Busking (6)
"Let's meet. Right now."
It hadn't come by text. Tae-il had called.
Something urgent lived in his voice, and Sakuya told him to come.
The moment she got home, she scrubbed herself clean.
"Sniff, sniff. I don't smell like sweat, do I...?"
You can't smell yourself. Human beings are a truly unfair design.
Sakuya's face pinched. Ever since a friend, back in the days when practice left her constantly drenched, had told her she gave off a sour stink, she had been almost obsessive about staying clean.
"Where did I put that perfume..."
In the end, still fussing at hair that hadn't quite dried, she dug out the bottle she kept carefully enshrined inside her vanity.
"Okay."
She misted the nape of her neck and the insides of her wrists, drew a long breath, and waited for Tae-il by the front door.
Her heart was pounding. Tae-il had never come to her house this late at night.
"Should I just jump him?"
For one instant a bad idea took her over. Someone like Tae-il, she could pin without breaking a sweat. And for all the talk of gender equality, when a man gets taken by force by a woman, the world's eyes still go a little strange.
More than anything—
Tae-il would never put me in a difficult spot.
On that point her faith was iron.
"No. I still can't do it that way. If I did, Tae-il would definitely hate it..."
Sakuya shook her head, trying to fling the thought off.
"Right. I have to make Tae-il be the one who jumps me. Crushed under the guilt, with no choice but to take me..."
She had not flung off a single thing.
Deliberately, Sakuya peeled off her shirt and pulled on a workout tank. She planted herself in front of the full-length mirror and checked the exposure.
"Armpits showing. The underside of my chest, too..."
Not content with that, she kept the outfit light on purpose and let the bathroom's damp, steaming heat stay on her skin so the flush wouldn't fade.
"Perfect."
Sakuya studied herself in the glass and nodded, satisfied. Anyone looking would have called it soaked in sex. It carried that particular sultriness the slim little books rely on—the kind that makes the delivery guy lose his head.
"When's he coming..."
She was soothing her thudding heart, waiting on his visit, when the doorbell rang.
"Coming!"
Sakuya shot to her feet as if she'd been waiting for exactly that and opened the door. Tae-il stood there in a loose hoodie, apology already written across his face. The instant their eyes met, he said it.
"Sorry for showing up so late."
"You're not."
She was glad, if anything. Sakuya beamed and welcomed him in.
Stepping into the room, Tae-il let his gaze flick without thinking. A man's instinct. Sakuya knew at once that his eyes had gone to the slack strap sliding off her shoulder.
Their eyes met. She grinned, and Tae-il flushed and yanked his gaze away.
"Heh."
This was fun. Giggling, Sakuya led him into the living room. The first time he'd visited, the place had held nothing but manga and sports gear. Now an amp and a guitar sat there as if they belonged.
"Did you shower?"
"I just came from working out. Greeting a guest all sticky and smelly would've been kind of awful, right?"
"I mean, you're not wrong..."
Tae-il wore the look of a man with far too much he wanted to say. Sakuya laughed it off. She came back with a tray of simple snacks and tea and asked,
"So? What brings you to a house where a high school girl lives alone, at this hour of the night?"
"There's something I wanted to ask you. Personally..."
"Ask me?"
"It's about Rena."
When Tae-il said a thing was about Rena, the odds were high it was about the band.
"I see..."
Sakuya drank her tea and smiled, bitter. She wasn't disappointed. Shin Tae-il had been this kind of man from the start: a man who, in any situation, kept his heart unmoved and put the band first.
"All right."
If anything, her head felt clearer. The pounding was gone, but one fact hadn't changed. He had come all the way here to ask her for something that was at least cousin to a favor.
I'll just squeeze a fair price out of him.
A date for the two of them, like last time, would do. So would keeping him in this room and spending time that belonged only to them. Sakuya laced her fingers and propped her chin on her hands. She blinked, quick.
At the look that said get to the point, Tae-il opened his mouth.
