Copenhagen is wet and slightly chilly all the time, and the language is incomprehensible, and senior dancers keep throwing skeptical looks in Minako’s direction, and she has never been more full of joy.
Nothing that Minako has experienced in her life has so purely deserved the name of work as dancing in the corps de ballet. She is given a task, and she completes it. Over and over again, with difficulty, with results. The company seems so enormous she can’t see around it. She thinks of her apartment like a subsidiary part of the theater complex, or as if the theater is a body and it exhales the dancers and inhales them again at predictable times of the day. No metaphor is quite sufficient for how enormous this feels, how encompassed she is by an endeavor many times larger than herself. She tries to explain it to one of her cohort once, when they’re waiting during a late rehearsal and both feeling a little stupid with fatigue; and Alina snorts and says it’s a good thing Minako didn’t have to read Marx or she might have become an ideologue. Minako doesn’t think so; she’s never taken politics very seriously, but maybe she would have if dance hadn’t gotten to her first.
For the first week after Minako and her class of new corps members join the company, they all behave with controlled, upright propriety, following directions as strictly as possible, and no one wants to intrude on each other’s privacy. Minako decides that if no one else is going to break the ice, she’ll do it, so she starts asking the other corps members personal questions at random and lets them believe this is just how things are done where she was brought up.
In her second week she dumps herself onto the studio floor next to a studious Danish girl named Veronika and asks her, “What do your parents do for a living?” She gets a startled but honest answer (mother delivers mail, father teaches history, and she had her ballet lessons subsidized by an otherwise estranged aunt) and from then on she has one person to talk to.
The next week she ambushes Alina, a dancer from Ukraine with wide eyes and lightning-fast feet, with a question about how she first learned to fouetté, and then she has two friends.
The third friend she makes is a young but formidably tall Turkish ballerina named Defne. She studied at the Royal Ballet School in London from the age of fifteen and speaks English considerably better than Minako, who used to consider herself proficient. Minako doesn’t have to come at her with a question because Defne beats her to the punch, dropping down next to her on the studio floor and announcing, “I’m never making soloist until they hire some taller men.”
Minako almost asks why not, but the answer is obvious. Defne is just shy of “too tall”: she can fit into the corps but only barely. They don’t have to do too much partnering, but it’s already clear that when a ballet requires that, Defne isn’t chosen for it. None of the men are tall enough to easily lift her or support her in paired moves and, “With my luck,” she continues, not paying attention to the fact that Minako hasn’t said anything yet, “my soulmate is going to be one meter tall.”
So that delivers another piece of information, and Minako decides to be frank in return and say, “Oh, well, I don’t have one at all.”
“Really?” Defne turns to look at her properly. “You’re sure you’re not an empath or a synesthete or something?”
Minako shrugs, trying to look careless like she did in Paris. Everyone knows she doesn’t have a visible mark—they all get a clear look at each other’s bodies every day at work. But people have always been eager to believe she has a different kind of soulmate. “I don’t know,” she says. “Definitely not an empath, unless I’m empathic with someone who never has any feelings. Synesthesia you never know for sure until it happens, but it does seem like there’s a psych profile and I don’t fit it. And I don’t believe in body swaps.”
Alina’s been shamelessly eavesdropping since Defne came over here, and she interrupts to say, “Aren’t Japanese soulmates connected by a red string of fate?”
Minako frowns. “No? That’s a metaphor. A folktale. It isn’t how things really happen.”
“What about languages?” says Veronika, leaning over Alina to get into the conversation.
Minako has heard this one before, about people who can automatically speak any language their soulmate can speak, but never from a doctor. “How would I know? Maybe I could understand Finnish or Tongan or Romansch, but I’ve never heard them.”
Veronika gets a glint in her eye and says, “Maybe we should take a trip to the library and find out. I bet they have books in all kinds of languages. We could try you on them.”
