#40: Fic: When They're Not Together
Title: When They’re Not Together
Fandom: Arashi
Summary: Hollywood calls again. Nino answers.
Notes: For darong's birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Thank you forochel for the beta and myjulien for the read-through. ♥
In April, Nino auditions for a film.
The audition takes place at six in the morning because he has rehearsals and interviews the rest of the day and the casting director will be leaving Tokyo that evening. Before he steps into the room his manager reminds him gently to try not to look as irritable as he feels.
It’s different from his Iwo Jima audition - and the comparison is inevitable, he knows - in that the director’s actually there. She is French; the producers are Japanese and American, and all of them repeatedly assure him that he won’t have to speak a word of English.
He’s always thought that Aiba would be best at such things, at nodding enthusiastically and warmly saying, “Yes,” with a sincerity impossible to feign. Or Sho, ever diplomatic, with his firm handshakes and his schooled, careful English. Jun would be earnest, thoughtful; singularly charming. Even Ohno might fare better, all absent politeness and instinctive talent under his inscrutable demeanour.
But Nino’s the one who is the old hand at this, somehow, even though he’s arguably the one with the least wanderlust out of the five of them. He’s the one who has done the press junkets, the European premieres. His manager - and by extension, the company - expects him to know how to handle this. So Nino smiles, and bows deeply, and does his best to deliver what everyone wants.
Three weeks later, they tell him he’s got the part.
“It’s an odd little heist film,” he tells Jun, when they head out for soba that night. “Half the script’s in French and all my dialogue is in Japanese.”
“Sounds like it’d be incomprehensible,” says Jun. There is a slight note of concern in his voice.
“Well, we’ll see,” says Nino, picking at his food with his chopsticks. “Never doubt the power of subtitles.”
He’s headed to London in three weeks for rehearsals before the actual filming starts. In this time he knows that his manager has been scrambling to work out a way to handle all the commitments he’ll be leaving in his wake; interviews he’ll need to postpone or conduct over the phone, television programmes he’ll be missing but should appear on anyway. Nino finds himself being asked to give an opinion on the first episode of a drama that hasn’t even aired yet.
“Sakurai-kun has worked very hard,” he says (because when has Sho not, really). “I enjoyed the first episode immensely, and look forward to the subsequent ones.”
“You’re brushing up on your English, then?” Sho asks him.
“Of course,” Nino replies in English. “Your face... it looks like an eraser.”
“Yes,” Aiba exclaims excitedly, bursting into their conversation at the first sound of another language. “Yes!”
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Sho tells them irritably.
Aiba says something unintelligible in Chinese and wanders off, beaming.
“Maybe I should dig up that phrasebook you gave me,” says Nino.
“Dig up?” Sho repeats, looking slightly offended.
“I put it away after the Paris premiere,” Nino tells him. “Didn’t think I’d be using it again.”
It would be the chance of a lifetime, if not for the fact that Nino’s life has been littered with such chances and he’s taken every one of them.
“Maybe you can call it the second chance of a lifetime,” Ohno says, when Nino mentions this.
“Perhaps,” says Nino, still clutching the ten-thousand yen note Ohno gave him at the beginning of the meal. (“You drink more, now,” was Ohno’s explanation for the increase in amount since the last time.)
That evening, Ohno draws a comic on six paper napkins illustrating the adventures of Nino in Europe. They involve a dolphin suit, three talking cats and the Queen of England, for some reason. At one point, Sailor Moon also appears.
Nino glances critically at it when Ohno is done. “I’ve always liked Sailor Mercury better,” he informs Ohno.
“I know,” Ohno replies, but makes no move to correct this.
When Ohno is in the washroom Nino folds up all six napkins and slips them into his DS case.
“Will you get homesick?” asks Aiba.
“Of course not,” snaps Nino. “I’ll be back in less than three weeks.”
“I get homesick all the time, even when it’s a couple of days,” Aiba tells him. “I miss the food the most. There’s a limit to the number of days one can go without rice, and mine is one and a half.”
