The evening after the audition.
Despite the fact that his final exams were the day after tomorrow, Kaoru still came after receiving a summons from Kinidaichi Toshiro, the director and troupe head of the Rararai Theater Troupe.
"Thank you for responding to my message."
"Not at all. I’m Kamiki Hikaru’s older brother, Kamiki Kaoru. It’s a pleasure to meet you."
"Likewise. I heard from Hikaru, and from Producer Matsushige Sojiro as well. You passed the audition, I hear?"
Kinidaichi Toshiro gestured toward a chair, inviting the politely bowing Kaoru to sit.
In his office, he absentmindedly dipped the only hospitality item he had on hand, a barley tea bag, in and out of a paper cup filled with hot water.
Kaoru was surprised that a stern-looking man in his early forties was the troupe’s leader, but he clicked his tongue as he watched the equally unpolished way he welcomed guests.
"It’s late, so thanks for coming all this way."
"Not at all."
"So... when are they planning to start filming?"
"I heard they’ll begin principal photography next Friday."
"Hrrp. Kaoru-kun, what’s your schedule?"
"They said it’ll probably be sometime in early or mid-July."
"Hah. If it’s later than that, they can move it later, but there’s no way it’ll start exactly then."
After taking a sip of barley tea and sniffing once, Toshiro’s blunt, matter-of-fact way of speaking made Kaoru feel that, despite his stern face, the man’s character probably wasn’t all that bad.
"That’s just how this world is. To a chick that’s only just hatched, everything looks interesting. It doesn’t even know there’s a cat right next to it."
"...Thank you."
"Anyway, enough of that. You sent in an application through the troupe’s email, right? I asked Hikaru, and he said you’d never really studied acting or shown much interest in it. Is that true?"
"Yes."
"Then why did you suddenly decide to audition for a drama? Did something change?"
"Yes."
"...Hmm. Is that so?"
"To be honest, it’s nothing complicated. I just wanted to try it. I suddenly felt like I wanted to do it."
"Really?"
Toshiro nodded indifferently and drank his barley tea.
But his eyes were fixed on Kaoru with clear interest.
After all, he was a veteran director who had been with the Rararai Theater Troupe since its founding.
He had an exceptional eye for judging not only an actor’s talent, but also their potential and whether they had the ability to blend into the troupe in the future.
Under the troupe’s motto of taking only the best and leading them forward, people complained endlessly that a small mid-tier theater company like theirs could never have enough members, but to Toshiro, that was an unyielding rule.
That was why he had become interested in the boy in front of him.
In the twin brother of Kamiki Hikaru, who looked exactly like the troupe’s next ace but had a personality that was completely, utterly different.
"Normally, if you want to join as a troupe actor, you have to go through an audition and a detailed interview. But since you’re Hikaru’s older brother, we’ve simplified the process for you. And since the producer put in a word too, I’m not going to blow the whistle and make a fuss about it."
"...Is that so?"
"Show me. Let’s see your acting."
"Here?"
"Where else? On the stage over there? Everyone’s busy rehearsing."
"There’s nothing here to use."
"You’ve got a script right here."
Toshiro tapped his own head with his index finger.
Kaoru blinked blankly, then let out an involuntary laugh.
"I wasn’t planning to say something so old-man-ish, but even if this place were hellfire or the summit of Mount Fuji, an actor has to be able to throw themselves away completely on the spot. That’s where acting begins. Once you’re tied down to the stage and buried in familiar habits, you’re finished as an actor forever. You’re just running laps on the same field."
"...Understood."
"If you understand, then do it."
After sniffing once, Toshiro folded his arms and told him to go ahead.
Kaoru looked at the table for a moment, then suddenly spotted a pair of scissors lying near Toshiro.
Scissors right next to the barley tea he had carelessly brewed for his guest.
He hadn’t even cleared the table before receiving company.
Kaoru suddenly found the middle-aged man in front of him irritating.
"Do you know something?"
"Know what."
"I’m actually an assassin."
"...I see."
"It’s not exactly something I like talking about, so I hesitated, but yes. My first mission was in Berlin. Unofficially. The place where I carried out my official assignment was Zurich."
"..."
As if he were really there, Kaoru’s natural gaze and expression were so convincing that Toshiro, with a director’s sharp eye, watched every detail without missing a thing.
Kaoru picked up the scissors, slipped his fingers through them, and continued his story.
