Busking (3)
Hyun Toseong.
A man who stood out for his unusual name, and for looks more unusual still.
"T-Toseong-hyung..."
Tae-il got the name out in a trembling voice.
Hearing himself called, Hyun Toseong broke off mid-phrase on the bass and smiled with his eyes, gentle as a male lead lifted straight out of a shoujo manga.
"Hey."
The voice sat a little high for a man, androgynous — and it was, without question, the Hyun Toseong Tae-il knew.
Faced with a meeting he had never seen coming, Tae-il froze where he stood.
What do I do?
His head went white. Blank as unused paper.
When Tae-il said nothing, Toseong set the bass down, rose slowly from his place, and came toward him.
Their eyes met at nearly the same height. He was slender enough that you had to wonder whether he could really drive a drum kit at all. And yet, somehow, Tae-il felt the same crushing pressure he had felt being interviewed by a seasoned professional.
Five years had passed since the band broke up. Perhaps, precisely because Tae-il had never stepped in or interfered, it had fallen apart even sooner than it otherwise might have.
Toseong asked.
"Didn't think I'd run into a Korean here. Do you know me? I don't think I've seen your face."
"Ah... that's..."
Tae-il tripped over his own words. He had no answer ready. His hands flailed at empty air as if he might catch hold of something in it.
At the ridiculous sight, Toseong laughed out loud.
"Ahaha! Sorry. I came on too strong, didn't I?"
"N-no!"
Toseong pushed his glasses up and stood at a slight angle.
Was the rumor true, then — that he had entered the cross-dressing contest on the school trip and taken the win without breaking a sweat?
A strange tension circled between the two of them.
Too late, Tae-il regretted it.
This is bad. I was so shocked I spoke to him without thinking...
Getting to know him, growing close — that had all belonged to his previous life. Not to now. Even so, it wasn't as if the two of them had no point of contact at all.
Tae-il steadied his breath and introduced himself.
"I-I'm Shin Tae-il."
"Shin Tae-il...?"
Toseong's eyes went round.
In Korea it was a name that had grown extremely famous thanks to a certain anime. Toseong belonged to the generation that had watched it live on tube televisions, so the name sat deep in his memory.
More than that.
Shin, and Il...
A surname of Shin, and a given name ending in il, stirred an odd sense of déjà vu.
Toseong's eyes narrowed as he looked Tae-il over.
They looked alike. The stiff face, the cold sweat, the tension — it was exactly like him and his little brother, who swore they looked nothing alike and yet smiled in precisely the same way.
Soo-sung would be shocked if he heard this.
Toseong smiled softly and put the question to Tae-il, whose nerves were written all over him.
"Shin Seongil?"
Of course.
The guess had landed. Tae-il nodded hard enough to rattle his head. The world really was small. Who would have thought he would come to Japan on a trip and run straight into someone tied to an old friend?
Right. He did say he had a cousin in Japan.
Toseong smiled wryly. A memory he had let pass without a second thought, and then forgotten, forced itself back into place as if someone had jammed it in by hand.
Still, if he was going to ask, he ought to ask.
He uncrossed his arms and asked gently.
"So. What's our friend Shin Tae-il's relation to Shin Seongil?"
"W-we're cousins! I started bass thanks to Seongil-hyung, too...!"
"Haha."
Toseong raised a hand and cut the outburst short.
"Did I... do something wrong?"
"Nah. Not wrong, exactly."
Toseong tipped his head a little to one side and pointed into the gap with his thumb.
"Behind you...?"
Tae-il followed the thumb with his eyes and found the band waiting for Toseong to come back.
"Yeah. Mind waiting a minute? The set isn't over yet."
"O-okay!"
Toseong excused himself and returned to the band. He took up the bass again. A light warm-up, and then the performance proper began.
It's... fine.
It was so thoroughly ordinary that Tae-il could sit with the mess of his feelings and sort them out in peace. Maybe because Toseong had started out as a drummer. Ordinary as the playing was, the sense of rhythm was still uncanny.
