92 posts tagged “aiba masaki”

Zugzwang, Book II
Chapter 032 – Check to Cross-check

The war, as it would seem, had afflicted Arashi as well. Although the members did not know of the recent declaration of hostilities between their ladies and Saeko, they had eyes enough to see that their shareholder had become more demanding in the post-production of their latest studio album. They believed this recent crackdown on the business of their new album and their recordings had its roots in Ohno’s silence and inaction.

Their titular leader’s silence and his decision to do absolutely nothing vis-à-vis the Saeko issue infuriated Sho, Nino, Jun, and to some extent, Aiba. While Sho felt that Ohno’s willy-washy behaviour was horribly provoking for the simple reason that it encouraged Saeko to be even bolder in her attempts to isolate him for herself, Nino had a more even assessment of Ohno’s behaviour. Like Jun, Nino had always known Ohno to be hampered by irresoluteness. Because of this, he deemed that his best friend was likely as bewildered by Saeko’s actions and words. But Nino’s patience was beginning to wear thin, and he wished that Ohno would stop vacillating and do something, anything – it mattered not to him what Ohno did, so long as he did something. The inaction of the oldest member was beginning to grate on his nerves. Nino was a man of thought and action. He needed something to respond to, and this was why he enjoyed provoking people. However, Nino’s association with Alys had led him to think on Ohno’s supposed inaction. It was likely that in choosing not to act, Ohno had in fact acted and provoked Saeko to unveil herself to the girls thereby resulting in the ‘universal sign of hypocrisy’ and the corporate raider’s scathing German insult. Things were slowly but surely coming to a head, and if Nino were a chess player like his lady, he would have prophesised that the Saeko-Ohno-Kaoru chess match was approaching the middle game.

Given the outbreak of open hostilities between Saeko and the ladies, the silent foot dragging the Arashi members practised in response to her post-production demands on their album as well as Ohno’s irresoluteness where she was concerned, it was with some relief that Nino and Sho greeted Aiba’s minor problem of what he should do to make Renée-Caroline’s parents feel more at home when they visited Japan. If not for the fact that Ohno had to disappear for a stage play rehearsal and Jun had to shoot the first episode of his new drama series, they would all have participated in figuring out Aiba’s conundrum. After lauding this noble enterprise of Aiba’s to see to the needs of his lady’s Europe-based parents, it was decided that they should adjourn somewhere to brainstorm.

As Nino did not fancy spending money going to an eatery, he dispatched a text message to Alys, asking if she minded company for dinner. She replied that they would have to eat fruit because she had just finished her 6pm lecture and had only purchased ‘three mini pan for 100 yen’ from the student cooperative bakery. To this frank answer, Nino texted back that he would ensure they would have something more substantial because he would ensure Aiba paid for their food. With a final reminder that he would see her at home in half an hour, he firmly invited Sho and Aiba to his residence on condition that Aiba bought food.

It was a scheme that readily gained the agreement of Aiba and Sho, as it meant they would be away from eyes and cameras of the paparazzi. Thus, thither they went. If they had expected Alys would be in her study (where she usually was) or watching one of the BBC channels on the television (a luxury Nino let her have since it made her happy to be watch her period dramas and catch up with British news), they were mistaken. Except for the facts that the living room light was on, the kettle was whistling, and Alys’s flat court shoes were neatly placed on top of the show rack, there were no signs of her anywhere.

Curious but undaunted, Nino shuffled inside once he had changed into his at-home slippers, calling out, “Tadaima.”

Instead of the crisp response of ‘hello, darling’ he usually heard from the professor, his ears and those of his friends were assailed by Alys clipped voice saying in English, “I’m in the kitchen.”

Sensing something amiss in the slight change in timbre in her voice, Nino dumped his plastic bag on the sofa next to Alys’s briefcase before pottering into the kitchen. “Don’t bother cooking. Aiba bought food. He wants to know where he should take Renée-Caroline’s parents when they visit.” Nino paused on seeing her squashed to the wall still clad in a sandstone coloured pants suit with a tie front jacket and a black long sleeved collared shirt. She was staring at the kitchen counter and had a hand protectively over her chest. “Is it your heart? Your lungs? Do you want your pills?” he asked, taking in her ashen expression.

“It’s still there. The horrid thing is still there,” she said shakily in English, convulsively gripping his forearm so much so that it was painful for Nino.

“What is?” Sho enquired, entering the kitchen with Aiba, turning off the stove and putting an end to the kettle’s protracted whistling.

“Cockroach,” she whispered in English, fear apparent in her eyes as she pushed up her glasses.

Heedless of that which had just been said, Aiba bounded up to Alys with a cheery, “Mama! I got Thai food today! You like a bit of spice, deshou?” Putting the things down on the counter next to an overturned bowl, he thought he saw the receptacle move. “I’m taking golf lessons from a beautiful woman sensei so that I can play with Renée’s father. He’s good at golf she says, better than her. I like my golf sensei. She has a nice butt. It goes swish-swish when she walks.”

“That’s nice, dear,” replied Alys in English without really attending to Aiba’s words as she scuttled closer to her partner, her eyes levelled at the overturned bowl on the counter.

“Where’s the cockroach?” Sho asked, moving closer to Alys and Nino to better hide from the accursed insect.

“There.” She pointed to the kitchen counter.

Knowing that she meant underneath the overturned bowl, Nino snorted dismissively and squeezed her hand once. “Oi, Aiba, kill the cockroach under…”

But Aiba wasn’t listening. He was more interested in the incongruity of the overturned bowl in the otherwise neat and clean kitchen. “Why is this here upside down?” That fatal question was accompanied by him lifting up the bowl, setting the trapped insect free and sending it flying down to the floor and crawling furiously towards the woman who had trapped it in its prison earlier.

Alys let out a shrill ‘eek’ and clambered onto the dining table where she flung a pot at the cockroach. “Kill it! Kill it!”

“Daijoubu!” Aiba grinned and caught the insect in his hands.

“Aiba-chan, don’t do what I think you’re going to do,” warned Sho, whose constitutional dislike for insects nearly matched Alys’s phobia of cockroaches.

“Do you want the cockroach down your pants, baka?” threatened Nino as he masked his own fear by looking for insecticide.

“I won’t frighten anyone,” declared Aiba stoutly. Then showing the crawling cockroach in his hands to Alys, he continued, “Mama, look, it’s harmless.”

Quickly backing away and knocking it out his hands, the philosopher let out a yelp when the insect flew to the floor and scurried indeterminately around Sho’s and Aiba’s feet. Now fully affrighted by the prospect of the insect crawling up his jeans, Sho joined Alys on the dining table whereupon she clung to him for dear life, much to Aiba’s and Nino’s amusement.

“Oi, Sakurai! Do something useful for a change!” Nino warned, giving up his search for insecticide and rolling up some newspaper instead, determined to protect his lady. “Aiba, get out of the kitchen!”

“But I was only trying to help!” protested the tall man plaintively with a pout.

Training his eyes on the scurrying cockroach as he swept aside his forelocks, Nino sneered, “Yeah, it must be real enjoyable for you to play with your own kind. You’ve done that already so get lost. Go watch television or something.”

Obeying Nino’s suggestion when the smaller man smacked the cockroach hard with the newspapers, Aiba wondered why women were scared of little things like insects. It greatly surprised him that someone as clever as Alys would shriek at the sight of a little thing like a cockroach. He shrugged to himself and strode to the living room. It didn’t matter whether he helped in the kitchen, Nino looked like he knew what he was doing, so Sho and Alys would be safe. Then a thought occurred to him. Perhaps he could help after all. Hollering a ‘‘chotto itte kuru’, he left the flat for the nearby convenience store where he was sure he could purchase a can of insecticide.

“Is it dead?” Sho asked, peering down uncertainly at Nino, patting Alys’s shaking shoulders.

“Should be,” Nino answered, vaguely amused at the responses of Sho and Alys. He lifted the newspaper and snorted at the overturned creature’s wriggling legs. “Overturned and twitching.”

“That’s dying, not dead!” Alys screeched, clinging desperately to Sho. “Kill it! Kill it!”

Smartly delivering a loud whack to the creature and stomping over it with a sickening ‘crack’ sound, Nino ensured the cockroach’s departure from the mortal world. He smirked at his partner and spread his arms. “There, dead. Poof. Magic.” Turning to Sho, he scowled, “Oi, you, get rid of the carcass.”

“Why me?” complained the rapper of Arashi as he gingerly stepped down from the dining table.

“Make yourself useful,” insisted Nino, coldly handing him some kitchen towels. As Sho scraped the cockroach corpse from the tiled kitchen floor and cleaned up the area, grumbling under his breath, the avid gamer extended a hand to his lady who refused to get down from the table. “Mah! How useless are you! Grown woman frighten of cockroaches! Oi! Kami-sama knows how you whip and torture me.”

“Are there more? If there’s one, there’re more somewhere! There’re bound to be mummies and babies lurking somewhere!” she insisted, the edge of fear still in her voice.

“Well, they’re not here! I killed one of them. They’re scared of me,” said her exasperated partner, rolling his eyes and flicking aside her ridiculous notion with a wave of his wrist. He softened a little when she shrank back, and was moved enough by her genuine phobia of cockroaches to take her trembling hand, which was much colder than it usually was. Realising that she was probably more frightened than she let on, he curled his fingers around her hand. “Why are you so cold? It’s already dead! Don’t be scared!” He paused and leaned in with a devilish smirk as Sho threw the newspapers, kitchen towels and carcass down the rubbish shaft. “If there are other cockroaches, we’ll throw Sho to them and flee.”

“I heard that!” Sho glared at Nino, observing that the diminutive bugger had drawn a rare smile from Alys who was thence hiding it very badly behind pursed lips. “Your floor is clean and cockroach-free again,” he announced, washing his hands at the sink.

However, the couple seemed not to have heard him, so occupied were they with their shared quiet laugh that they would not have cared if a legion of cockroaches had entered and borne Sho away. It did not bother Sho in the least. He had to admit to himself that there was something endearing about the Ninomiyas when they were wrapped up in each other. Slapping his hand on his face, he wondered how long they would remain so before deciding to dine. As much as he was relieved at the cockroach’s demise, he was getting hungry and wished to eat.

To his surprise, Alys jumped off the table not to inform him that he could help himself to the plates and begin eating the food Aiba had brought but to propelled herself at Nino. He was even more shocked – almost as shocked as Nino when she began showering kisses on her partner’s face whilst exclaiming in English, “You vanquished the cockroach! You’re not completely useless after all. Kazu darling, I love you!”

Sho coughed uncomfortably at this extemporaneous display of affection. While the Ninomiyas had a reputation for being affectionate to the point where they would embarrass anyone who chanced upon them, he did not expect such impetuosity from the couple famed for their calculated acts. In his experience, the Ninomiyas avoided verbal expressions of their devotion, and were only overzealous in their physical romantic expressions if they had an audience whom they wished to be rid of. However, it seemed to him that Nino was utterly taken aback by Alys’s sudden declaration. The couple were usually in sync in their little acts for the benefit of Aiba or before the Juniors in Central, were now behaving contrary to everything he knew about them, and Sho was riveted by this new development.

“What did you say?” Nino asked with a faint curling of his lips, when he recovered his wits to hold up Alys and glare at Sho as if to say that he would devise a fate worse than death if the older man dared reveal this to anyone.

“That you’re not useless after all,” she replied in Japanese, still mercilessly assailing his cheeks with kisses. She knew she had given herself away but had no intention of repeating it. In her opinion, it was bad form for the female to care more for the male as it was the first step towards dependency. Since Alys was of an extremely independent turn of mind with great pride in her self-control, she derided herself for so carelessly revealing herself.

Sho knew he should beat a hasty exit, but fear that the Ninomiyas could quarrel made him linger; and linger he did upon helping himself to an apple from the refrigerator.

“After that,” the gamer continued to demand of Alys, completely ignoring Sho. He knew what he had heard. He had never heard such words from his partner, nor did he ever think he would. He himself was not a proponent of verbal expressions which in his experience usually ran false. As he had the wondrous ability to say what he did not mean, he felt that humanity had the same dissembling streak. Therefore, he was surprised that his Alys whom he cherished as much as his game consoles should give voice to something she had never uttered before. He was more interested in finding out whether she meant those words, and to that end, wanted to hear them again because he was certain she would give that declaration an ironic turn if he wrested it from her. He needed to compare how she said it the first time around to how she would say it when forced to.

“Nothing,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder, refusing to have her hand forced.

“That wasn’t nothing,” he challenged, removing her glasses and putting them aside on the dining table behind her.

As far as she was concerned, sentiments that could be easily put into words had little meaning, thus she affected a careless air and curled her upper lip disdainfully. “Memory fails me.”

“Yeah, your head’s like a sieve, sensei. Don’t lie, say it again,” insisted he, pulling her back into his embrace when she made a move for her glasses.

“She said…” Sho attempted to contribute and so end a quarrel that he thought was brewing.

“Keep out of this!” the couple threw out irritably in unison at him.

“You definitely said something,” hissed Nino, extracting the coloured stick in her hair and tossing it on the table.

“It was nothing,” she claimed, meeting his eyes with a disinterested gaze, unsuccessfully pulling away the hands that were tugging at her bun and forcing the coiled braid down. “Stop that, freeloader.”

“Only if you repeat what I thought you said.” He loosened the braids slowly.

“What did you think I said?” she returned, raising an arch brow at him.

Leaning in, he kissed her nose and smirked like a cat that had the mouse in its grasp. “Say it again,” he demanded, kissing her lightly on the mouth.

“No,” she said firmly, curling her lips contemptuously against his to hide her embarrassment at blurting those words. She had meant them of course, but she had no intention of letting him know that for fear that he would laugh at her or worse, tell her off.

“Say it.” He kissed her again, so insistently this time that he pushed her on the table and licked across her lips. In so doing, he disturbed Sho who suddenly wondered whether he should make a hasty egress.

“No, non, iye, nein, nyet,” she breathed, nibbling on his lips with each negative answer, which instead of deterring him only emboldened him to seek out her tongue and roam his hands where they would on her person.

“Say it,” he repeated, caressing her neck and drawing a sighing whimper from her when he gnawed lightly on a spot under her ear lobe.

“No,” she sighed, sliding her hands under his shirt where she scraped the Greek alphabet on his back with her blunt nails.

“Say it again,” he hissed, dragging his kisses down her neck and to her modest bosom where he untied the front of her jacket, undid two buttons of her blouse and feathered his fingers over her clavicle. Whether this was because Alys’s cold fingers were creeping up his ribcage towards his nipples or because her knee was bumping against his crotch or because he wanted more from her, he did not know, and he did not think it mattered. “Just say it, Alys,” he went on. He had come to point where he had undone yet another button of her blouse and was lightly caressing one of her small mounds, well past carrying that Sho was being a voyeur. However, just to be safe, he decided to give his lady prior warning with a speaking look: “Say it now, or I won’t be able to stop.”

“Good,” she said, her voice hitching into a small sigh, “Don’t.”

Realising belatedly that he had likely overstayed his welcome and that there was clearly going to be no quarrel to avert, Sho backed away slowly from the kitchen, into the living room and did not stop until he came to the door. On opening it, he came face to face with Aiba who had returned with insecticide.

“What’s wrong, Sho-chan? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” teased Aiba, entering the flat, narrowly missing Sho’s attempt to grab the scruff of his collar.

“The Ninomiyas are er... passionately at it,” Sho said, darting his eyes to the kitchen and pointing his thumbs to the front door, indicating that they should leave.

