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Tokyo Symphony Ch. 01

By: LingerieRobot



AN: All dialogue, unless otherwise noted, is spoken in Japanese. For cultural objects that don't fully translate I've added a glossary at the end of the chapter.



If New York was the city that never slept, then Terry thought Tokyo was the city that never dreamed. Its denizens pulsed through the neon veins of the city, on their way to work and back, or another kind of work: the work of being fashionable, or up-to-date, or whatever. Harajuku and Akibahara were as businesslike and devoid of passion as any office building. That youthful swelling of imagination, of constant cultural renewal that you saw in other cities (if only at the fringes) was absent. This wasn't all a bad thing – Terry had lived in Baltimore for a couple years, and a city that didn't dream was better than one with nightmares. Still, he felt stifled, like the city was sucking up his soul.

But that was probably all bullshit. He was just blaming the city for his own miserable life.

Terry sat in his cramped bedroom, staring at a blank piece of paper. A saccharine J-Pop song invade his room through the weak walls. He was trying to draw a naked girl – more specifically a nude version of a character from a popular anime series he had never watched – but it wasn't coming out right. Every drawing was frightening, not erotic – the girl looked monstrous.

Naomichi knocked on his door, and then opened it without waiting for a reply. "Hey man, how are those pages coming?"

"They're not," Terry said. He pointed to the wastebasket, overflowing with discarded drafts.

"Dude, stop masturbating and just draw it," said Naomichi.

"Those aren't tissues, they're pieces of paper."

"Really? Paper seems a little coarse to me."


Terry might have laughed if he was in a better mood, but right now Naomichi just irritated him. His partner was everything he feared he was becoming – overweight, chubby and bespectacled, obsessed with anime, video games, and sex. Naomichi's clothes perpetually smelled, and Terry had never heard him taking them to the laundromat. He was a thirteen-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old's body. And circumstance forced Terry to work with him.

"Seriously, can we do something else?" said Terry. "I'm just not feeling this girl."

"Of course you're not feeling her. She's a drawing."

Terry supposed that expression didn't translate over into Japanese. "I mean, I'm having trouble drawing her. Can we just go back to doing Gurren Lagann? I can draw those girls fine."

"Look, you get to pick the next project," said Naomichi. "But I want to do this series, and you should to. It's new and hot and it'll sell a ton. Our doujin could be one of the first on the market."

"So it doesn't have to be good?" said Terry.

"None of this has to be good. It's pornography, not fine art. Just draw what people want to jack off to and they won't nitpick."

Naomichi grabbed the pack of pocky he had left his room to get and returned back to drawing his half of the doujinshi. Terry tried once again to draw, focusing on the pictures of the girl Naomichi had given him. They just kept looking younger. Terry wondered whether his work was staving off the urges of some pedophile, helpfully directing his desire away from real, flesh-and-blood teenage girls. Or maybe this kind of thing only excaberated desire. He didn't know; both made sense.

Terry's pencil idly wandere across the page. He discovered after a few minutes of drawing that he was sketching his high school girlfriend, Sarah Tamblin. She was a sweet girl, who thought that because Terry was an artist he was some kind of pure-hearte soul. But he was just another teenage boy, and she was just another teenage girl, and after a year of dating he had given up on being a gentleman and snaked his hand up her skirt and she had slapped him so hard it left a mark and that was that. Her handprint only took minutes to fade, but Terry had wanted it to last forever.

He drew her with a schoolgirl uniform. They had both gone to public school, but he was so used to drawing schoolgirls that the uniform grew unconciously. He stopped to look down at what he had done. It was Sarah, but it wasn't, it was a manga girl with big pleading eyes and a small demure mouth and blemish-free skin.

Terry wondered at this drawing, which had suddenly turned into a character. Who was this girl? Why was she smiling? What would she be ten years from now, what had she been ten years ago? He had given birth on the page, but all he had created was body and not mind.

But he was wasting time. He should get back to this new doujin, even if he wasn't enthusiastic about it. Terry set the drawing of the girl who looked like Sarah aside, but not before scrawling on the bottom: "SAKURA TANIGAWA."

