Side Story for the 200th Chapter (3): If the Goal Had Been Idols, Not a Band
When an original work takes off, related spin-offs come flooding in.
It is a law of nature. If the original belongs to the extraordinary, a slice-of-life school story appears. If the mood is grim, a super-deformed series in the exact opposite register—light as air—tends to follow. And in an age when mobile games are everywhere, there are gacha titles, and collaborations with other games besides.
The maximization of intellectual property. So-called IP.
A multimedia push on every front gives fans a wider spread of things to look at, and at the same time answers the hungers and wishes the main story alone could never satisfy.
Still not enough? Then you simply make the fan work you want to see.
The Band Show was no exception. An anime, drama CDs, and a prequel manga by another author, reviewed by the original creator. Among them was an IF short that hit hard enough for people to seriously consider giving it a proper serialization.
Idols.
Every band member from the original, recast as an idol.
Shin Tae-il was dead, so he never saw it. And yet, in the world he left behind when he was reborn, such a work—so they say—existed.
“No way.”
Tae-il was aghast.
Shibuya Scramble Crossing, where every billboard in the world seemed to be watching at once. Tenma Izumi’s face from BARD filled the screens there—not the easygoing, rocker look he remembered from the original, but a girl in a fluttering dress, dancing with a bright, bouncing smile.
His mouth would not close.
Anyone could see it. She was an idol, through and through. Not the girl-crush type so fashionable in Korea, but a cute, innocent, pure-hearted idol girl.
Tenma Izumi.
That same Izumi, famous for a face that never softened, was smiling wide and speaking straight into the camera.
Yahoo! It’s your little cutie, Izumi! December 24th! Christmas Eve! I’m coming to meet everyone at Nissan Stadium! If you don’t show up, that’s a no-no, okay? Promise?
She blew a finger kiss.
“Waaaaah! Izumi-kyun! Izumi-kyun!”
“You bastard! How dare you aim something so vulgar at the sacred Lady Izumi…!”
“She is the idol among idols!”
Out on the street, fans who had been killing time with wotagei while they waited for Izumi’s concert promo roared their approval.
“The Izumi I knew… what happened to her?”
Faced with an Izumi beyond anything he could imagine, Tae-il simply fainted on his feet.
“Shin-chan!? Shin-chan!? Wake up, Shin-chaaaan!”
The shout of his childhood friend, Ayane, felt farther away by the second.
In a consciousness that kept receding, Tae-il asked himself a question.
Where did it all go wrong…?
It began like this. The story turns back to the year the school band called BARD collapsed in miserable fashion, and then came together again.
“Haa.”
Even the busking she had prepared with such ambition, out in the park, ended in failure.
Unbelievable. Not a single person in the audience.
Izumi, who had a fair amount of confidence in her vocals, was genuinely shaken. Somehow she had felt that this time, with these members, she could do it. She had wanted it just that badly.
But she failed.
The members swallowed their disappointment, promised a next time, and went their separate ways. Izumi, too hollowed out to leave the park, wandered the edges of it and finally sat on a bench and cracked a beer.
That was when it happened.
“Noona, what are you doing over there?”
“…Me?”
Beneath a streetlamp whose light was already failing, a boy who had not even lost his baby fat was staring at Izumi in puzzlement.
Izumi took stock of herself. She did look a little ridiculous. A denim jacket slid halfway off her shoulders, and a face flushed scarlet from the drink.
“Heh heh.”
Izumi covered her face and laughed as if she might sob.
The boy hesitated, reading the air.
“Haa.”
Quietly, he came over and sat on the bench beside her.
“Any beer left?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I have some?”
“Yeah… wait, what?”
Hold on. Wasn’t this kid a minor?
Izumi’s head snapped up a moment too late.
Pssh!
The carbonation hissed, and the boy was already gulping the beer down.
One swallow. The way his throat worked, without a hint of hesitation, looked honestly refreshing. Izumi herself could never have drunk like that.
“Kaaah!”
“H-hey…!”
The moment he emptied a whole can in one go, Izumi started to panic.
The boy moved to reassure her.
“It’s fine. I drink pretty often.”
“Y-you’re a kid…!”
“They say you learn how to drink from your parents. So.”
“I-is that so…?”
“Yes. And beer doesn’t get me drunk no matter how much I drink. Everyone in my family holds their liquor.”
“Really…?”
A heavyweight. And a child so much younger than she was?
