Recording (2)
Humanity is a thinking animal.
The power that let humankind rule the earth is the ability to think, and the method of solving problems born from the wisdom such a species has piled up, generation upon generation, is exceedingly simple.
One: find where the problem is.
One: find what causes it.
One: find how to solve it.
That cycle of thought—drawing a solution, by logic, out of the trouble in front of you—is something only a person can do.
A bell rang. It was the bell that announced the end of lunch.
"Let's meet up again later."
Saddled with the task of curing Sakuya of her bad habit, Tales Tale agreed to break for now and head back, each of them, to their own classroom.
"See you in a bit! But you're not coming, Rena-chan?"
Iris, first to bolt from the art room, looked back in puzzlement at Rena, who had stayed behind alone.
"Fifth and sixth are home ec and P.E. They're not even required. I'll just stay here."
"Oh, right! Rena-chan's a special-talent student!"
"Hey."
It was a privilege among privileges, set only in the hands of students whom Yuuma had permitted to pursue outside activities, who then brought home splendid results and raised the school's name: the guaranteed-grades system. Iris, the only one among them from the college-prep track, blew her top.
"God, I am so jealous of that free-class privilege! I want to skip class and just practice singing!"
"Then come over to the free class next year. Join a choir or something and win a competition."
"I like singing, but a choir is kind of...?"
"Then forget it."
Iris cast about desperately for Tae-il.
"Shin Tae-il! Shin Tae-iiil! We should do some outside activities too!"
"Want to enter Rock Fes?"
"Perfect! We just have to conquer Rock Fes!"
Next year. Spinning out a daydream in which Tales Tale took Rock Fes for their own, Iris hummed her way back to class, and Tae-il, who had been watching in silence, smiled wryly.
"Haha. See you after school, then, Rena."
"Mm-hm."
The two of them said goodbye to Rena and walked the noisy hall.
"Sakuya, what'd we have fifth period again...?"
"Science, I think?"
Science. The class their homeroom teacher, Asakura, taught.
"Asakura-sensei, huh..."
Tae-il stopped dead. When he simply stood there, Sakuya turned, puzzled.
"What are you doing? You're not going to class?"
He carefully caught her hand.
"Tae-il?"
"Sakuya, listen. You know..."
Thud!
The iron door to the rooftop swung shut.
"Nnngh...!"
Sakuya stretched, laughing. "Ahaha! It's been forever since we were up here, too!"
It wasn't that the place held any extraordinary memory. Even so, it had left its mark, perhaps because it was where she and Tae-il had grown even a little closer. She threw both arms wide and drew in a long breath of unfamiliar air.
The rooftop. Tae-il's reserved seat for cutting class hadn't changed a bit.
"There's more dust than you'd think, so watch yourself. It sat abandoned all through break, so it's pretty filthy."
"Okay."
Having warned her, Tae-il turned the faucet they used for washing down the rooftop and filled a bucket to the brim. Sakuya sidled over and leaned in.
"Want me to help?"
"It's fine. Go sit in that chair and rest."
He turned down the offered hand, then took the water in the bucket and a rag he had set aside some time before and cleaned neatly around the chain-link fence. Sakuya helped a little anyway. Mostly it was carrying desks and chairs.
A short while later—
"Haaah!"
Tae-il sprawled on the freshly cleaned floor, and Sakuya carefully followed, lying down alongside him.
What a strange feeling. Had she ever gotten to lie down this easily anywhere that wasn't home? Even when she did, it was usually because training had worn her out. She glanced at Tae-il. The sight of him savoring the pleasant weather was almost irritating.
"Nice weather today. Perfect for a nap."
"Y-yeah..."
Sakuya turned her head back. Just as he said: merely looking at it swept her clean inside. Unlike the haze in her heart, the sky was flawless, not a cloud in it, with no sign of any storm on the way.
"Hey, Tae-il...?"
"Yeah?"
"Didn't you say we should talk, just us?"
"Hooo."
He steadied himself. Breathing out, long and deep, the air that had gathered in his chest, he quietly laced his fingers with hers.
"That video I saw earlier..."
"Ahaha. That?"
A performance video of a famous Western rock star. Tae-il knew it too; it was famous enough that even the habits and the routines were common knowledge. Sakuya laughed, a little abashed.
"Your guess is probably right."
She admitted it readily enough, and still, as if it shamed her, she scratched her cheek with her left hand—the right one was caught in his.
"I knew it..."
Her hand trembled. He felt the tremor pass into his own.
"Don't be nervous. I'm not blaming you."