Alina screws up her mouth and looks into the distance like she’s considering the practicalities of this plan. “They probably don’t have books in Tongan. Does that have a written form or is it one of those languages people only speak?”
“Everything has a written form nowadays,” Defne says, strikingly confident; “the missionaries made sure of that.”
“Or just hang around the harbor when the sailors are coming in,” Veronika says. “Or stay here for that matter. Maybe that’s why you became a dancer! Because you have a soulmate from a far-off land and this was what would bring you into the same country!”
“I doubt it,” Minako says, faltering a little. She’s spent her adulthood so far writing off the possibility that she might have a soulmate after all; but then, for a while she didn’t think she would ever land a permanent job with a company. Maybe she’s been giving up too easily, and now that she’s grown up, finally a professional in her chosen field, she can think about possibilities. She doesn’t manage to think of any witty response to Veronika before the break is over and it’s time to get back to work.
After that Minako listens closely when the German dancers find each other for a conversation, or the Italians, to see if she suddenly understands them or knows how to respond. No dice. There’s one Khazakh man in the company and she finds an excuse to stand next to him once during a break in class, turns to him and tries to will herself to speak Khazakh or maybe Russian. As soon as she tries it, her mind emergency-ejects all her knowledge of English, French, and Japanese, so she just blinks at him and runs away in search of her water bottle.
Many of the corps members have only recently paired up, and they divide their attention between the rigors of company life and the needs of a delicate new soulbond. Some lucky ducks are paired with another dancer, or someone attached to the orchestra or playhouse or opera, so they keep comparable hours and understand one another. Others have been inscrutably fated to fall in love with nurses or taxi drivers or bureaucrats. Veronika’s soulmate works in the Ministry of Environment and he doesn’t know anything about ballet, or so he strenuously insists whenever his colleagues are nearby; but, Veronika says, “He cares as much as he knows how. We only met last year. We’re still learning.”
“Lilia Baranovskaya lived in a different city from her soulmate for almost a decade,” Defne says. The four of them have started to form a habitual cluster; Minako is pleased to see that they all not only talk to her, they talk to each other when she is busy with something else. “He was an Olympic figure skater—he didn’t want to leave his coach, she didn’t want to leave the Bolshoi, so they commuted to visit each other on their days off.”
“It’s the ideal marriage!” Alina says, laughing. She’s quick with comments like that, but she goes home to her soulmate every day and is very shy of saying anything about her. Minako suspects she’s acting cynical so she doesn’t get revealed as a romantic.
Ballet is a global language, but Danish ballet is a particular dialect. It’s firmly committed to preserving its legacy (this is, as all their marketing material constantly reiterates, the third-oldest ballet company in the world) and in particular to the nineteenth-century Bournonville style. It’s quick, light, contained. Minako has to adjust after her six months of hyper-expression with Cason. It’s probably good for her, learning this kind of control. Her velocity and power have always been assets, but she also frightened her teachers sometimes with the way she threw herself into the air like a skydiver. During her long grind of fruitless auditions she suspected that this was one of the things holding her back, the appearance that she was unfettered and uncontrollable, the fear that she was going to hurt herself. She’s getting somewhere now, marrying that power to this delicacy; it makes both of them mean something more. Or so she hopes.
She dances assiduously all autumn and winter, playing some part in every program, occasionally going out with Defne to a small café-bar near the theater where they share cheap wine and pretend they have more in common than they do. Both of them are unmatched but Defne expects to meet her soulmate at any minute and Minako wavers perpetually between hope and resignation. They don’t often talk about this directly. Instead they compare notes on being an expatriate: the food, the language, the way people expect you to represent your home country even if you left it for good reasons. They take turns being the one having a harder time. Minako shivers through the wet Copenhagen winter, which hovers just above freezing most of the time so that the damp can penetrate her apartment walls and chill her through her scarves and gloves, and Defne talks almost fondly of wet winters in London with the RBS. Then Defne hits a slump of missing her family, and Minako tries to the best of her ability to jolly her up, to take her and Veronika and Alina out to museums or the Tivoli Gardens and make them all feel like they have a community here. She watches the figure skating at the winter Olympics in February and drags the rest of them into watching it too. Minako shouts out loud about Midori Ito’s triple-triple combinations, and they all hold their breath watching Silvia Camerlengo & Celestino Cialdini’s intricate lifts and spins in the ice dance competition and agree it’s a crime when they finish off the podium.
