53 posts tagged “remedy for a broken heart”

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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Aiba’s story Omake

‘Hello, Goodbye – until we meet again’

The morning parlour of a country manor in the faux Grecian style favoured by the late Georgians was, disappointingly, not a large apartment. However on a bleak rainy day where its generous hostess was trying to settle her bills with the tradesmen, the smallness of the room was not felt by its occupants. Quite a modest fire was already burning behind the grate made it unnecessary for all but one of the two ladies present to huddle shawls around their shoulders. As Lady Strange, known as Shoko to her literary circle, was suffering most grievously, it was understandable. An authoress who had been besieged and beleaguered by her own characters was to be pitied rather than derided.

Today, poor Lady Strange was at her dear friend’s residence, the honourable Lady Verdant, know affectionately to her friends as Junko, in great affliction. Lady Strange had visited whilst suffering from the earache, and besides stuffing a roasted onion into the afflicted orifice, had swathed her head and neck in an old kerseymere shawl. She lay curled up on an aged sofa, with her head on a worn navy blue cushion, and from time to time uttered a long-suffering sigh, to which, her estimable hostess paid no heed.

There were many indications that the morning parlour was a place to which the ladies sought some kind of refuge. A large horizontal mirror slab, believed by many guests to be ornamental was mounted on the wall. Books and papers were littered over the table in the centre of the room, but only one, the hostess of the manor was engaged in this agreeable activity of reading. Lady Strange, on perceiving no response to her continued hints of private trouble took up a pad of foolscap of paper and began jotting things in it.

“Shoko,” Lady Verdant remarked, momentarily lowering a sheaf of papers, “I find this most perplexing. A Mr Sakurai has been complaining that a Mr Ninomiya and Dr Teng are taking over the plots of all the stories so far because the narratives have more ‘crack’ in them.” She paused and brought forth another letter. “This one from Mrs Ohno complains that her son gets pushed over far too easily in his story and makes several disparaging remarks about the crack in Life’s Colours and Sounds. Another from a Mr Matsumoto complains that there’s too much crack in his stories. And one fan letter requesting for more crack scenes simply signed off as the K. A. Miya.”

Lady Strange raised her eyes obediently from the sofa and critically scanned the papers thrust towards her. Then she sighed and once more lowered her dark head on the sofa. “The professor and her beau wrote the last. Well, if that is their notion of crack in my tales, I shan’t write any more.”

“But you must and you shall!” declared Lady Verdant in accents of strong resolution.

“My dear Junko, they’ve given me an earache from their verbal complaints and physical bruises from darting pens at me. It’s damned if I do and damned if I don’t. To be honest, writing the ‘Whither my love’ series is not worth being pelted with writing instruments and shoved into priest holes. The only thing I want now is to be kept as far away from that motley crew as possible.”

The letter that she had perusing slipped from Lady Verdant’s fingers to the floor as she gasped and flew up out of her chair. “Not – oh, not that! The insolence! I’ll kick their butts for you! Look at this, Shoko!” She jabbed at a page violently. “Mr Matsumoto claims that From Cover to Cover and Wages of Sense lack moral tone.”

“Too much crack! I will have them know that my writings are not lacking in moral tone,” declared Lady Strange, quite ruffled.

Lady Verdant rubbed the tip of her nose. “Well, I think you would do better to show them that,” she remarked candidly.

The sufferer on the sofa sat up cautiously. “With what? More words? Look where that has gotten me!” This comment, delivered with all the bluntness natural in a woman who had undergone the tortures of the omake in Wages of Managing Sense, threw a blight over Lady Verdant.

“Your weapon of choice is the pen, Shoko,” reminded Lady Verdant encouragingly.

“Yes, yes, I acknowledge there is something in what you say,” sighed Lady Strange, gingerly removing the onion from her ear and throwing it into the fire. Ruthlessly seizing a stack of clean papers and dipping a pen in ink, she scratched quickly across the page, “I’ll show them what a story truly lacking in moral tone is like!”

Many hours later, in the same sitting room, the assembled guests were uncomfortably looking at one another in their seats, wondering why Lady Strange had issued them an invitation for tea, and was no where to be seen. As their eyes darted apprehensively from one person to the next, they each wondered as to the true reason they were kept waiting by their hostess. At the sounds of footsteps, the assembled party comprising of a motley crew of Arashi members and their ladies, looked expectantly up in anticipation of this Lady Strange’s entry. However, when they saw it was only a handsomely dissipated youth with a devil-may-care attitude, they returned with amiable rancour to the task of waiting.

The slim gentleman in mourning colours seated on the sofa stared freely in rapt admiration at the pallid, bespectacled dark haired lady in a burgundy gown seated in an armchair to his left. On observing his present activity, his companion picked up the stack of haphazardly arranged papers very badly hidden underneath a book on Edinburgh on the coffee table and began examining them with interest. The young woman in maroon on the pallid lady’s armrest, rested her head on her friend’s shoulder and asked, “Do any of you know why we have been asked to come here?”

A fellow with unkempt hair and resin stained fingers leaned forward in his seat and opined, “A better question would be – who else is coming?”

The dissipated newcomer sauntered to the side of the mirror and poured himself a drink of wine, evidently making himself at home, while the sulky looking fellow who had been frowningly studying his environment opened and shut the nearby box of bonbons without taking a sweet.

As the door opened again, everyone at the sitting room looked up, hoping that it would be their errant hostess. To their disappointment, it was only a gangly tall gentleman with an apologetic smile. “Am I late?” he asked.

“No, Masaki,” replied the sulky man playing with the bon-bon container. “Not at all.”

“Sho-chan, do you know who else is coming?” questioned the man with the resin stained fingers, ignoring the new arrival named Masaki Aiba.

“Ne, Riida,” chided the dissipated young man with a bore yawn. “Ever so eager to ingratiate yourself with the who’s who of society,” he scoffed. “Isn’t it enough for you that you were given the prettiest girl of the lot? Do you imagine sucking up to Lady Strange will result in a bigger role for you in the books?”

“It’s not that,” blustered Satoshi Ohno with a blush. “I just wanted to who else she had invited. It seems likely that she had forgotten about the invitation.”

“She – forget?” laughed the dissipated youth. “She writes about the incidents she observes around her, and plays around with the timeframe. Her memory is in no way defective, for all she claims to possess short-term memory loss.”

“It’s not that, Matsumoto Jun!” exclaimed Ohno, quickly defending himself. “If I know who else are supposed to come, we can stop them from joining us and sitting around like fools waiting for something to happen.”

“That’s not the Lady Strange I know,” snorted the sulky gentleman named Sho Sakurai in an educated Tokyo burr as he snapped the sweet box shut again. “She is the sort who makes us wait for something, and yet nothing of consequence happens.”

The pallid bespectacled woman cleared her throat. “Yes, Sho, we know. The series of stories is entitled Whither my love for a reason.”

“Nothing very much happens in these stories, and I thought she like, really liked us and all. All we do is run around and think, and talk, and then jump around, and then walk around, and then think some more, and then talk again. She’s been following us since we started out as a band and she still treats us like this,” pointed out Aiba, as he looked disinterestedly at his reflection in the long horizontal mirror in the sitting room.

“Things do happen to us,” contributed the woman with messy hair who had been seated by the window, hitherto observing the proceedings. “We each have an interesting back story, and odd things actually happen to us throughout the successive plots.”

“Such as a dependence on coffee and cigarettes when you write,” recalled the bespectacled female, steepling her hands in thought. “A little far-fetched in my analysis.”

“Not as far-fetched as her depiction of your predilection for painkillers and opera, Alys,” responded the Bryonesque woman at the window as she winked seductively.

“Touché, Sora,” applauded Alys Teng with a smile, before turning her attention to Aiba by the mirror. “What are you staring at, Masa-boy?”

“Mama! My tie’s crooked and I’m trying to fix it,” he answered. “It’s difficult to get the waterfall look on it just right.”

“Look, I have to be somewhere in an hour and a half!” the woman in a pageboy haircut said, tapping her foot impatiently on the floor as she consulted her watch. “She had better have a good explanation for keeping us waiting.”

“Indeed, Chiaki,” concurred the lady on the sofa as she looked up the papers she had been perusing. “Very bad ton, n’est-ce pas? Where do you think our hostess has gone?”

The smirking gentleman beside her crinkled his eyes in a mirthless smile. “Don’t you know, Renée-Caroline? Lady Strange plays with us like the gods play with mortals.”

“Ha! She? A goddess? Surely, you overrate her abilities, Freeloader. However, she chooses to play us; whatever it is that led her to summon us here – it had better be good. I am quite losing my patience,” harrumphed Alys indignantly, hiking up her feet and drawing her knees closer to her chest.

The Freeloader or Kazunari Ninomiya (Nino to his friends) eyed her speculatively as she wrapped her arms sullenly around her legs. “Are you breaking in a new thesis student at Todai? Heh, that would be fun. Do I get to watch?”

“The exigencies of work command where it must, n’est-ce pas?” enquired Renée-Caroline Chaussée, handing the papers she had been perusing to Chiaki before she went to assist Aiba with his tie. The Todai professor inclined her head forward in a nod and stared at the mirror as it momentarily shimmered. “I quite understand what you mean, chere Alys. Good students are so hard to train these days. They are like malcontent orchestra members.”

“Who cares about orchestra and university students?” Aiba burst out in frustration at his crumpled tie. “How anyone can see properly in this kind of shimmering mirror! That’s like really irritating.”

“Well, yeah, now you know how we feel about you,” Nino sneered evilly.

“Now that you mention it,” commented Sho. “What is that mirror doing there?”

Looking up with a frown, Sora studied the mirror and came to the same conclusion intimated by her partner. “It does seem out of place for this part of the house. It clashes with the décor, it seems… ”

“More half-baked theories? Lady Strange doesn’t write about people and situations in the same way you do,” interjected Chiaki as she studied the papers in hand.

“More importantly, ne, Why did she-who-must-not-be-named invite us all here? She’s written five stories – one for each of us. It all ends here, ne. Doesn’t it?” Jun stated with moderate conviction.

“Not quite, she will make passing references to the rest of us in a sequel entitled Zugzwang and the symbolism where botany is concerned is most telling,” said Chiaki as she continued reading the papers.

“Chiaki is right,” Alys answered, folding her arms and drumming her fingers on her arm. “The modus operandi of she-who-must-not-be-named is to mention names, places, character traits and whatnot in passing of both major characters and nameless minor characters, only to flesh them out much later. I hear she intends to flesh out a few characters mentioned briefly throughout the ‘Whither my love’ series in the sequel.”

“I sometimes wonder,” Sho remarked, thoughtfully scratching his chin, “Whether she is making sport of her readers or of us.”

“Whatever it is,” declared Alys hotly. “I'm going to give her a piece of my mind. Look what she’s done with my character! Instead of giving me a semi-decent history, she has me making a bloody exhibition of myself with the freeloader! What does she mean by throwing me with the likes of him? He’s a bloody arse!”

“But Nino is a stingy bloody bastard,” insisted Jun placidly, handing Alys a glass of claret. “He has such cunning eyes that I wouldn’t put it past him to throw both you and Sora into a pit for larks ne, just so as to see who emerges from its depths alive.”

“Meh, my Alys likes me this way,” smirked Nino devilishly, pouting and blowing a kiss to his lady.

“That’s hardly the point I’m making, Kazu darling,” Alys mock-huffed as she seized his hand with an affectionate smirk.

“But it is the point Iam making. Besides, I wouldn’t put her up against Sora. I’ll get another woman, keep her as a mistress, and then pit you against her. That would certainly save me the hassle of dealing with you when you’re in one of your moods.” Nino curled his lips into the withering smirk of doom. “Sheer genius to play them one against the other, isn’t it? That was my plan when I suggested to she-who-must-not-be-named a great scheme I had. She wasn’t in favour of it at the beginning. However, I think I successfully er… appealed to her perverse sense of mayhem to get her to include my plot. They would kill each other, leaving me free to pursue my own agenda; and I have the added benefit of not dirtying my hands should they kill one another. If one survived, I would graciously accept her as my long term companion. A man in my station in life always needs a capable woman beside him. What can be more capable than a woman who kills her rival in the pit?”

As Kaoru gasped in horror, Sora and Alys exchanged irritated looks at that speech. Alys was so roused by his callous manner of speaking that she kicked him and smacked him very severely with several large books she found lying around.

“If you know anything about she-who-must-be-named, which you obviously don’t,” sniffed Chiaki in stern disapproval. “You would know that she would incorporate your scheme in a such a way that you would regret asking her to enact it.”

“Exactly,” said Alys, her voice dripping with vitriol as she continued her physical assualt on Nino. “Why would I be running after a selfish cad of an arse like you? I would have kicked you in the testicles instead of the shins if I had my way. She-who-must-not-be-named could not have possibly taken your suggestion with sangfroid. She perverts everything that crosses her hands.”

“Ne, now that we’re speaking on the subject,” Jun said consideringly, tossing the hair away from his eyes. “You’re one of the most undeserving male characters in the whole series. What’s so special about you? You’re not handsome, ne; you have no taste, no class, and yet you want to have women fighting over you? Wouldn’t it be more realistic if they fought over me?”

“Only if you’re stripping,” Aiba interposed with a wide smile. “Women will fight over you when you’re stripping. Or maybe not. Maybe they would have nosebleeds and not be able to fight over you.”

“Actuallement, that and the scheme to which Monsieur Ninomiya alluded is in the plot outline,” corrected Renée-Caroline, as she took the papers Chiaki offered her.

“Could you repeat that, ne?” Jun enquired politely, watching Renée-Caroline intently as she went through the papers once more as silence fell in the drawing room.

“It is in the plot outline,” reiterated the maestra, shuffling the papers and putting them aside underneath the book where she had found them. She then picked up her very full wineglass and twisted it carefully in her hand. “I read her prelim notes for the sequel. She will be bringing some characters briefly mentioned in brief touch-and-go references in the previous stories.”

“Really?” Jun looked up, greatly interested.

“Why would you be stripping, I want to know,” Sora intoned darkly.

Meanwhile, Alys’s face had become perfectly impassive as she emptied her wine glass at her partner’s smug face.

Now that the contents of her glass were decorously dripping off Nino’s face, Alys had the good sense to feign interest in the conversation on the possible plot outline of the infamous sequel.

On her part, Sora was moved enough to glare frostily at her supposed beau for daring to strip before others without informing her.

Eager to mollify the ladies’ anger, Sho politely enquired at last. “Do tell us, Renée-Caroline-san, how do you know about the introduction of these other characters – whoever the hell they are?”

“Ecoutez, your manager will be given a name and an interesting back story, which has been hinted at in all the stories. Et aussi, someone mentioned in Monsieur Ohno’s story makes an appearance as an antagonist.” As gasps emerged from across the room, a smile lighted upon Renée-Caroline’s lips. “Remember those papers Chiaki and I were reading when I got here? Alors, those were Lady Strange’s plans for the first book of Zugzwang.”

“No!” everyone but the botanist and the professor chimed in unison.

“Aren’t you surprised, Alys?” asked the botanist.

Alys rolled her eyes in an expression of boredom. “Very little fazes me these days. It comes from living with the accursed freeloading worm.”

“Do you know what she has you do?” asked the maestra, as the rest of the men clambered for the papers under the thick guidebook on the sideboard.

“Kill someone, I presume,” said Alys in a bored tone as the gentlemen jostled with each other for the papers in front of the large horizontal mirror.

Kaoru, seated on the armrest of Alys’s sofa stared at the stunned Chiaki who was nodding dumbly. “Does Lise Nee-chan really kill someone in the sequel?”

Chiaki and Renée-Caroline could only exchange worried glances and dart their pitying eyes at Nino who was presently occupied with the rest of the men in their mad scramble for the authoress’s papers.

“About time too, I fancy,” Sora asseverated firmly. “Have you seen the hell you were put through because of your freeloader in the series?”

“There, there, my dears,” soothed Alys, patting the startled Kaoru’s hand. “Sora has raised a valid point. Given the circumstances Lady Strange has shoved me into, it makes it more plausible for me to kill off people. It’s high time the plot darkened anyway.”

Renée-Caroline widened her eyes in astonishment. “Mais, petite, are not you the least surprised? Do you know you are nearly instrumental to the demise of…”

The rest of maestra’s words were truncated by the various interjections of the men in the sitting room as they snatched at the sheets of paper containing the projected plans for the final instalment of the Whither my love series.

“Why don’t I appear in here?” complained Sho, upon relinquishing his sheet of paper to Aiba.

“There’s quite a bit on manager-san, ne. Are we to be thus forgotten?” lamented Jun, leaning heavily on the mirror. “Look at the mentions of Riida’s…”

“Oh, Sho-chan, you’re mentioned in chapter three,” Aiba shouted out, truncating the rest of the youngest member’s words.

Ohno nodded at the papers he had been staring at and pouted as an aura of dejection fell over him. “It can’t be any worse than her plans for Kaoru, or Chiaki, or Jun, or Nino.”

“That’s because you’re willy-washy, ossan! What does she-who-must-not-be-named do to me?” demanded Nino, reaching forward for the sheaf of papers in the band leader’s hand. The older man however refused to relinquish it to him out of consideration for his friend’s feelings. The gamer would brook no refusal and pressed forward for the papers.

In so doing, the mass of gentlemen strained against the mirror and shattered it, causing the entangled mass of male homo sapiens to roll forward into the chamber where their invalid creator was lying in bed.

Watching them disentangle themselves with a playful and knowing curl of the lips, the authoress patiently waited for the stunned ladies to join her around her sickbed, and allowed the embarrassed gentlemen to simultaneously question her motives for hiding behind the two-way mirror while pressing their complaints as to the projected plans for the sequel.

