Audition Read Free Page A

poorer and the poor are richer.’
        ‘It couldn’t just be that we’re getting older, could it?’
        Yoshikawa thought about that for a moment.
        ‘One thing I can say for sure,’ he said. ‘Everyone assumes that in ten years the world will be more or less the same as it is now, right? We all think, Well, I’ll be ten years older, but we assume we’ll be alive and carrying on as usual. In spite of the fact that an earthquake or an act of terrorism, or any number of other things, could wipe us out in the next heartbeat.’
        ‘So?’
        ‘So we act as if there’s no hurry to get things right, or to do the things we want to do. And when I say “we” I mean everybody – from the average teenage punk agonising over whether to ask a girl for a date to the politician contemplating reforming the tax code. No reason it has to be right now .’
        Aoyama had noticed that this doleful sort of tone was becoming increasingly common in his conversations with Yoshikawa. They were both in their early forties but sounded almost senior-citizenly at times. A few years ago they’d often joked about not understanding ‘the kids nowadays’, but this was different.
        The conversation turned to music. Yoshikawa said he and his son, who was about Shige’s age, listened to the Beatles together sometimes.
        ‘You’d think that anyone who likes the Beatles would have no use for the crappy Japanese bands of today,’ he said, ‘but I guess that’s not necessarily true.’
        He told Aoyama about a video made by one of the younger members of his staff, documenting a female pop singer’s concert at a stadium in some provincial city. Yoshikawa had happened to see parts of it, without sound, during a rough edit.
        ‘At first, I swear to you, I thought it was a ceremony for some new religious cult. Tens of thousands of kids, all dressed and groomed exactly alike, packed into the stadium in orderly rows, all rising to their feet or screaming or bursting into tears at the same time. But none of them – not one – actually seemed to be enjoying themselves. They all had this look of blood-chilling loneliness about them, as if they were stranded on the dreariest planet in the universe. What the hell happened to those kids?’
        As if on cue, the harpist began to play ‘Eleanor Rigby’. ‘Great song,’ Yoshikawa muttered, and Aoyama nodded. The two of them listened in silence awhile. Aoyama had bought the single back in the day, and he tried to remember what had been on the B-side. He was thinking it must have been either ‘Taxman’ or ‘Yellow Submarine’ when Yoshikawa grinned at him and clapped him on the shoulder.
        ‘So you’re finally ready, eh?’
        On the phone, Aoyama had mentioned the idea of getting married again.
        ‘That’s great,’ Yoshikawa went on. ‘Everyone’s going to be glad to hear this. I might be a little pissed off if she’s too young and beautiful, but . . . Tell me about her.’
        ‘Haven’t found her yet.’
        Yoshikawa gave him a narrow look, then flagged a passing waitress and ordered another sherry, telling her to make it a double. There were four waitresses, all clad in long red velvet skirts, all young and all stunning. They were probably students working here part-time, which would make them twenty or twenty-one. Too young no matter how you looked at it, Aoyama thought as he watched those red velvet hips undulate towards the bar.
        ‘You haven’t found her yet? What are you talking about, then – an arranged marriage? Not that you couldn’t find somebody nice that way, but—’
        ‘Not omiai , no. Yoshikawa, you ever done omiai ?’
        ‘Hell no.’
        ‘Me neither, but we know the drill. You meet the woman over dinner with the go-betweens, and then if you like each other you start dating. Which is fine, but once you’ve started dating it’s not as if you can arrange an omiai with