It’s not an easy season, but Minako feels as if she knows how to get through it, providing her own light through the long winter nights. Spring comes like a surprise, a sudden break in the clouds, and then in June the northern summer opens up like a flower and the ballet begins its summer layoff. Minako has no rehearsals and performances. Other dancers travel, or teach, or dance at summer festivals and theaters, but Minako makes the most self-indulgent decision of her life and takes the summer off. She promises her mother she’ll come home for a visit next year and then she stays in Copenhagen, joins a gym, keeps up a routine of barre practice, and enrolls in Danish classes. She’s home by nine every evening, watching the twilight come on and listening to the small human sounds in her apartment building.
The days stretch out until they feel effectively endless. It rains a lot but it’s almost always daytime, and on clear days the population spills out onto the sidewalks to drink coffee and eat buttery pastries in the sun. Minako skips the pastries, and her hot drink of choice is still green tea, but on afternoons when she doesn’t have class she’ll indulge in a cup of what Veronika calls “hammer coffee”—“strong enough to dissolve the handle and float the head”—and gets such a powerful caffeine buzz that she’s convinced she has arrived in the most beautiful city in the world. She misses the immersive, enveloping heat of a summer in southern Japan, but there’s salt on the air here, like in Hasetsu, and the people in this city are so grateful every time there’s sun that it feels like they’re all on holiday together.
During the season she had no time to think about food, just nutrition, a basic calculation of what calories and vitamins she needed to keep dancing. Now she has time to cook. The Danes eat a lot of fish, so that’s good: she writes home for advice and learns to make some basic seafood dishes, seasoned with precious mirin and soy sauce and sesame oil bought at an Asian market behind the central train station. She buys small, sweet strawberries from the open-air markets. She starts to think she might have found a home for herself here.
When fall comes, Minako attacks the rehearsals for the new season with a renewed joy and fervor. She feels like she’s constantly swimming upstream, but apparently she’s getting somewhere, because in the fall, thirteen dizzyingly short, agonizingly long months after joining the company, she’s promoted to soloist.
She stays there for seven years.
It’s the middle of the 1994-95 season, Minako’s seventh as soloist and eighth with the company, when she wakes up one morning wondering if she’s really going to be a soloist, in Denmark of all places, for the rest of her career.
She hates this thought as soon as she sees it coming. She hates considering the possibility of going back out there, taking class with other companies and sleeping in train stations or on airplanes, making another hard decision. And she simultaneously hates the fact that it’s been months since she saw either of her parents and it will be months again before she has another chance.
For the rest of that day—getting dressed, attending class, talking to her colleagues, going around the corner to order tea in Danish, even meeting with the costume department—she makes a game attempt to see Copenhagen like she did in her first summer, as a dear and beautiful city of brightly colored houses and harbor. This company gave her everything. Her friends are here. People know who she is, even; she gets recognized on the streets.
But then, of course she does, because she lives in Copenhagen, the city of one famous children’s writer, one philosopher, and exactly one Japanese woman. (That’s not really true, she reprimands herself; but it might as well be, some days.)
And no one told her, but being a soloist is lonely. She’s not onstage in every performance like when she was in the corps, and of course the principals get the really substantial roles. So she exists in between. Her first promotion came so fast that she thought it would be an easy walk up to principal from there, but it isn’t. She’s starting to doubt whether a promotion is in the cards at all.