A sharp clap of the hands from the woman seated in bed arrested their chatter.

“No more complaints!” she hissed coughingly, while writing in her notebook. “Be very careful, all of you.” She wrote something with a flourish on the page, and as soon as she lifted her pen, Aiba suddenly sprouted gills where his ears should be. “Any further complaints,” she went on, scratching something further on the book, causing Nino to bounce around the room like a rubber ball. Smiling a little as he bounced past her and flailed his hands in the universal sign of someone in distress, the authoress continued to scrawl in her book. “And you will meet a fate worse than this,” she muttered, as ‘pop’ sounds resounded throughout the room, effectively turning the characters into frogs one by one.

Oh well, she shrugged delicately, closed her notebook and pushed at her spectacles before hollering, “Junko, ma jolie, don’t bother going to the market. We now have frog legs for the porridge tonight!”

NOTES

Roasted onions strained and wrapped in muslin cloth into a compress was a common cure for earaches in the 19th century. Onions do have some antiseptic properties.

GLOSSARY

Maestra = lit. (Italian) Mistress. In this case, it is the feminine of Maestro, and used to denote a female conductor of an orchestra.
I hate it when people tell me ‘Mistress’ is a bad term. I was educated in a convent and we had a Head Mistress, i.e. principal.
Up to the late 20th century, Mistress is a very respectable term used like the modern day ‘Ms’. Indeed, the appellation ‘Miss’ (which I prefer to use when I know a woman isn’t married) is a shortened form for ‘Mistress’.
In the old days, in medieval Italy, servants who worked for a husband and wife would call their employers Master and Mistress. The Master = Maestro, and Mistress = Maestra.

[ma] chere = my dear (used to address a woman) e.g.: Ma chere Anne, meaning ‘my dear Anne’

[mon] cher = my dear (used to address a man) e.g.: Mon cher Henri, meaning ‘my dear Henry’. * Henri is the French version of the English ‘Henry’.
*Be careful with ‘cher’. When used in certain contexts, ‘cher’ means expensive.
e.g.: A woman who is told by butcher how much a cut of meat is will say, “Ah no, c’est trop cher.”
In this context, the sentence is “No, that’s too dear for me”. One half of my prelim readers (an American) did not understand how ‘dear’ could be ‘expensive’. My other prelim reader (British) did understand that ‘dear’ = expensive. It depends on context. As I mentioned in response to a review in an earlier chapter, English is very idiomatic. British English still contains many nuances of Latin grammar rules and the influences of other languages (especially the Romance languages) from the continent.

Ecoutez = listen (conjugated with vous instead of tu).

Actuallement = actually

Et aussi = And also

Alors = Well then

Mais, petite = But my dear
*Mon petit (to use on a male, i.e. mother calling her son) and ma petite (to use on a female, i.e. mother calling her daughter) can be loosely translated as “my dear”. It should be noted that “petit/petite” is a form of affection address which can mean "dearie" or "sweetheart". Depending on context, terms of endearment can also be used condescendingly in French.