--

Other than looks, there weren't many similarities between Sarah Tamblin and Sakura Tanigawa, but one of the few was that both were virgins at age eighteen. Sakura hadn't preserved her cherry out of any kind of prudish reluctance, but simply because the boys around her (and they were, after all, nothing but boys) were so stupid, immature, and for the most part just plain ugly. Her eyes were set on only one man, who was on a completely different level from these children, and who just happened to teach her English class.

Sakura was a B student in every other class, but even though she rarely payed attention to the material in English class, once she was at home she threw herself into it, hoping desperately to impress Mr. Bradshaw. And it worked, or so it thought.

"Very good," Mr. Bradshaw said to her in English as he handed back her test, a sterling blue "92" written on the top corner. "To tell you the truth, you know English better than a lot of Americans."

Sakura flushed. "Thank you very much, Mr. Bradshaw," she said in English. She still had a fresh-off-the-boat accent, but her grammar and vocalbulary were near-perfect. An unexpected benefit of her love.

And it was love – not some stupid schoolgirl crush. She had found the gaijin handsome from her first day of high school, and over the year she learned of his sense of humour, his compassion, his obvious intelligence, and fell deeply in love. He was her ideal man, really. Sakura had left Mr. Bradshaw a love letter in second year, in faltering but very explicit English, and handed it in between the sheets of her homework. He had never responded to it in any way. At first she was crushed, sure it was a rejection because she was ugly or irritating. Sure, it was against the rules to sleep with your students, but why would you fly halfway around the world to teach English unless you wanted to score with some young, nubile Japanese girls? He must be sleeping with the prettier girls, and had no time to fit her into his schedule. Sakura had spent the weekend after that crying and moping, her friend Natsumi holding and comforting her as best she could.

Over time she had come to believe that Mr. Bradshaw was just that pure-minded. No stories, not even rumours, of affairs with students had ever surfaced – and these things were fairly common at her school. So Sakura bided her time. She was already eighteen, and had turned from a gawky teenager into an adult woman with long legs and full, ruby lips and C-cup breasts (one of the biggest in her class). In a few months she would finish high school and they would no longer be student and teacher but just a man and a woman. She would have him then.

Until then she would just smile, wear her skirt high, and keep studying.

--

Three hours later, Terry had only done three pages of the doujin he was supposed to be working on, and they were crap. Every sex scene he drew looked the same, just with the names and hairstyles changed. Every artist has moments where they suspect that they're a total hack, but Terry was pretty sure those moments weren't supposed to last six months. On the other hand, he kept returning to his sketch of Sakura Tanigawa, adding in background and thinking up the story this girl belonged in. She was a schoolgirl, of course – some conventions had to be followed. He decided she was in love with her English teacher. Her foreign English teacher. He realized it was kind of masturbatory, but who would know? To the few who even paid attention to the byline he was Taro Ozuma, just another Japanese artist.

Naomichi emerged from his dank room, experimentally stretching his legs. "How's it going over there, Terry?"

"It's, uh, going. I'm almost out of paper, of all things." He thought of a way to kill some time. "Actually, I think I might head down to the store now.|

"I can do it, man. You're way behind on your pages." Even though they were supposed to be partners, Naomichi acted like a disappointed boss most of the time.

"Come on, the art store's right on the corner," Terry said, faintly angry that he had to plead. "And stretching my legs could do me good. Get the creative juices flowing."

"It's a bad excuse for a break," said Naomichi. "But I guess I can't force you to work. Just make sure it's done by the end of the week. And get some ink too, I don't think what we have will be enough for this one."

Terry knew he shouldn't resent Naomichi. It was only because of him that Terry could stay in Japan, and it was only because of him and his job (usher at a movie theatre) that they made rent and food every month. Terry, on the other hand, was practically a charity case. But with the tight quarters and tight deadlines bickering and resentment sprung up like weeds.

After descending several floors of his apartment building, deciding to take the stairs rather than the temperamental elevator, Terry burst out into the the sunny, crowded street. He was used to the stares that came with being a blonde-haired white guy in Japan, as well as the bubble of space around him on even the most crowded subway car. He walked down to the small art store on the corner and got some decent paper and ink. Terry wondered if and how he could get out of his present situation and start being able to afford the fancy pens and tools he saw in the glass display case.

