51 posts tagged “from cover to cover”

My readers know me as many things: some in the Harry Potter fandom call me Diotima Lestrange, RPG friends call me either Murasaki or Saki-chan, online Arashi friends call me Shoko. Who am I? That's a very good question. But if you are looking for a simple or easy answer, I am sorry to say that I haven't one. Since existential angst on 'what' and 'who' I am will likely bore you, I shall say nothing more on that score. If you must call me something, you may either call me Shoko or Lady Strange.

Here be a repository of my Arashi fangirling, fanfics, and other ramblings. Occasionally, there will be some serious talk on life, as well as original fiction and poetry.

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From Cover to Cover – Omake

‘Naked… at the onsen’

Part 5

“Well,” Sora said, worrying her lower lip with her teeth, “that still doesn’t solve what we are going to do next…”

Running feet on the stairs made her break off mid-sentence, and to be honest, she wasn’t sure what to do next, short of dosing Alys and Nino with narcotics instead of dealing with the Ninomiyas’ request for game tactics. Thus, it was that she and Jun peered nervously at the approaching runners.

Sho, Chiaki, Ohno and Kaoru burst into view. The ladies were covering themselves in such a way with their towels so as to display a minimum of torso flesh – a feat that Jun appreciated greatly. Ohno seemed to be clutching a towel at his waist while Sho was concealing what he had to conceal with merely a wooden bath-bucket.

Jun and Sora reacted simultaneously, both raising their hands to shield Kaoru’s innocent and chaste eyes.

“Kaoru-chan!” Jun growled, delivering a mighty glare at Sho for good measure. “Don’t look at that!”

“I’m an artist and I teach nude figure drawing at Musashino Art University, don’t you know,” Kaoru protested, blushing somewhat as she went up on tiptoe to get a better view. “Moreover, I’m sure he isn’t as developed as…”

Grasping the situation better than the rest, Chiaki’s ears pricked up at the sounds of Renée-Caroline’s footsteps somewhere on the stairs (presumably in search of Aiba). At least, she wouldn’t have to worry about the maestra and the resident idiot, she thought while looking into the still-open bedroom door to the Ninomiyas’ inner sanctum. She peered into the room, then past Jun and Sora trying to shield Kaoru’s eyes, then at Ohno who had pottered next to Nino and was asking him about grilled fish, until her eyes finally rested on the Ninomiyas as they seemingly ignored everyone else and concentrated on their respective DSes.

It was at that exact moment when Chiaki decided to call a tactical retreat (since there was obviously no calamity to avert). However before she could give voice to that noble suggestion, Nino’s voice resounded sharply, “You aren’t thinking of interrupting us, are you? Because if you are, I’ll have to ask you to see yourselves out the door.”

The “Us, interrupt you?” at the tip of Sho’s tongue would have sounded unconvincing and was exactly the sort of excuse Aiba would make. For a brief moment, Sho thought he should say “Yes, and can I recommend that you close your door if you do not want anyone interrupting you?” would have the benefits of honesty, but might not get the best results vis-à-vis the volatile Ninomiyas.

In the end, Sho weakly muttered amidst the creaking of the floorboards, “Are we interrupting anything?”

Rain hissed and rattled and thudded against the roof, and all of them looked up for a moment.

“It’s raining heavily again,” Alys sighed, shivering a little.

“As mournful as the tears of bitterness whispering in our minds,” murmured Sora, clearly slipping into novelist mode.

“I’ll ring the front desk guy for more blankets and a hot brick for you when I’ve cleared this level. Here, come closer under my futon,” Nino offered, ignoring the novelist’s temporisation.

Ever sensible to her surroundings, Chiaki coughed lightly. “Excuse me, everyone, but I think we should all go to bed and catch some sleep. We can settle all this peacefully if we all just…”

A tall form stepped into view at the head of the stairs. There was a mad, still-concussed light glinting in Aiba’s mismatched eyes. “No. I wanted to ask if Sho-chan knew where Caro-chan was. You will all not succeed in keeping my Caro-chan and her bosom from me any longer!”

Those words had the effect and everyone in the Ninomiyas’ room turned to look pityingly at Aiba. While he was not yet brandishing his A no Arashi laboratory coat or his magnifying glass, there was a less-than-subtle threat in his posture that he would not hesitate to subject his friends to harebrained experiments if he was not shown the way to this ‘Caro-chan’ person soon. The dazed, confused, and generally angry look in his eyes was merely a corollary to the general danger of having an irritated experiment-crazed Aiba in the bedroom corridor and less than a metre away.

“Caro-chan?” Ohno half-turned to look at Chiaki and Sho, his hands already moving into their usual shape for modelling clay. “Have any of you seen a Caro-chan?’

“Not hide nor hair,” stated Alys quickly in her crispest and curtest accent. She nudged at Nino with her toe. “Have you?”

“Don’t know anyone by that name. Wouldn’t recognise him or her if I had,” Nino agreed. “Probably slipped out the back way to escape from you. That fellow sounds like my kind of person – a damnably good wily bugger.”

Aiba paused a moment, then shook his head. “Do not expect to fool me so easily. Your pitiful impostures are heroic but doomed to failure. Hand her over…”

“Oh, so it’s a she!” Kaoru exclaimed in amazement.

“I still think she’s a wily bugger,” opined Nino stoutly without lifting his eyes from his game console. “Good for her.”

“Quite right you are too,” the professor concurred bracingly as she pressed two buttons on her DS with veiled ferocity.

Aiba made a sound resembling a cross between a pig squeal and a harrumphing snort. “Oi! I repeat, hand her over…”

“Hand her over or what? I already dealt with you once already tonight,” Sho interrupted, and in so doing, he cleared up the mystery in Ohno’s mind as to who threw the bath-bucket at the hapless Aiba earlier. “You want some more, huh?” Sho raised his bath-bucket and shook it threateningly. “You want some more of this, huh?”

A sudden current of cold air reminded him of where he had been holding that bucket seconds before. Seven pairs of eyes moved downwards on their own volition.

“Physiologically normal, and no that much different from the models in my art classes,” Kaoru blushed as she tiptoed for a better look.

In between, Chiaki hissed that Sho should have some standards of decency.

“Kaoru!” Jun gasped in horror. “Don’t look!”

Nino snorted dismissively and returned to the exigencies of his game and Alys shrugged her shoulder elegantly as if to say, “Really, some people had no sense of propriety.”

“Hmmm…” Aiba looked thoughtful for a moment as he leant against a wooden pillar, further exacerbating the creaking sounds. “Perhaps . . .”

Attempting to commit this moment in a quick sketch, Ohno pried a loose board from the wall that he could use as a makeshift desk. However that made the creaking sounds of the floorboards evolve into a loud series of cracks at their feet.

These sounds were also audible to Renée-Caroline who had returned to the baths downstairs for a long relaxing soak by herself. For a moment, she wondered whether she ought to be alarmed by the alternatively creaking and cracking sounds overheard. However she dismissed the sounds as figments of her imagination with a mildly martyred sigh. Keeping Aiba in check was harrowing and tiring work, and Renée-Caroline felt she deserved some time to rest and relax on her own before she took up reins to her duty to curb Aiba’s personal proclivities again.

Just as she lowered herself more completely into the hot, enveloping water, the ceiling creaked once very loudly and then fell.

By the time the collapse had finished, Kaoru found herself on top of the pile. She was vaguely conscious of a masculine form underneath her, of a firm chest which she was reclining upon whose voice was murmuring somewhat incoherently, “Caro-chan, pretty bosom…. Don’t run away boing-boing butt…”

With a strange combination of great pleasure and slight reluctance, she reached for one of the scattered ceiling timbers and knocked the dazed Aiba over the head with it, before scrambling off and helping Ohno extricate himself. Fortunately he hadn’t been severely hurt. In fact, Ohno had even, with great deftness, managed to hang onto the towel around his waist.

The seven of them eventually stood around the bathtub, glaring at each other with varying degrees of pretended anonymity. Aiba lay in the near-empty tub – most of the water had been expelled during the crash-landing, and was now ankle-high on the floor –
with a dreamy, vacant smile on his unconscious face.

“We should leave for another hostelry, Kazu darling,” Alys stated flatly in English before adding with an indignant sniff in Japanese. “I disapprove of the sort of clientele which this establishment attracts.”

Sho removed the sodden tatters of the towel from around Aiba’s loins for his own use. When he had secured the towel around his waist, he tossed the bath-bucket to cover the unconscious man’s vitals. “You are right, Professor Teng,” concurred Sho helpfully. “I find this place is not quite what one expects from an establishment of quality.”

“Damn right, we’re going.” Nino clutched his lady’s arm almost possessively as he watched her adjusted her spectacles. “Is it still raining out there?”

Everyone tilted their heads to listen.

“Ah, the rain,” Sora sighed. “Those quiet drops, falling from Heaven to Earth . . .”

“. . . reminders of forgotten sorrows,” Jun continued when he recalled that Sora was quoting from one of her latest books, “unable to let the past rest . . ."

Chiaki however blinked when she saw something turning around the corner. “That’s odd. I wonder why Renée-Caroline, the Ninomiyas and the Ohnos felt the need to leave quite so rapidly.”

In the rooms the ladies had booked for the night (and which rooms were also undamaged in the collapse of the ceiling), Alys, Kaoru and Renée-Caroline were busy packing their things and preparing their move to a more respectable hostelry, preferably an Aiba-free one with sturdier floors.

As Alys had not unpacked, all she had to do was change into dry clothes. No sooner had she done so than she drug her bags and herself to the lobby where Nino was waiting for her.

“Do you think they would notice?” Nino asked, his lips curled into an evil smirk, and his eyes dancing mischievously behind his glances as he swept aside her damp fringe.

“I hardly think so,” Alys stated with the barest hint of a smirk lurking at the corner of her mouth as she pushed up her glasses.

“You know what I think, Lise Nee-chan?” Kaoru added quietly as she checked out together with Ohno who was busy carrying his luggage as well as Kaoru’s, Nino’s and Renée-Caroline’s.

“You are going to tell me whether I like it or not,” the professor pointed out as Nino dumped her luggage on Ohno.

“I think,” Kaoru continued, smiling as Nino tied the sash around Alys’s overcoat. “A few more artistic rips in Sho-san’s towel wouldn’t hurt him or any of us.”

~~~~~~~ come morning… ~~~~~~~

The next day, the sun was shining brightly in a cloudless sky as Jun and Sho surveyed the damage done to the inn. The desk clerk would have greeted them with his usual charm and efficiency, but he was too busy trying to repair the large portions of the inn which had suffered blast or steam damage the night before.

“As usual, and as expected,” Sho commented in a half groan as he silently applauded Jun’s foresight in sending the ladies away from the scene of disaster last night. It was a stroke of genius to send Sora and Chiaki away with the departing Renée-Caroline, the Ninomiyas and the Ohnos. Sho certainly did not want to face Chiaki’s no-nonsense wrath when the damage was fully assessed.

Jun shifted uncomfortably on his feet, looking down at the unconscious Aiba floating in the now-refilled hot indoor bath. “I did it last time.”

“You did,” Sho agreed with a sigh. “However, I had to do it all the time at concert venues and within the Jimusho. It’s your turn now.”

Jun grunted something that might have been unwilling assent. He reached one careful arm out, and prodded Aiba with the tip of a finger. “Oi, Aiba-chan . . .”

Aiba reached out and with his eyes still closed, he dragged Jun into a firm embrace. “Caro-chan…” he murmured. “Don’t you and your pretty bosom and boing-boing butt go… Caro-chan…”

“Aiba… Hey, Masaki,” Sho said mildly, observing the scene with a slight smile. “If you squeeze any harder, I believe Jun may suffocate.”

“Caro-chan… pretty bosom… boing…” slurred Aiba.

“Masaki, you should know that Jun is turning an interesting shade of greenish-purple,” Sho advised in the same mild tone.

“Caro-chan…”

~~~~~ finis ~~~~~

From Cover to Cover – Omake

‘Naked… at the onsen’

Part 4

In order to carry out this great deed of physical prowess and mental alertness, Jun leaned his head around the bathroom door cautiously, wary of stray towels or random bath-buckets aimed at his head. He need not have worried, for it did not seem that any of the three persons outside the bathroom door were about to hit him or draw him away by the hair to a fate possibly worse than death. “Any problems, ladies?” Jun asked with gentlemanly concern.

“None whatsoever,” Chiaki hastily put in.

Kaoru popped her head into the male half of the indoor hot spring and caught sight of her intended waving cheerfully at her. The air was perfumed with presumably either Jun’s or Nino’s cigarettes, and she could just make out Sho communing with the floating rubber ducky whose beak he had just prodded. Ohno’s constant splashing, as he waved, made a pleasant sound against the backdrop of the heavy rain outside. “Is Alys Nee-chan or Nino-kun here?” she enquired brightly.

“No!” Jun almost grunted as he folded his arms. “Nino’s gone to bed for the night…”

Sho groaned loudly in the background. “So that’s why he said we were to ignore the noises from his room.”

“There’s a bet going round that he’ll have enough stamina to last through the night,” Chiaki explained, poking her head into the bathroom and waving a greeting at its users.

Face-palming himself and groaning once more, Sho shook his head. “Only the Ninomiyas.” He paused and narrowed his eyes at the botanist. “1000 yen says he does.”

“1000 yen says he doesn’t,” interposed Sora, folding her arms and lighting a cigarette.

“Wait a minute,” cried out Ohno, understanding finally dawning on him. “Is it possible for him to stay alive all night through the early morning if he and Alys are…”

“Too much information!” Jun threw an obliging bath-bucket at the leader of the band. Addressing the ladies, he sought to turn the topic back to its original purpose. “Renée-Caroline’s been here under five minutes ago. She dragged Aiba out.” He paused to introduce a dramatic note into his recapitulation of the facts. “Naked. I’m worried about him getting caught for indecent exposure.”

“Oh, she’s started with the fornication, I take it,” Kaoru commented innocently, making the men choke somewhat in shock at her blithe manner of approaching the issue.

“Eto….” MatsuJun adjusted the towel around his waist, painfully conscious that his robe was soaked and sodden, and the ladies were staring at a certain part of his lower body with vague fascination. Given the circumstances, there was only one thing to do – escape. Thus, he tightened his grip around the towel and muttered an incomprehensible apology.

“Fret not.” Sora hooked her damp hair behind her ear and ran an appraising eye along Jun’s physique, generously offering, “I’ll help search for Aiba and Renée-Caroline.”

A distracted hand ran through his hair while he nodded. “Ano, don’t touch my wine or my cigarettes ne. It’s not for the uninitiated.”