Izumi did not even need anything strong. A few cans of beer were enough to leave her pleasantly tipsy and in a good mood. Because of that, absurd as it was, she found herself respecting the boy.
“So.”
He set the empty can down and asked.
“Why’s a pretty noona like you sitting here all alone, drinking like the world’s ended?”
“Th-that’s…”
Was it because he was a child? Or maybe it was just the alcohol.
Izumi sipped her beer and let it all spill out. Her dream, her past, and the history of her failures. Today as well. The faces of the members, disappointed by another show no one had come to see, wavered in front of her eyes.
“I wanted to be a songstress…”
“A songstress?”
“Yeah. Like Seiko.”
Someone everyone looked up to. The lover of millions, and their little sister. A princess who sang. The idol of idols. The farthest peak a woman singer in Japan could reach.
“I saw her when I was little, and I fell for her at a glance.”
Human memory is hopelessly incomplete and abstract. Even the five senses are misjudged by the brain and thrown off; how much worse, then, is memory? Nostalgia is beautified as a matter of course.
Even so.
Izumi remembered with perfect clarity that season, that moment, when the seed of a dream was planted in her chest.
Everyone gazed up at the songstress on the stage. Izumi did too. She had wished that someone—maybe every person in the world—would look up at her the way they looked up at that songstress.
She had talent. She had confidence. And even with both, she had failed.
“So.”
The boy sat cross-legged and asked.
“You want to be an idol?”
“An idol…?”
“Ah, not a Japanese idol.”
In the dictionary sense, an idol in Japan had already changed far too much from what it used to be. The idea of an idol that existed in the bubble years had, over the eras, stopped meaning an artist outstanding in every respect, and curdled into something ridiculous and lovable that you could not help but cheer for.
But.
Idols of that older kind still existed.
“Korean idols.”
“K-pop…?”
“Yeah. ‘K-pop idol’ might be the more familiar phrase.”
The boy fished a smartphone out of his pocket and played a video on iTube. A fancam, shot by fans who had seen the show in person, of a Korean idol stage.
“Whoa.”
Izumi’s eyes went wide.
Vocal ability? The language made it hard to be sure, but it was good enough that she found herself nodding.
Still… I sing better than they do.
Then why did a stage by people beneath her send a thrill straight through her?
It was not only the singing. The looks. The dancing. The stage direction. And the fans. Every element worthy of a true idol had gathered into one, and it was giving her chills.
“A stage like that…”
She had seen one exactly twice in her life. It felt like Japan’s national band, its eternal band, R’z, fused with SEKAI NO OWARI, who had risen by climbing over every hardship in their way.
She was overwhelmed. By people who did not even sing better than she did.
When she came back to herself, Izumi had taken the phone from the boy and was staring a hole through the video.
The next one. And the one after that.
The boy quietly opened another beer and waited.
Thirty minutes passed.
Izumi handed the phone back.
“Thanks.”
“I’m not sure how far you watched, but those guys are the top even in Korea.”
“The top?”
“Idols at the very peak. Almost no one in Korea can follow them.”
Right now they were out on tour through Western markets, America among them. Izumi was startled.
“K-pop… actually works overseas?”
“Well, unlike Japan, which aims for individuality and local character built up from the indie scene, Korea is locked hard onto EDM and pop.”
It had no choice but to be popular. If it was not popular, even an idol could not survive in a market as small as Korea. The rise of K-pop was the rightful reward given to an idol industry that had thrashed to the very end just to stay alive inside a competition heated past the point of sense.
“The opposite of the Japanese market, right?”
Japan, say what you like, had built an enormous market that could feed itself on music alone. It did not need to break into America. The world did not need to raise a clamor and listen to J-pop. Look at the nation’s standing. The best in Japan was not so different from the best in the world. Sales proved it. Their cultural spirit, broken against the challenge of the wider world, had at some point stopped developing and turned its face inward. It had stagnated. The struggles of the few who tried to push a stalled industry forward had yet to show any effect. Perhaps they never would.
And so.
“I’m going to try again.”
Whether she would be a band, a singer-songwriter, or an idol, she did not know. But she understood this much. It was still too early to give up.
When Izumi nodded, her face set with resolve, the boy clapped.
“Congratulations.”
“Yeah.”
“And this is for the drinks I had.”
“Huh?”
The boy held out a two-thousand-yen bill.
Izumi, thrown by the appearance of a note that rare, dug through the convenience-store bag. Every can of beer inside it was completely empty.