"Match your mouth to mine."
"I'm in!"
"Not a kiss!"
Eyes alight, Sakuya had already been offering her lips, and Tae-il barked it at her.
In a hotel near Roppongi, Toseong sat on the edge of the bed and read in quiet concentration. Lines of text climbed fast across the reflection in his glasses.
"Mmm."
A woman with light brown hair, fresh from the bath, dried her soaked head with a towel and hooked her chin over his shoulder.
"What are you staring at so hard?"
"A personal blog."
"One of those cosplay photo dumps? You can pull all of those up in a scroll just by searching Twitter."
"It's about a band."
"A band?"
An unexpected word had come out of Toseong's mouth, and she tilted her head.
"You said you helped with some busking in Yoyogi while I was gone. Did that actually get you interested? Thinking of doing it again?"
"As if I would."
Toseong smiled, shut off his phone, pulled her in, and threw them both onto the bed. He took off his glasses and buried his face in her shoulder.
"I met Seongil's cousin."
"Seongil's? How did you meet his cousin? Don't tell me Seongil's in Japan right now too."
"No. The cousin just lives here, apparently. Said he'd even seen our old shows."
"Oh my, oh my. That's practically fate, isn't it?"
"And he has a band too."
"Oh. Oops."
Band. For Toseong the word was nearly taboo. The reason he and his younger brother, Suseong, got along so badly was that Suseong was still in one.
"They're busking in Yoyogi in a few days."
"Are you going to watch?"
"I already said I would. Nngh..."
"Idiot. If it hurts, just say no."
"How was I supposed to say no..."
He'd been the one to bring it up, and now that the words were out he was starting to regret them. If he hadn't already locked in his flight, he might have scraped together an excuse of his own.
"I'm scared."
"Of what? That you'll put your hands on music again?"
She asked, and Toseong, face buried in both hands, nodded.
Music's addictiveness is lethal. It isn't called the only drug the state permits for nothing. Fall in once and your brains run out of your skull, your senses go numb, and even while your hands and feet are being cut away you still can't climb back out. His girlfriend, who remembered Toseong at his peak, smiled faintly at the memory.
"Then just start again. Is that so hard?"
"I couldn't look Seongil in the face."
After the way they'd torn into each other, if he announced he was making music again, he would absolutely be laughed at. The thought alone was hideous. Toseong dry-washed his face. Above the hands covering his jaw, his eyes had lost their focus.
"Suseong would laugh at me too, wouldn't he...?"
"Wouldn't he be glad, if anything? He's insanely busy these days just earning formula money."
"Ha! Then why'd he go and have the kid before the wedding..."
"Don't be so hard on him. Not running away, and actually taking responsibility—that's already a lot."
"If he hadn't taken it, I'd have killed him."
The home Toseong had grown up in was not a good one. A single mother. Their father, out of Shandong in China, had gotten his hands on Korean citizenship and vanished without a trace. The two brothers had made a vow. They would die before they became irresponsible men like that bastard who had thrown his family away and left.
"Heh. So how about it? Should we make a baby too?"
"No thank you."
"Excuse me? Does my baby not want to marry me?"
At his cold refusal she pushed her lips out in a pout. Toseong let out a short laugh.
"Just enjoy it while you're young. Cosplay, whatever it is. It gets hard once you're older, you know?"
"You sound like an old man."
"First I need a stable job of my own..."
Children were a matter for after that. Toseong drew the line, cool and clean.
"I don't want to become someone who won't take responsibility."
"Heh. I'll respect that."
She patted his back.
Mom...
Raised under a mother who sang in a jazz bar, Toseong and Suseong had started part-time work young, wanting to help the house. Both of them were good-looking enough that jobs, surprisingly, came easy. Thanks to their mother's connections among the overseas Chinese, they could even land work that didn't match their age. One of those jobs was at a club. Naturally exposed to every kind of music, the two of them ended up putting their hands on it anyway. A rock band. They got taken in by that snake-oil peddler named Shin Seongil, and before they knew it they had debuted as an indie band.
