In the small green room of a TV station, Yuma summoned tears to her eyes. She protested, “I’ll always be a second-class idol—just a nobody in a miniskirt. That’s why I’ve had to take every job that comes in. No one listens to my songs. They all just stare at my legs. Don’t think I don’t see that.”
Flustered by her outburst, the balding Bando said, “Y-Yuma-chan, don’t sell yourself short like that.” He put his arm around her shoulder as he attempted to comfort her. “You’re a terrific idol and a terrific entertainer!”
Yuma brushed away his arm. “If you actually think that, you should listen to what I’m saying. Do I really have to meet the president of that company in person?”
“Yuma-chan,” the manager said. “This is your job. Sanshin Denki is putting their full weight behind promoting you. Surely you can at least meet the president and say a few words.”
Yuma furrowed her eyebrows sharply. Filling her voice with acid, she said, “As long as that’s all I end up having to do for him…”
“Don’t be silly. Of course that’s all. You don’t have to worry about a thing. But I want to be clear—I’m not asking you to do this. I’m telling you, as your manager, that I expect you to do it.”
Yuma shook her head with a “Hmph,” then threw open the green room door. “And let me guess—I’m supposed to put my hair in pigtails and wear that pink mini dress. Fine. But I’ll tell you this: I’ll meet him, we can have a little talk—but that’s it.”
The man’s eyes were those of an elephant—an elephant, hesitant and motionless.
The man with elephant eyes stood frozen in place as he stared at a poster of Kawasaki Yuma hung up inside the train station. The poster was a B1-sized advertisement for Sanshin Denki, which everyone knew was nothing more than a sketchy retailer hawking electronics of questionable manufacture.
On the poster, Yuma’s wind-tossed miniskirt had lifted to reveal her slim, athletic legs in near entirety. The posters hadn’t been up very long, but they had already become extremely popular among the serious idol fans.
The cutesy pigtail look was a 180-degree change from her previous image, but apparently those other fans liked it.
In the poster, Yuma looked more girl than woman. The man stared into her face, his gaze intense enough to bore a hole through the paper.
“This is wrong,” he muttered under his breath. “It’s all wrong. This isn’t Yuma.”
Rage filled his elephant eyes as he withdrew the box cutter he’d concealed in his pocket.
He carved an X across Yuma’s face.
Kawasaki Yuma stepped out of her taxi and immediately felt anxious. A strange tightness gripped her chest.
For a moment, she stood in front of her apartment building and took deep breaths to steady her nerves.
It was eleven at night. At this hour, the upper-end residential street was empty, with not even a stray cat in sight. She told herself that the solitude was the source of her disquiet, and continued into the apartment’s entrance, where she entered her passcode on the security panel.
The door automatically slid open.
The building’s security system provided safety, but Yuma always thought it felt impersonal, lacking in human warmth. Tonight, it made her feel relieved. She rode the elevator up to the fifth floor and walked down the short open-air hallway to her door, which she unlocked with a key. Each floor of the building only had two units, and Yuma was the only one who lived on the fifth floor. She had complete privacy here.
As she was about to enter her apartment, she heard something fluttering above her head. She turned toward the sound and saw an object wedged in the crack at the top of the door. She reached up and took it.
It was a letter-sized envelope.
Yuma tilted her head in confusion. Who could have come and left this here?
A stranger shouldn’t have been able to get into the building. Had it been left there by another resident? She never really associated with any of her neighbors…
Was it Yukio? she thought, picturing his tanned face. But he has his own key. If he were here, he would have gone inside.
Who, then, could it be?
Yuma’s anxious worry returned. She flipped the envelope over.
Written in the rounded, distinctive characters that typified girlish handwriting were the words, From Someone You Know.
She had no idea who that could be. But something about the envelope tugged at her attention.
The rounded handwriting was cutesy, but somehow ominous. It presented an uneasy mismatch with the words it formed—adolescent characters making a formal announcement, From Someone You Know.
If words and handwriting could reveal a person’s character, what kind of person would have written this?
Yuma felt an indefinable worry. Someone had slipped through a hole in the building’s security system to come to her home; that much was certain. That person then put a letter into the crack of her door.
With trembling fingers, she tore open the envelope to find out what was inside.
The smell of sweet perfume met her nose. Inside the envelope, she found a single page of scented stationery. She unfolded it and read.
I’m not mad at you.
I’m not mad at you, because I believe in you.
I’ll even forgive your thoughtless actions—
I understand that poster was part of your job and
that you didn’t have any choice but to do it.
