am.’ Suga yawns, cleans his glasses on his T-shirt, and steps outside to consult the sky. ‘So, a new day.’
‘Audition hall waiting rooms are nurseries for lunatics,’ says Ai, the noise of the wind a hazy crackle of static, ‘or psychological warfare students. Musicians are worse than those world-class chess players who kick each other under the table. One boy from Toho music school is eating garlic yoghurt and reading French slang from a phrase book. Aloud. Another is chanting Buddhist scriptures with his mother. Two girls are discussing best-loved music academy suicides who couldn’t take the pressure.’
‘If your music sounds half as good to the judges as it did to me last night, you should walk it.’
‘I think you may be biased, Miyake. They don’t give points for necks. Anyway, nobody walks it to a Paris Conservatoire scholarship. You drag yourself there by your fingernails, over the corpses of slaughtered co-hopefuls. Like the Roman gladiators, except when you lose you have to simper politely and congratulate your nemesis. Playing over the phone to you is not the same as performing for a panel of dug-up A-class war criminal look-alikes who control my future, my dream, and my meaning as a human being. If I blow this audition, it will be private lessons to cutey-cutey Hello Kitty daughters until the day I die.’
‘There will be other auditions in the future,’ I point out.
‘Wrong thing to say.’
‘When are the results announced?’
‘Five o’clock today, after the final candidate has performed – the judges fly back to France tomorrow. Hang on – someone’s coming—’ I get an earful of static swish and covered mumble. ‘That was my on-in-two-minutes call.’
Say something powerful, encouraging and clever. ‘Uh, good luck.’
Her breathing changes as she walks. ‘I was thinking earlier . . .’
‘About?’
‘The meaning of life, of course. I changed my mind again.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You find your own meaning by passing or failing a series of tests.’
‘Who passes or fails you in these tests?’
Her footsteps echo and static breezes. ‘You do.’
Customers come, customers go. A steady stream of movies about the end of the world get rented – must be something in the air. I wonder how Ai is doing in her audition. I thought my guitar-playing was okay, but compared to her I am a no-fingered amateur. A hassled mother comes in and asks me to recommend a video that will shut her kids up for an hour. I resist the temptation to slip her Pam the Clam from Amsterdam – ‘Well, madam, it did shut them up, didn’t it?’ – and suggest Sky Castle Laputa. I go to the door – the sky is one of those opal marmalade sunsets. A Harley Davidson growls by, a strolling lion. Its chromework is cometary, and its driver is a kid with leather trousers, a designer-gashed T-shirt saying DAMN I’M GOOD and an army outrider helmet with a cartoon duck stencilled on. The girlfriend, her perfect arms disappearing into the T-shirt, blond hair catching amber sunlight, is none other than Coffee. Love hotel Coffee! Same pout, same time-zone-straddling legs. I hide behind a Ken Takakura poster, and watch the motorbike weave through the clogged traffic. Definitely Coffee – or her clone. Now I am not so certain. Coffee has millions of clones in Tokyo. I sit down and open my grandfather’s journal. What would Subaru Tsukiyama say about Japan today? Was it worth dying for? Maybe he would reply that this Japan is not the Japan he did die for. The Japan he died for never came into being. It was a possible future, auditioned by the present but rejected with other dreams. Maybe it is a mercy he cannot see the Japan that was chosen. I wonder what angle to take when I meet my grandfather next Monday. I wish I could do angles like Daimon. I wish Admiral Raizo had given me a pointer. Should I applaud the samurai spirit stuff? Does it matter? All I want is for my grandfather to introduce me to my father. Nothing more. I wonder how I would have fared in the war. Could I have calmly stayed in an iron whale cruising towards my death? I am the same age as my great-uncle was when he died. I guess I would not have been ‘I’. I would have been another ‘I’. A weird thought, that – I am not made by me, or my parents, but by the Japan that did come into being. Subaru Tsukiyama was made by a Japan