And if not, then what? The friends she made in her first year here are still with the company, but they’ve all settled down with their soulmates—including Defne, who found herself matched up with the president of the stagehands’ union and jumped into domestic life faster than anyone expected. Alina has loosened up about her personal life just enough to introduce her wife to her coworkers at galas and holiday parties; Veronika’s fallen into a steady, workable routine with her soulmate, who’s left his old government job for a new government job that Minako can never remember. Minako is the odd one out again.
She’s considered just going out and looking for a hookup. There are people willing to fool around with someone who is unmatched; she was halfheartedly trying for this in Paris, though in retrospect she knows she was mostly playacting. Sleeping with someone outside of a soulmate match is supposedly fine, here in western Europe in the nineties. But it isn’t really. It’s still considered a betrayal if either or both of the parties has a soulmate they haven’t found yet, loathsome if they have found their soulmates and are being unfaithful, a sad if understandable act of making-do for people whose soulmates have died. Those feelings carry over into whatever small consideration people give to those like Minako who have no one to betray. It’s just taboo enough that attempting it feels emotionally dangerous: she might feel attraction, but not enough to go underground with someone, put her reputation on the line, embark on the weird intimacy of a shared transgression. No one would have the right to be angry at her if she took a lover, even a casual lover, but they’d find her somewhat tawdry. It doesn’t feel worth it.
Anyway it’s not as if she needs another physical activity, or more people to touch her; she’s active every day, has people’s hands on her every day. Mostly this is more than enough and she’s relieved to retreat to her little home. But she does need to be around other people sometimes, just to talk, outside of work. Lately she’s been trying to take charge of her social routines so that she doesn’t feel like a third wheel—she likes having people over for her birthday, or at the start of a break in the season. But her apartment looks a little shoddier in her own eyes every time she contemplates having someone else over, and a little less like a place where a thirty-year-old grown woman would live. In Paris she loved the romantic feeling of having a one-bedroom walk-up all to herself, but the starving-artist routine is a lot less cute in midcareer.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s time for a change. Three days after she woke up with that worm in her heart, she asks her friends, her old cohort, over to her apartment for a drink. “Ballerinas only,” she says, feeling a little juvenile as she says it; but she doesn’t know what other excuse to make for not wanting their partners to come, for wanting only the little group they used to be.
Alina kisses her cheek when she arrives, hands over a bag of low-fat crisps, and asks, “Have you been making changes here?”
Minako looks around. “I don’t think so? I cleaned it.”
“Oh, that’s it!” Alina laughs, and they’re back on their sarcastic not-too-close footing again. Minako feels wistful for a moment but then dismisses that feeling; she wanted to get her mind off of her own discontent, not have a heart-to-heart. But then she can’t quite think of anything to say. She offers Alina a glass of wine and they sit there making quiet comments about how the week has been until Veronika breezes in, Defne close behind her, and proposes a new topic of conversation, which Minako is startled to realize is: how are they all feeling about their careers?
“You start,” Minako says, wondering what she has in mind.
Veronika spreads her arms the back of Minako’s loveseat and leans back, crossing her legs at the knee and staring at the ceiling. “Confused!” she announces. “You know I did that choreography residency in London last summer just to try it, and I thought that was that, I didn’t need to pursue it. But I think it’s spoiled me for dance. I am getting very annoyed with following directions. I think I could do better. Which is absurd! I’m twenty-five, I haven’t been injured, I’m dancing well, this is the kind of thing I should be thinking about in ten years.”
Alina nods, thoughtful, and does that thing she does where she stares into the distance with her mouth screwed up, and then she says, “What would you do if you didn’t think it was ridiculous?”
The conversation stays focused on Veronika for a good while without any decisions being made, although she seems glad for a chance to hash it all out. “All right,” she finally says, “we’ve all talked about me long enough. Stop. Someone else go. Minako. How are you feeling?”
Minako feels a little panicked. That’s stupid, so to prove she isn’t panicking, she does the opposite of what a panicked person would do and tells the frank truth: “I’m starting to feel impatient with this company.”
