She stopped talking and laughed self-deprecatingly.
“But by that time, people had already started thinking of me as some delinquent.”
“Delinquent…”
“You really don’t want people to know you’re sick, right? You don’t want to make people worry about you, so you hide it. People just assume you’re a delinquent who’s always skipping school. I couldn’t seem to make any friends.”
Ootsuka’s eyes were filled with sadness, as if she was reliving those days.
“The only people I had to talk to were the older girl I met at the hospital and the boyfriend who came to visit her. That’s where I learned about dance, music, and hip-hop culture.”
“At the hospital?”
“But having said that, it’s not like they taught me how to dance or did anything special. They’d just come to my hospital room and start ranting. ‘Young people in Japan today are no good’ and ‘The problem with the youth these days is…’ And so on. Honestly, it was a little annoying.”
“…Yeah, doesn’t sound like much of a teacher.”
“Well, not at first. At first, I just nodded along. But then I started to get curious about the older girl. And I asked why she was in the hospital. And…”
Then Ootsuka trailed off.
“And?”
“She said, ‘I was a dancer when I was younger.’”
“A dancer…”
“The legendary female hip-hop dancer Kikyo. That was her name. And her boyfriend was the legendary rapper J-Bozu. Kind of a crazy coincidence, huh? To be hospitalized with someone so amazing.”
“I bet if their fans in the subculture knew about it, they’d die of jealousy. Maybe some of them would even intentionally injure themselves, just to get admitted to the same hospital.”
“Ah-ha-ha! Yeah, if there were actually people like that, I’d have been so mad! I’d be like, sure, let’s trade places! Gladly!”
It was easy to imagine. Being hospitalized must have been tough for Ootsuka.
“Every day, Kikyo talked to me about hip-hop. How fun it is dancing with friends, how hard she trained to refine her own technique. How she’d pushed herself to the limit and could no longer dance. We talked about all kinds of things.”
I looked up HIP-HOP DANCE + KIKYO, and sure enough, I found an article saying she’d retired at the age of thirty-eight and hadn’t appeared onstage again since. For a while, she was the top dancer in the world of hip-hop, but a member of the group that her boyfriend, the rapper J-Bozu, belonged to was arrested for violating the cannabis control law. After that, the whole group went up in flames, and they started getting hate mail and death threats. Officially, J-Bozu announced that he was retiring to focus on his private life, but there were rumors that he actually suffered from some kind of mental illness.
Put that together with Ootsuka’s story, and I’m guessing the stress of it all contributed to the hospitalization. A sad story. Brought down by the actions of others.
“I indulged her by listening, and she started showing me old videos of her performances. Through that, my interest gradually grew… And then on the day I was discharged from the hospital, I suddenly announced, ‘I want to be a hip-hop dancer, too!’”
I could picture young Ootsuka mustering up her courage.
“‘Who cares if I’ve got a frail constitution? I’ll show you how cool I can be!’ …Ah-ha-ha. ♪ Like some cheesy manga heroine.”
“So your physical ability… It’s not some innate talent.”
“Nope. It’s a form of revenge against my weak childhood! I swore I’d never let my weak constitution hold me back!”
A genius who’d gotten there purely by effort. That was the true identity of Tatsuki Ootsuka—Ryuzetsuran.
Man. Who wouldn’t want to support an underdog like that?
“I think it was Kikyo who saved me. Even after my hospital days were over, I was treated like a delinquent and couldn’t make friends. But Kikyo introduced me to the owner of this club, and I joined the hip-hop world, so it wasn’t so bad at all. And I started to feel like this world was where I belonged.”
As a result of being treated like a delinquent, though she wasn’t one, she found a place for herself in a community that included many delinquents. In the end, Ootsuka turned out to be the kind of person the uninformed thought she already was. It was a strange turn of events, I thought.
“But hip-hop culture is getting smaller and smaller every year. At this rate, it might disappear altogether someday.”
“Well, it won’t disappear entirely, will it? The culture will exist to some extent, on a smaller scale.”
“Underground, you mean. Unknown by most. Can you really call that existing?”
“…It’s a complex issue, huh?”
Hard to pin down, yeah. That’s what I felt.
Even during our time as recluses, Shiika and I still sought some form of social connection.
Me, making friends online through playing the battle-royale FPS game EPEX.
Shiika, with her activities as the Vsinger known as Seeker.
If no one knew about us…if we had totally shut ourselves off at home, would we really feel alive? The answer is probably…no.
But a subculture, no matter how it declines, can’t be totally cut off from the larger society unless the number of people in that subculture reaches zero. Still, it’s only natural to feel uneasy when that day of destruction seems like it might be on the horizon.
“I want the subculture that Kikyo loved so much to last forever. It gave me a place to belong. So in order for it to remain, it needs to evolve… Hmm. You know, I’m not usually the type to be so gloom and doom about stuff…”
Smiling, Ootsuka looked down at the street near the club building.
A few drunken young men were hanging out in a dark alleyway. Another man sneaked in from the far end of the alley, gave the young men some money, and received a paper bag in return. I didn’t even want to imagine what could be inside.
“When people like that exist, normal people get scared. Most people are great. But some of them… Well… Someone has to tell them that doing that kind of thing is no good.”
“So… You said something like that to Ryan Sengoku and Haruka Gokokuji.”
“Oh! Gakkun, you talked to the club owner about me?”
“No, he just told me all this stuff—I didn’t ask anything. It seems a shame for the whole subculture of this area to be dragged down just because of Sengoku and Gokokuji’s delinquency.”
“Well, people love to make snap judgments like that. It happened to Kikyo and J-Bozu. The backlash.”
“Hmm, for sure.”
“I think things are still okay. Sengoku’s an ex-member of the BRAVE school, so his activities aren’t widely known by the general public. But one day, if Ry-Ry hits it big-time, his connections to dodgy individuals might come to light. The face of hip-hop will be destroyed, and we’ll be forever associated with nothing but delinquency.”