“Y-you drank all of them…?”
The boy grinned.
“Peace.”
It must have been a fair amount for a little kid. His face had not flushed in the slightest.
Flustered, Izumi pressed the bill back into his hand.
“E-even so, I can’t take this.”
“Why not?”
“Th-that’s…”
Izumi did not know how to answer.
The boy stared at the bill in his hand, then closed her fingers around it again.
“Then let’s do it like this.”
“Like what?”
“Become famous. And if you fail, give it back to me then.”
“If I fail…?”
“If you succeed, you won’t even be able to meet me anymore.”
“That’s too…”
“But if you fail? You’ll be drifting around neighborhood live houses and parks like this, same as an indie band or an underground idol.”
Easy to run into, in other words.
“Why…?”
“If you succeed, that two thousand yen stops being just two thousand yen.”
He did not spell it out, but if she succeeded, something worth more than that would come back to him. So she would not have to repay it. It felt a little like a scam, and something about it was off, but the logic was surprisingly sound.
“Honestly, even if you fail, I don’t really want it back…”
Conscience pricking him, the boy glanced at the corpses of the empty cans and scratched the back of his head.
“Well, if I don’t do it this way, I don’t think you’ll take it!”
“What kind of reason is that…”
Izumi let out a small laugh and stared at the bill in her hand.
A two-thousand-yen note. Rare, certainly. And a good thing to make a memory out of.
“All right.”
Izumi tucked the bill against her chest.
“I’ll take it. That challenge.”
“Calling it a challenge is a bit much…”
Under Izumi’s passionate gaze, the boy scratched his cheek.
“Well, still. If you happen to succeed later…”
“If I succeed?”
“Send me a ticket sometime.”
The boy smiled, soft and a little shy.
“I want to see what a successful noona looks like. With my own two eyes.”
“…Yeah. I will.”
Time rewound to the present.
“Ah.”
“Shin-chan?”
What was bound to happen, happened.
Tae-il dropped to his knees on the pavement and covered his face with both hands.
It was me… it was my fault…!
He had never dreamed, not even in a dream, that he had misbuttoned the very first button.
The culprit was me…!
Ayane barely managed to drag the half-unhinged, despairing Tae-il all the way home.
When they arrived, Yoo Ha-na greeted him brightly.
“Oh! Son, did you order something? A package came.”
“A package?”
“Yeah. It said, ‘To the Two-Thousand-Yen Boy’?”
Tae-il said nothing.
He bolted up the stairs and tore open the parcel waiting in his room.
There were tickets. Three of them.
Instinct told him they were concert tickets, and that she had sent enough for the family as well.
A letter had been enclosed.
You remember our promise, right?
— Izumi —
“Haha.”
Tae-il laughed, hollow.
“They really do say some people are just born to make it…”
Tenma Izumi. She was someone who could succeed at anything she touched.
The next day.
“Ayane, you interested in a concert, by any chance?”
“A concert?”
“Yeah.”
On the early walk to school—early out of consideration for Ayane, who sat on the public morals committee—Tae-il asked carefully. Things with his father were awkward as it was, and both his parents would be away on business during the concert anyway, so the timing did not work. In the end, the remaining two tickets had to be used with someone else. And the only person Tae-il could share a ticket this precious with was, of course, his childhood friend Ayane.
“Whose concert?”
“Izumi.”
“Izumi? You mean that Tenma Izumi?”
“Yeah.”
“I wanna go! I wanna go! Ayane is absolutely going!”
The instant she realized they were Izumi concert tickets, Ayane’s eyes lit with fervor.
“Uh, uhhh…”
The reaction was stronger than he had expected. Inwardly startled, Tae-il looked at her with a stiff, reluctant face.
Then again, if I think about the original, is it even that strange?
In the original, too, Ayane had revered Izumi—not to the point of Iris’s blind fanaticism, but considerably. Remembering how the two of them would be at each other’s throats and then suddenly of one mind the moment BARD came up, Tae-il nodded as if he understood.
“Shin-chan! How on earth did you get Izumi concert tickets? Ayane is dying to know!”
“Uh…”
Pressed, Tae-il chose his words for a moment. Instinct warned him. Do not, even on pain of death, answer that he was the one who sent them.
“Someone I got close to at a live house said there was no way they could make it that day, and gave them to me.”
“Wow! What a good person! If you sold these, scalpers would charge a fortune!”
“Y-yeah, I guess…?”
