as his guest concierge, but she had a feeling he would've found a way to stay by her side regardless.
He counterattacked with the full puppy-dog stare. He was finding she was quite susceptible to it, though he kept its use at a minimum. He didn't want her building a tolerance to its effects.
"Listen, if you don't think my methods are helpful after a few days, we can go back to just reading the text. OK?"
"Fine."
"Alright...now…first let's do this..."
Kyoko was subjected to a battery of acting exercises. Kuon started with a simple one, the very first that he and his father used to play: he would say a phrase, Kyoko would repeat it back, exactly as she heard it. At first, the exercise irritated her. "I don't get this, Kuon. What's the point?" she said. But the exercise would grow in complexity until Kyoko would react to what he was saying reflexively, out of the circumstances of the action, rather than what she thought the action would be on its own. It grew on her.
Over and over, he drilled into her what he'd learned to be the foundation of his acting: that above everything, acting is behaving truthfully against imaginary circumstances. "An actor comes to his role after preparing," he lectured. "Here, the text of the script can actually be something that holds you back. You have to think about the character's true emotions. If you think she should be angry, why is she angry? Is her reaction true? Remember that you should always be acting truthfully no matter what you're doing," he told her, over and over again.
"How do you prepare your emotions?" she asked.
He was pensive for a minute. "Each actor has a different process. Back when I was in school, one of my teachers would tell us a story about an actor who had a role as an angry man during his play. So that actor would go outside, find something that he couldn't break, and then hit it with a wrench until he was so frustrated he couldn't break it that it came out in his acting."
Kyoko looked unimpressed. Kuon laughed. "But if that doesn't work for you, don't do it. But look inside yourself. If your character is angry at something, remember how that emotion felt when you were angry at something. If you want vengeance, think about a time when you wanted vengeance. Always base it on something real that you've felt before."
"But what if you haven't felt something yet? Like...what if I'm a beggar, and I've just been told I'm to inherit a million dollars?"
Kuon raised his eyebrow.
"OK, maybe that was a bad idea," she said, having been subtly reminded that she HAD been put into a place to inherit substantially more than she had been entitled to after previously having no worldly goods whatsoever. "What about Cinderella, when the clock was striking midnight? I've never had a magic dress disappear on me before."
"But how do you think Cinderella would feel, knowing that her dress would disappear at midnight?"
"Panicked, maybe. Ashamed, maybe. Scared of being found out."
"Have you ever felt like that before?"
Kyoko thought of the time Sho had seen her at the gas station. She'd been dressed in an alien uniform with a hat over her head, but she remembered the dread of having him find out what she was doing. "Yes," she said.
"Think about times when you've felt those things, then, and then apply it to your character. But there are limits to that," he said ruefully. "In acting classes, they'd always say to use your emotional memory as a well to draw from, but when you couldn't, you use your imagination to understand what emotional response the circumstance would get from you." He paused. "But sometimes there are feelings you can't imagine into being…" He trailed off, thinking of his failed Katsuki. Kyoko saw the look on his face and didn't press him further.
He taught her how her body could communicate what the text did not. "Silence is an absence of words," he would say, "never an absence of meaning. Let me show you…" How she stood, how she breathed and looked, it all filled the silence when there were no words, and underscored what the words truly meant when they were said. "Sometimes, you can convey something with a single look that you can't with an entire page of dialogue," he said, after reducing her into fits of giggles after a silent bit using a chair.
And finally he taught her that acting meant reacting truthfully to the stimulus provided by others. They moved on to improvising short, simple scenarios in which he gave her a single line and had her react to him, and then vice versa. "I'll give you a single line," he said, "and that line is 'Kuon!'" Say it back to me according to what the situation demands. The first time, he sat at his desk writing with a pencil as she came in, directing her to come in as if she had important news, and that she needed to get his attention no matter what. "Kuon!" she said, having bounded up to him with great eagerness. He didn't respond. "Kuon!" she said again. Again, he didn't respond. "KUUUUUOOONNNN!" she finally exclaimed, and then stomped her foot. He smiled. "See? One word, and yet you've managed to express how frustrated you are with me. One more time. How about coming back from a first date? Your only line is 'Kuon!'"
She'd glared at him but acquiesced, feeling a trap coming on. This time, when she came into the room, he was standing shyly in the middle of it and smiling at her. She came up to him. "I had a wonderful time tonight," he said, and held out his arm for her to take. They promenaded to the balcony doors, and he stopped as if he were in front of a house and walking her to her door. Then he took her hand and kissed it, and then, facing her, placed the kanzashi he'd been hiding in his back pocket back in her hair. She reached her hand back to touch where he had placed it. "Kuon!" she said, and the voice that came out surprised her because it was soft and sweet, and not enraged and embarrassed.