Halfway between having that thought and vocalizing it, it transformed from discontent with Copenhagen itself and with the way she’s been surrounded by white people for the last seven years into a real irritation with the Royal Danish Ballet. She blinks a little and tries it again to see what she says this time. “I don’t think they ever want to promote me.”
“God, I know,” Defne says out of nowhere. “It’s ridiculous the way they treat you. Everyone in the company can tell you’re one of the best we have. But they keep stuffing you in the background and having you do little things and it’s like they already have their minds made up for no reason whatsoever. God Almighty I don’t know how I’ve never heard you complain before now.”
“Oh,” Minako says, quiet. Then there is a moment she can never afterwards recollect, and when it’s over she is sitting on her floor crying, and her friends are yelling at Defne for making her cry while Defne is yelling at them back for being afraid of the truth and it takes a while before anyone tries to comfort Minako, which they can’t do anyway. She manages to refrain from wailing, but her eyes leak profusely while Veronika runs around looking for a box of tissues.
“How do you not keep these out?” she says, coming out of the bathroom. “I had to dig through your linen closet.”
Minako sniffles a little. “Back home,” she says, not answering the question, “they have covers for tissue boxes. I should ask for one from my mother; I never see those for sale here.”
She must look very sad about the lack of tissue box covers in Copenhagen. “I’ll macramé one for you,” Veronika says, getting down onto the floor with her, “if you care about it that much. What is this really about?”
Minako accepts a tissue, cleans her eyes, leans her head back against the wall and straightens her legs along the floor in front of her. “I don’t know. I was so happy when I got this job, and when I got promoted to soloist. I hate thinking about not wanting to be here anymore. I didn’t even go to a proper school. I should just be grateful I’ve gotten this far.”
“Should is a nice word, but…” Defne starts. Alina glares at her. “What? You two are being very uptight about this and it isn’t helping. Obviously she’s already been thinking about it.”
“I didn’t think I had,” Minako says. “But it’s been…I don’t know. Soloist with this company is a good gig. It isn’t that bad. But I really think I have it in me to do better than this.”
Alina volunteers, timidly, “I know you can do more than you’re doing. You’re such a powerful dancer, Minako. You’re so strong and so expressive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do a role onstage that made proper use of that.”
They sit with that for a little while; Minako doesn’t feel ready to respond. Veronika looks around the room. “From down here,” she comments, “this place looks really empty. Were you ever going to put some art on the walls?”
It’s not the first time someone has commented on the emptiness of her apartment. But Minako never saw it that way. Her food is here, her books, her television, her small movie collection, her clothes for rehearsal and her clothes for after-parties and days off; all of which is to say her laundry is here, and the things she intends to read, and the ballet videos she keeps meaning to go back and study, and the dishes that always need washing. It’s a full apartment. She always figured people must think it’s empty because it’s rare to live alone, at this age; a lot of people have found their soulmate by now.
But Veronika’s right that she’s never put any art on the walls. When she moved in here she thought she was too old for tacking up posters, and she never invested in art with a real frame, so now she has nothing. Not a life, just a headquarters. And here she was supposed to be an artist. She looks up at the ceiling, blinks a few times, and says, “Do we need to keep talking about me or can we discuss how successful Alina is now?”
Alina snorts softly but, mercifully, takes the bait, and when she notices that Minako has finished her wine and is twirling the glass between her palms, she gently takes the glass away and puts it on the coffee table. Minako stays on the floor, thinking vaguely that this would be more comfortable on a tatami mat or a rubberized studio floor than the cold tile of her apartment floors. Alina’s career is going gangbusters and they’re all very proud of her; Defne is optimistic. Minako joined the company later than everyone else in the room, after her jobbing years in Tokyo and her fellowship in Paris, and maybe that’s why she’s impatient. Or maybe there’s no reason. Maybe there’s a timer inside her that’s going off and she’s going to have to decide how to deal with it.