ma jolie = lit. my pretty one. Used as an affectionate term.
e.g.: A man would say his wife, “Anne, ma jolie, shall we dine out tonight?”
In this case, it would be translated as ‘my pretty’. In the 20th century, British and Irish stories featuring evil witches tempting children would say ‘my pretty’. Case in point, in the late 1880s British translation, the witch in Snow White’s story says, “Buy an apple from an old woman, my pretty.” The term ‘my pretty’ in this context stems from the ‘ma jolie’ usage from the French. The epistemology of the ‘ma jolie’ term is much more complicated than that (it is as complicated as the epistemology for the word ‘nice’). As I do not wish to bore readers with medieval French and Latin, I will speak no more on the issue.

~~~~~ to be continued… maybe… ~~~~~

Acknowledgements

Thank you, dear readers, for your patronage thus far. Your forbearance is very much appreciated.

My next tale, Zugzwang closes the ‘Whither my love’ series and is an overarching sequel written in the third person narrative. Zugzwang is a novel split into four books to accommodate the chapter divisions and so on. The title is a chess move, and readers familiar with chess may know what it refers to. Wherever possible, footnotes and glossaries will be provided to facilitate readers’ understanding. The story exists in a completed form, so fear not. While it is in turns dramatic and provocative (warranting the R rating I shall be pinning on it), I flatter myself in the belief that it may amuse.

I am thinking of inserting omakes after each book of Zugzwang. Should readers think these are unnecessary, let me know, and we will have an uninterrupted flow of the full story. Should readers want omakes, I will oblige as far as time and inspiration permit. Either way, do let me know.

Epilogue – Chapter 50

“We could call them down. It would be the day before Christmas Eve, and it would coincide with Masaki baby’s birthday,” Sho suggested, his face hidden behind the newspaper he was reading in the dressing room I shared with him.

The ‘them’ he said was just him talking about the Arashi princesses. Manager-san’s name for them kind of stuck with him by the corner of his mouth. He had daughters of his own, and he always treated the girlfriends better than he treated us. Sho said it’s because manager-san treated our girlfriends like his daughters. Manager-san always called them respectfully and spoke to them like they could ask for the moon and he would give it to them. It was really funny because manager-san looked like a gangster and was always growling at us. He was really a teddy bear with girls. Tee hee hee! But our manager wasn’t what we were talking about, and Sho and me were not in the dressing alone. It was our dressing room that he and me shared in TV Tokyo where we did Himitsu no Arashi-chan, but we weren’t alone that day. The rest of Arashi were hanging around with us. Nino, sitting on the makeup table with his feet on the makeup chair, was slouching as he played his DS. Riida was spinning in circles on the makeup chair next to the one with Nino’s feet, and Jun was on the sofa polishing his glasses. What were we doing together? What were we talking about that involved the princesses and my birthday? Ooh! I’ll tell you. My birthday’s later in the week, and so is Christmas, and we were planning to do something for both occasions because it would be fun to do something together.

It took me a while to piece things together but I finally did. Kaoru, Riida’s fiancée, was so secret that not even the Boss or manager-san knew about her. Riida wanted it that way because he didn’t want Kaoru to feel like an animal in the zoo. The time when I met her, you know, on the day, I brought Renée to Central, Nino had texted Riida to ask him if he should let me and Renée meet Kaoru, then Riida texted Kaoru because he couldn’t call her to ask. He couldn’t call because she’s nearly deaf. Kaoru told him that it was okay and mama and Nino let me meet her. But it is supposed to be a great secret, like a game that no one must know we’re playing. Renée said it’s because Kaoru wanted to get enough reputation for herself as a painter and not as the fiancée of one of the Arashi guys. She didn’t understand how we were popular, and she still didn’t believe that we’re popular. The guys always laugh at her and at me when I tell them that she’s a weird snob. But it’s kind of fun to tell her how popular we are and watch her face contort in disbelief as she laughed. Yokoyama says that it’s good because it meant she won’t interfere in my work. While Yoko doesn’t think she’s a snob, he does agree with me that Renée’s weird.

“Christmas Eve would be out of the question for Kaoru and Alys because they will want to go to church. It wouldn’t be good for us either as we would be tied up at Fuji TV with a shoot. Renée-Caroline would be conducting the Tokyo City Met for the gala performance before attending Midnight Mass. I’ll be damned if only Sora and Chiaki are left for damage control when the rest of us get drunk. That effectively leaves us with the day before Christmas. However, Renée-Caroline may not be able to make it because she has to be at the Opera House for the gala performance that runs from the 23rd to the 26th of December,” Sho continued, outlining the pros and cons of his plan.

“Move it up a day,” Riida suggested, resting his head on Nino’s thigh. “We’ll be free on the 22nd.”

“Only works if they don’t suspect we’re up to something,” Nino reminded us.

“Ano ne, they won’t suspect a thing because, ne, we’ll tell them directly what to expect. Eto… you know what would be a good idea, ne?” Jun said, thoughtfully putting on his glasses with a smirk. Yabai! A smirk! Noooo! Not a smirk! Very, very danger! Smirks were never good, and anyone knows Jun and Nino would know that smirks from either of them led to exciting and crazy but dangerous things.

The ‘good idea’ of Jun’s was us cooking. Hai, I mean us, all of Arashi cooking. You know the kodomo no bangohan slot we used to have on Mago Mago Arashi? MatsuJun’s bright idea was to have us cook with a Christmas theme. He called it a Kanojo no Arashi, and we would get the princesses to decide whose cooking they liked best. There was a prize. There must be one because all contests like this must have a prize. The prize for the winner would be a kiss on the cheek from the girls. Sho called it an incentive because we would be kissed by five of the most capable and prettiest women currently in Tokyo. It did sound like a good deal when he put it that way, but Jun had to say that there were lots of girls prettier than our princesses. You know what I think? If Riida hadn’t stepped in to add that Sho had said ‘five of the most capable and prettiest women’ in Tokyo and that meant he knew there were prettier and more capable women out there, Jun would have been very dead. As a punishment for Jun, we decided that we were having the Kanojo no Bangohan at his place. Jun liked the idea because he said the princesses could put up his tree for him. I liked it. It sounded like a wonderful idea and lots of fun. What could be more fun than spending time with friends and those we love, right? And we would get to exchange presents too! We all agreed to it except Nino. Although Nino objected to the idea on the reason that he would not allow Jun to exploit mama as a manual labourer, he later agreed to the scheme after he staked mama’s labour on a game of janken-pon and lost. It was, Nino later said on the way home that day, his most humiliating defeat in a very long time, even worse than the time he was ‘Most Dame Arashi’ on VS Arashi. I really felt for sorry because he looked so sad, so to cheer him up, I offered to pay for his groceries when we had the cooking thingy and that cheered up him straight, which was what I wanted anyway.

The princesses were contacted, and they each said they would bring dessert, which was super of them. Maybe if Sho had said that we had five of the sweetest women to be living in Tokyo, Jun wouldn’t have been nearly attacked by sofa seat cushions and water bottles. When I told this to Jun, he glared at me and continued talking to Sora on his keitai, asking for the list of things that the princesses didn’t like. Why were the princesses together? Because they were all out at Swallowtail Coffee House, a butler café mama and Chiaki liked to go to.

“Ano ne, if they like it so much, eh, why don’t they buy it? Iya, I don’t know how much Richard Ginori, Wedgwood or Royal Albert chinaware cost. I’ll get it for them, ne, for Christmas. No telling, ne?” Jun asked, rubbing his temple in frustration. “How about what they can or can’t eat, ne? Eto… You don’t like coriander, ne, and the rest of them? Hai... I’ll hold.”

Sho face-palmed himself and groaned that Chiaki and mama were probably staring and drooling at the handsome butlers again.

“Alys doesn’t eat garlic, and Kaoru doesn’t like leeks,” Nino said from behind his DS.

“How do you know about Kaoru and leeks?” Riida asked, looking at his best friend with admiration, and I was amazed too that Nino knew little things like that.

“Last time we were at your place for dinner, she put all the leeks from her bowl into yours,” answered the sarcastic bastard with the smirk of doom.

“Sora-chan,” Jun said into the keitai after giving the ‘okay’ hand sign to Nino. “We just need Chiaki’s and Renée-Caroline’s preferences. We’ve got the other two… No onions, and the maestra has an open mind. Got it. We’ll be seeing you. Bye-bye.”

And so, the plan was set. On the day we were supposed to go to Jun’s place, we had each thought of something we would like to make. Jun was going with pasta, Sho decided to be adventurous with mayonnaise crab vol-au-vent, Nino was doing something with chicken, I was doing something with vegetable soup and Riida was going with his signature dish of chahan. I didn’t think it was a good idea. The rest of the guys didn’t think it would be a good idea, but Riida said it was sure to succeed because it had never failed him. The rest of us shrugged and wished him luck in his decision.

At two o’clock in the afternoon on the 22nd of December, the princesses and their…what were we when we with our princesses…Aaaah! I’ll run with saying that the rest of Arashi and our girlfriends, okay? We were all there, except Sora who was working on a book and said she would come later. We arrived at Jun’s place where there were a few boxes in an empty space in the living room and he was pouring himself a glass of wine.

“Ladies, ladies,” announced MatsuJun very importantly as he sipped his wine, and the rest of us got out of our coats. “Assist us, ne, by putting up the tree, whereupon, ne, we will demonstrate our sincere gratitude by presenting you with dinner. Unless you have anything to improve on the plan, eh?” He suddenly stopped when Nino, Riida, mama, and Kaoru brushed past him and went straight for his fridge. “What are the four of you doing, ne?”

“Keeping the cake in the fridge, silly,” Kaoru giggled, covering her mouth cutely. “From my brother’s bakery.”

“Quelle surprise!” Renée exclaimed, tripping into the kitchen next to mama and Kaoru. “J’aime bien le gateau!”

Jun looked up at the ceiling and shook his head once like he was saying ‘why me’, but he didn’t say it. Sho and I shrugged sympathetically at him, but we soon went back to putting the tree together. It was a plastic tree, and we couldn’t let the princesses put it together. It wouldn’t be fitting when there were men around to do it. Jun smiled back at us and told the people at his fridge, “Oi, Nino! Stop feeding the cherry tomatoes to the professor! I need them for later, ne! Kaoru-chan, you really shouldn’t have brought the cake.”

“But I must! You are letting us dine at your expense, out of the goodness of your hearts,” she insisted firmly. “Satoshi-kun, could you help Aiba-kun, Sho-kun and Chiaki Nee-chan assemble the tree as we put aside the jellies away? Oh, you have large tomatoes in the vegetable compartment, did you know?”

“While that resolves the tomato crisis, ne, it does resolve who is going to cook first,” Jun sighed, and took another gulp of wine, and poured out a glass for Renée who pointed that she wanted some.

“I don’t need more than thirty minutes including preparation time,” Nino announced very proudly as he padded into the living room with mama and Riida.

“Chiaki, spread the branches at your end. The tree’s looking lopsided,” Riida interrupted, and helped with its top part.

“Who made the jellies?” I asked, skipping to the kitchen, and letting Chiaki and Sho assemble the rest of the tree. “Can I have one?”

“Yes,” mama answered in English, while Nino shouted, “No.”

“Thus ends of the mystery of who made the jellies,” Renée said, passing me the wine glass so that I could have a taste.

“Oh my God!” I burst out, staring at the jellies.

“Yes, my child?” Mama answered in English, making Kaoru frown while saying that mama was being blasphemous.

“What sort of jellies are they?” I asked, taking one out of the fridge and taking a taste

“Orange?” Renée suggested.

“Not orange.” I stuck out my tongue. I moved my mouth around and went ‘dap-dap-dap’ with the tongue, and then took another taste. “Not orange, but good.”

“Vraiment? Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Renée asked, when I handed her the spoon for a taste.

“Persimmon and cream,” mama replied in English as she, Nino and Kaoru opened boxes of ornaments. “What is persimmon in Japanese, freeloader?”

Nino shrugged. Sho translated for us, and we nodded in agreement. Souka! This was what persimmon tasted like! Sugoi! It wasn’t like anything I’ve had before.

“Ne, while Aibaka and Renée-Caroline are marvelling over the miracle of persimmon and cream, eh, it doesn’t solve the problem of who’s going to cook first. Nino’s cooking and prep time is short. We could keep him towards the end. My sauce needs to simmer for 40 minutes, so I won’t take that long at the stove. Who else will be using the stove, ne? Sho, do you want to, eh, preheat the oven since you’re using it?” Jun asked, then stopping to slurp the spoonful of jelly I held out to him, he turned around and demanded, “Sho, what are you doing?”

Renée and me poked our heads from the kitchen partition counter and saw Sho draping strings of Christmas tree running lights over himself.

“Testing whether the lights work,” Sho said matter-of-factly like it should be obvious that walking around the length of the living room with Christmas tree chasing lights hanging around his neck meant that he was testing them out. “Are these 100 lights or 250 lights?”

“Gone illiterate now? 250, read the box,” Nino replied, throwing the box at him, which Sho caught.

“I have idiots in my apartment, idiots!” muttered Jun, as he refilled his wine glass.

“Cheer up!” I grinned at him, purposefully mixing up my words, I continued. “I’ll need the soup for the stove.”

“Idiots!” Jun repeated and ambled outside to the sofa.

Meanwhile, I thought I would get started on cutting the vegetables for the soup. But first, I needed the recipe that I had written down and kept in my pocket. “Hey, guys, I’ll start first okay? I’ve got chopping to do.”

“Whatever,” Nino and mama said at the same time. It was getting freakily weird how alike they thought.

“Alors, Sho will be cheating. He bought readymade vol-au-vent cases,” Renée said, poking around in one of the grocery bags.

“I will still have to bake them!” Sho defended himself hotly, untangling the lights around himself as the princesses squealed over the different ornaments Jun had.

Renée looked pityingly at him as she went out of the kitchen and Sho washed his hands to get started on what he was going to do with what he was going to make. Confusing? With Sho and me in the kitchen, things were going to get more confusing. I thought it would be kind of nice to listen to princesses chatter for a while as I cut the vegetables and I heard them laughing over something Nino said in response to a question they asked him about what he was making. He was very vague about it, but assured them that it would result in them swooning at his feet. I chuckled while putting away the chopped green beans and started on the potatoes. Nino was always cocksure of himself in cooking, and then, he would always lose. I was going to say that to him, but Renée beat me to it.

“Are you always so tongue-in-cheek?” Renée asked him in her funny accented English, so different from the way Sho or mama or even Nino spoke the language.

“Always,” mama answered for him as she hung up a decoration on the tree. “I can vouch for it.”

“Yeah, only because you spend most of the time with my tongue in your cheek,” Nino answered smoothly in English with a sarcastic tone.

“How dare you!” Mama hissed, smacking his arm, and making us laugh with Nino at their old, funny ways. Sho muttered something about them needing intervention before the night was out, but I ignored him. It was much too fun to watch them at it. I think I heard the sound of keys at the door, but I wasn’t too bothered with it. I was too busy laughing at Nino and mama.

“What does that say of the characters of our Nino and Alys?” Chiaki asked jokingly.

“It only means their natures are too calculative to say what they truly feel and think. Hello, all,” Sora’s voice sounded out, as she came in through the front door. Eh? She had the keys to Jun’s place? I should be weirded out by that but I wasn’t. I think being in Arashi has allowed me to get used to the weirdness of people in general.

“Sora Nee-chan! Come do up the tree with us.” Kaoru cried out in delight as the rest of us waved and mumbled different types of greetings to her.

“About time you got here, ne. Eh, I would have run mad in another ten minutes. Riida’s the only quiet one, happily drawing,” Jun complained and rubbed his temple. “Enlighten me, great observer of human foibles – what would happen if there were characters antithetical to the Ninomiyas.”

“Jun-kun, where are the baking trays?” Sho shouted at him while beating two eggs.

“Cabinet above the fridge!”

“I’ll get it!” I said, glad to stop chopping for a while. It was difficult to cut everything into two-by-two-by-two centimetre cubes. “Sho-chan, you think you can cube the rest of the celery for me?” I asked, swapping places with him as soon as he put down his bowl. I jumped up to open the cabinet, and jumped again to grab a baking tray. But everything in that cabinet fell down with a clang-clang-clatter-clang that I had to take cover behind Sho.

“Oi! Omae! Don’t destroy my kitchen!” Jun shouted with a glare of doom.

Sora laughed and patted his arm once. “In Aiba-chan’s helpful illustration, it is established that those who have too active a mind and too impulsive a nature are either supremely intelligent or the supremely stupid.”

“Until they land in trouble, because that’s when…” Nino sneered.

“They are momentarily stupefied by their own brilliance,” mama replied dryly like she had continued the rest of what he was going to say.

I didn’t catch the meaning of that at all, but it didn’t stop me from laughing with everyone how silly it sounded to be made stupid because one was clever, and because I was really, very happy to see everyone animated, happy and laughing.

It didn’t take long for me to cut the rest of the vegetables, or for Sho to put the vol-au-vent thingies into the muffin trays and into the oven. It also didn’t take me long to put the vegetables on the stove with the chicken stock cube and vegetables. The recipe said it had to be there for 35 minutes, so guess that means I’m free until later. Yay! I was free, and I didn’t make any terrible mistakes! It also didn’t long for Sho to mix his crab and mayonnaise thingy. He boasted that it was the easiest thing he has ever done because all he had to do was to wait for the oven to ‘ding’ when it was done baking the puffy-pastry thingies and then spoon the crab and mayonnaise mix into them. Eh? That was all? It was cheating, right? He didn’t have to do any cooking at all. I would tell that to the princesses when they finished decorating the tree.

The princesses agreed with me when I told them that Sho wasn’t really cooking at all. Renée snapped her fingers, twisted her hand around in a circle in the air and said that she had known it was so and had said so at the beginning. But they decided to be generous and give him the benefit of the doubt, as mama said. To make sure that no more of this kind of cheating cooking continued, the princesses parked themselves by the bar stools on the kitchen partition counter that separated the kitchen from the living room and stared at Jun and Riida as the guys tried to do what they had to do. Nino said he could do his when MatsuJun left his pasta sauce to simmer, and he parked himself on the sofa stool where he could keep an eye on the kitchen partition, kicking my foot off the stool before he squatted there.

While reading the manga I brought with me, I heard the princesses commenting on the many things going on in the kitchen, and I heard Nino snort and snigger at some of their criticisms of what Riida was doing with the things he was trying to chop. Sho was looking at something on his laptop near me and stopped typing to laugh at some of the things they were complaining about.

“Shouldn’t the lettuce be bite size?” Chiaki said.

“Perhaps it’s Ohno bite size,” mama dryly said.

“Unless you are using it as a garnish, are you using it as a garnish, Satoshi-kun?” Kaoru asked. “Like a lettuce bowl?”

Riida defended himself by pretending to act all knowing and decisive. “You’ll see what I have in mind when I finish! Don’t wear lipstick when you kiss me later, okay? Okaasan won’t like if it stains my shirt.”

The princesses and the rest of the guys let out a great big shout of laughter because it sounded like Riida was sure that his cha-han would win them over. After laughing over what Sora called his ‘unjustifiable self-possession’, it didn’t take the princesses long before they turned their attention to Jun.

“What are you making, Jun-chan?” Sora asked between the sounds of sizzling, popping and crackling.

“Penne all’ arrabbiata,” he replied.

The princesses were quiet but only for a short moment. I put my manga down to see them staring at Jun with their elbows on the counter and their hands cupping their cheeks, looking at him with admiration. Renée looked so impressed and excited that she started poufing, patting and fluffing the cushion she had on her lap.

“Renée-chan, that be a cushion you’re molesting, not Doraemon,” I laughingly told her.

“There’s a thought! I would molest the freeloader if he were in a Doraemon suit,” mama sighed longingly, and I think she was thinking perverse thoughts. Sho must have thought so too because he shuddered and started rubbing his arms.

“Damn you! You wouldn’t molest me for ME?” Nino paused his game and padded to mama, resting his chin on her shoulder. “Is that why you molest Little Kazu more than me?”

“Who’s Little Kazu?” Chiaki asked.

“A soft toy panda,” Sora explained like she knew what she was she talking about.

“Little Kazu is far more squishable than you,” mama retorted, making as if she would kiss Nino but choosing at the last minute to brush him away.

“My love rival is a stuffed panda?” Nino cried out, disbelievingly, pretending to look so miserable that I laughed out loud and snorted several times.

“Be thankful it is an inanimate object,” Sho told him, laughter twinkling in his eyes.

