Awaken from a Dream Read online

  If I’d wanted to become an idol from the start, she thought, I’d be up in the clouds right now. In her mind, she stuck a scolding tongue out at herself. What will ever be enough for me?

  Having finished an appearance on an FM radio program in Tokyo’s Akasaka district, Yukiko took a late lunch at a nearby restaurant. Sitting across from her, her manager Domoto Yoriko was intensely focused on a plate of spaghetti carbonara. Something about the seriousness of the woman’s expression as she conveyed the pasta to her mouth made Yukiko giggle quietly.

  Yoriko was thirty-three and single. She wore her hair pulled back and had silver-rimmed glasses.

  She looks just like Fräulein Rottenmeier, she thought, picturing the strict governess from Heidi, Girl of the Alps. Now Yukiko chortled outright.

  Yoriko looked over the rims of her glasses with an expression that only made her look even more like Fräulein. “You should hurry up and eat,” she said, twirling her fork to pick up the next bite. “We only have time for a short lunch before you’re due at Marusho.”

  Yukiko’s expression turned sullen, and she pouted. “Do I absolutely have to go to that department store? The exhibition starts tomorrow. Why can’t I just show up then?”

  “What are you talking about? You know how extremely important this event is for you. The whole exhibit is about you—you’re the star.” Yoriko sighed, and began reminding Yukiko, in exhaustive detail, of all the hard work she had put into organizing the event.

  The last idol the department store had held an exhibition for had been Matsuda Seiko, and that was fifteen years ago. Yukiko was grateful for everything her manager had done to make the exhibition happen, but she’d heard this speech a hundred times.

  When Yoriko was finished, the manager added, “That’s why I want you to look over the displays for yourself. You need to see, with your own eyes, how it all came together.”

  Yukiko replied, “All right, all right,” then puffed out her cheeks.

  The Marusho department store had a long and successful history, in part due to its location adjacent to a major Tokyo transit hub. The passing years had inevitably begun to show their wear, but the building had a distinctive character that retained its appeal.

  Yukiko and Yoriko went in through the employees’ back entrance. The receptionist called for the exhibit’s coordinator, who came to usher them up to the event space on the twenty-fifth floor where the singer’s exhibit was installed.

  The coordinator was a man in his fifties, and as the group waited inside the elevator, he passed a hand through his thinning hair. Proudly, he said, “I shouldn’t be one to brag, but this turned out really well—especially the life-size figure of Tsukioka-san. It’s not just your ordinary wax statue.”

  Yukiko smiled pleasantly at the man, but on the inside, the whole thing repulsed her. The exhibit was meant to put the singer on full and open display, and the items included her actual toothbrush and coffee cups. She found it absolutely creepy. Any fans that would delight in seeing her personal belongings like this were not fans she wanted to have.

  Worst of all was that life-size figure of herself. Apparently, some superfan had spent three months sculpting the piece, but she had no desire to see a replica of herself—and she got chills when she thought of her copy being put on display in full view of who knew how many people.

  The elevator doors opened, and the exhibit’s coordinator gave a deep bow before spreading his arms wide as if to say, Well? What do you think?

  The entrance to the exhibit space was directly outside the elevator. It was a large space, big enough to fit a comfortable home inside. The walls and floors were clean and polished, and the exhibit was brightly lit, with spotlights on the various showcases and displays adding tasteful and eye-catching splashes of color.

  One display featured photographs taken of her lessons before her debut, alongside the leotard she wore for her jazz dance practice and a smartly arranged assortment of other objects from that time.

  Yukiko was impressed. This wasn’t the haphazard and chaotic mishmash she’d pictured. A four-sided standing display case occupied the center of the first viewing room. Inside the showcase were her various daily items and pajamas and the like. Even that collection was far from tasteless.

  “It’s great,” Yukiko uttered without thinking.

  “It is, isn’t it,” Yoriko said with a satisfied nod.

  It would do. The exhibition was elegant but also splashy.