Once they’ve checked in with everyone, they manage to move the conversation to lighter topics: food, music, Alina’s soulmate’s inexplicable sudden interest in bike racing. Defne hangs back when they’re all leaving and puts a hand on Minako’s arm. “If you want to know what they think about you at work, you can always ask,” she says softly. “You have a right to discuss it and not wait for them to tell you things.”
Minako nods, and on the next workday she approaches the head ballet master, a tall Dane named Anders who appears absent-minded but always turns out, when he is giving notes, to have been paying excruciatingly close attention to every dancer in the studio. He agrees to give her a meeting, and she stiffens her spine and goes.
He is very, very diplomatic. He talks about how she performs in partnered work, how she reacts to other dancers onstage, how she dances in romantic roles. It’s not until afterward, when Minako is warming up for the evening performance, that she realizes something is amiss.
“He’s judging me for being alone,” she says out loud to the mirror, and then she suddenly feels so angry that she almost shouts it at the ceiling.
That makes up her mind pretty rapidly. If the ballet master thinks that a person without a soulmate can't be a principal ballerina, if he thinks Minako is too callous or independent or naïve or bloody-minded or any other set of contradictory qualities that mean she can't dance Aurora or Odette, then she has to leave this ballet company. It would be one thing to get stuck at the rank of soloist because she wasn't good enough to be principal; if she really thought that was true, she could probably learn to accept it. But she can't sit still to be rejected because of a stupid prejudice.
So now what?
Minako is still considering that question when she walks past a coin-operated newspaper stand on the way to class, sees “Japan” in a headline, and stops to see what it’s about. What does jordskælv mean? She can see part of the front-page picture but it’s indistinct, a dark view of a city. She sees the word “Kobe.” She puts a coin in the machine, opens the front to get out a copy of the paper, and unfolds it.
Rubble, emergency crews, people with face masks on.
She starts to walk again but she doesn’t put the paper down, and by the time she gets to the theater and lifts her gaze to say good morning to the employee at the security desk she knows what that word must mean.
In the locker room Defne sees Minako holding the newspaper and grimaces, which is probably a kind of sympathy. Minako nods at her and looks for Veronika. She’s in front of her locker sewing ribbons onto her shoes, and when she notices Minako’s shadow falling over her she starts to say “Good morning,” but she stops when she looks up.
“Can you tell me what this says?” Minako asks, waving the newsprint at her forlornly, and Veronika bites her lip and confirms her suspicion. There’s been an earthquake, a level seven earthquake in Hanshin.
“I’m safe,” Minako’s mother tells her when they manage to connect by phone, “your father’s safe, everyone in Hasetsu is safe. A lot of people are talking about going there to help. It’s the worst one since the twenties.”
“Tell me again that you’re okay,” Minako demands, and she can hear her mother breathing a few times over the line before saying, “I’m safe. It wasn’t close to us.”
“It was a lot closer than I am.”
That doesn’t make any sense, but her mother just says again, “I’m okay.”
“She’s okay,” Minako tells Veronika when she comes out of the phone room, and Veronika, who has now witnessed more emotional moments in Minako’s life than Minako had ever intended, says, “That’s good,” and lays a hand on her forearm. They go back to finish getting dressed for class.
Almost no one asks about it. Defne finds her between the dressing room and class to ask if she’s all right and give a perfunctory shoulder pat when Minako says yes. Alina finds her during a break and expresses real concern. That’s it. Minako has never felt so shallowly rooted in this company. All these people know her, know where she’s from, and ought to know the news if they were paying any attention, but—well, they weren’t paying attention, or they didn’t put two and two together, or they don’t care enough to ask.
They’re opening a show on Thursday, and today is Tuesday, so everyone has other things to think about—including Minako, frustratingly. She gets lunch with Defne like usual but zones out during their conversation. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m just a bit—” but then she can’t think of any way to describe her state of mind except “shaken,” which is horribly inappropriate. “Distracted,” she supplies after a moment’s thought, but that doesn’t convey how it seems like something is badly wrong.