"That one," she said, not quite looking him in the eye, "was a trick." But she blushed and didn't attempt to give it back.
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It was time for her to apply the exercises into a real character, but he didn't want to start out with Lady Macbeth.
"Hmm. Maybe...let's start with something you're familiar with," he said. He rummaged around the pile of scripts he'd brought with him, finding Dark Moon's. "What about Dark Moon? Would you like to start creating a role here? You saw the drama, right?"
He'd considered asking her to do a Mizuki and then changed his mind. Mizuki was the main love interest, of course, but she was a straightforward character: pure of heart, strong, and true. She existed more as an ideal than a real character for Katsuki to play off of. No. Easily, the two most interesting characters in Dark Moon were Katsuki and Mio, similarly shaped by their quests for revenge. "Kyoko," he said.
"Yes?"
"What did you think about Mio?"
"Mio? In Dark Moon?"
"Yes. That's the one."
"But she's evil!"
"Maybe. Is she?"
Was Mio evil? Kyoko applied the things they'd been talking about to the character at hand. "The actress who played Mio...always frustrated me."
"Why?"
"At first I thought it was just that she was too meek. Hiding behind her hair. If she hated everyone so much, why was she always hiding behind it? And she was always trying to plot against Katsuki, but she just...never really felt like she had the conviction."
"Ah yes. So now you're thinking about behaviors that are consistent with the character's motivations."
"Beyond the script."
"Exactly. So tell me...if you were Mio...if you were the actress playing Mio, what would you do? Who would you be?"
"Mio is...the daughter of a rich family...she has a scar and an inferiority complex...and she hates everyone. And she wants revenge on her sister. But."
"But?"
"You know, I always felt sorry for Mio."
"Sorry?"
"She was Misao's equal, you know? Just as rich, and without the scar disfiguring her, just as pretty. I always felt that it was reasonable that she was angry because she was left out...angry at her mother's shame, anger at her sister's treachery, anger at Mizuki's joy...and then she was angry at herself because she was so angry...and that became despair. She was like a cursed princess."
Kuon sat back on his haunches and gave her an appraising look.
"So what I think Mio really wanted," continued Kyoko, "was for everyone to feel the rage and grief and despair that she did. And she also wanted them to hurt because an animal in pain destroys everything around it while it thrashes around and dies."
"And how did she feel about Katsuki?"
"She hates him, because Misao loves him. And Mizuki loves him too. That's galling for her. Why should he have the chance of a happy ending with Mizuki, when Mio was doomed forever by her sister's shadow? She doesn't want Mizuki to be happy, but she's conflicted, too, because having Katsuki leave Misao would devastate her sister. But...I think she may have recognized him as a kindred soul. A worthy adversary, maybe."
Kuon paused at that one. "'Kindred'?"
"They both wanted revenge. They were both in despair."
Kuon nodded. There was no question that the Mio on-set did not grasp the character the same way Kyoko did. To many Dark Moon fans, Mio was a one-dimensional villain, a girl who was spiteful and fiendish because she was scarred and resented everyone for it. But Kyoko's angle was certainly novel. And he could see the arc of her thinking supported within the script, could even see a strange attraction between the characters if played a certain way—though it exacerbated Katsuki as a dark hero with a somewhat demented harem.
"Good. Show me, then. Let's see…" He was thinking up a scenario for them to improvise on—he didn't want to complicate the exercises any further, merely show her that she could create a character from the facts she already had after having watched the drama and from emotions she already had within herself. "Let's pretend you've just seen me with Mizuki, and it's clear she's in love with me. Do you remember the scene with the broken teacup?"
Kyoko sat, pensive, as Kuon watched her. "In the Hongo living room?"
"Yes. Let's say you've just heard Mizuki play the piano, and you know she shouldn't have been playing the piano."
"You wouldn't happen to have something I can mark my forehead with, do you?" she asked.
"No," he said. "But you don't need a physical scar. Make me see it."
Kyoko looked at him thoughtfully and nodded. But she swept her hair back from where the scar should've been, rather than pulling her hair forward to hide it. Kuon watched her transform. The way she tilted her head a certain way seemed to imply a consciousness of something being on her skin, even though nothing was there. Kuon looked at her admiringly. The fact that she knew she had to hold her head differently told him that she had internalized his advice on the way an actor used his or her body. "I'm ready," she said.
Kuon readied himself. In the scene, Mizuki had just left him and he had been sitting with his head in his arms on the Hongo sofa. He echoed the position on the ryokan couch in his room, remembering to school his face with a rueful but wistful smile. He looked up as he heard footsteps.
