The first thing I remember is the sound of rain.
Not the gentle, rhythmic patter that lulls you to sleep, but a cold, relentless downpour that seemed to want to wash the world away. It's a memory without a face, without a voice, just a feeling. The rough texture of a cardboard box against my cheek, the smell of damp asphalt, and the ceaseless, indifferent drumming of water on the flimsy roof above me. I was a thing left behind, a forgotten parcel in an alley somewhere in the endless concrete labyrinth of Tokyo. That's how my life began. Not with a cry, but with a shiver.
The orphanage was a slight improvement. It was warm, at least. But it was loud, filled with the clamor of other forgotten children, each of us a tiny, lonely island in a crowded sea. The days were a smear of grey—grey walls, grey food, grey skies through barred windows. We learned early that hope was a dangerous currency, one that always left you bankrupt. You learned to make yourself small, to be silent, to expect nothing. That way, you were never disappointed.
I was six when she came.
I remember the day so clearly. The same relentless rain from my first memory was beating against the orphanage windows, and I was curled up in the reading corner, tracing the pictures in a book I couldn't read. The other children were buzzing. A potential parent. It was always a spectacle, a grim lottery where we were the prizes.
Then, the door opened, and she walked in. Ryouko Yorukawa.
She was like a sunbeam slicing through the gloom. She wore a pristine white coat, and her long, dark hair fell in a perfect, glossy sheet. She didn't have the pitying smile that most visitors wore. Her eyes, a sharp, intelligent brown, scanned the room with a purpose that was almost unnerving. They passed over the loud kids, the cute kids, the ones trying to show off, and they landed on me. On the quiet, forgotten girl in the corner.
She knelt down, her expensive perfume cutting through the institutional smell of bleach and boiled vegetables.
"What's your name?" she asked. Her voice was like honeyed velvet.
"Hoshiko," I whispered, my voice rusty from disuse.
"Hoshiko," she repeated, tasting the name. "Child of the Star. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl." She smiled, and for the first time, it didn't feel like a lie. "You're very quiet, Hoshiko-chan."
I just nodded, clutching my book.
"I was quiet, too," she confided, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "When you're quiet, you can hear the world's music so much better, can't you?" She tilted her head. "Do you like to sing?"
I shook my head. I didn't like to do anything that drew attention.
Her smile never wavered. "But you have a song inside you. I can see it. A special one." She reached out and gently brushed a strand of hair from my face. Her touch was feather-light, but it sent a jolt through my entire body. It was the first gentle touch I could remember. "The world can be a cold, grey place, can't it? But I can give you a new one. A world full of light, and color, and warmth. A life with a real mother. A happy life. The one you've always deserved."
A happy life.
The one you've always deserved.
The words echoed in the hollow spaces inside me. They were the most beautiful words I had ever heard. A promise of everything I didn't even know I was allowed to want. I looked into her kind, smiling eyes, and for the first time in my life, I wasn't bankrupt on hope. I was rich. I took her hand.
That was the first lie. The most beautiful, and the most brutal.
A high-pitched, electronic shriek rips through the memory, shattering it into a million pieces.
My eyes snap open.
I'm not in the grey orphanage. I'm in a different kind of grey. The dim, suffocating backstage world of the Tokyo Dome. The air is thick with the metallic tang of fog machines, the cloying sweetness of hairspray, and the sweat of a hundred thousand people on the other side of the curtain. The shriek was my in-ear monitor, a technician's feedback stabbing directly into my brain.
"Hoshiko-sama, two minutes!" a voice buzzes, impersonal and rushed.
My body moves before my mind does. My hand, ghostly pale under the dim light, adjusts the microphone headset. A woman I don't know the name of descends on me, dabbing my face with a powder puff that smells like dust and chemicals. Her movements are quick, practiced. I am a doll. A product to be polished.
The roar of the crowd is a living thing out there. It's not a sound, but a physical pressure that vibrates through the concrete floor, up my legs, and settles deep in my bones. It feels like being at the bottom of the ocean. They are screaming a name. Ho-shi-ko. Ho-shi-ko. It sounds like the name of a stranger.
I look at my reflection in a darkened monitor screen. A sixteen-year-old girl stares back, but I don't recognize her. Her eyes are huge and hollow, expertly lined to look bright and alive, but they're black holes. Her hair is a cascade of perfect, starlight-silver waves. It's my natural color, a strange and beautiful inheritance that Ryouko latched onto the moment she saw me. A genetic miracle, she'd called it. Something to be marketed. Her lips are painted a cheerful cherry blossom pink, pulled into a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. It doesn't even reach her soul. It's just a shape. A mask of flesh and muscle that takes a monumental effort to hold in place.