“Is that why there’re moans and other kinds of noise coming from over there?” Aiba asked blithely, setting the can of insecticide down on the coffee table. “We should tell them that it’s time to eat.”

“They’re on the dining table with their hands all over each other,” Sho reiterated with a little more of the facts this time so that Aiba would get the idea and leave with him, preferably for a soba place nearby.

“That’s normal. Mama and Nino maul each other all the time.” He grinned, and then stopped when Sho glared at him. It then dawned on him that the Ninomiyas could be past the mauling stage, and he turned a gaze of horrified fascination to Sho. “Eh? They want us to watch while they…”

Face-palming himself, Sho groaned, smacked the back of Aiba’s head and forcibly dragged him out by his collar, informing the younger man that the Ninomiyas though insanely malevolent, were not so hysterically barmy as to want voyeurs intruding into their private indulgences.

NOTES

Zugzwang is German for ‘compulsion to move’ and is a chess tactic. It describes a situation where a player is put at a disadvantage because he has no choice but to make a move – even though he would like to pass and make no move. Simply put, zugzwang is a term used in chess where the player has no choice but to make a move to his disadvantage.

The literary significance of the zugzwang in this sequel is that everyone blunders and is forced to make moves which lead to very bad consequences and outcomes. Even those who refuse to move in the sequel are road blocked because others around him/her play the zugzwang and unwittingly put him/her in a bad position.

To highlight this as the overarching theme of this story, I have given it this unusual title.

Please bear this in mind as you read this sequel.

Check, in chess reference, is a threat by one’s opponent to capture the king .

Cross-check, in chess reference is when one is in a position to counter the check imposed on one by issuing a check in response to the opponent.

‘Chotto itte kuru’ is an informal way of saying “I’m going out for a while” in Japanese.

It was mentioned in Ch 43 of Remedy for a Broken Heart (Aiba’s story) that Renee-Caroline’s parents would be visiting after the New Year when she says:
“Maman may be visiting next year. Mon père peut-être would join her. It would be the first time the family from maman’s side would be together.”

Chapter 027 – Lobbing a flop shot

Unaware that he had been the object of his lady’s warmest respect and devotion, Nino pinched his nose to stifle a sneeze, wondering who could be talking about him. Thinking that it was likely an obsessed fan or the skinny Haruyo scheming to throw herself at him yet again in between takes, he squatted in his dressing chair and hunched over the dressing table, blocking out anyone who wished to see what he was doing. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, he pulled opened the button that held the black leather organiser shut and smirked. His Alys, he noted, was methodological in keeping her appointments, schedules, timetables, birthday reminders, phone numbers and addresses in order. She was even careful enough not to leave any trace of her affiliation to him or Arashi in the organiser. It did not contain either his name or his picture, or anything that could be misconstrued by a stranger. The only thing a person picking up this organiser would discover was that its owner wrote in an old-fashioned English cursive, scribbled random notes on lectures and ideas for papers. He smirked and snorted to himself – his Alys could be trusted to be a consummate academic.

At last, he thumbed through a few more pages before lighting upon the dates and entry he had been seeking. A long vertical two sided arrow labelled ‘HK Philo Con’ spanned the page alongside some details as to where she would be staying and where the conference was held. He had just committed the hotel and university hall names to his memory when he heard something vibrate nearby. Thinking that it was probably nothing, he debated whether he should record some of the details of her conference to his mobile until a shadow loomed over him.

“New message on your keitai,” the teasing voice of Sakurai Sho broke into his thoughts.

“Sho-san, go block someone else’s light,” he snapped.

“What are doing, squirreling yourself in a corner?” Sho asked with a cheeky grin, peering over Nino’s shoulder. “A heavy cursive hand. They call it the Spenserian.” He paused and squinted, hoping that it would help him to make out the handwriting. Then it dawned on him that only one person in his immediate circle of friends wrote in that fashion. Dropping his voice an octave, he whispered, “Don’t tell me you stole Alys’s organiser?”

“Stealing is too strong a word,” laughed Nino, a crooked evil smirk firmly planted on his face. “Alys-chan calls it contributing to one’s self-contained economy.”

“Whose self-contained economy?” Sho narrowed his eyes at Nino whilst shaking his head at the equivocation of the professor. It was his personal belief that Nino and Alys were the only two human beings who could stand each other’s dark perversity of mind.

“In this case, mine,” he replied. “Mah, it’s for reconnaissance. I’ll give it back to her.”

“Sugoi. No one writes like that anymore,” Sho commented when his disapproval faded and came to be replaced with curiosity and awe at Alys’s philosophical thoughts and Nino’s audacity. Sometimes, it amazed him what the professor allowed Nino to get away with.

“Face it, Sho-chan, my woman has more class and more smarts in her little finger than you have in your brain.”

Completely un-offended by those words, Sho continued to stare at a word he could not make out in Alys’s slanted cursive hand. He then recalled that Alys had a habit of writing letters and wondered how her correspondents managed to decipher her handwriting. “How can you read it?”

“We’re picking up each other’s habits,” stated Nino like it was well-known fact. “Check my keitai for me.”

“Eh?”

“You said there was a message. Check my keitai for me,” Nino repeated him, irascibility creeping into his voice.

Obeying the injunction, Sho grinned on reading the incoming message. “It’s your wife. She sent Aiba to pick up her organiser and Dragon Quest IX.”

“We’re not the marrying kinds,” corrected Nino, extending a hand for his mobile phone. Wiggling his short fingers impatiently, he continued, “We’re both rascals, and if there’s a divorce, which the fortune tellers all claim there will be if I marry and we will likely divorce because her parents and mine are divorced, we’ll be fighting over the money and the property.” He paused and curled his lips into a bitter self-deprecatory smirk. “Alternatively, we could kill each other. Double murder, the press would love it. I rather avoid it all and stay unmarried, makes it much easier to cut loose at the first sign of trouble.”

Nino’s awareness of the pitfalls of having so much in common with his partner startled Sho who was constantly amazed as to the depth of Nino’s perspicuity. “Then you shouldn’t provoke her,” Sho advised, handing the mobile.

On inputting the details of her Hong Kong conference into his mobile, Nino looked up, the previous appearance of thoughtfulness gone. In its place was a devilish smirk that he used to mask his innermost fears. “Where would the fun be?”

“Keep at it and you’ll push her too far one of these days. Say, what are you doing with her organiser anyway?” Sho asked, shaking his head disapprovingly.

Nino placed a finger on his lips that were already twisted into the smirk of impending doom.

“Hi! Hi! I’m here! Nino-chan, Mama told me she wanted a Dragon Quest something and her diary-organiser thingy!” Aiba announced, bursting indecorously and noisily into the dressing room before Sho could advise Nino against any plot that could agitate or provoke Alys.

“Is that all? Tell the witch to come and get it herself. Oh yeah, she’s pretending to be an invalid and manipulating people to dance in attendance to her. She’s more trouble than she’s worth,” Nino riposted, his sarcastic mask in place once more as he closed the organiser and pulled the game cartridge out of his DS.

Sho slapped a hand on his forehead at this quick 360 degree change in Nino’s temper. He could not understand why the diminutive bugger never said what he felt when the topic touched on the professor. Similarly, he was perplexed by the professor’s methods of treating Nino with a small degree of cruelty. However much he preferred them to be franker with each other, he did not expect them to pass verbal messages via Aiba that bordered onto private matters.

“She said she wants you in an apron and tied to a bed.” Aiba revealed nonchalantly, smiling at his friends. Somewhere in the background, Sho gasped and choked.

“Tell her she has to catch me first,” Nino replied, as much amused by Sho’s evident discomfiture as he was by his lady’s proposal.

“I don’t know how that’s going to work.” Aiba shrugged his shoulders as he took the organiser and game from Nino. Then he stopped as his eyes lit up with a thought. “I could help tie you up.”

“Aiba-chan! Don’t give him ideas!” Sho groaned and shook his head as Nino inserted another game cartridge into the DS.

“Do you want anything?” asked Ichinose Haruyo as she poked her head through the door without knocking. Paying no heed to the censorious snarls and looks thrown her way, she managed an angelic smile at the company and continued, “I’m about to place orders for lunch, anyone want anything?”

“Two Doraemon bento sets,” Aiba immediately answered, not out of greediness or stinginess as one might expect, but from the simple thought that it would behove him to enlist others to help him in his quest to find the said bento sets for him and his partner.

However oblivious Aiba was, even he noticed Sho’s polite shake of the head and Nino’s pointed disregard for the model-actress. Unable to find a reason for it, he waited until the young woman left and then posed his question, “Why don’t you like her? She’s pretty. She looks sweet.”

“She doesn’t know the meaning of ‘get lost’ – that ice cream stick with breasts,” hissed Nino obliquely.

“Eh?” Aiba gasped.

“She’s been throwing herself at Nino,” Sho whispered in an abnormally loud voice.

“Doesn’t her management agency want them to be pure, sweet, virginal?” Aiba asked, cocking his head to the side in both fascination and inability to understand.

“Yeah, we wonder what they teach them there,” Nino responded sarcastically.

“You can do what you feel and keep it quiet. Lots of people do. Mama doesn’t have to know…” Aiba ventured, his throat dry with the thought that Sho and Nino could appear to be so unconcerned with this development.

“It isn’t our place,” reminded Sho, sensibly putting aside his meddlesome streak for once. He had caught Nino’s quick dart of the eyes and his gut informed him that restraining Aiba was to his advantage if the smaller member’s temper was not to be incited.

“Let the baka say what he wants. If he breathes a word to my witch and she agitates herself into an epileptic seizure, I’ll make sure he leaves Arashi,” came Nino’s quiet, even voice from behind his DS.

In an effort to preserve the tenuous peace and to dispel the heavy mood that had descended on them, Sho tried to reason with a despondently pouting Aiba. “Nino doesn’t like to see Alys-san more upset than necessary.”

“Oh, women don’t like it, eh? Maybe that’s why Renée didn’t say much in the car when we finished golf. There was this very pretty, sweet young thing teaching golf at the course today. She had a nice rounded butt that looked like it could go ‘boing-boing’ and had legs that went on and on,” Aiba said, enthusiastically describing the woman he had seen earlier while nodding sagely to himself that girlfriends did not like the idea of their boyfriends being physically unfaithful.

“You chatted up another girl in front of your girlfriend!” Sho leaned forward in his seat, levelling a glare at Aiba. While it was not on the same level of glares as MatsuJun’s, it was still a powerfully disgusted one that frightened Aiba a little.

“Iya, iya! I wanted to learn golf from her.” Aiba flailed his arms about in protest at his friends’ misunderstanding. “I was just admiring her, that’s all. But a fling with her, I wouldn’t mind. Ow!” He looked up at the two faces looming before his – one was cold and inscrutable, the other, disapproving. His two friends had smacked the back of his head and he had no idea why they had done so when he was merely being honest. He pouted and rubbed the afflicted part of his head. “Nino has Haruyo-chan hanging around him and you’re sorry for him. No one feels sorry for me when things like this happen.”

“The circumstances are different…” Sho tried to explain.

“You really want to know if anyone feels sorry for you?” retorted Nino, as he cut Sho off. An unpleasant smirk twitched at the corners of his mouth when he continued, “Let’s set your toes on fire and wait to see if anyone pees on you to put the fire out. It’ll be our A no Arashi.”

“Wah! Nino-chan’s mean!” Aiba cried out, cling to Sho, who patted his friend and shot the sarcastic gamer a speaking look that he had gone too far.

“Deal with it, brat,” he snapped, flicking a wrist and returning to his game, wondering if he was ever going to have any reprieve between dealing with idiot friends, his work commitments, CM engagements, ignoring Haruyo’s advances, and worrying over the health of his little professor.

As he had turned around and was facing away from then, Nino missed the shared pregnant glance that passed between Sho and Aiba. Although they said nothing to palliate him (and there was nothing to do be done when Nino’s mood took a turn for the worse), it had not escaped their attention that the avid game player had unconsciously used one of the professor’s stock phrases. It was a discovery that resulted in them quietly leaving the dressing room for the safety of the corridor where they could laugh unimpeded by blows to the head or an acerbic comeback.

NOTES

Flop shot is a short shot, played with an open stance and an open clubface, designed to travel very high in the air and land softly on the green. The flop shot is useful when players do not have "much green to work with", but should only be attempted on the best of lies.

Lob refers to an old-fashioned style of bowling in the game of cricket which is also played on the green. It is an underarm kind of bowl that is now illegal in cricket.

Take these two explanations and applying them to the story and this chapter.

Chapter 026 – Thunder and lightning

Renée-Caroline’s introspective mood did not lift when she and Aiba called on Alys at the hospital where the professor was conducting a lecture via teleconferencing. The theme of which struck the thoughtful maestra as particularly germane to the situation that Arashi was facing since Saeko’s unwanted intrusion into the thick of things.

“There is always tension looming overhead threatening to break out into civil war – that seems to be the fate of nations. The Cyropaedia and Oeconomicus highlight this problem by reflecting this threat in households.” Alys’s crisp English and laboured breathing greeted Renée-Caroline’s and Aiba’s ears when they stepped into her hospital room. “Xenophon draws the analogy between the state and the household in a very Socratic manner whereby the state is like a household writ large. The reasoning is simple – one, obviously more people are involved; two, the same principles are involved in running a household and running a state. In short, rulers have the same problems ruling a country just as household managers have problems running their households. This is quite an important and acute observation – it’s almost as if Xenophon is saying that if you want to know about the problems of political life, just look the way people run their households. What Xenophon does not say, and with Xenophon, it is what is not said that’s important is this – most households are in fact not very well run.”

Renée-Caroline cracked a smile as the philosopher held out a hand to pre-empt the boisterous Aiba from crying out for his ‘mama’ as he always did. It never failed to amaze her how much Aiba actually listened to Alys’s injunctions like he was an obedient guard dog, and she had never really understood why the unassuming professor had this power, so to speak over Aiba. At first, Renée-Caroline attributed it to Aiba’s unfortunate infatuation with the older woman; an incident that he readily told her and laughed over. Although initially disturbed by that revelation, the more she saw of Alys’s condescending semi-maternal affection towards Aiba, she realised that Aiba’s blind, child-like devotion to Alys had nothing in it. Now that she was privy to Alys in her natural environment as a philosophy professor and witnessed in close quarters the mode in which the older woman delivered her lectures, Renée-Caroline understood the paradoxical manner in which Alys wielded an unbending will to mentally cow Aiba.

Oblivious to his girlfriend’s private observations, Aiba merely nodded dumbly and meekly, and parked himself by the door. Both he and Renée-Caroline stared in fascination at Alys as she rambled on to the laptop screen with the microphone earpiece hooked to her left ear. It struck them that they had never seen her lecture before, and there must be something in her style that resulted in Nino sneaking away to the Kombama campus of the University of Tokyo at least once a month when the academic semesters were open.

“No, do not apologise Mr Takahashi, it is a good question,” Alys continued, speaking in English, and steepling her fingers before her. “All the problems of management boil down to one thing, videlicit, the management of human beings within a particular unit whether it’s a household or a state. And in the Greek Household, there are of course, slaves, who are usually barbarians, that is, non-Greeks. This is not so very different from the way of life in modern Japan where we have domestic help and foreign workers who tend to the streets, toilets and whatnot are non-Japanese; they are of different nationalities. The government regulates foreigners like me. Look at this in the context of the household, the rationale is that if you cannot manage your servants, then you can’t manage your children and you may not even manage your wife. Xenophon wrote another tract entitled Oeconomicus, from which we get the word, economics and this book is about what else – household management. It’s about the dialogue between Socrates and a household manager who is regarded as a very successful one, but it turns out that he has a problem with his wife - he can’t control his wife. Imagine the implications of this problem when it is expanded to encompass the political philosophy at the level of the government. The picture painted of human beings is not unflattering, but it is true. This is political philosophy and we deal with unpalatable truths, why else do you think we are so reviled? Read up for next week, and if Athena is merciful, I will rejoin you in person then.”

