Chapter 115
The ‘Gwao’ they had played earlier had felt slightly lacking. Perhaps the audience sensed that too, because they had responded with only mild appreciation.
But what about now?
Thinking that, he called Suyeon up. Then he thought again.
‘It really is her, right? … It must be, right?’
Despite having shouted like that just moments earlier, he looked at Suyeon again as if he couldn't believe it. No matter how he looked at her, it was her: average height, sharp-looking features, and long hair grown out and swept to one side.
But he couldn't help doubting it.
People said all sorts of things happened in life, but how often could something like this happen anywhere in the world: ‘I was listening to Korean music, found Korean rock on the TOP100 chart, thought it was pretty good, and decided to sing it at my next show, only for the original creators to happen to visit the live house where I was performing and hear that song’?
“
What is this guy saying?
”
“
He says, ‘Are you the vocalist of Group Sound?’…
”
“
That's right.
OK. I am.”
… It seemed things like that happened more often than expected. When the high school girl who had come up alongside her said so, Suyeon calmly admitted that she was indeed the one while looking at him.
And his thoughts ground to a halt.
If she really was, what was he supposed to do next? Should he give up the stage so those girls could perform instead? That didn't seem right. Meanwhile, the mood in the house gradually grew colder, since the audience had no idea what was going on.
“
“Everyone, the song we played earlier… ‘Gwao.’ The original band is here with us right now!”
He shouted that instinctively, first of all, to draw a reaction from the audience. The crowd responded. Some applauded and cheered, while others murmured among themselves. He could hear things like, “That song was pretty good. It was made in Korea?” “It was in Korean, at least.” “Those girls look young. They wrote a song like that?”
Taking advantage of the distraction, he gestured for Suyeon, who was standing below the stage with an utterly incredulous look on her face, to come up. He needed to salvage the thoroughly ruined atmosphere.
* * *
Myeongjeon tilted his head slightly. Against the backdrop of random-sounding waiting music, the live house had fallen into a subdued mood. Apparently, the band members had finished whispering among themselves, because the member holding the guitar passed it to Myeongjeon with a dazed expression.
“Wooaaaaah!”
Cheers erupted from the audience. Myeongjeon wondered how much of that emotion was genuine. Probably not very much.
The first thing he heard upon stepping onto the stage was Japanese he couldn't understand. Hyuna came up and translated: “He says the vocalist should stand up there for a bit.”
He wanted to dismiss it as ridiculous, but as a bandman, Myeongjeon couldn't stand by and let the atmosphere grow any more awkward, so he accepted the offer—on the condition that he would take the guitar.
‘What am I even doing…’
The guitar handed to him was a Yamaha Pacifica. Its purchase price was only around one million won at import prices, so it wasn't particularly expensive. But, true to the saying ‘Yamaha, the king of value,’ it offered performance beyond its price… enough to show off his skills.
“
Starto? Waito?
”
“Go, go.”
In the chaotic atmosphere, Myeongjeon answered the vocalist and then discreetly swept his gaze over the audience below the stage. What he saw was faint anticipation, confusion, concern, and disbelief.
“
All right, then let's start the song again. The vocals and guitar will be handled by Miss Ha Suyeon, the vocalist and guitarist of ‘Group Sound,’ the band that originally performed the song! Please listen to ‘Gwao’!
”
Applause followed the vocalist's introduction. At the signal of the descending drumsticks, a piano drenched in reverb came in.
Myeongjeon listened to it and thought.
‘Since it's come to this, should I play it for real?’
* * *
‘What is going on here?’
He looked up at the live stage.
Because of the backlighting shining from the wall in the distance, the face of the girl standing at the front of the stage was faintly obscured by darkness. The expression on her face could have been bewilderment, or perhaps confidence.
The third performance. A band whose name he had never heard, but whose considerable skill had made him think he should remember them.
He hadn't minded when they said they were going to perform Korean rock he'd never heard before. Korea obviously had rock too. And the song itself was decent: modern rock with a jangly sound. It was worth the experience, if only for the thought, ‘So this is what Korean rock is like.’
But what happened afterward was rather bewildering. The original creator of the song had suddenly appeared; they had called up a high school girl he'd never seen before; the live-house staff, the band, and the Koreans had briefly conferred, apparently without deciding how her appearance should be handled; and after all that, she had taken on both the vocals and guitar. It was confusing in every way.
‘Can she really do it? Honestly, I'm not convinced.’
He wasn't the sort of person who went around saying things like, ‘Japan is amazing!’ But he did know that Japanese bands were more skilled than Korean bands. What about a high school girl who looked about as far removed from being a bandman as possible? Would she really produce something good enough to satisfy the ears of the listeners here?
But those thoughts were shattered the moment the guitar began its first picking.
“Uwoooah-!”
What he heard was only the first phrase.
The cheer that burst out was as loud as if the song had already ended.
But he thought it was understandable. The performance was ‘definitely’ different from the one just before.
He couldn't explain it, but it sounded more rhythmic, clearer, and better… If he had to describe it, perhaps it was like comparing a guitarist who had just entered the professional world with a master who had already reached complete maturity.
‘But it's exactly the same melody as before.’
The song was certainly the same. The guitar was the same too. The effects and tone settings? It didn't look like they'd changed anything. Yet why did the rhythm, the sound, and the tone all feel completely different?
Even though the only thing that had changed was the performer.
One day, even if you choose
one path among countless roads
could I ever tell you
that you shouldn't have gone?
As the melody ended, Korean words were breathed out like a sigh. The lyrics uttered into the silence conveyed their emotion, even though they were in a language he didn't understand at all…
The audience applauded the simple yet beautiful melody that followed. Watching the girl sing and play guitar, her feet and head bobbing ever so slightly… he thought.