Upon seeing Katsuki in the living room, Mio's eyes narrowed and her mouth took on a sardonic twist. She stopped and observed him on the sofa. A long pause. With a refined voice, she said "Ara, Katsuki-san," she said, "does Misao-nee-sama know you're in love with Mizuki?"
Katsuki narrowed his eyes at her. "Mio-chan. What a wonderful surprise."
"Hardly. I am in my own home, Katsuki-san. May I ask what you're doing here?"
"I was merely asking after Misao."
"Oh? But you knew she wasn't home." A sardonic smile lit her face. "What a liar you are. I heard you both on the piano. Imagine! A teacher in love with his student. Sneaking around with her in broad daylight. What an indecent teacher. When he's engaged to my sister! Do you think you can have both of them at the same time?" Mio laughed softly, elegantly, and then her smile broadened. "Katsuki-san...can you imagine what would happen to your precious little one if Misao found out? After all, you know what my family does to inconveniences." The smile disappeared, replaced with Mio's gleeful laughter.
But as she laughed, the look on her face to turned to rage, and before he knew it, she was moving.
"And you think! You think! YOU THINK that you can have them BOTH! HOW DARE YOU!" Mio found a knife left over from their breakfast and lunged at Katsuki, who caught her wrist in a steel-like grip.
"You don't know me, little girl," he said. The words came out of him like a growl.
"Oh I do, I do," she responded, and in a sing-song voice she taunted him, "I know what your daaaaaaaddy saw," and twisted so that he had to let go of her wrist. Using her lower center of gravity, she shoved him, hard against the wall, and before he knew it, she plunged the knife straight into it, right by his ear.
Kuon was so surprised he fell out of character. "Um. Kyoko?"
His voice seemed to take her out of a trance, and her eyes widened as she took in where she was standing, where he was standing, and the knife in the wall. Her mouth formed a small "O."
"Kuon...I...I'm sorry! I...don't know what got into me." Her body was plastered against his, pinning him on the wall. She sprang off of him, suddenly conscious of his warmth and his smell, and hid her blushing face.
But when she could look at him again, he was on the floor and doubled over in laughter, so hard all he could manage were wheezes. In English, he said, "Holy shit, Kyoko, what in the actual FUCK was that?! Where did that come from?!"
Kyoko colored. Kuon had yet to use American curse words around her, but she supposed there was a first time for everything. "I...I'm sorry...I...thought that...my Mio would be...that...Was it really that bad?"
He shuffled the step or two between them on his knees, and then took her hands in his as he looked into her eyes. "No," he said proudly. "It wasn't bad at all. It was amazing. "
The smile he was giving her was dazzling, but Kyoko blushed and looked away. "You...you don't have to say that," she said. "I'm not even an actress. I failed my audition—"
His hands tugged on hers, and she was forced to look at him again. "No. YOU were amazing. A Mio like that would've blown the doors off of the production. Ogata wouldn't have known what hit him. Oh god, what a waste, what a waste…" He hugged her, and Kyoko 'eeped' into his shoulder. She was beginning to squirm but he held her still. "Our Mio was a timid little actress who was chosen by Iizuka-san, who played the first Mio from the original Tsukigomori. She did everything Iizuka-san told her to do. She didn't have a chance in hell of making her own character. And I...I…"
"Had no one to play against," Kyoko finished. "You couldn't react to her because you had nothing to react to."
"Yes," he breathed. "One of many reasons the series failed to surpass Tsukigomori. I should have been able to elicit something of a reaction from Mio. But my failure in playing Katsuki was wholly my own fault." He paused. "Because I didn't know what this felt like." He broke away from their hug but caressed the line of her face from her ear to her chin. Kyoko was mesmerized for a brief second before she moved away from his hand and then turned to walk briskly away.
To Kuon, that brief second of hesitation before she broke their contact was everything. Perhaps it was somewhat ridiculous to think that the fact that she didn't recoil at his touch was a positive development, but then, he was Kuon and she was Kyoko and not much else could be asked for. But she said "That's ridiculous, Kuon. Perhaps you needed to go back to your basic lessons before playing Katsuki."
"Those basic lessons were the only way I could get through that production back then. The Boss insisted that they weren't enough, because he could tell my love acting was so fake. Because I didn't know what love was." And now I do, he seemed to say silently.
The implication was not lost on Kyoko. She had to cut off this dangerous line of conversation and was flailing around for a way to do so when she realized she'd stuck an actual knife into her ryokan's walls. "Oh no," she said, looking at it. "Oh no." She dislodged it gingerly, looking at it as if it were poisoned.
He looked at the hole the knife at left impassively and held out his hand for it. "If I'd have known you were going to come at me with a knife, I wouldn't have left them out after breakfast...Where did you learn how to break out of a grip like that?"
