Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/19311553.
Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice
Rating: Teen and up, but this is mostly for emotional heaviness; no explicit sex or violence.
No major warnings; some mentions of institutional prejudice.
Published 2019-07-28
Words: 30,121
Chapter One: There are a lot of reasons why a child might not have a soulmark. It might be a simple issue of irregular skin pigmentation, or the mark might arrive late. Or the child might have another kind of soulmate. Usually these things work themselves out. In the meantime, for Minako at least, there’s ballet.
Chapter Two: Denmark, dancing, days off, decisions, and the starving-artist act is a lot less cute in midcareer.
Chapter Three: Adaptation, achievement, attitude, and this is going to be the real deal.
Chapter Four: Hasetsu, home, and Hiroko’s little boy.
Minako’s teacher says: “Elbows up. Don’t let them sag. Higher. Good. Now put your hands out farther in front of you so your arms round out. That’s a good start. Don’t let the insides of your elbows show. Imagine that you’re showing off your arms but you don’t want anyone to see your soulmark.”
Minako does, and does, and does, but at the last instruction she smiles a little smugly. It is easy for her to hide her soulmark. Nobody can see it at all. It’s definitely there—everybody has one, and they’re all different. Minako’s is just hard to see. Sometimes that happens. She will have plenty of time to think about this later. For now, she considers it just one of several things that make her a little bit better at ballet than everyone else in her class. She has long arms and legs for her age, and she has high arches in her feet, and she has a soulmark that’s easy to hide. It’s nice. But it’s just a nice thing; Rika has better turnout, and Sugako is better at spotting her head when she turns, and little Hiroko, who often waits with Minako for their moms to pick them up after class, is better at the stretch where you sit on the ground with your soles together and lean forward to touch your head to your feet. So Minako has plenty of work to do if she wants to be better than them.
Minako’s parents are right that some people’s marks come in later than others. There are lots of ways for this to happen. Most people (say the brochures Minako’s parents leave on an end table) are born with a visible mark, darker or lighter than the skin surrounding it, but not if their skin can’t produce much pigment—then they have to go to dermatologists to discern the shape of their mark. Sometimes the doctor gives them a tattoo, but if they don’t get one they have to rely on the sense anyone gets when they come close to their soulmate, the slight insistent pull between your mark and theirs. According to the brochures it’s a resistible feeling, and most people get used to it quickly; but you hear a lot of songs about it, and the movies are always playing it up. Or some people don’t get their marks until later, sometimes as late as puberty. Those are the usual reasons for a young child not to have a visible mark. It’s nothing to worry about.
Then again, someone might not have a mark at all because they might have an empathic soulmate connection instead. That’s harder to figure out, and it doesn’t start all at once. Adolescents tend to have strong and confusing feelings anyway, so it can take a long time to understand when some feelings are coming from a soulmate connection. Sometimes soulmate empathy creates feedback loops that make it hard to identify the causes of your own emotions. This is the topic of a sub-field of psychotherapy, and of a number of books that show up in the Okukawa household around the time Minako is ten.
A few rare souls (according to the section of the public library where Minako browses at eleven and twelve but knows she’s too young to check anything out without drawing attention) experience none of these things but develop sudden and vivid synesthesia the first time they touch their soulmate—hearing colors, smelling music. This is unpredictable, since you get no sign it is going to happen until a physical connection is made.
All of these things are possible, and none of them are inevitable, and meanwhile Minako turns in her elbows and dances.
Minsko at seven years old loves ballet class, but she likes riding her bicycle, too, and drawing pictures with crayons. Most little girls she knows like most of those things, more or less. Ballet hasn’t called her or chosen her. She’s just good at it, and then better than the rest of her class. Unlike most of the things that she tries, she understands how to get better at it. It’s a comprehensible kind of work, offering steady progress and a beautiful result. Later, when she grows up, she’ll accept the fact that ballet requires not just repetition but understanding, artistry, making choices. All of that is required to be great. But for now, she isn’t focused on greatness. She just wants to improve.
The notion of a professional career, of actually being a ballerina and not just having people call her one in a cute way, takes years to come into focus. Minako lives in Hasetsu, in Saga Prefecture. Real professional ballet doesn’t happen in places like that. Maybe it happens in Kyoto or Nagasaki, and certainly it happens in Tokyo, but mostly, ballet seems to belong in Moscow and Paris and New York. Could she ever go to those places? Maybe, maybe, but that’s years and years away, and today she has to practice her tendus and her port-de-bras: first position, second, fourth, fifth. Again.