“Alys Nee-san asked me to marry her once,” Jun said off-handedly with such casualness that it looked like it was part of what he was doing to the diced tomatoes and in the pan.

Everyone except mama and Riida turned to look at Nino, who was scowling dangerously at Jun. “You did what? How could you?” Nino ranted. “Damn you, Matsumoto Jun! You rejected her, of course.”

“Of course. Sora and Kiyora would have castrated me otherwise, ne.” MatsuJun flicked his hair aside and smirked.

“Tell you what, Nino, call Jun out for a duel!” Sora recommended seriously.

“Oh la la! A duello! It would be exciting!” Renée asked, looking and sounding like she would have enjoyed the prospect of a real duel. I told you she was weird. Most women would shriek and faint, but my girlfriend would get excited. Merpeople must be very violent if they liked duels. That could be why she scratches a lot in bed, right?

Jun tossed something in the pan and gave it a shake “Ano ne, since I am the aggrieved party, ne, I get to choose the place and the weapons, ne? Eh, today’s Kanojo no Bangohan, ne, is going to be just between us because Riida is doomed to failure.”

“I am?” Riida asked, blankly looking up at the faces of the princesses.

“Aiba can’t cook,” Jun continued.

“I can! Just not very well!” I protested with a laugh, knowing that Jun was joking.

“Sho cheated and should be disqualified!” Jun went on.

“Oi!” Sho growled but soon laughed as well.

“It’s a foregone conclusion, ne, that Nino and I will be the only serious contenders, ne?” Jun winked playfully at the princesses, pouted and then made a kissing sound.

“Kyaah!” the girlfriends chorused as they tried not to laugh themselves off the bar stools.

“Women,” Sho whispered to me, face-palming himself again and shaking his head with a loud groan. Nino was too busy laughing sarcastically to care about Sho’s distress.

“No wonder Alys asked him to marry you. Penne all’ arrabbiata must be only one of the dishes in his repertoire,” Chiaki said to Sora, nodding in understanding.

“He’s very accomplished,” Sora agreed proudly.

Chiaki turned back to Jun and asked, “Jun-kun, marry me and cook for me.”

“Eeeeh!” Sho exclaimed, his mouth opening so incredibly wide that I giggle-snorted.

“Jun, cheri, je vous aime. Marry me,” Renée joined in, her voice unwavering and steely.

“Eh? Don’t you love me anymore?” I whinged, running to her and throwing my arms around her. I was really worried that Jun would take up her offer. Scared, more like it. I think I know it’s a joke, but it’s kind of hard to tell because Renée’s usually so serious when she talks about things.

“Mais, mon pauvre, you cannot cook like him, n’est-ce pas?” Renée pointed out, reaching behind and patting my cheek as I pouted in dismay.

“My freeloader is by far the more superior chef,” mama sniffed indignantly. “Why aren’t you propositioning him? Kaoru-chan, would you like to have the honour?”

“I prefer the panda. Is he very squishable? As squishable as Satoshi-kun?” Kaoru asked as she giggled.

Riida blushed and pouted. “Mah, mah, I’ll add ham to the cha-han if you’ll all lay off Jun,” he mumblingly offered. Wah! Good old Riida! Always to the rescue of the sake of peace.

“That’s telling them, Oh-chan,” Nino laughed sarcastically, throwing his arms wide open. “Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, I highly recommend the devil. Ladies, you may flock to me at any moment!”

“You’re only going to be an irritant in this vein!” mama hissed him with a warning glare.

He smirked his answer. “Oh yeah? Drop dead, Teng sensei, you’re a damn nuisance!”

“Not if I kill you first for philandering!”

“Ha! There are lots of women who would have me if you prefer a stuffed panda to me!”

“I don’t know about you, Chiaki-san, but I remain unmoved by Ohno-kun’s earnest plea,” Sora said, ignoring Nino and mama’s mock quarrel.

“Indeed,” Chiaki mock sighed. “Jun’s the only feasible option for us. Gentle Alys will kill the gentlemanly Nino if we so much as touch him.”

Everyone then turned to watch as Nino and mama snarled insults at each other. Mama wasn’t being very gentle, smacking Nino repeatedly on the arm while he laughed and poked her cheek. Nino wasn’t being very gentlemanly because he was backing her into Jun’s white sofa.

“Will you two please behave?” Sho groaned when they fell onto Jun’s sofa, mauling each other until mama had a heaving, coughing fit.

“Les Ninomiyas, they are like this often?” Renée enquired, amused.

“They’re awkward jigsaw pieces that only fit together,” Kaoru said, turning away to smile at Riida.

“Jigsaw?” I asked in confusion. Kaoru was certainly pretty and super talented in art, but she was as spacey-dacey as Riida with the things she said. It must be her charm point for Riida, right?

“Oi! I don’t care if you quarrel about money, ne, but for her sake, ne, take her to a doctor!” MatsuJun exclaimed involuntarily, storming out of the kitchen with the glare of certain death. “Nino, change shift. Ne, scoot, eh, you can do what you have to, ne, while Riida takes over the stove for his cha-han!”

The rest of the princesses were now eagerly keen to see what Nino was going to do, or would do as soon as he peeled himself away from mama on the sofa. It’s kind of weird to say this but the way he and mama are when together is only a more over the top version of what Nino does to Riida, and I think we were all used to it because it was normal for people of that kind to be like that. Sho will groan a lot about how they were too much, and Jun would look away but everyone treated it like it was normal Nino-mama behaviour. Guess that means we’re kind of weird for thinking that it’s normal, right? I don’t think mama and Nino thought they were weird. Nino didn’t. He calmly poked mama’s cheek once and padded to the kitchen to take out Sho’s vol-au-vent cases from the oven because they were done and because he needed the oven. The girlfriends stared at him and talked among themselves what they thought he would be doing. I did too especially when I heard the blender.

“What the hell?” Sho shouted above the din.

“Blender!” Riida shouted back while he fried his thingies for the cha-han.

“But what, ne, is he blending?” Jun bellowed to be heard.

“Nuts, how you say - pecans,” Renée replied, turning around on the bar stool.

“Breadcrumbs,” Kaoru said next.

“Softened butter,” announced Chiaki.

“Flour, salt, and pepper,” continued Sora.

“Chopped chives,” mama said, stirring the contents of a bowl, and letting the other girls taste it.

“What is Nino making that he needs the blender? I thought he was using chicken!” I exclaimed, now completely confused. Mama let me taste the thing in the bowl she said was mustard and honey. What was Nino going to do with all of that? How could anyone make anything with chicken using all those things?

“I’ve got this in the bag.” Nino smirked confidently. “Pecan-crusted chicken with green garden salad.”

“Kazu! Don’t grab my behind when I’m cooking!” Riida complained, poutingly.

“Whose am I going to grab then? You’re nearer than my witch right now,” snorted Nino, dipping the chicken into the bowl mama passed him, and pressing the blended stuff on top of the fillets.

“It is going to be a tough one to call,” Chiaki laughed delightedly as Nino poured a little water into the tray/tin thingy. “Only two of the five know what they’re doing.”

“Don’t look at me, I’m biased in favour of one party,” Sora said flatly with a smile.

“Alys aussi. Voyez,” Renée pointed out, leaning over the counter with the rest of the girlfriends. I popped back into the kitchen to see what they were looking at. Aah! It was only Nino and mama trying to decide together which level of the oven to put the tray/tin thingy in. Wah! I wanted to laugh at first because it was kind of weird to see Nino and mama quiet with each other. But I remember how they were like when I visited them and they were very quiet with each other.

“Jigsaw pieces. They are jigsaw pieces, don’t you think?” commented Kaoru randomly, but no one knew what she meant by that. Not even Riida knew because he shrugged and said Kaoru knew best, and if she said mama and Nino were jigsaw pieces, they were jigsaw pieces.

When it was time to eat, and for the ladies to decide which one and whose one they liked, we had already decorated Jun’s place, had lost miserably at cards to Chiaki, it think it was already kind of fun. Sho already had a little too much to drink and was predicting global recession, Riida and Kaoru were trying to persuade mama to see a doctor for her cough, Nino was lazily smirking at mama as she complain about the rising costs of things and asking Sho to back her up with empirical evidence, Renée tried to get Chiaki to show her the mathematical principle behind winning at card games, and I was trying to understand how mathematics could be used when playing cards. Card games were games of dumb luck, right? What has mathematics got to do with it? I don’t think Renée got it either, because she snapped her fingers and shook her head, saying that she didn’t have the head for figures. But, she said, she had a nose for good food.

“If that’s so, ne, then I can already claim victory, ne?” Jun raised his wineglass at her. “By a ratio of four is to one.”

“Who’s depriving you of the perfect score?” Sho asked, smiling goofily, serving out his crab mayonnaise vol-au-vent. But Jun didn’t need to answer because we knew the answer. Mama usually took Nino’s side in things, not always, but she usually did.

“Umai!” Riida exclaimed, biting into it. We laughed at him for it because he said everything was delicious unless it was really horrible, grey and half-dead. The women didn’t like it very much. Kaoru softly said the mayonnaise was too heavy, Renée and mama found the vol-au-vent too dry, Chiaki said it was only okay, and Sora didn’t take any more than one bite.

“Ha!” Nino clapped his hands once when Sho dropped his head at the ladies’ response. “Don’t stop with hanging your head. Let it drag on the floor! Jun’ll need a mop later. We could use you.”

“I got wifey something nice for Christmas though,” Sho whispered secretly to us like it would make up for his horrible first course impression on our girlfriends. “Index Herbacecium, an encyclopaedia with a list of the top biotechnologists dealing in herbaceous plants. She made the list this year with her new bougainvillea hybrid.”

“Wah! I just got golf clubs for Renée,” I told the guys, while we watched the girls drink the soup and make their whispered comments about it. “What’d you get Kaoru-chan?”

“New paints,” Riida answered before declaring the vegetable soup, “umai!” The girls muttered that it was so-so, and Nino ate from mama’s spoon, calling it too salty.

“There are onions in this!” Chiaki commented and pushed the bowl shudderingly aside.

“Oops!” I giggled while Sho smacked me at the back of my head.

“What did the miser get his yuki-onna?” Jun asked, laughing at Chiaki’s and Sho’s reaction.

“Renewed her kino membership card. He said it was cheap,” Riida replied, nodding knowledgeably to himself, before passing spoons around to the girls to try his cha-han.

“What a loving kitsune!” hooted MatsuJun. “Sora’s getting Royal Albert chinaware.”

“Chinaware?” I gasped, thinking that it was a very unromantic gift for Christmas.

But Jun couldn’t answer because mama had started coughing and had spit something out into her napkin. “Garlic,” she wheezed in English, and took a glass of watered down wine from Kaoru and slurped it. I didn’t know mama hated garlic that much, but I guess there were people like that in the world.

“Garlic oil,” Nino said, after he chewed on Riida’s dish for a bit.

“I thought it’d be okay if she doesn’t see the garlic.” Riida pouted, rubbing his neck in embarrassment. “The others like it,” he stated, beaming quickly at the rest of the princesses who murmured that it was unexpectedly good.

“Yeah, Alys-chan wouldn’t know the taste of garlic either,” Nino sarcastically lashed out, putting a hand of concern on mama’s shoulder.

“There’s no garlic or onions in this,” Jun announced, scooping out some of his pasta for everyone. The girls seemed to like it because Chiaki asked Jun to marry her again, Sora asked to take the leftovers home for her elder sister, Kaoru asked for the recipe, and mama fed Nino, asking if he thought there was basil or thyme in it. Renée’s review was different from theirs.

She took a long sip of wine and said, “It had more heat than I expected, mais it contrasted with the tomatoes very well.”

“The chilli seeds, ne? Ano ne, I’ll try with cream sauce when we have dinner, ne. Eto, there’ll be no heat there.” Jun nodded very seriously at her comment, putting his fingertips together as he thoughtfully closed his eyes.

“Game, set, match! I’ve got it in the bag!” Nino said smugly, leaning across the table and watching the princesses eat with great interest. He was right to be smug. They looked like it was more than okay. Renée let me have a taste, and it was mecha umai. Nino could do this? I never knew. I wondered though who was the better cook between him and mama, and who was the stronger character because sometimes, they seemed like a rock knocking against other rock when they fought. The princesses liked it. Maybe he did have it in the bag because Kaoru asked him for the recipe, mama said he had outdone himself, Renée complimented him, and Chiaki joked that she should dump Sho for him.

“Interesting texture but too much of a contrast between the velvet of the chicken and the coarseness of the pecans,” Sora said bluntly.

Nino flicked a wrist. “Whatever. Can’t please everyone, especially not the critics.”

“Well?” Sho asked expectantly as the five girlfriends entered into a discussion on the different dishes. “Which one did you like best?”

“Kaoru and Renée-Caroline are for Ohno-kun, Sora and I are for Jun-kun, but Alys has uncharacteristically decided to abstain from giving her decision,” Chiaki answered, like an unofficial spokeswoman for the princesses.

“Why?” I asked, not knowing that one could abstain from things like that.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Mama smirked and patted the hand Nino rested on her shoulder. “I have my reasons. Come, let us not worry over the inconsequentials. As a Christmas concession, I’ll give each of you a peck on the cheek.”

It was an answered that satisfied everyone, and the rest of the girlfriends did likewise, much to my happiness. A guy can never have too many kisses from pretty girls, I think. But did I wonder, as I think you would, why mama wouldn’t say whose cooking she liked best. I expected her to go with Nino’s chicken thingy. But if she preferred Jun’s pasta thingy, she could have said it. It wasn’t like mama to give up a chance to say something nasty to Nino to put him in his place. She didn’t like Sho’s crab mayonnaise thingy or Riida’s cha-han, and she agreed that my soup was too salty, so why didn’t she say anything?

Renée turned her wrist and snapped her fingers at me when I told her what I thought about mama not telling us whose dish she liked. “Par Dieu! C’est tres simple! She was being diplomatic because none of the dishes suited her palate. She liked Jun’s for the piquancy, oui. She liked Nino’s for the subtle flavour, oui. Mais, she said they were all missing a – je ne sais quoi – substance. The English (and Alys is English at heart, Chinese on the outside or no), they are all mad, hein? Alys did not abstain because she wanted to be kind. Par ma foi, she did it because she thought it was a waste of time to decide whose cooking was the best. She thought the scheme de trop. She asked us several times why couldn’t we have a normal Christmas dinner. You cannot blame her, Masaki, tu comprens, she and her partner have many things to do for the move.”

“They’re really moving in together?” I asked, thinking that maybe it was a joke that they stretched too far because it was what mama and Nino did at times. I wasn’t surprised that mama would think the dinner thingy was a waste of time. There always had been something chilling about her character that no one except Nino could understand. I was only a little bit hurt that she didn’t find it as fun a day as the rest of us did.

“When the electricians complete the – how you say – wiring, n’est-ce pas, then they will be settled. Most of everything is second-hand, and they asked around if others could give them household appliances they did not want. Can you imagine? With two souls like them, who rules the roost? Chiaki rules Sho, Kaoru rules Satoshi, Sora and Jun will talk everything through, mais, Alys and Nino are impossible to fathom,” Renée said in apparent disbelief.

“That kind of question is like asking who is the bigger baka – you or me, deshou? Am I the baka for not throwing the mermaid back in the water? Is the mermaid ohime-sama a baka for running away with the enoki mushroom?” I laughed, and smiled gratefully at her. “I’m only joking. But you know, I’m very glad I didn’t throw you back in the water.”

“As I am very thankful that you did not. We have come a long ways from there, n’est-ce pas?” she said with a half snorting ‘hnh’ sound.

“It’s all because of the snowball and karaage,” I said, cocking a knowing brow.

While she laughed at my obsession with karaage and snowballs, I laughed with her thinking that this was one of the best Christmas and birthday celebrations I’ve ever had. Things would be reasonably okay from then on because all of us had someone to share with, talk to, and fight with. And Riida would be having his engagement party in the New Year. Things were going to be good, and maybe even get better because we had all settled into a kind of peace with our girlfriends. I don’t think anything could shake us up now that everything was right and in its place. Don’t you agree?

NOTES

Alys jokingly asked Jun to marry her in Ch 34 of From Cover to Cover.

Kaoru made the jigsaw reference in the epilogue of Life’s Colours & Sounds.

The ‘kanojo no bangohan’ idea was briefly mentioned in Ch 38 of From Cover to Cover.

Quelle surprise = what a surprise

J’aime bien le gateau = I love cakes

Vraiment? Qu’est-ce que c’est? = Really? What is it?

Je vous aime = I love you (very formal with “vous” instead of “tu”. Je t’aime is very informal because you use “tu” instead of “vous”. Because “Je tu aime” doesn’t make grammatical sense as two vowels can’t be side-by-side, it becomes “Je t’aime)

mon pauvre = lit. my poor one. Usually taken to mean ‘poor thing’. Sometimes may be used affectionately depending on context. May be used insultingly as well, it depends on the context in which it is said.

Aussi = also

Voyez = look

Je ne sais pas = lit. I don’t know what.

Mais = but

Tu comprens = you understand. (significance is that Renée-Caroline has switched from the formal ‘vous’ to informal ‘tu’ when speaking to Aiba)

~ ~ ~ Fin for now ~ ~ ~

The practice time in the dance studio ended too soon for me. I still wanted to run around and jump and all that, but everyone was tired. And our booking for the studio was over and we had to go. The girlfriends did tons of work while we were practicing. I think I heard them tell each other that they were almost finished doing what they were supposed to do. Renée told me that she finished making notes on one of the scores she would be using for the Christmas concerts. She would be giving mama a ticket, because mama asked her for one. Jun and Sho thought mama was kind of shameless to ask, but mama only answered back that shame was invented by pietists with nothing better to do. I thought maybe we could all have dinner – the guys and the girlfriends, but everyone had something to do. Sho had to take Chiaki back home because his mother would be making dinner. They asked Sora and Jun if they wanted to be dropped somewhere but the couple said they would wait for a cab. Mama and Nino were not as shy about accepting free transportation. They demanded it frequently from me or Sho, and we usually said okay not because of Nino but because we knew mama wasn’t very well in her health.

“Where to?” I asked them when we drove out of Central with Renée and me up front and the sarcastic pair in the back.

“Omei Art Museum and Gallery,” Nino said in a way that made me think he didn’t want to tell me much about what was going on.

“Why?” I asked.

“It must be an exhibition, a new installation peut-être, n’est-ce pas?” answered Renée, snapping her fingers at me. Oh! That could be why they were going to an art museum, but Nino wasn’t big into art. Why would he be going there? Was he going because it was somewhere mama wanted to go?

“I didn’t know you liked art,” I said to Nino.

“You think I tell you everything?” Nino sneered and folded his arms. “Who are you that I must answer to you?”

“Ano, what do you think about helping Riida get a girl?” I asked suddenly, not wanting our leader to feel left out that he didn’t have a princess.

“Quoi?” Renée gasped incredulously at me.

“How rude,” mama coughed disapprovingly into a handkerchief.

“Yeah, mind your business, baby-chan,” Nino retorted, and I saw him giving a worried look at mama in the rear-view mirror. Then he got out his keitai and pushed a couple of buttons on it. Who was he writing a text or email to? Was he telling Riida that I was being a busybody? “Oh-chan doesn’t need any help in that department,” he added.

“But he hasn’t a pretty ohime-sama like we have!” I whinged, slapping my hands on the steering wheel and accidentally hitting the horn.

“Par Dieu!” exclaimed Renée, and mama’s coughing became worse. “Watch the road!”

“But it’s sad!” I whinged and sniffed because I really wanted Riida to be as happy as us with our princesses.

“Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match …” mama warbled off-key in English. Mama had many talents like philosophy, teaching, giving advice, and cooking. Singing wasn’t a talent she has.

“Find me a find, catch me a catch…” Renée sang along gamely.

“You want to give Oh-chan girls like them?” Nino laughed sarcastically, but he quickly stopped when mama started coughing again, sounding worse this time.

“What’s wrong with our princesses?” I asked, making a mental reminder to ask Renée what kind of song she was singing.

“Should we do it, Alys?” he asked her, still moving his fingers quickly over the surface of the keitai. “It would shut this idiot up. We have the green light from the man himself.”

“What man? What green light? Did I run a red light?” I asked, turning around to see what they were talking about.

“Mind the road!” Nino, mama and Renée shouted at me.

“Par ma foi!” Renée held up her head in her hand like she didn’t know where to put her face. “I have made the wrong choice among the five of you.”

“Just realised it? It’s not too late,” mama dryly said between coughs as she looked at the keitai Nino passed her. “Freeloader, initiate the plan.”

“I thought you’d never say so.” Nino curled his mouth into the smirk of impending doom. Yabai! What kind of plan were they talking about? Was it one of their plans to take over the world or torture me because they were bored of torturing each other?

“Quoi? What plans? Are you house buying?” Renée enquired politely. I shook my head and laughed while turning at the intersection because I didn’t know how to tell her that any plan by mama and Nino was bound to be crazy and horrible.

“We’d save you an invitation when we’re settled in,” Nino admitted at last, confirming what the guys have suspected have ages.