Even so, it was a shame. The image of Shin Seongil had only surfaced while they were warming up.
I would've rather seen him on the drums...
Tae-il knew what Toseong could do. He watched the show carrying a deep regret the crowd cheering around him would never understand.
After the show, the two of them sat on the round bench spread beneath a large tree in front of a convenience store near the park.
"Haa. Been a while since I worked up a sweat."
"Sweat...?"
Tae-il stared, curious, as Toseong flapped his shirttail and complained of the heat. His hair was perfectly dry, not a trace of damp in it. No one looking at him would have thought he had tired himself out, or sweated, while he played.
Catching the look, Toseong opened his palm and held it out. Sweat had left the lines of his hand faintly slick.
"Haha. Believe it or not, I was a little nervous. It's been forever since I played in front of people..."
"So you don't play at all these days?"
"Sometimes?"
He muttered it the way a person does when it seems a waste not to use a skill already learned.
"Well, my little brother asks me to help out now and then. I haven't put the instrument away for good."
"Your brother..."
"Hyun Soo-sung. You know him, right?"
"I do."
Hyun Soo-sung. Toseong's younger brother, a year apart, on guitar. The only one. The only member who had never given up on music, all the way to the end.
Tae-il had gotten a great deal of help from him, too. As a guitarist his name carried real weight even around Hongdae, enough that he sat in as a session player at concerts for famous singers. After the shotgun pregnancy, he took on more of that work than gigs in Hongdae. Once he had grown seasoned, free concert tickets came his way often enough, and Tae-il had owed him plenty.
"Um, then the people you played with today...?"
"Oh, them?"
When Tae-il looked uneasy, Toseong gave a light wave of his hand and smiled, as if to say there was nothing to worry about.
"Internet friends. An otaku circle? Something like that."
"An otaku circle...?"
"My girlfriend likes cosplay. There are a lot of events for it in Japan, so sometimes I tag along as the pack mule..."
He shook his head, adding that for her personal shoots he sometimes got dragged along as the cameraman instead.
"For the record, she's probably off with her otaku friends in Ikebukuro right now."
"Ah, r-right. Otome Road?"
"You know it?"
"A-ahaha..."
Tae-il looked away. It was a neighborhood thick with memories he would rather not have.
"So the band is for otaku events, then?"
"It just sort of happened?"
He said the trouble had started when a drummer got hurt and looked so lost that he felt sorry for him and stepped in to help.
"Earlier I saw them promoting really hard, saying the band had a live show today. Are you...?"
"Yeah. I agreed to play with them as a guest."
"I see..."
Watching Toseong admit it so calmly, Tae-il made a complicated face that was hard to put into words.
"You disappointed I'm not getting up there with Seongil?"
"I don't know."
Tae-il pressed his thumb hard into his palm. What was rising in his chest was something stronger than disappointment. He did not want to know what that feeling was.
Toseong glanced sidelong at him and shrugged.
"Guess you really are Seongil's little cousin."
"Huh?"
"Same habit, when you're swallowing your anger."
"A-anger...?"
"No?"
"..."
Toseong ruffled Tae-il's hair, rough about it.
"You really looked up to him, huh?"
"...Yeah."
"Haha. He was a good older brother, then?"
"Not really."
"Hm?"
"He was always snapping at people, petty, and when he decided to be cold he was disgustingly cold."
"Yeah. That's the Seongil we knew, all right."
With a bitter smile, Toseong smoothed the ponytail that fell to his waist.
"Still, Seongil's human too. I think he held a lot in. He sacrificed a lot."
"What Seongil-hyung did wasn't sacrifice. It was playing the clown."
"..."
At the time, no one had thought he was sacrificing himself for the band. They had taken him for a man misunderstanding things on his own, throwing himself at the band, making a scene. Everyone had been looking in a different direction. A failure to communicate, born of each member's outstanding skill, and a handful of small misunderstandings, had driven the band to ruin in the end.
Tae-il sipped his canned coffee. Toseong sent his empty can into the trash in a clean arc and asked.
"You in touch with Seongil?"
"No..."