The hardest part is that you are never supposed to look like you’re struggling. “You’re not athletes,” her teacher tells the class. “Ballet audiences don’t want to think about how difficult your work is or wonder whether you can stay on your feet. They want to feel certain that you are going to pull it off.”
She stops Minako when her turns are too labored, or when she’s supposed to run from one spot to another and she actually runs, sometimes swinging her arms a little, anxious to get there on time. “This is still part of the dance, Minako! Everything you do when you’re dancing is performance. Even if you’re just getting into position for something else, you’re still dancing.”
Later in that lesson, she apparently notices that Minako is having a hard time looking graceful while wiping the sweat off her face and delicately picking through her bag for her water bottle. “Hey,” she says. “It’s okay to stop performing when you’re offstage. It’s important to be able to do that.”
The first time Minako goes to a ballet competition, at age ten, she places third in her age group. She expected to win—she just hadn’t thought about the possibility of not winning. But third place is nice, and anyway she has plenty of time to do better. She gets a little trophy, and her picture appears in the local newspaper, tiny and looking serious in her baby tutu and flat ballet shoes. She goes back to the studio and practices every day, trying to improve her turnout, and makes progress at an agonizingly slow pace, her knees pointing a tiny fraction of a degree farther from each other every day. She spots her head during turns so sharply and rapidly that she gives herself headaches; she strains herself in her arabesques as if she could make her limbs longer.
Her teacher tells the class, “You have to learn your technique over and over for the whole time you are dancing. You’re never finished.”
At eleven she goes back to the contest and takes first place in her age group, and again at twelve. The notices in the paper start to refer to her as a bit of a local celebrity, like the high school athletes who win games. She’s growing, and she knows it isn’t because of practice that her limbs are getting longer, but she feels accomplished anyway, admires the way her legs look in the studio mirror when she runs through her exercises at the barre, and then has to get out of that habit because admiring herself is distracting her from getting better. She knows that she’s the best dancer in her class, and so does everyone else. If anyone is jealous they don’t bother her with that information. Most twelve-year-old girls in ballet class want to be good but know that school is more important. Minako supposes that she should be making school a higher priority, but ballet is happening now. She’s afraid that if she ignored it for a little while she’d lose it. She learns how to do things, memorizes the instructions given by her teacher and repeats them until the movements get into her body and she forgets how she learned them. Then she gets too confident and has to re-learn the instructions again. The cycle repeats.
At thirteen she gets her first pointe shoes, moves up a division in the contest, and wins first again. This time the Hasetsu paper sends someone to interview her when she gets home.
The reporter for the local arts beat is professional and kind; Minako wonders if this is condescension, but she decides to take the act at face value. She’s a performer, after all. She answers questions about her ballet classes and her ambitions for the future: “I want to keep dancing,” no details. The reporter doesn’t press her too hard about her future career but does ask, “To whom did you dedicate your performance?”
Minako thinks about the question. There are warring superstitions at play here. The whole ballet world is always a little Russia-crazed, and in Russia it’s traditional to dedicate a music or dance performance to one’s soulmate; ballerinas like to provide quotes to the press about love giving them grace. But in Japan it’s traditionally considered bad luck to talk about your soulmate before you’ve met them, at least in public. She decides to do an end-run around the whole question. “My mother,” she says. “She takes me to Tokyo for the competition every year even though it’s a long trip. Ballet is a lot of work. For everyone involved.”
The interview runs with a picture of Minako from the competition, and her mother’s friends cut it out of the paper and send it to her to make sure she’ll have copies. Minako doesn’t like how her legs look shorter in the picture than in the studio mirrors. “I look like a baby,” she whines.
Her mother never laughs at her when she says things like this. Instead she seems to consider this comment, looks at the photo again, and says, “Your extension is improving, but I don’t think this picture captures it. It’s a bad angle.” She doesn’t put the picture up on the fridge but she gives one to Minako’s father, and he tacks it up on the little bulletin board in his office. He sleeps there most nights.
That year’s win gets her a letter from a teacher in Tokyo, a woman named Imai Fuyumi who had a short, distinguished career before retiring with an injury. Minako knows who she is. People in the Japanese ballet world talk about her the way ordinary people talk about bands that put out one great album and then broke up. She’s still new as a teacher, and studying with her won’t mean direct access to a company. But she’s already a legend as a performer, an enormous step up from Minako’s teacher in Hasetsu, and it’s not as if anyone else is offering.
