Tokyo is an enormous city.
This isn’t news. Minako has lived here before. Still, it’s strange to be back. At first it’s a relief to relax the part of her brain that helped her manage in English at work, that picked out the Danish words she knew in signs and menus. But hearing her first language all the time quickly becomes exhausting. Every time she hears someone greet another person in Japanese she has an impulse to turn around and see if they’re talking to her. And the city has changed: a café where she used to go as a student has been replaced by an Italian restaurant, as she determines after walking past the place three times and thinking she simply missed it. The street fashions have advanced by eight years and she can’t read them so easily anymore, determine who belongs to what group and what message they’re trying to send. The cheap neighborhoods are becoming trendy, and the trendy neighborhoods are becoming expensive and a little stodgy. In the years she’s been gone Minako has seen only a few Japanese movies, and no TV shows; now the city is plastered with advertisements for sequels and second seasons to beloved franchises she’s never heard of.
Minako knew, of course, that her mother had moved back to Hasetsu, but when she imagined returning to Tokyo she couldn’t help imagining her mother there, too, and the apartment that they used to share. Instead she’s on her own again. She’s left her teachers, her partners, her colleagues, her friends, and now it’s just her. Her and the brand-new ballet company that Ishikawa is starting.
She has a little bit of time before classes and rehearsals start, a grace period for settling in. She spends some time buying kitchen appliances, unpacking her boxes, setting up utility accounts, all the finicky tasks that go with moving countries. But she also spends a lot of time simply being in the city. She gets on the subway and rides it during rush hour, remembering what it’s like to be pressed in with this many bodies, and then she rides it in the daytime, when the office workers are all at their desks and the train is occupied by retirees, shift workers, children on summer break. She spends time in the parks and she gets reacquainted with Tokyo street food. (She admires but refrains from most of the fried offerings, and she controls her desire to buy every product containing red bean paste, but she is happier than she expected to be eating onigiri again, and shaved ice, and yakitori.) She outfits her apartment with a proper tea-making kit and a large canister of green tea, which is sold in good quantities here like the staple it is, and not as an exoticism parceled out in small doses. She buys some new clothes that she might or might not have needed, just to enjoy how easy it is to find her size.
She’s a little lonely, and a part of her worries that she’s trying to re-plant herself in a pot she already outgrew, but all of these things help to assure her that it’s going to be possible, that she’s making a good move. Two weeks after her arrival she attends her first company class at the Ishikawa Ballet, and her new life starts to make sense.
“A city of eight million people has room for more than the Tokyo Ballet,” Ishikawa Eiji said back in London. “I’m planning to dance and direct, both. I want to do contemporary works, commission choreographers, get something really new started. Are you in?”
It was the voice of her ambition, more than her own, that said, “In as a principal dancer?”
“It depends on the makeup of the company, but—”
“I’m interested, but not if the only reason you want me is that I won’t need a work visa. I have a soloist contract at the third-oldest company in the world”—she couldn’t believe she was repeating that line—“and I’m not interested in taking the same position in a smaller, newer company. We’re talking about a principal position or none at all.”
She’s always been a plain speaker but she amazed herself that day. It must have been something about the benefit show, something about the terrific boldness she had to assume to put the whole thing together and harness her emotions to dance in it.
“Fine. I’m not ready to talk numbers yet, but we can agree that it’s for a principal job.”
“Good. Now forgive me for asking, but do you know what you are doing, and is it worth giving up my contract, or is this a vanity project?”
“Forgiven,” Ishikawa said, and he laid out the details as they exist so far. He’s already incorporated the new company, which is named after himself, and he’s figured out a fair bit of funding. He knows where he wants to rent rehearsal space and has his eye on a few different performance venues. Some foreign dancers and a choreographer are interested in coming over for gigs. This is, or is going to be, the real deal.
Minako was clear that she didn’t want to be a big fish in their little pond. She needs to be surrounded by dancers she can learn from. Ishikawa has lived up to his end of that deal. The dancers he’s hired, though they’re mostly younger than her, are an impressive bunch, disciplined in small things and conspicuously talented in large ones. Ishikawa dances with them as he directs class and the company members keep slipping up in their forms of address, unsure whether to talk to him as an employer or a teacher or a senior colleague.