Izumi was a good person. That much was true.
“But Ayane, you liked Izumi?”
“Yeah! I love her!”
She was his childhood friend, and he had not known at all. Tae-il headed for school thinking something along the lines of Is this the original’s power of contrivance?, tossing in the occasional agreement while Ayane chattered out a stream of Izumi facts.
Which was why he did not notice.
“Hmm.”
That someone behind them had been listening in on the whole conversation.
Idols.
In anime and the rest of the subculture industry, they are portrayed as sublime idols, beloved by all the world. Reality is different. The popularity of Japanese idols falls further with every passing day. Even the named local idols are no exception. The struggle grows fiercer along with it. The wars for popularity fought under the surface are enough to make your brow crease from the stories alone.
Into the middle of that, a foreign invader arrived.
K-pop. Cultural pioneers more polished than anyone, leading the trends of the young. The position of the Japanese idol market, which everyone had believed would stand firm for a lifetime, began to shake.
That was when a savior appeared, like a comet.
Tenma Izumi. She revived the feel of a classic idol, in the manner of Seiko—practically the etymology of the word itself—and then proved with skill that she was an artist on top of it.
Lovely. As befit an idol who called herself a singer-songwriter, she sang well, too. As befit an idol, she could dance. And the way she grew shy when the choreography turned sexy, or thick with aegyo, was secretly cute. You could not touch her. And yet she appeared close enough to take your hand, as if you might. You wanted to worship her.
Iris’s thoughts tilted that way with perfect naturalness.
“For to lose one’s faith is to mean death…!”
Izumi’s fan club. As a single-digit honorary member of the Tenma Divine Cult, she proselytized harder than anyone. Hard enough that even the manager who ran the fan club, and Izumi’s own agency, acknowledged her efforts. Izumi knew. She was clearly aware of Iris as an individual fan. That alone sent motivation surging up in her, and she could evangelize with a faith deeper than anyone’s.
For example.
To a childhood friend around whom she had no reason to hold back.
“I told you, I’m not interested in idols…?”
Rena looked thoroughly sick of it.
“Don’t be like that, okay? Rena-chan! Once you fall for Izumi’s songs, you’ll love her too, I just know it!”
“The premise is already wrong. You’re saying I have to fall for her first?”
“Falling for her is inevitable. That’s Izumi’s charm!”
“I swear…”
Rena sighed.
“Damn Izumi ghost…”
What was so special about that idol that her childhood friend had fallen this far? Watching the person she looked up to come apart, Rena grieved from the bottom of her heart.
“Just once! Exactly once…!”
“You think they’re going to hand you concert tickets for pulling this?”
“Koff!”
Iris coughed blood.
The concert. Izumi had thrown down the gauntlet at Nissan Stadium, the first solo woman singer ever to do it. A green mid-career rookie, not even five years from her debut, and her arrogant challenge had the entertainment world in an uproar. She had to fill seventy thousand seats. The concert ran both days, so one hundred and fifty thousand in all. It was not her agency’s anniversary show. She was not an idol group. She was not even one of the giants people called a national band. A solo idol, no different from a singer-songwriter. On the strength of her ticket power alone.
A historic challenge. The industry, of course, and most of the press and the online communities, predicted Izumi’s failure and mocked her for it.
Their prediction missed in spectacular fashion.
“Why is it a complete sellouuut!”
“So you hate that?”
“No! I’m glad, I am! As a fan, nothing could make me happier than a total sellout…!”
Then why was she not in that crowd? Iris resented the complacent choice she had made that day.
“It is impressive, I’ll give you that. You were so sure it wouldn’t sell out, and then you failed.”
“No. There are still door tickets left…”
“I heard hundreds of people have been camped out in tents since a week ago.”
“Gyaaaah!”
Rena held up her phone and showed her the entertainment news in real time. The press was making a noisy fuss about an unseasonal summer rock festival.
Iris wailed.
“Why did Heaven give birth to me, and then also give birth to ten million followers of the Tenma Divine Cult!”
“Are you insane. The Izumi fan club has ten million members…?”
“No. I just said it.”
“Insane.”
In under ten seconds, Rena had deployed two different varieties of insane.
“Anyway, it’s fine!”
“What is?”
“There’s a kid who has tickets! A classmate!”
“You gonna shake them down like some delinquent?”
“As if!”
Iris shot to her feet in the art room and jabbed a thumb at the ceiling.
“If I’m going to hit them, I’ll hit them with money, so don’t worry!”
