Busking (2)
Sunday.
It was nothing like a weekend meant for rest. As always, Taeil would have spent the day buried in one thing after another.
But today was different.
For the first time in a very long while, he had decided to take a little time for himself—alone, as a man.
Ayane hadn't clung to him, either. He had told her plainly why he was going out on his own.
"Ugh. It's been forever since I was by myself."
Cold. Taeil drew his collar tight. Autumn had settled in for good, and the chill was beginning to seep through the cloth. Maybe he felt it more sharply because he was alone.
Since when had it been like this? Aside from his time in the hospital, Taeil almost never found himself truly by himself.
"What was it like, back then...?"
Making music, put another way, meant being popular. It was no accident that interviews with famous bands so often included the line about starting one in school because they wanted to be liked. Taeil hadn't been entirely without social grace, and having taken the stage more than once at school festivals, he had a fair number of people who knew his face.
Go further back, and there was Shin Seongil's band. Except near the very end, the density of his relationships had been fairly high. The band of the cousin he had watched up close was, quite literally, the in-crowd made flesh.
Funny. I wasn't actually that lonely, was I.
The industry was full of eccentrics and people with difficult personalities, but when he thought about it carefully, he hadn't been entirely without luck in the people around him. It had been agonizing—and yet there had been just as much joy.
Taeil walked, sunk in memory. Strolling a familiar street alone like this, the people he had met in Japan rose up one after another, unbidden.
"I miss them..."
A strange emptiness lingered in his light, unburdened arms as he boarded the train for Harajuku. His destination was the great pocket of nature set between Harajuku and Shinjuku, a wilderness in the heart of the city: Yoyogi National Park.
He had come for a single reason—to scout the ground before they went busking. Phone in hand, he snapped photos here and there, searching for a spot with heavy foot traffic and a good chance of catching the eye.
Our busking is publicity, first and last.
Busking was how a band announced itself to the scene. For a major act, it wasn't far from a stage debut. That was how indie bands started, after all.
"Here..."
They would use the Cultural Festival, a school event, as the foothold that carried the name Tales Tale out into the world. It wasn't a strange idea. Even now, cardboard signs and little banners put up to promote bands were scattered all through his line of sight. Each group was playing its signature song, or some popular tune anyone would know, and working hard to sell live-house tickets. Watching their heartrending struggle to meet the quota, Taeil smiled wryly.
"Are we going to end up like that someday...?"
It looked like fun. Watching indie bands show themselves exactly as they were, he caught himself thinking so without meaning to, and hummed under his breath.
He wandered the park in search of the best place for Tales Tale to play, but nothing jumped out at him the way he had hoped. Past the noisy outer edge, he slipped naturally into the quieter interior.
Figures. There are more people on the outside.
He had considered busking without an amp if it came to that, but one look at the sparse atmosphere and he scrapped the plan at once. Deeper inside the park, the law restricted the casual use of amps and the like, so the people performing there were not bands in any form he knew. Solo players of every kind, and eccentrics coaxing songs out of strange, ramshackle instruments, caught his eye. In wuxia terms, they were reclusive masters who had hidden themselves away from the jianghu. Getting tangled up with them would only be exhausting, so he kept his distance.
"Yeah. If we're going to busk, the outside is better than in here..."
The park's outer edge was the better stage. The road running from here all the way out toward Harajuku was, in fact, the mecca of busking in Japan, packed with bands and street dancers that delighted his eyes and ears by the moment. The level varied wildly, but in true indie fashion the distinctive sounds and the expressive playing kept making people's feet hesitate.
And yet.
Taeil studied the faces of the people watching the street performances more carefully than the performers themselves.
Tourists, young couples, families and old folks out for a walk, people who came to see the bands and the dance crews...
The ages in the crowd were so varied that keeping statistics almost seemed pointless.
Still, students are the fewest. As expected.
This wasn't the old days. In an era like this, it was no easy thing for young students to gather in a park and watch bands or street dance. Taeil felt a small pang of disappointment.
School band and cultural festival were the two phrases with the strongest pull among young students. Both were symbols of youth, so the audience he was aiming at was students, first and foremost. Yuma's Cultural Festival was a famous local attraction, and he had thought it would make decent bait—but the crowd here fell short of that. As a place to promote an indie band, Yoyogi Park could hardly have been better. The problem was that, for a school band, it was awkwardly off.