"I'm not nervous. The one who did something wrong is you, snooping through my phone whenever you felt like it. Right?"
"..."
Struck speechless, Tae-il worked his mouth like a goldfish, and in the end stuck his lip out in a pout. Sakuya laughed aloud.
"Ahaha! Then how about you grant me one wish, as the price of my forgiveness?"
"You already have a wish ticket..."
"The more, the merrier. That's what they say."
A wish ticket is the sort of thing that only gets better the more of them you hold.
"Kindly spare a thought for the person who has to grant them..."
"Ahaha!"
Sakuya laughed and rolled onto her side. Whether the ticket truly weighed on him or not, Tae-il kept his eyes stubbornly on the sky alone, his face twisted in open distaste. Her gaze dropped. His hand had gone tight, with no intention of letting go. She squeezed, and clasped it just as hard—pretending, all the while, to be perfectly at ease, and speaking in a voice that trembled just a little, afraid of the verdict about to leave his mouth.
"So. What problem does our dear leader see in me?"
"Hmm..."
The experts like to put it a certain way. Show and prove. A professional shows you with the results. And the skill of the professionals who actually produced those results sat so far beyond him that Tae-il couldn't even dream of it. Sheet music in hand, could he follow so much as the tips of their toes?
"Sakuya. What do you think sheet music is?"
"Sheet music?"
She tried to read what he was after. He doesn't want a simple answer, does he? Sheet music: by the dictionary, a record of musical melody written down in fixed symbols. Follow it, and you can reproduce the piece.
"I don't know. What kind of answer are you looking for?"
"Sheet music isn't an answer key."
Sheet music is not an answer key. Put another way, in the matter of how music is expressed, there is no correct answer that never changes.
"Why do you think Iris sits alone every day, agonizing over the lyric sheet?"
"That's..."
"With Iris's ability, she memorized everything on the page ages ago. If the sheet were an answer key..."
Iris would have no reason to give herself a headache over it, alone.
"I'm the one who wrote it. Asking me would be one way. But she didn't."
Why? To carry an expectation, and to live up to it. As a vocalist. Befitting the voice at the core of the band, Iris was cutting a road of her own, open, through reinterpretation.
"Sorry. I'm not like Iris yet..."
"No."
Tae-il refused the self-reproach.
"Honestly? Right now, I'm really glad."
"Glad?"
A player's performance holds their joy and their anger, their sorrow and their pleasure, and the whole of the life they have walked. Which is to say: copy another's playing perfectly, and you have reproduced that player's entire life.
"But there aren't many people in the world who can do it."
"No?"
"Even if they exist, they get written off as fakes."
What the public will grant them amounts, at best, to the standing of a tribute band, and even that never climbs out of the indie scene. Honestly, however closely the playing resembles the original, it is still somebody else. And a player skilled enough to copy, perfectly, the technique and the expression of a guitarist counted among the best in the world? Frankly, if you are good enough to copy a rock star they call a legend, the odds are high you have already awakened a domain of your own. You have already taken hold of the individuality so many players spend their lives longing for.
A look of sheer disbelief rested on Sakuya.
"You did that. As a complete beginner."
"Ahaha. Sounds just like a manga."
Basking in his gaze, she murmured as if the matter belonged to someone else. At the lukewarm answer, Tae-il's brow creased. Fine, then. He'd make her laugh. He grinned and raised his voice.
"Yeah. Simply put, you're wearing a Sharingan right now."
"Pfft! A Sharingan?"
"Yep. You perfectly copied somebody else's taijutsu."
"Thanks for an explanation I can actually follow."
Imitating another person to perfection had not, in truth, been so easy a thing even for Sakuya, a total novice at music. Bluntly put, copying someone else's drawing style had been easier.
"The real problem is actually the other thing."
In the arts, copying is not a vice. There is a reason people say imitation is the mother of invention: you grow further by way of other people.
"A person who can do nothing but imitate. No creativity at all."
"Ahaha."
Sakuya smiled bitterly. His assessment had struck dead center.
"The song from the video. You can play it, can't you?"
"Yeah. Perfectly."
If nothing else, she could be sure of that. Meaningless little gestures, the way the guitarist in the video handled his eyes, the movement of his fingers—she had memorized every last bit of it, not a detail missed.
"Reproducing it gave me a lot of trouble."
First she had split the video into frames, and split those again, forcibly hammering each motion into her head. Then she had gone through more trials and errors than she could count, forcing her actual body to reproduce the images she had hammered in.
"I wish the reference had been easy to break down, like the practice videos you sent me."