"He was a former senior official from an intelligence agency who had defected to the United States. He sold accounting data on investment in a U.S.-government-owned paper company to an official of an enemy state for 42 million dollars. Under their own witness protection program, he was living the high life on a yacht in neutral Switzerland, a traitor. My mission was to eliminate him."
"..."
"He traveled with about five or six bodyguards, which made the job extremely awkward. If I used a .22, the lethality would be too low, and even if I fitted a suppressor to a 9mm pistol, the sound would still be too loud, making it hard to pass the killing off as a secret assassination or the work of another operative. So I used this."
Kaoru gave the scissors in his hand a light shake, as if he were waving a snack at Toshiro.
"How do you think I did it?"
"...Let me guess. You cut him with the blades?"
"Haha. Paper’s easy enough. But you know this wouldn’t be enough, right, Director?"
"..."
Kaoru’s performance was too composed.
No, to call it a performance was almost wrong. His expression, tone, and gestures contained not a trace of falsehood, as if he had truly lived through such an experience.
Kaoru’s acting no longer felt like the acting of a twelve-year-old middle schooler. It was almost enough to make one feel as if a retired assassin were recounting an actual memory.
"I went to the audition, and apparently one of the candidates for my role said he was going to demonstrate throwing techniques there. There was some odd wooden board sitting in a corner, or so I heard."
"...And?"
"I didn’t show it at the audition, but I’ll show you something special, Director. I’ll show you the method I used to take out my target."
Kaoru let the corner of his mouth lift in a brief smile, then rose from the chair.
Toshiro stared blankly as Kaoru stood.
Holding the scissors upside down in his right hand, Kaoru swung his arm in a flash toward the wooden shelf beside Toshiro’s desk, where various documents were stacked.
"!?"
Thwack!
The sharp impact rang out violently through the office, striking the eardrums.
The scissors Kaoru had thrown were driven precisely into the wooden shelf, half-buried and fixed in place.
Toshiro stared at the unbelievable sight with his mouth hanging open for a moment, then—
"...Hic."
He clapped a hand over his mouth when an involuntary hiccup escaped him, then looked back at Kaoru.
Kaoru was still standing there without moving. With an emotionless face, he met Toshiro’s eyes and said,
"Is this enough?"
"..."
"I’m done."
"...Huh?"
"The acting. It’s over."
Rattle—
As if nothing had happened, Kaoru returned to his usual indifferent expression, glanced back once, pulled the displaced chair over, and sat down again.
With the atmosphere changing so abruptly, Toshiro blinked as he struggled to process what had just happened, then finally managed to gather his thoughts.
"Ah. Right. That was acting. Hoo—"
He muttered under his breath and gulped down the cold barley tea as if forcing it down his throat.
Kaoru didn’t miss the slight tremor in Toshiro’s right hand.
After drinking the barley tea, Toshiro took a while to collect himself. Then he scratched the bridge of his nose, sniffed once, and said,
"You... did you practice that at home?"
"No."
"No?"
"Yes."
"Was the acting based on a scene from some movie? Right? No, wait, at home, you know, like. What do you call it. Th-"
"Throwing techniques?"
"Yeah, throwing techniques. You practice those too? Hikaru never said anything like that."
"I saw it on the internet. It was my first time actually trying it, but if you use your center of gravity, it isn’t that difficult. If you learn it, you’d probably pick it up quickly too, Director."
"...Damn it. This is why— even if the internet has developed, it’s not good for kids. Things they don’t need to learn, things they don’t need to know."
The stern look on his face gone without a trace, Toshiro looked pained at the reality that the young people who would one day carry Japan’s future were learning such bizarre things from the internet.
The middle-aged man seemed deeply shocked by the horrors of the internet.
After another brief silence, Toshiro finally seemed to regain his composure and looked at Kaoru with his usual stern expression.
"Can you come back here tomorrow evening? You’ll need to sign the troupe register yourself. You don’t have a seal, after all."
"Yes. Ah... yes."
"Good. Then I’ll see you tomorrow. Earlier than today, though. Let’s say... much earlier. Here’s my business card, so contact me after school. And say hello to Hikaru for me."
"Yes."
"And don’t do that throwing-technique thing anymore. Understood? It’s dangerous, delinquent, and excessive. A real three-tier lunchbox set."
"Yes."
Kaoru stood and bowed politely before preparing to leave.
Toshiro got up from his chair and walked over to the desk to inspect the wooden shelf with the scissors embedded in it.
"Huh. Well, damn."
It didn’t look like Kaoru had put that much force into it, but the scissor blades had sunk halfway in and punched through the outside of the shelf.
