Saihate Astral Season, Beastly Season

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9162771-1-3
Verlag: Honford Star
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 136 Seiten

Astral Season, Beastly Season is the debut novel by Japanese writer Tahi Saihate. The story follows Morishita and Yamashiro, two high-school boys approaching the age in life when they must choose what kind of people they want to be. When their favourite J-pop idol kills and dismembers her boyfriend, Morishita and Yamashiro unite to convince the police that their idol's act was in fact by them. This thrilling novel is a meditation on belonging, the objectification of young popstars, and teenage alienation.

Tahi Saihate is a young, multitalented writer who made her first foray into fiction with Astral Season, Beastly Season. She has received numerous awards, including the Gendaishi Techo Prize for Poetry and the Nakahara Ch?ya Prize. Her writing has been the inspiration of a movie, a rock song, and a 2018 exhibition by several prominent artists at the OTA Art Museum and Library. In 2019, Tahi had an exhibition of her own visual artwork at the Yokohama Museum of Art.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Saihate, Tahi

Weitere Mitwirkende

Almony, Kalau

Leseproben

Dear Mami Aino,

You’re cute—that’s all you are. You’re plain and weakwilled—your friends are the only people in the world to you, and the rest of us are just some shining mass. That’s why I could resent you. When you were far away, when you were dancing, I thought I loved you. Why? Why did you kill someone?

It was in my total box of a classroom that suddenly I noticed your name appearing over and over in the glow of my smartphone. On Twitter, on news sites. They said you’d been arrested, which was true.

I looked up when I heard someone ask, “Where’s Morishita?” My teacher was looking for my classmate. Class had already started, but he wasn’t in the room. He and I had never talked, and I didn’t think we’d ever have a conversation or anything, but he was usually there when I went to your shows, and twice we’d made eye contact. Neither of us tried to talk to the other.

Another classmate looked in Morishita’s desk and even raised her hand just to report to our teacher, “His bag isn’t here!”

I already knew—he was at the house. I stood up and darted out of class like I was his friend, his good friend.

I went to the bike rack and pulled out my bike.

“Hey, Yamashiro!” My teacher had just managed to catch up. I didn’t respond. “Are you feeling sick? What happened to you all of a sudden?”

It was a good thing I’d attended class diligently up till now. My teacher’s voice was gentle, and I could even sense a hint of fear. He was probably thinking, , or something.

Excuse me. That’s all I said.

I got on my bike and my teacher said, “Hey,” again, somewhat more forcefully, but I knew he was being a lot softer on me than he’d have been with a delinquent. So I told him about you. That you’re cute.

Aino-san is a cute idol. She’s the leader of Love You Mixer. She’s my age, a junior in high school. Her skin is pale, her hair is dark, and even without special contacts she has two big, round eyes there below her eyebrows. You don’t know how many times I’ve gone to Akihabara for her, to those smoky concert halls. She’s cute, but besides the way she looks, there’s really nothing special about her. She can only dance and sing because she works hard. It’s all just effort. She’s an ordinary person who gets by on just effort, and that’s why she’s so cute, and there’s no way that kind of cute person could commit a crime. There’s no way she could kill someone, but the news sites and Twitter are filled with messages like, “Underground idol Mami Aino, arrested for suspected murder!” She must be innocent. There’s no way she could do something like that. I have to make sure. Are you telling me to die? Are you saying to believe she did it?

I stepped on my bike pedals and sped off.

My teacher was surprised at what I said, and it was easy for me to brush off his hand. I exited the school’s front gate and rode down the hill. I tried to brake as little as possible. At some point, the teacher behind me vanished and class resumed. There was no one around the school. I left just like that. It wasn’t even afternoon yet, still morning.

I didn’t go home. I went straight to your house.

Your house is actually in my neighborhood. Well, you may have been living alone in the city, but I knew you came home once a week. You weren’t that busy, and for some reason your family supported you. Maybe they’re stupid. You were really cute, but you didn’t have much talent, so you had no future in the industry. Your family supported you anyway. There’s something cute about that stupidity. It reminds me of you. I acted like I was heading to the park in front of your house and parked my bike. I walked through the forest-like entrance, thick with trees, and sat down on a bench as if I were a salaryman who’d lost his job. I took out my homemade headphone receiver and pulled the antennae up into horns.