"You really memorized the whole thing..."
"Ahaha. Did it look pretty dumb?"
"Pretty dumb, yeah."
It was a familiar verdict. Sports had been much the same. On nothing but inborn talent and the body she was given, Sakuya had been an ace since the Inter-Middle meets. Whenever she felt a limit, she watched the match footage of players they called legends and took it apart; she hardened her core while she copied them, and she melted other people's technique and play down until it was perfectly her own.
In sports, that worked.
You just do it, don't you? It was Sakuya's particular way of talking, the kind that set a listener's blood boiling. Unlike people who hit a wall on a regular schedule and suffered through slumps and growing pains, when it came to moving her body she had no equal. If she simply decided to do a thing, she accomplished all of it.
There was exactly one thing even she could not do. Creation. A wall like a great mountain, set across the path of a girl whose only hardship, until then, had been her family's grip on her—and that only because she was still a minor.
"I used to draw manga."
"Past tense?"
"Actually, I still do."
As a child, Sakuya had come up to Tokyo with a dream swollen full, and then, bold as anything, submitted her work to a famous boys' manga magazine.
"I got rejected a bunch of times. Below standard, they said."
"You?"
"Even now, when I think about it, my skill back then was pretty wretched."
Of course, that was only by Sakuya's own measure. Even the skill she called wretched sat far above anything Tae-il had pictured.
"But I kept submitting, so I guess I got better. One day, out of nowhere, an editor said he wanted to see me in person."
"And?"
"Ahaha. I'm not serializing anything right now, am I."
She shrugged. Even now, she could call that day up as vividly as if it stood in front of her.
"Your style is truly exquisite. Gorgeous, even."
"Really?"
"It would hold its own beside a professional's. The problem is exactly that."
"The problem?"
"First, I don't fault amateur artists for copying a pro's direction."
Direction is not some proprietary design. Copyright does not particularly see fit to recognize it.
"Frankly, so long as you aren't tracing, I don't care what you copy."
Similar settings, similar plots, a plagiarism scandal drifting through the air—none of it mattered. Popularity was enough. Overwhelming sales and fame could stamp out any controversy at will. Commercial judgment, in a capitalist market, sometimes turns its face from conscience and from morals. No. Perhaps it does so rather often.
"Manga, in the end, comes down to this. Put extremely: even plagiarism is fine, if the thing is fun."
Whatever anyone said, manga had to be fun. A work that wasn't fun was a sin by the mere fact that it existed.
"But you won't do."
"What?"
"You're excellent. That much is true. But your work is completely empty of creativity."
"Empty of creativity...?"
Characters lifted straight off someone else. Direction lifted straight off someone else. A plot lifted straight off someone else. Even the panel splits, even the lines of dialogue, lifted straight off someone else.
"The only thing you didn't do was trace. Your work is a perfect copy of something. Still, push a little further and you might manage a passable chimera."
"A ch-chimera...?"
Without pausing for so much as a breath, the editor drove nail after nail into the chest of Sakuya, who was nothing more than a middle-school girl.
"Even so, it isn't that you have no potential. Look at talent alone, and potential is spilling over."
"R-really...?"
"There are those who, being young, imagine freely and without prejudice. And there are those who, being young and inexperienced, imagine only what comes out of a mold."
The editor judged Sakuya to be the latter. In short, fill in the experience she lacked, and she could bloom into a beautiful flower whenever she liked.
"The fastest way to fix that bad habit of yours is still to experience a great deal, and to draw a great deal."
"Th-then I'll draw it again! If I do...!"
"Start as an assistant."
"An assistant?"
"Yes. I'll introduce you to a decent teacher."
She was a woman writer with a child of her own, he offered readily, so it ought not to be too uncomfortable. It was plainly a good chance. Sakuya declined it, politely.
The reason she gave was that she was busy. She had the Inter-Middle meets to prepare for, and the other spring tournaments besides. And underneath? The editor's verdict had wounded her pride, badly.
"I can do this..."
It was fine if the papers, or her seniors, sneered and called her arrogant. She had only to prove it with skill and take them down a peg. Manga was no different. All she had done was apply, to manga, the very method by which she had always succeeded.
"From then on, I kept telling myself."
She had always managed alone. This time, too, she had sworn she would manage somehow on her own, and she had run at it.
"First, pile up experience."
If she was good at copying, then she would copy all she pleased. Only, what she copied would not be other manga. It would be the life itself of a girl named Sakuraba Sakuya.