Nino nods. “I know,” he says, “and your response to this overwhelming depression is to buy us numerous pairs of flip-flops and zoo tiger t-shirts that we do not want.”
Aiba considers this for a moment. “Well, if you put it that way...”
Nino leaves for London two days after his birthday. The others, for various reasons, are unable to see him off at the airport, but he gets a deluge of text messages just before he enters the gate. These include words of encouragement and well wishes (mainly Sho and Jun), strings of excited emojis (Aiba) and a bizarre photo of Ohno brandishing two baguettes outside the entrance of their green room at Fuji TV.
On the plane, he attempts to study the newly-translated version of the script but ends up dozing off almost immediately. When he awakens (just in time for an odd-smelling breakfast he hardly touches) he is hit with the distinct sense of disorientation that often comes with air travel; the constant fatigue, whether waking or sleeping.
He dreams he is twenty-three again, flying to LA for months of dust and sand and terrifying explosions - perhaps he isn’t dreaming; perhaps this is a memory - and is gripped by the uncertainty from all those years ago. There is a nauseous feeling at the back of his throat, like fear and homesickness and inadequacy all amalgamated into a cold twisting feeling in his gut.
The first thing Nino does when he opens his eyes again is reach for the familiar weight of his DS. When he unzips the case two out of the six of Ohno’s napkins fall out. On one of them, Sailor Moon and a talking cat are discussing how it is rather difficult to find good omurice in England. It is strangely comforting.
The first thing Joseph Gordon-Levitt says to Nino when they first meet is, “I loved Gantz.” The second thing he says is, “After you.”
At thirteen thousand feet above the ground it is arguably rather difficult to make polite conversation, which is why Nino settles for energetic nodding and a hollered, “YES!” that results in him getting pushed out of the aircraft by their over-enthusiastic skydiving instructor.
It appears that the producers’ idea of a good introduction is having them leap out of a small plane together on their first meeting; Nino had been packed off to the hangar and sent up in the air before he could even point out that nothing on the schedule said anything about skydiving on the first day.
Perhaps it works; after they’re back safely on the ground with their parachutes put away, Joseph Gordon-Levitt flashes Nino a warm, slightly cheeky grin and asks him to call him Joe.
The film stars Joe as Benjamin "Tiny" Douek, the youngest son in a family of big-time robbers and confidence men, who left the business years ago and is now desperate to prove to his grandmother that he still has a place in the family's operations. Nino plays Yamakawa Ken, his very grumpy and very Japanese step-cousin once removed (how they end up being related is only cursorily explained in the story, but it apparently has something to do with an accidental murder and a deliberate marriage twenty years ago), and Ben enlists his help in getting a foothold in the family business.
Yamakawa Ken, Nino discovers, is a man of many talents. This means that in the week and a half of rehearsals before principal photography, Nino has to learn how to skydive, operate five different types of firearms and play the accordion, among other things.
By the time everyone is assembled for the table read at the end of the fortnight Nino has hurled himself out of a plane at least five more times and mastered three variations of Mary Had A Little Lamb on the accordion. This is a great achievement considering that he’s also had to go for daily stunt training and practise his fifteen lines of French with a rather exacting language coach.
“It’s rather a lot of work for a film that was described to me as ‘cerebral’ and ‘small-scale’,” Nino tells Jun over the phone. “I suppose that’s Hollywood for you.”
“We’ll have you back in a week, won’t we?” asks Jun.
“In a week, for a week,” Nino replies. “After that I think I’m headed to Paris.”
“Keep in mind that we’re demanding souvenirs from every place you visit,” Jun tells him, “and not the cheap junk you bought us the last time around.”
“I have never bought you cheap junk,” Nino retorts.
“Really?” asks Jun, and Nino imagines that he’s got one eyebrow raised.
“The mugs were kitschy,” Nino concedes, “but they weren’t cheap.”
In the film, Nino’s character understands English but refuses to speak it and Joe’s vice versa; the director is assured that it will work onscreen, but nobody seems fully convinced of this - not, at least, until the table read.