"Smile, Hoshiko," my mother's voice, that same honeyed velvet from ten years ago, echoes in my head. It's not a memory. It's a command, etched into my very being. "They paid to see you smile. They paid for your happiness. Don't be ungrateful."
Ungrateful. The word is a stone in my gut.
My chest feels tight, wrapped in iron bands. It's hard to breathe. The depression isn't a sadness anymore; it's a physical state of being. It's a thick, cold sludge moving through my veins instead of blood. It's a constant, low-frequency hum in my ears that mutes the rest of the world. It's the feeling that the strings connecting my brain to my limbs have been stretched thin, that one more tug will snap them entirely, and I'll just collapse into a useless heap on the floor.
"Hoshiko-sama, on standby!"
A heavy hand lands on my back, pushing me toward the hydraulic lift that will raise me onto the stage. The metal platform is cold under my feet. The mechanism groans to life, and I begin to ascend into a blinding vortex of light.
The darkness gives way to an explosion of color. A universe of ten thousand glowing light sticks—pinks, blues, whites—waves in the cavernous darkness. The pressure of the crowd's roar intensifies, hitting me like a physical wave. The heat is immediate, suffocating.
I'm on autopilot. My legs carry me to the center of the stage. My arm raises in a practiced wave. The smile on my face widens, a grotesque caricature of joy. The song begins, the music blasting from the speakers around me, so loud it feels like it's trying to pulverize my bones.
It's my biggest hit. A song called "Summer's First Star." It's a sweet, soaring ballad about finding hope and love on a warm summer night. Ryouko wrote the lyrics herself.
My mouth opens, and a voice comes out. It's clear, perfect, hitting every note with practiced precision.
"A lonely teardrop in the twilight sea…"
The voice is mine, but it feels disconnected. I sing of a lonely teardrop, but I am not a teardrop. I am the entire, cold, bottomless ocean. I watch my body move through the choreography, my hands gesturing to the sea of faces I can't truly see. They are a blur, a single entity of adoration. They love this girl on the stage. This perfect, happy, shining star. They love a lie.
I catch my reflection again, this time on the polished black surface of the stage floor. A distorted, elongated figure of light and color. I see a single bead of sweat roll down from my temple, carving a tiny, clean path through the thick layer of foundation on my cheek. It feels like a tear.
"You reached out your hand and set me free…"
My hand grips the microphone, my knuckles white. The tremor starts in my fingers, a tiny, uncontrollable vibration. It's a crack in the doll's porcelain skin. I hide it, using my other hand to steady the microphone, making it look like part of the performance. No one notices. They never notice.
As the song swells to its final crescendo, my body acts without my permission. It's time for the finale, the move they've seen in every music video, the one that makes the crowd erupt. My fingers loosen their grip for just a second. Propelled by a practiced flick of my thumb, the microphone spins fluidly over my knuckles, a perfect, weightless rotation like a pen between fingers. One spin, two. The stage lights catch the polished chrome, creating a fleeting shimmer of light. It's an intimate, almost casual gesture, but the crowd roars its recognition. My hand closes around it again, the cool metal settling back into my palm without a sound, just as the last chord strikes.
The final note hangs in the air, a shimmering, perfect thing.
For a single, beautiful second, there is silence. The world holds its breath.
Then, the universe explodes. The applause, the screams, the chants of my name—they rush back in, a tidal wave of sound and expectation. It isn't the sound of love; it's the sound of a demand for more. More of me. More of this lie. And as I stand there, bathed in the light of ten thousand fake stars, the iron bands around my chest squeeze so tight that something inside of me finally has to break. The thought, clear and sharp as a shard of glass, cuts through the static in my head.
I can't do this anymore.
The moment I stepped off the stage, the world snapped back into its harsh, flat reality. The blinding lights were replaced by the dim, functional glow of the backstage corridors. The roar of the crowd faded into a muffled, distant thunder, replaced by the sharp, staccato clicks of Ryouko's heels on the concrete floor.
She was waiting for me, just beyond the curtain, her arms crossed. The smile she wore was the same one from the press photos, but her eyes were chips of ice.
