#rip hide

So this is the first chapter we’ve had with the band in awhile, and lots of things are changing for the better: the new drummer, Nao, has officially joined, they’ve got staff (Kiyomi) to sell their goods, and today is the release date for the new single. Despite the disaster at the love hotel, Rei has of course finished the single… I’m not really sure if he’s expecting to be able to go on having a professional relationship with Teru… probably not, but he’s not going to back out of something he’s already specifically agreed to do (even if the CDs are just delivered impersonally to a PO Box). Also I think he’s still kind of Secretly Hopeful things will somehow work out?

Of course, Teru continues to feel like shit. It definitely doesn’t help that they’re back in the first venue where Rei initially saw him play, and he’s definitely not sure if he’s secretly hoping Rei is here tonight, as well.

Poor Nao, the replacement drummer, doesn’t get a lot of characterization… there was initially a little more, but other than being there and making the band better, he isn’t that important to the main plot, and a lot of it got cut. I don’t even think I really ever describe what he looks like, which is sad, because I always imagine him looking like this one guy in a band I used to follow who had long, straight hair parted down the middle that was jet black on one side and platinum blond on the other. That’s incredibly cool and I wish I’d included it.

But all that’s really left here is a short conversation about what happened to Bara and how some mysterious “fan” also suggested that Nao join the band… of course, Teru knows that this was also Rei, who he’s already trying and failing not to think about, and then when Nao makes a comment about smoking being bad for your voice (i.e. exactly what Rei always says), it’s just too much of a reminder, and Teru leaves the conversation to go upstairs.

(“Upstairs” here is the first basement, where the stage and the area for bands to sell their CDs and things are; the dressing room, the little break area, and the restrooms are in the second basement—all of this is based directly on the actual venue.)

Kiyomi gives him the set lists… I don’t think this is unique to visual kei or to Japan, but they’d always tape the set lists to the backs of the speakers or to the floor, at least one for every band member. I don’t really remember if I mentioned Kiyomi’s pretty, feminine handwriting to deliberately contrast it with Rei’s, which is barely legible, but maybe? Or maybe it was just a throwaway detail?

The next part is definitely not a throwaway detail, though. Kiyomi tells Teru she has something to tell him and takes him down into the stairwell leading to the restrooms (there are separate staircases for the restrooms, which anyone can use, and the dressing room and break area, which require a backstage pass). The stairwell is absolutely COVERED with graffiti, and this is, or at least was, more or less real. I’m not sure if the graffiti is still there, and of course the SPECIFIC graffiti in the book isn’t actually there, but the stairwell filled with graffiti proclaiming love for various bands was completely real.

What Kiyomi wants to show Teru is just that someone has written HIS band’s name on the wall, which is definitely cool—they’re a part of history! But of course that’s not the most important part of this scene.

I’ve talked before about the absolutely ridiculous death rate in this particular subculture. I don’t really think theres one specific reason behind it, but this particular type of music does tend to attract people who are intense, who just FEEL very deeply I guess and who might tend to live slightly reckless lives in pursuit of their music. There’s a lot of debate over whether Hide from X Japan was a suicide or not… people who knew him say he was probably just stretching his neck with a towel, not actually trying to hang himself. I’ve even heard it suggested that there was somehow foul play, although I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that is. Regardless, he was very drunk at the time and would apparently regularly get drunk and hurt himself… too fast to live too young to die, etc? There were a lot of sudden deaths—the book mentions Kami from Malice Mizer, who died of a sudden aneurysm in 1999. I think he was maybe in his mid-20s? Around 2002, the bassist from a little indie band I’d seen a few times died the same way; he was 19. There were quite a few car crashes when I was in the scene (not all resulting in death, but there would occasionally be concerts cancelled for minor injuries and there was a guitarist who lost an arm, etc.), probably just the result of young people who weren’t very experienced drivers rushing from concert to concert at midnight because they couldn’t afford a night off in a hotel in between. Suicides… although both were still alive at the time the story is set, and therefore aren’t on the wall, Isshi from Kagrra, Taiji from X Japan. And then there was the band where half of them drowned filming a music video. it’s just a LOT, compared to the overall population of the subculture, and quite a bit of the graffiti on that wall WAS “RIP” messages… and of course that’s the most important thing that Teru finds here.

An aside here… in retrospect, it seems completely ridiculous that Teru remembers Hide’s death as “over two years ago, now”, as if that’s a horribly long time. Two years, people. TWO. Oh, to be 21…. 😂Seriously, though, we’re coming up on the TWENTY FIFTH anniversary of Hide’s death next month, and this sort of wistful “two years ago” seems… “funny” is not the right word but… just very “21-year-old without a lot of life experience” in retrospect. (At the time I wrote it, I think two years legitimately seemed like a long time. I was 23.)