"Maybe I should look at a few other places, just in case..."
He was watching, with a detached eye, a cluster of bands advertising a live show that very day, and turning over whether any decent candidates existed at all, when—
Taeil's hand trembled. A melody that should never have reached him settled softly against his ear.
He stopped dead, as if his feet had taken root.
Chords. His neck creaked as he turned toward the sound. Unlike a rough, rhythmic slap, a sweet, soft melody built on harmonics flowed out in the exact phrasing he remembered—a song he had heard to the point of exhaustion as a child, like a lullaby.
And no wonder. The line he had just heard was the bassline his cousin, Shin Seongil, had always played.
An awl in a pocket.
That was the old saying. Unpack it, and it meant that outstanding talent, exceptional ability, would show itself to the world no matter how hard a person tried to hide it. Stars with a gift that simply could not be concealed would walk roads that had nothing to do with music, and still, in the end, find their way back.
Taeil had once refused to believe in any such thing. He had respected the man. And after watching, in real time, as that exceptionally skilled cousin fell apart, he believed in it even less.
But that, too, was already long ago. As the years passed and he made up his mind to accept reality, he decided that for people who pursued band music, luck like an awl in a pocket simply did not happen.
At least—he had to add one condition to that proposition. So long as they insisted on staying in Korea.
The Republic of Korea. A wasteland for rock, a neighborhood that might as well have been its grave. Coming into the twenty-first century, that was truer than ever.
The turbulent twentieth century. Band music, so often dismissed as dull these days, had been revolution itself back then. Unprecedented sounds, unbound by any rule, were more experimental than jazz, more daring, more rebellious. Countless bands fell deep into the form and pushed it toward change and progress, and each time they did, they led the public into a new world of music.
But the world cannot stay in ferment forever. Time passed, and a twenty-first century arrived that was all but an age of stability. As if to announce that the fashion had faded, band music—the very thing that had sent great waves of change across the world—was tracing a slow downward curve.
Japan was no exception. It had been surging back of late, but it still felt as though it lagged a little behind the idol market.
Even so.
Bands have it far better in Japan than in Korea.
What was impossible in Korea might be possible in Japan. They might never succeed. But if you were going to work the field as a bandman and make a living from music, Japan was the better place. Taeil put a small faith in Japan's love of band music, and in the musical infrastructure it had built so well.
Shin Seongil's failure was the same. It had all been because the country he was born in—the country where he made his music—was Korea.
"Hey...!"
Even as he shouted it, Taeil was inwardly startled. Korean had burst out of him.
And then the melody he knew cut off dead.
Thinking the bass had finished, the people watching broke into applause all at once.
No. That melody was not supposed to break off there.
Only Taeil, cold sweat running, forced his head up and looked at the face of the one who had been playing.
A man. Not his cousin, Shin Seongil. But a face Taeil knew well.
"H-how..."
Beyond the round, rimless lenses, the softly curving, feminine fox-corners of the eyes were striking. Truly striking. A colleague Shin Seongil used to joke should have been born a woman—that God had gotten the gender wrong.
"Why is Toseong-hyung here...?"
Hyun Toseong. The drummer of the band Shin Seongil had played in had descended before Taeil's eyes.
"Hey. How've you been lately, Rena-chan?"
"Same as usual."
Rena answered coldly, striking a drum pad with her sticks and repeating a dry, mechanical practice. In time with the metronome, pad and stick met with a sharp tack. Like a machine.
From the exquisite Kal-bak of her playing—that razor-sharp, metronomic precision—and from a posture that never once slipped, Iris felt a small dissatisfaction.
Time to interfere. Iris puffed her cheeks and hung off the shoulder of Rena, who was lost in practice.
"Rena-chan, don't you get bored just hitting the pad like that...?"
"I do."
Rena nodded without resistance. She, too, would rather practice on a real kit than on a pad this plain.
But...
Midterms were coming soon, and the busking date was already right around the corner. Rena judged her situation with the same cold clarity she brought to an approaching deadline.
Objectively, where is my skill right now?
Taeil might be satisfied. The others would praise her, saying she hadn't missed a single beat.
They're wrong.
What the people around her thought didn't matter.
I'm still nowhere near enough. I can tell just from listening to other drummers.
Her ear had opened. Now that she could hear the difference in the sound, she understood with painful clarity that even before technique, her fundamentals were shaky. The one playing knew it more deeply than anyone.
