Recording (3)
Bang!
The art room door flew open as if lightning had struck it. The culprit was a certain pitiful girl whose childhood-friend radar had just picked up a very bad omen.
"Shin-chan! It's okay now! Ayane's here! I came to save you!"
To rescue her childhood friend from the vixen, the hero—no, the heroine—Ayane made her grand entrance.
"Ah, damn it! You scared me!"
Rena, who had been practicing drums alone and holding down the art room, jumped so hard she toppled clean off her throne. Heat rushing to her face, she shouted at Ayane.
"That door's soundproofed, so it's heavy! Slam it open and shut like that and it'll break in no time, you idiot!"
"Sorry! But Iris does it too!"
"No, what the hell..."
The words died in her throat. It wasn't even wrong, so she had nothing to throw back. No matter how often Rena nagged her, Iris slammed that door every bit as hard as Ayane just had.
"That damned useless pig of a girl..."
Rena quietly swallowed her anger at Iris, who was running late on account of class duty.
"Anyway, Shin isn't here yet."
"What!?"
"You got here way too early. Miss Public Morals Committee."
Rena pointed at the clock. The bell ending seventh period had only just rung, and not even five minutes had passed.
"But!"
"But what."
"Ayane saw it!"
"Saw what?"
"Class 7 already finished homeroom, so the only ones left in the classroom were the duty students—aaaaah!"
"Aaaaah?"
"Don't tell me...!"
Ayane, who had been carrying on a whole one-woman show of wild guesses and contorted faces all by herself, set her bass gently on the floor.
"Shin-chan!"
She took off down the hallway with a start so clean that Sakuya would have been impressed.
"Hey! At least explain before you go! And what kind of morals committee member runs in the halls!"
Rena chased after her a beat too late. She could more or less guess.
The rooftop!
The Animal Husbandry Club was also somewhere Tae-il might turn up, but it sat far lower on the list. More than anything—
There's not a single reason Shin-chan would take Sakuya to the Animal Husbandry Club!
The rooftop, on the other hand, was lawless ground. A secret base where you could get up to all sorts of things without anyone catching you.
I don't know about the little one, but Iris or Sakuya alone with him up there is dangerous...!
Her childhood-friend sensor blared a furious alarm. Ayane knew it. Tae-il was terribly weak when someone came on strong. And the parts of the school he used most sat close to the Old School Building, where even a shout usually went unheard.
In other words—
A hidden place where you can do whatever you want without worrying about anyone watching...!
A place Ayane herself had been too embarrassed to actually do anything in, settling instead for secret, wicked daydreams. As if giving voice to her impatience, her stride quickened. Her breath came short and hard.
Beyond the stairs, a pale wash of light showed beneath the firmly shut iron door.
Clank!
The door opened, and the world that had narrowed before Ayane's eyes sprang wide as her pupils shrank.
"Shin-chan!"
"A-Ayane?"
There was Tae-il. He had shed his gakuran, it seemed, and stood in a crisp white shirt. Had they already gone through with it? Ayane jerked her gaze downward, and there was Sakuya—the enviable vixen, fast asleep, Tae-il's gakuran for a blanket and his lap for a pillow.
She could have gotten angrier still. She couldn't. Tae-il had pressed a finger to his lips.
"Shh."
Rena, late up the stairs, clutched her knees and heaved for air.
"Haa. Haa. Crazy, gloomy girl, why, so fast. Hack."
Sweating through in the span of a few minutes, Rena forced her head up. She saw the same scene Ayane had.
"Haaa."
A sigh slipped out of her before she knew it.
Bathed in sunlight, the two of them sat pressed close, tender as anything—a boy smiling awkwardly, and a girl asleep with his leg for a pillow, smiling as if she were happy. No matter how sturdy the girl. No matter how fragile the boy. The yin-yang balance at the root of the world remained exactly as it always had, unchanged.
"Hah."
Another sigh left her lips.
The art room.
Iris, late because of duty and left to wait alone for the others without the faintest idea why, cried out.
"That's not fair! Why are you all playing without me! Let me in too!"
"Sorry!"
Sakuya bowed her head. She had slept. Really, truly slept the afternoon away. By the time she woke, only about thirty minutes remained until dismissal—an awkward window for practice. Iris, abandoned in the art room until someone finally contacted her, shouted as if she'd been wronged.
"You think apologizing fixes everything! I had duty today, so I did all the dirty work without a single complaint!"
"Classroom cleaning counts as dirty work...?"
"Kiriko cleans her room for her, too."
"Oh my god."
True to her childhood-friend nature, Ayane—thoroughly accomplished at housework—covered her mouth in shock. Even so, a young lady was still a young lady.
Sakuya bowed even deeper.