"I see. So even his family doesn't know."
Toseong straightened, leaned back against the tree, and looked toward the park entrance with melancholy eyes.
It was evening, and the crowd had thinned, but groups were still performing. Plenty of people were packing up after their sets as well — guitar and bass cases on their backs, laughing and talking. Men and women alike, every one of them enjoying the music.
"I think about it sometimes."
"About what?"
"Whether we would've ended somewhere else, if the place we were born and met had been Japan instead of Korea. Something like that."
It was a cheap excuse, the kind that would have sent Shin Seongil into a rage, and Toseong hunched his shoulders.
"Sorry. Funny, right?"
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Got sentimental without meaning to. Tae-il, was it? Seongil badmouthed us a lot, didn't he?"
"He didn't..."
"...Really?"
The conversation broke off there again.
Toseong was turning over memories of Shin Seongil. Memory gets prettied up. The human brain is a nasty thing; it plucks out only the memories it needs and stores those. What remains is only what flatters you.
The band...
To be cold about it, Toseong wanted to forget every memory of band life tangled up with Shin Seongil. The band that had burned through his youth was full of memories — and just as full of wounds. More than anything, Seongil's cry, fierce enough that it refused to fade, still rang clear in his ear more than five years later, and that hurt too much.
He had lost a friend. Losing him over something that wasn't even a big deal made it feel worse.
Why did we have to burn ourselves out, and fight, and split, over something like that?
That was how he had felt then. Which was why, choking on it all the harder, he had taken Seongil to task. He had wrecked the set and thrown his sticks away. He had thrown out the drum pad and the snare that had taken up one corner of his room, every last piece. He had wanted to forget.
On impulse, Toseong cleared out everything connected to Seongil. It was vacation. The simple fact that he would not have to see him at school only pushed him further.
The gear, at least, Soo-sung managed to salvage somehow...
The person was already gone. The band was dead.
Toseong sipped his coffee in silence and watched the bands drifting farther away. He regretted it. But when he imagined feeling that way again, he sometimes thought that now was better.
"I do think I owe Seongil an apology."
"That's..."
"And at the same time, I don't want to get tangled up with him again."
"R-right..."
"Sorry. I'm not saying Seongil was the bad one."
"I know."
Tae-il found it hard to say anything carelessly. In this life, he had no ties to them.
Even so. Just once — when he had gone back to Korea — he had seen them.
"I've seen you on stage."
"Haha. Yeah? That was when we were really green. Just thinking about it makes me cringe..."
"You looked like you were having fun."
"Seongil?"
"You too, Toseong-hyung. All of you were smiling."
"..."
In a pure memory with no filter on it and nothing else besides, they had been a band like a picture. The kind of band that, had it come out of a manga or an anime, would have been guaranteed to succeed.
"Seongil-hyung was a weirdo from the time he was little."
"I thought you two were close."
"How do you get close to the cousin who's the holiday villain?"
"Ah..."
In this life they had barely had any point of contact at all, but even in the previous one, he could not say he and Seongil had simply gotten along. Tae-il had been a kid starving for attention and affection, and Seongil was already a teenager who more or less knew everything he cared to know. To Tae-il, Seongil was someone to play with. To Seongil, Tae-il was just a nuisance. They missed each other every time.
Tae-il would play with the plastic models Seongil had painstakingly built and smash them to pieces, and he would take the toys home without asking. The star of those legendary nephew-and-cousin stories that flooded the forums every holiday. To Seongil, Tae-il had been exactly that. An evil spirit, plain and simple.
Their relationship flipped the day Tae-il asked Seongil to teach him bass.
"Back then, hyung's eyes lit up."
"Haha. That Seongil?"
"I never dreamed the hyung who only ever got annoyed could get his voice that high."
At first Tae-il had been irritated, and spiteful, at the way Seongil looked down on him. He always put Tae-il last and threw himself into bass practice like a madman. But that did not last. The more he watched Seongil play, the deeper he fell in.
Cool. It was not the bass itself that had captivated him. In young Tae-il's eyes, Seongil making music looked like someone who had it all together. He had wanted to be cool, too.