"Your final spin was sloppy, Hoshiko," she said, her voice low and dangerously smooth. There was no 'good job,' no 'are you okay.' There was only the critique. The constant, relentless polishing of the product. "You almost lost the rhythm. We'll need to add another hour of practice for that section tomorrow."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. The words were trapped somewhere in the sludge filling my lungs. I just nodded, a puppet with its strings cut, and allowed myself to be steered through the maze of corridors by a silent assistant. Past the bustling crew, the congratulatory shouts I didn't hear, the hands reaching out to pat my back that I didn't feel. I was a ghost in my own life.
The car ride back to the penthouse was a silent, suffocating affair. Ryouko sat beside me, typing furiously into her phone, her face illuminated by the cold blue light. She was probably arranging my schedule for the next decade. I stared out the window, but I didn't see the glittering, neon-drenched dreamscape of Tokyo. I saw a cage. Every skyscraper was a bar, every streetlamp a warden's watchlight. The city was a beautiful, sprawling prison, and I was its most prized inmate.
The thought that had broken through the static on stage was no longer a thought. It had become a physical need, an itch under my skin, a gnawing hunger in my gut. I can't do this anymore. It wasn't a plea. It was a conclusion. A diagnosis.
When the car stopped at a red light, I saw my chance. A block away, the elevated tracks of a local train line gleamed under the city lights. An idea, cold and serene, settled over me. A final, perfect solution.
"I think I'm going to be sick," I mumbled, pressing a hand to my stomach.
Ryouko didn't even look up from her phone. "Don't you dare, Hoshiko. Not in the car. We're five minutes away."
"I can't wait," I said, my voice gaining a desperate edge that wasn't entirely faked. I fumbled with the door handle. Before the driver or Ryouko could react, I pushed the door open and scrambled out into the humid night air.
"Hoshiko!" Ryouko's voice was a furious hiss, but I was already gone.
I ran. I didn't know I had it in me. My stage costume, a confection of glitter and chiffon, was clumsy and restrictive. My heeled boots were never meant for pavement. But I ran. I shoved my way through crowds of people, ignoring their startled shouts and flashes of recognition. Their world didn't matter anymore.
I found the station entrance and vaulted over the ticket barrier, the alarm shrieking behind me. I didn't care. I ran up the stairs, my lungs burning, my legs screaming. I burst onto the platform and a sudden, unnatural calm washed over me.
It was nearly deserted at this hour. Just a tired-looking salaryman and a couple whispering in the corner. The air was heavy with the smell of ozone and stale city heat. Across the tracks, an advertisement featuring my own smiling face flickered on a giant screen. Hoshiko. The voice of a generation. The lie followed me even here.
I walked to the edge of the platform, my toes peeking over the yellow warning line. I looked down at the gravel, the two parallel lines of steel stretching into the darkness. A perfect, clean ending. No more smiles. No more songs. No more pretending. Just… silence.
A gust of wind rushed through the station, a harbinger. In the distance, I saw two pinpricks of light, growing steadily larger. I heard the faint, mournful horn, then the rhythmic, powerful clatter of the approaching train. This was it. The sound of my escape.
The wind grew stronger, whipping my silver hair around my face. The train was a roaring beast of light and metal now, hurtling towards me. The ground beneath my feet began to vibrate. I could feel the force of it in my teeth, in my bones. It was a physical manifestation of the end.
I closed my eyes. I thought of the orphanage. Of Ryouko's honeyed voice. Of ten thousand waving light sticks.
I leaned forward.
And then… nothing.
A thought, so profoundly empty it was almost funny, cut through my resolve. What's the point?
If I jump, there will be headlines. A spectacle. Ryouko would probably find a way to monetize my death. A final album of unreleased tracks. A charity foundation in my name. My tragedy would become her masterpiece. My entire life had been a performance for others. Why should my death be one too?
The sheer, soul-crushing pointlessness of it all was heavier than the train. It was a weight that didn't push me over the edge, but pulled me back. The effort it would take to jump, to let myself be obliterated… it just seemed like too much work. Dying was just another demand on my time.
The train screamed past, a hurricane of wind and noise that tore at my clothes and stung my eyes. It didn't touch me.
The brakes hissed, and the metal beast groaned to a halt. The doors slid open with a gentle, inviting sigh, directly in front of me. The inside of the carriage was warm, bathed in a soft, fluorescent light. It was almost empty.
I looked at the open doors. Then I looked back down the tracks, into the darkness where I had just been searching for my end.
I hadn't chosen to live. I had simply failed to die.
Without a destination, without a plan, without a single coherent thought in my head, I stepped forward. I boarded the train, and the doors slid shut behind me, sealing me in.
