Street performers in areas like Shinjuku or Shibuya drew from a broad general audience. Akihabara was different.
The people who came here came specifically for the subculture, and that shaped what worked. Anime songs drew crowds. Original material, unless already known, tended to thin them out.
The song reaching him now was one he recognized without effort.
"Do you still remember? The moment our eyes met. Do you still remember? The moment our hands touched. That was the beginning of our first love. I love you so..."
"Ai Oboete Imasu Ka" was the theme song from the 1984 theatrical film Macross: Do You Remember Love? It had been woven into the film's story at a level that made it inseparable from the work itself, and it had exploded in popularity alongside the film's release, embedding itself into the memory of an entire generation of fans.
More than a decade later, it hadn't faded. It remained the defining song of the entire Macross franchise for most fans, and had crossed over well beyond it. There were people who knew the song without having any connection to Macross at all.
Akira stopped at the back of the gathered crowd and listened. When he looked toward the center to find the performer, he saw it was the same girl he had spoken with earlier.
She was completely different from the impression she had left on the bench.
Something had shifted the moment she began to sing. The cool distance was gone. In its place was a presence that felt like a genuine inhabiting of the song, as though she had actually become Lynn Minmay for its duration.
Her voice was gentle and mature, with a quiet strength underneath it. She moved through the song's themes, the depth of a love that survives time, the fragility of civilization held together by feeling, the refusal to abandon hope when surrounded by loneliness and the reality of war, with an understanding that went beyond simple technical ability.
She sang extremely well.
The crowd was still. When the last note finished, the silence held for a breath or two before the applause started at the edges and grew, people coming back to themselves and expressing what the performance had done to them.
She could debut professionally at this level. The thought arrived clearly and without any exaggeration.
And with her appearance on top of it, if she were to go the idol route, the trajectory would likely be...
No. He had already decided that was a road not worth going near.
People in the crowd began moving forward, dropping coins and folded bills into the open guitar case on the ground in front of her, nodding briefly before stepping back. She received each gesture with a slight nod of her own. No words, no extended interaction. The whole exchange was quiet and self-contained.
After the flow of people thinning, the girl took a breath and spoke.
"The next song will be the last one for tonight. It is an original piece, called 'Unfinished Dream.'"
At the word original, a portion of the crowd simply left. They were here for the anime songs they already loved, and an unknown singer's original work wasn't what they had come for.
Akira, who had been on the verge of turning toward the station, found himself staying. An original song from someone performing at this level was worth hearing.
She gathered herself for a moment, then began to play.
"At this intersection I pass every day, I suddenly heard a long-forgotten melody. A dream others always laughed at for being too distant, like chasing the stars in the sky..."
The song was built around the subject of dreams, tracing the shifting relationship a person has with their own ambitions over time, the back and forth between giving up and pushing through, and the quiet moment when a decision is finally made to continue.
She performed it with real craft, moving through the emotional arc of the lyrics in a way that was easy to follow and feel, the hesitation and confusion giving way step by step to something more settled.
The problem was the song itself.
It was pleasant. But placed next to what she had just performed, the gap was noticeable. "Ai Oboete Imasu Ka" had worked because it combined a genuinely exceptional piece of music with exceptional vocal skill.
"Unfinished Dream" leaned more heavily on her performance to carry it, and even her performance couldn't fully close the gap left by material that was, at best, reasonably well-constructed but not remarkable.
That said, it was a street performance, and a good one. When the song ended, applause followed, tips were offered, and the crowd slowly began to move on. She had announced it as her last song of the night, and people took that as their cue.
Akira hesitated, wallet in hand. He opened it, looked through what was there, and found a five-yen coin. He joined the small line at the guitar case and dropped it in.
When he looked up, the girl was already looking at him.
A flicker of recognition crossed her face.
"It's you."
Akira nodded and offered the same words she had given him that afternoon.
"You sang very well."
"Thank you."
He gave her a brief nod and turned to leave. They were strangers who had crossed paths twice in an evening. There wasn't much more to add.
Then she spoke.
"What did you think of the last song? The original one."