Their first production as a company is going to be Balanchine’s Jewels. It’s a calculated choice in a lot of ways: an abstract twentieth-century work but solidly part of the canon, an American ballet that’s never been performed in Japan and shows off multiple styles of dancing. The goal is to pitch the Ishikawa Ballet to the public as high-level professionals, real competitors to the Tokyo Ballet, while making clear that they’re not going to retread the same ground; and it won’t hurt if they can literally dazzle some audiences with the flash of jewel-toned costumes. This production is discreetly cutting some corners—the corps isn’t as large as when New York City Ballet does it—but it’s still staking a claim.
The ballet comprises three pieces set to music by different composers: Diamonds to Tchaikovsky, Emeralds to Fauré, Rubies to Stravinsky. Each section is danced in a different style, and all the dancers are aware that what they do in this show will affect what they’re chosen to do in the future. Minako is in a good position, dancing the Tall Girl in Rubies and a smaller role in Emeralds on alternate nights of the run. This suits her very well. Emeralds is like being back with the Royal Danish Ballet; it’s Romantic and graceful and profoundly pretty. Rubies, meanwhile, is a role she can only assume she was given because Ishikawa watched what she did in Boléro. It’s faster than the other pieces, more angular, more conspicuously a twentieth-century piece, and she gets to show some attitude. She’s never been as interested in the stately Russian-style dancing showed off in Diamonds, and she frankly thinks that while the lead ballerina in that section might get her picture printed on the posters—she looks exactly like a music-box ballerina, doing prolonged arabesques in a stiff white tutu—it’s the kind of thing that casual viewers will watch once to confirm what ballet looks like, and then they won’t feel compelled to return.
They’re midway through the rehearsal period for the ballet when a woman starts showing up at rehearsals and parking herself on the floor to watch. She doesn’t talk to anybody and she doesn’t show any particular reaction to the dancing. Minako thinks she must be a designer or something, somebody involved in the production whom she hasn’t met yet, and when they have a break she goes over and introduces herself.
“Aoyama Reina,” says the woman with a small bow. “I’m Eiji’s soulmate.” Minako bows back and looks around for Ishikawa. He’s across the room talking to some other dancers; he glances in their direction and nods but doesn’t come over.
They have a short conversation about Reina’s career—she’s a curator at one of the university museums—but Minako is distracted by thinking that for some reason she thought Ishikawa’s soulmate was a foreigner. Why was that? Was she making assumptions, based on something about him or someone he reminded her of?
It’s not until later, after she’s at home for the evening, that she realizes: she didn’t make that assumption on her own, she actually read it somewhere. He had a partner when he lived in London, someone with some non-Japanese name she can’t recall. Minako can’t think how to ask him about it, so she doesn’t.
Jewels is a beast of a show for a new company to put on. They’re still learning how they work with one another, still getting their legs under them as a company, and this ballet is a hell of a lot of work for anybody. It needs to be worth it. They do some publicity events and Minako sends newspaper clippings home to her mother out of nostalgia. Her father calls to say he heard her on the radio and ask how it’s going. It’s good, she tells him. Hard, but good. She’s optimistic.
It’s justified. The show opens, not without a certain measure of panic, but when it’s really crunch time everybody does what they need to do. Minako dances in Rubies on opening night, flashes her Noé Cason smile and makes herself joyful, sarcastic, daring. She thinks, Now I am getting somewhere.
The crowd is a respectable one—Eiji is good at publicity, and at calling in his contacts. At the reception afterward Minako mingles a bit, introducing herself to people from the ballet world and some people from outside it, journalists and artistic types and dedicated fans. Reina is there; she gives Minako a nod and a generic compliment and then goes to find Ishikawa, who’s in the middle of a conversation. Minako hears him say, showily, “My soulmate and I are so happy to have the well wishes of so many in the dance community!”
She overhears that line a couple more times in the evening. My soulmate and I, my soulmate and I. It almost feels like a dig, somehow.
Well, never mind them. Minako was magnificent tonight, if she says so herself. She asks the bartender at concessions for a sparkling lemonade in a champagne flute, and she nurses it through the reception, pretending to be tipsily charming when really she’s just charming. She’s vivacious, interesting, demurely flirtatious, sharing stories about her time abroad but making a show of refraining from gossip. She never felt able to hold court like this at a party in Europe. She’s actually made it. She’s really one of the stars here.
Her old teacher is here, too. “Minako,” Imai-sensei says. “You should be very proud. I know I am.”