The result was wretched. In Korea, an indie band was a job that would not make money if you died trying. What good is it for a band to have personality and skill? The public doesn't want that. Even a competition show built for bands withers the moment it stops feeding the public's taste. The Korean band scene was dead. The answer was overseas. In fact, quite a few bands, unbound by the domestic market and pushing fresh genres and strange visions, were more famous abroad than at home. But Shin Seongil, stubborn to the bone, simply would not believe in the limits of a domestic band. The conflict piled up, and piled up, and then it blew.
"Saying every feeling out loud, all of it... sometimes I don't think that's the right answer either."
"Hard, isn't it? This thing called people."
"It's hard."
After that, word of Seongil cut off clean. Toseong put his head down in his studies, got into a decent university, and was living off scholarships. Suseong did not give up music. The poison had struck him too deep. His stubbornness was filthy strong besides. Fortunately, once the weight of being the head of a household landed on him as well, the man who hadn't changed even for a starving profession finally did.
"The kid who wouldn't even glance at a session gig because he had to do his own music—these days he's wearing out his shoes all over the place."
"Heh. I heard that too."
The first time Toseong heard that his little brother, who had been making music as a lone wolf, had suddenly joined a house band, he thought the sky had fallen in.
"I thought it was a lie. Then there he was on some competition show, playing guitar for all he was worth..."
"Ahaha!"
Toseong closed his eyes. Even he thought Suseong played guitar remarkably well. Otherwise, why had people sent him love calls to collaborate, even back in his lone-wolf days? The problem was that even he couldn't make any money.
"Think Japan might be a little different?"
"Isn't the hard part the same everywhere? The market's bigger, sure. But I cosplay because it's fun, not because I'm looking at the money."
"Yeah..."
If anything, Tae-il struck Toseong as strange. That unbending attitude of still choosing music after watching Shin Seongil fail.
"Still, he's Seongil's little cousin. He'll be good, right?"
"Didn't he see your show back in Korea? If it was good enough to show you, he must be pretty confident, no?"
"Mmm..."
Toseong dodged the answer. Honestly, the band they had put together back then had been close to cheating just by existing.
He said they were students, so at best it's a school band...
It might have been prejudice, but what stands out most in a school band is the vocalist. The vocalist does all the eating.
Our vocalist was a cheat code too, but the rest of us weren't exactly pushovers either...
He didn't have any great expectations for Tae-il's band.
Even so.
"Do you happen to have time?"
"I do."
He couldn't quite keep his own curiosity down either.
"The most important thing in a band is a sense of community."
A sense of community. For Sakuya, who thrived in team sports, it wasn't an unfamiliar phrase. Volleyball and the other team sports she played were forever preaching teamwork. Even the people running things, the moment it became a team contest, tended to hammer that word without rest. A band was the same. If anything, it sometimes showed a bond stickier than the relationships among ordinary team athletes.
"In sports, every player has a position, right?"
"Mhm, mhm."
Even if you aren't flashy like a striker, there are defenders who quietly hold the team up from behind.
"In a band, that'd be the bass and the rhythm guitar."
"In volleyball, blockers make the defense pretty visible in its own way."
"Haha. The point is this."
Athletes prove their worth with results and with salary, so sorting them into ranks is relatively easy.
"But a band doesn't really have a standard like that."
You can be acknowledged by the other members, or by fans, or by the experts, and that is as far as it goes. Do you get paid more? If the albums don't sell and the music doesn't succeed, nobody makes money. It's all the same. There is one exception.
"Royalties."
"Copyright?"
At the mention of copyright, Sakuya's ears pricked up. As a rule a band treats its own producing as the foundation, but even there the paths split in two. In one, a single member handles the composition from end to end and does the producing alone. In the other, the members collaborate evenly and haul the writing and the producing forward together.
"Usually, the closer you get to the second kind, the stronger each member's star power."