The train lurched forward, slowly at first, then gaining speed, pulling me away from the station, away from my face on the giant screen, away from Tokyo. I sank into a plush seat and watched the city lights begin to blur through the window, the towering skyscrapers shrinking into the distance.
The rhythmic clack-clack, clack-clack of the wheels on the track was the only sound in my head. It was a monotonous, steady beat. A song without lyrics, without a melody, without a lie. It was just a sound, carrying me forward. I didn't know where this train was going, and for the first time in my life, I didn't have to. I would just get off when it felt right. When the song stopped.
The train was a cradle, rocking me through the dark. I drifted in and out of a shallow, restless sleep, my head resting against the cool glass of the window. Each time I woke, the view outside had changed. The dense, glittering forest of Tokyo's skyscrapers gave way to the sprawling, repetitive geometry of the suburbs. Then the suburbs thinned, replaced by the sleepy, scattered lights of smaller towns, each one a lonely constellation in a sea of black.
Eventually, even those faded away, until there was nothing but darkness. A profound, deep-country dark, punctuated only by the train's own lights cutting a fleeting path through the unseen landscape. The other passengers, few as they were, had disembarked at earlier stops, leaving me as the sole occupant of the carriage. I was alone with the rhythmic, hypnotic clack-clack, clack-clack of the wheels. It was a pulse. A steady, mechanical heartbeat that had replaced my own.
I don't know how many hours passed. Time had dissolved, leaving only the sensation of movement. I woke with a jolt as the train's rhythm changed. The steady clatter slowed, and the high-pitched whine of the brakes began to sing. A soft, automated voice announced a station name I didn't recognize. A name that sounded of trees and water, not steel and concrete.
I sat up, my body stiff and sore. Outside, the first, faint hint of dawn was bruising the eastern sky, turning the black to a deep, inky violet. Through the window, I could see the station. It wasn't a station, not really. It was just a simple concrete platform with a small, open-sided wooden shelter. Beyond it, I could see nothing but the dark, hulking shapes of mountains and the ghostly outlines of fields shrouded in mist.
The song was stopping. The steady beat that had carried me this far was coming to an end.
The doors slid open with a soft hiss, revealing the cool, damp air of the coming morning. It smelled of wet earth and green things, a scent so clean and alien it was like breathing for the first time. I stood up on shaky legs. This was it. This was the place.
I stepped off the train and onto the platform. The world was utterly, completely silent. The train doors slid shut, and with a low hum, the metal beast began to pull away, its red taillights shrinking into the darkness until they vanished.
And then, the silence that was left behind was absolute.
It was a silence so profound it had weight. It pressed in on me, a physical presence. For ten years, my life had been a constant barrage of noise: music, crowds, Ryouko's voice, the endless chatter of staff, the clamor of the city. I'd forgotten that a quiet like this could even exist.
I caught my reflection in the dark glass of the station shelter. A girl made of glitter and shadows stared back. Her silver hair was a mess, her makeup was smudged, and she was draped in the ridiculous, fairy-tale costume of a pop star. Hoshiko. The product. She looked absurd here, a cheap, factory-made doll dropped in a pristine, living world.
A wave of revulsion, so strong it made me gag, washed over me. This costume wasn't just fabric; it was a cage. Every sequin was a bar, every stitch a link in a chain. It was the skin Ryouko had given me, and I couldn't bear to be in it for another second.
My hands, acting on their own, found the zipper at the back of the dress. It was stiff, but I tore at it, my fingers clumsy and desperate. Then I clawed at the delicate chiffon sleeves, the fabric ripping with a satisfying, violent sound. I pulled the glittering, ruined thing over my head and threw it to the ground. I unstrapped the heeled boots, my ankles screaming in relief, and kicked them away. They landed with a hollow clatter on the concrete.
I stood there for a moment, breathing heavily in the pre-dawn chill. I was left in what I wore underneath for comfort and movement during performances: a simple black tank top and a pair of soft, dark grey shorts. My feet were bare on the cold, rough surface of the platform.
I looked down at the pile of shimmering fabric at my feet. It looked like a dead, glittering animal, a shed skin of starlight and lies.
Slowly, I took a step, then another. The cold of the concrete was a shock, sharp and real. It hurt, but it was a good hurt. It was a feeling. It was mine.
I walked to the edge of the platform and down the two short steps to the gravel path below. I didn't look back. I just walked, barefoot, into the encroaching dawn, leaving the ghost of Hoshiko behind me. The only sound in the entire world was the crunch of gravel under my bare feet.