On her way home in the late afternoon she finds an actual newsstand with copies of the International Herald Tribune so she can read about the earthquake in English. They don’t have any Japanese papers. She takes the Tribune home and finds herself chanting, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” as she physically throws aside all the pages of the paper that don’t include news about the earthquake, all the coverage of politics and the letters to the editor. All the movie and theater reviews. Everything about the arts.
Her mother had said that people were traveling there to help, and for a wild few minutes Minako thinks she will do that too. But then she gets control of herself. It’s not just that she has commitments here; there’s no way she could help enough to justify the cost of the trip. It would make more sense to donate the price of airfare, but it wouldn’t quiet her nerves. For a moment she wishes she were a Christian so she could make herself feel better by praying for the victims, but there’s no use now in pretending that would do any good.
It’s not until a week later that she has the idea. She could raise funds; she could give a benefit performance and donate the ticket sales to earthquake relief. She could put herself to use.
The idea snowballs rapidly once she shares it with her friends. She adopts the tactic of talking about it in any conversation she gets into, and that way she finds out who to ask about reserving space, who knows someone in the publicity department, who can tell her the stagehand union’s rules about extra work. Someone has a jazz musician friend who might donate some time; someone knows someone who has worked with charities and knows about handling large donations. So word gets around quickly, but she is nevertheless surprised when she gets a phone call from Ishikawa Eiji, a principal danseur in London and one of the few other Japanese ballet dancers working in Europe.
Minako knows who he is, of course, but she’s a little surprised he knows about her. It’s not as if she’s made headlines here, and there’s word going around that he’s busy laying ground for a new company back in Japan. She’s flattered and a little proud when he tells her, “I have been trying to think of a way to help, but you’ve moved much faster than I have. I have some experience directing. Are you only holding the benefit in Copenhagen? You should bring it to London too. There are much larger audiences here. We’d raise more. I can talk to some people.”
He takes charge of a lot of the organization after that. Minako feels irked and grateful at the same time. She had braced herself to do all this work alone, and it’s anticlimactic to have so much help, but she physically couldn’t do everything that this project requires, and she suspects she’s given Ishikawa an outlet for his own shock and worry. She can’t reasonably begrudge him that.
They have a more organized phone call later, when he asks what she has on the docket and whether there’s anything she particularly wants to dance. She goes back and forth with herself a few times before deciding she might as well ask. “I’d like to do Bejart’s Boléro.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t know it,” he admits. “That is, I haven’t danced it.”
The Danish ballet doesn’t know it either, but she doesn’t say so. “We can learn it,” she says. “It’s beloved in Japan. It would mean a lot.”
It would mean a lot to her, of course, and maybe she’s being egotistical. But she remembers the ovation that the piece got when she saw it in Tokyo and thinks, that’s got to mean something. They don’t need as large a corps as Tokyo had; eight would be enough to make the central dancer look surrounded. She doesn’t bring up the fact that she’s never danced this ballet before, and he doesn’t ask her that directly, just how much prep time she’ll need. As soon as the details are settled she goes into the library at the theater, checks out the tape of Plisetskaya’s performance of the piece, and settles down to study it. It’s taxing, adding this additional practice time to her schedule, but she may never have this opportunity again—either to perform this piece or to rehearse something that means so much—and she’s not going to let it pass her by.
She works herself to her limits, reminds herself that she can’t dance if she’s dead, takes a grim rest day, begins again. Once she knows what she’s doing she passes the tapes around to all the dancers who are taking part and asks them to study it too. “We need all hands on deck,” she says. “Any gender, I don’t care. We’ll all wear black leotards and tights and the audience won’t care either.”
When they have their first rehearsal she’s desperately grateful for the tapes. She’s never tried to teach or direct before, and if this group didn’t already have much of the dance in their heads she doesn’t know how she would ever teach it to them. They look to her trustingly, and she tries her best not to disappoint them.