“Moving where? Why?” I asked, worrying more about the plan they were talking about before Renée brought up the topic of moving house.

“Because we will be living in delicious sin,” mama dryly replied, with a protective hand on Nino’s knee.

Renée treated it like a joke and laughed as I got the car into the museum-gallery. “I shall look forward to it. Mais, that is not the real plan of our discussion, n’est-ce pas?”

“You want to know why we told you leave Oh-chan alone from your matchmaking scheme?” Nino said, curling his mouth again in a smirk, opening the car door, and taking mama’s bag from her. “Come out and meet her with us.”

“Eh? What? Meet who? Her? Her who?” I asked, looking around me when I got out and getting more confused when all I saw around me was the tar and graphite of the car park and the whiteness of the art museum-gallery.

“Oh la la! They mean that your Captain, Monsieur Ohno, avez une petite-amie. They are taking us to meet his girlfriend.” Renée snapped her fingers at me, and then taking me by the elbow so that we could keep abreast with mama Nino as they walked.

“Eh? Riida has a girlfriend? For real?” I exclaimed and then put my hand on my mouth to shut myself up.

“The quickness of your mind is very impressive,” Nino sneered as we walked into the Omei Art Museum and Gallery, and into a section on the ground floor that was cordoned off and said ‘Next Change in Progress’ and a small sign below that said ‘Coming Soon – Morimoto Kaoru’s Reflection series’.

“She works here?” I asked, wondering what kind of girl Riida had hidden away for himself.

“She’s the artist,” mama said matter-of-factly, as she stepped over the cordoned section with Nino’s help. “I’ll look for her in the photography section; she may be in the dark room,” she continued, telling Nino rather than us because it sure didn’t make any sense to me what she was talking about.

“Eh?”

“Vraiment? Impressive!” Renée murmured and took Nino’s hand as he helped her into the section. “Where did she train?”

I poked my head over the section, hopping over the barrier and staring the paintings of people, things and landscapes.

“Geidai,” Nino answered, gesturing at the walls. “She’s touted to be one of the next leaders of Japanese post-modernist art movement.”

“Eh? Riida and a painter?”

“Why are you so surprised?” Renée scolded me, her curls bobbing along with her as she shook her head. “You have me, n’est-ce pas?”

“That kind of makes sense! Does it?” I asked her, quickly looking around at the paintings. “You mean she’s a snob too? Is she an art snob like you’re a music snob? Poor Riida! She’s heaps better than him.”

“He knows that; he’s always known that in the years they’ve been together. You don’t see him complaining, do you?” Nino said, sitting down a bench and staring at a picture with a hand spread over his chin so that a finger was on his lips and the rest of his fingers were supporting his head up.

Was that true? Riida had a secret girlfriend for years? Everyone knew? Did everyone except me know? How long ago did he meet her? What’s she like? Did Central know about her? How did Nino and mama become so close with her? How did Riida keep this secret from everyone for so long? I was getting more confused by the minute trying to find the answers to these questions. And when I realised that I didn’t have the answers, I got even more confused.

“Mademoiselle Morimoto’s mixed medium presentations are very bold,” commented Renée, sounding like she was seriously studying the art on the walls.

“Where’s mama? Why did we have to come here?” I asked, tapping the top of his head.

“Touch me like that again and I’ll kill you!” Nino growled, slapping my hand away.

“Is Riida’s girl a snob too?” I asked.

“I am not a snob!” Renée objected with a scowl.

“Oops!” I giggled, not knowing that I had said it out loud for her to hear. “Sorry! Ne, ne, Nino! What’s Riida’s girl like?”

“You must stand corrected, baby-chan. It’s fiancée, not girlfriend,” mama said, coming back to join us with a pretty woman in pigtails who had her hands clasped in front of her. “Mes amis, je me presente Mademoiselle Kaoru Morimoto. Kaoru-chan, this is the last of the idiots and his latest acquisition, Renée-Caroline Chaussée.”

“Yoroshiku.” She bowed and tilted her head to the side with a smile as she touched Renée’s curly fries hair. “Like a dolly! Satoshi-kun said you were very beautiful, I see he didn’t lie. You’re French? My sister-in-law is French. Can you say your name again slowly?”

“Oh la la! Très adorable!” Renée squealed in the same way she squealed over Doraemon, as she hugged and kissed Riida’s fiancée on the cheeks. “Oh! A hearing aid? Ma petite, you are even more admirable than I thought. Your art – it is magnificent! Have you ever thought of an exhibition in Paris? Your vision would stun the art world! Par Dieu, vous êtes très adorable. Renée-Caroline if you can say it. Oh, I could eat you!”

Not wanting to be left out, I bum-butted Renée out and took the painter’s hands excitedly, spreading the wide to have a better look at her. “Kaoru-chan? Pretty! Wah! Cute! I’ll talk to Riida tomorrow and ask if he wants to exchange with me!” Something hit me hard on the back of the head. “Ow! What’s that for?”

“You should have hit him harder, Renée-Caroline,” Nino said in a satisfied chuckle as mama passed him an envelope. “My Alys will show you how it should be done.”

“You’re silly, Aiba-kun!” Kaoru giggled at us. “Nino-kun, do you like the photographs?”

“Crétin! An enoki mushroom lusting after an angel!” scolded Renée, twisting my ear painfully, as I heard Nino answer that the final product had old-world charm. I wanted to ask what photographs, but escaping from the painful pinching of my ear was more important.

“It works better if your dig your nails in, twist and then pull outwards,” mama offered dryly.

“That sounds painful,” Kaoru said, covering her ears.

“It’s supposed to be,” Nino ridiculed with his smirk of impending doom. “You reap what you sow, Aiba-chan.”

“You’re a mermaid ohime-sama, way more divine than Kaoru-chan. I didn’t throw you back in the water, right?” I grinned despite the pain in my ear. “Can you let go now? I promise to be good.”

Renée pulled my ear one last time before releasing her grip. “I would have to learn to forgive the natural stupidity of a mushroom,” she sighed.

“Aiba-kun does resemble an enoki mushroom. I can’t think why Satoshi-kun never mentioned it before,” Kaoru said, tilting her head from side to side as she looked at me while I rubbed my abused ear.

Eh? Mushroom? I would never live that joke down because everyone started laughing, and I laughed too. Friends, especially happy friends with happy lives, and making other people see the lighter side of life were good things. I was happy to make people laugh. It was okay if they laughed at me. I laugh at me too. Tee hee hee! Arashi was happy because the guys in Arashi were happy. We had the full set of Arashi princesses like Boss Johnny said – Sora for elegance, Chiaki for sense, mama for wit, Renée for talent, and Kaoru for beauty. Yay! We have the full collection of princesses. It finally felt kind of complete. Life was good, and I think it was going to get better.

NOTES

Events herein were alluded to in the epilogue of Life’s Colours & Sounds. Reread said epilogue to see how it all fits in.

Monsieur Ohno avez une petite-amie = Mr Ohno has a girlfriend.

Cretin = idiot.

Par Dieu = By God (an exclamation equivalent to ‘My goodness’ or ‘By Jove’).

Ma chère = my dear (used when subject is female)

Mais = but/however

Quoi = what

Vraiment = really

Très adorable = very cute

Mon petit (male) and ma petite (female) can be loosely translated as “my dear”. It should be noted that “petit/petite” is a form of affection address which can mean "dearie" or "sweetheart". Depending on context, terms of endearment can also be used condescendingly in French.

Mes amis, je me presente Mademoiselle Kaoru Morimoto = My friends, I present [to you] Miss Kaoru Morimoto.

Finally, Nino gave a response to show that he was still alive behind his DS. He lowered it from his face for a short while, looked over Renée and than sarcastically said, “Good! Now that someone has taken you off our hands, you think you can leave my Alys-chan alone?”

Souka! I had almost forgotten that Nino had always known that I used to have a crush on mama, and he enjoyed tormenting me for it. But from the way it sounded, it could mean that he was glad I had a girlfriend and would stop being dependent on mama for advice. Riida looked at Nino and bit his lip like he didn’t approve of what Nino said because he knew of the silly crush. But the rest of the guys didn’t seem to hear what Nino had said. They were either staring at me and Renée with an open mouth like Sho or so shocked like Jun that he dropped his book.

“Renée-Caroline Tamiko Chaussée,” Sora formally introduced with dancing eyes as she curled her mouth at Jun.

“Renée-Caroline, if you please,” my bat-eared conductor said with a polite smile and nod.

Riida bent forward from his seat and looked up unblinkingly at her before nodding to himself. That wasn’t weird for him. Riida was a little out of things sometimes, but I think that nod had meaning. It looked like a confirmation of something, like he had just gone ‘ah, souka’ in his head.

I almost laughed because mama had a case of delayed reaction when she suddenly dropped the pen in her hand. “Quoi? Pourriez-vous répéter? Vous plaisantez, non? Non! Ça alors!” she gasped, pushing her glasses up and raising herself on her elbows.

Sho and Jun stared her, both with surprise on their faces. It wasn’t surprising to me, and it wasn’t surprising to Nino. Nino once said when he was very drunk that mama had lots more up her sleeves than we would expect. Hearing mama go off quickly in French sounding like the same kind of accent that Renée and Sora spoke in, didn’t surprise me, mainly because I once telephoned her to ask about a note that Renée had left me. Nino didn’t look surprised at all. He only turned his head on mama’s back and pinched the back of her neck, like you would if you were going to pick up a kitten.

“Ah, bonjour madame. Merci du compliment,” Renée answered with a warm smile as she sat down by the sofa nearest to mama’s rug and they chattered happily and laughed.

Sora, who understood all of what was said only said to Chiaki that Renée was an ‘all right person’ and took up the envelope that was given her. After thanking Chiaki, she squeezed herself next to Jun and curled her mouth, while I went over to Sho who had waved for me to go to him.

Mama gave her a small card and said something between coughs.

“Masaki baby,” Sho began shakily, “how in the world did you get a girl like that to overlook your idiocy?”

“I don’t know,” I answered with cheerful unconcern. It didn’t matter to me if she thought I was the biggest baka in the world. I’ve always told her that I was a baka, and she didn’t think it was too bad because she said I had the character trait thingies of a Shakespearean fool. She liked the Shakespearean fool, she said, and if she liked the Shakespearean fool, she liked me too. “Let’s ask her!” I added.

“Not when she’s in the middle of a conversation!” Chiaki warned me firmly but kindly. “What are they talking about? Any ideas, Sho? You’re the arts student between us.”

“European languages aren’t my forte. Renée-Caroline-san is presently conversing with the only known linguist in present company,” Sho pointed out apologetically, hanging his head a little.

Jun had asked Sora a similar question, and she was explaining to him what she overheard, which wasn’t very important because it was about mama admiring the music arrangement Renée did for an opera production called Norma. That must be before the time I saved her from drowning because I didn’t recognise the title. And mama said something about Nino being her boyfriend. Aww… Mama never called Nino that. Nino would happy if he knew, but maybe he did know. It’s difficult to tell what Nino knew and didn’t know, I think. The more Sho heard of Sora’s explanation to Jun, the more his eyes widened. If Chiaki had not slapped his hand and reminded him to blink before he dried out his eyes, he would have continued to stare from Renée and mama to MatsuJun and Sora.

“Eh? Chotto, who is she?” MatsuJun asked. Chiaki and Sho nodded, and looked eagerly at Sora for an answer.

“The principal conductor of the Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera,” Sora said while carefully looking at the papers that she had taken out of the envelope Chiaki had given her earlier.

“Hai!” I agreed, clapping my hands to thank Sora for explaining everything so simply.

Sho was so shocked by the announcement that he dropped his newspapers as he got up and gasped, “You’re the Franco-Japanese conductor who went missing for two days!”

Eh? Sho knew who she was? Oh, it must be the newspaper he had been reading when I found out who Renée really was. Wah! As to be expected from our newscaster, right?

Instead of answering, Renée bowed her head to say that Sho was right. I could see that Sho was going to ask some questions. Renée wouldn’t like it if she felt Sho was prying, and I wouldn’t like because it was not Sho’s business to know about it.

To stop Sho’s questions, I quickly took her around the room and introduced her to everyone. “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 smiled, giving Nino’s yuki-onna girlfriend a curious look. “Why do you call the philosophy professor maman?”

It was Chiaki’s turn to explain things. “Alys Teng, one half of the Ninomiya couple. Aiba-chan has a habit of giving people nicknames.”

“Oh la la! Masaki must be very naughty and troublesome,” Renée said, giving me a silent scolding look as she sat down again. Then, like she suddenly thought of something that had been troubling her, she continued, “It is terribly confusing. You do not play music with string or woodwind instruments? How very odd!”

“You have no idea who we are, do you, Chaussée-san?” Nino curled his mouth in the mild version of the smirk of impending doom.

“Renée-Caroline, if you please. The friends of Masaki in a… singing group, non?” She touched the tips of her fingers together. But at that unpretentious and honest answer, the guys and Chiaki burst out laughing. Renée looked at me in confusion, whispering if she had something wrong. I whispered back that she hadn’t and the guys were pretty much crazy and weird, which meant they laughed all the time and all kinds of stuff. But, I was careful to add, I thought the guys liked her.

As Jun was the most aware and most gentlemanly of all of us in Arashi, he quickly stopped laughing when he saw that Renée was uncomfortable, and explained that they were laughing because they didn’t understand how she and me could be a couple. He elaborated that it was the same with mama and Nino when Jun laughed at Nino ‘trapping’ a Todai professor as his girlfriend. Nino added that ridiculing me was a hobby of Arashi, and that made Renée giggle her agreement that I did have elements of the ridiculous in me.

The girlfriends quickly agreed, and they invited Renée as they gathered around the space where mama and Chiaki were and talked in English about I don’t know what. Jun commented that they made a pretty picture. Sho, Riida and me looked at them and agreed with Jun. But Nino had to be contrary by saying that the girlfriends were cackling like banshees. Mama said she would whip him for that, and he answered that he hoped he would, which made Renée stagger back until Chiaki explained that Nino and mama shared a private S&M joke.

If Renée found it really and truly disturbing, she didn’t say anything. She was as friendly and warm to mama as she was to Chiaki and Sora, and when the girlfriends followed us downstairs to the dance studio with their the things they needed to keep themselves busy while we practiced our steps for the Countdown performance, Sho joked that very soon, the ladies would be more popular than us because some of the Juniors were wolf-whistling at them.

Me? I laughed at the joke and the wolf-whistling but I was nervous because I wondered what manager-san and Johnny-san would think of Renée. Would they like her? They had to kind of approve of the girlfriends before they gave them the drill of how to be careful not to be seen in public with us. I was so worried about it that I kept my eyes on the dance studio door the whole time and ended up tripping over my own feet. Sho tried to assure me that things would be all right because manager-san approved of difficult women like Sora and mama. MatsuJun growled at me for tripping over his feet and ordered me to take a short break when manager-san and Johnny-san came into the practice room to watch us practice. I think I was more nervous than Renée about what manager-san and Boss Johnny would say to her. So, I was very, very surprised when manager-san came in and greeted the girlfriends instead of us.

“Good afternoon, ladies! Elegance, Sense, Wit and now, the addition of Talent,” he called out to them, nodding to Sora, Chiaki, mama, and Renée, who were each doing their own thing reading and writing while talking to each other.

“We would need Beauty for a full set. Miss Kujo, Miss Nakahara, Dr Teng, Miss Chaussée, good day,” Johnny-san added, clicking his heels at the ladies as he nodded at them.

“And we’re thrilled to be reduced to collection plates,” mama answered back dryly. I nearly gasped if my hand was not already on my mouth. I’ve never seen anyone talk back to the Boss before. I looked at Nino but he didn’t look like he worried because the corners of his mouth were curling up.

Johnny-san chuckled. “Well put, well put.” He paused and turned to shout at us. “YOU! Why aren’t you practicing?”

“Allow them some leeway in the name of masculine anxiety,” Sora said, sounding like she was pleading on our behalf, but from the way mama curled her lips and looked at her as she said that, I think it was meant to be ironic.

“As much as I am enjoying the scintillating nature of this exchange – no offence to you, of course, Johnny-san, may I suggest that we cut to chase before Aiba-san is reduced to a blithering idiot peeing in his pants?” mama said dryly with her lips pressed closed together as she darted a quick glance at Nino to be quiet. Nino loved it when she said things in that kind of tone, and because we all knew from the way he had the smirk of doom on his face that he agreed with mama turning the subject.

The Boss didn’t say if he had noticed us trying to hold our breath. He smiled and nodded like he agreed with mama, and directly spoke to Renée. “My sources inform me that you are currently consorting with Aiba, Miss Chaussée.”

“Oui, that is correct.”

Manager-san cleared his throat and looked at something he had written down in a notepad. “Initial investigative researches indicate that you are currently attached to the Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera and Toho Gakuen Daigaku. Your agent, a Miss Josephine Girard sent us a memo with the terms and conditions for the safeguarding of both your professional careers. What makes you suppose we will bear full responsibility if someone publishes a scoop on the two of you?”

“C’est très simple,” Renée explained, her hands moving like she was conducting the orchestra and telling them what they should do. “The classical music industry is not a big one when compared to the pop industry. You have more resources at your disposal and the ears of the investors and the big players in the studios, and would be able to carry out large scale logistics to smooth things over before they are exaggerated, n’est-ce pas? We cannot do this in our industry because we are so small that news and rumours travels very quickly. Within my generation of musicians, we have worked with people who have shopped with Adrian Fowler’s third wife and who have played under von Karajan’s baton.”

“A reasonable and fair enough compromise provided you and the other ladies continue flying under the radar, the Jimusho would be pleased to offer you what protection we can,” Johnny-san said after a long pause. “It would be a shame to clip any of your wings.”

“Do you mean you have clipped theirs?” Renée asked very calmly, putting down the pencil she had been using to mark the score. The girlfriends looked at each other like they knew what it really meant because Chiaki gasped, Sora seemed amused, and mama had the smirk of doom on.

“Renée-Caroline,” hissed Chiaki, grabbing her shoulder in warning, but she continued to smile calmly at the boss. She didn’t look like she was going to back down, and the guys and me held our breaths. Nino somehow looked unconcerned although he had put his hands in his pockets and had gone closer to Riida.

Johnny-san laughed at it, surprising us that he would find it funny. “This is what we need in this industry – acuity of mind! YOU, boys! You are really nothing without women, don’t you ever forget it!”

“Eh?” Arashi chorused, sounding pitch-perfect to me.

“We are in agreement, Johnny-san. Men are fools,” Chiaki stated, with a laughing glance at Sho.

“Well, Johnny-san, we have no choice but to abandon the boys for the girls,” our manager gruffly suggested as he tried very badly to hide a laugh behind a cough.

The boss smiled and nodded at the girlfriends, then at us. “However, they would be a more difficult handful. Miss Chaussée, I look forward to attending the Tokyo City Met’s Christmas gala concert; Miss Kujo, may your story win the accolades it deserves; Dr Teng, I thank you for sending me home-brewed longan and red date tea; Miss Nakahara, we will be sure to discreetly donate a sum to the Jindai Botanical Gardens laboratories. Good work, ladies, and YOU, boys! Why aren’t you practicing?”

We were so shocked by what the Boss had said that we were still standing around and staring at each other when he left. Eh? He had just approved and okayed Renée himself, right? He was even kind of laughing and joking with the girls. Yay! Banzai! It went smoothly, and both manager-san and Johnny-san okayed Renée! But while that was a super happy thing, I was thinking about something else.

The Boss said that we were short of one more for the set of Arashi princesses. We didn’t have a princess for Riida. That was sad, very, very sad. He still didn’t have anyone. Maybe I should do something about it. I’ll have to see if I can bring it up to Nino and mama after practice. They’re closest to Riida. They’re always going to his house to play. I have to take them somewhere after practice. Nino just asked me to. I could ask them about it and try to think of a good idea. Ooh! That was going to be fun! I just know it!

NOTES

Events herein were alluded to in the epilogue of Life’s Colours & Sounds. This chapter also coincides with the epilogue of From Cover to Cover

Mais = but/however

Oui = yes

Non = no

Bien sûr = of course

Parce que = because

Quoi = what

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.

Because Sho always said that it’s smarter to play by the rules in anything to do with the Jimusho, and because it would be better if the manager-san and the Boss knew about, and because it would be better for Renée if her agent knew about, we decided to tell our management people that we had gotten together. I met her agent, a tough-talking, chain-smoking woman she called Jo during the afternoon matinee concert performance when we had agreed that we were a couple. How do people talk about things like being a couple or not being a couple? In movies, it’s very romantic and sweet and makes you cry, when it happens in life, I end up confusing myself.