Someone tells Nino beforehand that it’s all right for the actors not to go full-out because everyone is expected to be coming in cold, but after the initial few pages he finds it impossible not to slip into character. There is that definite pattern in a grifter’s spiel that rolls off the tongue, persuasive in any language, and the back-and-forth banter of two men who understand each other perfectly despite speaking different languages takes on a rhythm impossible to anticipate from merely reading the words on the page. They argue like an old married couple, talk circles around their equally sharp-tongued marks and hatch plans to double-cross their own very powerful grandmother; Nino the long-suffering, slightly neurotic foil to Joe’s dazzlingly ambitious young upstart.
It works, somehow, even if he understands only half of what the rest of the cast is saying - after a point it becomes less about the translations printed in the margins and more about the dynamics they are building there and then: a family matriarch squaring off with the youngest son; the alluring heiress who proves impossible to con (and whose subsequent involvement in the duo’s operations drives Nino’s character up the wall).
“Welcome back,” says Ohno.
“You’re very, very brown,” Nino tells him, eyeing his skin in a critical manner.
“I know,” Ohno agrees, nodding mournfully. “This morning the makeup girl practically attacked me with her brush. She seemed very distraught.”
Nino’s forgotten about this part - the disconcerting clarity of vision he gets upon return, when the daily routine of his life (his real life) in Tokyo is cast in sharp relief against his time spent away. It’s only been three weeks but it’s enough to highlight to him how different the Ohno who resides in his mind is from the Ohno standing before him, slightly gaunt despite the stylists’ best efforts; weathered not just by the sea and sunlight but by years of early morning shoots and late night dance practices.
It’s in all their faces, Nino knows; has been there for months, hidden from view by virtue of their sheer proximity to each other. The last time he had left, he had returned to see them grow up. This time, he thinks, he’ll watch them grow old.
“Older,” Jun corrects him. “We’re older, but we’re not old.”
“Semantics,” Nino says.
“It’s an important distinction,” says Jun. “And you, of all people, should know that.”
Nino doesn’t reply, and for a moment Jun just looks at him, as if sheer force of will can convince Nino otherwise.
“Well, then,” Jun says, after the moment passes, “explain to me exactly how these fridge magnets you’ve brought back can be called anything but Very Cheap Junk.”
Principal photography begins in Paris, where they are scheduled to shoot for a fortnight before moving to a sound stage in Prague. There is no gunfire or trench-digging this time; the first day involves many hours of walking down the Champs-Élysées while exchanging verbal barbs and making numerous references to past operations together.
In the film, Tiny and Ken have known each other since childhood, and at some point in the screenplay there is a specific mention of their long history being ‘extremely palpable’. Off screen, Nino hardly converses with Joe, mostly because it’s much easier to stay silent than to fumble through a futile conversation in textbook English. Joe is good at silence, though; on one of their rare mornings off he commandeers the assistant director’s car and insists that Nino accompany him on a long drive.
Joe’s Paris is vastly different from the Paris Nino encountered six years ago - they stop at a cafe where the waitresses care little for movie stars and disdain Joe’s American-accented French, and visit a small record store run by an old man who has also devoted two entire shelves to Communist paraphernalia. Nino says very little, and Joe even less, which appears to work fine for both of them.
Everywhere they go Nino keeps an eye out for something the others might like - an odd-looking tiger figurine or a particularly florid scarf. There is, after all, an unspoken rule against giving someone an Eiffel Tower key chain more than once.
“My limit is a week,” says Nino, when Aiba calls. “For rice, I mean.”
“I should have guessed,” Aiba replies. For someone who claims to have spent the day learning exhausting dance moves for a stageplay he sounds extremely exuberant.
“I lasted longer in LA because Watanabe-san used to bring us onigiri every day,” Nino adds.
“That was very kind of him,” muses Aiba.
There is a pause, during which Nino thinks he can hear a fridge door being opened and shut.
“Are you having fun, then?”
“I’m all right,” says Nino, and proceeds to tell Aiba about how, during scene depicting the pair’s tumultuous first attempt at the Three-card Monte, he executed a Mexican turnover so effortlessly that his hand double was sadly made redundant.