He paid for the paper after convincing the cashier she didn't have to try and speak English with him. Terry left the store and headed home, or what passed for home nowaays. Usually when he walked in the city he was on autopilot, his mind far away while his feet took him mechanically from point A to point B, but perhaps to stall he took a look around this time. And that was when he saw her.

Terry's first impression was that she was beautiful. That was the one thing about her he'd never question. She had long, reddish-brown hair, a modelesque face, and a slender but curvy body. Her skin looked like porcelain. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen talking into a sewer grate.

Looking at her closely, she did appear a bit dishevelled. Her hair was sweaty and damp, her white blouse had a number of mystrious stains on it, and it and her black skirt was wrinkled and dishevelled. Everyone on the street walked on by, taking only a glance at the crazy, beautiful woman. Terry stopped and stared.

A Japanese man in a suit bumped into him and gave him an earful about holding people up. Terry didn't listen, so the man went into a further rant about foreigners. Terry walked forward and looked down at the girl, who stared into the sewer intently.

"What are you doing?" he finally got the nerve to say.

She looked up. "There's a kid down there. There's a kid down there and he's getting hurt."

"Oh my god, are you sure?" Mark shoved past her to look through the great. He didn't hear or see anything.

"Can't you see her?" the girl asked.

"Who?"


The girl shuddered. "Oh God, not again." She then recoiled suddenly, standing up and backing off. She backed into a woman who swore at her and then continued on her way. "You have to get me inside."

"What?" Terry said.

"If I stay out here they'll get me," she said, jerking an accusing finger at the air. "Please, can you get me inside? Somewhere with no holes..."

Terry didn't know what to do, but his instincts wanted him to help a pretty girl in distress, even if that distress was insane. "Uh, sure, yeah. You can come up to my place."

She rushed into his arms, holding him like a talisman against the darkness. "Thank you so much. You won't regret it, I swear."

They entered Terry's apartment building, and she instantly looked less scared and more cognizant of what was going on around her. "You here on vacation?" she said.

"No, work visa. I'm a freelance artist."

"Ooh, an artist," she said with a giggle. "Probably some genius American. Can you draw me?"

Terry wanted to say that he'd been drawing girls like her for months. Instead, he just said "Maybe. My name's Terry, by the way."

"Te-ri," she said, trying the syllables on her tongue. "Like in Teriyaki. My name's Mika. Mika Otori."

Terry wondered where he had heard that name before.

--

Natsumi's parents had the most loving relationship she had ever seen. After twenty years of marriage they still loved the sound of each others' voices, danced spontaneously in the kitchen, and had frequent and vocal sex that made Natsumi very uncomfortable. That wasn't to say that they never fought or were unhappy, just that there was an obvious passion and love that carried them through it. They loved her too, and were kinder than most parents, but it was obvious that their main interest was in each other, and she was just the product of that, a spillover of their love given solid form. 

When she asked her mom the secret to having a marriage like that, she said it was simply: she had married her best friend. Natsumi wanted to follow her advice. The only problem was that her best friend was a girl.

Being in love was, Natsumi had decided, incredibly frustrating. She had math homework to do, but every time she stared at the clusters of numbers all she could think of was Sakura. It was impossible to focus on much else besides her raven-haired maiden, with the shapely legs and the slender body and that ravishing smile and the breasts, by God the breasts...

And there she went again. One thought about Sakura and Natsumi found her hand halfway down her panties. This had to stop. She wasn't going to graduate if she couldn't focus on her homework.

Leaving math aside for now, Natsumi turned to her computer and checked the program she used for chat. Sakura was on and, like a moth drawn to flame, Natsumi went to talk to her.

SuperNatsumi: hey beautiful

SuperNatsumi: what are you up to?

girldustin: i'm starting a novel

SuperNatsumi: wow, you're a lot more productive than me

girldustin: not really

girldustin: i'll probably give this up after the first chapter

girldustin: just like all the other ones

SuperNatsumi: what's it about?

girldustin: it's kind of a romance thing

girldustin: about an american who comes to japan and ends up drawing hentai

girldustin: and he meets this girl who's like a model

girldustin: but she has a lot of issues

girldustin: which i haven't exactly figured out yet

SuperNatsumi: hmm, a romance about an older gaijin

SuperNatsumi: i wonder where this is coming from?

girldustin: :D

girldustin: did you see him today tho?

girldustin: hotter than usual, even 

girldustin: i could eat breakfast off that man

SuperNatsumi: like what, toast or something?

girldustin: no, i mean a full western breakfast

girldustin: fried eggs and bacon and maple syrup

girldustin: yum yum

SuperNatsumi: i dunno if mr. bradshaw would like having fried egg on him

girldustin: well tough

girldustin: he deserves it for being so unobtainable

girldustin: he's like

girldustin: what's the male equivalent of a cocktease?

