Idol, Burning , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Rin Usami

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55 pages

English

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THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE 2020 AKUTAGAWA PRIZE'My oshi was on fire. Word was he'd punched a fan'High-school student Akari has only one passion in her life: her oshi, her idol. His name is Masaki Ueno, best known as one-fifth of Japanese pop group Maza Maza. Akari's dedication to her oshi consumes her days completely. She keeps a blog entirely devoted to him, religiously chronicling and analysing all his events. He is the spine of her life; she cannot survive without him. When Masaki is rumoured to have assaulted a female fan, facing waves of social media backlash, Akari's world falls apart. Offering a vivid insight into otaku culture and adolescence, Idol, Burning is a brilliantly gripping story of obsession, coming of age and the addictive, relentless nature of fandom culture.

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Japan

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	03 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838856144
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Rin Usami, 2020
English translation copyright © Asa Yoneda
The right of Rin Usami to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Originally published as Oshi, moyu in Japan in 2020 by Kawade Shobo Shinsha
First published in the United States by HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 612 0 eISBN 978 1 83885 614 4
Designed by Terry McGrath
Illustrations © Leslie Hung

Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Afterword
Acknowledgments
A Note from the Translator
About the Author
About the Translator
A Note on the Cover and Interior Art

M y oshi was on fire. Word was he’d punched a fan. No details had emerged yet, but even with zero verification the story had blown up overnight. I’d slept badly. Maybe it was my gut telling me something was up—I woke up, checked the time on my phone, and noticed the commotion in my DMs. My dazed eyes lit on the line
< They’re saying Masaki punched a fan >
For a split second I didn’t know what was real. The backs of my thighs were sticky with sweat. Once I’d checked the news sites, there was nothing I could do but to sit transfixed on my bed, which had shed its blanket in the night, and watch the fallout as the rumor and the flaming proliferated. The only thing on my mind was the status of my oshi.
< evth ok? >
The text notification popped up on my lock screen, covering up my oshi’s eyes like a criminal. It was from Narumi. The words were the first thing out of her mouth the next morning when she ran onto the train car.
“Everything okay?”
Narumi sounded the same in person as she did online. I looked at her face, the round eyes and concerned brows overflowing with tragedy, and thought, There’s an emoji like that.
“It’s not looking good,” I said.
“No?”
“Yeah.”
The top two buttons of her uniform blouse were open and she sat down next to me in a waft of cold citrus antiperspirant. Social media—which I’d opened almost by reflex after entering 0-8-1-5 , my oshi’s birthday, into the lock screen, ghostly under the sharp glare—was mired in people’s hot breath.
“How bad is it?”
Narumi leaned over and pulled out her phone. There was a dark-toned Polaroid sandwiched inside its clear silicone cover.
“You got Instax!”
“Isn’t it great?” Narumi said, with a smile as uncomplicated as a LINE sticker. Everything Narumi said was straightforward, and her facial expressions changed like she was switching out profile pictures. I didn’t think she was being fake or insincere; she was just trying to simplify herself as much as possible.
“How many did you get?”
“Ten!”
“Whoa! Wait, but that’s only ten thou?”
“When you think of it that way, right?”
“It’s worth it. Total steal.”
The indie idol group she followed let fans take photos with their favorite group member after live shows. Narumi’s showed her with her hair carefully braided and her oshi’s arm around her, or the two of them cheek to cheek. Until last year she’d supported a major label group, but now she talked about leaving the mainstream idols on their pedestals and getting up close and personal with the underground. Come over to the dark side , she’d say. It’s so much better. They remember who you are, and you could get to talk one-on-one, or even date them.
The idea of making direct contact with my oshi didn’t interest me. I went to shows, but only to be part of the crowd. I wanted to be inside the applause, inside the screaming, and anonymously post my thanks online afterward.
“So when we hugged, he tucked my hair behind my ear, and I was like, Shit, is there something on it?” Narumi lowered her voice. “And then he said, ‘You smell good.’”
“No. Way.” I emphasized the pause between the words.
Narumi said, “I know, right? There’s just no going back,” and slipped the Instax back in her phone cover. Last year, her previous oshi had announced he was retiring from the entertainment industry to go study abroad. She hadn’t come to school for three days.
“True,” I said.
The shadow of a utility pole passed across our faces. As if to suggest she’d gotten overexcited, Narumi straightened out her knees and, much more calmly, addressed her rosy kneecaps. “Anyway, Akari, you’re doing good. It’s good you’re still here.”
