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Yukio Mishima

STAR

1

I glanced into my assistant’s little mirror at the crowd gathered in the street.

The fans were relentless. They leaned with all their weight against the ropes, reaching to get just a little closer to me, cheering and screaming to catch my attention.

It was a good crowd, full of pretty girls and boys alike who were skipping work or school to stand here in the bright May sun. Each and every one of them had shown up in the uniform◦— an ensemble of my own design that I’d singlehandedly popularized. They loved dressing in this uniform for me: the straw hat with a garish ribbon; the short-sleeved shirt with epaulets, stripes taut across the chest, and all three buttons undone to reveal a glinting pendant; slim pants that left no curve or bulge to the imagination, front or back, down to the ankles showing through their sheer black socks. The kids were more or less my age, young and spunky, broke and bored, and flaunting a doomed surplus of energy.

I was their model and their aspiration, the mold that gave them shape. I made a point of remembering this whenever I peeked into my assistant’s little mirror. My reflection was boyish and alive, but all the life was in the makeup. Since my face looked a little greasy, I applied some more powder, but I knew that there was nothing shining underneath. My physique was rugged and my build was solid, but the old power was escaping me. Once a mold has finished casting its share of copies, it cools and becomes deformed and useless.

Here I was at twenty-three, an age when nothing is impossible. Yet I knew for certain that the last six months of working days on end with barely any sleep would be the farewell to my youth.

But such foresight came courtesy of the real world. Not my world.

Thinking ahead was basically useless to me◦— no more than a fantasy. I had long since cut ties with that world, like a yakuza stepping out of the game and washing his hands of it once and for all. I had no more use for dreams. Dreaming was for the moviegoers, fingering their pulpy paper tickets. Not for me.

The farmer’s daughters in the fan clubs were always asking me, “What’s it like to be a star?” It amazed me how these clubs managed to attract so many ugly girls. Sometimes they even had cripples. You’d have a real hard time going out on the street and rounding up a group of girls that ugly. All I’m saying is they could carry on about their own dreams all they wanted, but there was no way I could tell them how it felt to live inside one.

“What shot are we on?”

“Looks like Shot 6. ”

My assistant showed me a page of the script, marked up with camera blocking in red pencil.

Takahama was the sort of director who blocked things out precisely. He always planned his scenes the night before, but once we got going he started hoarding details. If something on the sidewalk caught his eye, he forced it into the scene. At the moment he was hung up on getting some scraps of paper to roll and drift down the street artistically, giving me the chance to take a breather.