  Looking across the room, the coordinator said, “Tsukioka-san’s fans are sure to be pleased.” He clapped his hands and turned to look at Yukiko. “We’ve partitioned off the space into three rooms in the shape of a ‘U’ to direct the viewers through the exhibit. Your life-size figure is at the very end of the third room.”

  Yukiko nodded and briskly walked into the exhibition space. She followed the U-shaped path, turning right, and then right again, and there at the end stood another her. The second Yukiko, frozen in her signature dance pose and wearing her stage costume for “Flower in the Snow.” It was completely identical to the woman herself.

  For a moment, Yukiko thought she was looking into a mirror. When she moved her arm, she almost thought she saw the figure raising its arm to match. A chill ran up her spine as her forgotten apprehension came back to life.

  As the coordinator had said, the figure was incredibly realistic, with none of a waxwork figure’s typical artifice. The effect was uncanny. When she thought of the countless people who would come to gaze at her replica, she felt uncomfortable, like she was being spied upon in a private moment.

  The figure seemed to radiate an aura of its creator’s repulsive devotion.

  Yukiko asked herself, Can I do anything about this? As she looked at her own smiling face, vibrant and lifelike, she bit her lip in irritation. The rest of the exhibit is fine, but maybe I can ask them just to leave this figure out of it.

  She decided that she would do exactly that. Even with that figure back in storage, the exhibit would still be able to stand on its own.

  Having seen enough, she started heading back to the entrance, where her manager and the coordinator were waiting. Then, just as she was about to turn the first corner, she felt a presence behind her.

  Something had stirred the air at her back.

  What could that be? she wondered. She thought that she might have imagined it. Or at least, that’s what she tried to make herself believe.

  She sensed one thing above all: Whatever she did, she mustn’t turn to look behind her. Her sixth sense warned her she would see something that could not be unseen.

  Wherever that feeling came from, she didn’t want to look. She couldn’t look—but the more she told herself not to, the more her body rebelled against her instincts. Gradually, she began to turn to glance over her shoulder.

  Before long, her upper body had turned so far around that her spine began to creak. Her eyes peered directly behind her.

  Her life-size figure was still standing there—but now, something about it was even more unsettling.

  Wait. What’s that?

  Yukiko’s wide eyes opened wider. Something was entwined around her duplicate. She noticed it immediately, but in her already unsettled state, it took her mind a moment to accept what she was seeing.

  The thing stroked her replica’s face with a furry hand. Its entire body was covered with thick, fuzzy hair.

  Yukiko stared in transfixed terror.

  It was oddly tall. The thing teased its fingers across the figure’s face, hugged its arms around the figure’s chest, and lovingly caressed the figure’s body.

  Yukiko felt the sting of stomach juices rising up her gullet. A raw, unpleasant odor prickled at her nose; her throat made a reflexive, guttural coughing sound.

  The thing’s hands froze. Slowly, it turned its giant head to face Yukiko. Their eyes met.

  The thing had a big, round face and two long, standing ears.

  Softly, Yukiko blurted out, “It’s…a rabbit?”


  It was indeed a rabbit—or rather, someone in a rabbit mascot suit, a mainstay of the typical department store’s rooftop play area.

  Her initial reaction was almost disappointment. She felt like a fool to have felt such terror because of a rabbit. This was an event space in a department store, after all. An animal mascot was nothing out of the ordinary.

  Yukiko let out a deep sigh of relief and began to observe the rabbit in more detail. The first thing she noticed was how dirty the costume was. The face, which must have once been white, was now brown with dust and grime. Its arms and legs, where they stuck out from the denim jumpsuit, were similarly filthy and knotted in patches.

  I can’t believe how dirty that costume is, Yukiko thought. Not long after, she wondered, And why was it rubbing my replica all over?

  The terror began to build inside her once again and made its presence known. The right side of the rabbit’s face seemed melted, a burn-victim mess. The eye on that side was not its cheerfully oversized self. Instead it drooped, like a piece of round candy held over an open flame.