But that look wasn’t you. No, no, it wasn’t.
I might even start to not like you anymore…
That was a lie. Just a lie!
I could never hate you.
I’ll love you for the rest of my life.
On TV, you told me you loved me.
I won’t forget that.
If you betray me…
Oh, what a scary thought. So very scary.
Because I would never betray you.
From Someone You Know
Yuma gulped.
What did all that mean?
Several letters from her fans arrived at her agency’s office every day. Some letters were quite ardent, and some were nasty and harassing. But this message was not like those letters. Something was different about it. It was bizarre. And it felt all too real.
Maybe this is what had me feeling anxious earlier, she thought. A chill ran down her spine.
Yuma crumpled up the letter in her hand, envelope and all, and tossed it into the dustbin inside her entryway. Then she locked the door with both deadbolt and chain, and passed straight through her living room to her bedroom, where she burrowed into her full-size bed without stopping to remove her clothes.
She forced her eyes shut and pulled the duvet over her head.
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—there was something she hadn’t noticed.
The disturbing letter had been flecked with tiny bloodstains.
When Yuma entered the agency’s meeting room, Bando and the other staff members were already at their seats around the table.
The sight of her manager’s face reassured her more than she would have expected. She sat in the chair next to him, leaned in to his ear, and spoke quietly. “I need to talk to you about something after the meeting. I got a strange letter yesterday…”
“A strange letter?” Bando’s voice held a mix of curiosity and concern. But before Yuma could explain, he cut her off, saying, “We can talk about it later.”
Bando cleared his throat, and the room went quiet as everyone turned their attention on him.
“I want to dive right in,” he announced. “Today’s theme is hop-skip-jump, Yuma! We’re going to take this opportunity to re-examine our plans for her going forward. We’ve been fortunate that her poster campaign for Sanshin Denki has been a hit, and we can expect her to rise in popularity, as well. Her new single, ‘Lariat of Love,’ is debuting strong at number thirteen on the next Oricon chart. With everyone’s hard work, I want to make this song an even bigger hit than her first single, ‘Crossing Love.’ I’d like to hear everyone’s thoughts on how to promote her further. Let’s have a lively discussion—all right, everyone?”
For the next hour, the team came up with numerous ideas to push Yuma’s sales, several of which she thought had merit. In the end, however, the team settled on the uninspired approach of going forward with both her new Lolita look from the Sanshin Denki posters as well as her signature wild image. Yuma understood this as the typical indecisive result that came about when a group talked out ideas together.
They would begin by nurturing the popularity of the Sanshin campaign, playing up troubles with stolen posters (even if they had to fake a few thefts). At the same time, they would try to turn the microphone lasso move from “Lariat of Love” into a fad among the youth.
With a heavy yawn, Yuma stood up and went into the next room, where there was a kitchenette. She took a canister of instant coffee from the shelf and poured a scoopful into a paper cup, which she then filled with lukewarm water from a wall-mounted hot water dispenser. Without adding sugar or milk, she took a big gulp that left a grainy bitterness lingering on her tongue.
She retrieved a handkerchief from the rear pocket of her culottes and wiped the corners of her mouth. When she looked up, she saw Bando hurrying her way.
“Would you like me to make you some coffee?” she asked.
He nodded and sat on a folding chair at a small table, wiping sweat from his brow.
While she prepared his drink, Yuma said, “That meeting sure was pointless. We wasted all that time just to come up with the most obvious approach.”
“Now Yuma-chan, you mustn’t say that. Even if we end up with the most obvious plan, it carries more weight when arrived at by consensus. Just you wait and see. The team’ll have better cohesion after that meeting.”
The manager accepted the cup of coffee and began pouring copious amounts of sugar into the liquid. He dumped in four spoonfuls and then a fifth.
Now Yuma saw where his round belly came from. All that sugar intake had given his stomach the gentle rise of a Moomin character.
Showing her a confident smile, the manager said, “Just leave everything to me. I’m going to get ‘Lariat of Love’ into the top ten. You can count on it.”
Mollified by his smile, Yuma said, “Thank you. I’ll do everything I can, too. How should I start?”
“Primarily, I want you to take care of yourself,” Bando said. “Your schedule is going to be packed with appearances and events all over the country. If you push yourself so far that you pass out, it’ll all be for nothing. Your health needs to be your top priority.”
He produced a notepad from his inside jacket pocket and began flipping through the pages so intensely Yuma almost laughed.