"We have drunk patrons sometimes," she said. "Yayoi-san wanted to make sure I could defend myself if it ever came to it."
She was looking at the damaged wall now.
He snorted. "Oh that's no big deal," he said, "I'll just patch it up with some plaster. And the touch-up paint is in the storeroom, right? I'll get right on it, hime-sama."
"I...you...You don't have to, you know," she said. "I can do it, or Fujiwara-san can."
"Oh now what, I've graduated from your man-of-all-work? It's ok, Kyoko-hime."
"I honestly shouldn't have given you so much work…" she trailed off. "It's just that…"
"Hmm?"
"It was too fun watching you do it." She looked so guilty and so cute he had no choice but to laugh at her.
"And this, is this fun?"
She looked at him shyly. "Actually...it's more fun than I ever anticipated. I...I got goosebumps." More than fun, she thought. She loved it.
His breath caught at the quiet eagerness in her expression. "Wonderful. OK, so...here's a few things we should think about while you're developing Mio…"
He kept talking, discussing the finer points of the character. She couldn't help but listen. Kuon Hizuri teaching at full strength was impossible to resist.
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By the next day, they were back to re-reading Macbeth as a play. "Why don't you do the monologues?" he asked. She nodded.
"I'd like that," she replied. "Give me until tomorrow morning to prepare?"
Kyoko went back to her room, holding her Macbeth script. It wasn't just to prepare, in the actor's sense of the word, though she knew she would complete that task at hand. After spending so long with Kuon, she needed to get away from him—away from the dizzy, giddy feeling that she felt whenever he was around. This retreat was partially a way for her to arrest the free-fall she was in. He confused her. She'd been so sure that life at the ryokan was the life she wanted—a calm, quiet life, no surprises, a steady income, a lack of drama.
It was a mess. Half of her wanted to run away with him, the other half wanted to hide in her room until he left forever.
"Stars, hide your fires," she muttered, "Let not light see my black and deep desires." Because she desired too much. In his presence, she could almost see a different life burning through a bright haze. A life in which she had given herself up utterly to the impulse that beat in her blood like a drug as she acted in role after role, transforming herself like a chameleon. A life in which she'd stopped resisting his incessant assault on her heart and surrendered to his incorrigible wooing. All the fancies she'd had as a girl returned a thousandfold in his presence. Her Prince was here, and he was offering her her own share of magic in that fantasy land called Showbiz. The acting exercises—all the little scenes, the improvisation, being Mio—it had all been exhilarating. It was fun. Why did the exercises fill her head so? She found her entire body humming with possibility, with eagerness, as if she had multitudes inside her that just wanted to escape if only she would let them. When she was with Kuon, it all mixed into a heady, overwhelming brew that threatened to drag her off in an undertow. It was why she'd gone along with his silly acting exercises, though she knew as well as he did how little they had to do with her actual English class. The truth was she'd simply enjoyed playing across from him, Mio, Lady Macbeth, or otherwise.
Also within her was an equal and opposite reaction: never never never never never the mantra went, never never never again never again NEVER AGAIN never again, a voice speaking sotto voce underneath fancies of holding his hand again. Because how could she possibly trust him and his pretty words, when she'd trusted before and been burnt so badly? Even she knew how unlikely it was for an aspiring actress to succeed in showbiz, and she'd already tried and been rejected! She already knew what the outcome would be, so what was she even considering? What was there to consider at all? And as for his heart—he could claim all he want that he was no playboy, but here, at the ryokan, they had nothing beyond each other. Out there it was different. Even if he truly was acting in good faith, she knew she had nothing to hold him to her. No body, no career, nothing particularly unique about her personality. She was a sparrow in a field of birds of paradise. His passing infatuation would fizzle out and die, and she'd be left with the remains of another bad decision and self-loathing. Was it worth sacrificing the life she'd built for herself in some hare-brained scheme to chase a happily ever after? A potentially illusory happily ever after?
In the meantime, each day that passed meant one day closer to his departure, one day closer to returning to the calm that existed before he'd come back and turned everything upside down.
She stopped. That was the answer, then. Run down the clock. Get it out of her system. Indulge the impulse shamelessly and put it to rest when he left.
Because he would leave. And if life truly were a walking shadow, then she had until then to lose herself in this pretty fantasy until it all came crashing down. She was allowed her week of lunacy.
And so she crept back into her room, stopping at Yayoi's office on the way and explaining to her what she'd found out about Kuon. The older woman, oddly enough, hadn't seemed surprised regarding her revelation at all. She'd merely looked...amused. Almost like a cat that had just caught a mouse.
