Tokyo April 2010
The sweet scent of sakura floated upon the warm April breeze. I took in a deep breath, filling my lungs with the aromatic perfume of nature’s bounty. My body invigorated my head light, my heart also filled with love for the beauty and magic of the Sakura Jinja.
I loved this place. The one soothing balm that would always lessened the pain of my chaotic life. Though I have much to be thankful for of late, these blessings from the Kamis lifted me out of the darker places of my past, Jadeite the most significant of these recent boons.
But despite having Jad, and that my life was improving with each passing day, I couldn’t help but think there was something missing, something important. But what exactly I had no idea. I knew it wasn’t money. I had plenty of that.
I performed on stage with my band, dancing and singing for thousands of adoring fans both at home and abroad. I was traveling more since becoming a pop diva than I had ever done before my career as a J-pop superstar.
Yeah, you could say I had it all, but…
---
I sat before the fire each morning as was my custom whenever staying at my Ojii-san’s guesthouse on the grounds of the Sakura Jinja. I loved this place.
Yesterday, I helped my Ojii-san by planting baby Sakura trees and other flowering plants and shrubs beneath the large windows of the guesthouse. It felt so good to get my hands and knees dirty from doing something that took me so close to nature and my girlhood.
My memories, like sakura falling during the Cherry Blossom Festival, resembling snowflakes that helped melt away the hours. These cherished fragments of my life as a little girl were extra special for me as it was a time when like these saplings, I was fresh, innocent and my heart was content.
There I was, all those years ago sitting there spellbound, watching the delicate petals tumbling slowly to earth while trying vainly to count them.
The Cherry Blossom Festival was something I had always found most uplifting whenever I visited the shrine at this time of year. My world, as always, once more filled with enchantment and happiness at the sight of the pink blossoms.
Oh, how I miss those days. I also loved the snow. I adored the snowball fights in the park, rugged up, head protected against the cold, my scarf twirled about my throat ready to brave the elements. My friends and I would laugh till we cried at the fun had by all, as the snow maiden blessed us with her benediction.
I adored the cute scenes in the photographs I can picture now in my mind’s eye; on the right, I could see myself, the little raven-haired munchkin, seated cross-legged in jeans, a thick woolen coat coated with streams of glossy black hair falling about my shoulders almost to the ground. My tresses festooned with snowflakes.
There I was, with my friends, Saori and Kiowa, the three munchkins, brandishing our icy treats as Ojii-san asked us to say, ‘cheese’ -- a moment frozen forever in time, and forever a moment locked in my heart. I shuddered at the wonder of it all, how much like an ordinary little girl, I had been. Every time I pondered my childhood, and thought of the photographs in my album and stored as JPG files on my computer, I would bask in those remembrances, and allow the tears to trickle down my cheeks, revealing the most human part of me as I took a pit stop along the highway far from my risqué lifestyle.
As a girl of nine years of age, I could picture those snapshots of me skiing in the Swiss Alps and of those taken in Calgary Canada. I had participated in the Alpine Junior Skiing Tournament, getting third place and awarded the bronze medallion for my efforts. It wasn't quite the Winter Olympic Games, but it was something special and I felt proud of myself and still have it on display inside my photo album, slipped between two transparent inserts.
While in North America, I met so many people who I still keep in touch with to this very day by internet, one girl in particular, Eliza Schlitz, her father German and her mother Chinese. She was clever, funny and a great skier. We had so much fun.
I loved the shopping, especially the mall trolling on Saturday afternoons and sightseeing while I was there; the billet worked out perfectly. I adored Eliza’s sister Rayne and her younger brothers, Frederick and Klaus. I miss them so. I intend to visit there again soon. I was determined that on our next tour of the States and Canada, I would stay with them for a month.
On my twelfth birthday, I once again traveled abroad with my school classmates. I enjoyed the road trips through Asia and Europe as excursions were paid for by my father’s new ‘friends’ and to such a prepubescent, wide-eyed and ever-so sweet innocent girl that I was back then, the last thing I was interested in was where the money was coming from.
I was crying again, stroking the petals of a fragrant bloom as if it were my broken heart, my lamentations overwhelming me over all that could have been if only things were different.
I remembered with most fondness my mother lifting me into the air and spinning me about in a circle. I would squeal with delight– both mother and daughter giggling uncontrollably. I, the princess of hick-ups rewarded with a strawberry milkshake at the Crown Arcade, my treat for the day as mother chatted with the kind manager, Furuhata-sama. His eight-year-old son, Motoki and I would play rock, paper, scissors, or draw in our coloring books as we sat in the booth.
I had always been close to him. As I grew up, he would be there to support me.
Motoki’s lovely girlfriend and now fiancé, Reika and I were like sisters. I loved those days. Now it would come back to reclaim my heart and I would almost be there once again, the wide-eyed child I was all those years ago: our visits to Azabu Park, mother and Ojii-san talking while I pushed, and then jumped, upon the spinning roundabout, afterwards rushing towards the swings.
Father would never have time to spend with me back then, even though he was an honest businessman at the time, some things remained a constant as our relationship continued its downhill slide over the years. I used to cry myself to sleep over his lack of attentiveness, but around the age of twelve or thirteen years of age, I stopped.
Something had changed the moment I began to go through puberty. I felt as if growing up displeased him, so I acted the child and refused to grow up until I had realized that no matter what I did, he would continue to ignore me.