“Really?” Minako says, and she winces a little at how young she sounds.
“Of course,” Imai-sensei says. “It looks like those lessons in Paris paid off, hm? You’re so much more expressive than you used to be. No one could look away from you.”
“Oh,” Minako says, helplessly pleased.
A couple people say they’re eager to see what the Ishikawa Ballet does next, so they’re bound to sell at least a few tickets to the rest of their shows this season. Both of Minako’s parents are coming later this week to see the show, which is remarkable both because of the distance from Hasetsu and because they haven’t always been good at traveling together. When the party is over, Minako sets her champagne flute softly down on a tray, wraps her shawl closely around her shoulders, and stands there a moment memorizing what this feels like.
How does success feel in her body? It isn’t really an emotion. But the restlessness that always used to dog her, the need to get up to the next level, has quieted down for a moment, and in its place is a certain warmth. She flutters her fingers a little, rocks her head back to smile at the painted lobby ceiling. It’s brighter than contentment. Quicker. Fizzy like the lemonade.
When they finish Jewels they’re on to rehearsals for the next show, set to a Britten piece and choreographed by Ishikawa himself, and Minako is to dance a significant pas de deux with him. She digs into the process like she always has, working hard, thinking hard, taking pride in being consulted on how this should go and having opinions to offer on the subject. She stops calling him Ishikawa-sama and switches to Eiji-san. His choreography is complicated to learn, all the more so for being brand new, and they need a lot of rehearsal time.
Reina often shows up at break time to take Eiji to lunch, sometimes making awkward small talk with Minako while Eiji runs off to make a phone call or something. Minako finally gives in to her curiosity and asks her, “And were you ever in London, or have you been living in Tokyo?”
Reina pauses a moment and says, “No, I’ve been here. We both decided to do what made sense for our own careers for a number of years.”
“Oh,” Minako says, still wondering about the European whose name used to appear alongside Eiji’s, but she can’t think of any way to continue the conversation except to say something about her own move back, and how the public transit here has taken some reacclimatization, and she doesn’t learn any more about that situation that day.
She does the very next day, though, when she goes in search of dirt. Some of the other principals have known Eiji since London; maybe they know what’s going on. She tries one of them during a break in rehearsal, a younger European woman who came to Japan for this company. Minako sidles up to her in a companionable way, throws off a comment about how she’s feeling about the rehearsal, and then says, “So. I have a question.”
The woman raises her eyebrows.
“Do you think Eiji and Reina are really soulmates?”
“What?” She jolts a little. “Why would you ask that?”
“I just want to know what you think. Isn’t there something fishy there?”
“I mean, a little, but...” She looks over her shoulder, lets out a puff of breath. “I think they’re just weird. They’ve been weird a long time. I don’t think they’re faking it, though. Just playing up the happy-families image.”
“Uh huh,” Minako says. “Didn’t he make his name while they were living on separate continents? Wasn’t there someone else, in London?”
“Well.” She chews her lip a little. “It’s possible they’re a non-romantic pairing.”
“Interesting.” Minako thinks for a moment. “So they did the bohemian living apart thing, maybe got together with other people, and now they’re trying to clean up their act.”
“Well, maybe. I might be speaking out of turn. I’ve known platonic soulmate pairs and they don’t move countries over it. It’s possible they’re just an awkward match and they have no idea what they’re doing.”
The way he talks about her, though—you’d think the man lived under the thumb of a full-time nanny. During an anodyne mid-rehearsal conversation about how tired everyone is, Eiji interjects that his soulmate tells him when to wake up, and he waits for a response but nobody gratifies him with one. She controls the temperature in their apartment, he says; they own a car but she’s the one who drives it. None of these things sound outrageous to Minako, although she privately agrees that it would be a little annoying to consult somebody else about all those domestic details. She tries to listen, to find some way through these conversations that’s productive or at least not corrosive to their working relationship. It’s not hugely annoying, but it’s slightly annoying all the time, and sometimes she thinks that’s worse. There’s the day, for example, when Reina leaves after they have lunch together and Eiji says, “Thank goodness!” as he starts rehearsal with Minako. She stares, comes up short, and goes on dancing. It’s like that a lot, as if he thinks he’s building camaraderie by acting irritated with Reina or putting her down, in ways that are so small they’re hard to respond to.