SuperNatsumi: a cunttease?

girldustin: wow, my girl natsumi is picking up some dirty words

SuperNatsumi: I know i've gone through this spiel b4

SuperNatsumi: but i really think you shouldn't be so fixated on this guy

SuperNatsumi: i mean, he's a teacher, and a gaijin to boot

SuperNatsumi: he probably has a big-titted american girl back home

girldustin: just you watch

girldustin: i'm going to get him

Natsumi sighed and cast her head back, looking at the ceiling. Such was her punishment – to be so close to the girl she loved that she got to hear him dishing about the man she loved constantly. Every word she said about Bradshaw was like a knife in the gut, but Natsumi smiled and tried to pull through. Just act like everything is normal. The worst thing to do would be to lose Sakura's friendship. So she kept up the smile, even when it felt like a straightjacket.

Natsumi changed the subject away from Bradshaw and asked Sakura for help on her math homework.

--

Terry had taken Mika up to his apartment, having to practically carry her up the stairs, and sat her down on the couch. She was asleep within a minute. Naomichi emerged from his room, carrying a bag of chips whose crumbs formed a kind of Van Dyke around his mouth. "Dude. I send you out for ink and you bring back an unconcious chick?"

"She was in bad shape out there," Terry said. "It looked like she was hallucinating something. I decided to take her in before she got hurt."

"Well, I think you managed to find the hottest crazy girl in Tokyo. Just keep an eye on her, okay? Don't want her stealing our stuff."

"We don't really have much worth stealing."

"Which is why it's important we hold onto it," Naomichi said. "Now give me the stuff and go get your pages done."

Fortunately, Terry's bedroom door opened up into the combined living room/kitchen (it wasn't a big apartment) and he could sit at his work desk and still see Mika laying across their ratty old couch. She looked serene, almost angelic, pink lips flat against her ivory face, chest slowly rising and falling with her breath. Grudgingly, Terry returned to his work.

He was surprised to find himself caught up in a storm of ink and creation. The images and words almost leaped from his head to the page. Terry was delighted, and sure he would be done this today, until he noticed that somehow the centrepiece of the comic, the flat-chested moe girl from a show he hadn't seen, had slowly morphed into the vixen that lay on the couch across from him. The early pages could still be mistaken for the character, but they were mostly completely unusable. He crumpled the offending pages up and angrily tossed them into the wastebin. He felt like such an amateur, unable to concentrate on a simple – moronic, even – project. Terry pounded the thin wall, which shook and rattled.

The noise seemed to revive Mika, who cracked open sky-blue eyes to stare across the room at him. She slowly sat up, her long hair falling back into a straight line, and tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes. "Oh my god, I am so sorry. You brought me in off the street, right? You didn't really need to do that."

"Uh, don't worry about it," Terry said. "I'm just a Good Samaritan."

"A what?"

"Guess that's a Western thing," he said.

"Anyway, like I said, I'm sorry for causing a scene," Mika said. "I'm on these sleeping pills, you see, and at first they were great but now they're starting to give me hallucinations, and it's getting worse. I think it's the sleeping pills, at least – I'm not taking anything else."

Terry didn't know what to say. "You should probably get off those pills then. Er, if you don't mind me saying so."

Mika got up and started walking around the cramped apartment. Naomichi's door was still sealed shut. She wandered past Terry into his room. "So what do you do, besides rescuing girls all day?"

Terry turned around and frantically tried to stop her from seeing his room, but it was too late. His dank bedroom was practically a temple to hentai. In addition to the sketches sprawled out across his desk there was a small stack of the work he and Naomichi had finished and self-published, and a larger stack of other hentai comics, done by the best in the business – it always paid to check in on the competition. There was also a bookcase stacked with comics and DVDs both Japanese and American. Terry knew it made him look like a freak.