"I'm really sorry! I'll make up for the practice we lost today with music later. I promise!"
At that resolute attitude, Iris's anger eased a little.
"For real, Sakuya? You can promise that?"
"I swear on Tae-il!"
"On me?"
"Mm... accepted!"
"Hey!"
Tae-il, suddenly turned into the stakes of a bet, flared up.
"Ahaha! Just kidding. But that's how serious I am. Trust me, Iris."
"Haa."
Trust me. At the return of a phrase that felt like it was slowly becoming a trauma, Iris let out a sigh.
"...Fine. I should trust you."
We're friends. We're in the same band. And maybe, just maybe, we'll become rivals. Of course I should trust her.
"Thanks. In that spirit, can I ask your advice?"
"Advice?"
"Yeah. I want to get myself a guitar."
The band broke up a little earlier than usual. The timing was awkward anyway, and Iris had readily agreed to Sakuya's request to buy a guitar of her own.
"Great! We can't let the first guitar Sakuya ever owns be some cheap piece of junk! See you tomorrow, then!"
"S-see you tomorrow morning—aaaaah...!"
"Let's go, go, go!"
Sakuya's short scream vanished along with Iris, who was welcoming the newbie with the unsettling glee of a grizzled veteran.
In an instant the two of them were gone, leaving only three in the art room. Tae-il turned to Ayane.
"Practice is a wash, and we've got time. Want to stop by the Animal Husbandry Club for a bit?"
"Th-the Animal Husbandry Club is a little..."
Ayane, who had already suffered at the hands of bugs, shrank at the mere mention.
"Haha. Got it. Anyway, Rena, what do you want to do?"
"Me?"
"Yeah. Want to walk home together? Iris isn't here, after all."
Rena's commute to and from school had always been with Iris.
"Oh. Right. I forgot without even thinking about it."
Realizing just how naturally she had been leaning on that, Rena twisted a lock of hair tight around her finger.
"But isn't your place closer from here?"
"It's fine. Let's go together."
"Puffff...!"
At Tae-il's offer, Ayane puffed her cheeks out like a hamster beside them. She had been delighted at the thought of finally having him to herself.
"The gloomy girl doesn't want to."
"Ayane."
"E-even if you ask, I'm not saying yes."
Smack.
Tae-il pressed a kiss to the back of Ayane's hand.
"Eh."
"Gek."
Their expressions went in opposite directions.
"I'm asking you. I'd worry if Rena went home alone. It's okay, right?"
"Y-yeees."
Rena muttered, "Way too easy..."
"Thanks."
Tae-il smiled brightly as he said it. And then the follow-up.
"Let's sleep together again tonight. Holding each other tight."
He whispered it softly, only into Ayane's ear, so Rena wouldn't hear.
"Hgk!"
Boom!
Her fantasies ran wild and, unable to stop, finally exploded. Ayane's face, flushed crimson, collapsed into a boneless heap with a sound like a pop. Tae-il caught her as she went down—not a steadying hand, but a full embrace.
Rena stuck her tongue out.
"You're turning into more of a smooth operator by the day, aren't you?"
"Haha."
Patting Ayane's back, Tae-il somehow laughed his way out of the interrogation.
In Japan, getting your hands on an instrument is not a particularly difficult thing. Wander the streets as often as Sakuya did, and you naturally come across shops that deal in them all over the place. When she was bored, she used to step inside herself and kill time looking at instruments and every kind of accessory.
Even then, I never dreamed I'd end up playing one of these...
That was the charm of a human life. You could never see an inch ahead.
Meeting Tae-il was the crime.
Feelings do as they please. They don't listen to reason. Even so, she didn't regret it.
Sakuya smiled wryly and followed Iris into a high-end instrument shop that screamed expensive at a glance. Iris introduced it with pride.
"This is the place. The shop I use all the time. Aside from vintage and made-to-order, you can get pretty much anything here!"
"Whoa..."
Guitar. Guitar. Guitar. Guitar. Guitar. Guitar. It was a spectacle of nothing but guitars no matter where you looked, and even Sakuya couldn't help but marvel. A veritable wall of them. Every spot in the shop where a guitar could stand or hang was packed tight with instruments in every color. And of course, as befit a specialty shop, not a single price tag looked ordinary.
"Eek! O-one million five hundred thousand yen...?"
It wasn't even a huge instrument like a piano, and yet the price was so excessive that Sakuya's eyes nearly rolled back in her head.
"Hehe."
The veteran, savoring the newbie's fresh reaction, slipped in with a bright smile.
"Expensive, right?"
"I'd only ever heard about it. I never dreamed they were actually this expensive."
People didn't flip instruments for reinvestment for nothing. Sakuya looked appalled, her face gone a little green.