“In English today, Dr Teng?” Renée-Caroline asked, noting with some relief that the liquid in the pleur-evac machine was clearer and that the nurses had reduced Alys’s oxygen intake to 1.5 litres. It really ought not surprise her as the academician had already been hospitalised for close to one and a half weeks.

She folded one arm and cupped her cheek with her other hand in a manner that reminded Aiba eerily of Nino when he was in thought. “All my graduate courses are in English. Xenophon is much more difficult to teach in Japanese,” she replied between coughs.

“Mama! We brought pistachio and chocolate covered marzipan for you!” Aiba flung himself at the foot of the bed and sat down with an impossibly wide grin as Alys dismantled the microphone and closed the teleconference connection on her laptop.

“Enough chocolate, baby-chan, papa would divorce me if I get fat!” joked Alys, reverting to Japanese. “We’ll save this for Kaoru-chan, and say that you got it for her. She’s been feeling low of late.”

“Souka! It would cheer her up!” Aiba chirped, nodding at the sagacity of his own perceived generosity and peering down at her laptop. “What’cha doing now?”

“Emailing my paper to the Ancient World Philosophy Conference panel for dissemination to my discussant,” replied the academic as she lifted her glasses and flicked her wrist to the bed stand. “Can either one of you hand me the organiser?”

“Okay.” Aiba grinned, but try as he might, nothing on the bed stand resembled the black leather organiser Alys favoured. “Oh my God!”

“Yes, my child?” The professor blasphemously replied in English with a long-suffering sigh.

“Mama, it’s not here.” He handed her the slim, black game console instead. “Your DS is here though; you want it?”

“What do you mean it’s not there? It was there yesterday! It couldn’t have sprouted legs and run off!” Alys snapped her head up testily, closed her laptop, and began coughing sharply.

Renée-Caroline patted Alys’s hair bun to soothe her, marvelling that she could not cover the chignon with her hand. “He may have been remiss in bringing it, votre mari…”

“Don’t call him that,” she protested in English, but soon regained her customary acerbic humour when she realised Renée-Caroline was most probably right that her annoying freeloader had chosen to be forgetful. It was also entirely likely that he had mistakenly taken it with him the previous day for they had on several occasions taken each other’s Nintendo DS. When Alys judged that she was sufficiently calm enough, she curled her lips and addressed Aiba. “Are you up for running an errand?”

“Eh? What kind?” he asked with some hesitancy on account of her dangerous smirk.

“Go see the freeloader on set and retrieve my organiser. While you’re at it, bring back Dragon Quest IX for the DS if he’s holding on to it.”

Relief instantly fell upon his features. He had worried that it would be an impossible and harrowing task when it was really a small matter of fetching something from Nino. Aiba could do that, he thought, he had time. Besides, he had a vague inkling it would be fun visiting Sho and Nino in their drama location. “Hai! Will Renée-chan be all right with mama? I’ll bring food back and we can eat together, okay? Oooh! Yoko said there’s a shop selling anime bento. I saw a An-pan man one before. I’ll try to find a Doraemon bento for you!”

“Do they have those?” Renée-Caroline’s eyes shone with excitement at anything to do with the ear-less, robotic blue cat from the future.

He grinned and pinched the conductor on the cheek. “I’ll find it for you! Mama, what do you want to eat?”

“I want the freeloader tied to the bed wearing only a white frilly apron. Failing that, bring me Ohno-kun in an apron,” deadpanned the professor without missing a beat.

As Aiba’s jaw dropped, Renée-Caroline gave her friend a very long, hard and scandalised glare. “Oh la la! With Satoshi’s physique.” She paused and shook her head to steady her thoughts.

“How could you, Renée!” he pouted in dejection.

“Mais c’est vrai,” replied the maestra.

“Mama, are you serious?”

“Always.”

He scratched his head, knowing that he shouldn’t ask such a question. But his desire to know overwhelmed his dim sense of propriety and he asked, “Eh? Why?”

The philosopher’s lips curled sardonically behind the DS she had just started up. “Baby-chan asked, and I answered.”

Aiba who was earnestly pondering Alys’s request and wondering how (fun though it may be) he could arrange for his mama’s freeloader to be tied up in a compromising position, said nothing and simply slipped away to locate Nino. The ladies, now alone, shared a soft laugh as they knew how straightforward Aiba could be. There was no doubt in their minds that he would blurt the whole to Nino and receive a smack to the back of his head for his perceived perversity.

NOTES

The subject of socio-political life mirroring domestic arrangements (i.e. household management) that Alys brings up in her teleconference lecture Renee-Caroline and Aiba overheard at the beginning of the chapter is one of the many themes of this overarching sequel. Please read the story with this theme in mind as well. I hope readers will draw their own conclusions as to the significance of this theme versus the other themes in the plot as they read on.

Votre mari = your husband
Mais, c’est vrai = but, it’s true

Chapter 025 – A hazard in the green

While Chiaki went to work the next morning still pondering over the weighty issue of her blackmailing scoundrel of a maternal uncle, Aiba and Renée-Caroline were in considerably better spirits venting their pent up work frustrations in a game of golf. As Aiba did not have any CM or drama commitments, and the sound studio recordings were in the hands of the technicians and engineers, he effectively had a half-day off. He was not expected to do anything until the late afternoon when we would be meeting up with the rest of Arashi at a television station for one of their television shows. Unlike Nino who enjoyed packing his schedule, or Sho who organised his schedule with reasonable breaks in between, or MatsuJun who liked to think that he only engaged in projects of artistic merit or Ohno who let their manager handle his schedule, Aiba liked the small degree of freedom he had with slightly less engagements than his friends. It gave him the leverage to drop in on Renée-Caroline’s rehearsals and allowed him a little more time to himself. Likewise, the maestra of the Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera tried to work her rehearsal schedules around his free days and half-days.

Having stayed over at his place the previous night, and having arranged for the orchestra to have their individual section rehearsals without her that day, she was prepared for either a day out boating and fishing with Ohno and Kaoru or golfing with her boyfriend. As they had woken up too late to go fishing with the artists, they settled for a round of golf before heading to the hospital to call on Alys.

“I’ve been thinking, Renée-chan,” Aiba began after knocking his ball into a bush that he believed moved to obstruct his journey to the first hole. “Maybe Arashi should tell Johnny-san that we don’t like Saeko-san. Maybe we can get rid of her. She watches us and she watches Riida. How she watches Riida makes my flesh crawl.” He allowed himself to draw up his shoulders into an artistic shudder. “Mama watches Nino and it makes me go ‘aww’ and squishy and squelchy inside because she always knows where he’s hurt and she’ll rub it to make it better. Kaoru-chan watches Riida and always smiles with encouragement even if he does something wrong. But Saeko-san watches and tells everyone that we’re all wrong.” He balanced the club on his shoulder with his right hand and formed a passable duck’s bill with his hand by clamping his four fingers above the thumb in the manner popularised by Sho as a dubious swan. Moving the so-called swan’s bill, he illustrated and continued, “Yap, yip, yap. She always complains about everyone and says we’re spoiling Riida’s talents. But we’re Arashi; we do things together. We cover for each other and we say sorry when we’ve done something wrong. But we haven’t done anything wrong because manager-san didn’t scold us.”

“Les mesdames have said something like that too. She went to see Alys at the hospital, hoping to be introduced to Kaoru, did you know?” the maestra replied evenly, hitting her ball with moderate force.

“Eh? For an introduction?” His eyes widened. While he had indeed heard of the visit to the recuperating professor, he had not heard of the reason behind it. In the innocent simplicity of his mind, he had supposed that Saeko called on Alys’s sickbed because the CEO of the Umebayashi Group blamed the sickly scholar for distracting Arashi, or more specifically, Nino from their practice and recording sessions in Central. To him, Saeko was first a shareholder of J Storm eager to see the returns on her investment, and secondly a potential third wheel in Ohno’s relationship with Kaoru.

“Par ma foi! They played cards for it. Piquet, Sora mentioned,” revealed Renée-Caroline in staunch disapproval.

“Cards? Mama put a meeting with Saeko and Kaoru on a game of cards!” His raspy voice cracked slightly from incredulity. His eyes widened again at the seemingly unending wonders that were unveiling themselves to him. “Nino and mama never stop with the games. They’ll be eaten alive by a game with a big lion’s mouth one day.”

“It pushed back Mademoiselle Saeko’s plans pour un moment.”

“But they didn’t meet, so mama won, deshou? That makes it okay, doesn’t it?”

Renée-Caroline dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper as she changed her club. “Oui, mais she – how you say – cheated.”

“Did Sora know?” he whispered back, and then gaped when he realised that he had just been told that cheating was involved. “Eh, chotto, chotto, does Nino know?”

“Bien sûr,” she answered matter-of-factly, even though her curls bounced with stern disapproval. “He visited with Satoshi and Kaoru immediately after she left. Alys and Sora told him when Satoshi and Kaoru left for home. He was as Alys herself said ‘pleased as punch’ to hear it.” She paused when Aiba shook his head at his incomprehension of the English phrase. “He was very glad to hear of it parce que he taught her the sleight of hand in the cutting of the cards.”

Aiba’s mouth hung widely open as a thought dawned on him. “Eh? Is that how Nino does his magic card tricks! Wait a minute, how does he do the sleight of hand thingy?”

“Je ne sais pas. Les Ninomiyas, l’enfant terrible husband especially, playing dirty is commonplace, hein?” The maestra shrugged. “Mais there was nothing in the cut that Sora could see. They refused to tell Sora the trick. All Monsieur Ninomiya said was that Alys caught him while he tried the trick on her, and she demanded that he teach her. Oh la la, the two of them!”

Greatly tickled by this revelation, he broke into a giggle that soon became a full blown laugh, drawing a few stares from the other nearby golfers taking lessons from a very comely looking instructress in a short white skirt and very long legs. “Maybe that will mean Umebayashi Saeko will finally go away and leave Riida alone.”

“Alors, however much no one likes this Saeko, she is a shareholder still, hein?”

Her words of well-meaning advice fell on deaf ears for Aiba was chronically drawn to the new and shiny. His attention was presently fixed on the group of four individuals of both genders receiving instruction from a woman whom he thought was exceedingly beautiful. And if conventional standards of beauty were to be applied, the golf instructress commanding his attention would be thought to be pleasing to most males. She had a snubbed nose, large eyes that inclined upwards at the ends, a generous mouth, hair dyed to an even shade of bronze, long and slender limbs, a pert bottom, and a sinewy waist that twisted perfectly when she demonstrated the efficacy of a full golf swing. It was fortunate for him that the music director of the Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera was not inclined to be possessive or she might have kicked up a fuss.

Unaware of this generous-hearted spirit of his lady, Aiba gave the instructress a final lingering look before making a flop shot. “Maybe I should take golf lessons. I don’t want your father to beat me too badly when he visits.”

“Par Dieu! Last minute lessons will not improve your technique or your swing,” chided Renée-Caroline, pulling down the sun visor to better shade her eyes from the sight of her boyfriend staring in frank admiration at another woman. She was more interested in her own golfing than that of another and called on her gravity to bring Aiba back to the play at hand.

“Then maybe we should do something about the moving hazards. Did that bush move, you think?” He pointed to an ordinary low lying bush some distance ahead. “I thought I had a straight path ahead. But the bush moved and covered the path up. We play golf to escape life and work, but even in golf, life comes and gets in the way.”

As she did not think disparagingly of Aiba’s faculties of reason, Renée-Caroline did not lecture him for his silliness as his friends in Arashi would have. She had always held an unshakeable belief that her Masaki’s thought processes were the most harmonious of all the men in the band. Although the other band members frequently derided Aiba for being a so-called natural ‘baka’, she remained steadfast in her belief that Aiba had the clearest vision and a quickness of mind that surpassed the most educated brain in the group.

“Parce que the path was clear in your head, n’est-ce pas? That keeps you playing to meet the goal of getting a hole in one. It is a very good way of thinking,” she conceded, taking her shot across the tee.

“Will your father think it good of me?” He tilted his head to the side in uncertainty.

“Papa could believe you were letting him win,” she pointed out. “It is easier to allow him to win at golf than to sleep with your eyes open.”

“I can do that!” he raised an energetic arm and waved it furiously. “But Nino always finds out; then he tells on me.”

“Were you snoring?” she asked, a humorous gleam in her eyes.

“Iya. Drooling,” he admitted blithely, completely unashamed and unrepentant as he hit his golf ball into the rough.

“I hope you will not drool at maman’s recital.” She shook her head and lightly rapped his head with her wooden club.

“Oh! You’re conducting, deshou? I won’t sleep if you’re conducting!” He grinned shamelessly. “Your mother trained you in the piano, so you should sound kind of the same. I won’t sleep so easily.”

Giving her club a middle range swing, she followed her ball as it drifted over the green into the fairway. “Our music differs, Masaki, like night and day. You will hear how when you hear how she plays.”

He flashed her an earnest look as they walked to the next hole. “Aren’t you going to play? I like it when you play. The music goes whoosh, and then bam! I hit a brick wall, but I don’t get hurt and then it forces me to dodge and lots of crazy stuff.”

“Later in the spring season, I will be playing and conducting Ravel; you will hear it then.” A distinct glint lurked in the corner of her eyes. “Alors, your tickets are always on reserve. The conductor is always given a reserved box for family.”

A long arm was promptly dangled around her shoulders. “You’re easy on me.” He smiled widely and rubbed the back of her head affectionately. “You think your parents will be easy on me too when they come from Paris?”

“Grand-mère Eguchi’s inspection was not easy and you passed, n’est-ce pas?” she reassured him, and would have expanded upon the theme with a lively illustration from Rossini’s Barber of Seville had an unwanted interruption not intruded itself on them.

The intruder, instantly recognisable as Umebayashi Saeko, carried herself as befitting one accustomed to enjoying money and influence, turned to greet them and displayed her freshly cut hair that been styled to geometrical perfection. “Aiba-san, what a small world meeting you here!” she exclaimed with as much pleasure as a surgeon finding out that there were two gall stones to remove instead of one.

“Big golf course,” replied Renée-Caroline, studying the face behind the oversized squarish-oblong sunglasses.

She tittered artificially and flashed her teeth at the couple. “You are Mademoiselle Chaussée of the Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera. I enjoyed your superb performance of Die Fledermaus. Since you’re here, could I get your autograph?”

“I do not give autographs,” responded the maestra brusquely with narrowed eyes.

“What brings you here, Umebayashi-san?” Aiba enquired, grinding his teeth into a facsimile of a smile.

“Business.” She indicated a dour looking, heavy-set man of the Teutonic persuasion fiddling the set of clubs near her. “We started from the other side of the green.”

“Vraiment? I could be sure you took in more territory than that,” Renée-Caroline smiled thinly, marvelling at Saeko’s uncanny ability to appear where she was not wanted.

“In fact my interests now span into the arts scene. Have you heard of any good exhibitions from the up-and-coming graduate students of Tokyo University of the Arts?” Although Saeko laughed at the comment, she could discern mettle in the conductor and knew that it would be foolish to pump her for information. If there had only been one thing she had learnt since engineering her meeting with Alys and Sora, it was that the girlfriends chosen by the Arashi members were tough nuts to crack. She may not like them very much for obstructing her from her final objective of obtaining Ohno, but she could respect them. It did not matter to her that women attached to her latest investment were proving more than a challenge to run over. There were always more than one method of arriving at the end, and she had just hit upon it with Aiba’s more susceptible and pliable nature. It was a plan made all the more easier given his broad smile at his girlfriend for indirectly telling off the head of the Umebayashi Group.