Tokyo Symphony Ch. 01



Mika had no immediate reaction. She idly looked through the pages he had sketched, and paused at one page – a full-page splash with the moe character, spread eagle before the reader, being slowly penetrated by her generic male lover. The dialogue was standard: a flushed girl proclaiming "N-no... that place is dirty...", the man grunting "I can't stop... my hips are moving on their own..." Desire overcoming inhibition, or pseudo-rape, depending on how you looked at it. Terry nervously awaited Mika's reaction, already bracing himself.

She cracked a smile. "I used to love these comics."

"You did?"

"My brother had a big stack of them and I would steal them from his room and rub myself sore," Mika said. "I always wondered why the girls put up such a fuss. It looked like a lot of fun to me."

Terry shrugged. "It's the convention. Readers want a girl that's innocent."

"Well, no wonder they have to turn to fiction then," she laughed.

"You still read these? Me and my partner have a couple we haven't been able to sell..."

"Wow, you drew this?" Mika said. "Pretty good. But no thanks, I moved on to yaoi and then moved on to real-life boys."

Terry sighed over-dramatically. "Another reader lost to man-on-man action. Maybe we should go into that. Good money from the female crowd."

She flipped through the first volume of Tail Chaser. "You know, Teriyaki, I think you deserve a reward for your good work."

"Oh no, I couldn't."

Mika walked up to Terry until she was inches from his face, and he could feel the warmth radiating off her. She pressed a finger to his lips. "You don't want to refuse. I think you need a little inspiration."

Terry didn't stay anything, stunned. Mika sank to her knees and rubbed her face against his crotch, feline, coaxing his dick to hardness. It didn't take long – he was coming off a long dry spell. Terry's cock grew turgid, basking in the warmth up against his jeans.

Mika removed his pants, letting them fall down and pool around his ankles. His boxer shorts soon followed, leaving his cock jutting out into the air at full mass. Mika licked her lips. "I guess it's true, Americans really are bigger."

She leaned forward and flitted her tongue out experimentally, like she was trying to catch a snowflake, and with the tip of her soft wet tongue touched and caressed the head of Terry's cock. Mika slid her tongue up and down the length of his cock, dipping down to suck one of his balls in his mouth, leaving a warm coat of saliva on it before travelling back up the shaft.

Then Mika shuffled forward on her knees and took the head of Terry's cock into her mouth. He let out an involuntary gasp. Mika slowly started to bob her head up and down, drawing out the sensation, her skilled tongue wrapping around Terry's hard shaft. The sensations of her mouth were overwhelming, and Terry felt his knees getting weak. Whoever this girl was, she could sure give a blowjob.

Terry thought he was going to come quickly, but Mika drew it out, pulling back when he was on the edge, keeping total control of him the entire time. The expression on her face was not affection or arousal, but the concentration a professional shows when doing their job. Terry didn't really notice that though, just stared down at her ruby lips wrapped around his shaft and felt her soft pink tongue coaxing him to dreamland.

"Oh, Mika... ugh... coming..." She didn't pull away. Terry's hips jerked forward and he shuddered with pleasure as he shot jet after jet of cum down her mouth. There was a lot built-up after several months of only his right hand as lover, but Mika gulped it all down without saying a word.

Terry stumbled back from the impact of his orgasm and sat down on his bed. "Mika, that was uh... wow..."

Mika stood up and brushed some precum of her lips. "Glad you enjoyed it." She stood up, dusted off her skirt, and left the room."

"Wait!" Terry said, but by the time he got to her feet she was already gone.

--

Hayato usually didn't come to this type of place, but Yui had invited him so many times and he was feeling too lousy to be alone. The bar was dark, lit only by flickering red lamps that made the whole place look like a zombie movie. The foreign industrial music didn't help. Yui was sitting at the bar talking with some punk in his twenties. Hayato hadn't seen Yui outside of school before, and her outfit, or what there was of it, stopped him in his tracks. She was wearing a black leather tank top that clung to her chest like a lover, and ended right above her bellybutton. Her pants were ex-pants, cut into shorts with a knife that cut jaggedly. She was wearing a dog collar and jade earings that dangled like hanged men. Her hair, dyed honey blonde, was carefully gelled into a forest of flaccid spikes, cascading down in layers until it hit the back of her neck.