‘It's completely different from before.’
The performance now was closer to a combination of an artist and a session musician than a band. The other instruments were merely accompaniment meant to highlight the guitar and vocals; it couldn't really be called a band's performance.
It wasn't harmonious in the slightest.
And yet, the audience felt that this performance was far better than the one before. Why was that?
‘The guitar's presence is just too overwhelming.’
Cheers poured toward the guitar playing the main melody. Just look at it. That guitar's tremendous presence was dragging every other instrument beneath the surface. Like how, no matter how much a goose's feet move beneath the water, you can't see them from above…
After several minutes of playing.
Silence settled, and the final lyrics were murmured. Afterward, Suyeon greeted them in Korean.
“Thank you.”
The cheers that erupted were closer to animal cries than a language. Thunderous applause and shouting. Suyeon waved to greet each and every one. One audience member was shouting the name he'd picked up earlier: “Suyeon! Suyeon! Suyeon!”
And so, everyone was happy.
Hyein, watching her daughter perform and receive recognition(?) in a foreign country; the other girls, listening to a Group Sound song resound in another land; Myeongjeon, casually strumming the guitar while thinking, ‘Whatever, I give up’; and the audience, who had never expected to hear guitar playing of this caliber in a live house on a dim, out-of-the-way street.
The only ones who felt a little depressed were the band, who had been abruptly robbed of the starring role despite not having done a single thing wrong.
* * *
‘Priority booking, exemption from the quota… What ridiculous nonsense.’
The live-house owner had handed Myeongjeon a business card and asked him to get in touch. Myeongjeon shoved it roughly into his pants pocket and looked again at the objects before him. He couldn't tell how old they were, but they looked quite ancient.
Iseo and Seoha were sitting under the air conditioner, while Hyuna and Hyein were energetically roaming around the shop. Hyuna seemed to feel as though she had finally visited a ‘real otaku place,’ while Hyein had found quite a few items related to the manga she used to read.
‘Was it called Nakano Broadway?’
According to Hyuna, unlike ‘Akihabara,’ which they had visited earlier, this was a place with lots of old Japanese manga- and game-related items. Just as she had said, it seemed full of old things, though he had no idea what their histories were.
“Suyeon, look at this.”
“Yes?”
Myeongjeon, who had been casually rummaging through whatever caught his eye, turned at Hyein's words. Hyein was holding a manga. It looked quite old… a book drawn in the style of so-called ‘pure romance manga.’
“This is a manga I read when I was young. Back then, things weren't embellished so lavishly. A lot of manga came in with the backgrounds and things erased, then blacked out like this.”
Hyein spoke in a voice steeped in nostalgia. Her voice as she said, “It was really fun back then. I'd stay up all night reading manga like this…” seemed veiled in a violet mist.
“Don't you read them anymore?”
“Not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I'm not sure. Maybe I've lost interest, and I don't have time to read things like this anymore…”
Hyein's face looked somewhat lonely as she said that. Memories of a past that had passed and would never return. Even if she tried to recreate it now, she could never bring back the feelings of that time. She seemed to know that instinctively.
“Still, why don't you buy one as a souvenir? They're not expensive.”
After saying that, Myeongjeon made the suggestion to Hyein, who was about to put the book back. After hesitating for a moment, Hyein put the book in her basket and said, “Should I?”
“You should look around too, Suyeon. There are lots of interesting things.”
“Yes.”
‘Even so, I wonder if there'll be anything interesting…’
Myeongjeon thought. Hyein was at an age where places like this could contain ‘things from her memories.’ They didn't cost much, and she was young.
But he was nothing like that.
The things likely to evoke his memories were more likely to be in museums or collectors' warehouses than in a place like this. They would have to belong to an era difficult to find in an ordinary shop like this before they could evoke a feeling in him like, ‘Oh, they did have things like this back then…’
That was what he thought. He idly rummaged through the merchandise until he saw something familiar.
“Huh?”
Myeongjeon unconsciously murmured that as he carefully picked up a doll. It was quite grimy and worn out. The price tag stuck to its back read 1,000 yen. Less than 10,000 won in Korean currency.
But from a long-ago memory he no longer even vaguely recalled as he went through life… Myeongjeon could picture this doll.
‘This… I think my father bought it for me when I was little.’
A very long time ago. In Myeongdong, or somewhere else. They had decided to eat out, but his father suddenly had business to take care of and ended up staying out overnight in a hurry.
He remembered that he had probably cried terribly then. It wasn't so much that he was disappointed about missing the meal; he had finally been going out with his perpetually busy father after a long time… and then his father canceled it and left. How could that make any sense? He had sobbed his heart out with that feeling.
The next day, his father bought him this doll. The doll he had treasured until it became completely worn out. The doll that disappeared while they were moving, making him wail that they had to go back to that neighborhood. The doll that had been forgotten in his memory.
“Should I buy it?”
He murmured unconsciously and picked up the doll. 1,000 yen. Far too cheap a price for a memory. But that didn't matter. It was enough if it could serve as a thread leading him back to the past.
“You're going to buy that?”
“Yeah.”
“Isn't that a totally ancient manga? I looked it up on the wiki before, and it was practically a relic…”
It was Iseo who suddenly attacked Myeongjeon with that remark. Iseo's tone was utterly innocent, but Myeongjeon felt his face tighten before he knew it.
“… Why?! Why are you angry? S-sorry. Don't be mad, okay? You can like old manga… Wait, why? Are you saying it isn't old manga? But it is old manga… No, sorry…”
Myeongjeon brushed Iseo's apologies aside and headed for the counter. He thought that no matter how old he got, he still hadn't quite managed to become an adult properly yet. “‘Denture’ was still going too far, wasn't it?”