He doesn’t mention anything like being lonely or something similarly ridiculous like that, because Nino is no longer fourteen or sixteen or twenty-three. He is twenty-nine and being paid to play a very expensive game of dress-up; the least he can do is have the time of his life.
Aiba picks up on it anyway, it seems, because before he hangs up he says, “You’ll be back in no time, Nino-chan.”
“There’s still Berlin, Vietnam and three other locations after Prague.”
“Like I said,” Aiba says patiently, “no time at all.”
What Joe might have in common with him, Nino supposes, is a history of having work at the age of twelve or thirteen, of growing up in front of cameras. It’s only the loosest of similarities, though, because everything else about their experiences is vastly different. Joe is an actor; Joe comes with no disclaimers about how back home, he is also a singer and an idol.
Nihon TV sends a small crew over so that Zoom In!! Super can find out how Nino is doing. He also records two short VTR segments for Shiyagare. During the interview section Nino demonstrates his newly-acquired accordion-playing skills and does his best to offer the vaguest of answers to questions about the film. “I look forward to coming home soon,” he says, and finds that it isn’t far from the truth.
“You’ve met a lot of people while filming this movie,” says the interviewer, “is it strange that they might not be familiar with who you are or what you do?”
“Generally I try to sum it all up for them,” Nino replies. “But it gets a bit difficult to explain.”
He doesn’t mention that he’s sort of stopped trying to explain this to his co-workers; just lets them refer to his work in Iwo Jima and assume that he is an actor like the rest of them are. Nino looks back at the past sixteen years and finds what he’s done impossible to classify - he loves it and doesn’t care for it; has struggled through it but finds it bafflingly effortless. There is no easy way to sum up the many contradictions that make up Ninomiya Kazunari, and really, he shouldn’t have to try.
After their time in Prague the schedules and locations become increasingly fragmented; they spend two days in Berlin filming Yamagawa Ken’s first appearance in the film, in which he is seen cheating a helpful German couple of a hundred euros by posing as a robbed traveller at the train station. Almost immediately after that, they are seeking an audience with Catherine Deneuve (their grandmother) in a private boat on Ha Long Bay.
The time differences get harder to calculate, and Nino’s internal clock becomes so scrambled that he just takes to sleeping wherever he can, the flight from one location to the next turning night into continuous day. The number of odd trinkets and interesting items continues to grow even as Ohno’s napkins become increasingly tattered.
Nino both loves and loathes this; he knows that he should treasure the experience because it is probably his first and his last, that when time is stretched and crinkled in this manner things grow and uncanny knack for ending far sooner than he expects.
And then, on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, Nino returns.
The first thing he does when he gets home is take a bath. The second thing he does is sleep. The third thing he does is call his manager to thank her for all her trouble these past months.
“I can’t believe we’re this low on your priorities list,” says Jun.
Nino emerges from his kitchen to find the four of them seated in his living room, critically examining the paper bag of souvenirs he had left on the coffee table.
“Yes,” Aiba agrees. “I also can’t believe you got us Eiffel Tower keychains again.”
“I’ve lost mine,” Ohno murmurs, “so I’m glad there’s a replacement.”
“I tried to stop them,” Sho tells Nino, attempting to look apologetic and failing. “But I can’t say I’m not disappointed.”
“Those aren’t for you,” says Nino, after the shock of discovering intruders in his house has worn off. Before he can continue, however, he is promptly interrupted by Aiba, who has crept round behind him for the sole purpose of giving him a bone-crushing, slightly sweaty hug.
“I’m not sure if suffocation is the best way to welcome him back,” says Sho uncertainly.
“Welcome home,” Ohno tells Nino, patting him fondly on the head.
“Yes,” says Jun, “things have been really stupid without you.”
“Glad to know,” says Nino, once he has struggled free of Aiba’s grip.
For a moment he just looks round at their beaming faces and wonders how he’s managed to survive two months without them.
Then Aiba and Ohno attack him simultaneously, and he wonders how he’s survived twelve years with them.
“Come on, then,” says Nino, “I’ll show you all the cheap junk I’ve brought you.”
