Star

by Yukio Mishima

  Kayo rushed over to my side.

  The assistant director started screaming.

  “What’s going on here — who the hell are you? Thanks to you, everybody’s gone nuts.” He grabbed at the bosom of the girl’s cocktail dress. She shrieked but couldn’t speak.

  *

  The grumblings of the veteran actors helped clarify the situation. This girl was a “new face” who had joined the studio a year ago. In her impatience to land a decent role, she ran herself ragged and wound up with some kind of an infection that led to a nervous breakdown. Desperate, she concluded that the only way to make it was to pull some bizarre stunt, anything to appear alongside none other than yours truly — and she was ready to resort to measures no sane actor would chance.

  But this incident didn’t follow the usual course of events, with her removal from the set. What happened next was comical, all too typical of the film industry, and it sickens me just thinking about it. Takahama’s anger didn’t last. As he looked into the new girl’s eyes, he felt a gust of inspiration.

  He wrote her into the scene as a crazy girl who jumps inexplicably in front of me, embraces me, and refuses to let go. Meanwhile, Neriko, who has been watching from the dress shop, is spurred by jealousy and rushes up to pull me away.

  “Doesn’t that turn it into a comedy?” the assistant director asked.

  Takahama responded with a glare. That settled things.

  “What’s your name?” the director finally asked.

  “Yuri Asano.”

  Yuri had landed an unbelievable role, and the stable of actors — who despite waiting all day had not even been cast as extras — observed this injustice with icy stares. They dispersed, muttering nonsense about how unfair it was.

  We jumped headfirst into the test run.

  Yuri was petrified and tightened up. Her arms and legs were stiff, as if caught in plaster. I absorbed the icy glares they cast upon this actress who had overstepped her bounds. Yuri’s body would not regain the fluid liberty of that moment. That sense of living realness, felt only once, was gone for good. The sentiment had shriveled up. Her body was clammy, quaking from her center, her feet unsteady, unable to move even a few steps.

  We kept trying, but anyone could see that it was over. Takahama heaved a sigh and announced that Yuri was no longer needed. We were returning to the original plan. When the casting director, whose job it was to pick our roles, heard Takahama make this announcement he rushed onto the set after the producer.

  During Yuri’s impromptu audition, the casting director’s reaction had been so palpable I could almost hold it in my hands. His face was saying, “Here we go. If she pulls this off it’s gonna be a disaster.”

  But to his relief, Yuri couldn’t pull it off, and like a pair of detectives, he and the producer escorted her off set. It drained the last of the blood from her face. She looked back, as if to say goodbye, but I didn’t even bother to return her glance.

  The producer resolved to cut her on the spot. Nevertheless, she lingered in the greenroom, refusing to go home.

  Shooting ended around ten. I went out back and found the other actors in a state of panic. Yuri had snuck into one of the starlet’s dressing rooms and overdosed.

  Still wearing my costume and makeup, I charged over to her. Kayo, who loves this sort of chaos, had beat me there.

  Yuri was doped up on Valamin. A group of actors laid her out on a bench and waited for the doctor to arrive.

  Her eyes were closed, but the thickness of her makeup kept her from looking like she was really on the verge of death. The men gathered around her pliant body, and even those who’d spent the day fighting each other now seemed congenial in the presence of this dying girl, as if her body were exuding sensuality.

  When the doctor arrived with a nurse, the producer asked him the most obvious question:

  “Is she going to make it?”

  The young doctor pulled back one of her eyelids and checked her pulse.

  “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 ove
r 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?”

  3

  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.

  Despite billing the film as a grand production shot in lifelike color on Cinemascope, the studio only gave us twenty-five days to shoot, forcing us as usual to move at a grueling pace, working each day late into the night. Every morning I woke before seven, headed to the set, and didn’t come home till past eleven. But that wasn’t the end of it. To film the night scenes on location, we sometimes worked until dawn three nights in a row. All the while there were heaps of conversations, photo shoots, and interviews for magazines. The PR Office scheduled meetings with the newspapers during my lunch breaks. I barely had a chance to chew my food, much less taste it. The other day I looked down and saw red in the toilet bowl, but didn’t tell a soul.

  I was outside, pacing in the brutal sunlight while they were switching out the sets, when the producer clapped me on the shoulder.

  “Your name’s getting bigger and bigger, kid. Pretty soon we’re gonna have to get you doing one a month.”

  “Great. I can’t wait.”