“What do you mean….” Sho began tentatively. But he got no further in his line query for Jun and Sora had navigated down the corridor in search of Renée-Caroline and the errantly naked Aiba.

Luck was on his side, for Jun and Sora found the sinewy forms of Aiba and Renée-Caroline in the corridor upstairs after a great deal of dodging around doorways and peering nervously to check who was coming. Jun’s first glance was at Aiba. When he established that the older man was safe and not worse for wear (despite his naked state), Jun relaxed a little. His second glance at Renée-Caroline gave him some cause for alarm as her face expressed utter shock. Even Sora noted the bewilderment on the maestra’s features and sought to comfort her. The novelist shot a speaking look at Jun in agreement with his unvoiced opinion that poor Renée-Caroline must have seen something no human being should have seen. Wondering what was it she had seen, Jun and Sora nudged Aiba out of the way as they pressed their ears to the door of Nino’s room.

“Oi! That’s underhanded. Keep your hands where I can see them,” Nino half-snarled (or so they heard), the traces of a laugh and faint hitched breath audible to the listeners at the door.

“Get on your knees and I may think about it,” Aly’s voice purred dangerously. Then it hitched slightly. “Ah! Like what you see, don’t you?”

“Kami-sama, you know what I like. Don’t stop,” the voice belonging to gamer drawled.

Jun shook his head and discreetly handed Aiba the spare towel he had grabbed before leaving the bathroom. It would not do for Aiba to be walking around naked in that semi-aroused condition upon eavesdropping on whatever perversity the Ninomiyas were up to. Once Aiba had deigned to cover his vital bits, Jun’s mind turned to the unfortunate Nino.

“They’ve been at it since we’ve before we listened in,” Aiba contributed in an earnest desire to be useful.

“Who knows what tribulations he might be suffering at Alys’s hands?” the youngest Arashi member whispered in concern.

“You’re good at this. But I'm better.” The voice belonging to Nino sounded heavy and uneven. “Damn you! Oh, that’s good! Do it again!”

“You can’t touch me. Don’t even think about it,” lilted the professor’s voice.

“That’s not playing fair!” Nino’s voice whinged in obvious disappointment

“Beg me and I may reconsider,” purred Alys’s voice.

“Par Dieu!” exclaimed Renée-Caroline, still unaccustomed to the insanity marking any typical encounter between Nino and Alys.

“Fortunately for him, it doesn’t sound like he’s overly distressed,” commented Sora, leaning against the door.

Jun sighed and tried to drag Aiba away from the door. It was an exercise in futility as Aiba’s natural perversity overrode his commonsense so much so that he gripped the handle of the door and burst into the chamber. Rolling his eyes and staring at the ceiling as he waited for the outraged yelps of the Ninomiyas (who he had no doubt were in flagrante delicto), Jun scowled and realised he should have stayed in the hot water of the indoor bath and left Aiba to fend for himself. Aiba deserved to be hacked into tiny pieces for running around naked and barging into a friend’s room unannounced. In fact, if Jun hadn’t known better, he would have thought that Aiba liked being abused by Nino and the professor. However, the dead silence following Aiba’s entry into Nino’s room gave him food for thought.

The silence was soon broken by the very crisp and dryly enunciation of the professor in something of a hiss as it drifted out through the open doorway: “Ah, Masa-boy, no one makes an entrance like you.”

“Pfft. It’s a dying art that baka tries to keep alive.” Nino’s voice dripped with industrial strength acid.

“Shouldn’t you make yourself scarce?” the professor snarled lowly in barely concealed irritation.

“Yeah, you heard the woman. Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something? Get lost!” Nino snapped waspishly.

Moving forward together with Renée-Caroline and Sora, Jun peered run the open door to pull the dumbfounded Aiba away. In so doing, he and the two ladies found the professor and the gamer fully clad in flannel pyjamas, lying prone on their futons with their respective DSes in hand. From the scowls and glowers shot their way, it seemed that the couple had been playing against each other in a game.

“Wait a minute,” Jun requested, blinking once as he dragged Aiba aside and ducked into Nino’s room. Glaring at the pair as they kicked their feet in the air and met levelled reproachful looks at him, he swallowed hard. “You mean to say you’ve been playing a DS game all this while?”

“Were you expecting something else to happen?” Nino hissed impatiently, trying to keep his voice low. He did not want to give either Alys or the other ladies any embarrassment by speaking of matters that were best left to the confines of a locked bedchamber.

“We assumed from the conversation that you were in the act,” Sora explained, deciding against mincing her words.

As Nino sullenly levelled a glare at the novelist, the academic flicked a wrist dismissively. “Bah, after a while, sex becomes boring, especially when you know every crevice and curve. We need more stimulation than two hours of physical activity.”

The gamer laughed at the shocked faces of everyone before him. “Do you want my Alys to throw bricks at you before you’ll believe us?”

By this time, Aiba had regained his faculty of speech as well as the ability to blink. “Mama could be hitting you or worse. She always hits you several times. But now I think I see… Mama’s not in the mood, deshou? So you didn’t get to the chance to er… you know… ah….”

Upon whacking the taller man’s head, Jun breathed a sigh of relief. “Good.”

However, the relief was short lived for he caught sight of the sarcastic pair’s smirks of impending doom. It was evident to the youngest man that the Ninomiyas were making a joint, executive mental note to target Aiba next time they had a reason to fight. Indeed, it looked as though they were agreeing that Aiba needed a few broken legs and arms.

“Alors…” Renée-Caroline swallowed hastily and tried to pull Aiba out with her. “D’accord, enjoy your game.”

Meanwhile, back in the indoor bath where Sho, Chiaki and Kaoru were soaking, Ohno wrapped a towel around his waist and grabbed another terry cloth article to towel his hair as he entered the bathroom again with the beer and wine. Sho, who was in the far corner away from the ladies, was indistinguishable in the masses of steam. Ohno thought he could discern a smear of dark hair at the edge of the bath. For a moment, he considered dropping the towel and getting back at the hot water again, preferably next to Kaoru. But the idea was rejected as soon as it was formulated in deference to his preconceived notion of the natural delicacy of the fairer sex.

“Did you see Aiba-san and the Ninomiyas?” Chiaki asked lazily.

Sho let out a loud groan. “Really, wifey, it wasn’t as if a naked Aiba dragged out by an amorous Renée-Caroline after carelessly commenting on the beauty of female bosoms in general. It’s not like Nino and Alys on the rampage is that serious a problem.”

“We should leave them alone. It’s the smartest and safest thing to do, don’t you agree?” suggested Kaoru. “Now, Satoshi-kun should hand Sho-kun his beer and come back in here and relax. I’ll scrub your back if you come over.”

“Oh, that is nice idea,” Ohno concurred unabashedly as he contemplated a nice hot bath in good company with perhaps just the barest hint of impropriety.

No sooner had he adjusted the towel around his waist when a raspy murmur resounded from behind him: “Sho-chan! At last… you wouldn’t believe…”

It was only Aiba and nothing to be alarmed about, Ohno thought. Rather, it was only nothing to be alarmed about if Aiba had not reached out a hand from the enveloping steam to knot in the yukata and pull him back against a thin but muscular chest.

“Sho-chan… you wouldn’t believe what mama and Nino were doing this time…” Aiba’s highly edifying speech paused on its own accord as the exploring hand reached Ohno’s bellybutton. “Eh, wait! I can’t feel the navel ring hole. You’re not Sho-chan!”

While this exclamation echoed in the air, one of the bath buckets collided into Aiba’s head with a melodious ‘konk’ and bounced off against the wall. Judging from the trajectory of the throw, Ohno hazarded a guess that it had come from either Kaoru or Chiaki. Then again, it was kind of difficult for him to tell who had thrown the bath bucket. It could as well have been Sho who threw the bucket. Ohno supposed it hardly mattered who threw the bucket as it had stunned the interloper for long enough that he was able to wrench himself free. As soon as he managed that task, Ohno tried valiantly to clasp the towel and damp robe around his body.

“Come on, everyone!” Sho shouted, and jumped out of the tub with an elegant leap. He looked around quickly, grabbed the still-rattling bucket to cover himself, bade the women escape with him, and dragged Ohno out through the door into the corridor.

While they made their escape, the steam from the hot indoor bath wafted out behind them as they headed for the stairs.

From Cover to Cover – Omake

‘Naked… at the onsen’

Part 3

Shrieks and crashes like coming from the ladies’ indoors hot spring bathroom could not go unnoticed, especially if they made the thin wooden partition separating the men’s and women’s baths shake with the magnitude worthy of an earthquake.

The vibrations of these shrieks and crashes were so violent that they roused Matsumoto Jun from his slumber to declare unnecessarily, “There are screams coming from the ladies’ bath!”

“That sounds like Alys-chan!” Nino rose and got out of the steaming water, prepared to duel the person who had sought to steal his lady’s virtue.

“The professor’s here too!” gasped Ohno in astonishment. “Are they all here? We should invite them to join us. Here.”

“Shut up!” Nino smacked the back of Ohno’s head. “My Alys is in danger, and I must rescue her.” He struck a suitably manly pose. “And save her from ravishment, I shall, for she would shower me with gifts and praises unimaginable by mortal man if I succeed. I shall save her when her towel slips a few sweet centimetres to reveal the modest curve of her bosom and the delicate roundness of her hips…”

“Has Kazu-chan been smoking your cigarettes again, Jun?” enquired Ohno sotto voce as he moved towards the youngest man.

“Cover your thingy!” Sho yelled, tossing the younger man a hand towel.

“There’s no time! My Alys’s virtue is at stake here,” announced Nino turning around.

Jun cast his eye down towards his friend’s manhood and raised a brow. “Wear a towel, Ninomiya. The cold air will cause some er… shrinkage, ne. It’s best to hide it.”

Nodding at this intelligent suggestion, he grabbed a damp but serviceable bath towel, wrapped it quickly around his loins and made for the door. Unbeknownst to our would-be hero, the bright orange towel belonged to Aiba.

“Hey, just a minute! That’s belongs to –“

Nino shut the door and cut off Jun’s voice behind him, then blinked as Alys came running out of the opposite bathroom and tumbled into his arms. Still in shock from the perceived besiegement of her virtue, the professor tried to simultaneously toss her long coils of sodden hair back off her face, hold her towel around her so as to maintain some standards of decency, and run without tripping over. It was, as she recognised within two steps, a lost cause.

“Why did I let my hair down? What kind of immoral impression must I have given the stranger who wandered in and saw me like that? I’ll complain about this to the receptionists and write to the newspapers! What kind of a miserable establishment is this if a woman gets taken advantage of in the hot springs!” she muttered darkly in English under her breath, not as shaken as she had been a minute ago.

When she tripped over, she found herself in the arms of her beloved freeloader. For some reason, he was soaking wet, and clad only in a towel. Well, this has infinite possibilities written all over it. Now to find somewhere private, she thought, clinging to him for dear life. She was about to speak when the door further down the passageway opened. There was a surprised moan and a sharp intake of breath before the door abruptly shut again.

Renée-Caroline looked up from straightening her yukata as Chiaki re-entered the room. “Quoi? Is there a problem?” she asked, taking in the botanist’s blank countenance.

“I just saw something I shouldn’t have…” Chiaki seemed to be in shock.

“Yes?” Kaoru smiled encouragingly.

The botanist swallowed hard and managed to collect her senses into coherent speech. “I just saw Ninomiya in the corridor, and he was doing things with this woman who looked like Alys!”

Kaoru tilted her head in a sign of inquisitiveness. “Things?” She gestured for the older woman to continue.

“Well… His towel seemed to be slipping, and her towel wasn’t covering much, and he was holding her up, with his hand up her side and . . ."

“Par ma foi! In full view?” Renée-Caroline’s eyes widened. “This, I must see.”

They opened the door and popped their heads out. The sight before them yielded three varying responses - a surprised half gasp from Renée-Caroline, a squawk from Kaoru and a groan from Chiaki.

By sheer wilful perversity, the couple currently presenting a tableau to three very stunned ladies remained engrossed in their conversation – a conversation that did not sound suitable for the ears of the chaste, virtuous, innocent or very young.

“Mah, mah,” Nino curled his lips in amusement. “You are hardcore.”

Alys snorted delicately as became a female of breeding and taste. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“Yeah? I bet I’ll be able to make you scream before the night is through,” he said, smirking smugly, readjusting her glasses for her.

“You?” she laughed dismissively. “You’ll be the one screaming, not me.”

“Is that a challenge?” He raised a brow in speculative interest, sweeping aside her sodden tendrils of hair.

“More like a fact,” she purred huskily. “You couldn’t possibly keep up with me.”

“I’ve endurance, my cynical little witch. I can keep it going longer than you can; comes with practice,” he breathed, leaning in closer to her.

“We shall have to see if you live up to your boasts,” she retorted lowly with a devilish smirk.

It wasn’t until Chiaki loudly coughed did they desist. “What?” they threw out testily in unison, clearly irritated at the interruption.

“Please tell me there is a perfectly good explanation for you two flaunting yourselves before others in an almost naked state, wet, dripping, and sprawled on the floor in a compromising position,” Chiaki pleaded, hoping against hope that there was a grain of logic in whatever explanation the Ninomiya-Teng couple proffered.

“What are you doing in the middle of the corridor?” Renée-Caroline asked, wondering whether there was something in the water to give rise to the scene before her.

“Isn’t it obvious what we’re doing! We’re trying to get up!” cried out the fallen couple in unison, who were – to their credit, attempting to disentangle themselves and rearrange their loosely draped towels.

“That does not aid one’s sense of balance,” Chiaki covered her hand over her eyes.

Kaoru blinked and smiled in kind understanding. “I know you intend to spend the night in fornication like the rest of us, but there’s absolutely no reason to do it in public, is there?”

This blithe comment drew uncharacteristic blushes from Nino and Alys, who though utterly perverse, did not think the virtuous looking Kaoru could harbour such thoughts.

“I didn’t even think of it!” protested Alys truthfully, manipulating the towel around herself to better cover the curve of her bottom.

“Mais pourquoi? There is a lot of scope and possibility, hein,” Renée-Caroline said, gesturing in a way before her bosom to demonstrate her own scope and possibility.

“I’ve just been molested in the indoor hot spring. I can assure you, sex is the furthest thing on my mind,” the professor announced with chilling hauteur, somehow holding the towel around her in such a way as to display a minimum of naked torso flesh.

“You were what!” Nino hissed in fury, whilst patting his lady’s rump. “Who dares do such a thing to my cynical little witch! It’s Aiba, isn’t it? The scoundrel! That towering scumbag of impurity! The swine! The brute! Taking advantage of my innocent and virtuous Alys when she’s wet in a bath and naked…”

“Alys is not innocent and virtuous,” a voice groaned from behind the ladies’ bathroom door.