"Um, is the guitar you use this expensive too, Iris?"
"Me? Not at all."
Hands clasped behind her back, Iris snapped her fingers, and Kiriko, who had been waiting behind them, appeared without a sound.
Kiriko. To Sakuya's eye, a being who seemed even more like a character out of a manga than Tae-il. When Iris flicked her a rough glance that said explain for me, Kiriko shook her head and opened her mouth.
"The young lady currently owns about twenty guitars in total. The most expensive among them is a five-hundred-thousand-yen instrument."
"Five hundred thousand. That doesn't even feel like a real price..."
"For reference, the reason for the purchase was not affection or passion for guitars or for music. It was purely that Tenma Izumi of BARD actually plays it—a vintage Fender the young lady went out of her way to acquire."
"..."
When Sakuya stared, Iris pouted, stuck out her tongue, and rapped her own head with a fist.
"E-ehk?"
"Don't tell me every guitar you're using right now...?"
"A-ahem!"
More than twenty guitars, all bought because of Izumi. Sakuya gave up the interrogation then and there.
Once, she had heard the price of Tae-il's bass and been horrified at how expensive it was.
And Tae-il was satisfied, saying he'd gotten a discount and bought it really cheap...
Of course, later, when she heard what Rena's drum set had cost, she had thought the bass was the cheaper of the two after all. She had never dreamed Iris would go a step further still.
"Well, whatever about your guitars. But why are these so expensive? Honestly, just looking at them, that one over there looks way fancier than this one."
Sakuya pointed at a guitar on the opposite side whose price wasn't even in the same league. Forty thousand yen. Absurdly cheap next to the one and a half million in front of her.
"Because the materials are different from the start."
"Materials?"
"Yeah. Expensive violins go for hundreds of millions of yen, don't they?"
"Hundreds of millions?"
"Of course they do. You're in the free class and you don't even know that?"
"That's not—"
Sakuya felt wronged, too. Honestly, Class 7 didn't have many students majoring in classical, and when it came to music she had always been a complete outsider.
"More of an athlete than you look, huh?"
"So what."
Seeing the rare sight of a sulking Sakuya, Iris smiled faintly.
"To put it simply, that one is expensive because it looks like that."
"Because it looks like that?"
"The shape itself is brand power."
"Really?"
Didn't bands on stage all start with flashy instruments? Even Iris, whose guitar changed every time they played together, used mostly flashy ones if you looked closely.
"That's interesting..."
"Is a guitar not being flashy that surprising?"
"You know how it is. Those kids in artist photos where the person looks like nothing special but the instrument is flashy. Or the ones who shade their faces so you can barely see them and only show off the instrument..."
Every one of those guitars was flashy beyond belief. Color, shape—there wasn't a single thing they held back on.
"Pfft!"
At Sakuya's phrasing, Iris burst out laughing before she could stop herself.
"Ahaha! You're right! There are always kids like that in indie bands! Still, they're pretty cool up on stage, you know? Well, it depends on how each of them plays!"
Sakuya tilted her head.
"So is this one a simple-is-best kind of thing?"
"Haha. Not quite."
Iris giggled. To a veteran, this newbie—pure as spring water—was endlessly cute.
"This one and that one are just on completely different levels."
"Huh? How?"
"First the weight of the brand name, then the quality of the materials and whether a craftsman's hand was involved, and last of all the sound."
All of it was different. Sound especially. Being an instrument, it absolutely had to have something that set it apart.
"No matter what anyone says, an instrument only earns its worth when someone plays it, right?"
The true value of an expensive instrument lay, as expected, in its outstanding sound and expressiveness—something that revealed itself only once it passed through human hands.
"If it's too hard to tell, want me to play them so you can hear?"
"Do you have to?"
"I want to play them for you."
Iris asked Kiriko, who had been watching from the side, to bring three guitars. The prices were one million, five hundred thousand, and the twenty-thousand range.
"I'll play them in order."
She plugged one into an amp the shop had set out for customers to try.
"Starting?"
Iris settled into her stance and struck the strings with a pick. Unlike Sakuya, who still stole glances at sheet music without meaning to while she played, this was pure memory. A melody familiar even to Sakuya rang out.
"This song is..."
The ending theme of the theatrical mystery-anime films she went to see every vacation. A song BARD had collaborated on, too.
"I picked something you'd probably know on purpose. How is it?"
"It sounds good."
"Right? This time I'll try the cheaper ones."
Iris played guitars from the other price ranges in front of Sakuya, one after another. To make them easy to tell apart, every melody was identical.
"So. How was it?"
"Mm."
Sakuya crossed her arms and tilted her head.
"I can't really tell."
There was a slight difference, but whether it amounted to anything meaningful, Sakuya—whose ear hadn't opened yet—simply couldn't grasp.