“Here like on the way to school?”
“Yeah.”
“For a second I thought you meant, among the living.”
Narumi laughed somewhere deep inside her chest. “That too.”
“Oshi work is life and death.”
Fandom talk could get a little over the top.
< Thank you for being born >
< missed out on tickets my life is over >
< he looked at me!! MY FUTURE HUSBAND <3 >
Narumi and I could be guilty of this, too, but it didn’t feel right to me to talk marriage and whatnot only when things were going well, so I typed:
< I stan by my oshi in sickness and in health. >
The train came to a stop, and the sound of cicadas swelled. I tapped Post. An instant Like flew in from next to me.
I’d accidentally brought my backpack to school without unpacking it from when I went to see my oshi perform a few days ago. The only things in there I could use for school were the loose-leaf paper and pens I used for noting down my impressions of the show, so I had to share in Classics and borrow for Math, and stand by the side of the pool during PE because I didn’t have my swimsuit.
I never noticed it when I was in the pool, but the water overflowing onto the tile felt slick, as though something was dissolved in it—not sweat or sunscreen, but something more abstract, like flesh. The water lapped at the feet of the students sitting out the class. The other student was a girl from the homeroom next to mine. She stood at the very edge of the pool handing out kickboards, wearing a thin white long-sleeved hoodie over her summer uniform. Bare legs gave off blinding flashes of white each time they kicked up a spray of water.
The herd of water-dark swimsuits also looked slippery. The girls pulled themselves up by the silver handrail or onto the grainy yellow ledge, making me think of seals and dolphins and orcas hauling themselves onstage at an aquarium show. Rivulets fell from the cheeks and upper arms of the line of girls saying “Thanks” as they took my pile of kickboards, leaving dark stains on the dry pastel foam. Bodies were so heavy. Legs spraying up water were heavy, and wombs that shed their lining every month were heavy. Kyoko, who was by far the youngest of the teachers, demonstrated “moving from the thighs,” using her arms as legs and rubbing them together. “I see some of you just flapping your feet around. None of that effort is getting you anywhere.”
We also had Kyoko for Health. She used words like “ovum” and “erectile tissue” without skipping a beat so things never got awkward, but I still felt the burden of my involuntary role as a mammal dragging me down.
In the same way that a night of sleep put wrinkles in a bed-sheet, just being alive took a toll. To talk to someone you had to move the flesh on your face. You bathed to get rid of the grime that built up on your skin and clipped your nails because they kept growing. I exhausted myself trying to achieve the bare minimum, but it had never been enough. My will and my body would always disengage before I got there.
The school nurse recommended I go see a specialist, and I was given a couple of diagnoses. The medication made me feel ill, and after I repeatedly no-showed on appointments, even getting to the clinic started to be a struggle. The name they put to the heaviness in my body made me feel better at first, but I also felt myself leaning on it, dangling from it. Only through chasing my oshi could I escape the heaviness just for a moment.
My very first memory is of looking directly up at a figure in green. My oshi, at twelve years old, is playing the role of Peter Pan. I am four. You could say my life started when I saw my oshi fly past overhead, suspended on wires.
But it wasn’t until a lot later that he became my oshi. I’d just started high school and had stayed home from a rehearsal for the sports day in May. My hands and feet were sticking out from under a terry blanket. Rough, papery tiredness caught on my overgrown toenails. From outside, the faint sounds of baseball practice landed in my ears. I sensed my awareness lift half an inch into the air at each impact.
The PE clothes I’d washed two days ago in readiness for the rehearsal were nowhere to be found. At six a.m., half-dressed in my school blouse, I’d searched my room, turning it upside down, then given up and fled back to sleep. The next thing I knew, it was noon. Nothing had changed. My ransacked room was like the dishwashing sink at the restaurant I worked at—totally unmanageable.
I cast around under my bed and found a dusty green DVD case. It was the production of Peter Pan I’d been taken to see when I was a child. I fed it into the player and the title screen lit up in full color. Occasionally, a line would move across the image. The disc might have been a little scratched.
The first thing I feel is pain. A momentary piercing sensation, and then a pain kind of like being shoved, the force of it. A boy puts his hands on a windowsill and sneaks through the window. When he lets his dangling feet swim inside the room, the tips of his short boots thrust themselves into my heart and carelessly kick upward. I know this pain , I think. At my age, my freshman year of high school, pain should be something long buried, something that’s become part of my flesh over the years and only prickles once in a while as a reminder. But he