Still, it won’t be logistically easy. Minako’s family lives here in Saga, and she’s only thirteen. Her father’s law practice is here; he can’t easily move. Her mother is a realtor, and it would be hard for her to go too, but maybe, maybe…
It’s difficult and bizarre having conversations like this with her parents, taking the leading role, as if she’s somehow become the head of the family—as if she’s ascended to some throne and they are her regents. It hardly seems possible they can believe in her talent enough to talk about moving, about her parents’ careers following hers. Can they afford this? What will they have to do to afford it? Minako’s parents have never had an answer when she asked them why she didn’t have any siblings, and sometimes she wonders if she came into the world and left no room in the family for anyone else. Her parents could barely even stay together after she started dancing, and they’re soulmates—did she do that?
Whether or not she was responsible at first, it seems obvious that she’s responsible now, when her parents agree that her father will stay in Hasetsu with his job, and her mother will come with her to Tokyo and find work there, and they will see each other at holidays or whenever they are able.
After that it’s a long time before Minako gives another interview to the newspaper in Hasetsu.
Imai-sensei has a small group of students and works closely with them every day. Minako is a little wistful when she hears about schools in London or New York that are attached to professional companies, where dozens of students live in dormitories and study intensively together, and the advanced students get invited to be apprentices and join the corps de ballet. It would be nice to have that kind of straight line to success. But then, she wonders, what if you failed it? If you studied for years and years at the Tokyo Ballet Gakko and didn’t get invited to apprentice with the Tokyo Ballet—what would you do? You’d have to go look for a job somewhere else, after spending your whole education aiming at one particular place. That would be hard. It’s hard not knowing where she will go when she’s old enough to be a professional, but at least she knows that she’ll have to figure that out, and this way if she decides to do something else it might not feel like such a failure. And anyway that’s years away, still. Today she’s going to a screening of The Red Shoes with all her classmates, because the film club at the library is showing it and someone told her that all ballet students ought to watch it, and they’re a bunch of teenage clichés in pointe shoes.
The movie is sentimental and bombastic and ridiculous. Everyone somehow has a spotlight shining across their eyes at all times, and they’re all cut up about the idea of a ballerina wanting to get married, even though her soulmate works for the company and it would be really easy for them both to stay there. Minako’s classmate Anzu shrieks in something like performative horror, and something like joy, at the part when Moira Shearer dances herself to death. “Imagine giving yourself up on the altar of dance!” Anzu always talks like that. She’ll get a corps de ballet contract in Kyoto at eighteen, and she’ll dance there for one year before she quits and goes to college to study urban planning.
Minako won’t do that, even though in the future it will never be easy to explain why she kept it up when others didn’t. Any day there’s an opportunity to quit, but she doesn’t have to, and she doesn’t want to, and even though it feels recklessly ambitious she lets the idea of a professional career come into real focus in her mind. Periodically her mother asks her how things are going at school, the weird school for actor and dancer kids that Minako attends when she’s not at the studio, and asks if any of the subjects there especially interest her. It’s important—she says gently—to have backup options. Minako hears this from other students sometimes, too, and she takes it as seriously as she can, which is not very. She attends advanced ballet class in the morning, goes to school for three or four classes—English and Japanese and history and math—and then she goes back to the studio so she can attend a lower-level class for more practice, doing all the barre exercises on pointe to make them more challenging. Tokyo for her is small, just home and school and the studio and the bright, crowded spaces between them full of fast-moving people, Minako slipping sideways between them to get to the next place. She still doesn’t feel anything like a pull toward a soulmate, not even with all of these people around, but then, she’s so focused that she might have just missed it. It’s a relentlessly narrow life but it’s all animated by the promise and possibility of something bigger.
If Minako really tries, she can imagine quitting and doing something else. She’s watched her mother long enough to understand a little about what her job is like and to hear about the different lives of her clients, the young professionals and the university people and the people who work in big offices doing office things. Minako will go into that world if she has to, but she likes the life she has now. Routinely she asks herself whether this is what she wants, and by the time she’s done with school the answer has solidified, little by little, into a yes. Yes to the work and the constant learning and the physical diligence and the risk of failure; yes to choosing this life and getting to live it. Somebody gets to do it and it might as well be her.