End
Fandom: Arashi
Summary: Hollywood calls again. Nino answers.
Notes: For darong's birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Thank you forochel for the beta and myjulien for the read-through. ♥
In April, Nino auditions for a film.
The audition takes place at six in the morning because he has rehearsals and interviews the rest of the day and the casting director will be leaving Tokyo that evening. Before he steps into the room his manager reminds him gently to try not to look as irritable as he feels.
It’s different from his Iwo Jima audition - and the comparison is inevitable, he knows - in that the director’s actually there. She is French; the producers are Japanese and American, and all of them repeatedly assure him that he won’t have to speak a word of English.
He’s always thought that Aiba would be best at such things, at nodding enthusiastically and warmly saying, “Yes,” with a sincerity impossible to feign. Or Sho, ever diplomatic, with his firm handshakes and his schooled, careful English. Jun would be earnest, thoughtful; singularly charming. Even Ohno might fare better, all absent politeness and instinctive talent under his inscrutable demeanour.
But Nino’s the one who is the old hand at this, somehow, even though he’s arguably the one with the least wanderlust out of the five of them. He’s the one who has done the press junkets, the European premieres. His manager - and by extension, the company - expects him to know how to handle this. So Nino smiles, and bows deeply, and does his best to deliver what everyone wants.
Three weeks later, they tell him he’s got the part.
“It’s an odd little heist film,” he tells Jun, when they head out for soba that night. “Half the script’s in French and all my dialogue is in Japanese.”
“Sounds like it’d be incomprehensible,” says Jun. There is a slight note of concern in his voice.
“Well, we’ll see,” says Nino, picking at his food with his chopsticks. “Never doubt the power of subtitles.”
He’s headed to London in three weeks for rehearsals before the actual filming starts. In this time he knows that his manager has been scrambling to work out a way to handle all the commitments he’ll be leaving in his wake; interviews he’ll need to postpone or conduct over the phone, television programmes he’ll be missing but should appear on anyway. Nino finds himself being asked to give an opinion on the first episode of a drama that hasn’t even aired yet.
“Sakurai-kun has worked very hard,” he says (because when has Sho not, really). “I enjoyed the first episode immensely, and look forward to the subsequent ones.”
“You’re brushing up on your English, then?” Sho asks him.
“Of course,” Nino replies in English. “Your face... it looks like an eraser.”
“Yes,” Aiba exclaims excitedly, bursting into their conversation at the first sound of another language. “Yes!”
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Sho tells them irritably.
Aiba says something unintelligible in Chinese and wanders off, beaming.
“Maybe I should dig up that phrasebook you gave me,” says Nino.
“Dig up?” Sho repeats, looking slightly offended.
“I put it away after the Paris premiere,” Nino tells him. “Didn’t think I’d be using it again.”
It would be the chance of a lifetime, if not for the fact that Nino’s life has been littered with such chances and he’s taken every one of them.
“Maybe you can call it the second chance of a lifetime,” Ohno says, when Nino mentions this.
“Perhaps,” says Nino, still clutching the ten-thousand yen note Ohno gave him at the beginning of the meal. (“You drink more, now,” was Ohno’s explanation for the increase in amount since the last time.)
That evening, Ohno draws a comic on six paper napkins illustrating the adventures of Nino in Europe. They involve a dolphin suit, three talking cats and the Queen of England, for some reason. At one point, Sailor Moon also appears.
Nino glances critically at it when Ohno is done. “I’ve always liked Sailor Mercury better,” he informs Ohno.
“I know,” Ohno replies, but makes no move to correct this.
When Ohno is in the washroom Nino folds up all six napkins and slips them into his DS case.
“Will you get homesick?” asks Aiba.
“Of course not,” snaps Nino. “I’ll be back in less than three weeks.”
“I get homesick all the time, even when it’s a couple of days,” Aiba tells him. “I miss the food the most. There’s a limit to the number of days one can go without rice, and mine is one and a half.”
Nino nods. “I know,” he says, “and your response to this overwhelming depression is to buy us numerous pairs of flip-flops and zoo tiger t-shirts that we do not want.”