"When I asked him to teach me bass, hyung was ridiculously happy."
So much so that it was hard to believe this was the same person who had disliked him a moment before.
"There aren't many people back home who decide to learn bass on their own. Seongil must have been glad, deep down."
"At first he yelled at me a lot."
He had been young, and his hands were not strong enough to pluck the strings properly. His fingers hurt, and he would burst into tears in the middle of playing. The bass was so heavy he gasped that he could not breathe. Every time, Seongil scolded him — what are you doing — instead of comforting him. Looking back at how lost and flustered he had been, he had probably just had no idea how to soothe a kid younger than himself.
"He was... more of a drill sergeant than I thought..."
"Haha."
Even now, Seongil was an excellent bassist. Tae-il had simply been unable to keep up with someone who taught without any knack for teaching.
"It was fun, though."
There had been plenty of twists along the way, but time spent thick and unhurried with someone else was bound to be enjoyable.
But Seongil's lessons came to an end.
Crack.
The bass Seongil had put in Tae-il's arms and taught him on was slammed into the floor. The neck snapped. The strings went slack and hung limp. From Seongil, who had destroyed with his own hands the thing he treasured most in the world, came anger, grief, and despair he could not hide.
"..."
Tae-il bowed his head, solemn. Toseong had a rough sense of what had followed, and kept his silence.
"I..."
Only after a long while did Tae-il manage to open his mouth.
"I'm busking soon. Here."
"As a band, not solo?"
"Yes. We're aiming for a major label. It might be more ambition than I have any right to, the way it was for Seongil-hyung..."
The members, better than Tae-il deserved, had declared they would follow that will.
"We're going to debut."
A vow he had forgotten came back to life. Izumi. Iris. The memory he had carved into his chest even before the promise he had made the two of them put the strength back into his hands.
"We'll debut, and we'll succeed. And then I'll tell him."
That you weren't wrong, hyung.
"..."
Toseong quietly studied the light in Tae-il's eyes. Clear.
He's not losing his head and running wild the way Seongil did.
Of course he wasn't. Seongil had treated of course as far too obvious. The members' will had not been in it. There had only been a tyrant, declaring that they accept the obvious ending.
Fortunately, the cousin — who did not know even a fragment of the truth — looked different from that older brother, who had been closer to a tyrant and a dictator. Of course, the breakup had not been Seongil's fault alone. If you divided the blame, Toseong was not free of it either.
Which was why he wanted to see it for himself, just once.
"When's your busking?"
All at once, Toseong was curious. What shape that band might take — the one made by a cousin who was as good as the tyrant's legacy.
Otome Road.
Called a holy site for women otaku, the place was in truth also a holy site for cosplayers, where every kind of cosplay shop had gathered.
"Achoo!"
A cute sneeze sounded inside the shop.
"Shironeko? You okay?"
"Sniff."
When the woman called Shironeko suddenly sniffled, her companions looked at her with worry. She flashed them a smile that said not to fuss.
"I'm fine, I'm fine! It was just one sneeze. More importantly, look at this wig!"
"Kyaaa! It's Hoshiro!"
"Should I put it on my boyfriend? I think it'd suit him!"
"Really!?"
"Butler and maid! I want a duo shot beside him, me and my boyfriend both in Lingling outfits..."
"Kyaaa! Let us in! We want to do it too!"
"No, you can't! Then the reverse harem turns into a harem!"
"Isn't that fine?"
"I don't like it!"
When Shironeko flared up, her companions burst into giggles.
"Then should we dress as boys for you?"
"Ehh..."
Shironeko side-eyed them. Japanese cosplayers, every one of them — and every one of them absurdly well-endowed.
"Ugh..."
When she puffed her cheeks, they rushed to soothe her, insisting that being cute was Shironeko's whole charm.
"Or should we do the opposite?"
"How?"
"We dress Shironeko's boyfriend up as Lingling..."
"That's it!"
Shironeko's eyes sparkled.
Somewhere in Yoyogi Park, someone flinched.