Still, she thought something would change when she finished high school. Not much does.
Minako makes a tape and tries to get auditions, and mostly can’t; she keeps going to class. She keeps practicing. She’s still taking classes with Imai-sensei. It’s frustrating—she is old enough to be dancing full time, and she should be auditioning for professional companies, but she can’t seem to get in the door. Minako will object to anyone suggesting that Imai-sensei is anything but a world-class dancer and an excellent teacher, but it’s clear that her name is not enough to get a student of hers into an apprenticeship with the Tokyo Ballet. Minako is already self-conscious about how much her mother had to give up to enable a dance education in Tokyo to begin with. She really has to start earning her own way now, but doing that is confusing and difficult. Who wants to hire a ballet dancer?
She gets a part-time gig with a small company that travels to places where there is less competition. They might perform in a town like Hasetsu, if Hasetsu weren’t so far away. They don’t put on feature-length productions—nothing that ambitious. They do scenes instead, the standards like the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty, the final scene from Gisèle. Minako has always wanted to dance Aurora, and if the only way she can do that is in a school auditorium, she’ll take it. Meanwhile she teaches a class once a week at Imai-sensei’s studio for twelve and thirteen year olds—anyone older than that is too close to her own age to see her as an authority, and anyone younger is, according to sensei, much too hard to teach. “You’ll need a lot more experience before you’re ready to teach beginners,” she tells Minako. So that one class is a meager source of income, and she earns a little more as a performer.
Minako is a champion at scoring discounted tickets to the ballet—whether she gets there by bothering her teacher’s friends for comps, waiting in the rush line on performance day, going in on season subscriptions with three or four other students so they can share the subscriber discount, or just keeping an open ear around the school for anyone with an extra ticket.
Getting dressed for the ballet always means walking a tricky line between what she wants and what she can afford. She’s good at dressing the part of a young professional, in slim belted dresses that are simple enough it’s hard to tell they’re a year or two out of date, and flats that are cute enough to make up for not being heels. She does up her makeup right and keeps her hair simple—long, even, no bangs. She blends in on the street but at the ballet she wants to do more than blend in: she wants to look like she belongs. On nights when she has tickets she’ll line her eyes wider as if she’s trying to make them visible from the stage, or she’ll wear her flats with the strap across the instep like a child’s ballet slippers; she puts on her earrings of long silver dangling chains to look a little more artsy than the patrons who will be wearing pearls. It’s hard to say whether any of this gets noticed. She keeps doing it on the theory that you have to fake it until you make it, but she’s keenly aware that she might just end up faking it until her time runs out.
She’s in one of these outfits when she takes her classmate Emiko to see the Tokyo Ballet, the autumn she’s nineteen. The headlining piece that evening is Paul Béjart’s Bolero, a dance for one woman and a corps of men—the woman standing on top of an enormous circular table, and the men seated behind her.
The piece is almost twenty minutes long and the ballerina is constantly moving—not traveling far, and not leaping, but her whole body pulses continuously. The circle of men around her are drawn into the dance with agonizing slowness. Is the woman powerful, or lonely, or both? Her motions are repetitive, hypnotic; is she weaving a spell, or is there a spell on her? There’s something a little disturbingly Rite-of-Springish about the whole thing, as if the dance is going to come to a tragic crisis; but the closer they get to the end, the more the ballerina’s face goes from a studied and neutral intensity to a grin that deepens and gets fiercer, until every time she raises her arms the men around her rise too, coming up on their toes until she releases her arms and they go down again; she seems to convince them with one gesture to rise and fall in unison. She looks ferociously satisfied as they start to circle in closer around her, as the radius shrinks, until finally the inner ring of them takes the step of climbing up on the ballerina’s table, and she draws up her arms one more time and on the final fanfare flourish of the music they all collapse. When the lights come back up for the curtain call, the ballerina is glowing like an incandescent bulb—eyes wide, mouth grinning like the cat that’s got the cream. She’s won something, and conclusively so, but what it is—that feels difficult to name.
Standing around in the lobby at intermission, Minako asks Emiko what she thinks, not because she wants to know but just to raise the subject so she can talk about it herself.
“I had chills,” Emiko says, and they can agree on that much. But then she says, “It’s so cruel. Almost bitter. It left a weird taste in my mouth.”