“Insane.”
Faced with Iris’s absurd ideas and her ability to act on them, Rena’s vocabulary was beginning to degrade.
“No, that’s not it. What are you going to do if money doesn’t buy them?”
“M-maybe tempt them with my body…?”
“Do you actually want to die?! How many times have I told you a girl can’t go throwing her body around…!”
“S-sorry! It was a joke! A joke!”
“Really?”
“J-just half of it…?”
“Today one of us is dying, you crazy bitch!”
“Kyaa! Calm down, Rena-chan! It’s nice that you treasure me, but Izumi-chan’s concert is a more serious matter than that!”
“What in the world could matter more than you!”
“Ah! That line just now was a liiittle bit moving, maybe…?”
“Drop dead!”
“Kyaa! It hurts! It hurts! It really hurts, so stop hitting me, Rena-chan! Ow!”
A broken machine only listens when you hit it. Rena put the technique she had learned from her father to full use and beat Iris until her anger cooled.
“I-in that spirit…!”
Rena said nothing.
“Hand over the ticket! O-ow…”
The places Rena had hit still stung, so after mustering a properly imposing shout she shrank right back down.
Tae-il carefully raised a hand.
“Um…”
“W-what! You’re a believer of the Tenma Divine Cult too?! You’re saying you won’t sell the ticket for money!?”
“That’s not—”
“Khh! It burns me up, but even my body… that’s no good, is it?”
Iris folded her arms, awkward about it, as if to emphasize her chest. Tae-il turned his head at once.
“No, what I’m saying is—”
“E-even this isn’t enough!? A special taste!? Should I have brought Rena-chan!?”
“Would you just listen to people for once!”
“Kyaa!”
Iris clapped both hands over her ears and curled in on herself.
Tae-il sighed. Iris peeked up at him.
“Huh?”
There was a ticket in front of her.
On instinct, Iris snatched it and hid it against her chest. Even thinking about it again, it was a thoroughly petty thing to do.
“I-I’m no take-backs, okay? This is mine. I’m really persistent, you know? I’m not just talking!”
“I know. So take it.”
“R-really? It’s okay? It must have been incredibly expensive.”
“So what. There’s one left over anyway.”
“Left… over?”
Tae-il scratched his head and said that was right, and all at once everything felt hollow to Iris.
“I couldn’t even get a single one…”
“For the record, that ticket works for VIP standing both days, so…”
“I love you! Want me to kiss you!?”
Tae-il covered his mouth and, perfectly serious, dropped his gaze. A kiss from none other than Arisugawa Iris made even him hesitate, a little tempted. If he stayed here any longer he was going to get strange, so he turned his back in a hurry.
“Anyway, that was all I needed, right? I’m going.”
“W-wait…!”
When he tried to leave, Iris stopped him.
“What?”
Three tickets. VIP tickets, at that. An ordinary high school boy could not get those just by deciding to buy them. Iris wanted to know who Tae-il really was.
Could it be…!
Member Zero, of whom the fan club had nothing but rumors. The legendary fan-club member who had made the present Izumi possible. This boy in front of her?
An absurd assumption. More precisely, the probability was only very low. It was not an impossible assumption.
And.
Izumi-chan said you must never dismiss even a vanishingly thin possibility.
Wasn’t there a saying that what if was what got people killed?
“If you’ve got nothing to say, I’m just leaving.”
“Wait!”
Iris caught the hand of Tae-il, who had been about to turn away. She swallowed, dry.
“By any chance, are you Izumi-chan’s…”
Fan club number zero. Put another way, the spiritual producer who had made the present Izumi possible. Which was to say—the boy in front of her might be the only miracle to come near Iris, who had nurtured a dream she could not reach.
She, too, had grown a dream while gazing at her idol. Singing alone was not enough. To become like her idol, she had to study the stage, study composition, study acting, and study dance besides. She could not call herself perfect. But she had a little confidence. That she might be able to do it. What she needed was certainty. A living, breathing signpost that would believe in her and lead her forward.
“No.”
Iris drew a deep breath, then looked at Tae-il with a resolute face.
Tae-il was flustered too.
Iris…
The serious look she was giving him was exactly like the one she wore when she was trying to lure Ayane into the band. She had steeled herself. And she was holding on to the hope that the situation he had secretly been expecting might actually unfold.
“Tae-il, by any chance…”
“What…?”
With a crash of breaking glass, the dream of a band shattered.