Aiba considers this for a moment. “Well, if you put it that way...”
Nino leaves for London two days after his birthday. The others, for various reasons, are unable to see him off at the airport, but he gets a deluge of text messages just before he enters the gate. These include words of encouragement and well wishes (mainly Sho and Jun), strings of excited emojis (Aiba) and a bizarre photo of Ohno brandishing two baguettes outside the entrance of their green room at Fuji TV.
On the plane, he attempts to study the newly-translated version of the script but ends up dozing off almost immediately. When he awakens (just in time for an odd-smelling breakfast he hardly touches) he is hit with the distinct sense of disorientation that often comes with air travel; the constant fatigue, whether waking or sleeping.
He dreams he is twenty-three again, flying to LA for months of dust and sand and terrifying explosions - perhaps he isn’t dreaming; perhaps this is a memory - and is gripped by the uncertainty from all those years ago. There is a nauseous feeling at the back of his throat, like fear and homesickness and inadequacy all amalgamated into a cold twisting feeling in his gut.
The first thing Nino does when he opens his eyes again is reach for the familiar weight of his DS. When he unzips the case two out of the six of Ohno’s napkins fall out. On one of them, Sailor Moon and a talking cat are discussing how it is rather difficult to find good omurice in England. It is strangely comforting.
The first thing Joseph Gordon-Levitt says to Nino when they first meet is, “I loved Gantz.” The second thing he says is, “After you.”
At thirteen thousand feet above the ground it is arguably rather difficult to make polite conversation, which is why Nino settles for energetic nodding and a hollered, “YES!” that results in him getting pushed out of the aircraft by their over-enthusiastic skydiving instructor.
It appears that the producers’ idea of a good introduction is having them leap out of a small plane together on their first meeting; Nino had been packed off to the hangar and sent up in the air before he could even point out that nothing on the schedule said anything about skydiving on the first day.
Perhaps it works; after they’re back safely on the ground with their parachutes put away, Joseph Gordon-Levitt flashes Nino a warm, slightly cheeky grin and asks him to call him Joe.
The film stars Joe as Benjamin "Tiny" Douek, the youngest son in a family of big-time robbers and confidence men, who left the business years ago and is now desperate to prove to his grandmother that he still has a place in the family's operations. Nino plays Yamakawa Ken, his very grumpy and very Japanese step-cousin once removed (how they end up being related is only cursorily explained in the story, but it apparently has something to do with an accidental murder and a deliberate marriage twenty years ago), and Ben enlists his help in getting a foothold in the family business.
Yamakawa Ken, Nino discovers, is a man of many talents. This means that in the week and a half of rehearsals before principal photography, Nino has to learn how to skydive, operate five different types of firearms and play the accordion, among other things.
By the time everyone is assembled for the table read at the end of the fortnight Nino has hurled himself out of a plane at least five more times and mastered three variations of Mary Had A Little Lamb on the accordion. This is a great achievement considering that he’s also had to go for daily stunt training and practise his fifteen lines of French with a rather exacting language coach.
“It’s rather a lot of work for a film that was described to me as ‘cerebral’ and ‘small-scale’,” Nino tells Jun over the phone. “I suppose that’s Hollywood for you.”
“We’ll have you back in a week, won’t we?” asks Jun.
“In a week, for a week,” Nino replies. “After that I think I’m headed to Paris.”
“Keep in mind that we’re demanding souvenirs from every place you visit,” Jun tells him, “and not the cheap junk you bought us the last time around.”
“I have never bought you cheap junk,” Nino retorts.
“Really?” asks Jun, and Nino imagines that he’s got one eyebrow raised.
“The mugs were kitschy,” Nino concedes, “but they weren’t cheap.”
In the film, Nino’s character understands English but refuses to speak it and Joe’s vice versa; the director is assured that it will work onscreen, but nobody seems fully convinced of this - not, at least, until the table read.