Right on cue, Aiba tightened his grip on his seven-iron and jumped to the defence of his absent leader’s fiancée. “You’re only asking about Geidai students because of Kaoru-chan, deshou? She’s Riida’s fiancée, back off, okay!”

“Am I so insidious that I cannot be allowed to be a patron of the arts?” Saeko smiled in a manner that seemed to Aiba to resemble a cat that already had a mouse wiggling in its paw.

A blank look crossed Aiba’s face. “What’s insidious?”

“Sinister, cheri,” explained Renée-Caroline without breaking eye contact with Saeko.

As the confirmation of that one fact had been inadvertently done by Aiba, Saeko could now rest easy and leave the scene before she was deemed unwanted. “I can’t keep my business associate waiting. If you change your mind about the autograph, Mademoiselle Chaussée, send it to my office. Tata.”

“Alors, she got what she wanted,” said the maestra darkly as the CEO went off into the buggy, presumably to another hole.

“Eh? What did she get?” Aiba scratched the back of his head in genuine confusion

“Reflect on it, Masaki.”

“Yabai! Did I say something wrong? I’m always saying something wrong.”

“It was not wrong, but it did anger her. Poor Satoshi or Kaoru would have to bear the brunt of it. It has all the hallmarks of a tragic opera.” She shook her head and puzzled over the potential ramifications this could have on the band and their interpersonal relationships.

“You’re just thinking too much because your parents would be coming soon. And also not everything is like opera, life’s a lot simpler than you think. I think you’re seeing what isn’t there. She only wants to show that she’s breathing down Arashi’s neck.”

Renée-Caroline did not reply. It would have been pointless to do so when he was not paying any attention. Nothing would get into his head when he was staring ahead at the svelte long-legged figure of the golf instructress, and wisely, Renée-Caroline, as a woman who came from a long line of dignified sufferers, kept her own counsel and retreated into introspection.

NOTES

Hazard in the chapter title is a double entendre. It could refer to hazard in the economic sense as well as the golfing sense.

In economics and insurance, a hazard (especially an ‘armed hazard’) can affect persons, property or environment. This type of hazard is likely to require further risk assessment.

In golf, there are three kinds of hazards: bunkers, water hazards and lateral water hazards. Basically, a hazard is any bunker or permanent body of water including any ground marked as part of that water hazard. Special rules apply when playing from a hazard

Green or putting green refers to the area of specially prepared grass around the hole, where putts are played.

Die Fledermaus, lit. the bat, is a German operetta composed by Johann Strauss II and a general comedy of manners. We see that Renee-Caroline has moved away from heavy opera (Wagner) to comedy (Johann Strauss II). Make what you will of this.

Glossary – French

Mais = but/however
Oui = yes
Non = no
Bien sûr = of course
Parce que = because
Je ne sais pas = I don’t know
Hein = an expression of disagreement or agreement (depends on context). Think of it like a snort of agreement or disagreement.
Par Dieu = By God (an exclamation equivalent to ‘My goodness’ or ‘By Jove’).
Grand-mère Eguchi = grandmother Eguchi
Vraiment = really
Alors = Well then. *Please note ‘Alors’ has no real English equivalent.
N’est-ce pas = don’t you agree / don’t you think. *Please note this also has no real English equivalent. It is used in the same place as the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the examples below:
(a) Time is of the essence, no?
(b) You speak Polish, yes?
Bear this in mind when you next encounter “n’est-ce pas”

Chapter 020 – Hidden hostilities

There is an old adage that states one is best able to determine a person’s true mettle under pressure. Conversely, how one held up under exacting circumstances is determined by one’s disposition and sometimes, one’s character. To the students of human nature, studying the different reactions of people under the same trying circumstances was a fascinating and profitable enterprise. Nino and Jun were two such people who enjoyed observing the evolution and foibles of human nature. Where the first exploited what he gleamed from others’ characters to his private advantage out of the belief that the stupidity of human beings were to be derided, the second used his knowledge as extenuating factors in tempering his behaviour to certain individuals from a belief that others would be civil to him so long as he was civil to them. Thus, when these two men arrived at the University of Tokyo Hospital with the rest of Arashi, they reacted differently when faced with the scene before them.

Neither of them had to instil order, for order was clearly present, due to the good offices of Chiaki who had prevailed on the ladies not to overly distress themselves lest they distract the attending physicians from their work. This tactic of appealing to reason had by and large worked. Kaoru was doing her best to restrain her tears as she clung to Renée-Caroline’s arm; and Renée-Caroline was studying a pattern on the floor with more interest than she felt. The only notable exception to this picture of calm was Sora. Her temper was already very nearly flying off the handle (and aggravated by both Alys’s unfortunate condition and Kaoru’s very apparent distress) so much so that the redoubtable Chiaki was at that moment attempting to calm her by physically holding her back as she lashed out mercilessly at a doctor who had emerged from the room.

“I specifically requested for Shikishima sensei! He’s the best in the field! Where is your head of pulmonology?” asked Sora viciously, desperately wanting to jab the doctor before her in the chest.

The balding doctor cracked a toothpaste advertisement smile as he reasoned with her, “But he’s not available today.”

“Do you know who I am?” she continued waspishly. “Kujo Sora. My family makes sizeable contributions to this wretched hospital!”

“My colleagues and I are doing all we can to see to Teng-san’s needs. We need confirmation from our laboratories on our secondary diagnosis. In the meantime, we have given her antibiotics for the pneumonia,” explained the doctor.

Sora fumed and folded her arms, fixed the physician with a look that would in normal circumstances make grown men whimper and lesser men cry. “Are we going to sit around and wait for you to poke needles in her and run tests when she could have the best pulmonologist in Japan treating her?”

“Sora, please, get a hold of yourself,” Chiaki recommended, valiantly trying to prevent the novelist from drawing any attention to their group, especially since Jun and the rest of the band were there. While it was true that they were in disguise, there was still the off chance that they could be discovered. Being a prudent woman, Chiaki was not prepared to take that risk. She whispered that reservation to Sora and thus managed to calm her down, though it did nothing to abate her colourful and pungent invective against the medical tribe.

As Sora’s disagreeable nature was well-known to Jun (who found this aspect of her charming), he did not bat an eyelid. Judging that Chiaki had things well under control, he went into the hospital room, heavy with the clinical too-sanitised smell of every type of cleaning agent known to man. He had expected there to be two machines hooked up to her, not this vision of a profusion of tubes running around the top of her hand, one of which was attached to a 0.9% sodium chloride and glucose solution bag, an oxygen machine with the ends clipped to her nostrils with the setting at 3 litres, and a small blue tap on the top of her hand standing out above the profusion of tubes around her.

Somehow, she was sitting up somewhat and trying to write. A task which he noted looked more strenuous and painful than it actually was given her trembling hand. He frowned at her laboured breathing as the now pasty academic paused in her writing to look up with a faint lip curl and lifted a finger in salutation. If he was this taken aback by this change in the usually acerbic philosopher, he wondered how Nino would take it. Deciding that he should (out of politeness) ask after her to see if she was any better, he cleared his throat. Before he could speak however, the machine beside the bag of sodium chloride and glucose solution started beeping. It was so loud that Aiba and Sho burst in asking jointly, “What’s that noise?”

“Pleur-evac machine. It drowns Sora’s voice,” Alys replied breathlessly, a brow raised at the sight of two other Arashi members.

“Eh?” Aiba asked, knocking the machine and shaking it for good measure in the hope that it would quieten down. “The words ‘air’ and ‘completion’ are flashing.”

“Don’t,” Sho said sternly, holding out a hand to stop Aiba’s continued assault on the machine. “It drains her lungs. She needs it.”

Aiba let his gaze drift to the woman and he started bawling on Sho’s shoulder.

Running a hand distractedly through, Jun began again, “Ano ne, Nee-san, are you okay?”

“Do I look okay to you?” she snapped weakly, flicking her fingers at him in annoyance, and drawing an almost perceptible smirk from him. Returning to writing on a sheaf of printed papers, she went on, “Are the other two here as well? If Ohno’s here, tell him to take Kaoru home. She’s distraught. Please apologise to everyone for the trouble…” she paused to breathe and to cough. “Sora should be told I’m fine so that she cease her one-woman operation to mass massacre the hospital staff. Sho-kun, take Chiaki home, she looks tired and get her something to eat that’s high in iron, she’s been complaining of having a troublesome period. Baby-chan, take Renée-Caroline to the Opera House; she’s conducting Die Fledermaus… Get her something light to eat. Tell the freeloader to phone my solicitors on the English side…”

“You don’t have to act normal. Rest and recover. Our manager will ensure that you will not be disturbed and…” Sho told her, his frown lines deepening at the professor’s innate sense of responsibility.

“Tosh! I’m not the freeloader; I do not know how to act,” she replied in ragged breaths. “Incidentally, is he here?”

“He’s with Riida somewhere out there,” wailed Aiba, waving a vague hand in the direction of the door while wiping his runny nose on Sho’s sleeve.

She pushed her glasses higher on her nose; her face paler and its expression unreadable. “I want to see him.” She curled her lips disdainfully at the three men staring at each other and then at her, not quite believing that she had said what she just did. “What are you standing here for?” she hissed slowly to minimise the pain in her chest as she spoke, not knowing that it made her accent more distinct and had given her words a serpentine aspect. “Renée-Caroline has an orchestra to conduct. Kaoru needs to go home and sleep, and I want Kazu. Hop to it.”

As Sho and Aiba stood gawking at her (the latter shocked out of his crying in the process), Jun realised that he would take charge or nothing would get done. Why it fell him to him to take up the reins of control in times of crises, he did not know, and even if he did know, he would have taken charge of the situation anyway. Sho could have a panic attack and induce another crying fit in Aiba, which would in turn leave the maestra without swift transportation to the Opera House. This would in turn stress Chiaki who was trying to keep Sora calm, and further agonise Kaoru whose tender heart did not like to see anyone suffer. He gave Alys a quick nod of assent and ushered Sho and Aiba out to the waiting ladies and Ohno. Their leader was, to his credit, sensitive to the apparent distress of his fiancée and comforting her in his arms.

“She’ll be okay; you’d see. She’d be thwacking Nino with books in no time,” Ohno soothed, pouting sadly.

“They suspect lupus in addition to the pneumonia. Lupus!” Sora huffed indignantly. “They’re not even sure! How’s that for efficiency?”

Jun nodded his agreement at the want of proper clarity in this most notable of hospital and attempted a weak half-smile at his novelist. “What she has or hasn’t, ne, is for the doctors to decide, ne? Eto… Alys Nee-san will not rest easy until we follow up on her few instructions, ne. Aiba must take Renée-Caroline to the Opera House ne for work. It’s the right thing to do, eh? And Riida must take Kaoru home to rest, ne.” The others surprisingly acceded fairly easily to the scheme as they nodded. “Chiaki and Sho can keep her company, ne, until Sora and I find...”

He paused abruptly on espying a shadow that quickly darted behind a wall. It was familiar and he had a fair idea of who it was. He clenched a fist and mentally derided Umebayashi Saeko for stooping so low as to follow them. One of these days, she would go too far and he would give her more than an earful. However, he decided that acting now would be too premature, for he was still nowhere close to uncover the gist of Saeko’s greater schema of affairs. Jun swallowed hard and pressed his lips together thereby keeping himself admirably in check by asking, “Chotto, where’s the miserly pustule?”

From her current strategic position behind the wall, Saeko heard Ohno’s reply that Nino was in the stairwell behind the ward they were in. Secure in the belief that she was unnoticed by the party a short distance ahead of her, and secure in the unreasonable belief of her own superiority, she did not pause to consider that she could have been spotted by one of the Arashi members or that she was already spotted by MatsuJun. No, those thoughts were nowhere in her mind as she was too busy seething at Ohno’s very affectionate manner of comforting Kaoru and turning the gears of her mind as she tried to go through the who’s who amongst the Arashi girlfriends. She had overheard everything, having eavesdropped on part of the conversation and discerned enough to know which lady was involved with which member.

“That must be the fiancée,” she muttered to herself, gritting her teeth at the gentle way Ohno draped his arm over Kaoru’s shoulder when the couple as well as Aiba and Renée-Caroline passed her on the way to the lift that would bring them downstairs. Fortunately for her, they were oblivious to her presence, and she could watch the rest of the party to recap the facts she had gathered.

She had already overheard that the bat eared woman they called Renée-Caroline worked at the Opera House and was with Aiba; that was enough information for a background check. Kujo Sora, she knew by reputation for being a member of the former aristocracy, and twin sister to Kujo Sakihisa, an upcoming politician. That woman looked like she was with Jun, and would be, Saeko reflected, someone she could talk to on an equal footing. However beyond learning the personal names of the tomboyish woman, Ohno’s prettily helpless fiancée, and the rest were Chiaki, Kaoru and Alys respectively, and learning that the patient was a professor and Ohno’s fiancée was with Geidai, she knew nothing more.

It was an information imbalance she immediately sought to rectify by approaching the information desk at that level to enquire after the patient in room 328. The reply provided her with the missing pieces of the puzzle as records indicated that the patient, one Teng Alys, was formally admitted by Nakahara Chiaki, and Morimoto Kaoru has asked for a change in the patient’s antibiotics. As that was all she needed to know, and she went away feeling smug. She had no intention of exposing them. To do so would be folly and bring the wrath of her JE Central, and she had no wish to make an enemy of the company she had just gotten in bed with. No, instead she would make the most of the information she had gathered and put them to work for her like she did with the people in her employ.

Thus, armed with her newly acquired knowledge, she walked away and made her way out, phoning her personal secretary. “Vyrubov, I have something I want you to check up …” As she laid out the details of what she expected to be done, Saeko reflected that it was good to be the head of a conglomerate with various resources at her disposal.

NOTES

Kujo Sakihisa was mentioned very briefly in a blink-and-miss fashion in Ch 12 of From Cover to Cover.

Chapter 019 – Where wisdom listens

“Which of you is the manager?” began Alys without preamble, narrowing her eyes at the sight of just two men in the kitchen and the state it was in. Disordered would be the best way to describe it. Understaffed would be another, for what sort of eatery only had one cook and needed the manager to help out. Alys adjusted her glasses and curled her lips contemptuously at the sight of empty cans of cream of mushroom soup in the rubbish bun. What sort of establishment doesn’t make its own soup! How absurd! Even she, who did not consider herself as capable in the kitchen as her freeloader, could manage to make her own cream of mushroom soup. For the long wait time she and the ladies had to endure, she had expected near gourmet class cuisine, and here the establishment heated things from aluminium and tin cans! Outrageous! She wasn’t going to stand for it.

“I am. How may I help the valued customer?” responded a portly man in a suit that was too tight for him, looking up from the pot of mushroom soup.

The academic’s eyes flitted from the surroundings to the man as she silently appraised him, not bothering to hide her disdain for the way in which the eatery was run. “May I enquire how you run your business? Table 28 waited half an hour for our orders, and your serving boy had the temerity to request we order pastries while waiting. How long more do we have to wait, pray tell?” demanded Alys between ragged coughs as she grabbed the counter to keep the façade of her upright posture from cracking under the painfulness of each heaving breath.

“I am very sorry, madam…”

“Try another tactic, madam is waiting to be impressed.” The professor scowled.