Kyoko was too distracted by the task at hand to worry much about it. She left in a daze, all the while 'preparing' to play Lady Macbeth. As a member of the Fuwa staff, she'd had decades of hiding her emotions. No matter how extreme her distress or her disgust, Kyoko had always been expected to show a serene smile. Manipulating her emotions to match her outward face had been a skill she'd learned as a young child. As for Lady Macbeth—how would she do it? A woman who was ruthlessly ambitious—who was willing to use her wiles and murder for it. How, then, could she find these feelings in herself and turn them into a murderous queen? She was only a high-school student, for goodness' sake. She thought about it a long, long time, but she found the embers within. A woman who would dash her own child's brains into rock—well, she certainly had an example from Saena. Kyoko remembered the thin line of her mother's lips, the furrow in her brow that formed whenever Kyoko had done something that particularly enraged her. And as for the ambition...Kyoko had to hand it to Sho, this time—the ambition that had reared its head inside her soul had at first been dashed by her rejection at the audition, but somehow part of that drive remained in her. But she remembered the dark satisfaction of taking Sho's birthright away from him—a feeling that she had not wanted to acknowledge aloud even then—and then the slow, uphill climb at school, outclassing, out-scoring her detractors and her rivals. She fed into it, growing it, imagining it leading not to the vanquishment of her rivals but to the murder of a king...and she smiled. And when she looked into the mirror, she saw that it was a chilling, feral smile. And as to how she felt about Macbeth...here, Kyoko blushed. Because she had seen other Lady Macbeths, seen how they made their Lords more pliant. Some with kisses tauntingly withheld, some with bodies that pressed against their husband. And there, Kyoko also had to acknowledge a feeling she'd been loth to acknowledge before: the low, sub-aural feeling of lust at the bottom of her stomach and between her legs when she thought of Kuon.
Humming along, she began to practice Lady Macbeth's walk and Lady Macbeth's looks, exploring the imperious way she held her shoulders and the use of her sex to ply her husband into compliance. She decided her regular ponytail or bun wouldn't do, and brushed her hair into a long, black curtain down her back, looked through her closet and decided that none of her thrift-store clothing would work. Later that night she remembered a pile of old curtains that had been squirreled away in Sho's old room by the Okami-san after the banquet hall had been renovated, and began working. She didn't need a dress, no. But if she was going to greet Kuon in the morning as a Queen, she thought, she might as well look like one.
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Lady Macbeth stood at the center of the room, a blank piece of paper in her hand. Her hair was flowing wild and long and unbound down her back, she was wearing a dress made of curtains as if it were made of samite.
Kuon watched from the shadows as she walked, agitated, to and from the window. She had come to his room in-character that morning, already dressed in something she had sewn overnight. The fact that she carried a blank piece of paper atop her little bundle told him she was planning the Act I Scene 5 monologue, but the eager "Kyoko-chan!" on his lips died as she held out a cloak to him and then placed it on him as if she were dressing him for battle. As if she were Lady Macbeth seeing me off on that 'foul and fair day,' he thought, as her lips narrowed into a quietly determined line. He held still and let her 'arm' him, the way he imagined medieval knights of old did when the lady of their castle saw them off in armor. There was some tenderness in the way she tied a belt around his waist, complete with a loop for a shinai that doubled as his broadsword. A little bit of pride and a seductive glance bid him come back to her as she brushed his hair back during her silent farewell. The cloak and belt were made out of the same material as the dress. They'd acted all this in silence and he didn't comment on the fact that she hadn't brought breakfast. That made it a truly novel occasion.
My god, Lory was an idiot, Kuon thought, watching her pause, and then turn. The past few days had been a revelation of sorts—and one that he didn't want to keep for himself. She was using the entire room—the entire 'set' as he'd told her to. Lory was an idiot because what Kuon had discovered in Kyoto was a monster, the likes few had ever seen. Once she'd grasped the heart of the role and the rhythm of the poetry, the character had developed almost out of whole cloth. They'd discussed the language extensively, and the clips had filled in what he and the footnotes couldn't. Oh, she wasn't perfect. She was still raw, in need of refinement and instruction, but what she lacked in technique could be easily learned. Any person could take classes from the most renowned drama schools and would still be hopeless without talent. And it was talent that was in Kyoko, the cosmic spark that one either had or did not have. She could have very easily taken a mechanical approach to the role—looking at any of the Lady Macbeths they'd watched for cues on where to put her hands and when to raise her voice. But she didn't. This Lady Macbeth was no pale imitation of some internet clip. There was a malevolence in Kyoko's eyes that Kuon knew belonged to a different soul. Give her the right stage and the right polish and she'll be truly frightening, he thought. All I did with her was give her a few pointers and some exercises, but now she's ready to go kill a king, apparently. Looking down at his cloak and his sword, he thought, And so am I.