Someone tells Nino beforehand that it’s all right for the actors not to go full-out because everyone is expected to be coming in cold, but after the initial few pages he finds it impossible not to slip into character. There is that definite pattern in a grifter’s spiel that rolls off the tongue, persuasive in any language, and the back-and-forth banter of two men who understand each other perfectly despite speaking different languages takes on a rhythm impossible to anticipate from merely reading the words on the page. They argue like an old married couple, talk circles around their equally sharp-tongued marks and hatch plans to double-cross their own very powerful grandmother; Nino the long-suffering, slightly neurotic foil to Joe’s dazzlingly ambitious young upstart.
It works, somehow, even if he understands only half of what the rest of the cast is saying - after a point it becomes less about the translations printed in the margins and more about the dynamics they are building there and then: a family matriarch squaring off with the youngest son; the alluring heiress who proves impossible to con (and whose subsequent involvement in the duo’s operations drives Nino’s character up the wall).
“Welcome back,” says Ohno.
“You’re very, very brown,” Nino tells him, eyeing his skin in a critical manner.
“I know,” Ohno agrees, nodding mournfully. “This morning the makeup girl practically attacked me with her brush. She seemed very distraught.”
Nino’s forgotten about this part - the disconcerting clarity of vision he gets upon return, when the daily routine of his life (his real life) in Tokyo is cast in sharp relief against his time spent away. It’s only been three weeks but it’s enough to highlight to him how different the Ohno who resides in his mind is from the Ohno standing before him, slightly gaunt despite the stylists’ best efforts; weathered not just by the sea and sunlight but by years of early morning shoots and late night dance practices.
It’s in all their faces, Nino knows; has been there for months, hidden from view by virtue of their sheer proximity to each other. The last time he had left, he had returned to see them grow up. This time, he thinks, he’ll watch them grow old.
“Older,” Jun corrects him. “We’re older, but we’re not old.”
“Semantics,” Nino says.
“It’s an important distinction,” says Jun. “And you, of all people, should know that.”
Nino doesn’t reply, and for a moment Jun just looks at him, as if sheer force of will can convince Nino otherwise.
“Well, then,” Jun says, after the moment passes, “explain to me exactly how these fridge magnets you’ve brought back can be called anything but Very Cheap Junk.”
Principal photography begins in Paris, where they are scheduled to shoot for a fortnight before moving to a sound stage in Prague. There is no gunfire or trench-digging this time; the first day involves many hours of walking down the Champs-Élysées while exchanging verbal barbs and making numerous references to past operations together.
In the film, Tiny and Ken have known each other since childhood, and at some point in the screenplay there is a specific mention of their long history being ‘extremely palpable’. Off screen, Nino hardly converses with Joe, mostly because it’s much easier to stay silent than to fumble through a futile conversation in textbook English. Joe is good at silence, though; on one of their rare mornings off he commandeers the assistant director’s car and insists that Nino accompany him on a long drive.
Joe’s Paris is vastly different from the Paris Nino encountered six years ago - they stop at a cafe where the waitresses care little for movie stars and disdain Joe’s American-accented French, and visit a small record store run by an old man who has also devoted two entire shelves to Communist paraphernalia. Nino says very little, and Joe even less, which appears to work fine for both of them.
Everywhere they go Nino keeps an eye out for something the others might like - an odd-looking tiger figurine or a particularly florid scarf. There is, after all, an unspoken rule against giving someone an Eiffel Tower key chain more than once.
“My limit is a week,” says Nino, when Aiba calls. “For rice, I mean.”
“I should have guessed,” Aiba replies. For someone who claims to have spent the day learning exhausting dance moves for a stageplay he sounds extremely exuberant.
“I lasted longer in LA because Watanabe-san used to bring us onigiri every day,” Nino adds.
“That was very kind of him,” muses Aiba.
There is a pause, during which Nino thinks he can hear a fridge door being opened and shut.
“Are you having fun, then?”
“I’m all right,” says Nino, and proceeds to tell Aiba about how, during scene depicting the pair’s tumultuous first attempt at the Three-card Monte, he executed a Mexican turnover so effortlessly that his hand double was sadly made redundant.