“If madam is unhappy…” the manager gave her a curt bow.

“Points of information: One – madam is displeased with your appalling service; two -- madam is furious with the cavalier manner in which she is treated in this pathetic excuse of an eatery,” corrected she in an artic tone, swivelling her head to the waiter who had just entered with a new order. Without warning, she grabbed him by the elbow and continued to address the manager between coughs, “This impertinent pup suggested we order additional items while the kitchens prepare our order, and then had the audacity to present us with incorrect orders. If this is the height of sophistication in dining, I have a good mind to write a most scathing review of this establishment! First and foremost, we ordered the bisque, not your cream of mushroom soup.”

Perhaps cowed by her evenly modulated tone of her vociferous accusations and the thinly veiled threat, the manager was sufficiently aware that he was not dealing with a customer who could be appeased by any old excuse. “The sous chef is in the toilet doing his er… business and can’t make the bisque.”

“So much so that we waited half an hour for soup from a can? Bah bloody humbug!” She flicked a wrist as she heaved a heavy cough and tried to ignore the excruciating pains in her chest. “Do you honestly expect me to believe that the apprentice has no idea how to make soup or salads? Pray, inform this ignorant critic, how long does it take to prepare food in this establishment? Forty-five minutes? An hour?”

“With our sous chef in the toilet, we do what we can…” shrugged the apprentice chef.

Seeing how he had a death wish, Alys trained her eyes on him and curled her lips contemptuously. “Are you so incompetent that you do not know what to do in the kitchen? You must be a gentleman of leisure to have all the time in the world, but some of us have to work. We are not going to wait indefinitely for our orders in a place with bad service!” She paused to allow her lungs to vent a cough as she struggled to catch her breath. As soon as she had enough breath with which to inhale, she let fly in the coldest possible manner to the manager. “My good man, your staff are incompetent and rude. This boy gave us coffee éclairs instead of chocolate, and he apparently expected five women to share one napkin. I am all for saving the environment, but this place takes the biscuit in going too far!”

The manager turned to the waiter, incredulity stamped clearly on his features. “One napkin for a table of five?”

“You told us to save on serviettes with one per table…” stammered the waiter nervously.

“One per customer, not one per table!” barked the manager.

The academic interrupted with cough and faint smirk of amusement at the increasing discomfiture of both the manager and the waiter, “Then there is the small matter where our orders were ‘mucked up’, shall we say. There are five hungry and very busy women who are waiting on their orders, and have been waiting for…” She paused and checked her watch. “The past forty minutes. I can see from the state of affairs in this domain that future waiting would be an exercise in futility. We will be taking our business elsewhere, just as your sous chef is doing. We will pay the bill for that sludge you call mushroom soup and that alone in acknowledgement that the first oversight on our order was a mistake. The second mistake on the éclairs does not deserve such consideration. I expect the bill at our table in a timely fashion. Good day to you.”

“Matte kudasai!” the manager called out in sudden panic at the customer’s apparent livid coolness as she spun around on her heels. He bowed apologetically to her coughing figure. “There will be no charge. We apologise for the inconvenience and for madam’s dissatisfaction.”

A self-satisfied smirk formed on her lips when Alys heard those words, for that was exactly the outcome she had wished. Turning her head to the side to gaze dispassionately at the manager, she raised a brow, pushed up her glasses, stifled a cough and said nothing. To all observers, she would just be an irate customer disgusted with the service at the eatery, and she made sure by her silence that the manager followed her out of the kitchens still apologising and cancelling their need to pay a single yen.

The other ladies at table 28 heard the portly manager’s profuse apologises, and were torn between amazement and amusement at what had transpired. Kaoru, bless her heart, was stunned that it was possible not to pay for the soup she had consumed. Chiaki and Sora had anticipated this turn of events, and one shook her head with a snigger while the other cracked a smile of approval at the professor as she approached their table. Although Renée-Caroline strongly disapproved of (what she suspected were) the strong arm tactics it took to bring out this outcome, she raised her glass of water at Alys in a silent toast to her incorrigibility.

“You’re despicable,” Chiaki teased, shaking a finger at her.

“You wound me! I’m merely disreputable,” deadpanned the philosopher as she neared the table. “Shall we head elsewhere? Kaoru has to eat. Anywhere would be preferable to this…” However as she was about to say more, she began hacking away again.

This time the coughing jag was so violent that she could not breathe. As she flicked her wrist and dismissed the solicitous concerns of the other women, she realised belatedly in a detached fashion that she very likely had miscalculated and could well be dying from pneumonia before she had made the final corrections to her Hong Kong conference paper. In the same detached manner, she observed that the blood she was coughing up was a bright red and her heart was thrashing wildly with lack of air. She even went so far as to imagine that she could hear her alveoli popping one by one. Perhaps she would die of heart failure or bronchial apoplexy, she mused wryly as she fell forward; after all, she had always held the opinion that one of her chronic ailments would kill her one day. A shame she couldn’t see her mother, grandmother and annoying freeloader before she died, but she hadn’t factored them in either. An oversight, her mind reminded her, and to her credit, she would have smirked self-deprecatorily at herself if she could. But her mind soon wandered again to mundane observations. That the floor of the eatery was moderately clean gave her reason to be vaguely pleased she would not die in dirty surroundings were her last thoughts before specks of stars circled her eyes and she blacked out.

When the shock of seeing one of their own fall at their feet without warning finally died off, Chiaki swept in with cool commanding logic and sought to restore order among her companions while Sora called for an ambulance.

“Alys Nee-chan isn’t…” Kaoru’s voice trembled as she tried her best not to cry.

“Non, she is all bile, hein, far more tenacious than she seems,” assured Renée-Caroline, as she rubbed Alys’s temples with ointment Kaoru had offered.

“I can see one benefit to this,” Chiaki stated with all the calm of a person used to dealing with panic attacks and crises.

“Oh?” Sora replied, disconnecting the call to the hospital and dialling another number.

Chiaki fixed the novelist with a serious look as the latter pressed the mobile phone to her ear. “She’ll finally be treated for pneumonia whether she likes it or not.”

“Aussi, her caro spouso would be glad. Masaki told me Monsieur Ninomiya has been tetchy of late,” Renée-Caroline muttered, her clouded brow clearing as if by magic from the thought that her beau would be much pleasanter if his sarcastic friend were to be himself again.

Whether Nino would be relieved was unknown as he was occupied with the rest of Arashi in the recording studio in JE Central, tetchier than his usual acerbic self, willing himself not to snarl at the Umebayashi Saeko woman who was hawk-eyeing them. He sneezed once and rubbed his nose, wondering if his little professor was thinking of him. Or, he thought with a smirk of delight, she could be insulting him, cursing him under her breath and threatening to do unspeakable horrors to him. Well, so long as she thinking of him and blackening his name (even if no one believed her), he was content. And that thought did make him feel marginally better, for it indicated to him that she still cared enough to cast aspersions on his character. His reverie at being the receiving end of his lady’s harsh tongue was unfortunately broken by a voiceover from the sound mixing booth in the studio complaining that one of them was too shrill and drowning out Ohno’s voice.

The rest of the band members looked at each other, annoyance and impatience etched on their features. They had all been doing very well and were almost done with recording the last bonus track of their new single until Saeko came in to observe them. Officially, she was there on business to oversee the post production process where the music would be recorded on her new line of scratch-proof and copy-proof CDs. However, all of Arashi knew her true motivation was to see Ohno and to hear him sing. She was so transparent that it was almost pitiful, and if the situation were removed from the band, MatsuJun would laugh at the ludicrous near scandalous way in which the head of the Umebayashi Group was making a fool of herself over an oblivious man who was too polite to tell her to go away. However, for the moment, he was struggling to keep a tight lid on his anger. MatsuJun was never one to suffer fools gladly, and presently, Saeko was being both foolish and annoying by interrupting the recording process with her demands. It was a sentiment that was shared by all the members of Arashi, for they were doing extremely well all morning and afternoon, and had only slipped up when she showed up fifteen minutes ago to commandeer the sound booth in the recording studio.

In Jun’s opinion, she had no business being there when she was clearly ignorant of the minutiae of the music business. Moreover, despite his slight sympathy for those who were thwarted in love, he could not bring himself to feel sorry for her when she was so irresponsible as to cut short a meeting with the board of directors of her various subsidiaries just to attend a recording session. His frayed temper had almost all but worn down when she suggested another take. Arashi’s manager had been unable to pre-empt her last order as he was on the mobile and had stormed out the booth with a heavily darkened brow. Seeing that Date-san was occupied, MatsuJun threw down his headphones and was prepared to barge into the sound booth with a sharp reprimand against Saeko’s unwarranted highhandedness – a reprimand that stilled and dissolved when the commanding voice of their manager resounded in the studio.

“Matsumoto, you have a call! Now! Everyone else break!” huffed Date-san gruffly as he barged into the studio proper. Dropping his voice to a low hiss as he clapped Jun on the shoulder and handed him the mobile phone, he continued, “Sora-sama on the line.”

Nodding his thanks, Jun followed his friends out of the studio, relieved to get away from Saeko’s unblinking metallic, predatory eyes as she ranted over the way they sounded on the recording. Now that was a Queen Bitch if there ever was one, snorted Jun inwardly to himself while sauntering out with his friends under their watchful manager’s gaze. As they adjourned to a nearby stairwell where Nino and Ohno could have quick cigarettes and Aiba could regale Sho with the latest developments in the manga he had been following, Jun smiled at his friends (and at Ohno who offered him a cigarette) before speaking into the receiver. “Where’s the fire? Or did you miss the irresistible me?”

Sora laughed nervously over the connection, too nervously in the youngest member’s opinion. “Stop being a pompous arse, Jun-chan, this is an emergency. I’ve explained to Uncle Date. We’ve had a small incident and are at the University of Tokyo Hospital.”

“Were you in a motor accident? I thought your doctors were with the Tokyo Memorial Hospital! Who’s with you? I’ll take off from work now. Do you want me to bring you anything? I’m going to you now, okay?” he enquired anxiously in one breath, puffing very quickly and indecorously on his cigarette.

“It’s not me; it’s Alys. She had a turn for the worse. What is Ninomiya’s mood like today? Renée-Caroline mentioned him being ‘tetchy’ in Aiba’s estimation,” Sora went on; the desultory manner in which she made the conversation, rendering her well-hidden distress apparent to Jun.

“What’s going on, Sora-chan? What’s wrong with Alys Nee-san? Did she finally see the doctor for her cough?” He lowered his voice instinctively so as to calm her.

“Sort of. She had a type of seizure associated with bacterial pneumonia. She’s been warded. Chiaki’s sending Sho the details now.”

It did not take long for the gravity of the situation to sink in, and Jun considered his next step while posing a question and running a nervous hand through his hair, “What did the doctors say?”

“The bungling buffoons refuse to say anything. They’re hooking up machines to her – one to pump the blood and fluids from her lungs, another to help her breathing. Heads are going to roll if the head of the pulmonology department does not arrive soon,” Sora snapped disagreeably, exhaling cigarette smoke from her end of the line as she sat beside a weepy and visibly distraught Kaoru in the open air part of the hospital canteen.

“Keep cool, I’ll be with you soon, ne,” Jun advised, Aiba’s gasp as he read something off Sho’s mobile device not lost upon him. He nodded when Aiba and Sho turned around and showed him the message from Chiaki.

“It’s a miracle we’re not wailing and tearing our hair out. Commandeer Aiba’s car. Someone has to take Renée-Caroline to the Opera House for her performance tonight, and we need transport for Kaoru. She’s beside herself with worry.”

“Hang in there, I’ll try to get clearance for us to leave, or failing that, I’d get clearance for Nino,” he replied and pushed a button to disconnect the call.

“Clearance for what? I don’t need clearance for anything. All I have to do is contrive.” Nino smirked, placing a fresh cigarette at his lips.

“For us to leave now,” Sho answered grimly, patting Aiba whose eyes were already watery. “The professor is with the doctors and…”

“About time,” Nino snorted dismissively, rising and pushing open the door of the stairwell. “What? What are you staring at?”

“What I am staring at? Your stingy empress had difficulty breathing and has been hospitalised. The doctors aren’t saying anything,” Jun bellowed vociferously, following Nino out the door and waving for their manager to approach.

“If they’re not saying anything, maybe she’s dead,” Nino laughed as he lit the cigarette. Although his tone was sarcastic and his air was of careless unconcern, he was inwardly worried. The phrase, ‘Kami-sama, if you take her away, I’ll go to hell and drag her back so that I can kill her for turning me out’ repeated itself like a mantra in his head.

“Mama can’t breathe on her own and you’re saying things like that!” wailed Aiba, giving Nino a look of pure contempt before crying on Sho’s shoulder.

“Mah, that’s enough,” Ohno interjected, tugging at Nino’s elbow in a bid to curb the cutting remark that was on his tongue.

“What are you saying, baby-chan?” sneered Nino, masking his internal anxiety with a carefully blank face.

“She’s on the respirator and the pleur-evac. It could mean her lungs have collapsed,” Sho clarified with a frown, watching Jun return their manager the mobile phone.

Pointedly ignoring the conversations in the background, Jun addressed Date-san, “May we go? Nino, at the very least, should go. The professor is out for the count.”

“Sora-sama told me. Okay, listen up, boys, you’re done in the studio. We can cut and mix out the imperfections. But I want everyone back in again bright and early tomorrow. Do I make myself clear?” manager-san gruffly acceded, checking his watch.

Everyone save Nino gave signs of assent. Eschewing conventionality, he flicked a wrist and snapped (to appalled gasps of Aiba and Ohno), “Damn witch can’t take care of herself; serves her right. Let her fester, rot and die or whatever. See if I care.” After a judicious pause, he turned around as if he remembered something of minor importance. “Oi, Sho-san, do we have filming today for Resurrected Butterflies?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” came the answer as well as disapproving looks.

“Good,” Nino said decisively, taking a few steps away and then turning back at the gaping men staring at him. “Close your mouths. You want flies to lay their eggs there or something? Will someone with a car take me to the damn hospital to see who or what is trying to kill my woman?”

Date-san nodded at the Arashi members as they collected their things and left, much to the disapproval of Saeko. Having overheard enough of their conversation from her position behind an obliging wall, her interest in the band members’ private lives was piqued. It surprised her that someone as emotionally lacking as Nino (which was how she saw him) could have a crumpet stashed away on the side mildly ridiculous. However, clearer thought brought a question to her mind, and it was on that question that she decided to make her next move.

“Spare the rod and you’ll spoil those boys,” she told him, staring at their retreating figures with a wooden expression as she folded her arms. “I came all this way here after an important meeting to hear them sing and you let them go after they made a mess of the last take.”

“They’ve been at it all day, and were good until a presence began nitpicking. They need a break,” answered Date-san coolly.

She harrumphed and stormed away at his impertinence. As Saeko was not good at not getting what she wanted, she resorted to the only thing she could do under the present circumstances – undertake reconnaissance.

NOTES & Glossary

Non = no

Mais = but/however

Aussi = also

Caro spouso = lit. Italian for dear spouse (used to speak of a male spouse; use cara sposa if spouse is female). In classical music, most things are written in Italian and as Renee-Caroline is a conductor formerly based in Europe, it would not be far-fetched that she should know Italian on top of her native French.