She spotted him before he could get over it, and waved cheerfully. "Hayato! You finally made it! Come down and have a seat."

Hayato sat down on a neighbouring bar stool. "Hi Yui. You sure we can be here?"

"Don't worry, they never card," she said. "Hey! A gin and tonic for my friend here." The bartender, a tough-looking bald guy, slid a glass of clear liquid at Hayato. "So what brings you down to this den of iniquity after all of my prodding."

"Oh, you know, the usual," he said with a sigh. "Natsumi."

Yui's face twisted into a scowl momentarily. "You're still going after that dyke? I've told you it's a lost cause, man."

"She's not gay, Yui."

"Dude, my gay-dar has never been wrong before, and let me tell you you're barking up the wrong tree."

Hayato gulped down his drink. He still wasn't used to the taste of alcohol, but he managed to force it down. "It's just so confusing. Like one day she'll be all nice to me and say she wants to hang out more, and then when I offer to take her out somewhere she just snaps at me and says she has other plans. I don't understand it."

"Well, that's women for you," Yui said. "We're bitches." Hayato wasn't sure whether she was being sarcastic or not.

Hayato ordered another drink and continued complaining about Natsumi, while Yui listened and nodded to him patiently, thinking to herself that boys could be pretty frustrating too.

--

It was the dim embers of early morning. Terry had been up all night. At 4:30 AM he had finally finished sketching his pages, which had progressed from "crap" to "the same old crap", the latter of which was perfectly acceptable to the hentai-buying public. His real name wouldn't be on it, so mediocrity was acceptable. He decided to start inking tomorrow, but even then he couldn't sleep. He had a story germinating in his head, which grew like a child but much faster, inflating until it had to be pushed out. His pen was lightning here, much more skilled than it had been on the doujinshi, and he had sketched out ten pages of the untitled comic within the hour.

It was an original, a story about a love pentagon involving four high school students and their teacher. It was sort of contrived, of course, but there was a lot of potential for drama. It would be pornography of course – he doubted it was good enough to sell otherwise, and his mind was in a pornographic mode anyway – but it would be good pornography, with a plot and characters that weren't filler. And of course, it was about high school students who all looked great and were magically eighteen, but there were some things you couldn't cange.

Weirdly, all those "of course, but"s didn't hamper his enthusiasm.

Terry had only done about a third of the first chapter, but his mind was racing ahead. He realized that he needed a sex scene for the first issue, to grab the reader's attention, but he didn't want any of his characters to fuck so soon. It would rush the story.

The solution didn't take long coming to him – masturbation. (This was so often the solution to Terry's problems.) You didn't see much masturbation in hentai for some reason, but Terry personally thought that an attractive woman bringing herself to orgasm was one of the most beautiful things in the world. He just hoped he could portray it on the page.

The hours were catching up with Terry. His drawings, a black-and-white sea, seemed to swim beneath him. He found himself closing his eyes, then his head jerking forward and sudden awakeness after a few seconds of micro-sleep. He knew he needed to go to bed. The inking and the masturbation scene could wait for tomorrow.

Terry stumbled across the few feet between his desk and his bed, and slumped down across the mattress, not bothering to change clothes. Just before he passed out, he had the sudden realization that he needed to see Mika again.

--

Yui was too frustrated to sleep.

She couldn't explain her interest in a goody-two-shoes like Hayato. It had started with just toying around with him, accosting him in high school hallways and teasing him about his glasses or his attempts to grow a beard. It hadn't bothered him, which intruiged Yui. If things were reversed, she knew she would have punched him in the face.

It had taken a long time to stop denying that she was in love with him. The class delinquent in love with the straight-A student... how much more cliché could you get?

But he was pretty cute, she guessed.

Yui tossed her covers aside and slipped her pyjama bottoms off. If she wasn't going to get any sleep, she may as well have some fun.

Yui ran her hands up and down her legs, her fingertips gently greeting her thighs, warming herself up for what was to come next. She twisted a shoulder up and shucked off the bra she wore to bed. She felt her pert breasts and already hard nipples -- rigid, she supposed, from thinking about Hayato. Yui cupped one of her own breasts and tenderly carressed it, enjoying the sensations it created.

