It was too late to stop her manager and the coordinator; they had already entered the exhibit. But now Yukiko worried that she had sent them into peril. With bated breath, she watched and waited for the outcome.
She didn’t know how long she’d been waiting when she looked up and saw Yoriko and the coordinator in front of her. Both appeared unharmed.
Yoriko gave Yukiko a smile and said, “You can relax. No one was there. No rabbit—not even a mouse.” She turned to the coordinator and said, “Whoever it was must have run away.”
“It’s odd, though,” the man said. “This is the only way in or out of the exhibit. The emergency exit at the rear is locked, and there’s nothing else but concrete walls.”
Yoriko and the man exchanged a look that seemed to say, Maybe Yukiko was just seeing things.
Her manager looked to her with worry. “Yukiko-chan, you’ve been working so hard lately.”
Yukiko couldn’t figure out where the rabbit had gone. Maybe Yoriko was right, and the rabbit was just some phantom conjured up in her head.
Then the idol rejected her doubt. No. That was no trick of my mind.
That monster had called her name. It had come after her.
That disturbing, half-melted face had been seared into her retinas—but the true source of her certainty was the distinctively repulsive and prickling smell that even now clung to the inside of her nose.
Sitting at a table in a small café near the Akasaka-mitsuke subway station, Domoto Yoriko slowly drank her cooled-off lemon tea. Across from her was a well-built gentleman in his fifties—Kanda of Kanda Projects, the talent agency to which Tsukioka Yukiko belonged.
Yoriko downed the rest of her tea and gathered her resolve before saying, “I was hoping you would consider letting Yukiko-chan take some time to rest and recuperate. I realize that this is a crucial time for her career, and she won’t be able to forgo all her responsibilities, but I’d like to at least ease her schedule, even if only by a little.”
“I understand where you’re coming from, Yoriko-kun. But if we ease up on Yukiko’s pace right now, it’ll be worse for her in the long run.” His voice was calm and low as he tapped his finger on the table. “I agree that Yukiko is fatigued. I also understand that you care about her like a mother cares for her child—if not more so. But right now, Yukiko needs to go full throttle, even if means having to push herself. I’ve been in this business for a long time now, so I know—with girls like Yukiko, everything hinges on this first sprint. So far, she’s been lucky—her debut single had strong sales, and a commercial has already come in. She draws a lot of attention due to her unique position as the lone innocent-style idol persevering against the current trend. If we don’t build her success into something lasting, the next thing we know, she’ll be part of the past.”
Yoriko nodded with each of his points, but that didn’t mean she agreed with everything he said.
Kanda discovered Yukiko when she worked for a modeling agency in another part of the country, and he had gone to great lengths to get the head of that agency to give her up. It was no wonder he invested such care and enthusiasm in her. Yoriko felt the very same way.
But what Yukiko needed most now was not some future stardom. She needed rest.
Not giving up, Yoriko told Kanda everything that had happened in the department store.
Then she said, “Yukiko-chan is so exhausted, she’s started to hallucinate. Please consider her situation. She’s still only nineteen—just a child. She doesn’t know any better. We’re the adults—if we tell her to keep trying because it’s for her own good, she’ll listen. We’ll end up forcing her to keep on pushing herself past the limits of what she can take—when what we should be forcing her to do is rest! Surely you must know I’m right.”
She slapped her palms down on the table. The sugar pot and the cups and saucers hopped, making a tremendous clatter. The other customers turned startled stares their way.
Tears began to well in Yoriko’s eyes. Kanda put his hand to his chin, then grunted and slumped in his chair.
“All right, Yoriko-kun,” he said. “I’ll have a talk with Yukiko. I want to hear what she has to say.”
Yoriko nodded as if to say, That’ll have to do.
Yukiko awoke with a start.
She looked to the clock beside her bed—three in the morning. Her alarm wouldn’t go off for another two hours. Night sweat clung to her forehead. She must have been dreaming, though she couldn’t remember it. A half-read paperback sat next to her pillow. Yukiko sat up in bed. She must have fallen asleep while reading—she thought that might have been around one in the morning, which meant she’d only slept for two hours.
I need to get back to sleep, she told herself. Tomorrow is another hard day.
She laid herself back down and closed her eyes. But now that she had woken up, sleep didn’t return easily. After a little while, Yukiko gave up on trying to fall asleep and instead simply let herself rest. Forcing herself back to sleep would have expended more energy. Far easier for her to just rest until it was time to get up.
Yukiko stared off through the darkness at the wall across from her bed, thinking about the recent events of her life.
After her commercial aired, her former classmates—who hadn’t reached out to her following her debut—got together to send her a bouquet of flowers with a card signed by all of them.
She’d received interview requests from nearly every men’s weekly magazine there was.
At the planning meeting for her follow-up commercial, she met an eighty-year-old sponsor who kindly gave her a great deal of advice.
And…
And there was that other thing.
That sinister rabbit suit popped into her mind unbidden. She had tried and tried to make herself forget. Again and again, she had told herself that the rabbit was, as Yoriko said, a figment of her imagination.
After a few days, Yukiko had finally started to believe the hideous rabbit couldn’t have been real. But now, in this moment, alone in her bed, the figure appeared in her mind’s eye, the melted side of the rabbit’s face made even more disturbing by the animal suit’s former cuteness. Its short and round body was likely adorable once, but its sinister, miasma-like aura made it feel like an evil spirit.