"No special dramatizing. Even drawn exactly as it is, a life people could laugh at and enjoy. Strange, and wondrous, and fun—a life like a protagonist's. I'll live that."
She had come running under that single conviction.
"That's why meeting you felt so good."
Her eyes went to him before she meant them to. For her, the existence called Shin Tae-il sat dead in the strike zone of her taste. An awkward laugh slipped out of her.
"Shin Tae-il."
The distance between them closed. A brief kiss. Tae-il touched his own lips, dazed, and when he looked back, Sakuya—whose touch had been so bold—was smiling with a shyness that made him wonder if it was really her.
"Of everyone I've ever seen, you're the most like a protagonist."
The man had his shortcomings. Spend any time with him and he showed plenty of pathetic, foolish sides; the way he refused to drop his stubbornness over truly useless things made him a bit of a brick wall, and there were days his indecision pulled a sigh straight out of her. But.
"When I'm with you, I'm happy."
And.
"Everything that happens around you is fun."
The band. She hadn't exactly welcomed it. Sakuya's life was already packed tight with sports and manga, so full there was no slack left, and into that narrow space she had wedged Tae-il. The heart is not infinite. It has a set capacity. And yet, presumptuously, he kept widening his territory inside her, and into that widened ground the band had pushed its way.
Music. A field she had loathed from long ago. But with Tae-il beside her, it was a little fun. Whether she could go on enjoying music for a lifetime in this state, she didn't know.
"I'm going to be with you."
"Sakuya."
"Whatever it turns out to be, I want to stay at your side, and keep being with you."
She was the same as Ayane. If music was the minimum condition for being with Tae-il, then she would learn it gladly. She had come to understand the joy she felt because he was there, and she had no wish, here, to feel as if she didn't belong. Above all—
"I love that I get to make you into a protagonist."
"A protagonist..."
"Can I use the wish ticket now?"
Tae-il nodded.
It's stifling. Lunch was over. The weather was clear, the temperature none too high, and still the air felt close—because of the heat pouring off Sakuya.
"The wish I want is only one."
For a lifetime. The only wish she would never ask of him again. She laughed, loose and bright, the way Tae-il did at every decisive moment: a foolish smile with not a scrap of cool in it.
"Yeah."
Tae-il doesn't know what sort of protagonist she wants. Even so, her wish left him with the sense that he had understood something.
"Good."
Somehow she had climbed on top of him, and she pulled his neck into a hard embrace. Her ears were red. Her body was hot enough to burn at a touch. With her face buried in his shoulder, she mumbled.
"I think I'm going to die of how embarrassed I am..."
"Haha. You did great, Sakuya."
"Mnnn..."
Tae-il patted her back, and he kept at it until the bell that ended class rang, and the noisy voices of students rose from the schoolyard all the way to the rooftop.
"Hah!"
"Why are you suddenly standing there frozen, Ayane?"
Hinako stared, baffled, at Ayane, who had stopped midway through tidying her desk, hair standing on end, and risen from her seat. Ayane was looking out the window toward the inner courtyard. As if on purpose, the far end of her gaze held the rooftop of the Old School Building.
"I've just got this feeling a vixen has latched onto Shin-chan...!"
"The childhood-friend radar, I see."
At Ayane's instinct, Misuzu pushed up her glasses, impressed. Hinako looked thoroughly put off.
"Whoa... that's insane."
"It's an NTR-detection radar at the same time."
"Whoa— no, not whoa! NTR!? Then isn't she in serious trouble?"
"Heh. A childhood friend really is a defeat flag."
Having reached her conclusion entirely on her own, Misuzu sent them a thin, knowing smile.
Bang! Ayane slammed the desk.
"And you call yourselves my friends after that!? I'm going to go check on Shin-chan for a second!"
"Huh? Hey, the homeroom teacher's about to— hey!"
"Let her go. We'll play our part as friends."
"Misuzu..."
A moment later, the teacher came into the classroom for closing homeroom.
"Class president. Katsuragi just ran out—did something happen?"
"Ayane..."
Her face was set with grim resolve, and when Misuzu answered, the tragic grandeur practically dripped from the words.
"Our proud friend has departed, to defend a love of many years."
"..."
The homeroom teacher's expression began to curdle, and Hinako rushed to cover.
"H-her stomach hurts, she said! Her stomach hurts!"
"I-is that so...?"
"A-ahaha! Ahaha! Misuzu's lost her mind from exam stress, that's all. Ahaha. Ahahaha..."
Cold sweat beaded on Hinako.
"Tch."
Misuzu clicked her tongue.