Talking to Renée’s agent, Jo, was confusing. Her name’s really Girard Joséphine Lucie, but everyone calls her Jo. Talking to Jo was talking about contracts and agreements, and threats. She told me that I would have to take responsibility if the press photographers caught us. Jo said that the classical music world was so small that almost everyone knew everyone, and it would be very bad scandal if it was found out that one of the brightest young conductors had ‘allied herself to a mere self-proclaimed pop idol’. It was kind of the same for me. The Jimusho wouldn’t like it if the paparazzi photographers caught me with a woman it didn’t know about. Jo then asked if I wanted her to get in touch with the Jimusho to ‘talk terms’, discuss ‘preventative measures in the event of press leakage’, and ‘potential statements to be released’ if we were found out. Wah! These agents and managers think of everything! I don’t think so far about what would happen. I guess that’s why Sho always says that it is the mark of an evolved individual to be prepared for every worst eventuality. He said he learnt it from his mother. His mother’s nice and smart as hell, she would think of things like discussing matters with the Jimusho before things got out. Sho kind of got that from her too because when he got together with Chiaki, he told manager-san and the Boss almost immediately. It would be the best thing to do for me too, right?

I think it was, and that it would better if I told manager-san and the Boss myself instead of getting Renée’s agent to do it because it would show that I wasn’t serious about letting the JE management people know about my stuff. Thing is, I couldn’t tell manager-san immediately because I had Johnny’s countdown rehearsals for all of December and Renée had rehearsals with the orchestra at the Opera House for the winter programme series and the Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera’s Christmas gala concert performances to organise and stuff. But we came to an agreement that we would take some time to meet with the Jimusho’s people. At first, we thought of calling manager-san out for golf and telling him then. But it was kind of difficult because we were too busy for golf and we would never finish a nine-hole course in an hour. In the end, she decided that she could take one day away from the Opera House, let the individual sections of the orchestra and the choral division have their mini rehearsals, and follow me to Central to meet manager-san and the Boss. On the day before, I called manager-san to tell him that I wanted him, the Boss, and the guys to meet my girlfriend. It was heaps easier to let everyone meet her than doing it one group at a time.

It was easier to deal with manager-san because he grumbled about having to meet and vet another Arashi girlfriend. Manager-san’s a grumbler. He grumbles about everything; when he’s not grumbling, he’s barking like a mad dog. I took it as a good thing that he only grumbled about having to meet Renée on ‘short notice’, treating it like he was grumbling about everything else, and said he would see her tomorrow with the Boss. The guys were also kind of easy to deal with. They would make fun of me, ask her all kinds of rude questions, and they would accept her like they did with Chiaki, mama, and Sora. Riida would be happy too because he could stop watching me and trying to keep Nino away from me. I wonder if Riida has somebody. He’s always very quiet about his personal life. Sho used to joke years ago that Riida was the type to have a secret wife we would only know about after he got divorced. He could have a secret wife, but most likely he didn’t. He was always thinking about his mother that it didn’t seem possible for him to have a secret wife when he was so sticky-sticky with his mother. I told Renée all of this when I picked her up so that we could go to Central.

I had to be in Central because we had to practice dance steps in the studio for the Johnny’s Countdown. But I wasn’t there in the morning because I had to do a Tensai Shimura Doubutsuen thingy at one of the zoos. I thought of asking Renée to accompany me to the shoot that morning but she said she would not be comfortable with it, and people would stare. She said it was easier to be a conductor than a pianist because people would stare at her back and concentrate on her music and not on how she looked. It was supposed to mean something profound but I didn’t catch it. I wasn’t clever like MatsuJun and Sora who said these kinds of things. I took it that she didn’t want to and that was okay because I could pick her up from where she lived. I understood when I picked her up, why she didn’t want to go home after I got her out of the river those months ago. It was because she lived with her agent, and she didn’t want to face Jo. Jo was very fierce and scary, especially when she talked about business, contracts and all the formal legal stuff. It made my head swim. Jo was also very loyal and protective of Renée, which was why Renée didn’t want me to see her up to her flat whenever I brought her home. She didn’t want Jo to ask questions or frighten me. Renée didn’t like people asking her too many questions about the way she did things. She didn’t mind questions about stuff like why the sky is blue and all that. She just doesn’t like questions on why she does the things the way she does. I think it’s because she’s a snob. She always says she is not a snob but a person with good and refined taste.

As a person of good taste, she was taking the meeting that she was going to have with manager-san, Boss Johnny, and the guys much more calmly than me. She didn’t look scared, anxious or anything when I picked her up. I asked her why, and she said it was purely business. She knew what to do when it was matters of business and if it didn’t work out, she could call Jo to ‘aggressively negotiate with the JE management’, and I had nothing to worry about.

“What if they don’t like you?” I asked worriedly.

“My terms are so reasonable that they will agree to it even if they find me a completely reprehensible and scheming female. Should their terms be equally as amenable to me, I will be civil to them, and we will have mutual respect for each other. In a business setting, liking someone or not liking someone is not the point. It is whether an agreement may be reached, n’est-ce pas?” she reasoned, flicking away a curl from her face. “Par Dieu! What is the use of having these ears if they do not keep the hair behind me!”

“It’s okay to be nervous,” I told her with a laugh. I had to tell her that because she sounded like she was a little nervous. Meeting the JE management had always been nerve wrecking for me because they had a way of making you feel small. Renée would most probably make them feel small if she started snapping her fingers in irritation at them. “You could meet the guys before our manager. They’re nice. Sho’s the mother-ish type, Jun’s the fussy type big on cleanliness, Riida or Ohno-kun’s spacey, Nino’s a sarcastic bastard. Their girlfriends are really very, very pleasant too. Aki-chan’s serious, Sora-chan has kooky ideas about books and stories, and mama’s gently sarcastic.”

“Dis moi, Masaki, are there any sane individuals in your circle of friends?” she asked when we finally got to Central and I was trying to find a good parking spot.

“You’ll see for yourself.” I grinned, and took her hand as we zigzagged past the other parked cars and bikes to the main entrance’s automatic doors. We stopped to avoid hitting someone who was walking in very hurried, and I was about to tell the person to be careful where he or she was walking when I stopped. I stopped because it was a very familiar someone smoking a cigarette. “Sora-chan!” I greeted cheerfully with a big wave. “Visiting today?”

“I’m collecting something from Chiaki,” she explained, blowing the cigarette smoke against the direction of the wind. “Who’s this beautiful creature?” She paused to tap away the cigarette ash and spoke in English, offering her hand, “I feel as if I know you from somewhere. I’m Sora Kujo.”

“Enchanté, Madame Kujo,” replied my girlfriend in accented English, turning her wrist and then taking Sora’s hand. “Renée-Caroline Chaussée. May I compliment you on your taste in cigarettes? The smell of Davidoff reminds me of my father.”

Sora’s eyes flickered with faint interest, throwing her cigarette down and stepping on it with her shoe. “Chaussée? The Renée-Caroline Chaussée of the Tokyo City Met?” she asked in English.

Renée bowed her head in acknowledgement, and Sora’s eyes swept over the two of us. “My, my, Aiba-chan, not bad a choice for a girlfriend” Sora said with a strange smile like she was pleased with something she had seen. “I felicitate you.”

“Eh?” I blinked. She didn’t seem surprised? Why not?

“Don’t go ‘eh’, it isn’t cute!” Sora nagged when we got inside and were in the lift. “Mademoiselle Chaussée, I do hope we will become better acquainted. If you are uncomfortable in Japanese, we can communicate in English or French.”

“Oh! You have a little French! What a delight!” my conductor exclaimed in delight, her curls bouncing along with her as she nodded happily. “It would be acceptable to me if you were to call me Renée-Caroline.”

“Such a beautiful name! I’m stuck with miserable Sora. Nothing sky-like about me,” the writer said, a humorous gleam in her eyes.

They continued to talk in French, I think, because I didn’t recognise any of the words to be English. I sighed and smiled to myself. It’s official – the Arashi girlfriends are 100% weird. They’re clever like anything, but definitely and completely out of this world weird. Sora and Renée looked like they enjoyed talking to each other because they were speaking very quickly and it seemed to me like they were talking about many different exciting things. That was why when the door opened at our floor and Sora stopped chattering, I stole a peek at her. I thought that maybe Renée had something Sora didn’t agree with. But it wasn’t anything like that because Sora had to check to keitai. Renée told me that she thought Sora was knowledgeable on several subjects and a very colourful personality. Was that a good thing to be a colourful personality, I asked her? She said that it was, and I thought I must be colourful too because I liked lots of colour around me.

“Everyone’s here,” Sora shared with us, keeping her keitai.

“Even Jun?” I asked, wondering everyone included MatsuJun because I thought he would be still stuck with his drama shoot.

“Everyone,” Sora repeated very carefully, giving me a look that would have meant something if I knew how to read looks.

“Part one of the series of meeting the who’s who in JE Central,” I told Renée, hoping that she wasn’t nervous. She didn’t look nervous, but it was difficult to tell sometimes because those eyebrows always made her look like she was scowling or always on the verge of sinking into deep and depressing thought.

Renée rotated her wrist and snapped her fingers at me, irritated, telling me to get to it. I grinned at her and then at Sora and opened the door. Riida was answering someone when we went in because he had just said, “Hai, one.”

Because Jun was the only person who looked like he was paying attention to what Riida was saying, I thought they were talking about something important. That’s why I threw open the door quickly, and asked him, “One what, MatsuJun?” I thought they were making some kind of a decision, and if it was a decision, I wanted to know what it was about and how it would involve us.

The door hit the wall with a loud ‘slam’ and everyone in the Arashi room looked up at us. Make that, everyone except mama and Nino. They were acting like there wasn’t a loud noise, and that they weren’t disturbed. How could they not notice the loud sound? Even Renée flinched at hearing the door’s loud ‘ka-blam’ sound when it hit the wall. Even Sora jumped back a small step. But not mama and Nino. Mama continued to write and look at the books and paper stuff she had on the rug on the carpeted floor where she was lying on her stomach. It was a rug that Sho’s mother didn’t want anymore that Sho had cleaned and brought to liven up our room in Central. He said it was because Chiaki said it would be better for mama to have something to lie on instead of the bare carpet. Nino liked the idea because it wouldn’t cost him any money, and he was looking very normal, lying with his head on mama’s back as he played his DS.

Eh? Chotto, mama was there! I looked around the room. Eh? Chiaki was there too! Were all the Arashi girlfriends going to be there? I stared at Riida, half-expecting him to move aside and tell me that he has a hidden girlfriend who was visiting too. It was kind of, no, not kind of, very, very weird to have all the girlfriends there. I was going to freak out, or run around the room shouting in joy because Renée could meet all the girls, and she would see that while the Arashi guys were completely crazy, the girlfriends were heaps better than us. You know, if the girlfriends were heaps better than us, and they really were – what were they doing with us?

The guys (except Nino) and Chiaki however continued to look at Sora, Renée and me as we went into the room, with the look of ‘what’s going on’ on their faces.

I would answer them. Renée calls it rising to the occasion, and I would do that. It would be fun to see everyone shocked when I told them. Tee hee! “Hello everyone! What a kick up to find everyone here! We met Sora-chan downstairs. Guys, this is Renée, my girlfriend,” I announced with excited pride.

NOTES

Events herein were alluded to in the epilogue of From Cover to Cover and the epilogue of Life’s Colours & Sounds.

When I woke up the next morning, I was immediately made aware of the seriousness of what had happened. I woke up alone, and she was gone. If there wasn’t the rumpled pillow beside me and the condom in the wastebin, I would have thought that it was just one of those kinds of dreams, squinting at the sunlight that had come in through the windows. I sat up and tried to sort out the mixed up pieces that I remembered in my mind. MatsuJun once read a passage in a book Sora had written about fate happening too fast and it ended up bruising the characters. This was what it felt like.

There must have been a lot more than joy, fear, excitement and madness in that kiss because it was one of those times when I wished I had thought through my impulses before acting. I couldn’t call it a ‘lapse’ as Sho would call the times he lost his temper. Normally, I don’t think too much. If I feel like something, I do it. It had never seemed a bad thing before, but now, in the cold light of day, my impulses did seem like bad things.

It’s always difficult when impulses come from emotion, you know, feelings like hate, contempt, anger, desire, pleasure, misery and joy. Why can’t I have the calculated impulses of Nino? That guy never does anything unless he thinks he stands to benefit from it. Why couldn’t I have the calculated impulsiveness of MatsuJun? He considers whether his impulses are going to be good or bad before he acts on them. My impulse – only one (if that’s a good thing) – had got the better of me, and it makes me feel like a bigger baka than the baka I already know I am.

A lot of things seem harsher in the cold light of day, MatsuJun would sometimes say when I revealed that I had done something cheeky. But this wasn’t cheeky. It was kind of like a realisation, and when I understood it, I had no one to talk to about it, except the dogs. I wonder if they would understand me. There wasn’t a note on the pillow, and my clothes were flapped over the end of the bed. It was weird waking up alone after what Sora would call a ‘passionate and uninhibited night’. It was weird with Atom and Uran staring at me over the side of the bed I did not sleep in. It was useful to have a writer girlfriend in Arashi, I realised. Sora had words for everything, and I think she would have plenty of words to tell you what she thought I was thinking now. Did the guys have moments like this when they woke up and their girlfriends weren’t beside them? Nino wouldn’t care. He was selfish, and he would remain so for the first half of the day, and spend the other half turning Tokyo upside-down for mama, threatening to kill her if he found her. Sho would panic and phone the police. Jun would check his flat for a sign of Sora; and if Sora wasn’t there, he would look for her. What would I do now that everyone I talked to about Renée, like Yokoyama, Eguchi Obaasan, the orchestra concertmaster Ojisan guy, was right?

“Eh, boys? What’cha looking at?” I patted the empty side of the bed. They jumped up and rested their heads on the pillow she had slept on, drooping their tails and whining. I stuck my hand under her pillow and found the open condom wrapper there and then I sighed. “She ran away again, eh? What should I do?” I asked them, scratching their heads. “What should your baka owner do?”

I finally roused enough courage to get out of bed and search the flat for a note, which I found on the refrigerator door. It just held a simple phrase -- ‘Sorry’ scrawled on a green post-it. The frantic feeling of oppression returned, and I sat down, suddenly tired again, so that I could ponder my problem. What had seemed completely commonplace eight hours ago had by now assumed humongous proportions. In the sober light of day, I was at a loss to imagine how I could ever have not seen that I had developed an attachment to her, the mermaid ohime-sama.

What should I call her now? Renée-Caroline was too long for me, even though she said it was supposed to be said like one name in France. She let me call her Caro-chan at first. And in bed, I just called her Renée. Facts always seemed cold in the morning light. Probably that was why people read the newspapers in the morning. Yabai! What if she never spoke to me again? I would have brought that upon myself, and as Nino would always say, it would really serve me right. Who should I talk to? The dogs weren’t much help, even if they were staring at me like they knew something wasn’t right with me. I couldn’t talk to Sho. He would fly into a panic and Chiaki would have to calm him down, and then Chiaki would sit on me and maybe beat me. I couldn’t talk to Nino because he would say I deserved what I got, and mama would only listen to me without saying anything. I couldn’t tell Jun because he would hang me upside down outside a window while scolding me, and Sora would ask if she could write about my misery in her next book. I couldn’t ask Riida because he was so spacey that I think he doesn’t know what’s what sometimes. Oh! But I could call someone.

Suddenly, I grabbed the phone from the kitchen wall and pressed one of the numbers I had on speed-dial. “Yoko-chan…Kimi-kun… Are you very busy?” I asked.

“Maru and Tacchon will tell you that I am never busy,” Yoko replied with a yawn. “I had to get up anyway. Do you want to catch breakfast? It will be your pleasure to pay.”

I scratched Uran on the head because he looked particularly sad, like he was sad for me. “Could you spare me a moment of your time now?” I asked.

“You may have as many moments as you desire, Kappe,” he answered not unkindly. “What scrape have you gotten yourself into?”

“I’ve done something dreadful,” I confessed mournfully.

“I am prepared for the worst,” he laughed. “What did you do?’

“I’ve done something dreadful and the mermaid ohime-sama, Renée… She went away again.”

There was a pause over the line, and the dogs looked sympathetically at me, as if they knew my friend on the phone wasn’t being very helpful. “Is that all?” Yoko asked.

“Iya,” I continued anxiously. “That’s only the beginning. I… We spent the night together and she went away. She’s not here anymore. She left a sticky note that said sorry.”

“Why in the name of all that’s fluffy and pink are you calling me? You’ve outraged her maidenly modesty! You must take responsibility,” he said, treating it lightly and giggling slightly like it was a joke. “In circumstances like these, it is obligatory for the man – that would be you – to kneel at her feet, kiss her feet, pledge devotion in as loud a voice as possible so as to compromise her. She would then have no choice but to marry you.”

“I’m not you, you perverted idiot!” I laughed thinly because it was kind of funny even if it made feel kind of sick to laugh.

“Go after her.”

“Eh?”

“GO AFTER HER!” he shouted into the receiver. “Do you have to be in Central today? I’ll cover for you if you do.”

“Not today because countdown rehearsals don’t start till next week…”

“Then hang up the goddamn phone and go after her!” Yoko yelled, and without waiting for me answer, he disconnected the line.

While going after her would be a good and fantastic idea, I didn’t know where she would be. I called her keitai but no one picked up. Yabai! It could mean she was angry with me. She couldn’t have disappeared. The Opera House always had Saturday afternoon matinee performances on top of the Saturday night ones. I thumped my head on the wall in a thunk-thunk-thunk motion because I realised how stupid I was. She was probably at the Opera House. She was only herself when she had something to do with her music. And that’s where I would have to go.

An hour and a half later, I was at the Opera House, and in my most serious and firm voice enquired of one of the cleaning staff if Chaussée-san was in. The maestra, I was told, had come in under half an hour ago, and was with the concertmaster in her office. I drew a deep breath, as though I was going to dive into deep waters, and walked across the foyer into the inner parts of the theatre, into the back passageway and down the corridor to her office with the ‘Music Director’ sign.

The door was slightly open when I got there. She was standing by the desk, with her back to the door, reading something that I think the concertmaster guy, Hayakawa Ojisan had given her. She looked like everything except a conductor in the cherry red long-sleeved, open neck collar wrap style shirt and slim cut stitch-waist trousers. She was still carrying her gloves in one hand; her woolly hat was thrown down on a chair nearby.

“Alors, ici – the phrasing for the bowing may interfere with the tempo of the third melody here if we make the sound too sharp in the first movement,” she said, giving the thingy, which must be a score back to him. “The melodies are supposed to blend in a – how you say – impassioned feel that flows from one movement to the next, n’est-ce pas, Monsieur Hayakawa?”

He did not answer her because he was bowing to me. Because he did not answer her, she turned her head and saw me. “Bonjour. I did not hear you come in,” she said smoothly like nothing had happened between us. That was scary; super, super scary.

I was so frightened that I gave a half-hearted smile to Hayakawa Ojisan. The concertmaster looked me over curiously. I think it was because I have always been friendly with him (as he didn’t know who I really was – these classical music people were real snobs). He didn’t say anything to me. He said good morning, I think. I wasn’t sure, because he left the office when he saw that I wasn’t going to leave.

“Are you busy now?” I said in a small voice, as she picked up a score and started reading it. “I want to be private with you.”

