My Hero, My Legend
Her stage name was Aimyu. Her real name was Suzui Ai.
The first time she ever heard the name Han Jiyoung was five years ago, when she was a fifteen-year-old high school freshman.
Back then, a K-pop craze had swept across the Japanese archipelago. Ai herself was just another ordinary high school girl, sensitive to every new trend.
It was the YouTube algorithm that first delivered Han Jiyoung’s voice to her ears.
What song is this……?
Until that moment, every piece of Korean music Ai had ever heard had been an idol track. The information she dug up after typing into the search bar only shocked her further.
This girl is the same age as me.
The fact that a girl her own age, living in a country called Korea across the sea, was creating music of such depth set Ai’s heart ablaze. Having learned guitar by watching over her parents’ shoulders since childhood, it was no great leap for her to dream of starting a band. Immersed in Japan’s solid band culture, she naturally picked up instruments and began building her own musical world with Han Jiyoung’s voice as her guiding star. Yet the object of her admiration vanished with almost cruel abruptness.
Did she quit music?
After releasing only a single song, all news of Han Jiyoung cut off as if it had been a lie. Ai scoured Korean sites every day, running everything through a translator, but there was simply no information to be found on an obscure, unknown singer.
Why would she stop? With a voice that beautiful…
Because that song had shaken her life so profoundly, the quiet retirement of a nameless girl left a deep ache of regret in one corner of Ai’s heart.
I won’t give up.
Even if her idol Han Jiyoung had crashed against the walls of reality and broken, even if circumstances had forced her to throw music away—Ai alone swore she would walk this path to the very end.
And now, five years later, under the soft lighting of a traditional Japanese house, Aimyu sat face-to-face with the person she had dreamed of meeting all this time.
She’s beautiful.
Ai stared blankly at the Jiyoung before her. She had followed every moment of the recent reverse-trend that had swept Jiyoung to number one on the Korean charts, and every overwhelming performance on the hot audition program. The woman on screen had already been captivating enough, but the aura of the real Han Jiyoung was on another level entirely—skin so white it almost looked cold, proud eyes, and a strange atmosphere that pulled people in.
She’s so cool in real life!
While Ai was still firing off silent gasps of admiration, Jiyoung opened her mouth.
“Aimyu-ssi?”
“Yes? Ah, yes!”
Ai’s shoulders jerked at the sudden call of her name. Jiyoung lightly clapped her hands together.
“Ah, so you’re that Aimyu! The one who sang Something Like Wanting to Convey Love!”
Before Sakura’s interpretation could even finish, Ai’s face lit up brilliantly. She clasped both hands to her chest in disbelief and leaned her whole upper body forward.
“That’s right! You know who I am?!”
“Of course! I check the Japanese charts every now and then, and you’re always ranking near the top.”
When Jiyoung’s praise reached her through Sakura’s mouth, Aimyu’s expression crumpled with joy so intense she looked ready to cry.
“It’s an honor! A true honor! I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight!”
As Ai excitedly poured out Japanese, Sakura’s head whipped back and forth at high speed.
“Jiyoung-nim, Aimyu-ssi says she’s going to treat today as her second birthday. Just knowing her song is on your playlist makes her feel that becoming a singer was worth it.”
“You don’t have to go that far…”
Jiyoung answered with an embarrassed smile, and Sakura promptly translated the words back into Japanese for Ai. Caught between the two of them, only Sakura was dying.
Every time Jiyoung spoke a sentence, Sakura snapped her head right and spat Japanese like a machine gun; every time Ai answered in a flood of emotion, she snapped her head left and rendered it into Korean. As the conversation between the two musicians deepened into more technical musical talk, Sakura’s eyes began bouncing left and right like a ping-pong ball, and a thin sheen of sweat beaded on her forehead.
Director Kawaguchi watched the rare spectacle with warm satisfaction and emptied his teacup.
“Jiyoung-ssi. Has this gathering I prepared made a good gift?”
Jiyoung nodded from the heart.
“Thank you, Director Kawaguchi. I’ve received a truly wonderful gift.”
“No, I am the one who should thank you.”
Kawaguchi chuckled and turned his gaze toward Aimyu beside him.
“Truth be told, Aimyu-ssi had expressed quite a lot of regret about not being able to take part in this OST herself.”
At those words Aimyu waved both hands frantically in front of her, speaking in a rush.