Only after gripping the handle and shaking it a few times did the blades finally come free.
Toshiro brushed off the wood shavings clinging to the blades, put the scissors back into the pen holder, and let out a quiet sigh as he thought of the boy who had already disappeared without a sound.
"He’s a monster. In more ways than one."
-
Kaoru waited for the train.
It was almost eight o’clock, and no one in his family had contacted him.
As for his parents, he knew they were effectively separated. Hikaru... if he weren’t his brother but some stranger, Kaoru would have installed a tracker and a bug on him long ago and monitored his every move.
From the start, he hadn’t expected any contact.
Thinking he’d just buy a lunch box from a convenience store and eat it, he boarded the arriving train and headed home.
He had never visited Tokyo, Japan in his previous life, but he had heard enough about it.
One of those things was the infamous hell that was the Tokyo train system.
So crowded and with so many lines that once you stepped into it, anyone could become lost.
As for him, he could memorize the whole map at a glance and ride without trouble, but there was nothing he could do about the fact that the trains were packed like bean sprouts.
"..."
Twelve years old, and once July 27 arrived next month, he would be thirteen.
For a growing boy far shorter than an adult, it wasn’t easy to hold onto a subway strap and endure being squeezed among grown-ups.
Kaoru wanted time to pass quickly so he could grow taller.
- This station is...
Three stops left.
Kaoru let out a tired sigh and rubbed his temple.
Lately, he had been so busy that, thankfully, the frequency of headaches from memory overlap or symptoms like identity splitting had noticeably decreased.
Rather, by acting and steadily observing and immersing himself in his own self, much of the stress from it had faded away.
What he had done when Toshiro ordered him to improvise just now was proof of that: he had pulled a few elements from his past-life memories, built a setting on the spot, and performed it.
If he hadn’t started acting, then merely recalling his past-life memories would have been too much of a burden, and he would likely have run away again.
"Haa."
If only he could hold on just like this. If only he could keep going at exactly this level.
Opening his eyes and looking at his reflection in the window, Kaoru soon felt the train’s momentum slow to a stop and glanced around.
Screech—
Hiss—
Rattle—
The train stopped, the doors opened, and a flood of people got off and on.
A river of bodies. In the middle of it all, he stood there blankly.
Thud—
A girl wearing a hat a little smaller than Kaoru’s height was shoved by the crowd, then bumped into him slightly hard at the very end as she got off the train.
"Ah."
Before he even had time to feel the impact, Kaoru’s eyes caught a hairpin slipping from the pocket of the girl’s hoodie.
Apparently not even realizing she had dropped anything, the girl stepped off the train and disappeared.
The boy quickly picked up the rabbit-shaped hairpin she had dropped.
"Hey!"
Drrrriiiing—
His shout was drowned out by the announcement that the doors would soon close.
It was something that had to be returned to its owner.
Kaoru had no choice but to take a gamble before the doors shut.
He muttered a small curse and darted out of the train with quick, agile movements.
Tap-tap-tap!
The girl, still unaware of anything, walked along looking at her phone.
Kaoru sprinted the short distance between the train and the girl, then grabbed her left arm and pulled her back.
"!?"
Startled by someone suddenly seizing her arm, the girl was forced to turn around, her eyes widening.
Kaoru met the girl’s gaze, then immediately placed the rabbit hairpin in her left hand and said,
"You dropped this!"
Drrrriiiing—
The train was on the verge of closing its doors.
In that brief encounter, no longer than a blink, Kaoru left only those words behind and darted back into the train.
Fortunately, he made it inside just before the doors closed.
The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds. Kaoru panted heavily, then sat down on a seat that had finally opened up a little and caught his breath.
"Damn it. I want to move."
At last, as if fed up with a daily life that would not leave him alone, Kaoru let out a very twelve-year-old complaint.
-
"..."
The mysterious boy who had left the hairpin in her left hand and disappeared.
The girl, with her radiant purple hair and eyes that shimmered with a glossy brilliance, looked down at the rabbit hairpin in her left hand.
"I didn’t even get to say thank you."
It had all happened so quickly that she couldn’t even properly remember his face, but his voice remained vivid in her ears and etched itself into her memory.
The girl removed the hat she had been wearing, neatly fixed her bangs, and pinned the precious hairpin back in place after it had finally been reunited with its owner.
Of course, she put her hat back on, but now that it would no longer be separated from the hairpin, she felt a little more secure inside.
"Mm... I feel better now."
The girl smiled, then hummed a tune as she walked toward her destination.
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