He stopped.
It wasn't the question he expected. He turned back and looked at her, and saw that the expression on her face was not casual. She was asking seriously.
His first instinct was to give her something easy and harmless and move on. But looking at her face, he let that go.
They owed each other nothing. He had no particular reason to soften the answer.
He thought about it properly, then spoke.
"You performed it beautifully. But the song itself, compared to what came before it, 'Ai Oboete Imasu Ka,' feels a little thin."
"Part of the issue, I think, is that the song doesn't have a moment that sticks. It's pleasant while you're listening, but once it ends there's nothing that stays with you, nothing that makes you want to hear it again."
"A moment that sticks?"
The girl went quiet, turning the words over.
Watching her take it seriously, Akira felt a small twinge of concern.
He had no professional knowledge of music. What he had just described came entirely from his own subjective impression of what he had heard, nothing more.
If she genuinely took his amateur assessment to heart and adjusted her work based on it, and it led her somewhere worse, that would be a problem entirely of his making.
Being polite and noncommittal would have been considerably simpler. He was already regretting the departure from that approach.
But he had started, so he continued.
"If you don't mind me asking, why did you want to know what others thought?"
The girl blinked. It seemed no one had ever turned that question back on her before.
She thought about it for a moment, then spoke with a trace of frustration in her voice.
"Honestly, I already felt that something about the song wasn't quite right. I just couldn't work out what it was. So I thought if I asked people what they heard, maybe someone would point to something I couldn't see myself."
"That makes sense."
He understood the problem immediately. It was something creators ran into regularly, and for reasons that weren't simple. Spending too much time with a piece of work created a kind of blindness to it, a cognitive numbness where you could no longer perceive what was actually there.
Sometimes a person had high enough standards to know something was wrong but not enough distance to identify what. Sometimes the work became so familiar that it started to feel strange in a way that made evaluation impossible altogether.
In his previous life he had been a struggling web novelist. Not a successful one by any measure, but a creator of sorts, and he had bumped into the same wall often enough to recognize it.
"In that case, it might help to try looking at it from a different angle entirely."
"A different angle?"
He saw the uncertainty in her expression and gave her a concrete example.
"With painting, sometimes you've been staring at something so long that your eyes stop registering it properly. You can look directly at a mistake and not see it because your brain has filled it in.
One thing that helps is turning the canvas upside down. The image becomes unfamiliar again, which breaks the numbness and lets you see things you couldn't before."
"The other option is to put the brush down and step away completely. Do something else for a while. Come back the next day, or a few days later, with fresh eyes. The problem that was invisible before often becomes obvious."
It was a method the original owner's art club advisor had taught, drawn from the memories he had inherited. Interestingly, the original owner had rarely needed it himself. His draftsmanship was clean enough that mistakes were genuinely rare.
The quiet efficiency of genuine talent was something else.
"I see. That's really useful."
Something had shifted in her expression, a small click of understanding settling into place. He noticed it and added one more thing while he had the chance.
"Even when you're looking for feedback, I think the more useful approach is to find someone with actual knowledge of the field. Someone who works in music professionally."
He paused, then continued.
"I'll be honest with you. I don't have any real grounding in music theory or composition. What I said earlier was entirely based on how the song felt to me as a listener. I could easily be wrong about all of it."
A random passerby giving useful critique was possible in principle. The probability was just low. A professional's input might not always be reliable either, but the odds were considerably better.
She was quiet for a moment, working through what he had said. Then something eased in her posture, a tension she had been carrying releasing slightly without fanfare. A small smile appeared without her seeming to intend it.
"Thank you for all of that. I think I have a better sense of where to go from here."
"I'm glad it helped."
The smile changed her entirely. The cool, self-contained impression she carried disappeared, replaced by something warmer, the look of someone who was simply a young woman feeling a little lighter than she had a few minutes ago.
Then she looked at him, a touch of shyness in her voice.
"My name is Shimizu Rin. May I ask yours?"
Akira was caught off guard for just a moment, then nodded.
"Mochizuki Akira. Good to meet you."