The Beatles had been that way. Queen had been that way. Even taking Japan, bands like X Japan and Luna Sea had been that way.
"The second kind is fine, because everybody gets their own spotlight."
Each of them already has star power, so the money comes in on its own. In practice, with that second kind, it's almost absurd how often every member keeps doing well even after the band breaks up. The problem is the first kind.
"When the producing is piled onto one person, there are more problems than you'd think."
"Copyright problems?"
The income copyright brings in is genuinely enormous. Because she dreamed of being a manga artist, Sakuya understood the power of an IP better than anyone. For a creator, living off royalties is a dream so far off it barely looks real. Even in Japan, where the otaku industry has flourished, the people who can actually do it are not common. It's something reserved for so-called S-rank creators. Tae-il nodded.
"Right."
One: the income can fall out of balance.
"If everybody sticks their hands into the writing and you just put the copyright in the band's name, maybe it's fine..."
"Otherwise one person swallows the whole thing?"
"While the band's together and everybody gets along, they might split it. After they break up, one person will end up taking all of it."
When everyone is doing well and still close, it's fine. The problem is when conflict opens up between the members and they drift apart.
"The biggest thing is the feeling of being left out. In a band like that, as long as you keep the frontman, the rest of the members hardly matter."
Even if the band swaps members all the time, it doesn't make much noise. Why? Because the musical identity survived. The popular member is the frontman anyway, and the ones who change are spare parts, ready to be replaced whenever.
"A band that's supposed to roll forward as one starts using its members like parts in a factory."
Of course the real relationships might not be like that. If anything, the bond itself is often tight. The problem is when the relationship is good and the member still can't feel that the band needs them.
"I think that's where Rena is right now."
Burnout was burnout, but the real problem was belonging, and whether she felt necessary.
"In our band, aside from me and Iris, nobody's musical opinions run very deep. You could say we don't have any."
Whenever the talk turned musical, the current of the conversation was driven by two people: Tae-il and Iris.
"So the rest of us just get left out. Naturally."
"Right."
"Yeah. I do get that feeling sometimes."
Ayane, at least, was studying harmony. Sakuya was only memorizing the knowledge she needed, then playing on the back of brutal practice and an inborn instinct.
"A band that leans on the frontman this hard doesn't have anything like individual member work, the way idols do."
At most, sitting in as a session player on someone else's stage? In Korea, even working pros out on the field, short on money, can make an income teaching—online courses, cram-school instructing, playing teacher to idols and the other talent signed to agencies. This wasn't Korea, and it would be strange to debut and then suddenly start teaching. Get caught by the fans doing that sort of thing on the side, and you're the only one who loses. They'll ask why you aren't focusing on the actual job and dump every criticism they can think of on you.
"And they might take a swing at how the money inside the band even gets split. Right?"
"Yeah."
"Mhm. Money really is the root of all evil."
When she was little, Sakuya had often watched adults fight over it.
"So what you're saying is, if we succeed, you're the one who makes the most?"
"Haha. I'm going to split it all the same..."
"Really!?"
"Why are your eyes lighting up at that?"
He glared, and Sakuya sulked and stuck out her tongue. He owed the members. To everyone except Iris, especially, that debt ran deep. If it would lighten it, money like that was truly nothing to him. Of course the whole thing rested on the premise of success.
"Anyway, I didn't come here to talk about money."
"Right. You said it was because of Rena."
"I said because of Rena, but only because Rena's the one showing the signs."
Sakuya and Ayane sat just as squarely inside the circle of people he meant to look after.
"A producer is no more all-powerful than a coach on a pro team."
A producer only plans the process, manages it, and sits in the seat that takes the blame.
"Some music producers have a born eye and almost no musical opinion of their own."
Tae-il himself had come through a practical music program. His résumé was only a little longer; it wasn't outstanding skill. Being born again had bought him the time to pick up a grab bag of techniques, but he didn't have a perfect grasp of every instrument.