  That eye stared back at Yukiko, boring into her. The rabbit’s mouth curved up in the shape of a crescent moon. Out of its center jutted two buck teeth.

  “Yu…ki…ko,” the rabbit said. It was a man’s voice, hoarse yet strangely shrill. The combined effect was something Yukiko wished immediately to never hear again.

  “Yu…ki…ko,” the rabbit repeated. It pushed itself away from the figure in a slow, exaggerated motion. He took one step toward her, then another.

  As if violently repelled, Yukiko turned on her heels and ran.

  When Yoriko saw her come running from the exhibit space, her face pale, the manager spread her arms wide. Yukiko collapsed into her waiting arms and clung to her.

  “Yukiko-chan, what’s wrong?” Yoriko said. “What happened?” She took Yukiko by the shoulders and gave her a firm shake.

  Yukiko’s lips trembled. Her voice wavered as she muttered, “A rabbit… a rabbit…”

  “What?” Yoriko shouted impatiently. “What are you talking about? What rabbit?”

  Yukiko’s shoulders shuddered as she pointed a weak finger toward the exhibit.

  “Yukiko-chan, please get a hold of yourself! Is someone behind you? Did you see something?”

  Yukiko pushed herself free from her manager and slumped down to the floor with her hands and head on her knees.

  “There was,” she said, pausing to gather herself, “there was a rabbit. Someone in a mascot costume. It was putting its hands all over that figure of me—that life-size figure of me.”

  The exhibit’s coordinator was beside them, listening in. “A rabbit costume?” he said with doubt in his voice. “As far as I know, we don’t have any animal costumes here.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t something else you saw?” Yoriko asked. “Like he said, they don’t have any animal costumes here.”

  Yukiko shook her head from side to side. “I’m not making this up,” she said, her sentences running together. “It was really there. It was really a rabbit—and it wasn’t a normal animal costume. It was dirty, and its face was burned. It was like some kind of monster. And it was coming toward me.”

  Yoriko looked at her face for a moment, then turned to the coordinator and said, “Well, let’s go take a look. Whatever it was, she must have seen something.” The manager put her hands on Yukiko’s arms. “You stay here, Yukiko-chan. We’ll go have a look. Just wait right here.”

  Yukiko bobbed her head once. As Yoriko and the middle-aged man disappeared down the exhibit’s corridor, she thought, What if that sinister rabbit is trying to bring some terrible disaster upon us?

  It was too late to stop her manager and the coordinator; they had already entered the exhibit. But now Yukiko worried that she had sent them into peril. With bated breath, she watched and waited for the outcome.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been waiting when she looked up and saw Yoriko and the coordinator in front of her. Both appeared unharmed.

  Yoriko gave Yukiko a smile and said, “You can relax. No one was there. No rabbit—not even a mouse.” She turned to the coordinator and said, “Whoever it was must have run away.”

  “It’s odd, though,” the man said. “This is the only way in or out of the exhibit. The emergency exit at the rear is locked, and there’s nothing else but concrete walls.”

  Yoriko and the man exchanged a look that seemed to say, Maybe Yukiko was just seeing things.

  Her manager looked to her with worry. “Yukiko-chan, you’ve been working so hard lately.”

  Yukiko couldn’t figure out where the rabbit had gone. Maybe Yoriko was right, and the rabbit was just some phantom conjured up in her head.

  Then the idol rejected her doubt. No. That was no trick of my mind.

  That monster had called her name. It had come after her.

  That disturbing, half-melted face had been seared into her retinas—but the true source of her certainty was the distinctively repulsive and prickling smell that even now clung to the inside of her nose.

  Sitting at a table in a small café near the Akasaka-mitsuke subway station, Domoto Yoriko slowly drank her cooled-off lemon tea. Across from her was a well-built gentleman in his fifties—Kanda of Kanda Projects, the talent agency to which Tsukioka Yukiko belonged.