“Shut the door,” she answered, carefully studying the score and making very soft ‘pa-dam-dah-dum-pah-dum’. I think it must be the music she’s reading.

Closing the door and leaning back on it for a moment, I said, “There is something I must tell you.”

She looked up from the score at me for a moment, rather searchingly, I thought, and her eyes flickered surprise for a short instance. Moving forward a step and going back another two until she came into contact with the desk, she asked, “Please, have a seat.”

I took a step forward but stayed at my new position, my hands gripping the back of the chair that had her woolly hat. “It’s better for me if I stand. I’m afraid you’re amazingly angry, right?” I said, the honest words rushing out, “I deserve it if you’re angry. If you won’t speak to me again, I deserve it, only… I hope you won’t.”

“Par Dieu! What do you want to say?”

I traced the pattern of the chair-back with one finger. “Ano, I… Ano ne, you see, I…I got the message you left.” I raised my eyes to hers fleetingly, and saw her watching me very seriously. “About last night… Because…” I licked my lower lip, puzzling over an apology, but what quickly and suddenly came out was, “Do you think we should have had omelette instead?”

“Quoi?”

“Ano, I can’t explain it without the omelette,” I said mournfully. “The er…performance last night… I can’t lie that it didn’t mean anything. Did it mean something to you?” She remained silent, and it made me feel worse. I took a firmer grip of the chair-back and continued, “I shouldn’t have kissed you. Then things wouldn’t have happened, and you wouldn’t have run away. And we wouldn’t have a terrible thing on our hands of you being quietly angry with me, and me being so scared that you wouldn’t want to speak to me again. I thought it would be easier to see you and talk about this, because even if you are angry with me, you should know that I don’t do things like that to anyone. I couldn’t bear it if you are angry. I’m…”

“I am not angry. I am only sorry,” she replied.

“I’m not!” I allowed myself to burst in violently. “The consequences of this are well… erhm… that I must know if you think it is possible for us to get together, like a couple.”

“Why? It was reckless, oui, but it should not give rise to serious nervous qualms,” she curled her mouth into a scornful smile and knit her eyebrows horribly. “You are either supremely confident or incredibly simple to come here with that load of balderdash. I have anticipated you, monsieur, and I will put you out of your misery by refusing you, as you would have wished. C’est fini – the charade is finished.”

“Why do you always run away when it suits you? I’m not anything like you, or know the things you do, and I sure can’t ever think of all the things you do, but have you ever asked me how I felt in this? I want you because I’ve become used to the idea of talking to you, and hearing you think. I’m not much of anything as a natural baka, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings!” I let the words gush out in solemn anger too quickly before I realised what I said. Yabai! Now she would really never speak to me again.

She turned to face me; her eyes calm and thoughtful. “I am not the only coward in this room, n’est-ce pas. Do not feel obliged out of a misguided sense of chivalry or pity. It would be de trop. Had I been one of your clingy – how do the vulgar say it – conquests, you would not be here imagining there is something more to a brief liaison. Understand that I am not tumbling over myself to catch you.”

“You didn’t. You’ve never tumbled over everything, except once over the stairs, and everyone who sees you knows that you have terrible bat ears. You’ve been nothing but aeroplane turbulence since I fished you out of the river. Because of you, I haven’t a moment’s peace. But I like it. I like spending time with you, and I see from that pot of Sweet William on your window sill that maybe it’s kind of the same for you,” I told her honestly and seriously, without any anger. Maybe I was a little angry, maybe it was tiredness and worry. “Last night… I behaved very badly, but I don’t regret it.”

She gave nothing away in her face, but when she looked straight at me, there was a light in her eyes that I had never seen there before. “Non, je ne regrette rien. It is a song title, did you know? We both behaved very badly, n’est-ce pas?”

“It’s the snowball. It rolled the down the mountain and it brought me to you.”

“Quoi? What snowball?”

I selected a nut from the bowl she had on the desk and tried to busy myself with cracking it. “I thought it started when you came back to the Opera House, but I know now it started when you threw yourself in the river. At first, I did think you were like a puppy I could look after. It was kind of fun to have someone to play golf with, and talk to, and eat karaage with. I don’t regret any of it because if you hadn’t tried to drown yourself and gone away before I could ask you who you were, we might not have come in one another’s way again. And I would have never discovered that I had the found the ohime-sama I had been looking for so long.”

A look of surprise and a splash of colour washed over her face. She put down the score she had been pretending to study swiftly and stared at me. “C’est impossible. That cannot be. I have taken care to hold you at arm’s length. Most women would toadeat the men they are tumbling over to catch, and monsieur is too much a frippery fool to warrant toadeating. I took care to be indifferent to you because it became apparent you were – how you say – trifling with me.”

“I don’t do complicated thinking thingies like trifling with people.” I leaned forward and smiled down at her. “You’re a snob and completely weird, but I know I’m looking at what I have been looking for.”

“Pourquoi? C’est impossible…”

Because I didn’t want to hear any more of her excuses, I took her firmly into my arms and kissed her, after which she clutched at my neck and cried into my shoulder. None of the comforting things I said to her to assure her that I wasn’t into trifling with her soothed her, and her curls were starting to tickle my chin. But after I told her that she would have to face the orchestra with a bucket over her head to hide puffy eyes and sticky out bat ears, she laughed.

She became much calmer after that, calm enough to make a joke, “Par Dieu! You always intended to have me at your feet, n’est-ce pas?”

“You at my feet?” I laughed out loud. “The loyal servant of the mermaid ohime-sama should be at your feet.”

She smiled tiredly, and shook her head as if she didn’t know what to do with me.

“That’s done, ne?” I smiled back at her. “It’s always easier when the ohime-sama runs away with the baka upstart enoki mushroom servant willingly.”

The inside mushroom joke we shared made us both laugh. As I put my arm around her, I realised this was what having a girlfriend was about. It was about being carefree, and lighter, away from the pressures of work because I had someone to talk to. This must be what happens when the snowball rolls down the mountain and takes the ohime-sama and the baka servant out of the palace.

NOTES

Alors, ici… = now then, here…

Par Dieu = by God

Quoi = what

Oui = yes

C’est fini = it’s finished/over

Non, je ne regrette rien = no, I regret nothing

Pourquoi? C’est impossible = Why? It is impossible

Alors = Well then. *Please note ‘Alors’ has no real English equivalent.

N’est-ce pas = don’t you agree / don’t you think. *Please note this also has no real English equivalent. It is used in the same place as the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the examples below:
(a) Time is of the essence, no?
(b) You speak Polish, yes?
Bear this in mind when you next encounter “n’est-ce pas”

The flower shop assistant, a man this time, I think he’s gay from the way he was looking at me, told me that the mignonette is popular in potpourri. When he showed me the flowers, I opened my eyes wide and blinked once. It didn’t look like anything special. The flowers weren’t pretty like carnations, and it came in a squarish pot. I just said the most important thing. It came in a pot. Another potted plant? They smelled nice and came in different colours of white, yellow, orange and green, but why did it have to come in a pot? Did bouquets suddenly go out style? I would have to ask Jun. He knows all about style. He even knows where to get good food. Sora calls him a connoisseur of the finer things in life. Me, I just think Jun has an eye for good quality stuff.

“It comes in a window-box to scent the city air. The English people in the old days used to grow it in pots and put it on their windows so that they would not have to smell the sewage of the London. Similarly, at our branches of September Florals, we wish to render Tokyo less smoggy with the refreshing smell of the mignonette,” said the shop assistant guy as he smelled the flowers and took the pot with orange flowers away from my hands.

“Eh?” I looked at him when he finished his sales pitch. “How did you know I was thinking why it came in a pot not a bouquet?”

“You, valued customer, were raising that question aloud,” he told me, with a flirty look like he thought I was cute.

Because that was weirding me out, I speedily paid for the mignonette and hopped back into the car and raced my way to the Opera House, making it with twenty minutes to spare. I parked my car, picked up my ticket from the box office after shouting at the deaf old man behind it, and left my overcoat with the cloak room counter obaasan, I asked Nana Obaasan if she could get someone to bring the potted plant flower thingy to their conductor.

“No problem,” she said, sticking two fingers at her lips and whistling very loudly. “The porter will be here. Do you have a message to go with this weed?”

“It’s a mignonette!” I told her, but I don’t think she believed it to be anything other than a weed. I looked at the pot again, thinking what I should write on the small piece of paper the cloak room obaasan handed me. It wasn’t a pretty plant, but it smelled nice, and it would be different from what she would get from the audience. Sho always said to keep things simple if I didn’t know what to say or do, and running with that was probably the best thing I could do. Wah! When I started rolling the snowball to search for her after she disappeared from my flat, I couldn’t have imagined that it wouldn’t stop rolling. I thought it would have stopped rolling when I found her again, but it hadn’t. It must be a super weird snowball if it hasn’t stopped rolling. Maybe it was because the hill was too high and it couldn’t stop yet. Snowballs aren’t animals, I didn’t know how snowballs think. Did snowballs think? Sometimes they move on their own like they’re thinking about things. I could write something about the snowball taking me to the Opera House, but I don’t think the mermaid ohime-sama would understand. Maybe I should stop calling her that too because she didn’t like it. And I could get her name right most of the time now. It was crazy to think so much when I was writing a note to go with the potted plant. It was making me confused, and a confused me wasn’t very happy. Dame yo, ne?

I just let my hand move across the paper on its own, writing:
‘Your honesty and cleverness makes you beautiful in spite of the ears. Masaki.’

The cloak room obaasan pinched the paper from me when I finished, stuck it in the mignonette and spoke to a young guy who had run up to the counter. “Yoshizumu! For the Maestra.” Turning to me after the boy ran down the back passage, she said, “Box seats upstairs to the right. The usher will see to you.”

“What’s today’s performance about?” I asked.

“You don’t know your head from your tail, do you?” She exclaimed in annoyance, helping another person deposit his overcoat. “Read the programme booklet.”

“The thing that came with the ticket? It’s a booklet? Sugoi! I didn’t know it was free!”

“It’s not; its price is worked into the cost of the ticket.”

Because she sounded like she wanted to beat me with her shoe, I retreated upstairs to the box seats. One of the ushers showed me to my seat and I tried to read the programme booklet. But I wasn’t paying much attention to the booklet. I was first wondering what a weird name it was to call someone who just showed you to your seat an usher. These opera places and classical music people must be really snobby to give these kinds of names to people. Like the place where we gave Nana Obaasan our coats, why was it a cloak room? It was very snobby sounding. I think the Opera House was full of snobs. That’s what I thought when I looked down at the people in their ordinary seats. Not everyone there was a snob. Some were there for the music, and were excitingly reading the programme booklet and talking to each other. The snobby ones were the ones who didn’t want to bump into anyone and who was dressed more fashionably than MatsuJun. And that was completely super weird because it is nearly impossible to be more fashionable than MatsuJun. Chiaki always says he has no taste, but he has style, that’s what I always answer back. Chiaki and Jun are like brother and sister with their comments on each other’s dressing and style. It’s not weird when I think about it that Jun treats Chiaki like a younger sister and mama like an older one. It’s how Jun always treats women. He treats them like family and they feel respected. I wish I could do something like that, but I’m not nearly as clever as him and I don’t know how to talk to people.

In my own box in the Opera House, I didn’t have to worry about that because I didn’t have to talk to anyone. The inside of the box was greener and darker than the green of grass, and when I looked up, the Opera House looked like a big hanging chandelier. There were some young men in the pit ogling at the ladies in the boxes at my level. I can imagine this being an old-fashioned movie where the guys and me would be ogling at the pretty ladies in their fancy dresses. Jun’s Sora-chan and mama would not be out of place here. They would be reading the programme booklet and have their eyes on the stage, criticising the orchestra and the singers or dancers and they wouldn’t know that we were looking at them. Oh! The programme booklet! I had forgotten about that! I still didn’t know what the performance was about.

Eh? Did they do these things in classical music? It was going to be an original ballet that the Opera House ballet corps had choreographed for the ‘symphonic poem’ with a completely weird name of Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche. There was a kind of summary to the story of the ballet. Turns out that the thingy is German, and it looked like a funny and cheerful piece. It was about a mischief maker who played pranks on people, chased girls, and makes fun of people who are too serious. The main character, Till, laughs a lot because he likes to have fun, but that also means that lots of people dislike him, especially those in charge. He’s captured in the end and sentenced to death. But even then, he’s cheerful and jokes about everything. He dies in the end because those in charge didn’t like his jokes. Did he die? The last line of the summary in the booklet said, “The authorities are led to believe they have exterminated the nuisance that was Till.” Why was the ‘led to believe’ part highlighted in a different colour? Does he die? I didn’t think I’d like something if the cheerful main character died, but I was curious now and wanted to see how things would turn out.

The lights then dimmed, and it was quiet. I didn’t know what to expect for something like this. Then a person walked out and the audience clapped. Oh! It was the mermaid ohime-sama (maybe I should stop calling her that, I thought again). She came out in the kind of formal thingy that conductors always wore, probably because it was a conductor’s uniform, bowed once and took up her baton. The orchestra played the first few notes and the curtain rose, and the ballet began. It was interesting, and the music was light and fun. It was different from the usual kind of thing I heard on the radio, or even from her music that I listened to on borrowed CDs. The ballet made it clear, I think, because it made it easier to see what the music was trying to say. The main character guy, Till, makes fun of people and makes jokes to show that people around him are greedy and foolish hypocrites. Then it hit me like a smack of the head that this was the ballet she had been watching them rehearse the other day while making notes on the score. The whole ballet thingy and the music left me speechless, and I didn’t move when there was a break because I wanted to know what happened to Till in the end. It was like manga or anime, but with different music and different movements. It was something completely new.

I was relieved at the end of the performance to see that Till didn’t die. The guy ballet dancer playing Till twitched at the end when everyone went away thinking he was dead. And the music suddenly repeated something was heard at the beginning of the piece and Till raised his head. Then the curtains fell and everyone took their bows, the ballet corps, and then the conductor. She looked up at all the boxes and nodded at each one. She didn’t seem to notice me in the box because she didn’t act like she saw me. Maybe she was being professional. People gave her flowers and she took them, sharing the flowers with the ballet people and the curtain fell with people still clapping and yelling bravo. I think they were cheering for the ballet corps. But they didn’t know that the conductor had it hard too. She had to keep the music in time with the ballet people’s steps by watching them prance around, and she had to watch the orchestra to make sure that they didn’t mess the music for the ballet dancers. It was hard work. Maybe that was why she once said the role she played in music was overlooked.

I didn’t leave immediately when it ended because the rest of the audience would be squeezing out and I didn’t want to squeeze with them. Squeezing with them could mean I would noticed more easily and I would get into trouble. I just hung around in the box, thinking why she insisted I attend this performance. There were lots of other ones she could have asked me to go to, right? I could have made it to her rehearsals if I had free time and it would be the same, right?

Someone coughed and I turned to see that it was the teenager who had sent the pot of mignonette backstage to her. “The maestra, Chaussée-san wants to see you.”

She had seen me after all! Yay! I could ask her if she liked the plant and I could tell her that I liked this Till Eupen-what’s-it, and ask her directly what was so important about this performance that she wanted me to see it.

How I got backstage, I couldn’t remember. I think I followed the porter. Things were kind of a blur. But she didn’t seem surprised when she saw me. She had just closed the dressing room door, and I met her there. She had changed out of the conductor’s tuxedo uniform thingy, taken out her contact lenses, and tilted her head at me to say hello.

“Ah, bonsoir, Monsieur, did you enjoy Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche?” she smiled in a way that the smile was almost a grin. “It is supposed to be my belated thanks to you. Not for les mignonettes, but for returning my music to me.”

“You’re forcing me to say I liked it even if I didn’t when you put things that way!” I laughed at her, taking the pot of mignonette so that she could pick up her bag from the floor. “Are you going to say you like the weed too?”

“Non,” she stated, pushing open the back door that said ‘exit’ above it. “It is the very thing I need for my place to remove the narrowness of the Tokyo sky and the choking smog of the city.”

“What’s so important about Till that you wanted me to see it?” I asked her, after hearing the ‘peep-poop-peep-poop’ car doors unlocking sound.

She looked seriously up at me, her straight eyebrows almost giving her the appearance of a scowl. It used to frighten me when I first got to know her, but now, it was something I was used to, like Nino pinching Riida’s butt. “Monsieur has not the brains today, hein? The fool deserves a foolish piece, n’est-ce pas? That is my raison d’être. The spirit of Till is that of Shakespearean fool, able to tear the mask of hypocrisy from people because he is able to see people for what they are. That is the spirit that is – how you say – indomitable, n’est-ce pas? It is something that cannot die.”

“Eh? I’m a fool? I thought I’m a natural baka!” I asked again. But as I said so, I think I got what she was trying to say. Souka! Till’s spirit does not die at the end. I should have seen that.

“It is the same thing,” she insisted, sniffing at the mignonette. “Your dogs would agree with me.”

“Oh! Good idea!” I replied, making as sharp u-turn around the junction to take the expressway. “We’ll go home and ask Atom and Uran what they think. They miss you, I think. They struggle when I bathe them, and if I play your music, they whine and go to sleep.”

“Alors, am I to be happy that I put dogs to sleep?” she asked in a completely unserious way as she straightened my tie. “Do not wear it like that if it is going to crooked! Crétin! Are you hungry? I am.”

I turned to look at her for a while because the traffic was pretty smooth. She looked tired, but still beautiful, if not for the bat eats. Those ears! They made me laugh, but maybe that was why she was always so serious because people laughed at her ears. That was something I didn’t think about before, and it made me a little sad. But sadness was never good when I was hungry. That was why I made looked at her and made a suggestion, “We’ll ask the dogs what they think and then I’ll whip us up a hamlet.”

“Hamlet can mean two things, Monsieur – a play by Shakespeare or a village.”

“Iya, iya,” I laughed at myself. Getting words wrong was already a speciality with me, now it looked like I was getting food names wrong too. Maybe I should add that to the list of things I got wrong. “I meant the fried egg thingy with tomatoes, green capsicums, onions and cheese.”

“Omelette. No capsicums. Je déteste les poivrons.” She put the back of her hand to her mouth to cover her yawn. Something in me swelled, I didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was hunger. Probably it was. An omelette, ne? I could make that. I make it sometimes when I want to eat in the middle night but nothing’s open for me to order food from. Okay, the omelette thingy then.

“Wah! That makes things loads easier; I hate digging out the middle part of capsicums. You’re easy on me.” I patted her knee once and then replaced my hands on the steering wheel. Two more junctions and I would be home. It was kind of weird to take her home to my place. She hadn’t been there since she disappeared shortly after staying two days. Atom and Uran would love to see her again, Atom especially. He was never quiet with me, but when she was around, he followed her and slept at her feet. Maybe he just preferred female company, or maybe it’s because she fed him her food. Some dogs automatically became friends with people who fed them.

“Vraiment?” she asked while she yawned, making it sound like it was challenge. “It is only an omelette.” Her stomach made a sound, as I parked the car, and she laughed. “Ah, non, a life saving omelette.”