“The door speaks!” Kaoru gasped in unfeigned amazement, hiding behind Chiaki.

Deciding that it would be much better to deal with this assailant if they banded together, Renée-Caroline mimed that they should remove their bath clogs and use them as weapons. Thus, poised with clogs in hand, they waited until the bathroom door opened before venturing to clobber the so-called molester. Fortunately for the virtue of all the fair maidens at this onsen, the bathroom yielded only Sora, who was mildly injured from Alys’s skilful self-defence abilities

“Hold it!” the novelist shouted before the clogs could hit her. “I was only trying to tell Alys that the rest of the guys were here when she battered me.”

One brief bout of explanations later, it was established that a molester was not on the loose. Satisfied that the ladies would be perfectly safe in their half of the indoor hot spring, Nino rejoined his friends in their bathroom with some reluctance. However, the moment he did so, he discovered Aiba had returned empty handed without any alcohol or cigarettes.

“Where’s the sake?” Sho asked, looking up expectantly.

Ignoring the surprised mutter from the bath, Nino dropped his robe mid-step and swung himself over the edge into the steaming water, snapping, “The baka forgot. As usual.”

“I heard something from the guy in the kitchen!” Aiba chattered excited, grinning from ear to ear.

“Wine, sake, beer, alcohol,” Jun repeated, glaring daggers at the lanky man, wondering how difficult was it for his brain to process the simple instruction of ‘fetch everyone something to drink’.

“I asked for cigarettes,” Nino reiterated, folding his arms underwater.

Ohno looked at Aiba sympathetically and sank to eye level in the hot water so as to avoid the trouble he instinctively knew was about to occur.

“Why are you back without the alcohol and cigarettes?” Jun glowered at Aiba meaningfully, and reached for an obliging towel with which he could use to lash at the taller man.

“It’s not my fault, guys!” Aiba twittered excitedly, cheeks flushed somewhat as he flailed his arms about. “I was just bringing everyone what they wanted when I heard that there were lady guests!”

“Ah,” Sho nodded sagely as befitting a newscaster with a Keio education. “Those honoured patrons…” he jerked a thumb towards the thin wooden partition, “are next door.”

“Ano ne, what will it take for us to have a quiet getaway with no mishaps?” MatsuJun slumped back deeper into the bath. “Wine, some quiet, and some smokes. Whatever happened to an evening free from maniacs who can’t follow simple requests for booze and cigarettes, or women with whips?”

“The professor brought her whips?” Ohno grasped Nino’s hand in a display of fear for his friend.

“Riding crop’s more her thing actually,” Nino yawned blandly.

“Trust the moron to not know that he’s supposed to get us alcohol instead of socialising with the onsen staff,” snorted MatsuJun impatiently.

“I’ve heard something even better than the news about the princesses being here!” Aiba got back into the water with an uncannily wide grin.

“You grew a brain cell?” the gamer sarcastically threw out, tapping the wooden partition and putting his ear next to it.

“The kitchen servant guy told me,” began Aiba in a conspiratorial whisper, “there’s an underwater passage between here and the women’s side. All we have to do is find it, then we swim under and…”

Sho face-palmed himself and groaned. “You can’t be serious!”

“Meh! Look at that face, he’s dead serious all right,” Nino scoffed, still rapping on the wooden partition and listening to the three knocks that came in response. Then pushing himself upright and out of the bath, he flicked a dismissive wrist. “Yeah, whatever. Do what you like.”

“Where are you going?” Ohno enquired plaintively.

Lips curled into a smug smirk answered with deceptive lightness, “I’m retiring for the night. Ignore all the noise that will be coming from my room later, okay?”

“I’m not listening to any of this.” Jun further submerged himself in the water.

“Ooh, ooh! Riida should know Kaoru-chan’s here,” Aiba lilted his voice in a playful sing-song manner.

The band’s titular leader blinked and pouted thoughtfully as he considered the merits of the proposed scheme.

“Next, that baka will tell us the girls will be flattered if we did something that colossally stupid,” Nino sneered, wrapping his towel around himself, grabbing his DS, and leaving.

“Hai, hai, Nino-chan’s got it!” chirped Aiba eagerly. “It’d show that we appreciate their er… assets.”

Wishing that he had shared Nino’s rare foresight and had left with him, Sho remained adamant in his refusal. “I don’t think that’s wise.”

At this juncture, Jun surfaced, a worried frown etched on his brow. “Er… Ne, ne, doesn't this mean that the women could be swimming underneath right now and spying on us . . .”

Silence fell and cut across the thick mist of steam in their bathroom. For a brief moment, it seemed that all the Arashi members had frozen to consider Jun’s words. It took only five seconds to think through, and another five additional seconds for them to scramble out of the water and desperately clutch their towels to the lower half of their bodies. Rather, all but Aiba clambered out of the bath.

“Aiba-chan, aren’t you going to come out in case the women are peeping at us?” Ohno asked with all the genuine curiosity of a five year old, as he hid behind Sho, hoping no one else had seen his manhood.

“But why?” the gangly fellow stretched his arms out, luxuriating in the hot water. “I don’t mind if they see everything. I show them mine, they show me theirs.” A bath bucket whizzed through the air and collided with his head. “Ow! Who threw that!”

“Ano, have you no shame ne? Do you know, ne, that you would be shaming the good name of Arashi by exposing yourself to others in the way you are now?” Jun scolded, shooting a glare that would have turned the silicon in glass back to sand.

The tall bather cocked his head to the side in consideration of the issue. After a few minutes, he cracked a wide grin. “No, not really. What do I have to be ashamed of?”

“It’s not shame, but what the girls could do to you if they are in the water,” ventured Ohno fearfully, quivering behind Sho, who was doing his best to comfort the older man.

“They can do anything they like,” Aiba declared loudly, thumping his chest for good measure. “It’ll be gentle. They’re women after all.”

“Alys-san is with them, have you forgotten?” Sho reminded his friend with a worried frown.

Ohno nodded and corroborated this warning. “I’ve seen Nino with whip welts on his bum and bite marks on the inside of his thigh.

“Knowing Alys Nee-san and Sora, if they’re behind this, it’d be domination and obsession.” Jun allowed himself to shudder artistically as the moment demanded.

“Not my girl! She wouldn’t! She’d be shy, and whimpering and stuff,” Aiba insisted, vigorously thumping at the surface of the water. “Love has a generous bosom to those who let everything hang out.”

“Aiba,” Ohno called out, his eyes darting up when he heard a sound.

“I say if the girls are going to peep at us and they get found out, it’ll be cool because it’ll be artistic….”

“Aiba-san,” Jun interjected, caution and uncertainty dripping from his voice.

“With lots of water and soap and foam, and they’ll try to shield themselves with their hands when I pull away the towel to reveal their supple bodies. Their soft, delicate bosoms…”

“Masaki!” Sho yelled, and threw a bath bucket at him for good measure.

It was then that the hapless Aiba became conscious of the general silence and the looming presence behind him. “Er, hi, mermaid ohime-sama!” he called out weakly.

Renée-Caroline leaned down, grasped him by the neck and hauled him out of the water. “You said something about removing someone’s towel to view certain supple bodies and their bosoms?”

Aiba coughed and stared at the conductor’s bosom, much too distracted for any neuron in his brain to function. “Your bosom is pretty. The prettiest bosom I’ve ever seen. The softest bosom known to man, the most…”

Unimpressed by his impromptu ode to her bosom, Renée-Caroline snorted and dragged him out of the room by the hair.

“Help me, guys! Save me!” he whined, kicking feebly as he was dragged out and the door dramatically slammed shut.

It took Ohno a while to realise what had happened. When his brain finally registered the event that had just taken place, he gasped, “Shouldn’t we help him? He is naked and helpless.”

Jun looked up from the examination of his fingernails and replied, “Naked? He’ll drip on the veranda. We must give him a towel.” When neither of his companions made any move to push themselves out of the water, he harrumphed and volunteered himself. “Fine, I’ll go upstairs and search for him.”

From Cover to Cover – Omake

‘Naked… at the onsen’

Part 2

Sakurai Sho let himself sink deeper into the hot water with a sigh of blissful relief. Another five centimetres and his ears would be covered. Sinking another five centimetres had the added benefit of rendering him momentarily deaf to any more of Aiba’s incessantly happy chatter. He closed his eyes in bliss at the prospect. Technically, he only needed to make sure that his nose was above the surface of the hot hydrogen carbonate water to facilitate breathing. The rest of his body could take care of itself as he slipped quietly away and let the hot water soak into his poor tired muscles.

He would have done so had not the nagging voice in his brain whisper that he needed a smidgen of alcohol. He groaned and slapped his forehead. Getting out of the bath in the search of alcohol would mean facing a cheerful and talkative Aiba. Sho sighed inwardly at the injustice of life and sank deeper into the water, espying Jun in the far end of the bath closer to stone wall that separated the men’s bathing area from the women’s. Perhaps if Sho could find it within himself to crawl out of the delightfully hot water for thirty seconds, he could suggest that the pretty-boy princess look after the boisterous Aiba for the next few hours.

Alas, Sho could not do so, not because of exhaustion, but because MatsuJun had threatened fates worse than death if anyone disturbed his private soak far away from them. Therefore, poor tired Sho, being the responsible one, was left with the unenviable task of keeping an eye on Aiba as the younger man played with the water around him. Sho sighed in self-pity and turned his gaze to Ohno and Nino, hoping against hope that one of them would watch Aiba for him lest the lanky man did something stupid. No such luck was to be found in either Ohno or Nino, for one was wholly absorbed in playing his DS (which he had the rare foresight to pop into a Ziploc bag to protect it from the water), and the other was staring into space doubtlessly contemplating the mysteries of life. Good for them that they were able to relax. Sod them for being complacent and not keeping Aiba busy.

“I’m out of cigarettes,” Nino’s voice resounded across the steam.

Sho hoisted himself a little so that his mouth was out of the water. “I’m out of sake too. Why don’t you call the staff for alcohol?”

A low chuckle came from Nino’s general direction. “You couldn’t keep me away from this hot water if you tried.”

Having observed everything that had gone on in the hot spring bath, Ohno darted his eyes above the water and saw that the room was thick with warm, comforting mist. He could dimly see Aiba squirting water from between his hands and laughing at something he discovered he could do with onsen water. “Oi, Aiba-chan,” hissed Ohno so as not wake Jun (who looked like he had dozed off). “We could use with some beer!”

“Wine,” Nino, ever the epicurean, corrected him.

“I’ll have hot sake,” Sho said, relief evident in his voice as he subsided back into the hot, enveloping water.

“Yeah, yeah, it could be absinthe for all I care. So long as we have something to drink,” retorted Nino acidly. “Run, Aiba! Go get out drinks! Run! Go, go, go!”

“Hai, hai!” agreed Aiba, pulling a robe around him with a hideous pout. He grumbled to himself as Nino asked the captain of the band to scrub his back. Less than a minute later, Aiba poked his head back into the area.

“That’s fast,” sneered Nino without lifting his eyes from his DS. “Don’t know how to get the staff to attend to you? Or do you need a map to find the reception desk.”

Aiba tugged at his earring and scratched his arm. “Guys, guys! Sho-chan! I zipped passed two someones who looked like Aki-chan and Sora-chan.”

Ohno managed to inject his voice with polite interest. “Looked it, you say? It probably wasn’t.”

“But Nino-chan, Riida! They didn’t say hello or anything. Do you think it’s them and they’re here?” Aiba enquired earnestly.

It was probably pure coincidence. More to the point, it wouldn’t hurt to err on the side of caution. “Jun ought to know about this. Wake him up and tell him,” Sho declared, and kicked at where Nino’s ankle should be under the water, in the hopes of prompting spontaneous agreement.

“After you’ve got the wine and cigarettes,” Nino added firmly with an air of great helpfulness.

Good, kind Kazunari, Ohno mused in a surge of sudden affection. It was good to know Nino always had the right priorities.

“Sure?” Aiba shifted his weight from one foot to the next uncertainly. Maybe he was remembering the bloodcurdling threats which MatsuJun had been making earlier. It was amazing how much sheer icy venom could be got into a simple promise to mete out a fate worse than death to anyone with the temerity to disturb him.

“Yes.” Ohno and Sho concurred as they envisaged a nice, long soak without Aiba nearby.

“After you’ve got the alcohol and cigarettes. Run, Aiba! Go!” Nino commanded, flicking a wrist in the general direction of the door.

Huddled at the juncture between the indoor hot spring bathroom and the corridor, Chiaki and Sora hid behind the curve of the stairway after spotting Aiba Masaki. Normally outright casual greeting would have been standard protocol, but Chiaki had decided to withdraw for a moment and assess the situation. The numbers all seemed to add up. This looked unexpectedly promising. She luxuriated in the combination of dry bathrobe and possible fringe benefits.

“He called out to Ohno-kun, Sho and Nino,” Sora reviewed that which they had heard. “They’re there in the men’s half of the bath, in that bathroom. Alys did mention there were five names in the register, so it must mean the lot of them are there. I have a sneaking suspicion, they’re travelling incognito.”

“We’re travelling incognito as well,” the botanist reminded her in a whisper. “If Lady Strange found out we had snuck out, heads will roll. Who knows what kind of insane omake she would stick us in next?”

“So what are we going to do if the guys are here too?” questioned the novelist lowly, looking around for any potential eavesdroppers. “Do we make the most of this promising turn of events or don’t we?”

The answer on the tip of Chiaki’s tongue was hastily swallowed and the two women leaned around the corner watching Aiba heading towards the kitchens. “There he goes for the beer. Shall we tell the rest? Alys is probably in the bath already, but Kaoru and Renée-Caroline should still be in their room.”

Sora considered the matter briefly. “Time is of the essence. We’ll get Kaoru and Renée-Caroline, and then find Alys. The longer we leave it, the chances of the guys finding out we’re here increases, as Aiba nearly did. Come along.”

Tiptoeing forward, Chiaki wrinkled her nose at the penetrating smell of cigarettes wafting from the closed door of the male indoor hot spring bath. She tapped a finger against her lips, to remind Sora of the need for silence, and observed her friend’s simple yet effective attempt to mime that she’d slide open the door to the room Kaoru and Renée-Caroline were sharing and slip in. Before she could touch the door, the sharp cracking sounds of another door sliding open came to their attention. A hand belonging to Chiaki dragged her down.

“Hide,” commanded the botanist in a harsh whisper as they reached the corridor of the bathrooms. She waved a vague hand towards the bathrooms. “You go in there and tell Alys. I’ll get Kaoru and Renée-Caroline.”