So I really think Teru is just kind of… confronting his own mortality here, because while of course he knows that youth and talent and beauty aren’t forever, he’s recently had reason to sort of have that emotionally driven home, and because that’s sort of on his mind ANYWAY he’s noticing the “RIP” messages probably more than he otherwise would… when he finds one for Rei’s band. Before this point, Teru didn’t actually know what Rei’s band was called or what any of his bandmates’ names were, but how many entire bands with frontmen named Rei all died (or, well, were rumoured to have died) all on the same night in 1995? It’s clear that this is Rei’s band, and finding it first makes Teru feel a little more of the age gap between them, I think… he was only 15 on January 5, 1995. And then I think it just makes him feel even sadder and more hopeless, and again that deep sense of injustice, this time not only for Rei but also for those other names on the wall.

A couple of other seemingly insignificant but actually important things happen here: Yasu tells Teru there’s an after party, and this time Teru agrees to go since for once he doesn’t have plans with Rei, and he considers and decides against wearing Kiyomi’s necklace… still hoping, I think, that Rei is going to be watching the show, even though he doesn’t expect it.

At the end of their set, the crowd actually screams for an encore… this was fairly unusual at these little shows with 5 or 6 bands playing (half the time the venue staff would quash it even if the fans asked for it), as is shown by the fact that they don’t actually have an encore prepared, and since their drummer JUST joined they can’t just dig up something old he doesn’t know yet… so they decide to play the second song that Rei gave them, which they’d been practicing but hadn’t planned to play live yet. The title (Phoenix) is another super blatant nod to Phantom of the Paradise. (Im not even sorry; that movie is the sole reason I wanted to write a Phantom retelling in the first place.)

Another one of my favorite lines here, as the audience laps up the suuuuper angsty, tragic song: “This is visual kei, after all. Who doesn’t love a good tragedy?” I think Teru’s partly just calling HIMSELF out here—yes, he’s more than a little drawn to Rei BECAUSE of the whole tragic backstory thing, and this room full of (mostly) girls who love all these songs about death and heartache and loss almost definitely spent way too much money on the Hide tribute album or the Kami memorial box set… at what point are we mourning these tragedies and at what point are we just plain enjoying them? I definitely don’t think Teru knows, and he’s probably as guilty of it as any of them, but now  he’s seeing that that’s not really fair either… that none of this is fair, and he doesn’t know how to deal with that.

But he doesn’t have time to process it because he has to go out into the lobby and sell CDs and sign autographs and I’m actually really proud of the MOOD of this whole thing. I like the way I wrote this chapter, sorrynotsorry.

And then at the very end of the night, when they’re all about to get kicked out, Teru finally goes up to the balcony, thinking Rei might be there after all… and he’s not, but he finally meets Chizuru, who’s the sort of Daroga character here, as in she’s the one who has known Rei for years, she’s the one who helps him, in various ways, navigate the “normal” world. I love her a lot… she’s so complicated, and we definitely don’t learn as much about her on the page as other characters, but even here, she says directly that she hates Rei and calls him a “self-centered bastard,” but also seems to genuinely want him to be happy—probably partly because it makes her life easier when he’s not in a terrible mood, but I also think that after fate kind of threw them together as the two survivors (she wasn’t in the accident, but as the hair and makeup artist she usually would have been with the band and I think does feel similar survivor’s guilt because she stayed behind), I do think she’s gotten to know him well enough that she does understand, sympathize with, and care for him, even if that doesn’t extend to friendship per se.

She gives Teru a message from Rei—to stop parading his “girlfriend” around in front of the fans. Rei is definitely just being petty here… I think he knows Teru doesn’t seriously want to date Kiyomi, but seeing her here just kind of reminds him of what he can’t have, and he takes out that kind of aimless frustration on Kiyomi (and Chizuru as his proxy). But then she tells Teru that Rei isn’t angry so much as he believes that he deserves everything that’s happened to him, but that he doesn’t really want to lose Teru…. In other words, encouraging Teru to go back and apologize.

I think this is partly selfish. Chizuru doesn’t want to be Rei’s caregiver forever. She wants to move on, as we’ll see later, but I do think there’s an obligation she feels to Rei. He doesn’t need 24 hour care anymore, but he definitely did at one point, and he’s not really 100% independent, even now. She’s not going to completely desert him and make him hire some government care worker… but if there’s anyone else out there who might actually WANT to help?

At the same time, though, I think she actually does care for Rei at some level. I think she’s also fiercely independent and can sort of identify with him on that… so while she’s not going to abandon him, she does want him to find something that’s more happiness and less “We depend on each other because everyone we actually loved is dead.”