Realistically, pulling my skill dramatically higher from here is impossible. Even when inspiration flashes while I'm drawing, that was only luck.
In music, which was always the real thing, she couldn't hope for the same kind of fluke as in art. Rena made a deal with herself. Rather than lifting her drumming across the board right now, she would focus a little more on playing together.
In a band, what matters most is still locking in perfectly.
They had to blend into one. Like matching harmony, many had to look like one, and for that lock to become perfect, the first thing to eliminate was mistakes.
She hated it. It was boring. There was no fun in it, nothing at all, and long hours of practice only left her shoulders and wrists aching for no good reason.
Even so, Rena repeated this joyless, pointless practice without rest.
Tack. Tack. In the practice room, the only sounds were the metronome and Rena hitting the pad. No backing track at all—nothing but a single metronome—and even Iris, watching from the side, found the sight painfully dry.
"Gyaaaah! Rena-chan! Want me to throw in a riff instead? Something flashy—ja-jang! Like this!"
"If you're going to get in the way of practice, get out."
"I'm sorryyy..."
Against her will, Rena looked away from Iris crumpling beside her like a piece of trash. Her head was already so full of the ensemble melody—without Iris even playing—that she had no room left for anything else.
"Haa."
Rena let out a sigh, cold sweat trickling down. Her hands faltered. Just now, in the performance she was imagining, she had lost the beat on her own.
Again. Repeat that measure from just now.
Until she could do it. Like an old monk striking a wooden fish, Rena emptied her mind and filled the beat in once more from the beginning.
The goal—until she could reproduce the performance without even being conscious of it.
A natural fill is still too much for me. So...
If a lack of ability made it hard to bring out a feeling of her own, she had no choice but to cling a little more closely to the original. Exactly as the score was written. Splitting the beat mechanically, and in the end even the dynamics—control of the sound itself.
I absolutely cannot be wrong.
Rena obsessed over perfection because she didn't want to disgrace herself, or the band.
Every member of a band had one defining trait. First, the vocal. Most came out of the frontman role, so their mere presence tended to stand out. Next, the guitar. They produced about as many frontmen as vocals did, but what actually drew the eye was when the playing was good. A guitar that played disgustingly well had a stage presence that cut through any ordinary vocal and every other instrument and lodged straight in the ear.
Next, the bass, which bands always treated, somehow, as the pitiful one. Strangely, it was the unlucky case whose presence was felt precisely by not standing out—recognized so naturally that its absence left a hole.
Well then. What about the last of them, the drums, the very sound of the band's heart?
The answer was this: the worse you played, the more you stood out. Befitting an instrument whose sound could sway a band's entire genre, the more you missed, the more enormously you showed. A band was collaborative work, so the back-and-forth with the others mattered. You couldn't stick out just because you thought you were doing well on your own. Mistakes that arose along the way had to be cut down as far as possible, and even when they happened, you had to glide past them as if they weren't mistakes at all.
"A live show doesn't stop because I messed up."
"Well, yeah?"
"And I wasn't originally from this side to begin with. That's all the more reason I don't want to mess up."
Rena let out a deep sigh.
Should've just stuck to drawing. What was I thinking, crossing over to play drums?
If she made a mistake, that was exactly the kind of abuse she'd get dumped on her by the bucket. She already had a fair number of antis who called her arrogant, thanks to a personality that was prickly to begin with.
"This isn't only for Shin."
Rena corrected her slipped posture, then struck the pad hard in perfect time. Tok. Tok. Between the clicks of the metronome, her beat split fine.
"It's for myself, too."
"Rena-chan..."
"I'm going to lay the ground so you, Iris, can sing your heart out without worrying about the rest of us."
Like the heart of the band. She would send blood to the brain and every limb, so the vocal could breathe.
"So."
Rena closed Iris's hands around her own trembling ones and steadied them. Quietly. Eyes like a deep blue sea, sunk without a trace of murk, fixed on Iris.
"You say you believe in me, too."
"I do."
"With a little more sincerity."
"Hehe."
Iris stuck out her tongue, and Rena smiled wryly.
She'd do it. So she wouldn't be ashamed of herself.
Just you wait, Shin. I'm going to shock you.
Hoping for Taeil's praise, Rena steadied her wavering heart and set her grip on the sticks.