Confident of Chiaki’s proposed plan, Sora ducked into the first bathroom on the right without checking the sign on the door. It wasn’t until she entered that she realised she had stepped into the wrong room. She held her head high, supremely confident of being able to handle the three sets of eyes staring at her. She counted herself lucky that the room was so heavy with steam that they could not make out who she was. Excellent! Thank goodness for steam! Ignoring the surprised mutter from the bath, she held on to her robe tightly and swung her foot over the edge, allowing just a toe to test the steaming water.

Three pairs of eyes looked at her. Who their owners were, she couldn’t tell, especially since they were nose-deep in the water. However, she could discern someone very much like Jun in physique apparently sleeping or dead in the far corner away from the other three. Now, what was the proper protocol for former aristocrats in such a case?

Ohno blinked and squinted through the steam at the lady in the robe. She seemed to bear an astonishing resemblance to Jun’s novelist girlfriend, and she seemed somewhat embarrassed at her current situation. But there was no need to be embarrassed, Ohno thought generously. Still, it would behove to check if it was indeed the novelist.

“Are you Sora?” asked Ohno loudly.

A hand, presumably Nino’s, smacked the older man’s head. “Of course it isn’t,” Nino snapped hastily – too hastily for Ohno’s liking.

In response, the newcomer withdrew the tentative toe from the steaming surface of the water and recalled something she once read in the old Fujiwara clan guide to aristocratic behaviour written eons ago when they were still able to plot for the throne – If forced to take to your ablutions in a hurry due to political inconvenience, always comport yourself in such a way as to achieve the respect and gratitude of those in the bath with you.

Ah, it was clear what she must do, Sora decided. She bowed politely and civilly informed the three pairs of astonished eyes, “If you will allow me a moment to collect myself, I will fetch some more alcohol.” And with another bow for added flourish, she retreated from the bathroom and leaned against the wall outside, relieved to have escaped so easily.

“Are you sure it wasn’t Sakiyama sensei?” asked Ohno again, genuinely puzzled.

“Of course not,” Nino repeated.

“No way,” Sho corroborated, submerging hastily.

“Maybe I should wake Jun up and tell him to check…”

Nino and Sho levelled glares at the older man. “Shut up,” they recommended in unison, much too insistently for his liking.

Next door, Alys was blissfully leaning back in the artificial rockery, idly watching the steam rise into the air and slowly dissipate. The bath was filled to overflowing with hot sulphide and hydrogen carbonate water just for her (or so she imagined), and she could relax by herself with her thoughts. She settled further back into the water, bracing her shoulders against the side of the artificial rocks closest to the thin wooden partition. Then stretching her arms on either side of her, she turned her back defiantly to the door, as if to say, “Get lost, world. Leave me alone.” A bundled towel held her hair away from her face and allowed her to simply savour the delightful sensation of heat and relaxation. The world contained nothing but blinding steam and hot water and the drumming of the rain outside. Ah, the rest of the world could flood for all she cared. So long as she was inside where it was warm and safe, the outside world could go to hell.

Her reverie was not to last for she heard the creak of the opening door. The sounds of the sliding door behind her alerted all her senses. More accurately, the sudden influx of cold air roused Alys from her lazy enjoyment of the deliciously steam-wrapped somnolence. Who was it, she wondered? It had to be one of the ladies, she surmised. It was too noisy to be Kaoru, and it was too barbaric a way of opening doors to be Chiaki. The towel wrapped around her hair obstructed her peripheral vision, and she couldn’t make out who it was through the ambient fog. Embarrassed that she had been so easily taken off guard, she sank gracefully beneath the surface of the water like a lotus blossom at dusk. A heavy pause followed, filling the void between herself and the door.

The padding footsteps were audible even through the water that filled her ears, and the professor held her breath. She remained so, until a hand slid possessively over her bare shoulder, and down across the base of her throat. It was when the hand ventured along her clavicle that her mind snapped into place.

“Aaack! Pervert! Molester!” she screeched in English, hurtling herself out of the bath. Then grabbing the bath-bucket she had left beside her glasses, she caught the intruder with a straight swing of the bucket to the intruder’s back, and delivered a few more kicks to the person’s behind for good measure when the vaguely human form hit the ground. After all, a lone female could never be too safe. She bent to pick up her glasses and the towel holding up her hair collapsed. However, she was more concerned with flight than the towel. Stepping over the back of the fallen would-be molester, she clasped the towel around her body and made a run for it, slamming the door behind her.

* Omake means extra or bonus in Japanese. Omake often include comedy sketches where the characters behave out of character, or subtly address opinions of the fandom known to the writers. Sometimes scenes from the telly show or OVA (or manga) are humorously re-dubbed or re-written. Omake can also consist of non-canonical, and often comedic crossovers.

Please bear in mind that my omakes are meant to be jokes for humour and fun, and often (though not always) has nothing to do with the main plot of any of my stories. No offence is intended, and I certainly own nothing except the girls and myself.

From Cover to Cover – Omake

‘Naked… at the Onsen’

Part 1

The latest Arashi single was a phenomenal success, breaking the band’s own previous record sales. To celebrate that fact, the management had ordered the members to go on an impromptu cross-country late autumn tour with select appearances (extremely select as Johnny Kitagawa had informed them) in pre-arranged parts of the Japanese isles. How pre-arranged appearances could be construed as part of an impromptu tour was a question the members posed to their manager, who in turn, diverted the topic with the promise of recreational getaways when they were far enough from the long-reaching money-grubbing arm of the upper management.

While the members embarked on this tour, their ladies were left to their own devices. Away from the stress of being partners to five extremely talented but no less ridiculous men, the ladies took less than five minutes in their power lunch to propose a mini-break away from the bustle of Tokyo. A destination in Hokkaido was selected and thither they went, a fortnight after their menfolk left for their impromptu cross-country autumn tour.

Contrary to their hopes, Hokkaido was far from the snowy paradise they had been expecting. From the very moment they landed at the airport, they were greeted by rain. Not just rain, but torrential rain that blew their umbrellas inside out. Under these weather conditions, there was not a taxi to be called on for love or money. Yet, their spirits were not dampened. Out of sheer determination (or in the case of Sora Kujo and Alys Teng, pure obstinacy), they trudged out of the airport determined to find a taxi. Unsuccessful in this noble task, they were soaked to the skin. The rain did not look like it would abate. The rain unrelentingly poured down the trunk of the tree under which they were sheltering, and dripped from their branches onto the shivering and very wet ladies. The wind veered in so many different directions that it wasn’t humanly possible to take shelter under a shop awning and remain dry.

“It’s better than being back in Tokyo,” Kaoru Morimoto muttered between chattering teeth, for the folds of her dress clung to her legs and arms, soaked and freezing cold.

“I want hot tea, dry clothes, and someone to whip. In that order,” Alys wheezed darkly, removing her overcoat and covering Kaoru with it, conveniently forgetting that her own health was the least robust amongst them.

Beside her, Sora made a noise that was very close to a sneeze before staring bitterly into the driving darkness of storm around them. Water slicked down her neck and glistened on her skin. In the beginning, she had pointed out that the use of a mobile phone to call the long-suffering manager of Arashi would kill the surprise of their being in Hokkaido. It was not their intention to alert the band members, who were reputed to be in the area, to their presence.

However, the less stubborn Renée-Caroline suspected that it was now a matter of principle not to call their beaux’s manager for transportation and shelter. Besides, she sighed with resignation, it wasn’t as though they could get any wetter.

Chiaki rubbed her face and flung aside the water droplets from her hand, looking as bedraggled as her friends with her hair slicked to the head and mattered across her cheeks. Her clothes, she noted, were probably no different from Alys’s gloves and probably hanging in wrinkles against her arms and body. She smiled at Renée-Caroline as the latter held up her long scarf, soggy with accumulated water and wiped her face. “If we were being sensible, which we aren’t,” she began, logical as ever, “we would have noticed a light due southeast, approximately a kilometre away on the edge from where we are.”

Sora looked up hopefully and patted Alys’s back when the professor started coughing from the cold. “Tell me there’s a hostelry,” she asked, wrinkling her brow as she sought to remember the maps of the area which they had checked on the aeroplane.

“With a bathhouse,” contributed Kaoru helpfully.

“We don’t have reservations,” reminded Alys between coughs as she wrung the water from her mother-of-pearl woollen roll-neck blouse.

“Alors, the proprietors cannot turn us out in this weather, n’est-ce pas? If this was snow rather than rain, it would be easier them to turn us away. It is much easier to ignore the cold than to ignore the rain,” Renée-Caroline commented miserably, increasingly annoyed with the steady stream of freezing water running down her back.

Sora frowned, clearly deep in internal debate. Rain sheeted against her, flowing down her leather jacket and dripping from the ends of her hair. “And the boys won’t know where we are?” she asked irrelevantly.

“Look, are we going to hang around until we catch bloody pneumonia and die?” snapped Alys waspishly, reaching behind her for her cable of hair (braided but unbunned because the airport people thought her plastic hairpick was a potential weapon) and wringing out the water. She watched the water squelched down towards the sodden ground. “Let’s just take shelter in that hostelry and be done with it.”

Kaoru gasped in protest. “But it’s near the grounds of their impromptu…”

“We’re tourists, not fangirls,” insisted the professor authoritatively. “As tourists, we will book rooms, order food and whatever, and have hot baths.”

“Oh la la! Hot water and dry towels, and steam, and heat,” murmured the maestra of the Tokyo City Metropolitan opera, her eyes wide and dreamy. “With dry robes, hot wine and…”

“Right, we’re on our way,” Chiaki Nakahara said quickly before Sora could even consider changing her mind. “One kilometre southeast, right? Let’s go.”

For some strange reason, on their arrival, the ladies had decided Alys was to take charge of booking them rooms at the hostelry. And as Chiaki pointed out, Alys’s sardonic tongue and forthright manner would undoubtedly get them better rooms. The professor, however, suspected that Chiaki had meant to say, ‘You’re better at bullying people than any of us.’

“Party of five,” she addressed the bored looking receptionist. The fellow couldn’t possibly be overworked, going by the doodles he was drawing all over the bill receipts. There couldn’t be many customers in this inclement weather, for who would venture out when the rain practically obscured one’s vision? She levelled a glare at the clerk and adjusted her glasses. “Rooms and baths. Are there any rooms with private bathrooms?”

The clerk suppressed a yawn, made an effort, and checked his clearly near-empty register. “Sorry, but I can put you in rooms on the floor directly above this place’ bathrooms, so you won’t have far to walk. We’ve a hot spring round the back, gender segregated if you’re particular about things.” The man paused and looked at the professor. “Not that there’s much to see on you. How many rooms do you need again?”

“Two,” the stingy Alys decided, not wanting to waste money in a dodgy establishment, even if it was an onsen.

The clerk looked up, pen at the ready to scribble something in the ledger. “Under what name?”

“Suzuki,” Alys ventured hastily, not from any real dishonesty but from a general aversion to using her real name in hotels and inns.

“Ooookay.” The clerk scratched the kanji for the dubious surname in the ledger. And on pushing up her glasses and squinting, she saw that the two entries of ‘Suzuki’ were written under five entries of ‘Yamada’. The unctuous but completely bored clerk looked up when he was done. “Enjoy your stay here, madam, we offer the best hospitality outside of Tokyo.” He paused, ignoring the philosopher’s derisive snort, and glancing towards the other four ladies as they sat on their suitcases, tried to wipe each other’s faces and keep warm before the fire. “We’re er… very discreet.”

Dr Alys Teng leaned over the desk towards the clerk. As she did so, she removed the grey shawl she had draped around her neck, and part of her cable of hair fell forward, dangling on the clerk’s desk. “I was beginning to think you weren’t.” She flicked out the shawl and it cracked with the sound of a whip. Noting the startled look in his eyes, she curled her lips contemptuously, “Good. You understand me. We’re here for a quiet night.”

“Yes, madam, you’ll have that,” the clerk swallowed hastily, backing away slightly. “No problem. No problem at all. Please go upstairs to the left. Your keys.” His hand recoiled upon dropping two keys with plastic tags on them. He had grazed her fingertips and they were icy cold. It did not help that he suddenly noticed the lock of hair dangling forward on to the reception desk was incredibly long and that the woman was of the awfully pale persuasion, and dressed in a mother-of-pearl roll-neck sweater and an off-white pants suit. Fearing that he had encountered a party of yokai women and the fabled yuki-onna (and this was Hokkaido after all), he hastily added, his hand shaking slightly. “The indoor hotspring bathrooms are directly below. The outdoor hot springs are sheltered and will be on the right. There are dry robes and yukata in your bedrooms. Many designs to choose from. There’s white damask too… Er… unless madam would like food first?”

“We’ll order some food later,” Alys said decisively, flinging her hair behind so that it fell below the curve of her bottom. “Hot baths first,” she continued, stealing a quick glance at the shivering Kaoru and Renée-Caroline. “Send a few jugs of hot sake up, and a fresh pot of buckwheat tea.”

“Of course, madam, anything you say.” The clerk nodded. “Have a restful and pleasant night.”

Chapter 47 – Epilogue

Autumn soon lapsed into winter and before we all knew, the art exhibition of Riida’s fiancée had closed and moved to another gallery and all the bands in Central were preparing for the Johnny’s Countdown. Preparations for the countdown always began in November, and it was always one of the busiest times of the year for Arashi and for our princesses as well. That naturally meant ne, that we couldn’t see our girls as much as we would have liked. It was to be expected if both we and our princesses were occupied, ne? Where we had the usual television, photo, filming, rehearsal, and recording commitments, the pretty Kaoru had to work on the artwork she would have to hand up for her first semester evaluation as a doctoral student; the ever-capable Chiaki had to write formal reports for the Jindai botanical garden Tropical Collection greenhouse as well as attend a botanical or biotechnological conference on a new strain of bougainvillea hybrid she had developed; the sardonic Alys had to mark her Todai students’ semester exam scripts and prepare for a philosophy symposium in February; and the disagreeable Sora had to finish volume two of The Masqueraders to make the Christmas sales’ list.

I don’t really know how the other guys held up, but I was doing all right, ne, even if I was surviving on little sleep. Sometimes, I wonder how Nino did it, ne. When did he have time to sleep? For the sake of money (what other reason could there be, ne), he had been accepting project after project non-stop since our summer tour. He would shoot PVs with us, dash off for drama shoots, return to record in the studio, run off to a photo shoot or an advertisement shoot, film for our television variety shows, host his radio show, and dash off to another drama shoot. It just didn’t seem to end for him. When I expressed some anxiety that he would be working at the expense of his health, he laughed derisively at me for imagining things, adding that he had to pay his 70%. That was curious, ne. 70% of what, eh? However, it wasn’t my place to ask, and so long as he wasn’t in debt, scandalising Arashi with his mess or involving Alys in it, I could pretend that I didn’t know anything. Knowing Nino, ne, I think he would more likely be a loan-shark than actually borrow from one.