Chapter 016 – Risking arbitrage

The voices of five men in near pitch-perfect harmony were marred by someone going a little off-key with too nasal a drawl towards the end of the chorus. The technicians in the recording studio were not bothered by it, knowing full well that they could digitally remove it or cover it up with clever remixing and synthesising. Everyone in the sound round observing Arashi pressing large headphones to their ears, closing their eyes (and in one case, a wrinkling of the nose) while singing into large microphones felt that the current outtake the band was singing was one of the better versions. It was a well-known fact that each member had been occupied with band responsibilities as well as his own private commitments and was, in effect, working nearly around the clock, functioning on a little food and even less sleep. Each member had his respective set of advertisements and endorsements to record. On top of that, Aiba was busy with on location shoots for his Tensai Shimura Doubutsen show; Ohno was tied up with rehearsals for his new stage play; Nino and Sho had their new drama script to memorise, and would have to shoot for the series soon, and MatsuJun had accepted a new movie script. Then there were their various television programmes to record – Arashi no Shukudai-kun, Himitsu no Arashi-chan, and VS Arashi. Yet despite these numerous claims on their time, they were still expected to show up for work at JE Central, record songs for the new album, conceptualise a theme for a new single, and make plans for the tour that would inevitably follow in summer later in the year. Given the tremendous pressure on Arashi, nearly everyone on the control panel side of the recording studio (including the incredibly muscular and yakuza chief-like manager) cut the artistes some slack if they sounded a tad hoarse or off-key that day. That is to say, everyone save the newest shareholder of the J Storm label.

The side of Saeko’s face twitched when Matsumoto Jun hit a raw note. She went so far as to physically flinch when she heard the low raspy rumble of Aiba’s voice.

“How can you allow it? This is a bad take. The rest of them are ruining the main balladeer’s vocals,” Saeko said, no doubt thinking she had raised a valid point. She was, after all, a shareholder of J Storm. As a shareholder with more than 10% of the label, she had a right to audit their recording sessions to ensure that her investment in the label’s biggest names was exacting the returns she thought she and her company deserved.

The sound technician rubbed his hands nervously and replied unctuously in a manner that would be worthy of Dickens’ Uriah Heep, “I can edit it out. This fourth take of the song is the best so far. Studio recordings have the…”

“Is that what you are promoting? A second-rate band with singers who mess up in the studio? They will do it until they get it right!” demanded Saeko, shaking her foot angrily.

Date-san, Arashi’s manager observed the masculine way in which she sat with her legs crossed and her foot shaking and narrowed his eyes under his sunglasses (that never left his face save when he was in the bath or sleeping). He could respect her ideals and her perfectionist streak in demanding the best from her investment, but he could not respect her highhanded way of doing things. The Arashi boys were tired and allowances would have to be made. That was why they had sound technicians and engineers to fix wonky vocalisations on the recordings. The boys did their part; and the sound crew should do theirs. To his well-ordered mind, Umebayashi Saeko had no business demanding changes to the way things were done, especially since the sound crew were paid to make the necessary corrections and buffering in the tracks. However, he had also been in the music business long enough to know that Saeko was not an easy adversary. Speaking to her would yield no changes to her attitude. He would have to resolve matters himself by giving bending down and informing the producer to remix and buffer the recordings they had so far, and send the boys away for a day’s rest. It was clear from the way Arashi looked askance at Saeko that they resented her presence in the recording studio. And if he did not do something, Arashi could quickly tire themselves out before the day was out.

Stepping out of the sound mixing booth, Date-san growled gruffly at the band members, “We’ll wrap the recording here today and remix the first two tracks. Head out and get some sleep.”

All the members, save one, were about to heed that excellent advice for they had to record one of their television shows in the evening. Sho, however, opted for another mode of releasing his pent up frustration. He disguised himself and went for a drive.

There was a lot of good work he had done that he should be thankful for. But Sho was presently dissatisfied with the way things were done in the J Storm now that it was no longer fully under the control of Johnny’s Entertainment umbrella. The sense of accomplishment he felt two days ago on closing the drama deal with Nino for the tragic story of ‘Resurrected Butterflies’ was gone, and in its place was a gnawing sense of disquietude. Despite being given permission to enjoy a rare half-day off, Sho could not find in it himself to rest. The reason for which, he wryly reflected, lay in their new shareholder, Umebayashi-san. With the whole of the mid-afternoon and the rest of the day yawning before him, and his frayed temper on the verge of exasperation, Sho decided to make an unannounced call to the most rational person in his acquaintance in the quest of tempering his growing sense of unease. It was this unease that led him to subconsciously drive to Jindai Botanical Garden in search of the director of the Tropical Greenhouse Collection.

It did not take him long to find her unmistakeable figure in the botanical gardens’ winter overall with a faux fur hat carrying a large toolbox and a large clipboard. Stopping the car next to her, he rolled down the window and grinned. “Yo, wifey! Got a moment?” he greeted with a two-fingered salute at Chiaki.

“I’m working if you haven’t noticed,” she said without malice. Although Chiaki’s strong work ethics shunned the notion of malingering, she knew from her long association with Sho that he would not call on her announced during working hours unless it was something important.

“I’ll help,” Sho offered, nodding his thanks to her as she got in the car.

“Get us back to the Greenhouse, get changed and you’d be more help to me,” chided Chiaki in the firm non-nonsense way Sho had come to adore. When he grinned his assent, she tilted her head to the side to better look at him and asked directly, as was in line with her character, “Did you shirk off your work?”

“Manager-san gave us a half-day,” he explained, still trying to make light of things. “I thought I’d see two of my favourite girls.”

“The bougainvillea is doing fine and I’m in the pink of health,” she answered, folding her arms and resting her elbows on the toolbox. “What’s the trouble? Umebayashi Saeko again?”

“How did you guess?” Sho asked incredulously when they stopped outside the greenhouse and emerged from the vehicle.

Shaking her head as she led him to her office within the greenhouse and foisted a pair of overalls on him, she answered, “Going from buying shares in your record label and propositioning Ohno-kun, it logically follows that she would antagonise the drizzle boys next.”

Sho sighed at being transparent in front of Chiaki. However, he did not allow himself to dwell too long on the thoughts of being an open book to his girlfriend. He knew that he was often helpless at keeping secrets and was prone to either angry bursts of temper or panic attacks, and to negate those incidences, he made it a point to discuss everything with his level-headed Chiaki.

“That Saeko woman has been hawk-eyeing us in the recording studio all morning! She behaved like she owned us, calling for take after take of a song. She stared reproachfully at Aiba who was sneezing badly. It’s bad enough she controls a sizeable minority stake in J Storm stocks, now it seems we can’t do anything without her hawk-eyeing us. This is beginning to wear on Jun’s nerves, put a dent on Aiba’s spirit and weigh down Ohno-kun. Nino suggested that we couldn’t even sneeze without her permission next. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came to that. Yesterday, she said we were holding Ohno-kun’s vocal talents back!” the resident rapper of the band let out in full steam without pause as soon as he had emerged in the standard wear of the Jindai Botanical Gardens.

“So it has begun.” Chiaki’s face undertook a dour expression, taking up the toolbox and placing several test-tubes into it before laughing dryly. “Sora predicted it with the deadly accuracy of an archer. Her skill at reading people far surpasses Ninomiya’s. She has never met Umebayashi-san and already she could foresee something like this occurring.”

Although Sho was aware of Sora’s habit of observing other people not in her immediate circle of friends and family and thence drawing her conclusions on them, he never failed to be completely amazed by how quickly she could grasp the true nature of anyone she analysed. The only exception to this rule, as everyone in Arashi knew, was Jun, whom she had dubbed ‘the Original’. Kujo Sora’s perspicuity surpassed that of even the deceptively languid Renée-Caroline and the carefully veiled eyes of Alys. It was remarkable, Sho thought, the Arashi men should have plucked these outstanding specimens of womanhood, and he made free to say so.

“How did we ever get women like you and the other princesses?” he enquired aloud, following her out of the greenhouse with a wheelbarrow of everything Chiaki needed to check up on the plants in her sector of the botanical gardens.

“You must have done something good in your youth or childhood. Except Ohno-kun, not one of you deserves your girlfriends, if you want my honest opinion,” Chiaki replied, pushing the wheelbarrow with him, glad that she would not have to conduct the task of seeing to the trees on her own.

“Umebayashi could throw Ohno-kun’s happiness into disarray if this goes on. Our diminutive bastard constantly reminds us that it is a game; our OCD princess Jun counsels that we bide our time, but we are no closer to uncovering the bigger picture or deciphering her plans. While we do nothing, time is slowly trickling away. Our inaction versus her action could be interpreted as weaknesses,” Sho vented, stopping to hand her a measuring implement from the toolbox as she indicated.

“The way I see it, Umebayashi-san wants to isolate Ohno-kun for herself by trapping him and inducing the Stockholm syndrome. The signs are there, Sho. She began by pushing him closer to the edge, then working to alienate the drizzle boys,” said Chiaki in a tone that suggested she had expended great thought on the issue. “She intends to force him into a corner so that he would be as Jun once said, ‘high and dry and bereft’ with no one to turn to but her. Alys fears that it may work because according to our know-it-all professor, he lacks the skill to avoid the feint in this King’s gambit.”

“Eh? Seriously?”

“Hai, seriously.” The botanist turned back to the tree and shrugged. “Her words not mine.”

“Her too? She and Nino are really two halves of a whole to think in games!” he exclaimed, wiggling his brows suggestively. “If they can see it for what it is, why don’t they guide Ohno-kun through it?”

“Because, husband,” Chiaki stressed the word to soothe his growing exasperation, “even they have no confidence of winning this game. If Umebayashi persists in isolating Ohno and alienating the rest of you, this would place a burden on you and Jun to keep the drizzle boys in tact.”

“Well, Jun and I are the parents minding this motley crew.” Sho allowed a rueful smile to grace his lips.

Chiaki turned around and pinched his cheeks lightly “That’s my Sho, a responsible husband and father to the bitter end.”

“What are we going to do?”

“As Renée-Caroline observed, Ohno-kun is too good natured to say no directly to Umebayashi-san. So, the girls and I are going to tell Kaoru. You should keep an eye on Ohno and have all the drizzle boys watch Umebayashi-san closer than she watches you,” she recommended.

“You’re sensible as always, wifey. Now, for the other breaking news stories…”

“There’s more?”

“You wouldn’t guess what happened two days ago,” Sho said as he held the toolbox for Chiaki while she checked the tree before for parasites.

“Made fools of yourselves on television again?

“Nino and I have a new drama series entitled Resurrected Butterflies, a tragic drama-romance, the kind MatsuJun would lap up and shed tears at the end. Ichinose Haruyo would be in it with us, smart girl – reminds me of myself when I was managing Keio and work simultaneously. But that isn’t the interesting portion, this is – in spite of his dislike for the script and the meagre increase of 5% more than his usual going rate, Nino accepted the role citing Hong Kong, where we would be for some of the shoots, as his reason. What do you make of that?”

“The kitsune is up to his old tricks,” Chiaki smiled knowingly and laughed. “Associate Professor Teng will be attending the Ancient World Philosophy Conference held in Hong Kong in late February.”

“The penny drops,” Sho whistled lowly. “Is he trying to rekindle the flames or torture her? They may claim they’re both sadistic, but he’s likely to keep her on an emotional yoyo if she continues to hold him at arm’s length.”

“This is their affair, Sho. Do not interfere,” she warned.

“But wifey! He’s not been happy of late. He complains that she’s been cold to him.”

“She is under a lot of strain at work and is ill. If he had any ounce of sense, which he doesn’t, he would know that she is looking out for his health by isolating herself from him. She knows how important it is for him to be physically well for his work.” Chiaki paused and threw a quick dismissive look at the air. “Though how she thinks she can delay treatment until the Hong Kong conference ends is beyond me.”

“Can’t those two be honest with each other? Do we have to lock them in a cupboard for them to bring that about? What happened to ‘Dear, I am worried about your condition’ and ‘Darling, I don’t want you to catch my germs’? Argh!” Sho cried with notable irritation in his voice.

“The way I see it, they are dissembling because they are afraid of what it would mean to lose each other,” Chiaki explained, patting Sho on the arm and mentally disapproving the Ninomiya-Teng pair’s pointless acts. “The professor self-diagnosed herself with pneumonia. She suspects it’s bacterial rather than viral, and believes that treatment now would delay her preparations for the Hong Kong conference. She claims as long as she seeks treatment no later than mid-March, she would be able to recover. I disapprove on principle and she jokes that a ‘touch of pneumonia’ wouldn’t kill her.”

Sho shook his head and draped a comforting arm over his girlfriend to soothe her obvious worry. “Tell you what, wifey, I’d let Nino in on this and leave him to deal with her.”

“You had better. Pneumonia is no joking matter,” Chiaki harrumphed.

While Sho assured Chiaki that Alys would be all right once Nino had confronted her and coerced her into consulting a medical doctor, the couple in the Jindai Botanical Garden was unaware that they were being observed by a shadowy figure secreted in the grove of trees some distance ahead of them.

NOTES

Arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets where one strikes a combination of matching deals that capitalise upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. Simply put, arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state. In other words, arbitrage is a risk-free profit. A person who engages in arbitrage is called an arbitrageur such as a bank or brokerage firm.

To take the risk of arbitrage however is an investment strategy that very often backfires because the arbitrageur can buy the stock of the target and make a gain if the acquirer ultimately buys the stock. Alternatively, the arbitrageur may short sell (short-change) the acquirer and buy the stock of the target.

Readers should think what this means in the context of the story and of this chapter.

King’s Gambit explained in footnotes at the end of Ch 014

Chapter 014 – Risk charting liquidity

In quite another quarter, though topographically hardly five underground stations away from the location of JE Central, the news of the Umebayashi Group’s acquisition of 20% of J Storm shares created different sensations in the three women who were gathered at a small café. It was the lower storey of a restored pre-war shop house, and most certainly not the kind of establishment Sora usually visited. However, as it was three votes against her one, she found herself seated at the nondescript café, poking at her scrambled eggs and reading the newspaper article Chiaki had indicated.

“Par Dieu!” Renée-Caroline exclaimed, reading the newspaper over Sora’s shoulder and looking up briefly at the harried looking and coughing fourth woman who had just entered the establishment. “Alys, ma chère! Have you read the financial headlines?”

“I got you tea and a bagel,” Chiaki addressed the bespectacled academic as Alys joined them at the table and dumped her briefcase on a chair.

“20% of their label!” hissed Sora lowly in disbelief as the newcomer slapped the newspaper that had been under her arm on the table. At the same time, Chiaki’s mobile phone chimed with an incoming text message.

Pushing up her glasses, Alys choked the rest of her cough in a tissue paper before flicking her wrist airily to signal her knowledge of that fact. “The point being?” she asked dispassionately, adding half a sachet of sugar to her tea.

“The point being we’ve underestimated her,” Chiaki said calmly, placing her mobile on the table. “She’s made her move.”

Sora seized the phone before Alys could read the message. “I could have anticipated that! The bitch!” declared the novelist and mangaka in a hot, accusatory tone.

Renée-Caroline gasped when Sora showed her mobile. “Non! She did not! She could not!”

“Forgive me for being so dull-witted, but would you believe it – I am still in the dark as to how becoming a shareholder in a record label constitutes as anything other than a business deal,” commented Alys from the rim of her teacup.

Promptly flipping the mobile phone screen towards her, Sora calmly said, “From Sho.”

The philosophy professor pursed her lips into a bloodless line after reading the message. “King’s gambit with her first two moves. She buys enough of their stock to potentially be on the J Storm shareholders board, and she declares her intention to win him back. Very clever and well done. She’s gambling everything on this. Very amusing, or would be, save for the fact that Ohno can’t play at her level and win.”

“Mais Alys, this is not a chess match. This is real!” Renée-Caroline reminded her.