"The way a parent never fully understands their own kid. I don't have a complete hold on every part of the songs I write, either."
Tae-il needed help too. And that help was something they could lend even if they weren't on Iris's level.
"Besides, you're the ones who'll be playing these songs with me."
"Right?"
"I want to really hear what you think, too."
"Like you did with Ayane?"
Tae-il nodded. He'd come up a bassist, so whenever he wrote he tended to get a little greedy with the bass. Trivial to him. For Ayane, still a beginner, it landed as a serious burden.
"I still regret it a little, even now..."
"Hmm?"
"Ayane can't refuse me if I ask. I knew that, and I still feel like I pushed her, so..."
He had lectured Ayane on how important the bass was, and the whole time his conscience had been stinging.
"Hmm?"
At the confession, arriving out of nowhere, Sakuya's eyes went half-lidded and she looked at him sideways.
"Then what about me?"
"Huh?"
"Did you come because you figured I couldn't refuse you either, same as Ayane?"
"Haha. I can't say that had nothing to do with it..."
"Mean."
Sakuya let out a short laugh.
"Well, fine. I'll give you the chance to be a bad guy. What, specifically, are you asking?"
"I want to give Rena more of a sense that she belongs."
"Belonging how?"
"I've been thinking about this way too simply."
Tae-il had a wealth of live experience. He had never stood on a truly enormous stage, but he had felt the way a live show's afterglow addicts a person. From his own experience, he had believed, hard, that if the members went through that ecstasy of feeling as if they owned the world, they would change.
"I thought living through a show would solve all of it."
Right now, aside from Iris, the members of Tales Tale didn't have enough of a reason to keep making music.
"Sakuya, you know this. In the arts and in sports, if it isn't something you truly love, you can't last."
Even Tae-il, who had loved music, had felt his heart fold under failure after failure. What if you don't even like it? You quit. And if you can't quit? You break. Not only Tae-il. Countless young hopefuls had snapped that way, and then dried up.
"Well, on that part I agree with you. I do sports because I basically can, but I also like moving my body that much."
Manga was the same. She had failed again and again and still hadn't quit, because she loved drawing that much.
"But our girls aren't in a band because they love music. Not even as a polite lie..."
"Ahaha."
Sakuya remembered their date, and how desperately Tae-il had struggled to make her feel the charm of the band and of playing live.
So he'd already seen this coming.
Back then she had only been blind with love, and his effort had looked like nothing but something admirable, something to praise.
Yeah. Just like Tae-il said. Me, and Rena, and even Ayane...
None of the three were in the band because they loved music. They were blind with love. They were forcing themselves to fit, for love's sake. Rena's situation was even worse. Looked at in the extreme, Sakuya and Ayane only had to give up on the love. Sakuya was already certain Tae-il would not turn his back on them over a thing like that.
But Iris?
Rena might lose not only the love, but the friend who had been her support for so long. The stress of doing a band while not even liking music might, perhaps, run deeper for her than it did for Iris or for Tae-il.
"Ahaha."
Sakuya let a dry smile slip. Facing the truth she had been working so hard not to look at did not feel good. An awkwardness and a discomfort, like wearing a body that didn't fit, left a grimy feeling on her.
"So I'm going to change the approach a little."
"How?"
"From here on, I'm going to pull all of you into the band's creative work more actively."
"You mean composing?"
"Composition would be best, of course, but I think it's still too soon for us."
"Thank god. Actually, I think so too."
She wished she could call up anything at all, but at the mere first letter of compose, Sakuya's head was a blank sheet of paper.
"We'll start with what's easy. Researching melodies that sound good, together. For you, Sakuya, finding a guitar tone that's yours would be fine."
"Hmm. But will just that be enough?"
"On top of that, I'm going to keep leaving Rena's mark on this band."
"Her mark...?"
Tae-il set his teacup down.
"Sakuya."
A serious tone. His eyes had changed, and he straightened where he sat. Then he asked.