It was a Friday in mid-November and I realised that I hadn’t called Sora in a week. I would have to phone her during the weekend, ne, just to catch up. She was in the can trying to finish the last leg of the second volume of The Masqueraders, and I should check in on her during the weekend. Mentally rearranging my weekend schedule to accommodate this newly formulated resolution, I walked into Central a little after eleven in the morning following a long overnight drama shoot with the hope that rehearsals for the Countdown dance steps would end by at the early evening. Although I had dragged myself to Central, I knew I could have gone home and caught some sleep, ne. However, work demanded my presence at Central Knowing that it would be bad form for me to show up looking tired, I decided to give my brain and body a jolt by eschewing the lift. Therefore, I lit a cigarette and used the stairs.

I expected that most of the guys would already be in the Arashi room, with the exception of Aiba who was doing his Tensai show that morning and would most likely join us during or after lunch. Therefore, it was with some astonishment that I came across Nino and Alys sitting on the steps in the stairwell of the floor housing the Arashi, NEWS, KAT-TUN, and Kanjani8 rooms. They were there, for the privacy, ne, because it would be impossible for them to have any serious conversation once the rest of Arashi arrived and overturned the room. From the sounds of things, I gathered (when I was one floor below them) they were discussing colour schemes and layouts; rather, she was giving her opinions and he told her she could have whatever she wanted within budget. The only break to this conjugal exchange was when she started a hacking cough. By the time I was sauntering up the steps to them, I saw that Nino had an arm supporting her and she was desperately covering her mouth with a handkerchief. Around them were a Nippon paint brochure and several cheap furniture brochures.

“What are you lovebirds doing all alone in a stairwell?” I questioned with a suggestive leer, gently touching Alys’s forehead as she continued to cough. She was usually cold to the touch and that slight heat I felt wasn’t normal for her.

“You… stupid boy…” wheezed Alys, sounding like she had the wind knocked out of her as she shifted her glasses up her nose. “Isn’t it obvious what we were doing?”

“Ano, making out on the stairs is rather painful, ne?” I poked fun at them despite knowing that they were abnormally normal in their discussion about paint, furniture and design layout.

“Yeah, we like doing it on hard and painful surfaces,” riposted Nino, narrowing his eyes at me as he watched me unwind the scarf around my neck. “Leave us alone so we can continue where we left off.”

“At least wrap her up, ne, if you’re going to keep her here. There’s no heating in the stairway,” I said, giving him the scarf as she rubbed her hands together. “She’d fall ill.”

“Because you’re not putting that out, MatsuJun,” Nino snapped, jerking his knee at the cigarette between my fingers. “Even I try not to smoke in front of her.”

Giving the sickly scholar a repentant smile and pointedly ignoring her other half, I threw my cigarette to the ground and stepped on it. “Are the rest here yet?”

“One of them is with his ‘wifey’ today,” answered Nino scathingly.

“There’s white fungus and quail egg soup in the room. Help yourself,” coughed the little professor.

“Ne, you shouldn’t put yourself out when you’re busy with work. Ano, what happens when you fall sick, ne?” I gently chided her. “The freeloader would be lost without you.”

“Iya, I’ll be celebrating my limited freedom with a bunch of cute girls,” Nino intoned sarcastically with a deadly glare at me as he stroked her hand.

She kicked his foot in response and chokingly told me, “The tabulated scores and grades were submitted to the office 6pm yesterday, leaving just the Rousseau paper to redraft.”

I nodded at her in acknowledgement at her efficiency and thoroughness. “Don’t stay here too long, ne? It’ll get colder,” I reminded the two of them as I pushed the door and stepped out of the stairwell and into the light of the main floor proper.

The presence of one Arashi princess was already a surprise, ne. The news lately conveyed that a second princess was in attendance was remarkable. Eto, I wonder how the stars must have aligned themselves if it could bump up Chiaki and Alys to our sacred JE building, ne. Nodding to Murakami who waved a hand at me as he entered his band’s room, I opened the door to the Arashi. In so doing, the mischievous comment I was about to utter dissipated when I saw not one princess but two. In addition to the one holed up in the stairwell by her selfish clod of a boyfriend, that makes three. Eh! This was quickly becoming one of those ‘once in a blue moon’ occasions, ne?

“Yo, Jun!” Sho called out from behind his newspaper as Chiaki did something on his laptop.

“Alys should be somewhere. She brought soup,” Chiaki chimed in at the same time Kaoru and Riida waved their drawing charcoals in the air at me and greeted, “Ohayo!”

For a few moments, I was completely stunned and unable to do anything but stare hard at everyone in the room. Ne, it wasn’t that I didn’t welcome them. Central and the management knew about the princesses with the exception of Kaoru. But if Riida brought her there and if she got a taxi out, she could slip under the radar unnoticed. I was just wondering, ne, what would happen if Manager-san were to come in and see the artists at work. He would tear Riida to shreds, and that wouldn’t be good for Arashi.

“Is it safe for Kaoru-chan to be here?” I asked, hanging up my coat, and hat.

“She’s only dropping something off for Sora,” Chiaki stated, her eyes widening as she read something on the laptop screen.

Kaoru adjusted the hearing aid behind her ear, and watched Riida carefully mouth Chiaki’s previous comment before replying, “The preliminary illustrations for a short story she’s written for a special Christmas compilation of modern tales for winter.”

“Published by Chuo Koronsha. It’s very prestigious,” Sho said, turning over the newspaper and taking a sip from one of Alys’s recycled old margarine containers. “Six authors are selected for Chuo Koronsha’s annual compilation. That, Jun-kun, is tantamount to the short-list for the Tanizaki Prize.”

“Eh?” I let my jaw drop just the slightest bit. I wasn’t aware of that, ne. Eto, what did I know? She canned herself to finish the manga project and would be starting on the murder mystery after the New Year.

“For crying out loud,” Alys’s exasperated voice rang out loudly and clearly in English as she knocked on the door, “who locked the bloody door!”

Sho and Chiaki exchanged an amused smiling snort as he rose, tossed his newspaper on the table and shuffled to the door. “How your mellifluous tones travel,” Sho joked with her in English as he let her in, the vocabulary and pretty much everything flying over my head. “This baka accidentally hit the lock button on the knob,” he explained in Japanese with an impish grin.

“Then you’re paying for the soup, Jun-kun, 250 yen please when I get back,” Alys hissed on adjusting her spectacles and folding her arms. “Kaoru-chan, the time! You have to be at Omei Art Museum and Gallery to supervise the installation in half an hour! The minions downstairs have already called for a cab on my behalf.”

“Minions?” I asked, getting increasingly confused by the flurry of all this activity

“The reception staff,” Riida said, rubbing his nose with his charcoal stained fingers.

“Where’s Nino?” Sho asked out of idle curiosity.

“Smoking in the left wing fire escape,” replied the professor.

Riida looked up from his drawing with a pout. “Take care, okay? ‘Kaachan will be making your favourite, so come for dinner.”

After giggling and wrinkling her nose at him, Kaoru cheerfully waved goodbye to us and took her bouncing pigtails and paint splattered bag with her as she disappeared down the corridor in the direction of the lifts with Alys.

“And that,” announced Chiaki in a conspiratorial tone, “is how Aiba-kun and Manager-san will be kept in the dark.”

“Eh?” I asked, still feeling overwhelmed, or was it the lack of sleep, ne.

“Kaoru-chan’s presence here was a one-off thing, to drop the sketches off for Sora,” Sho said, giving me a speaking look of great significance.

Crossing my legs on the sofa, I curled my mouth into a knowing smirk. Eh, so that was it, ne? I chuckled and rubbed my eyes. I must be more tired than I thought if it took me this long to figure it out. “Did she say when she’s coming in?”

“As soon as she hands over the complete manuscript to publishers and they go through the typesetting,” Chiaki said, partaking what I presumed to Alys’s Chinese soup of the day from Sho’s margarine container. “She tried calling you early this morning, only to be told that your keitai’s not in range.”

“You didn’t charge it!” Riida gasped at me with a reproachful look, wagging his charcoal pencil at me. “Jun didn’t charge his keitai and it died before Sora-chan could call him,” he helpfully repeated for the benefit of his Ohmiya partner who had decided to rejoin us.

“Serves the butt-less baka right,” smirked the miser as he plonked on the opposite sofa and extracted a yellow-lidded tupperware from a canvas bag with green straps. “Where’s Alys?”

“Seeing Kaoru off,” Sho said off-handedly as he continued his perusal of the newspaper.

“Fending off the vultures more likely,” Chiaki commented, clicking the mouse.

“She should at least know her place is by my side fending off this vulture. Ask nicely and maybe I’ll be seized by compassion,” Nino complained acerbically, holding his container of soup away from a visibly excited and nearly drooling Riida. I saw a brief flash of something in his eyes that I found disquieting. Perhaps Sora was right in saying that he had a possessive streak.

“Why do you get longan red date tea and we get white fungus with quail eggs?” Riida pouted, his lower lip trembling with great emotion.

Nino smirked smugly and took a happy mouthful of longans and wintermelon strips. “Because it’s the most effective way of…

“Blending poison in a solution of a darker colour,” deadpanned the professor as she stepped in the door.

I exchanged a frightened glance with Chiaki when I heard their exchange. It sent a chill down my spine that they were completing each other’s sentences, ne. They certainly had the most abnormal relationship I have ever observed in my life. That they loved each other was something I never doubted, ne, but this whole thing of them able to finish each other’s sentences was scary, ne.

“Hontou?” Riida asked, his head tilted to one side and his mouth half open.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Nino smirked evilly, with the spoon hovering above the container.

The professor clamped her mouth over the spoon and chewed its contents. “Try it and find out,” offered the professor archly as she raised a brow in challenge, duly passing the spoon and Tupperware to him.

“You’re going to frighten Ohno-kun if you keep up this line of joke,” Sho warned, his voice heavy with unvoiced disapproval.

Nino laughed sarcastically. “His tastebuds are…”

“Most regrettably shot to pieces…” continued his professor from her place on the rug where she was lying on her stomach with various photocopied book articles and papers and a foolscap pad with her strange, cursive writing in English or god knows what language around her.

“Umai!” Riida exclaimed, jumping up from his seat and returning the Tupperware to Nino who was smirking in acknowledgement that there could be no doubt of the superior quality of his girlfriend’s cooking.

“Alys-chan is always delicious,” he answered whilst squeezing her shoulders in a massage of sorts, drawing a purr from her.

“That came out wrong,” Sho groaned, very much aghast.

“I suspect it was meant to,” Chiaki said with a shake of her head.

I rolled my eyes and gestured to Sho that I wanted to borrow his keitai as the battery to mine had died.

“Nino, Nino, Nino,” I chided with stern glare. “Telling people what your girlfriend tastes like, eh, maybe too much information, ne. If Alys wasn’t so engrossed in drafting her paper, you would be lying in a pool of your blood now, ne.”

“Well, since you asked, she tastes bittersweet like tea and English orange marmalade.” The miser curled his lips scornfully at me as he plucked out a white DS from her bag and lay down, resting his head on his professor’s back. “What time is our dance studio booking?” he asked, starting up his game from his rather prone position.

“One, I think,” Riida said, as I sent Sora a text message. Luckily, I had something to do which prevented me from baulking. I most certainly did not want to know what Alys tasted like. Ano ne, Sora could be correct in her assessment that the Ninomiyas had no shame, ne.

Crossing my legs to still the frustration that came with dealing the rest of Arashi on next to no sleep, I took a book from my bag and confirmed Ohno’s answer, “Hai, one.”

“One what, MatsuJun?” burst in the ridiculously buoyant voice of Aiba as he swung open the door with so much force that everyone but the Ninomiyas paused to look up at him. Nothing short of a natural disaster ne, could tear Nino away from his game or tear his Alys away from her reading and writing.

The sharp reminder I would have let out that doors were not to be opened in such an uncouth manner failed to make it out of my throat when Aiba ushered two very lovely ladies into our presence. The two ladies presented a charming picture, ne, and I very nearly discovered myself gaping. The first was known to me as my disagreeable novelist. I could recognise her anywhere, ne, even if she currently looked like she had just wandered out of a snow storm. And it wasn’t snowing, ne, it was just cold. The second was taller, with dark ringlets, expressive almond shaped eyes, a straight nose and delicately moulded lips. Such features belonged to the providence of those who were of mixed parentage as her fair colouring and dark hair proclaimed her, ne. The only flaw I could discern from the second woman was that her ears stuck out too much and her earlobes were far too long to pretty. Judging from the boots on her feet and the blue kerseymere sweater that peeked out of the crocheted collar of her heavy military-cut coat, she was a woman of great taste and style. She may be taller and have a better figure Sora, but she could not compare to the robustness of my girlfriend. However, I will allow that the other woman had a deceptive air of fragility, just the very kind that would attach the romantically minded, ne.

“Hello everyone! What a kick up to find everyone here!” exclaimed Aiba loudly, precipitating himself into the room with the two ladies in tow. “We met Sora-chan downstairs. Guys, this is Renée, my girlfriend.”

“Good!” Nino spat out with some asperity. “Now that someone has taken you off our hands, you think you can leave my Alys-chan alone?”

Eh, did my ears deceive me? I was so stunned by this sudden news that the book slid from my fingers and fell to the floor in a soft thud. All right, I could concede that it made sense for the woman to be Aiba’s girl. He wouldn’t have brought her to Central otherwise, ne. Gods! Where did Aiba find her? She looked too chic, too poised, too everything for him. Don’t tell me she was really a doctor or a bengoshi?

“Renée-Caroline Tamiko Chaussée,” Sora said in a manner that suggested the absolute declaration of a fact. It would have, ne, if the name actually meant something to me. Still, I was right about the lady being mixed. The name was a hint enough, ne.

“Renée-Caroline, if you please,” the newcomer’s voice faltered in some hesitation. The sound of her voice and the lilt in it made Riida eye her with wide-eyed wonderment.

A thick silence, only to be interrupted by Alys’s sudden pronouncement as she dropped her pen and jerked her glasses up with a knuckle, “Quoi? Pourriez-vous répéter? Vous plaisantez, non? Non! Ça alors!”

I had no idea what Alys said, ne, but I noticed her accent had changed from her usually restrained British one to a fast paced European-ish one. Whatever she said made the silence thicker and would have been completely strange if Nino hadn’t just continued with his game like nothing was the matter.

“Ah, bonjour madame. Merci du compliment,” replied this Renée-Caroline in a complimentary tone and an encouraging smile. Lots more were said, but her words came out much too quickly for me to follow.