“What’s cruel about it?” asks Minako. “You think she was cruel?”
“No, I mean—the men were cruel, weren’t they? They were just waiting that whole time, and then they circled around and closed in.”
Minako feels disoriented. “But they weren’t in charge at all. I thought the focus was all on her. She was the one drawing them in.”
Emiko shrugs. “I mean, sure, it was framed that way, but it always is, isn’t it? It’s—” She looks away, apparently uncomfortable, to watch a woman near them adjust her wrap, which is silk and such an ugly shade of green that it must be fashion-forward. Emiko frowns and tries again. “All the time in ballet, the ballerina is always in front, and in the spotlight, but she’s still the one getting picked up and thrown, isn’t she? She’s the one getting supported by her partner. It’s all part of the show to pretend that isn’t true.”
Minako was ready to argue but not about this. She wishes she had a drink to fiddle with, but it hadn’t seemed worth the money. “I thought,” she says. “I thought she was magnificent.”
“Yes, she was wonderful! It’s so subtle, and so drawn-out. I wonder if people will appreciate how much stamina she showed up there.”
“Right.” Minako can feel it leaking away, the powerful sense of assurance she felt at the climax of the piece, and she grasps at straws. “It’s such a relentless rhythm, but I never felt like she was having trouble keeping up with it. The way she used her arms it was almost like she was conducting the music.” Which is true, and she noticed it early on in the piece, but there was so much else, and she’s worried she’s going to lose it, it’s all going to slip away before she can say to herself what it meant to her, that wide-eyed grinning commanding face, that relentless steady strength.
Later she’ll think about ways she wishes this conversation had gone. She’d wanted to say something about how the ballerina seemed almost like a siren, drawing in all those men with a winding, repetitive song until they drew close and she knocked them all down. But that wasn’t it either; she wasn’t as ferocious as that. Minako understands the truth of the story she’s been told only in what she remembers of the dance itself. It comes back to her in snatches when she’s thinking about something else—how it felt to watch that performance—and every time, she straightens her back a little and thinks about how she might become that steady, that sure. If she can’t explain in words what the piece means, she’s going to have to dance it herself. She has to take care not to miss her chance.
Later that winter, a pair of British ice dancers skate to an Olympic gold medal with a routine set to “Boléro.”
Minako likes figure skating well enough, certainly better than football or any of the other team sports people watch in bars, but ice dance has always seemed like a bizarre cousin of ballroom dance, formulaic and excessively focused on couples making romantic pictures. In any case she has little time for things like watching the Olympics. But after Torvill and Dean win perfect 6.0s across the board for their artistic expression, the routine gets repeated on the television every evening for a week, or so it seems, and Minako watches it thoughtfully. The program is not romantic, or not in a way she’s used to seeing. It’s not even clear if the two skaters are meant to represent two characters, or just a single soul struggling through a repetitive set of thoughts. She decides that she likes it, and then her memory of it gets tangled up with her memory of the Béjart, and then she spends a week with the melody running repetitively through her head at every moment that she isn’t dancing to something else; she practically marches to it when she walks down the street to class.
This isn’t enough, she says to herself, like a mantra as she walks. The Rose Adagio in school auditoriums is fine as a start but she isn’t going to settle for it permanently. She’s going to get up on that table in the center of the stage. She’s going to grab an audience’s attention and keep it.
She might need to leave Japan to do it.
Once Minako gets it into her head to go abroad, it’s all she can think about. She’s tried for every audition she can plausibly get in Tokyo. She knows all the companies and most of the teachers, and she’d make things socially and professionally complicated if she tried to leave Imai-sensei for another instructor. And anyway she doesn’t want any of them; she’s too familiar with their faults.
Abroad, though. She feels excited all of a sudden, like when she was little and moving to Tokyo, except it’s different now because it’s all her idea. She’s going to break a brand-new trail for herself.
She cuddles this pride to herself for a whole week and a half before admitting that she is going to have to ask for help after all. She doesn’t know how to get the attention of a foreign ballet teacher or school, or—well, she has the notion of a company with some kind of fellowship program, but maybe those don’t exist. She reads the dance magazines religiously, and there are some opportunities there, but half of them are in countries whose language she doesn’t speak. Is she going to try to learn enough French in secret to apply for a program in Paris all by herself, or is she going to swallow her pride? She goes to Imai-sensei and admits that she needs help, because she is stuck.