And now, he thought, it begins.
She straightened and said, with a certain glee, "The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements."
And with that single sentence, Kuon knew she'd stolen the show. Stolen the show on her first scene. 'My battlements,' he thought. As if the castle were hers, not Macbeth's. As if he were a child to be coddled and cajoled into doing her bidding. Oh yes, the castle was hers, the throne was hers, and the plot, too. Her domain, and King Duncan would be moving into her power. With a determined air, she walked away from the window and into the center of the room. But, Kuon thought, watching her face, what's interesting is her words sound as if she has no doubt or fear...but her body shows otherwise. For a minute she was silent—Kuon watched her face as she struggled between an unsaid fear in her eyes, even a flash of guilt, and then watched as the fury of her ambition and her lust for power overcame her doubts. And then, she stilled. She's made up her mind! he thought, with a twinge of fear in his gaze as he watched her breathe deeply in, straighten her core, and then raise trembling hands up to the heavens.
Her voice began with a waver and then strengthened. "Come, you spirits," she said, "that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty!"
He watched her hands descend and then crawl up her torso, as if her words were truly changing her. But though she called for the spirits to unsex her, the way she arched her body—the frisson of electricity in the air—the way she had thrown her head back and opened her mouth so he could see the moisture on her lips all seemed to call upon an incubus. He hadn't thought she could feel the intersection of lust and power like this, but the way she was standing right now was no innocent, amateur stance. Though perhaps he shouldn't have underestimated her. They'd watched multiple iterations of Lady Macbeth, and she was no stranger to interpretations that focused on the character's use of her sexuality. But seeing Kyoko's feverish turn took him by surprise. This was a woman who lusted after power, who fed upon it, who was willing to sacrifice her humanity for it.
"Make thick my blood," she said hoarsely, "Stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and it!"
Her voice rose in intensity, the hands now placed across her chest and over her breasts like a body being made ready for burial. "Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature's mischief!"
Kuon could almost feel a dark magic invading her body, rising from the soles of her feet and into the crown of her head, fusing with her soul as she made an unholy pact. Every hair on his arm was raised and he shivered, feeling spirits he could not see descend on her. "Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry 'Hold, hold!'"
Kuon had told her that part of acting was delivering a true response to an external stimulus, usually imaginary. What he didn't expect was how compelling she would be as she called him to respond to her. Oh yes, she was playing him now, there was no question. Macbeth answered his cue and entered in haste, after a long day of battle, tired, weary, but anxious to join her. He strode in to her quickly and claimed her as a man victorious in battle, given a supernatural assurance of a future kinghood. He fixed a steely smile that warmed as he picked her up and spun her around, holding her close as she exclaimed. It was to her credit that there was never any doubt as to who was in his arms. Lady Macbeth, not Kyoko, looked at him with an eagerness with a tint of ferocity underneath it. "Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter! Thy letters have transported me beyond this ignorant present, and I feel now the future in the instant."
And then she ran her hand across his face, and he was half ashamed that it wasn't quite Macbeth who leaned his head into her hand and gently bit at her finger. "My dearest love," he said. Oh...to call her that as myself! he thought. "Duncan comes here to-night."
She grinned, still perched on him. "And when goes hence?" she asked playfully.
He responded, "To-morrow, as he purposes."
She twisted herself off of him and out of his grasp ferociously, the action reminding him that she and not he controlled their interactions. The playfulness was gone, replaced by the resolve he'd heard when she called her spirits downward. "O, never shall sun that morrow see!"
She said it more to herself than to him. Looking him in the eye she spoke to him closely, urgently. "Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters. To beguile the time, look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't."
She smiled after that speech, chilling him to the core.
And then she turned away, moving, planning. "He that's coming must be provided for: and you shall put this night's great business into my dispatch; which shall to all our nights and days to come give solely sovereign sway and masterdom."
Kuon allowed Macbeth to look both horrified and eager. His lady wife had accosted him with a welcome and a plan for murder, after all. But he also couldn't deny the fact that this was an eventuality they had looked for, a plan never spoken aloud before but tacitly agreed upon by both of them.
"We will speak further," he said.
She gave him a sideways glance as she swept past him, and then paused. Her back was to him, she would have been facing the 'audience' with her body turned a quarter to the right. "Only look up clear; to alter favour ever is to fear: leave all the rest to me."
And with that, she dismissed him. 'Leave all the rest to me,' she said, as if there were nothing left to be said. The Kuon-within-Macbeth shivered in anticipation. The fate of a king in her hands, a castle under control. He stared after her thinking how apt it was that the Queens in chess moved powerfully in all directions while the Kings could only move one space at a time. With this monologue, she had established the nature of her relationship with him, her naked ambition for power, and the true mastermind behind the dastardly plot.