I could only watch the exchange and follow their expressions and gestures, ne, as I couldn’t understand a single word of what was going on. Sora, who seemed to understand, found the exchange highly amusing because she sat down beside me with an ‘it’s perfectly all right’ gleam in her eyes after taking the A4 envelope Chiaki had offered her.

Alys’s lips curled into a smirk that was half-suspicious and half-contemptuous as she flicked her wrist dismissively. “Mais actuallement, je suis un professeur.” She paused to stifle a cough and handed what I presumed was a namecard to the newcomer. Then she indicated with another flick of her wrist at Nino. “Et lui, il est mon copain. Mademoiselle Chaussée, j’aime bien votre arrangement pour Norma.”

“Ne, ne, what’s going on? Ano, does Alys know this Renée-Caroline?” I whispered to Sora while she extracted several sketches from the envelope. No doubt they were the illustrations Kaoru had done for her. Aiba and Sho were blatantly staring at the two women in disbelief as they continued their conversation.

“Iye. They’ve only just met. Alys is a fan of the conductor. Renée-Caroline asked what Alys did for a living, and she’s very impressed. Just look at her – trying to play cool while she’s excitedly saying how much she enjoyed the production of Bellini’s Norma. Oh, and that Ninomiya’s her boyfriend. I do believe it is the first time she referred to him as that,” Sora said with an indulgent laugh, holding the papers some distance away from her so as to assess the artwork.

“Eh? Chotto, who is she?” I whispered, retrieving my book.

“The principal conductor of the Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera,” came the placid answer, which when given voice caused all the eyes in the room to stare unblinkingly at Sora.

“Hai!” Aiba clapped his hands happily, beaming in complete pride.

“You’re the Franco-Japanese conductor who went missing for two days a couple of months back!” Sho cried out, standing up and knocking over his newspapers.

The maestra, for so she must be, bowed silently in the way conductors of orchestras always do in thanks at the audience. Aiba promptly seized the opportunity to go round with the room with the introductions. “That’s Ohno or Riida with the drawing thingy, Jun with the book, he’s Sora’s boyfriend. That’s Sho with the newspapers, Aki-chan’s his girlfriend at the laptop thingy. That’s Nino with the DS, and mama with the books and papers.”

“Maman?” Renée-Caroline asked with mirth in her eyes.

“Alys Teng, one half of the Ninomiya couple,” Chiaki said, “Aiba-chan has a habit of giving people nicknames.”

“Oh la la! Masaki must be very naughty and troublesome,” Renée-Caroline exclaimed, sitting on a footstool in evident confusion. “It is terribly confusing. You do not play music with string or woodwind instruments? How very odd!”

Nino paused his game and sat up, smirk firmly in place. “You have no idea who we are, do you, Chaussée-san?”

“Renée-Caroline, if you please. The friends of Masaki in a… singing group, non?” she asked, her Japanese construction a little off, but understandable otherwise.

That answer set off a mass round of chortling between Chiaki, Sho, Nino, Aiba and me. It was funny in a way, ne, that we had someone who wasn’t interested in Arashi as one of our princesses. She must be quite the classical music snob, ne. Just what was she doing with Aiba, ne? That boggles the mind.

Despite the laughing and the teasing, which we assured her was at the expense of Aiba, we all found Renée-Caroline very amiable and charming if you ignored her very prominently sticking-out ears. In the hour and a half that followed, we learnt that she was half Japanese on her mother’s side and came from a long line of notable classical musicians on her father’s. Her mother, Eguchi Tamako, hailed from one of the old tea ceremony schools, was one of the top pianists in her time, and now heads the piano division in a Paris Music Conservatoire. Her father, Boris-Claudes Chaussée is still one of the top conductors in Europe. Her decision to take up the conductor’s baton in Japan stemmed from the acceptance of the visiting professor’s chair in conducting at Toho Gakuen School of Music, and a desire to meet her Japanese grandmother and cousins. Such affection to one’s family was most pleasing, ne, and I found her to be a pleasant woman. I dare say Alys must have too ne, because she had wheedled tickets for the Christmas Eve performance of an opera whose title escapes me. The princesses seemed to get along, ne, as far as I could tell with them. They made a pretty picture poring through Chiaki’s reports on the laptop and Alys’s scrawls about a dead Frenchman philosopher.

By some quirk of fate, all the princesses (except Kaoru who was supervising the installation of her exhibition at Omei Art Museum and Gallery) were able to stay the day with us at Central, even if they were all doing their own thing. Johnny-san came down to watch us practice and exchanged a few words with the ladies and lingered particularly at Aiba’s girlfriend. Despite that intereference, the ladies were highly productive that day. While we were cooped up in the dance studio, they were completely engaged in their own respective duties while conversing desultorily in the corner of the studio where they watched us without paying much attention. Indeed, they were so productive ne, that I believe they achieved much more that afternoon than us. Where we merely made sure we didn’t trip over our own feet or each other’s, Chiaki finished her annual greenhouse report, Sora wrote the first chapter of the murder mystery, Renée-Caroline finished making notes to her conducting score, and Alys rewrote the bulk of her conference paper. It makes you wonder what we were doing with our lives if our girls accomplished so much in one day, ne?

“Ne, Sora-chan… Eto, how do you manage to be so indifferent at the news of Aiba and Renée-Caroline?” I asked her while we were waiting for a taxi after dance rehearsals for the countdown were over.

“The moment I walked in the front doors and saw them, I knew there was something between them. It was intuition really. I am a good observer and commentator of human behaviour and foibles. They are well matched if you think about it,” Sora stated, swinging her bag happily and checking her keitai.

I looked at her quizzically. “Eh? They seem pretty mismatched, ne. She has class, he has none. She has taste, he has none. Then, ne, she has brains in her head and he has his in his arse.”

“There are many things that are silly about Aiba. That, I will concede,” Sora reasoned, flicking aside the hair that had slid down the side of her face. “However, even a blind bat is able to see that psychologically, Aiba and Renée-Caroline are suited. She is languid, so much so that conducting is a form of exercise for her. She looks helpless because she has, I suspect, some emotional scars. I deduced that when Alys revealed that Renée-Caroline favours a heavy but too ripe and too tart interpretation of German operatic music. In my observation and experience, a person who interprets Wagnerian opera that way is often the bearer of emotional scars. She will need saving, in small ways, from herself.”

“Ne, while that explains what she’s like. It doesn’t demonstrate, ne, that she’s a good match for Aiba,” I said thoughtfully, trying to following her train of thought as I hooked her hair behind her ear.

Waving at the smirking air kiss the Ninomiya couple blew us as they climbed into Aiba’s car with his conductor, she further elucidated, “Aiba’s defining characteristic is to have an outlet for his energy. One way of creating such an outlet is to save her in small, everyday ways. He will trip all over himself to ensure that nothing happens to the in-all-appearances emotionally scarred Renée-Caroline. Put them together and you have someone who needs to be saved, only in a little way, and someone who expends his energy being a hero in only a little way. She gets to feel secure, and he gets to feel important and needed everyday. What could be more potent than that?”

“Sugoi, ne, and all that just from observation and a brief conversation,” I remarked with astonishment as our taxi finally came. And it was true, I was astonished. Sora always astonished me with how well she could read into people’s gestures and behaviour.

“I think rather highly of my genius too, thank you,” she responded with playful relish when we got into the cab.

“Oi! Your ego is getting inflated already, ne,” I laughed.

“Unlike you, I have legitimate reasons,” she said tartly, counting on her fingers in illustration, “shortlisted for a literary award, volume two of The Masqueraders will be on sale in a fortnight, and my muse who provides me with a never-ending group of lunatic friends to observe and write about.”

“Ano, I don’t know whether I should be flattered, ne, but I shall accept the dubious compliment anyway,” I informed her in mock severe tone.

“I didn’t say you were my muse.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I feel obliged to say something polite at the moment but words fail me. I shall include Renée-Caroline’s and Aiba’s characters in the murder mystery. She’s the murderer who falsifies her own death but dies at the end to ensure that no one leaves the mansion alive. Dash it, that means I would have insert a few more paragraphs of chapter one. This throws my plot into disarray. Why do you always do this to me? You set me thinking and start overthrowing my plans, plots and schemes and outlines. Why and how do you do it?” she asked, turning to me beseechingly.

I enjoyed watching her being thrown into occasional disorder and so forbore to give her a straight answer. Choosing instead to place a finger on my lips as if it were a great secret, I answered, “You said it yourself, ne, I’m on original. A writer of your calibre, ne, needs an original to inspire her so as to guarantee the continued excellence of your work.”

To my surprise, she did not meet me with one of her sallies. Sora only shook her head once and snorted with a low ‘hmm’ sound, evidently tongue-tied with pleasure at this disclosure. The novelist who had a ready reply for everything was now ironically silent, and only able to respond by placing a hand over mine and squeezing it gently. I guess even the disagreeable Kujo Sora could be agreeable when she wanted to, ne?

NOTES

English/British orange marmalade is slightly bittersweet whereas the American ones are sweet. This bitter taste is what Nino was trying to identify when he kissed Alys in Ch 30 of Between Wit & Sarcasm.

Please note that in France, compound given names, such as Jean-Luc, Jean-Paul, or Anne-Sophie are not uncommon. These are not considered to be two separate given names. Aiba refers to Renée-Caroline as just Renée or Caro because he thinks compound names are too long and troublesome to pronounce. Please bear this in mind especially in the next story.

Maestra = female maestro. I personally have heard of female conductors addressed as such.

Recall that Alys mentions listening to La Traviata in Ch 29 which she says was conducted by Chaussée. Think you on the significance of that.

Quoi? Pourriez-vous répéter? Vous plaisantez, non? Non! Ça alors! = What? Could you repeat that? You’re joking, right? No! I don’t believe it.

Ah, bonjour madame. Merci du compliment = Ah, hello/good morning, madam. Thank you for the compliment.

Mais actuallement, je suis un professeur. = But actually, I am a professor (by profession).

Et lui, il est mon copain. Mademoiselle Chaussée, j’aime bien votre arrangement pour Norma. = And him, he’s my boyfriend. Miss Chaussée, I love your (musical/conducting) arrangement for Norma.

Bellini’s Norma is a real opera.

Lest some quibble with the un-PC-ness of using ‘professeur’. Let me clarify matters. When I studied French years and years ago, the lecturer told us, "There are some nouns that express entitities with gender for which there is only one form, which is used regardless of the actual gender of the entity (example: personne (always f), professeur (always m).)" According to him, only the Québecois use the feminine term, ‘professeure’. Since my training in the language was for France, I subscribe to using the noun as always masculine.

Chapter 46

On the journey to the Tokyo University of the Arts, I had expected grim and macabre artistic visions lurking around the art work on display. Therefore it was much surprise when I stepped into the ‘Reflections’ exhibition to find that some of the pieces served to invoke various emotions in the viewer at once. This artist was something, ne, for someone in their early twenties. Ano, I figured that since I had to look for Sora, I might as well look around, ne. The photography section was audacious on portraying the imperfections of everyday things, and the effect of exposing the film, ne, gave the photos an interesting perspective. If I had been expecting something similar for the oil painting section, I was wrong. The paintings were definitely more macabre, ne. They were meant to deliberate provoke conflicting feelings of fear and admiration, ne, that’s what I think. I was admiring one with the green blood and melted glass when I saw the series on modern women. That set of paintings gave me a big shock, ne. The models for two of the pieces, ne, were women who bore more than striking resemblances to Chiaki and Alys.

Eh… Now I could enter into Sora’s shock when she called. The paintings were more thought-provoking than titillating. But that wasn’t the point, I suspected. It was who this Morimoto Kaoru was that she had used two of Arashi’s princesses as her models, ne, that was what I wanted to know. Having gone through the shock of that revelation, I moved to the next section to look for Sora. In so doing, I was completely unprepared for the vision that was before me. A scriptwriter or mangaka couldn’t have done better, ne.

If a paparazzi mosquito was around, it would die from a heart attack of joy at the sight of three Arashi members hanging around a bunch of women, among whom were two middle-aged women. One of these older women, ne, I recognised as Riida’s mother, the other woman conversing with her wasn’t someone I knew. Riida’s mother had seen me and gave me a polite nod. She was a shrewd woman, ne, she could always recognise any of the JE boys under our disguises and make us feel like young boys again with just a critical look. You could always trust her to keep the mosquitoes at bay. She didn’t try to alert her companion to my presence and continued talking to the other middle-aged woman. Near her were Chiaki and Sho with their backs towards me. They were before an installation of a kind of twisted sculpture with faces that seemed to be squished inwards to each other, and Sho was frowning at it, clearly not understanding what it was supposed to be. On the other side of that section were the rest of them. Sora was seated on a bench with her arm around the shoulder of a young lady with pigtails in front of a kind of landscape painting with an avenue of trees shrouded in mist. On a bench next to that were the unmistakeable figures of Nino and Alys, huddled together in matching outfits, seated in the same manner with their legs crossed and their heads resting against each other’s as they played on their respective DS. Between these two benches stood Riida looking spacey as usual as he stared unblinkingly at the landscape painting with a half-smile.

Everyone looked so natural, ne – from Sho’s and Chiaki’s posture before the sculpture, to Nino’s and Alys’s ludicrous slouching, to Riida’s appreciation of the landscape, to Sora’s conversation with the lady in pigtails – that I was loathe to intrude. But I was here on Sora’s summons, ne, and since I was there and bombarded with curious facts, it was only fitting that I demanded answers.

“Obaachan, ladies, Riida, Sho-kun, Nino,” I greeted with a playful smirk firmly in place as I strode up to them.

Instantly, all the heads except those of the novelist, the girl in pigtails, and the professor and her boyfriend, swivelled around to face me. Riida’s mother simply told her companion that I was just another friend of her son’s and continued her conversation with the older woman. Sho was still very much shocked by the unexpected intrusion and would have remained gaping if Chiaki had not nudged him.

“Et tu, Brute?” Chiaki asked with an unaffected laugh, throwing me off with whatever she had just said. It didn’t sound like Japanese. In fact, I was sure, ne, that it wasn’t Japanese.

“My dear Chiaki, ‘tu quoque’ would be more apropos,” Alys added in what sounded like English, shifting her glasses up without bothering to lift her head from her game console.

“Eh! I died?” Nino complained, resting his chin on his beloved’s shoulder. “You could have been gentler.”

I rolled my eyes at the scene before me. What were those two women going on about, ne? Sensing my confusion, Sho found his tongue and explained, “It’s a Shakespearean reference to Julius Caesar. But the philosopher over there had to correct the French.”

“Latin,” Chiaki and Sora corrected him.