Imai-sensei makes some phone calls to people she knows from her performing days, and then she has them make some phone calls to people who speak languages she can’t, and she gets those people to agree that if the elusive and mysterious lost ballerina of Japan (meaning Imai-sensei herself—she lays this on a bit thick, apparently on purpose) will send tape of her most promising student, a girl who needs to go abroad to properly flourish, who has music in her toes and fingers and is eager to study further to learn how to use it—in short, she gets them to agree that if she sends them a tape, they will watch it. Of course they don’t promise anything more than that, but that’s a big step when it comes from teachers in Paris and Berlin and London, people whose names are a little familiar to Minako from the magazines but who, if they ever performed, haven’t been onstage for a decade or two. Minako pictures wrinkled old ballet masters wearing all black and sitting on wooden chairs turned backwards, leaning on the backrest with a cigarette in one hand and saying, “Ten more repetitions.” She doesn’t know if she’ll flourish under a teacher like that. It will certainly be a change from the rather young Imai-sensei, who tells her students quite frankly how proud she is of them, or how frustrated when they fail; who tells them she’s worried about giving them eating disorders, so they have to tell her if they start being afraid to eat. Imai-sensei has been Minako’s lifeline in Tokyo, and she’s nervous about cutting loose from her and leaving her mother too. But they make the tape anyway, and they send it off to Europe in bubble mailers with airmail stickers on them, and they cross their fingers.
The Paris Opera Ballet doesn’t have much room for dancers from anywhere else. They have their own school and hiring procedures, and Minako has nothing to offer them. But the POB doesn’t own the city of Paris or all its ballet masters, and despite their dominance there is other interesting work going on here. Imai-sensei put Minako in touch with a friend of hers from her early professional days, a beautiful dancer and idiosyncratic choreographer who makes his living nowadays through a combination of choreography, teaching, and performing modern dance that doesn’t tax the body as badly as ballet.
The money for Minako’s residency here is coming from a relatively new but extraordinarily well-endowed private foundation in Tokyo, to whom she sent videos of her performances and a detailed letter about all the ways in which she planned to change the ballet world. This was going to require a great deal of international study. She implied that she would have to travel to Paris and New York to truly understand the global landscape of ballet, and that it would be ideal for her to spend time outside the traditional ballet capitals as well, to learn about what local dance idioms were flourishing elsewhere; but she modestly requested only enough funds to spend half a year in Paris studying under a great teacher, to conclude with a public recital where she would prove to a Parisian audience what Japanese dancers could do.
This wasn’t exactly a lie. It’s hard to lie when describing what you would like to do if someone gave you enough money. But it was mostly made up on the spot when Minako decided she needed to look beyond Tokyo for her next career move. Minako is increasingly coming to believe that no one is ever going to believe in her until she grabs them by the lapels and tells them why they should, and so that is exactly what she has done. And now she is here in Noé Cason’s studio making faces at the mirrors.
Minako’s place in this studio is strange. She’s one of the students, more or less, but she’s neither a pre-professional teenager nor a hobbyist adult. She takes classes alongside the younger students, a small group, for the sake of keeping up her daily practice; and then she does intensive study with M. Cason.
They spend more time than she expected on her acting. Imai-sensei encouraged good facial expressions, of course, but it wasn’t a major focus of hers. Her aim was a pleasant, natural expression that didn’t distract from the movements. But Noé has her doing such enormous facial expressions that they seem to Minako like pantomime. “Are you a ballet dancer or Marcel Marceau,” she imagines asking him—mutters it to her toothbrush, sometimes, in the evening when she’s going over the day in her head. She’s not prepared to say it to his face, though. She feels ridiculous, but it does seem possible that he’s teaching her something she needs to know.
It’s not until she feels like she’s made an ass out of herself in the studio, flashing bizarrely gleeful faces every which way like a clown, that he finally says, “Okay. You can stop. How do you feel?”
Minako chews her lip, looking at him for a moment. “How much of the real answer do you want?”
He laughs a little. Minako has to give him credit for that; he doesn’t have a fragile ego. “I assume you’re tired, in pain somewhere, and sick of this exercise. Besides that, how did it feel dancing that variation?”
She thinks about it.
“I don’t think I felt in character, exactly. I still don’t really know who the character is in this variation. But I think I felt more airborne that time, if that makes sense.” She thinks about it a little more. “Like—it’s not that I made myself happy, exactly, but I felt kind of. Gleeful? Like I was going to have a good time just to spite you.”