  “Whenever the president goes out to have some fun, he always takes along a few photographs of you to hand out to the geisha girls, to see how they react. In his mind, geisha are the most self-centered and honest type of girl. ‘A geisha never lies.’ That’s his motto. Could be worse. But listen to this. When he pulls out the photos of you, the girls fight over who gets to keep them. He said it makes him feel like Mr. Moneybags, throwing coins into a crowd.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I guess the geisha got pretty worked up last time.”

  The producer was an amicably cynical man, but it wasn’t until recently that he’d begun to speak with me this casually.

  It was strange to have a day this clear. The rainy season had come early, with almost daily showers since the start of May. Lucky for us, we were done with most of the location shooting. Inside, the studio was unbelievably humid, the air thick with a promise of mold.

  Here’s how things progress after the scene I mentioned earlier, where I head out to confront my enemy in the face of certain death. Keep in mind that some of the later scenes had actually already been filmed, to accommodate the schedules of certain members of the cast: I bid farewell to Neriko and leave the dress shop. Off into the city lights, as if we’ll never meet again. Once she’s alone, Neriko finally realizes how much she loves me. She runs out after me, grabs ahold of me, confesses her love, and tries to get me to abandon my mission. Eventually I give in and put it off for one more day, to spend the night with Neriko in our first “passionate embrace.” Things get pretty hot and heavy.

  Trouble is, the next morning, the guy dies anyway, in a car accident. You’d think I’d be relieved to hear he died without my intervention — Neriko sure thought so — but instead I resent her for stripping me of my life’s purpose. After just one night together, I toss Neriko aside and set my sights on the runaway girls who hang around Ueno Station. I lure them in, set them up as streetwalkers, and make a living as their manager. That’s where Neriko finds me.

  On this particular morning, the scene was set in a dingy hotel room in Ueno, where I’ve taken one of the runaways to bed. Everyone was saying that these next fifteen shots could take all afternoon.

  Ken, the wizard of the lighting crew, was sure of it.

  “It’s our first day on set. No matter how fast he tries to go there’s no way we’re finishing this morning.”

  Takahama liked filming out of order. Say, for example, the camera setup is the same for Shot 5, Shot 8, and Shot 10 of a given scene. His method is to shoot all three in quick succession, out of sequence. In a pinch, he has no qualms about burning through shots from completely different sections of the movie. If Scene 60, Shot 5 and Scene 75, Shot 5 use the same setup, he shoots them back-to-back. When the cast for the scenes is identical, the effect can disorient the uninitiated. Without actually going anywhere, you hop into a time machine and blast into the future, then back into the past, then back to the future, forced all the while to keep track of where you are in the script.

  Habitually deferring to efficiency and economy can make life start to seem less consequential. Let’s say somebody’s just cut me up and I’m in serious pain. In the next shot, without moving an inch, I’m miraculous
ly healed, but in the shot after that, I’ll have to start wincing again from the freshness of the wound.

  If you get too used to living life this way, the steady flow of real time — where there is no turning back — begins to feel boring and stale. Let’s say I meet a girl. I want to skip ahead to when we’re sleeping together, but I can’t, which makes me antsy, and it feels absurd that I can’t jump ahead to where I’m sick of her, or back to the freedom that I had before we met.

  I recall a rare afternoon off: I went shopping on the Ginza, where I witnessed a man being arrested for stealing a pair of cufflinks, under the cover of the crowd gathered there to see me. It felt like we were in a dream: a star and a shoplifter is each a rare encounter, but seeing us together cracked the superstructure of reality. Everyone was watching. The shoplifter was a grungy middle-aged man, and at the time I was still twenty-three, a burning beacon of youth. When they arrested him, the crowd cheered and our eyes met. His face was in agony.

  At that moment, it felt like this middle-aged man and I were pulled loose from reality, from the gleaming store displays, from the racks lined with shirts of every color, from the uproar of the crowd. Like a rose being plucked down to its stem, the world tore back before my eyes and showed me its interior. It felt like we were in a scene being shot out of order, at the mercy of some unseen director.

  That shoplifter was me, only twenty years older! The moment he reached out to touch those handsome cufflinks with their precious stones, reality began to slip away, and he and I switched places. The next shot in the scene was rolling, only he was playing me.

  “Please forgive us for all the excitement,” the store manager begged me, once the shoplifter had been apprehended and taken away. “There’s such a crowd today that I’m afraid you won’t be able to have a proper look around. Why not make yourself comfortable upstairs? It’s a bit of a mess, but at least up there you can take your time and look things over.”