“Be fiercer,” she tells Defne, who usually gentles her edges onstage. “It’s okay to show your teeth a little.”
“Go slower,” she says to a man from the corps whose name she keeps forgetting. “This has to be very, very patient.”
And they do, and it gets better, and she dances in the center and commands them. She feels herself growing into a job she hadn’t thought of choosing, a role she chose anyway because nobody else was going to do it.
When the night of the performance finally comes it’s a mess and a trial and a joy, no one backstage feeling quite prepared, everyone putting on brave professional faces when they go onstage. Everyone onstage keeps referring to the earthquake, and Minako feels a little panicked remembering how it felt to stare at that Danish newspaper trying to make out what it said, to wait for her mother to pick up the phone and say she was all right. She looks desperately around her at all the people who have shown up to help and tries to take comfort in it, but that seems premature, like she’s trying to move on from a grief before she’s felt it. There’s a cellist onstage playing some very restrained and elegant Bach thing and she’s in danger of breaking into tears as if it were the climax of Romeo and Juliet. She’s up next. It would be better not to cry through her own performance.
She thinks back to the first time she saw this ballet in Tokyo, and tries to school her face: serious, authoritative, powerful. She gets halfway there but strongly suspects that there’s still visible grief on her face, and exhaustion from throwing herself into this enormous endeavor right after a taxing full season of dancing. She breathes in and thinks of Noé in Paris asking, how does it feel in your body?
It feels heavy. It feels unsettled in her limbs, quick in her heartbeat. She lifts her arms from the elbows and notices how she wants to curl her hands in protectively toward her chest; she turns her palms outward instead, as if pushing someone away. She thinks, I can work with this.
And she does. Whether the ballet looks sorrowful to anyone else, or triumphant, or whatever she thought she wanted to be, it’s difficult to say; but she gives it absolutely everything she can, almost twenty minutes of ceaseless churning motion, raising her unmarked arms over her head again and again until the company is closing in around her at the climax and she knocks them down and then stares at their bodies on the stage as if thinking, what on earth have I done. The ovation is immediate and long. She feels like she’s broken through something to the other side.
Minako barely has time to bow to her audience and wonder whether the applause is full of admiration or pity, to shake the hands of the attendees and avoid their questions about why she cast Boléro with a mixed-gender corps and what it means, to nod through a rushed conversation with the head of box office about how much money they brought in and how it will be handled, before she’s off to do it all again in London.
She doesn’t know London well, has only visited once for an unsuccessful audition. It’s so much larger than Copenhagen, and so medievally winding and disorganized, that she shrinks away a bit from spending any time out in the city and chooses instead to stay mostly in the theater, rehearsing all over again. Some of the participants from the Copenhagen show have come over and some haven’t, so they have to learn Boléro over again with the new company. It’s the most multiracial group of ballet dancers she can remember seeing; Ishikawa has rounded up most of the Japanese dancers in Europe, plus a significant number of Ishikawa’s colleagues from the Royal. It seems likely that everybody else here could have danced the lead in this ballet at least as capably as Minako could, but there’s no going back now. If Ishikawa notices that she’s new at this he doesn’t say anything about it. He has a lot of other things to think about too—he’s running this whole show and has to wrangle contracts, ticket pricing, publicity; even work that he isn’t directly doing seems to need his input every day, and they only have a short time together. They hardly talk except to establish schedules and make plans.
The Royal Opera House in London is larger, the audience is louder, the whole show feels like a bigger deal than anything she’s done in Denmark. Minako isn’t sure how to feel about that. She doesn’t know how she feels about anything. She corrals her emotions as best she can and goes onstage for Boléro relying on a kind of muscle memory, thinking of how it went the first time, and one way or another that seems to work. It seems like she’s done all right.
Still, she’s completely unprepared when Ishikawa finds her at the reception afterward and offers her a job.