He grins. “Excellent. Where was that feeling in your body?”
That’s a hard one. “In my chest, mostly.” She puts a hand to her sternum, then higher. “Like my heart was up here.”
“What does that do to your arms and your neck, when your heart moves up there?”
“I don’t know.” She moves her arms experimentally. “They want to float up, a little. And out. Expand.”
“Excellent. Dance like that.”
She tries it. It changes. The dance is more buoyant, more open. Then they start over again doing the same variation with an exaggerated droopy sad face and she tries to dance the way that suggests.
“You see?” he says when they stop once again. “What you do with your face feeds back into how you feel, and how you feel informs your body. Once you fake an emotion you usually start to feel it, and then you can express it another way. You don’t have to psychoanalyze a role from the inside out like a method actor; you can find it from the outside in.”
Minako tries it, not just in the studio but when she’s walking the streets of Paris in her free time. She wears long sleeves every day, buys cheap scarves and ties them around her neck as chicly as if they were Hermès, hardens her smile, and perfects the art of walking through a neighborhood where she’s never been as if she knows exactly where she is going and why. She sits in cafés drinking black coffee and flirts with people there in an absurd mixture of Japanese, English, and ballet-studio French.
“Where is your soulmate?” asks Eric from Lyon, or Tobias from Leipzig, or, once, Mariah from Newcastle, and she tells melodramatic lies: her soulmate died young, her soulmate is a political prisoner somewhere, her soulmate rejected her.
It’s fun making up these stories, until one day it abruptly isn’t fun anymore. “I haven’t got one,” she tells Martin from Aix-en-Provence. “I never have.”
He was stirring artificial sweetener into his coffee when he asked the question, avoiding eye contact, but when he hears her answer he looks up in shock. “Really?” he says. “Never? How—what are you going to do?”
“What are you going to do?” she asks, and this is a nonsensical response, just reflecting his question back at him, but he seems genuinely unsettled by the turn the conversation has taken and it takes him a moment to answer. When he speaks it sounds, absurdly, as if he might be about to cry.
“I’m going to continue searching,” he says. “I’m going to find them. Her. I think it is probably a woman but it’s taking such a long time…”
Minako doesn’t care for tears, and she feels a little guilty for provoking them. She responds, as in most situations, with bluntness. “I’m not going to be your confessor about all that,” she says. “I’m sure you’re doing a perfectly adequate job. If you want someone to take your mind off your search, well—” She gets a pen out of her handbag and writes down the telephone number of the sixth floor walk-up apartment she’s rented in the Latin quarter. “Give me a ring when you’re in a better mood.”
It takes him a week to call, but when he does his voice is steady, and his eyes, when he appears at her front door with a bottle of wine on a Thursday evening, are dry. The concierge looks at Minako with some kind of inscrutable judgment in her eyes and retreats to her office, and Minako takes her guest by the hand and leads him upstairs.
It starts well, the two of them at her tiny round kitchen table sipping wine out of jam jars.
“I hear ballet is very torturous,” he says.
“Is that the word you wanted?” Minako asks, sharper than she meant to be and immediately rebuking herself: he’s not here for English practice. “It’s hard work.”
“Is it worth it?”
She laughs. “Absolutely not!” Martin blinks in surprise but he must notice the gaiety in her tone, because he’s teasing when he asks, “So why put in all this work? There are other ways to learn a living.”
“Oh, are there? Nobody has ever told me that. I thought I’d have to dance or starve.” Is this mean-flirtatious thing working? It’s hard to tell; maybe she’ll try to scale it back. “What I mean is, if you start asking if it’s worth it, you’re asking the wrong question. ‘Worth’ is a—it’s how you talk about money. So what you’re asking is, when I rehearse every day, and take care of my diet, and feel in pain all the time, is that worth what the audience pays to see? Is it worth it for them to see me dance?” He looks more puzzled than attracted, but she’s committed to this bit now. “And of course it isn’t. They pay to come see something beautiful, and I hope they love it, but there are lots of other beautiful things to see. Lots of beautiful things without so much pain. Especially here in Paris! They could just watch a sunrise or go to Sainte-Chappelle.”
Martin lifts both his eyebrows and takes another sip of wine, lost.