The truth was that he was inordinately proud of her. The past few days, he'd worked her through the play as much as she'd worked him with carrying rocks uphill. And he'd found that she was a sponge. It wasn't just the concepts that he'd taught her. It was how she absorbed things unsaid. Things like how to pay attention to diction. To breathing. She seemed to understand the ideas behind character creation intuitively, though she'd had his help. She watched him with a laser-like focus and then imitated or adapted the concept he thought with clinical precision.
And he wanted to see more of it. Just a single twist of the golden round and perhaps she could join him. He didn't know if she'd completely discounted acting after the audition debacle at LME, but if even a small part of her found it appealing, he wanted to beg and plead that she give it a chance. In his mind's eye he saw her smiling on small and big screens, smiling at him from on high on a billboard as he crossed the street. He imagined her bathed in the applause of a roaring crowd, cameras forming a halo around her head. He wanted to be by her side on the red carpet as a nominee in her own right, telling the reporters "Oh, I'm so proud of her, she did such an amazing job with so-and-so's film!" as he trailed after her. In the blink of an eye he saw all of this and it made him breathless. Meanwhile, his Lady smiled at him and asked, "Next scene?"
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Yayoi was walking along the corridor that led to Kuon's suite when she heard raised voices. Raised voices in English.
"I have given suck," she heard, and her eyebrows raised as the rest of the lines faded into the walls. She moved closer, hearing Kyoko's voice say "...while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out had I so sworn as you have done to this…" Kyoko sounded...like a different person. Entirely different. Yayoi could sense a malevolence in her voice that she'd never heard before, and it worried her.
"If we should fail?" Hizuri-san's voice, coming low and urgently and almost desperately from the wall.
"We fail?" she heard her say, "But screw your courage to the sticking-place and we'll NOT fail…" Yayoi could not quite make out the rest of Kyoko's speech, but the violence in it...it made her hair stand on end.
"BRING FORTH MEN CHILDREN ONLY," Hizuri-san said, the words springing out of him as if from a well of deep adoration, "for thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males…"
Men-children? What? That's it, Yayoi thought. I need to go in there and see what they're doing...
"KYOKO-CHAN!" she screamed, wrenching open the shoji door. The sight before her stopped her in her tracks. "What in the—"
Kyoko was in a gown made of what looked like old curtains, flushed, her hand around Hizuri's neck as he stood behind her. They looked...entangled. His left arm was snaked around her waist, his right hand was wandering indecently down the curve of her belly and her hand was over his, forcing it further downwards as their fingers entwined. Where a woman's intimate places would be, Yayoi thought, thinking of the sound of his voice saying "men-children" and blushing lightly. His mouth nestled into the curve of her neck. Kyoko's body was taut like a bow-string about to let an arrow fly. Yayoi caught the look of lustful murderousness that they shared before they looked up in surprise.
Her entrance into the room ended the spell. They sprang apart, abashed. Kyoko colored a beet red, more embarrassed than Yayoi had ever seen her.
For a few seconds the three of them stared awkwardly at each other. And then Kyoko said, bowing awkwardly, "Ano...I'm sorry, Yayoi-san. Hizuri-san has been helping me with this summer's English homework. We're reading Macbeth for that class I'm taking, and he felt that I would best understand the scenes by acting them out…"
This is homework? Yayoi thought. Yayoi took a long, hard look at Kuon, who was looking off to the side and trying to appear as innocent as possible. "Hizuri-san!" she said. Kuon gulped. Here it was again, another interrogation.
But no such interrogation was forthcoming. Yayoi held no advanced degrees, but she was not uneducated. She'd even seen a production of Macbeth in Japanese once or twice. But she didn't know quite what to say after the scene she had just walked into. She narrowed her eyes, her glance moving between their blushing faces. "Be sure you tutor Mogami-san well," she said. She gave him a meaningful look that she barely saved from turning into a smirk. "And don't teach her incorrect interpretations of the text."
"Hai!" Kuon said, bowing reflexively.
Yayoi swept out of the room, barely making it out before collapsing into stifled giggles in the hallway.
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When Yayoi got to her office, she dialed Takarada-san's number.
"Fuwa-san?" he said. He hadn't heard from her since their last call. "Have there been developments?"
His eyebrows raised as he heard Yayoi speak. "They are playing Shakespeare together," she said gravely.
"Oooooooh!" he squealed. "Romeo and Juliet?"
"No. Macbeth."