“As apt as your chess metaphor is, we’re talking about a woman who could break up Kaoru and Ohno, and you’re talking about it like a game. Is there any shred of humanity in you?” chided Sora, watching with some fascination as Alys twisted off bite size pieces from her bagel.

“There is only ice in my veins,” deadpanned the academic, popping a bit of bagel into her mouth. “Yet joking aside, I am afraid this is the stark reality. Ohno can’t hope to win playing the game at her level. He would most likely respond to the gambit rather than decline it. She wants him to respond. The only way to thwart her is to put a foot down and not respond to this feint.”

“Why aren’t you’re not the least surprised?” Chiaki asked, anxiously eyeing her shaking hands and the bloodstained tissue paper on the table.

“Are you not disturbed? Did you know? Did Monsieur Ninomiya tell you like Masaki told me?” enquired Renée-Caroline, patting Alys’s hand as she coughed.

“I know what you tell me. The freeloader did not say anything. It is too sensitive a work-related topic for him to broach with me. However, I have had my suspicions from the questions Ohno had been posing on power politics,” was the calm reply as the philosopher read the English version of the Nikkei Financial Times for a more in-depth analysis on the stock purchase. “It appears the Umebayashi Group is restructuring divisions in the technology wing to deal with cash drains. A most interesting development raising a most interesting question.”

“The ‘why’ question.” Sora nodded, finishing the rest of her eggs.

“Precisely,” Alys said between coughs. “Why invest so largely in an industry she has no experience in if it would lead to potential cash drains? Unless, of course, it meant that the cash drains were already existent prior to the stock purchases. The 20% stake in the J Storm label is a sure-fire means of turning a profit, serving to bring in the dividends to cover the cash drains with near immediacy, aid the restructuring of the Umebayashi Tech wing and boost investor confidence in Umebayashi’s technology stocks. However, like any good analyst, I have two residual questions, videlicit: one – what necessitated the restructuring of a sound corporation; two – what brought about the cash drains of the technological face of the company?”

“Indeed.” Chiaki frowned and nodded. “It would be too simple to say she bought the shares to make a play for Ohno, or because of the profit of the record label.”

“Alors, why does she need so much money now when she has a multimillion dollar business firm?” was Renée-Caroline’s realistic question.

“Exactly, there isn’t a liability in J Storm because it’s blue chip stocks. She would continue to receive regular dividends even if, blessed Athena forbid, the boys’ management company isn’t doing well. Inversely, her need for security in dividend payouts suggests, as my sainted grandmother would say, she is covering ten pots with nine pot covers,” Alys intoned animatedly between coughs while pushing up her glasses and perusing the newspapers.

“It still doesn’t explain why something’s rotten in the state of the Umebayashi Group.” Chiaki shook her head and her friend’s habit of reducing everything to either a game or an academic exercise.

Renée-Caroline lit a cigarette and shook her head as she had no explanation to offer.

Sora leaned forward, pulled down the newspaper covering Alys’s face and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “I have it.”

“Quoi?” The maestra snapped her fingers to encourage the novelist to speak.

“How did you manage to…” The botanist turned to look sharply at her.

“As a former member of the kazoku, I am still able to pull a few strings.” Sora smiled smugly and leaned in closer to the table, much amused by the startled expression on Chiaki’s usually no-nonsense mien and the studied blasé air about Alys. “The Group has been profit warned. It is expected to make a slump in the first fiscal quarter.” She paused when Chiaki blinked blankly at her and Alys curled her lips into a faint smirk of interest. “Umebayashi Engineering has been selling some of its R&D investments for a more liquid stake in the service industry. My Nijo and Konoe cousins inform me that they suspect scalping.”

“Scalping?” Chiaki and Renée-Caroline questioned simultaneously, not following the train of thought of their two companions.

“A form of market manipulation.” The professor flicked her wrist and explained, “It occurs when price gaps are arbitrarily created when trading securities, currency and commodities. The rule there is to play hard, play large, play fast, pull out even faster. Dangerous stuff, even the freeloader and I don’t play games of that nature.”

Chiaki with her usual logic and sense and immediately grasped the concept and was appalled by what was suggested. “Why does a large conglomerate have to provide a false impression to the market by playing around with the asking price?”

“Dites moi, what would bluffing the trader or seller do?” Renée-Caroline added.

“By fiddling with the bids, there is a tremendous amount of capital to be had if you play it right. The rationale for this stems from the avaricious desire to obtain a large profit per share by going large with the buying and selling. Precisely because they are playing hard and fast, the second cardinal rule is to never hold stocks for long periods of time,” said Alys propping up her cheek on a hand as she coughed into another piece of tissue paper. When the coughs subsided, she turned back to the novelist and the gestured for her to continue. “The company held volatile stock overnight? Imbecilic!”

“Whose doing was it? The new CEO or the former CEOs?” Chiaki asked.

Sora cracked a crooked smile. If someone had told her two years ago that she would be friends with a botanist-biotechnologist, the maestra of an orchestra and a Todai philosophy professor she would have consigned the person to the lunatic asylum. She was amazed at how they got along and were able to meet on a level of intellectual equality. For most of her life, she had held the erroneous view that most people were helplessly stupid and not worth her time getting to know. However, extended acquaintance with her present company had overturned that notion with their quick minds and humanity.

“When the late Umebayashi husband and wife bought and sold chunks of the Konoe family owned Kujaku hotel and resorts stocks in after-hours trading, the Nijos in the stock exchange suspected swing trading,” the novelist-mangaka elucidated. “The Konoes responded by pulling out capital from the hotel stocks. The resultant sudden price change killed the Umebayashi Group’s capital in play by catching them unprepared. Their sudden deaths meant they couldn’t sell to recoup their losses. Given Umebayashi Saeko’s response for quick liquidation and her investment in the blue chip stock of J Storm, she had not been aware of the scalping.”

“Until recently,” Renée-Caroline sighed, knitting her brows at the complicated mess that they had uncovered. “Alors, what would it mean if she purchased more J Storm shares?”

“Which means she would be doing all she can to keep her conglomerate afloat,” Chiaki said with a generous shake of her head at the unseemly dirtiness of the business and corporate world.

“Is there any current danger of flight-to-liquidity?” asked Alys, coughing and surreptitiously checking her watch for the time, for she had a lecture to deliver at 10am.

“Or panic selling? Is there a danger of that?” Renée-Caroline whispered while patting the professor’s hand again, frowning at the bloody tissue papers tucked besides the older woman’s plate.

“Not if Umebayashi covers her losses,” Sora intoned gravely.

“What about Kaoru?” Chiaki asked, handling a fresh packet of tissue to the violently hacking professor.

The novelist thumped the table in self-annoyance at forgetting the unfortunate fiancée who was likely to be caught in the crossfire between Saeko and Ohno. “Kaoru-chan isn’t going to throw up her hands and say that it’s Ohno’s loss like Chiaki, or channel it through writing like I would, or carry out elaborate revenge plots like Alys, or stick a baton up his arse like Renée-Caroline. Should we tell her?”

“Mesdames, she is not chinaware. She will not break,” Renée-Caroline firmly interjected. “We should tell her.”

“Confound it!” Alys exclaimed in English, rolling her eyes. “Just tell her and get over and done with it! Vacillating between telling and not telling borders on Ohno-esque indecision. Come what may, we are going to screw our courage to the sticking-plate and tell her, damn the consequences!” she continued, coughing desperately and raggedly into her hand.

“She deserves to know, if she hasn’t already suspected,” Chiaki reminded her present company, giving Alys a suspicious look as if she knew that the academic was hiding something from everyone.

“Of course she suspects; we suspected!” Alys rolled her eyes to highlight her belief that it should be plainly obvious to all. It was a comment that drew the agreement of all the ladies present as they discussed the best way of approaching Kaoru with this disagreeable development in the fabric of her relationship with her fiancé.

NOTES

Risk is used in the economic and financial sense in the chapter title where Risk = (probability of event occurring) X (impact of event occurring). In finance, risk is the probability that an investment's actual return will be different than expected. This includes the possibility of losing some or all of the original investment. A fundamental idea in finance is the relationship between risk and return. The greater the potential return one might seek, the greater the risk that one generally assumes.

Liquidity refers both to that quality of a business which enables it to meet its payment obligations, in terms of possessing sufficient liquid assets; and to such assets themselves. Liquid assets can be sold rapidly, with minimal loss of value, anytime within market hours. The essential characteristic of a liquid market is that there are ready and willing buyers and sellers at all times. This is based on the probability that the next trade is executed at a price equal to the last one. A market is liquid if there are ready and willing buyers and sellers in large quantities. In contrast, an illiquid asset is an asset which is not readily salable due to uncertainty about its value or lacking a market in which it is regularly traded. A product’s liquidity of a product is dependent on how often it is bought and sold. Traditionally, investors look at the stock exchange and future markets as liquid markets because the shares in the stock exchange can be converted quickly. Speculators may affect the liquidity of the market by taking advantage of the fact that some market makers are willing to pay a higher price for the asset in a liquid market than for comparable assets without a liquid secondary market. This in turn brings us to liquidity risk.

Liquidity risk is the risk that a given security or asset cannot be traded quickly enough in the market to prevent a loss (or make the required profit).

In light of what readers now know by liquidity and risk, readers are expected to see the significance of liquid investments, understand Saeko’s business model and worldview, and read behind the lines whenever the ladies talk economics and business like they do in this chapter.

This story also has investments and liquidity and risk management as themes. I leave it to the readers to interpret these two issues vis-à-vis the story.

Alys mentions Saeko making a King’s Gambit in paragraph 11. The King's Gambit is one of the oldest documented openings in chess. Although now rarely seen at Master level, it is used frequently in amateur games in order for Black to maintain the one pawn advantage, moves must be made that seriously weaken the position of the White pieces. Black can obtain a reasonable position by relinquishing the extra pawn at a later time and consolidating defensively. Ideally, King's Gambit should end in a draw with best play by both sides as the forcefulness of the opening moves is a gambit equally well attacked and defended is never a decisive game, either on one side or the other. However, because of the difficulty of White players responding/accepting the Gambit and surviving, some grandmasters have called the King’s Gambit a “decisive mistake” and that “it is almost madness to play the King's Gambit”.

The way Alys talks about the King’s Gambit indicates she places herself in the black player’s position. This time, she does not do so out of choice (even though she prefers to play black herself). She puts herself in the Black’s position because she observes Saeko has made the first move. In chess, White traditionally makes the first move. In the King’s Gambit, White opens with e4 and then e5 (yes, white opens with 2 moves in the opening in this gambit and this gambit alone). Black, if he/she chooses to accept the gambit will have to play f4.

Although one of the early chapter titles is ‘Queen’s Gambit’, I mean that metaphorically because a ‘would-be queen’ starts the game and besides, only 1 move occurs in that chapter. When Alys says ‘King’s Gambit’, she refers to the specific fact that Saeko makes 2 moves when she opens (cf. para above).

When Sora mentions “As a former member of the Kazoku…”, she is referring to her links to the former aristocracy. Kazoku literally means flowery lineage was the peerage system in Japan used between 1869-1947. Under this system, the heirs of the five regent houses (go-seike) of the Fujiwara clan (namely the Konoe, Takatsukasa, Kujo, Ichijo and Nijo all became princes.

Glossary – French

Par Dieu = By God (an exclamation equivalent to ‘My goodness’ or ‘By Jove’).
Ma chère = my dear (used when subject is female)
Alys, ma chère = Alys, my dear
Bonjour ma chère Chiaki = good morning, my dear
Mais = but/however
Quoi = what
Dites moi = tell me
Mesdames = ladies
Alors = Well then. *Please note ‘Alors’ has no real English equivalent.

Glossary – Miscellaneous

Videlicit = namely, or that is to say
If you recall from Ch 36.5 Between Wit & Sarcasm, Alys finds acronyms and shortening terminology vulgar. Hence she calls ‘pub’ by its proper name ‘public house’. Where possible, she uses the actual term. Here, she uses the actual Latin form of the phrase“that is to say.” In scholarly articles, videlicit is shortened to “viz.”

Chapter 013 – Between praxis and phronesis

The news of Umebayashi Saeko’s 20% stake in J Storm was made public exactly a week after the deal had gone through, and it made the headlines in the finance and economics pages. The purchase was not only remarked upon by the newspaper reading sectors of Tokyo, for it was also had been remarked upon by Sakurai Sho as soon as he returned from his 6am run around his neighbourhood and perused the Tokyo Financial Times. Although the news initially excited no great concern for him, he became more disturbed as he read on. The analysts were predicting Umebayashi Tech stocks to soar, and an increase in revenue to the whole of Umebayashi Group after the cash drains and debt burdens of the corporation were settled. His eyes widened at the mention of debt burdens. Was that the reason why Umebayashi Saeko had bought up enough stock in J Storm to have voting say on the label’s board of directors?

The debt burden could only have come about from a restructuring of the company. As far as he knew, the Umebayashi Group did not require any corporate restructuring when it had bought stock in another company. If anything, it was the other company, namely the J Storm side, that needed restructuring to fit it with the expectations of the Umebayashi projected profit margins. The only reason why the large conglomerate needed restructuring was if it was in debt. Should the company be in debt, it would require a large economic turnover to offset the losses it had incurred, and that would explain why Saeko had bought chunks of J Storm stock. She needed financial returns and fast. However, that explanation only presented another question – why was the Umebayashi Group in debt and how much did it require that it would have to take a record label on a ride on the technological and engineering highway for near immediate and almost guaranteed returns? There was no doubt in Sho’s mind that Saeko knew buying stocks in J Storm was a sound investment. The label made millions, and their songs, albums and singles were purchased by fans all over the world so much so that the turnover rate far exceeded the breakeven cost. What had happened that Saeko needed large sums of fast money? That was the foremost question on his mind when he walked into JE Central.

Sho’s arrival in the Arashi room with his laptop and newspapers did not occasion more than a fleeting interest until it became apparent that he was wound up tighter than a jack-in-the-box. The others who arrived minutes later one after another could not help but notice the dark storm cloud hanging over his head as he pored through the newspapers and typed rapidly into the laptop.

“What’s eating Sho-chan?” quizzed Aiba in a loud whisper with a hand on his cheek as he pressed his face against his stuffed toy dog’s and squeezed on the sofa between Jun and Nino.

“Is he hungry? People can be grumpy when hungry,” Ohno said, staring at his open sketchbook and tapping his pencil on it.

“Not with that face, ne,” came MatsuJun’s laconic response as Aiba wormed closer towards the youngest man. “Oi! Aiba-chan, will you stop that! You’d crumple my clothes, ne!”

“Has it ever occurred to you to ask Sho what’s bothering him instead of bugging me when I’m playing a game?” snapped Nino waspishly, kicking Aiba’s foot away.

“Nice idea, Nino! Ne, you’re beginning to sound like mama,” Aiba giggled, peering over Ohno’s sketchbook that was still disappointingly blank.

“Really? It must be something I can pick up from her like oh-say a cough, because I sure as hell can’t catch a wink of sleep with her hacking away in the study all night! I really love it when she locks me out and I can’t even catch a strand of her hair!” retorted the smaller man, tightly crossing his legs and shuffling cards in his hands.

“Did you fight with mama over money again? Quarrels about money always end up bad because my Okaachan refuses to sleep in the same room with Oyaji if they’ve fought over money.” Aiba nodded at his soft toy, making it nod in agreement with him.