Minako lets out a gust of breath and sets a grin on her face. “Anyway! Wrong question! You asked is it worth it. Art never is, probably. Not if you ask money questions. But the right question is will I keep doing it as long as I possibly can, and the answer to that is yes. So there you are. What do you do? Is that worth the effort?”
“I, ah.” He looks out the window as if he needs inspiration. “I don’t—I’m not sure how to say it in English. I have a normal job. It’s boring.”
“Well.” Isn’t he going to hold up his end of the conversation at all? “What do you do when you’re not at work?”
“Mostly I sit at home and feel sad.” He blushes. Maybe he didn’t mean to say that. “It’s been a bad time. Most of my friends are back in Provence.”
“That isn’t very far.”
“No, but I was the only one who dreamed of a life in Paris, you know? And I got it, and it’s lonely. That’s all.”
“So you started talking to foreign women in cafés.”
“It was better than sitting at home watching television.”
“Can’t you think of better things to do in Paris?”
“Honestly? No.” He keeps looking between her and the window, like he doesn’t want to maintain eye contact. “It’s a good place to be a tourist, and a good place to be in love. I suppose it’s a good place to be an artist. But when you are just a normal person and you aren’t in love, it’s just métro, boulot, dodo. Train, job, sleep, and then you do it again, and then you go out and drink a coffee. What else? People dream of coming here, and then you come here, and then you’re out of dreams. You know?”
“No, not really,” Minako says. She should probably be more polite, but she’s never considered it polite to lie. “I’m still chasing something. Do you always consider it a bad thing for people to get what they want? That’s depressing.”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe you have to be French to understand.”
This is so patently ridiculous that she feels a little of her warmth towards him go out of the room.
“Martin,” says Minako. “You sound a little depressed.” He looks uncomfortable, and she has no earthly idea what to say, so she does the daftest possible thing and kicks up her leg as high as she can while sitting in this rickety wooden chair and wearing jeans. “You should get better at putting your feet up.”
He laughs, and somehow they manage to change the subject. Minako talks about Hasetsu a little, though she never knows what to say about it, and she asks him a few questions about Aix, and they finish the bottle of wine that way. When it’s gone, Minako says, “Well. You managed not to cry,” and he smiles more genuinely than he did before, and thanks her, and kisses her lightly on both cheeks, and then he is gone.
So there’s that. She approached this visit with a sense of finality—if she turns out someday to have a soulmate, she won’t have waited for them. But then the evening ended so chastely that—well, if she was ever waiting, she still is.
Her lessons get increasingly demanding, until she has no more time for talking to strangers in cafés.
As the end of her time in Paris approaches she finds that she simultaneously wants to go home, and wants never to go home.
She misses hanging around the house on off days with her mother, gossiping lazily about the people they know and falling asleep in front of the television. She misses going shopping with her father, strolling the streets of Sasebo with a coffee and trying to convince him not to buy her things. She wants to eat real Japanese food again and relax into speaking her first language. She wants to celebrate holidays the way she did as a kid and stop second-guessing which way to look when she crosses the street.
But she also looks at her tiny Paris apartment sometimes and says to herself, Look where I am. She finds the groceries she wants in a Russian-run international store and feels so proud of herself she could crow. Everything is unfamiliar and so everything is an adventure: going to the movies, finding her way to a new restaurant, reading ballet reviews. She is learning some French from tapes (slowly slowly slowly) and she keeps getting caught between her three languages and forgetting the words for what she means, and it’s aggravating but somehow also wonderful. The world seems both bigger and smaller than it ever has before. She spends every day working in a studio doing what directors and choreographers tell her, and yet she feels as if she must be the freest person she has ever met: no soulmate, no children, only her body and the things it can do, the way it can communicate without using language at all. She might be homesick, but she’s not ready to call an end to this adventure.
So it’s back to the tapes and the letters and the trying to get auditions. It’s different this time, with a Parisian return address, with Cason on her résumé. She gets a foot in some doors. She shows up and shows what she can do.
There is a moment in the middle of Minako’s audition tour when she is in a train station in Tours in the middle of the night waiting for a connection, when the fatigue of travel gets so strong that it feels like mental clarity. She looks around her at long rows of chairs, the tall windows onto the night that reflect back the lights of the interior, the shut-down food kiosks and the ticket counters, and she thinks, “I might actually pull this off.”
She will remember this moment for a long time without ever trying to explain it. Three weeks later she’s offered a corps de ballet contract with the Royal Danish Ballet.