Macbeth? Lory mused. Hardly romantic. How disappointing. Typical Kuon. He always preferred Macbeth over the other plays. The idiot should have talked her into Romeo and Juliet, and then maybe he'd have had a chance of getting somewhere. "Macbeth," he said, flatly. "They are...acting out the play?"
"Yes. In his suite. Really, none of our strategies were needed, Takarada-san. They've been stuck together at the hip since he got here. He appears to be better at this than you give him credit for."
Lory stroked his chin, looking pensively at his snake curled around a sun-warmed rock. His office was decorated in an "Old Hollywood" style at the moment, complete with palm trees flown in from Los Angeles and a facsimile backdrop of the Chinese Theater over his desk. "And...your Kyoko-chan...has she fallen for him, do you think?"
"Oh yes. But I don't think she'll admit it."
"Hmm," he said. "Let's wait and see."
Kuon, he thought, what are you doing?
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In Kuon's room, Kyoko had changed out of her 'Lady Macbeth' dress and was placing their dinner—oyakodon—on the table.
"So, we're starting Romeo and Juliet tomorrow?" Kuon said, far too innocently.
Kyoko looked at him and glared. He looked far too happy about it.
"It's a very different play than Macbeth, you know." Kuon was happily taking a bite.
"It's about a stupid girl who was a slave to love," Kyoko responded. "Actually, they were both stupid."
Typical Kyoko, he thought, avoid, evade, dissemble. "Aww. Give it a chance," Kuon said. "It's far more interesting than people give it credit for!"
"Everyone knows the story, Kuon," she said, helping herself to some tea. "It's hardly something I need to familiarize myself with."
"But there are sword fights! Seriously. We can stage some swordfights. Have you ever done a sword fight before?"
"Well, no…"
"Precisely. You have not. Therefore, it is something you ought to do so you can say you have had a staged sword fight. Just for the hell of it," he added in English.
"Well the main characters are awful."
"I think their lines are beautiful."
"She's a thirteen-year-old child who killed herself for a boy she'd only known for less than a week!"
"You were only fourteen when you left for Tokyo. Just because you're young doesn't mean your feelings are invalid."
The room's temperature plummeted. Uh oh, Kuon thought, I shouldn't have said that.
A Lady Macbeth Mio combo turned on him and he started looking to secure any knives that might be within her reach. "And I was an idiot. I will never, ever, lo—"
But she couldn't look Kuon in the eye and say it. She choked on the words.
Regaining her equanimity, she started again. "Yes, we're starting Romeo and Juliet tomorrow."
Kuon smiled but said nothing, taking a bite of his dinner, instead. What she hadn't been able to say was enough for him, for now.
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Thank you so much for reading! Please let me know what you think.
Some notes:
1. "Truthfully against imaginary circumstances" - From Sanford Meisner's book Sanford Meisner on Acting. My acting credits include a notable stint as a singing spider in my 6th grade production of "The Hobbit," as well as a two-hour session with improv players in Gimli, Manitoba (I know, super random). I don't really distinguish between classical acting, method acting, and Meisner method acting here. I don't know enough about acting to support any real substantive comment on all those various approaches. I know that Shakespeare is traditionally the domain of classically-trained actors, but I thought this fic was improbable enough without me sticking a random Tenessee Williams play in there so Our Dear Couple could emote more violently. So please forgive me if I got things wrong. I am no actress. Much of the content in this chapter that is about acting is either derived directly from Meisner and, to a lesser extent, Constantine Stanislavski himself. I only skimmed An Actor Prepares and Creating a Role, though, so I am sure I missed many things. Hopefully I got at least part of that bit right.
2. "The Origin of all Poems"/epigraph - excerpted from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
3. Kyoko's monologues are all from Macbeth, Act I Scene 3, and Act I Scene 7.
4. I actually did end up watching a bazillion Lady Macbeths, and the video referenced here is from the Royal Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare Learning Zone. In it, an actress is asked to deliver Lady Macbeth's Act I Scene 3 monologue in various different ways. Angela Bassett does an amazing Lady Macbeth that she demonstrated in a talk show which I found ahmaaaaazing. My favorite might be Judi Dench's 1979 Lady Macbeth from the Trevor Nunn production. I also enjoyed Kate Fleetwood acting against Patrick Stewart. Anyway, lots of videos. I did fall asleep when I tried to re-watch Throne of Blood the other night, though. I am a little ashamed of that. Kyoko's particular interpretation isn't based on any of them, really, I amalgamated some things that I liked (Patrick Stewart picks up his Lady, for one, in a way that we often imagine Ren doing to Kyoko) and some I entirely made up. I *totally* think Kuon and Kyoko would be lustful murderers. 100%.
5. The Romeo and Juliet chapter is coming, and soon I'll have to make up my mind about citrus. What say you?