“Why are we talking about her at all?” Minako finally blurts out. They’re at the exit of the building where they rent studio space, and it’s raining heavily outside. Eiji is waiting for Reina to pick him up, and Minako is waiting for the rain to slack off, or at least stop blowing around so violently, before she hazards her umbrella against the storm.
Eiji, apparently caught off guard, blinks at her and doesn’t say anything, so Minako has an opening to say, “She’s driving through Tokyo traffic in the rain so you don’t have to get wet. I don’t really want to hear about how you won’t want to talk to her when she gets here.”
“Just making conversation,” Eiji says a little indistinctly, half to her and half into the collar of his coat.
“Well, let’s talk about something else. Have you been watching baseball lately?”
“Um. No.” It’s the off season, but he doesn’t mention that.
“Me neither! Let’s talk about our respective decisions not to watch baseball!”
She is rescued from following up on this gambit when Reina’s car pulls up, and Eiji gives her a confused look and leaves without saying anything else.
This conversation only halfway works. Eiji just barely cuts back on the offhand remarks about his soulmate, but now he follows them up with, “I know, I know,” and Minako is spared coming up with a reply or change of subject. She tries to be content to leave the whole situation alone, to tell herself that she has no idea what it’s really like in that relationship and let that be the end of it, even if the whole thing still irritates her more than it should.
Meanwhile they move on with the work of the company. The Britten show is complicated and utterly new. The woman in charge of costumes, who might get to be costume mistress in the future but for now is basically a freelancer, announces that they blew a large chunk of their money for the season on Jewels (“we didn’t blow it, it was a strategic investment,” Eiji says, but he doesn’t seem bothered either way) and they shouldn’t expect anything so fancy for the next couple of shows. A lot of bold simplicity, a bit of making do.
Minako is surprised, a week into rehearsals on the new show, to get a phone call from Imai-sensei, to hear her say, “If you have some time off from rehearsal and you can stand to spend it in a studio, I’d like to have you visit one of my classes.”
Minako’s prepared for starry-eyed children, but when she gets there and watches Imai-sensei put them through their paces they turn out to be a serious, high-level group. Some of them flick their eyes over in her direction, but none of them say anything until the barre exercises are over. They gather in the center of the room and Imai-sensei gives an overview of what they will be working on that day, and only then does she introduce Minako and invite her to talk about her career.
It’s not the best story right now. She’s just upended herself into a brand-new company with no certain future, and she isn’t sure what to say to make herself sound like a success. But never mind: these students are here for class, not for a reception. Minako dispenses with her introduction as quickly as she can and then asks if they have any questions.
“How do you find a job?” someone asks immediately.
She doesn’t want to give platitudes. “Study English,” she says, after a moment’s thought. “Don’t get too attached to staying in Japan. Get as many auditions as you can. Don’t wait for permission.”
Someone else asks, more shyly, “What is it like to have a dance made for you?”
“I’m just finding out,” she says. “I’m new to being a principal, so no one has ever choreographed something new for me before. It’s frightening, but in a good way. I recommend it.”
They laugh at that. Another student asks about how she does fouettés, so she gets into the center of the room and shows them: “I pull up now,” and “you have to draw in your arms in here to get speed,” and they seem to like that. She answers a few more questions, and then they have to do their exercises in the center but she agrees to stay and practice with them so they can watch. They’re enchanted by this. Minako can’t remember a time a stranger was so happy to be in the same room with her, let alone a dozen strangers.
She leaves with an open invitation to come back, as soon as her schedule will allow.
The Britten ballet is a success; best of all, Minako is a terrific success in it, getting almost as many inches in the newspaper reviews as are dedicated to the new choreography and concept of the ballet. She holds tight to this triumph when Eiji kicks up the velocity of their rehearsals yet again.
A year after moving to Tokyo, Minako finds herself back in Denmark, participating in the Copenhagen Summer Dance open-air event with some of her former colleagues. When she comes into the studio for the first day of rehearsal, still jet-lagged and feeling a little dim, she feels something crash into her and a voice yelling her name right into her ear and she’s startled to realize it’s Veronika.
“I didn’t know you were going to be here!” Veronika cries when she pulls back, putting her hands on Minako’s shoulders like an older relative inspecting how much a child has grown.
“I’m sorry,” Minako says. “I meant to call, but the time difference…”
“You could have sent a postcard! Or you could buy a computer, you know. Whatever, it doesn’t matter, you’re busy being prima in a brand new company. I don’t blame you.”
