Free Audition by Ryu Murakami

special – nothing fancy, but then again nothing tragic either . This idle train of thought was abruptly derailed when Yamasaki Asami appeared at the entrance to the café. The instant he saw her, his heart grabbed him by the throat and he realised that the entire list of things he wanted to say – a list he’d gone over several times – had been completely erased from his memory banks. What’s wrong with me? he had to wonder once again. Forty-two-year-old men don’t act like this . Yamasaki Asami scanned the room, and when she finally spotted him she beamed and hurried towards his table, threading her way through the waiters and waitresses who bustled back and forth, balancing their trays. Her hair was tied back, as it had been at the audition, and she was dressed in an outfit that managed to be neither flashy nor drab – navy-blue dress, vivid orange scarf, suede jacket and matching pumps, black stockings. This, he thought, was one woman who really understood how best to complement her own beauty. And of course it was clear, from her sense of fashion, that she knew very well how extraordinary her own beauty was.
        ‘Sorry! I’m afraid I’m a little late.’
        She sat down across the table from him. The sunlight through the lace curtains both illuminated and veiled her profile. She’d been gorgeous under the bleak fluorescent lights in that meeting room, but in this light, thought Aoyama  . . .
        She was ten times as beautiful.
        ‘Not at all. I got here much too early. My office is near by.’
        He found, to his chagrin, that he couldn’t look directly at her and didn’t know what to do with his eyes. He felt like a high-school kid, and thought how embarrassed he’d be if Shige were to see him like this. When he tried to focus on that lovely and vaguely melancholy face of hers, it felt as if his heart and stomach were getting all tangled up together. At last he resigned himself to the occasional fleeting glance. If he completely avoided meeting her gaze she might wonder about his character, or even take him for some sort of pervert.
        After ordering a lemonade, she tilted her head to one side and smiled.
        ‘I’m really glad to see you again,’ she said.
        Possibly because she’d hurried for fear of being late, her cheeks were somewhat flushed, and he remembered thinking at the audition that her soul seemed to lie just below the surface of her skin. When she smiled, it was as if you were looking directly at a happy soul. Aoyama decided to peer into her eyes for just a moment each time he began to say something, then look away, but he had to remind himself not to let his gaze dance all over the place. He rested his chin on his left hand, trying to remember if he’d ever been this stiff with tension before. It was exhausting, but exhilarating.
        ‘Please just relax,’ he said, thinking, You’re the one who needs to relax, buster . ‘It’s not as if I have anything in particular I want to grill you about.’
        She nodded and said ‘all right’ in that voice of hers. That warm, limpid, liquid voice that seemed to curl around his nerve endings.
        ‘I thought we’d have lunch and just, well, chat about this and that. There’s a restaurant on the top floor here that I thought might do, but they specialise in steak and so on – are you OK with meat dishes?’
        ‘I like every kind of food.’
        Aoyama’s palms were moist with perspiration. He was surreptitiously wiping them on his trousers when something very strange occurred. A young man in a wheelchair had entered the café, accompanied by an older woman who was probably his mother. They were laughing about something. Still smiling, the youth turned his head slightly, and his eyes widened as they locked on Yamasaki Asami. The smile froze, the blood drained from his face, and he made as if to rise up from his wheelchair. Seeing his distress, the woman leaned over and asked him,