“We haven’t any money, what’s there to quarrel over! But she’s keeping me from my beauty sleep! Damn witch doesn’t see that I don’t mind being kept up if she wants me bound in chains and reading to her while she touches…”

“Too much information, ne,” Jun reminded him, moving away to the far end of the sofa in horror, clutching a book close to his chest.

“Wait! Are you frustrated because mama refused to sleep with you?” Aiba asked, his ears instantly pricking up at the mention of anything veering into the topic of sex and general perversity.

“Yeah, like I need her to function normally! It’s that cough! It’s driving me crazy!” the gamer shot back, still shuffling his cards.

“So it’s not about sex?”

“Shut up!” Jun helpfully smacked the back of Aiba’s head. “She still hasn’t seen the doctor, eh?” He turned to a silently fuming Nino with a sympathetic shake of his head, wondering to himself why Nino did not simply drag Alys by force to a doctor. Surely, he could not be that stingy as to refuse to pay for his girlfriend’s medical consultation.

“You could try asking mama if she…”

Sho looked up from his newspapers, groaning and swatting away Aiba’s attempt to creep towards him in a poor imitation of a sneaky tiptoe. “Nino’s bed is his business.”

“Mah, mah, Nino’s just worried,” Ohno interjected in the interest of peace.

“As worried about his little professor as I am about the state about our record label,” said Sho gravely, pushing aside his laptop so that Aiba could check his morning emails.

“Has she threatened you too?” Ohno asked quietly, putting aside his pencil on realising that he wasn’t in the mood to draw.

“Now that you mention it, ne, what did she want with you the other day, eh?” Jun raised a suggestive and teasing brow. “Did she, ne, offer you a settlement for disappearing on you all those years ago?”

Ohno’s gaze faltered as his mouth quivered into a pout. “Will everyone promise not to get angry?”

“I told you they wouldn’t be,” Nino said bracingly, leaning his head on his best friend’s shoulder.

“Spill, Ohno-kun, what did she want?” Sho demanded, miraculously preserving his calm.

The oldest member of Arashi swallowed valiantly. “Me.”

“You?” repeated Jun, removing his glasses to better express his disbelief in a well-executed glare.

A sarcastic laugh escaped Nino. “Is it so difficult to believe? I want a piece of him too.”

“Eh? What does that mean?” asked Aiba, looking to the shocked faces of Jun and Sho for help in deciphering what seemed to him to be an extremely cryptic remark. He had understood it well enough, however, he did not want to think that it was true.

Ohno sighed in his determination to make a clean breast of the situation and quickly clarified, “Saeko… She wants me back.”

“Like the way you were?” Jun enquired forebodingly, tightly folding his arms.

“The penny drops! So that’s why she bought enough to transfer securities to voting stock! She’s cunning, I give her that much,” Sho exclaimed in sudden realisation and reached for his mobile to input a quick message. “What did you tell her?”

“That I’m engaged to be married.”

“What did she say, Riida?” asked Aiba kindly, offering him the plushie dog for a hug. It was an offer that was quickly squashed by Nino who promptly stepped on the unfortunate toy.

“That I could get disengaged.” Ohno said quietly.

“That’s too much!” cried Aiba with great feeling.

“Damn right,” Nino concurred, putting aside his game.

“What I want to know, ne, is what are we going to do about it, ne?” asked Jun. “Professionally, we can go on as before, ne? What about privately, eh? What are we going to do about her claws on our Riida?”

“Nino says it’s my game and I have to play it.” Ohno pouted unhappily and hung his head, not feeling any better despite having unburdened himself to his friends.

“That’s going too far.” Aiba shot a reproving look at Nino.

“Oh yeah? What do you expect me to say? You want me to lie and say things would be okay?” challenged the gamer in a low growl. “It’s not like he’s alone. We’re in it as well.”

“Nino has a point, ne,” acknowledged Jun, pressing his fingertips together and forming a steeple at his chin. “Ano ne, this is an Arashi matter, we’re in it together.”

“Does she know about Kaoru?” asked Sho thoughtfully with a frown as he considered various worst-case-scenarios of what Saeko could do to Kaoru. Sho was a firm believer in the maxim that hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned.

Ohno shook his head. “I didn’t tell her about Kaoru, only that I was engaged.”

“Keep it that way,” Jun suggested, tapping his fingertips together. “Constant vigilance, ne, is what we need. No mentions of Kaoru must ever be said in front of the Umebayashi woman. If we’re going to use names, ne, make sure we don’t use real names or real places. We have to keep that woman as far away as possible from Kaoru.”

Aiba sighed, hugged his plushie dog closer to himself and screwed his eyes shut, hoping that it was a nightmare and that it would all go away. But it wouldn’t go away, not when he could hear everyone’s heavy sighs and the muffled thumping sounds of Ohno banging his head on the sofa armrest. He opened his eyes again when a thought occurred to him. it was a thought to which he did not have an immediate answer. Thus far, the discussion pertained to what they would do vis-à-vis Ohno and Kaoru, and that was only half the equation. “What are we going to do about Umebayashi Saeko?” he asked, the raspy edge in his voice all the more apparent from his distress that this unpleasantness should be happening to his friends.

“Excellent question,” commended Sho approvingly. “Do we act or do we wait?”

“We do exactly what she’s doing to us now, ne,” replied Jun with a grim purse of his lips. “We observe her.”

NOTES

Praxis in ancient Greek lingo may simply be understood as theory.

Phronesis in ancient Greek lingo is practical wisdom, frequently translated as prudence.

I used praxis and phronesis as the chapter title because I want readers to reflect on the difference between them and how each character in this chapter and the whole story tries to balance theory and the act of doing something prudently. Think about the implications of this.

Chapter 012 – Sidestepping the gambit

There was no way for Ohno to tell what Nino, that perversely perceptive and sarcastic creature, meant when he alluded to the game of power politics. He had dined with Nino and Alys to better understand the concept, and yet, Ohno was no closer to understanding it or unravelling the reason why he should have to play and win a game he was so unwillingly thrust into. Years of friendship with Nino had taught him that the younger man’s perverse enjoyment in watching situations unravel out of control meant that Nino was likely more interested in the outcome of the situation resulting from Saeko’s declaration than in steering him out of the perilous waters of power politics. Any hope that Nino’s little professor would explain the premises of the political game was also doomed to failure for Alys brought in the political realism of Hans Morgenthau and spoke about Machiavelli with such tremendous enthusiasm that Ohno was frightened into thinking that politics was a very troublesome thing requiring a lot of thinking and planning if one wanted to emerge unscathed as a victor. Ohno suspected Nino was much deeper involved in what went on in Central and their record label than he let on, but he had never uttered a word on the matter. However, Ohno knew in his heart that Nino was a keen observer, an able verbal fencer, and a dabbler in any game he deemed challenging, even if the younger man gave no show of surprise at the revelation that Saeko wanted him back. Ohno could not understand why Nino seemed to think it natural that Saeko should make a declaration to that effect.

He had repeatedly reiterated his personal feelings on the matter to Nino in the days following Saeko’s revelation. “You’re telling me to play a game I don’t understand. This isn’t like play acting for drama or butai, Kazu,” he protested.

“Do you still believe yourself in love with Saeko?” questioned Nino when he dropped by the theatre where the older fellow was rehearsing his butai.

“Iya, it’s not that.”

“Then what is it?” The younger man placed a supportive hand on his best friend’s shoulder.

“It’s not that I’m not glad she’s back. I’m happy to see her again. But you know how I used to laugh at the things she did and the things she said? I can’t do that anymore. It’s like she’s become untouchable now, not in the way like we’re touching now, and that’s only because you’re touchy-feely.” He paused and took Nino’s hand with the convulsive grip of someone who was internally afflicted and frightened. “It’s like I’m scared of her now. She wasn’t like that from six years back, was she? I can’t see, and I don’t see why but I am scared of her and what she can do. I ask myself when I think about it – was that what she always was like? Was that what she was like when we were young and really liked each other?”

“Her?” Nino snorted, twitching his lips into a disdainful smirk. “She’s probably always been that way.”

“I feel a little sorry for her because I think a part of it is my fault for not making a clean break with her, but the feeling of being sorry for her keeps becoming fear.”

“Captain!” exclaimed Nino in frustration, grabbing his friend’s chin and looking straight into his eyes. “You don’t have to be scared of her if you know what she’s like, and you do know what she’s like. You can play it to your advantage.”

“Why should I play it? I can’t see why I should play it!”

“You will do it because Arashi’s future is at stake. You will do it because of Kaoru. You will do it because that damn Saeko bitch doesn’t believe in honour like Sora. You will do it because that damn bitch isn’t upright like Chiaki, or thoughtful of others’ feelings like Renée-Caroline, and she doesn’t have Alys’s self-restraint. That’s her true face! Meet her head on in this or we sink!” Nino said severely.

Ohno flushed at these words, silently acknowledging the truth therein. “I don’t like doing it, Kazu! I don’t want to do it!”

“Yeah? I hate playing games at that level too, but it’s never stopped me! Damn it! You must contrive a win in this or Arashi will never be the same again. The guys know that the bitch’s 20% stake in our label means a change in the way J Storm does business. They know she would be watching our every move. Did you hear Sho yesterday? We’re an investment. We screw up and we’re dead. We’ve gone from being Johnny-san’s money cows to that Saeko woman’s shares in the J Storm label. How’s that for objectification! What happens to you then when you don’t give her the returns she expects? You’d probably never be the same again! Don’t forget our women, Satoshi! Each of them has a wing spread over Kaoru. If anything should happen and Kaoru’s heart is broken, they would do things to you that would make the things Alys and I do seem like a walk in the park,”

“Kaoru and Okaasan wouldn’t let them do that,” continued Ohno, ignoring his friend’s vivid descriptions of medieval torture devices.

“Wanna bet? Your mother would stand guard while the ladies tear you limb from limb,” Nino told him grimly.

Ohno wasted three days dwelling on this violent prospect, but arrived at the conclusion that if he continued to be polite to Saeko and continue as he had been, there could be no truth in Nino’s pessimistic prediction. By the weekend, he was expending his frustrations on his clays while considering whether it would be expedient for him to keep the whole situation a secret from Kaoru when his mother announced that his fiancée had arrived.

He looked up from his blob of clay with a sheepish smile as Kaoru came in, and offered her his untouched breakfast while hastily mumbling that he was trying to create something and had gotten carried away.

A quick glance darted to the ball of clay in his hands and his slightly flustered appearance would give anyone intimately acquainted with Ohno Satoshi to doubt his words. As his fiancée, Kaoru was more than commonly in tune with his peculiarities. The perfunctory glance she had thrown over his art studio was all it took for her to surmise that something was troubling him. Even so, she gave no indication that she was surprised by his blatant lie, or an indication that she knew it to be a lie. She merely smiled placidly at him and shook her head gently.

“I’ve eaten already,” she said. “Oh, I’ve brought the backdrop designs for your new butai.”

“Eh?” pouted Ohno apologetically, finally putting aside the clay he had been unable to shape.

There fell a sudden stillness. “The designs for the backdrops of your new play,” repeated Kaoru, holding out an A4 envelope to him. “Be as cruel as you like in your critique.”

He received the envelope and made a half-hearted attempt to peep at its contents without so much as removing the papers. “They look nice.”

A slight pause fell over them as he briefly considered telling all to Kaoru. However, he found himself unable to give voice to his fears. Being a soft-hearted individual, he believed that he was partially as responsible for Saeko’s present guise of a frightening corporate raider as he was responsible for her belief that she still stood at chance at getting him back. He knew, like any person with a modicum of commonsense, that he should have firmly told her that he was involved with someone who was shortly to be his wife. However, his unfailing politeness that endeared him to many had now placed him in this trap. He could tell Kaoru, and she would reason with him, and perhaps even ask to have a ‘sit down’ with Saeko. He knew Kaoru was equal to it, as she lacked his natural cautiousness when she was angry. He had seen her fling tins of paint on canvas in anger and frustrations at her male students at Musashino who refused to take her nude figure drawing classes seriously. But what if Saeko took things the wrong way and exerted her considerable influence to block Kaoru’s career in art? He had heard whispers between Nino and Sho that Alys’s academic career was nearly ruined by a former love rival. He had no wish for a similar fate to befall Kaoru.

The matter with Saeko was not as hopeless as he saw it, or so he wanted to believe. It would be a dark road ahead if he were to deal with her and Ohno did not relish it. But what else was to be done? Saeko had steered him like a small fishing skiff into a whirlpool, and it was up to him to get out of it. The more he thought about it, the more he developed an ambition to steer himself out of the whirlpool without anyone’s help. He could not bring himself to tell Kaoru about Saeko because it could potentially put her face to face in an encounter with the corporate raider. His masculine pride was roused and he was determined to shoulder the responsibility of dealing with Saeko alone.

Kaoru realised with dismay that he was out of humour with himself. It was apparent from the way he squared his shoulders. To see him attempt to work on art and not produce anything pained her, for it bespoke of the weighty cares on his minds – concerns so utterly perturbing to him that he lacked the heart and inspiration to throw himself fully into that which he loved. She wondered whether she was the cause of his apparent dejection and if he would tell her how she could relieve his worries. She was tempted to enquire after his troubles. However, she held back, thinking that her lack of knowledge of his work and of music in general rendered her ill-equipped to provide either a listening ear or sound advice. Moreover, there was no assurance that an enquiry into his work troubles would palliate the nerves of her worried, red-faced fiancé. He could interpret her questions as prying and she had no wish to be seen as a prying wife. Kaoru only feared one thing more than her inability to produce paintings of artistic merit, and that was the loss of her Satoshi’s good opinion. It seemed that she was being put to the test, and she would have to tread gingerly.

Thus, she cracked a smile and wiped the residue of the clay from his hands, speaking deliberately as she did so, “Has work been very bad?”

“It’s been the same,” he answered, curling his fingers around Kaoru’s as she tried to clean his hands.

He knew she was asking him to confide in her. As she was his affianced, almost his wife, he would readily have done so. Yet, he was loath to involve her in the matter and throw her to the shark that was Saeko. The thing as it stood with Saeko refusing to back down from her declaration was already bad enough. It was true that he felt responsible for Arashi now that Saeko had stated her stance and her stake in J Storm. He knew that he had considerable experience in dealing with difficult people in managerial positions. He had encountered a few in the many play productions of which he was a part, and he believed he had watched Nino, Jun and Sho talk business with all kinds of people involved in any Arashi production and concert to know what to do in professional dealings with Saeko. But he also knew that things invariably became complicated when emotions were involved, especially women’s emotions. He had no wish to hurt Kaoru, and he certainly had no wish to hurt Saeko any more than she had been hurting for the past six years.

“But your art isn’t the same, Satoshi-kun. Art never lies,” she murmured, staring intently at him as if doing so would allow her to absorb the unease on his mind and put him in his usual sanguinity.

“Eh? I’m just tired from the butai rehearsals, and learning the lyrics of the new single, and trying to think up dance steps for it.” He offered her a smile and pinched her nose to give credence to the act that he was untroubled.

“Hontou?” she asked, levelling her wide-eyed gaze at him

He nodded and smiled again at her. He couldn’t tell her and spoil drag her into thing that Saeko started. He would have to do this by himself. Everything from Arashi’s future to that of his career as a JE artiste depended on how dealt with Saeko. He smiled wryly at himself when he realised Nino was right. It was his game, and he had no choice but to play it.

NOTES

The gambit in this chapter’s title refers to a chess opening where the first player risks a piece (usually a pawn) with the hope of achieving a resulting advantageous position. Sidestepping the gambit maybe understood as dealing with the gambit through accepting it or refusing it. Whether the gambit is accepted or refused in this chapter is something readers must discern for themselves.