Veronika probably does blame her a little, and Minako is embarrassed, because it’s justified. She might not have a home computer but she did sign up for an email address not too long ago, and she can hardly claim there’s nowhere in Tokyo to go online. Really the reason she didn’t contact Veronika is that it didn’t seem important; she assumed all her friends here were settled in with their soulmates and their careers. And she used to think of Defne as her friend, the one she would turn to for a one-to-one conversation, and others as their friends, good in a crowd but not people she expected to lean on as individuals. She never expected Veronika to miss her this much.
Still, “It’s very good to see you,” she says, stilted but sincere. At the break she lets herself be talked into going out for lunch together at a little shop that serves enormous salads, where she finds herself spilling the whole story about Eiji and his whining and how Reina hangs around anyway and the two of them plaster on smiles for the public all the time.
“What do you think?” she asks. “Are they putting on a show? Should I be putting on a show? Is this respectability thing going to be a problem?” She wasn’t planning on asking for advice, but then, she wasn’t planning on having this conversation at all.
Veronika wrinkles her nose. “Putting on a show sounds awful. Do people really expect you to do that? I thought Japanese people were discreet about that kind of thing.”
“Yes and no.” Minako tries to stab a cherry tomato with her fork and it rolls away from her. It’s been a while since she experienced the frustration of eating round things with a fork; for a moment she almost feels nostalgic, then she chases the tomato down and crushes it in her attempt to stab it again. When she puts it in her mouth it’s sour. People ask her sometimes if she misses Western food, but at the moment she can’t think why. “I mean it would be indecent to ask them personal questions, but it matters that your soulmate exists. It makes a difference to how people see you. I think some people consider me childish.”
“Wait, they do? Have they said so?”
Veronika looks rather innocent and Minako blinks at her. “They wouldn’t say so. That isn’t how it works, at least not back home. But everybody’s got opinions, and I can guess what they think about me.”
“Sure, you can guess, but you might be guessing wrong. Anyway are you actually considering pretending to have a soulmate?”
“I wasn’t! But the way people talk about those two, the way he shows her off, it makes me worry. I don’t have a lot of chances, you know. If my career fails that’s it, the end.”
“Yes, but…Minako, that’s true for all of us. We’re all just dancing until we get injured or sick or something. Is that how you’d want to spend your career, going around telling lies about your personal life? It seems to me you were always okay telling people to keep their noses out of your business.” She smiles a little wryly. “You told me enough times.”
Minako’s struck by this. Veronika seems genuinely sad, looking down now and chewing on the insides of her lips while she turns her water glass around and around on the table, but then she shakes herself a little. “I’m sorry,” she says, “you were trying to ask for advice, weren’t you?”
“I was,” Minako says, “but it was probably a bad idea. Just feeling peeved and trying to get an outside read on why. Veronika, you know…I can be rude sometimes, without meaning it. Especially in English. I didn’t mean to shove you away.”
“Ah, well.” She’s trying to laugh it off but not quite succeeding.
“I was always glad we were friends.”
“Well. Me too. It’s good to see you. Eat your salad.”
She has three weeks in Copenhagen to not think about home—three weeks of remembering everything she does and doesn’t miss about this city, and of catching up with Veronika and having rushed coffees with Defne and Alina and promising she’ll try harder to keep in touch—and then it’s another long travel day, and she’s back in Tokyo with autumn approaching.
It’s a good year.
Eiji is creating a lot of their ballets himself but he’s brought some people on to help, a choreographer from New York, a composer from Germany, people he knows from his days in London. Minako is stronger and faster than she’s ever been, more sure, more expressive; when she leaps attains a new kind of altitude. A well-meaning interviewer asks her what has inspired her improvements since joining the Ishikawa Ballet and she has no good answer—just work, and a certainty that this is her time. Mostly work. She’s hard at it both in and out of the studio; when they prepare to perform Jardin aux Lilas she practices diligently and then goes home to read poetry about gardens, wandering into art galleries on her off days to look for pictures of lilacs.
It’s hard to say for sure, but Minako is starting to get the impression that she’s actually famous. When she goes back to Imai-sensei’s studio in the middle of her second season, one of the students shrieks, “It’s so amazing to meet you! You’re the greatest ballet dancer in Japan!” Minako accepts the enthusiasm but discards the compliment.