“Latin? Like the dance? Paso doble?” Riida suddenly asked, confusion written over his expressive features.

Nino laughed sarcastically, kept his own DS, and took the DS console his beloved offered him and continued her game. “The language, Oh-chan! But it’s understandable – my Alys-chan’s brilliance would be too much for you to digest.”

Sora clicked her tongue in disapproval at Nino and tried to get Riida to sit down on the bench next to the pretty thing in pigtails whom I suddenly recognised as the artist featured on the news the previous night. That was highly suspicious, ne?

“Ne, I have a sinking feeling I’m going to regret asking,” I said, folding my arms and with a glare at everyone. “Why were you using Shakespeare and Latin?”

“Caesar utters ‘Et tu, Brute’ when Brutus stabs him in the play,” came the lisping voice of the girl in the pigtails with a shy smile as Riida placed a protective hand on the top of her head.

“Eh?” I gasped, still unable to make the necessary connections. That I suspected the artist was somehow known to at least two of the girlfriends, ne, was already an established fact in my mind. Riida’s speaking gesture of placing a hand on her head had momentarily thrown me into disbelief. Surely not, ne? Demo, the way he did, ne, must mean that. Gods! I needed to sit down or lean or something.

“There is a logical explanation to this,” Chiaki began commandingly, when she observed my discomfiture. “Morimoto-san…”

“Kaoru-chan to us,” Sora interrupted, much to the sniggering delight of stingy pokers hunched over a game console.

The botanist continued, “She is Ohno-kun’s fiancée. Save the Ninomiyas…”

“Don’t call us that!” Alys interjected in indignation, which only made Nino run a finger across her thigh.

But no one seemed to pay attention to that and Chiaki pressed forward, “Save the Ninomiyas and the couple’s respective families, no one else knows. Since we found out yesterday when Sho did the news coverage and we learned of the nudes, and Sora found out today upon viewing the same nudes…”

“And then you came…” Riida added, moving his hand to the artist’s shoulder where she patted it.

“You’re the latest one to hear of it. They used the lines which meant, ‘And you, Brutus’ because it seems that you’re the latest initiate into the great secret,” Sho continued in his newscaster voice.

Eh, hontou desu ka? Riida has a secret fiancée that no one but the misers knew? I really needed to sit down, ne. It would have been much easier for me to piece the facts together.

“Will you just let me finish!” Chiaki threw her head back in a laugh at the constant interruptions. The Ninomiyas flicked a careless wrist each in silence for her to continue, surprising me with how in sync they were sometimes (and it was frightening sometimes, ne). “Our charming Alys’s overriding flaw is her need to play the perfect academic…”

“My Alys-chan’s perfectionism isn’t a flaw,” Nino hissed defensively. “The way she holds her chopsticks however is criminal.”

Chiaki rolled her eyes when the professor began raining slaps against her freeloader’s arm and drawing a contented smirk from him. “As I was saying, Alys had the need to correct the Latin.”

“Point of information – I wasn’t correcting, I was quoting from De Viris Illustribus,” replied the academic in question.

“Matte, matte,” I muttered, refolding my arms again and glared at the assembled company to recollect my bearings. And I had to, ne, I was getting confused, which wasn’t usually the case with me. My grasp on situations was frequently incisive and quick. How did Chiaki know the artist if only the misers knew of the engagement, ne? “Ano, ne, Riida is secretly engaged to be married to Morimoto Kaoru-san?”

Riida and his pigtailed artist nodded with wide beams.

“Nino and Alys, ne, know of this?” I went on.

“You think?” they riposted in unison, acid hanging on every syllable.

“Ano, Sho and Chiaki know of this, ne, but not the rest of the upper management?”

Sho grinned impishly as Chiaki said, “It would appear so.”

“And then, ne, I’m lost. What happened that resulted in the rest of you knowing?” I asked, glaring at Sho and Riida for some kind of a satisfactory answer.

“Please do not be angry, Matsumoto-san,” came the gentle lisp of the painter, who was a little on the greenish-pale side and was twisting a part of her skirt in her hands. “If I had known the trouble it would have caused, I wouldn’t have asked Chiaki Nee-chan and Alys Nee-chan to sit for me.”

“Sheer genius,” Nino applauded acerbically, “you’ve now upset her. Very smooth, Jun.”

“Ano, I didn’t mean to…”

“Mmm-mmm.” Morimoto-san shook her head with a smile. “Daijoubu. Nino-kun always talks like that. I must admit that I knew who Chiaki Nee-chan was to the group when Alys Nee-chan introduced us. Chiaki Nee-chan saw us while performing her tree surgeon duties at Ueno Park and called out to Alys Nee-chan. I was just claimed to be a friend and not a word was ever breathed about Satoshi-kun. Then when Sho-kun came down to cover the exhibition, he saw some parts of the collection and called Satoshi-kun…”

“Whereupon, they learned of Kaoru-chan’s connection to Ohno-kun,” Sora ejaculated eager to say her piece as well. “When I called you, I was before the two oils. As I sought to give voice to my disjointed impressions, I caught sight of Alys and Kaoru-chan holding hands and talking to an older gentleman whom I later learnt was the renowned Toyomi Hoshino sensei. At which point, Chiaki loaned her arm to Kaoru-chan. I hung up on you because I was struggling to regain mastery over myself and when I did so, I called out to them.”

“The necessary introductions were made, greetings were exchanged and the basic facts exchanged,” Alys continued when Sora paused.

“Then why didn’t anyone say so at the beginning, ne!” I said with gritted teeth, trying hard not to burst out laughing at the machinations that must have gone on behind the scenes. However, on deeper consideration, I should have known, ne, that Riida was the sort to keep his private life completely private and keep everything a great secret. Guess that means, there’s more to his dazed expression than he lets on, ne?

The ladies, clearly annoyed by their perception of my lack of intelligence chorused, “Because you did not ask.”

Goes to show you the mettle of the Arashi princesses, ne? Still, Riida with a secret fiancée, eh…Sho was right when he said Riida would be the dark horse surprising us with things we didn’t know about him like a secret wife we wouldn’t know about until the divorce papers were released. Ano, so now, everyone with the exception of Aiba knew of Riida’s fiancée. It was all so hush-hush that not even Manager-san knew. Still, it wasn’t that bad, ne. After all, his mother did know about it, and if anything were to happen or news were to leak out, Riida’s mother would swoop in to defend her son and daughter-in-law. That was just the kind of woman she was, ne, redoubtable – just the way women should be.

Due to my reflections on the matter, I declined Sho’s offer to drop Sora and me back, and watched as Riida’s mother and Kaoru’s mother shepherd their children and their children’s freeloading miser friends into a bakery van with the name ‘Six Petals’. I was still a little overwhelmed, flabbergasted, call it whatever you want, ne.

“She’s a sweetheart. She agreed to do the cover design for the murder mystery,” Sora announced abruptly as we strolled out of Geidai.

“Ever the mercenary,” I teased with knowing smirk.

She made a dismissive gesture with her right hand before tucking her hair behind her ears. “I am a member of the former Sekkan-ke; I plot and plan and scheme. It’s what we former aristocrats do for entertainment.”

“Why couldn’t I have had someone pleasant like Kaoru, eh? Riida must have done something exceptional in his childhood to snap up a girl like that. A shame that she’s mostly deaf, ne?” I remarked with forced casualness.

“Even so, you must own they are well suited,” Sora sighed wistfully. “If only I could written an epic romance about them set in a time of war and great tribulations. However, I shall be gracious and allow other pens more eloquent than mine to dwell on such a story.”

“Ne, this display of humility is most affecting,” I said with a smile, somehow managing not to laugh. “May I know, eh, why it has suddenly attacked you?”

“I am not going to dignify that with an answer!” she retorted and then shrieked in laughter when she saw that she had made me snigger.

Only she could make me cross and laugh in turns with her play on words and her irrepressible wit. This was what it was like to be completely comfortable and unguarded in another’s company, eh? Ne, I don’t really care what the guys think. They have their own girls who were in turn, shy and creative, assertive and strait laced, neurotic and intelligent; and Aiba has his animals. But seriously ne, Sora united all those character traits. As such, I like to entertain the thought that I had the best deal of them all. How very vain I am, ne?

NOTES

Part of this chapter coincides with Ch 40 of Life’s Colours & Sounds.

Chapter 45

For the duration of the next week, I shuttled between my place, the studios, JE Central and the Kujo sisters’ place to check in on Sora. She had started work on the second volume to the Masqueraders manga and as with Sora, ne, she neglected everything once she started work. It was just one of those things she was obsessive about her, like her need to analyse human behaviour and see them for what they really are. I worried about her, ne, when she worked like that. Kiyora may think it normal for her sister to work in forty-eight hour spurts, but I don’t think it wise. Eto, the brain slows down if it’s been awake for too long, ne? It can’t be good for Sora’s work if her brain is too tired to produce good quality work. I needed Sora to be in good health so that I wouldn’t worry. I quite relied on her, ne. I discussed my drama and movie scripts with her, and she always helped me to get a handle on the characters I played. Moreover, I wanted to talk to her about Aiba’s recent behaviour. Recently, ne, Aiba has been borrowing classical music CDs from Alys in a bid to render himself more cultured. Of course, Nino didn’t like the idea of his Alys being ‘exploited’ as he called it. I think, eh, in their own warped little world, ne, it was all right for the Ninomiyas to exploit others but not the reverse. It was something I didn’t agree with on principle. Sora, on the other hand, believed that it was a sign of his devotion to his little professor, and she made free to tell me when I dropped by late in the evening after a drama shoot.

“It’s sweet that he’s protective of her,” opined my girlfriend as she sat before the television with reams of blank paper, inks, pencils, pens, and other writing and drawing accoutrements scattered haphazardly around the table. As much as my hands itched to put things in order, I didn’t, ne. Clearing up Sora’s messes while she wrote or drew was a thankless task. Ten minutes after cleaning, everything would be messy again. I didn’t like it, ne, but getting her angry while she worked wasn’t an option. I could appreciate the fact that she was a respected professional in her own line, ne; and as such, she should be left in peace to work lest she miss her deadlines. Hard work was always something to be admired and respected, ne?

Ignoring the welter of papers and tissue paper scraps with which she used to wipe her pens and pencils and all that, I concentrated on staring at the bowl of senbei that Kiyora had placed on the table before pottering to the study to make a phone call to their cousin Ichijo. I frowned on noticing that the bowl was chipped and a fine crack ran by its side. I wouldn’t use it any more if that were the case, but the Kujo sisters had a funny habit of not throwing something away if it wasn’t completely broken or useless. I guess that means I would have to buy them a new set of bowls for them.

“I don’t know whether that’s protectiveness or just an obsessive compulsion, ne. Ano, they’re just CDs, ne?” I remarked, opening the peanut butter jar for her. This was because Sora, wonderful woman though she is, liked to cover her senbei with peanut butter.

“He could be jealous or feeling neglected. There is something inherently selfish and possessive about him,” Sora said matter-of-factly as she removed her glasses and capped her pen. Taking up a senbei and coating it with peanut butter, she elucidated, “He always wants to know that Alys is available for him and him alone. He wants her near him merely for the sake of having her near, whereas she wants him around for companionship. There is a very clear cut difference. In the long term, it could cause potential problems for them because they are both fiercely independent. They like to go off and do their own thing without being questioned. Alys may see her kindness of loaning CDs to Aiba as something she does because she wants to, but Ninomiya may see it as an act where she neglects him to care for someone else. That selfish streak of his could cause some problems if they aren’t careful. It doesn’t help that I sometimes think their relationship is a tussle for dominance and power for them.”

“But they’re so, eh, ‘into’ each other when we see them, ne. Even if it’s just a show, which it is when they overdo things; they’re devoted to each other. She came to Central this morning with lemon barley water and we were all in the recording studio, ne, and she only stayed for a short while. But Nino, ne, he just had to see her to the door. Eto, it was a private, unguarded moment, ne, that I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t come out of the toilet at that time. They were waiting for the lift and even though they were not touching ne, because she had her head in an English newspaper, and Nino had his hands in his pockets, he was looking at her – just looking at her with a half-smile. This was despite the white lighting of the place making her complexion look sallow, her eye bags more prominent, her glasses thicker, and highlighted the two silver strands I saw in her hair. He was almost salivating, ne,” I reminded her. “I don’t see that as a war of dominance.”

“You just don’t see it. They have the potential to take over the world, just as they have the potential to destroy each other. They know each other’s every warped twist and bend; it’s what they do with that knowledge,” Sora said mysteriously while increasing the volume of the television as the News Zero theme started to play.

Realising that we were never going to agree on the subject, I stared at the television screen so as to ignore the crack on the senbei bowl. It was infinitely easier to pretend that something wasn’t there if you weren’t looking at it, ne. It was just about time Sora took a break anyway so I watched the news with her. The main report Sho presented had something to do with this up-and-coming Japanese artist from Geidai. Impressive, ne, a Geidai postgraduate student, this Morimoto Kaoru. She was cho kawaii with pigtails and eyes like marbles. Unfortunately, ne, she spoke with a noticeable lisp, and was according to Sho’s report, mostly deaf. She was about to have her first very exhibition titled ‘Reflections’, and she spoke of her art with a great clarity of vision and great professionalism, even if she was a little shy, ne. The brief interview was followed by a cursory highlight of some of the pieces that would be on display. I personally found her work a little macabre, ne, but her work was good – it drew people in. Whether you liked it or not, you were drawn into her work. Sugoi, ne?

Sora was blown away by the art work too and declared with her mouth full of senbei, “I’m going to that exhibition tomorrow to see the oils up close. If she’s as good as the few pieces highlighted by the programme suggest, I have a mind to ask her to do the artwork for the murder story.”

“Eh?” I uttered, surprised by her sudden decision. “Tomorrow, ne? I have the day off, but I can’t accompany you, ne. I have to go see my folks.”

“I don’t need your escort,” she answered firmly. “I didn’t ask you to come along anyway. It’s not like anything will happen to me for the two hours I will be at the Geidai art exhibition hall or wherever it is.”

I rolled my eyes and smirked. It was typical of her to be zealous only when something piqued her interest. “Mmm… Sakiyama sensei has spoken, ne? I could deal with that. Ne, I should be out of the set by the evening. Ano, want to do dinner tomorrow?” I asked.

Since she assented to the scheme and promised to be a good girl and sleep that night instead of drawing and writing for the next instalment of The Masqueraders, I didn’t give the matter much thought. I had other things to do, ne, like my new drama to go through and memorising the script to a movie project I had signed for. However, I learnt that the more one doesn’t think of things, the more the things would present themselves before one.

It was late afternoon the following day, and I had just put on my shoes and was about to leave my parents’ place for Shinjuku (where I wanted to do some shopping) when Sora called on the keitai.