  Yoriko downed the rest of her tea and gathered her resolve before saying, “I was hoping you would consider letting Yukiko-chan take some time to rest and recuperate. I realize that this is a crucial time for her career, and she won’t be able to forgo all her responsibilities, but I’d like to at least ease her schedule, even if only by a little.”

  “I understand where you’re coming from, Yoriko-kun. But if we ease up on Yukiko’s pace right now, it’ll be worse for her in the long run.” His voice was calm and low as he tapped his finger on the table. “I agree that Yukiko is fatigued. I also understand that you care about her like a mother cares for her child—if not more so. But right now, Yukiko needs to go full throttle, even if means having to push herself. I’ve been in this business for a long time now, so I know—with girls like Yukiko, everything hinges on this first sprint. So far, she’s been lucky—her debut single had strong sales, and a commercial has already come in. She draws a lot of attention due to her unique position as the lone innocent-style idol persevering against the current trend. If we don’t build her success into something lasting, the next thing we know, she’ll be part of the past.”

  Yoriko nodded with each of his points, but that didn’t mean she agreed with everything he said.

  Kanda discovered Yukiko when she worked for a modeling agency in another part of the country, and he had gone to great lengths to get the head of that agency to give her up. It was no wonder he invested such care and enthusiasm in her. Yoriko felt the very same way.

  But what Yukiko needed most now was not some future stardom. She needed rest.

  Not giving up, Yoriko told Kanda everything that had happened in the department store.

  Then she said, “Yukiko-chan is so exhausted, she’s started to hallucinate. Please consider her situation. She’s still only nineteen—just a child. She doesn’t know any better. We’re the adults—if we tell her to keep trying because it’s for her own good, she’ll listen. We’ll end up forcing her to keep on pushing herself past the limits of what she can take—when what we should be forcing her to do is rest! Surely you must know I’m right.”

  She slapped her palms down on the table. The sugar pot and the cups and saucers hopped, making a tremendous clatter. The other customers turned startled stares their way.

  Tears began to well in Yoriko’s eyes. Kanda put his hand to his chin, then grunted and slumped in his chair.

  “All right, Yoriko-kun,” he said. “I’ll have a talk with Yukiko. I want to hear what she has to say.”

  Yoriko nodded as if to say, That’ll have to do.

  Yukiko awoke with a start.

  She looked to the clock beside her bed—three in
the morning. Her alarm wouldn’t go off for another two hours. Night sweat clung to her forehead. She must have been dreaming, though she couldn’t remember it. A half-read paperback sat next to her pillow. Yukiko sat up in bed. She must have fallen asleep while reading—she thought that might have been around one in the morning, which meant she’d only slept for two hours.

  I need to get back to sleep, she told herself. Tomorrow is another hard day.

  She laid herself back down and closed her eyes. But now that she had woken up, sleep didn’t return easily. After a little while, Yukiko gave up on trying to fall asleep and instead simply let herself rest. Forcing herself back to sleep would have expended more energy. Far easier for her to just rest until it was time to get up.

  Yukiko stared off through the darkness at the wall across from her bed, thinking about the recent events of her life.

  After her commercial aired, her former classmates—who hadn’t reached out to her following her debut—got together to send her a bouquet of flowers with a card signed by all of them.

  She’d received interview requests from nearly every men’s weekly magazine there was.

  At the planning meeting for her follow-up commercial, she met an eighty-year-old sponsor who kindly gave her a great deal of advice.

  And…

  And there was that other thing.

  That sinister rabbit suit popped into her mind unbidden. She had tried and tried to make herself forget. Again and again, she had told herself that the rabbit was, as Yoriko said, a figment of her imagination.

  After a few days, Yukiko had finally started to believe the hideous rabbit couldn’t have been real. But now, in this moment, alone in her bed, the figure appeared in her mind’s eye, the melted side of the rabbit’s face made even more disturbing by the animal suit’s former cuteness. Its short and round body was likely adorable once, but its sinister, miasma-like aura made it feel like an evil spirit.

  Then there was its smell, powerful and raw, which still lingered in Yukiko’s nostrils.