He doesn’t mention anything like being lonely or something similarly ridiculous like that, because Nino is no longer fourteen or sixteen or twenty-three. He is twenty-nine and being paid to play a very expensive game of dress-up; the least he can do is have the time of his life.
Aiba picks up on it anyway, it seems, because before he hangs up he says, “You’ll be back in no time, Nino-chan.”
“There’s still Berlin, Vietnam and three other locations after Prague.”
“Like I said,” Aiba says patiently, “no time at all.”
What Joe might have in common with him, Nino supposes, is a history of having work at the age of twelve or thirteen, of growing up in front of cameras. It’s only the loosest of similarities, though, because everything else about their experiences is vastly different. Joe is an actor; Joe comes with no disclaimers about how back home, he is also a singer and an idol.
Nihon TV sends a small crew over so that Zoom In!! Super can find out how Nino is doing. He also records two short VTR segments for Shiyagare. During the interview section Nino demonstrates his newly-acquired accordion-playing skills and does his best to offer the vaguest of answers to questions about the film. “I look forward to coming home soon,” he says, and finds that it isn’t far from the truth.
“You’ve met a lot of people while filming this movie,” says the interviewer, “is it strange that they might not be familiar with who you are or what you do?”
“Generally I try to sum it all up for them,” Nino replies. “But it gets a bit difficult to explain.”
He doesn’t mention that he’s sort of stopped trying to explain this to his co-workers; just lets them refer to his work in Iwo Jima and assume that he is an actor like the rest of them are. Nino looks back at the past sixteen years and finds what he’s done impossible to classify - he loves it and doesn’t care for it; has struggled through it but finds it bafflingly effortless. There is no easy way to sum up the many contradictions that make up Ninomiya Kazunari, and really, he shouldn’t have to try.
After their time in Prague the schedules and locations become increasingly fragmented; they spend two days in Berlin filming Yamagawa Ken’s first appearance in the film, in which he is seen cheating a helpful German couple of a hundred euros by posing as a robbed traveller at the train station. Almost immediately after that, they are seeking an audience with Catherine Deneuve (their grandmother) in a private boat on Ha Long Bay.
The time differences get harder to calculate, and Nino’s internal clock becomes so scrambled that he just takes to sleeping wherever he can, the flight from one location to the next turning night into continuous day. The number of odd trinkets and interesting items continues to grow even as Ohno’s napkins become increasingly tattered.
Nino both loves and loathes this; he knows that he should treasure the experience because it is probably his first and his last, that when time is stretched and crinkled in this manner things grow and uncanny knack for ending far sooner than he expects.
And then, on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, Nino returns.
The first thing he does when he gets home is take a bath. The second thing he does is sleep. The third thing he does is call his manager to thank her for all her trouble these past months.
“I can’t believe we’re this low on your priorities list,” says Jun.
Nino emerges from his kitchen to find the four of them seated in his living room, critically examining the paper bag of souvenirs he had left on the coffee table.
“Yes,” Aiba agrees. “I also can’t believe you got us Eiffel Tower keychains again.”
“I’ve lost mine,” Ohno murmurs, “so I’m glad there’s a replacement.”
“I tried to stop them,” Sho tells Nino, attempting to look apologetic and failing. “But I can’t say I’m not disappointed.”
“Those aren’t for you,” says Nino, after the shock of discovering intruders in his house has worn off. Before he can continue, however, he is promptly interrupted by Aiba, who has crept round behind him for the sole purpose of giving him a bone-crushing, slightly sweaty hug.
“I’m not sure if suffocation is the best way to welcome him back,” says Sho uncertainly.
“Welcome home,” Ohno tells Nino, patting him fondly on the head.
“Yes,” says Jun, “things have been really stupid without you.”
“Glad to know,” says Nino, once he has struggled free of Aiba’s grip.
For a moment he just looks round at their beaming faces and wonders how he’s managed to survive two months without them.
Then Aiba and Ohno attack him simultaneously, and he wonders how he’s survived twelve years with them.
“Come on, then,” says Nino, “I’ll show you all the cheap junk I’ve brought you.”
End