“That’s not it! Director, that’s a misunderstanding! Of course it would be a lie to say I never felt any ambition as an artist, but right now the anticipation is far bigger than the regret! Just imagining how Jiyoung-nim performed the song for the stage I so desperately wanted to stand on makes my chest swell!”
Sakura gasped for breath as she relayed Aimyu’s sincere feelings. Director Kawaguchi answered with a mischievous smile.
“Haha, is that so? Then you’ll simply have to confirm that curiosity for yourself later, in the theater.”
He gestured toward the lavish spread of dishes on the table.
“Well now, chatter is fine, but don’t you feel sorry for all this carefully prepared food?”
Jiyoung and Aimyu both stopped talking and nodded at the same time. Director Kawaguchi lifted a bottle of sake.
“Please enjoy both the drinks and the food to your hearts’ content.”
How much time had passed?
Before anyone noticed, the room had filled with the incoherent murmuring of thoroughly drunk people. Everyone had accepted the cups the director kept offering, and now they all looked completely wrecked.
Even Sakura, who had been helping me, already had unfocused eyes.
I told her not to drink.
She hadn’t been able to refuse and had downed several cups; this was the result. With the interpreter out of commission, I could no longer understand a single word Aimyu was saying. Then again, Aimyu herself didn’t seem to know what she was saying either.
“Hic—!”
I clamped a hand over my mouth, but it was useless. I wasn’t sober myself. Alcohol after so long made my head buzz and the whole world bob gently up and down. Come to think of it, the first time this body had ever tasted alcohol was that time I ate gukbap with Yoo Sia. In my previous life I had prided myself on holding my liquor fairly well, but this slender frame clearly ran on completely different data.
Still…… this much is fine.
Aimyu in front of me was already about to face-plant onto the table, and the director was humming contentedly to himself. In this complete mess, I seemed to be the only one still sitting upright. Well, a pleasant tipsiness like this wasn’t bad at all.
“Ji~young… hic, Jiyoung…”
With thoroughly mangled pronunciation, Ai called my name and staggered over to sit right beside me. She chattered something in Japanese; I roughly grasped the meaning. She shoved her smartphone right under my nose and pointed at the lens—clearly begging for a photo.
I wordlessly nodded and took her phone.
Click—!
On the screen appeared two women whose cheeks had flushed a soft red from the alcohol. Ai was resting her head on my shoulder with the expression of someone who had just won the entire world. After checking the photo she grinned foolishly and tossed a few more Japanese sentences at me.
Sakura, watching us with half-lidded eyes from the side, slowly opened her mouth toward me.
“Jiyoung-nim… Aimyu-ssi is asking… if she can upload this… to SNS…”
Well, there was no particular reason she couldn’t. I gave a light nod of permission. The instant my reaction landed, Ai thrust both hands into the air like a child and cheered.
“Yatta—!”
Leaving the delighted girl behind, I turned my gaze to the moonlight seeping through the paper sliding doors.
Japan’s main social network was still, without question, Twitter. Even though Instagram had swept the world and many people had migrated, when it came to the real-time spread of information and communication within subculture and music circles, Twitter continued to hold an overwhelming lead.
Ding—!
In the quiet dawn, notification tones rang across countless smartphones throughout Japan. A single photograph had been posted to the official account of Aimyu, the singer-songwriter who maintained a top ranking on the domestic charts and commanded a massive fandom.
The photo showed Aimyu with cheeks flushed a soft red, and a woman nestled against her, wearing a languid smile. Both of their eyes were loose with pleasant drunkenness, and they looked as close as sisters.
The photograph, uploaded with that short Japanese caption, ignited an explosive reaction the moment it went live. Tens of thousands of hearts piled up, and the retweet count climbed at a speed that made people rub their eyes. In less than a few hours, the keywords #Aimyu and #HanJiyoung sat side by side at number one on Japan’s real-time Twitter trends.
The reaction across the archipelago was feverish, and that heat immediately crossed the sea into neighboring South Korea. Korea’s sleepless cyber wreckers were never going to miss such delicious prey. The first to react were the major online communities.
The moment the post went up, the comment section caught fire.
The spark that started on the communities raced across SNS in an instant, and soon the YouTube Shorts wreckers picked it up and ran with it.
Unaware of any of it, Jiyoung sank into a deep, peaceful sleep.