"But you can tell each one sounds different, right?"
"Yeah. They were definitely different."
"You haven't waded in deep on this side yet, so the difference might not seem like much."
Iris played as if she were enjoying herself. Sakuya didn't know. But Iris could feel the difference in what she had just played with perfect clarity. Before long, Sakuya would be the same. Iris believed it. Once anyone's ear began to open, they grew stressed by these minute differences, felt their limits, and demanded change. They would search like mad for a sound that truly fit them and cling to it there. No matter how expensive. And, conversely, no matter how cheap.
"Hehe. A person's hunger for gear never ends, right? These are the same."
"True. Sports are like that too."
Finished, Iris put the guitars in order and handed them back to Kiriko.
"Shall we go look at some other ones, then?"
She dragged Sakuya along to a corner of the shop.
"Among instruments, there's something called high-end spec."
"High-end..."
"You said you like games, right? In game terms, think of it as endgame gear with maxed-out options."
Thanks to that, the numbers on the price tags started at five hundred thousand as a baseline.
"A bit expensive, right?"
"I can say with certainty that this is absolutely not a price range to shove at a student."
She had used expensive sports equipment before. All of it had been sponsored by brands or shops and handed out by the school for the students.
But instruments...
The rental instruments at school were all things upperclassmen had used and then donated. Most were beginner guitars, so they weren't expensive, and they had been left neglected for a long time without proper care, so their condition was a little dire. The wind section was no different, even with as many as seven of them. Most wind students preferred to use instruments of their own.
If anything, the problem is that I got too complacent and never thought about an instrument until now. Ahaha...
She had plenty of money. The scholarship from school, prize money from competitions, and the allowance she had saved working as a reader model. But no matter how firmly she had resolved to go forward with Tae-il, she did not want to blow five hundred thousand in cash right here. It was too huge a sum.
"I don't know about you, Sakuya, but honestly, if you've got the money, I think buying the expensive one is the right answer, skill aside."
"I've got a lot of money for a student too, but this is a bit..."
"Yeah. So what you should be looking at is over here. The ones back there are for later, when you've really fallen in deep."
Iris led her to another corner of the shop. If a moment ago there had been a lot of oddly worn, excessively misshapen designs, here there were many guitars with dazzling, modern ones. Above all, the gloss came up so prettily that at a glance they looked even more high-end than the bizarre vintage instruments she had just passed. But unlike those, the guitars on display here ran from about twenty thousand to forty thousand yen.
"Somehow, drop one zero and all the excitement just drains right out..."
"Yeah? Want to go back?"
"N-no, I'm joking!"
Sakuya forcibly stopped Iris, who had already turned on her heel. Honestly, stand too close to something that expensive and it sucks the life right out of you. She let out an inward sigh of relief and asked.
"Why are you recommending these?"
"With guitars, once you clear about twenty thousand yen, they'll do a respectable job."
"Simple reason..."
"When you're buying one, price comes first. After that, the sound features, starting with the pickups. The bridge is about last."
Factor in service like after-sales support, and this price range was the most reasonable and decent of the lot.
"Well, accessories like picks and strings—we've got plenty at my place, so don't worry about those."
"All of them are leftover stock."
"Ahaha."
Sakuya smiled wryly and looked over the guitars.
"Can I try playing them myself, like you did?"
"Of course!"
She swept her eyes over them with a careful gaze. Her first guitar. It wouldn't be a one-of-a-kind custom like Ayane's, but she wanted to give it a meaning and a symbolism of her own.
And that's how much affection will go into it...
Sakuya began searching in earnest for a guitar that suited her.
"Iris, what kind of genre do you think our band is going to play?"
"Shin Tae-il said he wants to aim for emotional music, so... probably typical alternative rock?"
Put another way, you could also call it a pursuit of typical J-pop. Usually, depending on a band's leanings, pop rock or punk rock got added on top.
"Looking at his tendencies, psychedelic or electro are possible too."
"Then can you recommend a brand that fits those?"
"Usually a Telecaster fits best, right? Autumn Love Song especially suits that distinctive twangy cry a Telecaster has."
But she couldn't say for certain they would keep writing songs in the same vein after that.
"In the end, if you play it safe, it's a Strat."
"Telecaster and Strat..."
"Both made by Fender. Want to look together? The price might climb a bit."
Sakuya nodded.
"Or you could pick something nicer, and a little more expensive, from another brand. Ibanez, Yamaha, that sort of thing."
"I want to check all of them."
"Hehe. Good! Let's go! In search of romance!"
There was plenty of time. It was fine to be picky even while knowing nothing at all. With Iris's advice as her guide, Sakuya wandered the shop in search of a guitar that was hers alone.