“Seems like I’m the only guy stupid enough to save the helpless mermaid ohime-sama.” I poked her nose when we got out and walked to the lifts.

“Alors, you have a hero complex.” She yawned, the ends of her eyes wetting a little as always happened when a person was very tired and trying hard to stay awake. Eyes always did that, I didn’t know why. Chiaki said it was because eyes must always be kept moist.

I didn’t think much about moist eyes because I was thinking how tired she looked. Thinking that maybe conductors didn’t catch any rest, I rubbed her arm, feeling the woolly material of her coat, and pulled her head to rest on my shoulder. She didn’t make a squeak of protest, but that could be because she was tired. I didn’t seem to have any control over what I was doing. That was weird, super weird even. Chiaki and mama always said that the brain controlled everything we did like why we were hungry and when we scratched ourselves. Why couldn’t I control my hand from running through the curls in her hair? It would be okay if it stopped there or if she said something or made a noise. She didn’t. She only yawned again, and I thought she was kind of cute when she was tired. Because I thought she was kind of cute when she yawned, I kissed the top of her head.

“Omelette and a headrest, you are well-versed in the arts of saving the life of a struggling conductor, n’est-ce pas?” she whispered as a tired joke.

“There’s bread too, if you want that,” I told her, reaching over and gently moving my fingers to her cheek, drawing them down to trace the shape of her lips.

Maybe I shouldn’t have done that because she stiffened, pulled back and stared straight at me. “Qu’est-ce que vous… What do you think you are doing?” she asked calmly without fear or anger.

“I don’t know,” I laughed nervously with a shrug. “You looked tired, and I thought…” I didn’t finish because I really didn’t know what I was thinking. But the lift got to the floor where I lived and had opened up, and it cut me off from giving her an answer I didn’t have. “Coffee would be a bad idea since it’s late. I may have apple juice, but I don’t know if it’s expired,” I said because something needed to be said otherwise I was going to have a heart attack from not knowing what I was doing or saying.

“Dis moi, Masaki, what did you think?” she asked softly but seriously, her fingers drumming on the pot of mignonette.

“Ano…” My mouth had decided to go dry. I think it’s because I didn’t know what I was thinking. Maybe it was a stupid thought. Eh? She called my name, right? Not cretin, not enoki mushroom, not monsieur. I was breathing faster than normal, that wasn’t good. There wasn’t a hospital nearby. I could die from a heart attack and no one would know. I had get inside my flat and not die on the common corridor. I took a deep breath and tried to slow down my breathing as I unlocked the door, and let her go in first. “I thought maybe you would run away again like you did before without telling me.”

She waited until I had closed the door and was done greeting Atom and Uran before she put down the mignonette. “The dogs knew, I told them,” she replied calmly, holding my gaze, and she didn’t seem as tired as she was just now. “Aussi, I left a note of thanks where you would be sure to find, and I made sure the place was clean be…”

“Please, Caro-chan, Renée-chan, I was scared… I’m scared you would…” I said without thinking, touching a finger to her lips and moving closer. I heard the dogs scratching on the other side, the whines of Uran and the ‘arff’ of Atom, someone’s baby wailing a few flats down, and I still didn’t have a good idea of what I wanted to say.

“Please don’t run away again,” I said, as I tightened my hand on her elbow and kissed her. Who was more surprised? I was surprised she had responded, and I think she was surprised that I had done it. Or maybe we were both surprised by what we could taste in that kiss.

NOTES

Je déteste les poivrons = I dislike capsicums

Dis moi = tell me

*Notice she uses “dis” which goes with “tu” instead of “dites” which goes with “vous. This signals that she has switched from the formal “vous” to the informal “tu”. Make what you will of this switch.

For those confused, “vous” and “tu” mean “you” but one is formal and the other informal. Please refer to earlier notes in earlier chapters for in-depth explanation.

Aussi = also

Crétin = Idiot

Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche is a German lyric opera and ballet. Please refer to mainbody of chapter for the plot of this piece.

Any plans that I had to meet the mermaid ohime-sama for coffee were on hold because she said she wanted to concentrate on the new programme list. I didn’t know what it was, because the things she told me flew over my head, but she sounded excited about it, and said that the ballet corps had put together something for one of the selections. She told me, insisted very firmly that I attend the concert next week, that is, the week after I was supposed to have coffee with her but found the café closed. And she answered that she would leave me a ticket at the box office.

I did wonder what was so special about this performance that she wanted me to see? I didn’t really like ballet very much, and I got bored easily, so I didn’t really know if I could sit through a whole performance. But then I thought I had never been to a real classical music thingy before, and then thought maybe I could go for one to see what it was all about.

Thinking like that, I was kind of looking forward to it. And by the time of the performance for Friday night, I was excited to go. But there was one problem. I was in Central in a meeting that manager-san had called between the designers of the new single CD jacket and us. I didn’t really care what was going on there, but how did meetings on what colours to use and what to do with pictures and motifs last over three hours? I was bored, and everyone was bored, and what was worse was that I needed to be somewhere else. In the end, the designers settled it anyway, and we ended at six, giving me enough time to go the Opera House, and beat the traffic jam.

The guys were all restless when we got back to the Arashi room, and Nino was suffering from both DS and nicotine withdrawal because his fingers were twitching very badly. But he was much better when he had the DS in his hands once again. Since I had time, I figured I could take a quick shower at Central, pick up flowers (because the conductor of an orchestra should get flowers) and then go to the Opera House. It was all okay except that the guys were giving me strange looks. Jun and Sho were. Nino was too busy trying to pack his things and play his game at the same time. Jun and Sho were staring at me with some amusement and I don’t know what because I was trying to tie my tie and not getting it right.

“By chance, are you attending an important function?” Sho asked, as he wiggled his eyebrows in that way that he always did when he thought he suspected something. His suspicions were usually wrong, but I think, he may just be right this time.

“Is a performance a function?” I asked, leaving the ends of the tie around my neck and trying to tuck my shirt properly into the pants.

“What do you have on, ne, Aiba-chan, that you need to wear a tie? Eto, do you need any help?” Jun asked playfully, taking his glasses slowly down. “Ano ne, your belt buckle is upside down.”

“Music performance. I don’t know what kind. I’ve got a ticket reserved for me. Not bad, eh?” I laughed. After fixing the belt buckle, Jun and Sho were still staring at me and giving each other looks like they both suspected something. I ignored them, flipped up the collar of the shirt and tried to work on the tie. “I need help with my tie!” I exclaimed loudly in frustration because the thing had suddenly grown a knot in the middle.

“Ask the tie expert,” Sho said, helpfully throwing an empty soft drink can at Nino. “Aiba needs help with his tie so that he can go to a concert.”

“Whose concert? Someone we know?” Riida asked.

“It could be Crown Prince’s for all I care! You want me to fix the tie? How much is he paying me for it?” Nino asked automatically as he slouched forward from his place on the sofa with his plastic bag of things beside him. “Oi, Oh-chan! Captain! We have to go. Time’s a-wasting!”

“More of your illegal, nefarious business, ne?” Jun teased, turning around on his chair so that he could rest his arms on Sho’s shoulder.

“Yeah, we’re hiring unsavouries to do away with a certain butt-less baka,” Nino sneered as he grabbed Riida’s butt.

“What’s a function?” Riida asked suddenly, putting down his bag and undoing the knot in my tie. “I thought it’s something mathematical. Can Aiba do more mathematics than basic arithmancy?”

“Eh, Riida, ne, have you been reading my Harry Potter books, ne?” Jun giggled.

“You mean arithmetic,” Nino pointed out as he paused the game and took the tie that Riida had dangled in front of him. “Damn you! Do you have a death wish coming between a man and his true love? Nothing comes between me and my DS!”

“Just fix the tie for Aiba,” pleaded Sho, shaking his head. “Aiba, your socks. You didn’t pull the left one. Not my left! Your left!

“I’m sure your little professor would love to hear that speech,” Jun said, while I tried to make sure my socks were on right.

“Because if they were mathematical symbols, he would be a function tending towards the asymptote,” Sho said, laughing at his joke although no one understood him.

“Hilarious, Sakurai,” Nino said dryly, throwing the done tie at me. “Go strangle yourself with it, but give me 500 yen before that.”

“What for?” I asked, slipping it over my neck and adjusting it.

“Fee for tying the Windsor knot on the tie,” he answered back with a smirk.

I would have stayed and argued with him because it was what we did for fun, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be late for the concert performance. I thought of asking Sho what kind of flowers I should buy for a conductor to say that her performance was good. I didn’t know if I would like it, but it couldn’t be that bad. Even if I didn’t like, conductors needed encouragement too, right? But I thought it would only make the guys weirder, so I flashed them a peace sign to say bye for the day, and did the second best thing. The guys were already plenty weird staring at me like they didn’t think I would wear a tie on a normal night out. Jun and Sho were giving me funny looks like they didn’t know if they wanted to laugh at me or ask me what was going on. I couldn’t deal with them, not when I didn’t want to be late, and because dealing with them would mean running around the place trying to escape from them trying to smack me at the back of my head. It was better to go to the second best thing by calling mama and asking her about the flower thing as soon as I was on the road.

“Mama? Masaki here,” I quickly said before she could say anything. “I’m going to a concert performance, classical music performance, I want to know what sort of flowers I should give to…”

“Oh ho! You sly devil! Now it is crystal clear why you wish to be more cultured. The abrupt interest in classical music could not have sprouted from nowhere. Tell me, have you set your heart on a pianist or an oboist or a harpist! Now, there’s a thought,” mama laughed over the line. “Is it the NHK orchestra’s Mendelssohn special at Suntory Hall?”

“I’m not going to the Suntory Hall do. I’m going to Setagaya…”

She got in before I could tell her more, “But of course! The Hitomi Memorial Hall at the Women’s University in Setagaya is hosting a chamber music series for the next fortnight. You have to be gentle with the ladies in chamber music. Blue violets for modest love, honeysuckle for devoted love. Iye, much too direct for the chamber music crowd. Something subtle and graceful, perhaps something commonly overlooked. How about the mignonette? It represents moral and mental beauty.”

“I’ll run with the moral and mental beauty thingy one. It’s a migno-what’s-it, right?” I checked with her, not knowing what kind of strange flower it was. But mama was mama, she knew these things, I would have to trust her on this one.

“Mignonette, baby-chan,” she corrected me with a patient sigh. “I will send you the spelling in English as well as a picture of it via electronic mail when I hang up. Don’t fret; you will enjoy the concert if you like Beethoven and Schubert.”

“Demo, mama…” I started to protest, wanting to explain that it was the conductor of the Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera, but she hung up.

Not long afterwards, she sent a message through the keitai with the flower name and a picture just as she promised. I couldn’t call her back because she would be on her way to go to the Suntory hall concert performance. Mah, I’ll go pick up the flowers and hope that the flower shop people know what I’m asking for.

We didn’t get back to Tokyo till the next day, but that was okay. We weren’t missed by anyone. The mermaid ohime-sama wasn’t missed by anyone, I think. I didn’t ask her and she didn’t tell me. No one came looking for me either. That was what I thought until I saw Yokoyama a week after we returned from Kyushu. It was mid-week, in the afternoon, and I was about to leave Central for Café Sinfonia at the Opera House because I was meeting the mermaid ohime-sama for coffee before going to TV station to do Shukudai. I had just gotten into the lift, pressed the ‘door close’ button and who but Yokoyama should butt in, looking tired and rushed.

“How long will it take a taxi to arrive if I ask reception to get one for me?” he asked, repeatedly looking at his watch and tapping his foot.

“I don’t know. I’m not a taxi driver. I’ll give you a lift if you’re heading any way along the Tomei Expressway,” I told him, not liking it when he was nervous. Other nervous people always made me nervous too.

“Kinuta Park for an outdoors drama shoot, last episode,” he said.

I nodded wisely in understanding and sympathy. Yoko was doing a romantic drama, and the last episodes of romantic dramas usually involved a dramatic chase in the park, a tearful confession and everyone living happily ever after. Why did the dramas and movies always end with the happily ever after? All the interesting stuff happens after the couple gets together, right? Sometimes, I didn’t understand TV dramas. I don’t think Yoko did either but he did because he wanted enough money so that his brothers could go to good schools and good universities, and so that his mother had a nice house and wouldn’t have to work so hard anymore. He had a good reason for wanting money. Not like Nino, and maybe mama. Nino and mama didn’t seem to have a reason for being as stingy as they were. Maybe I should ask them one day. I nodded to Yoko again when we got out of the lift, saying, “I’m going to Setagaya. I’ll drop you.”

“Going to Zenyomitsu-ji again for divine blessings?” he teased, raising both eyebrows up and down like see-saws.

“The Tokyo City Metropolitan Opera House,” I answered, feeling very smart for pronouncing every syllable without stumbling and because it sounded very intelligent to say that I was going to the opera even if I wasn’t watching it.

“Skirt chasing today, Kappe? In hot pursuit of your conductor, eh?” He jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow when I pressed the button for the ‘peep-poop-peep-poop’ sound to unlock the car doors.

“Yoko-chan, the joke’s wearing old,” I laughed anyway because he liked teasing friends. “Sitting at a table and having coffee is not chasing after skirts hotly. I don’t think I want to chase a hot skirt. What good is a hot skirt? Food’s pretty good if it’s hot, but not skirts.”

“Taking it slow with her, ne?” Yoko said in a very knowledgeable way. “She’s got some problems especially if she lets you fish her out the river. Don’t you worry about what’s in here?” Yoko tapped his temple. “She could be…” He suddenly stopped speaking and started drawing circles in the air above his temple. “Any woman who lets you get close to her on anything more than a friendly-like manner has some serious mental health issues.”

“She is crazy. She breathes fire when she screams at her orchestra, but she respects the music and the people that make it for her. She is dead serious about everything but squees in delight like a little girl when she sees Doraemon plushies. Those are clear signs she’s very, very 100% crazy. Grown-up women don’t squee over Doraemon plushies, do they?” I half agreed with him, but I was getting tired of him insisting that there’s something between the mermaid ohime-sama and me, because I didn’t think there was anything there.

“My mother can sing the Doraemon theme song, and she’s the finest figure of a woman I know,” Yoko announced with pride. “You know what it means about your mermaid conductor? She’s got a pure spirit to find happiness in things like plush toys. Let me help spell it out for you – it means she has something unspoiled in her, something uncomplicated, which is far more than I can say about the yuki-onna. Stick to mortal women, and never look back at the yokai.”

“What can I tell you to make you believe me that she and me are like you and me. We are not a couple. We have coffee, sometimes dinner and we talk about stuff,” I tried correcting him.

The whole left side of his cheek raised itself as he smirked. “I did not mention anything about you and the mermaid conductor being a couple. Why did you have to bring it up?”

Not knowing if I could say anything to answer that because I really didn’t know why I said what I just did to him, I pouted. “You’re evil today, kind of like Nino. Maybe you’re a yokai too.”

“Who knows, eh? I’m not telling,” he laughed jokingly and I laughed with him because it seems ages since we laughed about together. But he was quickly serious again when I exited the expressway near the south end of Kinuta Park. “In the time I’ve known you, this is the first time you’ve ever thought about anything outside of yourself. Don’t ruin it.”

“Eh? What are you talking about?” I asked him. Where did that weird statement come from? What was he trying to say? Yoko was getting to be almost as weird as the Arashi guys. Maybe there was an epi…epi…and epi-what’s-it of a disease of weirdness passing over people. I don’t know what the word is; I can’t remember the epi-what’s-it word thingy Sho said on News Zero.

Yoko didn’t answer me. He just smirked again and got out of the car. I was surrounded by smirkers and I had no idea what all the smirking meant. It was getting to be a pain, but I wouldn’t let it bother me. Nothing comes from being bothered about something, ne? That’s why I can’t let it bother me, and it wouldn’t bother me once I was at the Opera House and talking about how my day was. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and it wasn’t too hot, and it hadn’t turned too cold yet. There were lots to be happy about.

But the café was closed, and I didn’t know if she would be in. So I asked the cloak room counter obaasan, “Is the mer… is the conductor in practice today?”

“She’s in the small hall, watching the ballet corps rehearsal,” she frowned at me, looking questioningly at me, asking with her eyes what I was in there.

Waving my thanks to her, and signalling that I didn’t need anyone to accompany me, I made my way into hall she indicated. The mermaid ohime-sama met me at the door when I went in and found the place brightly lit. She was seated somewhere in the middle with a score in her lap, a box of cakes in the seat beside her, and she was half-watching the ballet with a quiet smile as bright as the afternoon sun, and her coffee coloured curls bouncier than the springs of a slinky.

Sitting in the seat directly behind her, I leaned forward and said, “You’re happy today.”

“Vraiment? You must have a vivid imagination. I brought macaroons, fancy trying one?” She turned her head to the side and held out the box to me

“What’s a macaroon? And what happened? You look happy,” I asked, taking one of the strange bun-like, cake-like thingies. “This is good!” I smiled into her laughing eyes as I bit into a macaroon.

“Par Dieu!” she cried out, smiling while she dusted the crumbs and cream around the corners of my mouth. “You have execrable manners, Monsieur.”

I liked her when she was smiling like that, so different from the usual thoughtful, slightly sad smiles she always had on when we talked about the things in life. She seldom smiled. People should smile, I believe everyone should smile. The weather could be foul and snowing or raining heavily, but when people smiled, the air would seem softer, the sun would seem gentler, and talk would be less heavy. Seeing her smiling and peeling small pieces of macaroons and slowly eating them like it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted made something in me swell with happiness and made me feel a little breathless.

“What’s the good news? The ballet people stopped calling you names?” I asked. “That’s why you’re here watching them, right?”

“Non! I want to mould the music for the entr’acte according to their movements, to mirror their – how you say – fluidity. Mais, I will tell you the news. Maman et grand-mère have finally decided to bury the hatchet, and are talking again. Maman may be visiting next year. Mon père peut-être would join her. It would be the first time the family from maman’s side would be together,” she announced, finishing her macaroon. “You knew this would happen, n’est-ce pas? You fixed things for this outcome,” she continued, turning around to face the stage and going back to writing things on the score.

“I didn’t do anything! I didn’t even think about long-term consequence. I just thought it would be a good idea. That’s a big problem with me. I sometimes think I need someone to help me think,” I admitted, and then I laughed at myself a bit bitterly because I realised I was really stupider than I thought. But she never made me feel stupid. Instead of telling her that, I laughingly leaned further forward in the seat, slipped my arms around her shoulders in a kind of backwards hug, and leaned down, laying my cheek against hers. It was a backwards hug because she was in a concert hall seat with her back towards me. I don’t know why I did it. It must be one of those impulsive thingies she spoke about. It just felt like it had to be done, and I did it.

She didn’t pull away. She stiffened once, but she relaxed almost immediately. “Alors, Monsieur is made out of impulses, yet they miraculously do not yield disastrous consequences,” she murmured.

“Idiots are lucky,” I answered. I didn’t want to spoil this simple, uncomplicated, comfortable moment. Then she wrenched my arms away, confusing me with her violence. I looked at her but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking up at the stage.

“Attention, s’il vous plait. May I have the company repeat of the steps for the adagio to determine which of the four musical threads I want to highlight for that section,” she got up and spoke to the dancers on stage.

I don’t know why she did that. She didn’t say anything when I asked her later before I went to the TV station, but she brushed it aside saying that she had to work and I was being a clingy child. It could be that it was another one of her weird habit thingies. I think that was it – a weird habit thingy.

NOTES

Zenyomitsu-ji is a Buddhist temple in Setagaya ward in Tokyo.

Non = no
Mais = but
Maman et grand-mère = mummy and grandmother
Mon père peut-être = my father perhaps