“Please, calm down.”

“But my daughter couldn’t do something like that!”

I could hear the voices through a hidden microphone that seemed to have been placed somewhere in your living room.

“Your daughter’s handkerchief was found at the scene of the crime.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Mom!”

I knew that voice. It was you.

“Did you kill Yu-chan? Tell me the truth.” “That is the truth…”

Of course you’d say something ordinary. You sing songs with such ordinary lyrics, say such normal thank yous when you take pictures with fans after concerts—of course you’d say something ordinary today, too. I held my breath and waited, wondering if I’d be able to hear you breathing. But no matter how hard I strained my ears, all I could hear was cloth rubbing against cloth and footsteps. It would have been nice if whoever hid that microphone put it in a different spot.

Was this “Yu-chan” the little girl who went missing the other day and was then reported murdered? I hadn’t seen the news, and I didn’t know her name or what she looked like. But recently my mom was going on about something like that. “What’s happened to this neighborhood?” she said.

If only Yu-chan got killed by some weirdo. An old man or woman. If only she’d been killed by some freak who just did it for sex or for money. If it was this sort of cliché story, the adults and kids who are into that sort of thing and the internet news updates would vanish so fast they wouldn’t even have time to fade away. A new pervert would appear, a new killer would emerge. That would happen over and over, and eventually everyone would just accept it. And then you wouldn’t have killed anyone. There’d be no such thing as the killer idol.

“I killed Yu-chan.”

But you said it. I could feel the blood in my veins cloud with bubbles. You were lying. I got this feeling that I had to kill you, strangle you. I had to enact violence on you for lying or else I’d die. I wouldn’t be able to keep on living. I’d burst. The bones in my ears were rattling, and my whole body began to resonate along with them. Waveforms crashing and spiking. I had to kill you before I died. And I had to ask you with murderous kindness, murderous righteousness, not to lie. The person who was killed, the body, the corpse, her dreams and hopes and future and passion, all life, I would stomp on it all, crush it, and kill you. Don’t lie. I would scream. I needed to let you know. Your color is pink. Pink made from people’s bodies ground to dust. It’s this texture like my palms, my insides, all my pink parts, spit out. I know. I get it. You’re just normal. It’s a lie. I know. My opera glasses. I turned to look at you. Into your ears. At your brain. Your thoughts. The pink puddle of your mind. I turned to look into your real eyes.

And then I saw a boy standing pressed up next to your house’s fence. Morishita.

Your curtains were closed, so I couldn’t see into the house. But Morishita was standing there next to your fence. Morishita who went to your concerts as often as I did.

No one in our class knew Morishita liked idols. No one knew that I liked you specifically, but still the girls would say things like, “I bet you’re into idols.” I wanted so badly to tell them, but they weren’t looking for an answer from me, so I never actually knew what to do. But Morishita was popular, and I’d even seen someone tell him that he looked like some male idol. But he just said, “Who’s that?” and the girls laughed at his reply. They laughed. They laughed, and I couldn’t hate him either. If he were just moderately condescending to me, if he treated me differently from everyone else, or even if he just acted like he couldn’t see me, then it would be easy to hate him. Then I would have justification to hate him, but Morishita always greeted me like he did everyone else, and he didn’t date any of the girls in our class, and he even came to your concerts.

The first time I saw him at a show was the first time I went to that concert hall in Shimokitazawa. The other performers weren’t idols or anything. I was agonizing over how to even breathe in the middle of all the racket while I waited for your band, Love You Mixer, which was coming on third. Morishita walked up to the bar like it was the natural thing to do, talked a little with the woman working the counter, and got an orange juice. I wondered why he wasn’t drinking alcohol, but actually it’s because he wasn’t drinking alcohol that I realized right away, . At first, I figured he came to see a different band. But he didn’t even glance at the second band that was on stage at the time, went straight outside, and came back right before Love You Mixer came on.

You probably don’t know, but from the crowd, the stage is brighter than you’d imagine, and the audience’s seats are super dark. But because of that, it’s also easier to spy on the crowd than you’d expect. I watched Morishita approach the stage slowly, gradually. I never interacted with other fans. I always just watched your shows from the back. But Morishita approached you like it was the natural thing to...