Her second summer, Minako takes every opportunity for guest dancing that comes her way, and they start to add up. Small gigs like a festival in Fukuoka that takes her close to home, so her family can come watch; much bigger ones like a spot with the Royal in London, or a dizzying few weeks at the Bolshoi watching Lilia Baranovskaya, still incredible in her late forties, dominate the stage. Minako revises her former opinions about finding Russian ballet too stiff. Alina makes it to one of those performances and they spend a day being tourists in Moscow together, stopping every once in a while to remind each other of something Lilia accomplished onstage. Veronika has started doing more choreography, and when Minako gets home to Tokyo she finds postcards there from Veronika’s gigs in Cardiff and Brussels. She brings little treats from abroad to give the other dancers at her first day back in company class.
Eiji has stayed in Tokyo all summer, taking meetings and making phone calls and juggling funding, because in the Ishikawa Ballet’s third season, after years of saving up while dancing leotard ballets on bare stages, he has a Project with a capital P.
Ishikawa Ballet Spreads Its Wings in Swan Lake
1997-10-04 Saturday
The Ishikawa’s new Swan Lake is daringly Japanese. Rothbart (danced by creative director Ishikawa Eiji), once a magician with mysterious motives, here becomes a political climber in a feudal household, with Siegfried (Kagabu Kaito) as a daimyo’s son who needs to make a strategic marriage for his family’s sake but sentimentally hopes to hold out for his soulmate. It is difficult to dance about politics, and the first act sometimes gets bogged down in the attempt to communicate details that might best have been left out. But once Act II begins, and the young hero finds his soulmate in the most unlikely place, the ballet finds its center. Miss Okukawa Minako’s performance as Odette and Odile is the hinge on which the whole show turns. She is a tragic figure who still convinces us to hope for a happy ending, showing a bewitching joy on finding the love that she hopes will save her. … Odette might meet her inevitable fate at the end of this ballet, but with Okukawa on the stage we have reason to look forward to a golden age of Japanese ballet.
Minako goes out to buy a paper the morning after opening night, and she reads the whole review while standing on the sidewalk, her back pressed against the side of a building so the commuters can get by her. She can’t stop reading the last sentence over again. A golden age of Japanese ballet. A golden age of Japanese ballet. How does it feel in your body? asks a familiar voice in her head, and she breathes in deep to find the answer. It feels like a balloon in her chest, like her eyes are tight with—oh. It feels like crying. She gives herself five undisciplined moments on the sidewalk to hide her face with her newspaper and weep.
When she gets to class Eiji looks stressed. “Good work last night,” he says. “I hope nobody went out celebrating.” And that’s it, and they begin their barre exercises.
The review didn’t say much about his dancing. He can hardly feel left out—the whole production was his baby. But he looks exhausted and a little sad, and not at all like someone who might have cried with happiness earlier this morning. Minako stops on the way out of class while he’s hanging back and looking at something in his planner. “Good show last night,” she says. “Really. It’s amazing what you’ve accomplished. You should be proud.”
He gives her a level look. “Thanks.” He taps his pencil against his planner and looks her up and down. “You should be proud too. Miss Golden Age.”
She blushes, and wonders whether this was a good idea. “I am,” she says simply. “Thank you for the opportunity.”
It’s strange, dancing Odile, the black swan, who counterfeits her mark to steal away Odette’s soulmate and causes horrible destruction for everyone. “The world thinks I could be like this,” she says one day out loud, to her dressing room mirror, as she puts on her Act III makeup. It’s a frightening thought, but a part of her relishes the sheer destructive glory of it, enjoying onstage a state of being that she never dares go near at any other time.
A month later Eiji and Minako are in a radio interview together, and the interviewer refers to “the Okukawa—I’m sorry, the Ishikawa Ballet.” Eiji smiles thinly and answers the next question with a rambling discourse about his entire life and career, and Minako can’t get a word in edgewise for the rest of the interview.
The company does an evening of short ballets after that and Eiji doesn’t give Minako any parts at all, saying that nothing was suitable for her. She shrugs and takes a guesting gig in Korea, comes home with a handful of business cards from dancers and directors and musicians, to find that the Ishikawa’s ticket sales fell fifteen percent with her gone.
A year later she wins the Prix Benois.
How does it feel in your body?
Like knowing, like arriving, like joy.