“Jun-chan, are you free now?” she asked quickly, her syllables colliding into one another.

“In a manner of speaking, ne, I am,” I answered, furrowing my brow at the rapidity of her speech, wondering whether something had upset or frightened her.

“Could you make a detour to the Geidai Founder’s Memorial Gallery now?” she asked in a near squeal.

Eh, now? The art must be very good if she was squealing to that extent, ne. However, the preview of some of the pieces on News Zero gave the impression that this Morimoto Kaoru person’s artwork was macabre. It was also likely that Sora was disturbed by some of the work there, ne. Hailing a taxi and climbing into the vehicle, I told her, “I’m en route, give me some time, ne. Was the exhibition any good?”

“It’s fantastic, but you have to see some of these pieces with your own eyes,” she said with the same rapid tone of urgency she had used earlier.

“That good, eh?” I teased with a chuckle.

“Wait till you see them for yourself. That’s the Geidai Founder’s Memorial Gallery. It overlooks Ueno Park near the swan pond. I’m in the oil painting section. I don’t believe this and neither would you. This goes beyond my expectations and analysis. Aiyee! Is that who I think it is? Jun-chan, I have to hang up now but I’ll still be here.”

As I heard the telltale monotone sounds of a phone being disconnected, I was left distinctively perturbed. What could have made her so incoherent? What could she have seen, ne? Who did she see that she had to hang up? Someone from the Alliance Publishing? An old friend? There was more to this than she was letting on, ne, especially from the way she mentioned whatever she had seen going beyond her expectations and analysis. Whatever, ne, I would be at Geidai soon anyway and would be able to see what was going on for myself.

Chapter 44

If you want me to be honest, ne, it shouldn’t be surprising that Sora and Chiaki had already gotten in touch and were friends. Why shouldn’t they be, ne? The guys hung out with each other, and sometimes we would want to bring our girls along. It wouldn’t be fair to exclude them, ne? Girlfriends and wives like going out and having fun outdoors too, and it would be nice to get them out of their work and show them that they’re appreciated once in a while.

“Ano, shouldn’t we ask the misers to join us, ne?” I enquired when Sho tried to make a u-turn at the corner. It would be the correct and polite thing to do, ne.

Our rapper shook his head and his turned the steering wheel with one hand. “Try calling them and you will get a waspish Nino and a testily jetlagged Alys on the line. Let them have some time alone.”

“Eh? I’ve never known Nino to turn down a free meal, ne. But yeah, we could meet up with them some other time,” I remarked, considering the merits of Sho’s reasoning. It would be more prudent to leave them alone, ne, especially if Alys was jetlagged. She didn’t make very good company was she was tired because she tended to be overly sarcastic, and Nino would probably want her to rest too. I was impressed, ne, Sho was beginning to think more sensibly at times now. Sho had always been sensible in his own way. But where he would have previously swooped in and pleaded with Nino and Alys to join us in our merriment, he now exercised some thought and restraint in choosing to let them have their private moments. It must be Chiaki’s doing, ne? Her good influence must be rubbing onto him.

Sho nodded in approval before throwing up the matter that was foremost on our minds. “Rajeev’s Tandoori Oven…Those two… What do you think they are up to?”

“The Ninomiyas?” I asked, choosing to be deliberately obtuse. Honestly ne, addressing the issue as to why our girlfriends had arranged to meet us at the same place was disconcerting, and if this were a manga or a television drama, I would say that it was either a very crazy plot device or the beginning of some kind of conspiracy plot.

“Matsumoto…” Sho growled with a quick glance at his watch as we drove into the corner street and he tried to park the car. Fortunately, ne, it wasn’t a popular dining place or we would be swamped by the paparazzi mosquitoes.

I twitched my lips into an apologetic half-smile. “Honestly, ne, I don’t know. But it can’t be anything bad, ne?” I replied when we made our way into the restaurant where an obsequious man with a heavily pomaded moustache wanted to know if we had reservations. On hearing that we had one and were already expected, he led us to one of the quaint private parlours were Sora and Chiaki had already placed the orders and were discussing something in rapt animation.

“Ladies,” I greeted with my best smile and an apology on my tongue for keeping them waiting. With wives, mothers and girlfriends, ne, it always helped if the man apologised first. In my limited experience with Sora, I learnt that if I apologised first, she would follow it up with an apology of her own and there would be peace. And mutually peaceful relations were one of the most important things between a couple, ne?

Chiaki smiled and indicated with a firm jerk of her chin in acknowledgement. “Sho sent a message earlier saying that the shoot had gone into overtime. We took the liberty of ordering first, otherwise this useless fellow would get sulky if his tank is empty.”

“I do not sulk!” Sho protested with a pout for good measure.

“That is a sulky face,” Sora pointed out.

“Deshou?” Chiaki agreed, washing her hands in the finger bowl and indicating that we should do the same. “How was work today?”

“Ohno’s new steps were a trial to dance to,” Sho said with a facsimile of Riida’s pout. “My calves are all sore.”

“I’m not Alys, I don’t do massages.” Chiaki spooned some kind of an aubergine dish on a plate. “I stoop, squat, carry pots and bend over my laboratory all day, and you never ask if I have a backache.”

“That’s why I said we should have called her here today for a lady’s night out. Alas, her devotion to her freeloader and snippy post-jetlag attitude prevents her from joining us,” Sora said with careless unconcern. “Instead, we’re stuck with these two.”

“Oi! Putting me down in front of my friends who know of my flaws doesn’t serve any purpose, ne,” I teased, sitting down beside her.

Turning to me with an arch look, she smiled in a horrifyingly sweet manner that drew attention to her wide mouth and drawled, “Why don’t you just ask me already – did I orchestrate this or not?”

I folded my arms and glared at her, and at Sho who was already happily following Chiaki’s instructions and eating very unskilfully with his hand. “I don’t have to ask, ne. You’ve already given it away, eh, with a miscalculation. You should have been good and pretended that it was a coincidence that you met Chiaki here and I would perhaps, ne, have let things slide. However, you’ve already all but stated you ‘orchestrated’ this.”

“Come off it, Jun-kun,” Chiaki requested while handing me a plate with rice and some other kinds of dishes spooned on it. “She and I know of each other, and we have been in touch via email for the past two months. When she asked to consult me on naturally occurring plant poisons, I figured that now is a good time to meet up as any other, isn’t that right, Sora-san?”

“I couldn’t have put it better, Chiaki-san,” smiled my girlfriend as she swept her fingertips around the food on the plate, gathered it up and pushed the small bundle into her mouth with her thumb. I was impressed, ne, that was a neat way of eating because only the fingers were deployed and the palm of the hand essentially remained clean.

“Eh? That was it?” I asked, my voice straining in disbelief as I hunted around for cutlery. I wasn’t going to use my hands and have the smell of the spices linger over my elegant digits or risk the potential of burns from the still steaming gravy.

Sora wiggled her fingers at me in a teasing fashion. “I don’t plot. Politics isn’t my thing. I don’t play games either. I leave that to the experts. Can’t I say I want to meet up with a friend and be believed?”

“Even if I concede to that, ne, it doesn’t mean you have to go behind my back,” I complained in a gently scolding voice. I wasn’t cross ne, it was just something that had to be said.

“Now you know what I felt when you went behind my back with the whole surprise impromptu private performance at the publishing house, it’s ‘Tit for tat, butter for fat’, Jun-chan,” she riposted with a smile of feigned sweetness.

Counting to ten to still the dual desires of smacking her at the back of the head for catching me off guard and do something about that hideous hair band she had on, I calmed myself sufficiently to offer a compromise. “Okay, if I promise not to spring any more surprises on you, ne, will you tell me what you’re really up to?”

“I’m not up to anything that I do not already do,” Sora said with a deliberate carelessness.

Infuriatingly, Sho and Chiaki were pretending not overhear this exchange and were wholly absorbed in eating and discussing something about African violets and the new single we were cutting. They weren’t going to make things easy for me, ne. If it weren’t so undignified, ne, I would have banged my head on the table in frustration. However, Sho’s keitai rang at that opportune moment, providing me with an opening.

“Ano ne, are you going to pick that up?” I asked, knowing that he couldn’t because his hands were dirty.

He shook his head, showed me his curry and spice stained hands, and stuck out his hip at me. “Answer it for me.”

In times like these, when mine was the only sensible head left in room, the onus was always on me to do the menial, nitty-gritty tasks. Glaring my indignation at him, I extracted the keitai from his pocket. “Aiba,” I informed him tersely and pressed the button to take the call. “Moshi…”

“Jun-kun? What are you doing on Sho-chan’s keitai?” Aiba gasped, completely guileless. This guilelessness was one of his strong and weak points.

“I’ve been asking myself the same question ever since Sora-chan and Chiaki-chan set this up,” I mumbled and then added clearly, “I’m having dinner with him, ne, and it just so happens, eh, eto, I’m the only one with clean hands.”

“Mama gave Sho-chan a book about flowers and what they mean, right?” Aiba immediately launched into his longwinded elucidation as to his reasons for calling. “I want to know what kind of flowers I can give someone who’s been depressed but isn’t depressed anymore, but is kind of worried that people won’t like… Is there any kind of flower to tell someone to smile and be happy and say that things aren’t going to be as bad as you think? Like an encouragement flower or a cheer up flower.”

“Why do you want to know that?” I asked when I finally extracted the important parts of his ramble and processed them. Dropping my voice to a whisper and a put-on cough, I lowly asked in as quiet a voice as possible to preserve his privacy, “Girlfriend? New target?”

“Eh? New target? For what? It’s just a friend.”

While I didn’t buy into all of it, I was much too tired to extrapolate more from him. I did the next best thing by requesting that he hold and grant me some time to make the necessary enquiries. “Ne, ladies and gentlemen, Aiba wants to know how to convey encouragement or cheerfulness through flowers.”

“I don’t know.” Sho shrugged. “Alys’s book isn’t with me at the moment.”

“Don’t ask me, my Victorian notes are at home.” Sora shook her head and sucked at a fish head. She frightened me when she ate fish for her uncanny ability to pry off the flesh from the fish head, leaving it clean.

Chiaki, whose brow had been furrowed in thought, parted her lips and said, “Dianthus barbatus or Sweet William, a perennial plant with flowers growing in dense clusters in dark red, pink, white and purple, and red. It has two meanings – the first is ‘gallantry’, the second is ‘will you smile’. Is that what he wants to convey?”

“There’s a type of flowering plant called Sweet William. Chiaki informs me that it represents gallantry while posing the question ‘will you smile’. Will that do?” I spoke into the receiver, noting with faint interest as I did so that there was orchestral music in the background.

“Sweet William? Funny name. But it asks for a smile, right? I’ll run with that.”

“Do you want to join us for dinner?”

“Any chicken?”

I looked around the table. “There’s something that looks vaguely like poultry.”

“Hontou? Does it look good?” He sounded like he would be swayed to join our party, but he ended up declining my suggestion. “I’ve got to get the Sweet William thingy. It’s really super important. Aaah! Policeman, I have to hang up before he stops me for talking on the keitai without the ear extension thingy. Bye-bye.”

“Is he joining us?” Sho asked when I slid the keitai down the table to him.

“Not today. Claims he has something important to do,” I thoughtfully revealed, pondering on the nature of his task.

“Smells like a new story. One fraught with intrigue and suspense, possibly like the one I’m conceptualising and for which I am consulting Chiaki-san,” Sora commented, her eyes glinting in unvoiced speculation.

“Are you writing a new story?” I asked, putting Aiba’s oddness temporarily aside in a bid to uncover the ladies’ real reason for meeting up.

“Murder with a squeeze of romance,” the botanist added on swallowing a mouthful of aubergine.

I sighed and shook my head. Eh? Was that all? That was all good, ne. Everything was hypothetical in a murder mystery, ne, unless Sora was going to interview murderers to develop the characters’ psyche. Eto… If it’s a murder mystery, why does she need Chiaki to give her pointers? A straight forward stab in the back or rat poison in cocaine usually did things, ne. It must be something to do with plants, eh. Sora was usually very thorough in her research before she wrote. “Why do I have to have such a clever girlfriend, ne?” I sighed again.

“Do you have to ask rhetorical questions?” Sho said in between bites.

Averting my eyes for the moment (because Sho, good man though he was, ne, had appalling eating habits that I couldn’t stomach), I managed to get down a little piece of very tender chicken even if it was too much on the spicy side. That was Sora’s way, ne, to always go sideways when she wanted something. Eh, chotto, that was kind of like me too, ne? Hastily taking a sip of water, I smirked at the thought of her next novel’s plot. “Ne, how is the story going to work?” I enquired. “Who are you basing the inspector on?”

“There isn’t one. The murderer kills everyone, including herself,” she said nonchalantly, trying to persuade me to eat something she had scooped up between her fingers. I didn’t, ne, eat it, I mean.

“Murder-suicide?” Chiaki gasped.

“Something like that,” Sora replied with a wink, “and because everything was done using the most natural of poisons.”

“Sleeping pills?” Sho asked, looking very intrigued indeed, which was unusual, ne, because he didn’t read the kind of novels Sora wrote. He claims he doesn’t read novels, but he does, ne. His taste is a little more discerning, shall we say.

“Acorns, which affect the kidneys in large amounts and only kills over time; cherry bark for the cyanide, mayapples, and daffodil bulbs,” the novelist said in a completely blasé voice. “Oh, and my favourite – jasmine berries.”

Chiaki added, much to my shock and Sho’s, who also, no doubt, ne, had any idea that she was this knowledgeable about plants and their toxins, “Moonseed would be better if you want a mass killing. They look like wild grapes, and may be accidentally ingested.”

“I’ve just lost my appetite,” Sho announced, wiping his hands as the ladies continued eating.

“That just proves that the old adage ‘there’s always a first time’ is true,” I said, much to the amusement of the ladies.

Under normal circumstances, ne, I would have stopped eating too, but I had become accustomed to this. The girls were talking openly and casually about naturally occurring poisons, which in normal situations would frighten the shit out of anyone. But, ne, when you become acclimatised to the way Sora always talks about her plots, eh, you wouldn’t think much about it. And this kind of talk is very mild for her. I had grown accustomed to it, just as I had grown accustomed to Ohmiya’s hand-holding.

However, I must acknowledge, ne, that there was something disconcerting in Aiba’s sudden phone call. I hoped he hadn’t gotten himself involved in something he shouldn’t be. He could be susceptible to the flimsiest of cons if he wasn’t careful. I didn’t allow myself to dwell on that matter, for I accepted that we, as Arashi couldn’t keep him cosseted him all the time, even he needed to get out and ram his head on the wall once in a while.