Then later, there was my induction into the Shachihoko and the rest you know.
My thoughts leapt forward, making their way through the corridors of time, bringing me back to the present. Although my life for the most part was difficult, I was proud of the children I had sponsored and liberated from destitution and a life of crime that otherwise would have been their fate. I smiled, many of these having blossomed into happy and well-adjusted young adults with promising careers and others studying at home or abroad. Each one of them a living testament to what a little love and support can do. I nurtured the children and those young people under my wing with more than I ever could from my earnings at the Hei Pollyanna Nightclub.
Now, as a pop idol, I could house, feed, clothe and see more youngsters on their way to a better life after surviving the impact of the Shachihoko on their lives. I took care of their expenses for college and university, accommodation and transport, just about anything one could possibly need. So this was another reason Motoki and Reika were so important to me as they helped me build and maintain the dream and organized my finances in those earlier days when I siphoned off some of my earnings and the trinkets to build a special fund and to bestow gifts and offer shelter to my charges.
Reika also put up young students at her house after these had successfully applied to the tertiary institution of their choice. With all this, I was more than satisfied.
Then my thoughts turned to darker matters. Recently, there had been an underworld war involving the Triad, the Yakuza and my overlords, the Shachihoko. The bloodshed was unrelenting and all over the papers and the electronic media. During this time, I stayed in the US and launched an impromptu tour of both North and South America. We toured continuously until the fighting back home ceased.
Tragically, the ritual slayings and the gruesome crime scenes were so bad the Japanese minister of the Interior and the National Police Intelligence Dept placed an embargo on the media, preventing those publishing details of the turf war’s bloody aftermath. I knew it was bad. None of my friends in the movement were talking, and I wasn’t about to press the matter. I was simply glad I was out of there.
---
The band, our road crew and I had a ball. We did all the main tourist things in California, Nevada, Florida, New York before heading south via Texas and then stopping over in Mexico City and flying from there to Brazil and doing pretty much the same there, Argentina and Chile were fantastic. I loved the people and the scenery was truly breathtaking. The sun and the surf, the dancing at Mardi gras was fantastic.
After signing the contract with my record company, I moved out of home, left my father to his teenage lovers and his other vices, and had purchased my own apartment here in Tokyo where my mother would occasionally stay over and it was so much fun. She was like a girl all over again. She dressed young too and yup, she pulled it off to perfection, her eyes bright and her spirits high. She was seeing an artist by the name of Tomoe Souichi. He had a daughter by the name of Hotaru, whose mother had died during childbirth and he’d only opened up to my mother after she’d translated an ancient Japanese text for him that was the subject of an art exhibit he was putting together to go on tour throughout the country. He needed a promoter and a good manager, and mother was the best. One thing as they say, led to another and soon they’d grown close, eventually falling in love. I was so happy for them both and who wouldn’t be; she is gorgeous and the best mom in the world. I was so proud of her. After a couple of false starts, she had broken free of father and become her own person again and the change was doing her the world of good.
Aside from the monthly contact by representatives of the Shachihoko and that bitch, Nehelenia, I was pretty much my own boss. Only on those rare occasions these days would I spend the night with a powerful monarch, businessman, politician or another celebrity like myself. I was glad these edicts by my overlords were becoming fewer and far between.
When the so-called 'war' had ended, we received instructions to return home. I wasn’t all that keen to return to Japan, such was the fun we all had while on the road, but it was home and outside my dark world, it was good to be back. Unfortunately, upon my arrival in Tokyo, I had to sleep with another super –heavyweight underworld demigod.
Life is often intriguing. He mumbled in his sleep about a deadly scourge plaguing the international crime scene. He laughably spoke of Youma, if you’re not aware of what these are, they’re daemons, malevolent spirits and monsters, these come in all shapes and sizes according to Shinto mythology and other sources. These feature heavily in the Manga and most of our pop culture’s fantasy films and Anime.
I thought, ‘Too much booze, drugs or whatever else he’d had before he stripped me and threw me on the bed and before I knew it, he’d come and I hadn’t even arrived. But I dug my nails into his back and made sure I got something out of this farce of a one-night stand, as I preferred to call my call girl episodes these days.
He said something to me then that sounded quite strange; he called me, “The Fire Lady!”
I giggled and pacified him as best I might. I had to follow protocol, to do otherwise would spell certain death and therefore I would, ‘please’ this brute at any cost, as the stakes were high and the Shachihoko needed this man to work with them. Who was I to argue, but Fire Lady? The only fire I was interested in at that moment was that burning in my genital region. I would always take an aphrodisiac, required form when a call girl working for the movement, the pleasurable shame of my trade. Thank the Kamis he was half-decent a lover, once he got going after half an hour or so of foreplay, and good-looking too, not that skin deep is my sole criteria for evaluating a good lover, but if you’re going to fuck a complete stranger whose word meant you lived or died; I’d say it was a bonus.
Fame was my liberator, but I knew, for my peers in the J-pop industry it could be a double-edged sword, but not for me. I did take solace in the fact that whenever I ventured out in public, nobody recognized me; this, just as I liked it as my profile demanded an image that once the make-up was off, and my hair free of pearls and other adornments, you had Hino Rei. Estella was gone.
I would slip on a pair of shades, tie back my hair in a ponytail and dress like any other typical adolescent. I was unrecognized wherever I went. For a brief moment in time, I was free.