Almost of its own accord her right hand slid up her thigh and to her longing pussy. Yui slid her fingers across her bush, lightly pulling on the sensitive roots, and then slipped through her black pussy hairs to brush her fingertips over her clit. She liked teasing herself, enjoying the swelling and receding of pleasure. Yui thought of her body as a musical instrument, one that she was the master of.

She traced her pussy lips with her fingers, feeling the ache for more slowly grow inside of her. She needed a fantasy. Hayato sprung instantly into her mind: he was here, in this room, with her. She was trying to convince him to fuck her. He wanted to, but his inhibitions held him back, and she was carefully seducing him, corrupting him, bringing him over to her side.

In the fantasy, Hayato leaned over and kissed Yui, and she felt a jolt through her body like this was really happening. She slipped a finger into her pussy, and another quickly joined it. She drove her digits between her inner walls, and with her other hand stroked her clit, each time eliciting more pleasure, a greater flash of bliss. Yui wished she had more hands – to hold and carress her breasts, sticking up into the air, pert nipples like antannae longing for any kind of connection, one to shove a finger up her ass, still more to run down her flanks and legs and massage her feet and treat her whole body like a sexual organ, built to deliver the most mind-blowing orgasm imaginable.

Her fantasy Hayato tried to fill the gap, caressing her breasts, rolling the nipples between his fingers with childlike discovery. She would be leaning forward, undressing him, rippin the clothes from his perfect body, revealing washboard abs, powerful thighs, and a stiff, large cock.

The pleasure was addictive, always pulling Yui forth for more, causing her to strum her clit and finger-fuck herself ever harder. When in her fantasy Hayato paused between her legs, long and thick shaft dangling close to her entrance, he hesitating and her urging him on – that was when she knew that her fingers would be a laughable simulacrum for his cock. In her mind Hayato's cock was a monster, poised to split her open and send her to Nirvana.

Yui rolled over and clumsily felt around for the edge of her bed, and the drawer underneath it. She rolled it open and found her most cherished posession – a large black vibator, always hard, unlike the men it ostensibly replaced. She switched it on and felt its buzz. She dragged the shaking head across her clit briefly, gasping at the sensation, and then slowly slid the artificial cock into her cunt.

The pleasure forced her eyes to screw shut, and she drove the vibrator into her with a manic frenzy. In her mind, though, it was Hayato, fucking her the only way he knew how – hard. They were gasping and swearing like pornstars, grunting out their pleasure. "Harder... harder..." she moaned out loud, and her hand obeyed, savagely fucking her with the vibrator.

Yui barely contained her scream, having to instead bite down on her pillow as she came. Her whole body spasmed and she lost all sense of reality. For a moment she believed she really was with Hayato, plowing her relentlessly as she orgasmed, but eventually she had to retreat to reality.

Yui switched off the vibrator and dumped it in its drawer, putting it away until it would be needed again. There was a part of her that hated herself for how hard she had just come. How many times had she mouthed off, either to her friends or to pushy boys, that she didn't need a man? And now the mere thought of one was making her legs quake. It was a little disgusting.

She got up and walked to the window of her apartment, looking out at the city below. At night, Tokyo was significantly less populated, and the usually frantic pace of the city had slowed to a stroll. She wondered if anyone could see her standing in the window – flushed red, nipples hard and pussy sopping, hair dishevelled, looking just fucked. She hoped they could, for some reason.

But the city wouldn't care. Tokyo, unlike any of its inhabitants, was immune to love.

Glossary

Akibahara – Tokyo electronics district, the nerd capital of the world.

anime – Japanese animation.

doujinshi – A fan-drawn comic using the characters of an established property (usually an anime or video game series). Frequently, although not always, pornographic. Japanese law allows these to be sold as long as the print run is under 1000.

gaijin – Usually derogatory word for a foreigner.

Harajuku – Fashionable district of Tokyo.

hentai – Japanese drawn pornography. This comes in different forms – animation, comics, video games – but for this 

manga – The Japanese word for comics, used in English to describe Japanese comics.

moe – Pronounced "moh-ey" and impossible to really understand if you've seen sunlight in the last year. A cute/helpless character archetype.

yaoi – Hentai centring around gay male sex, mostly aimed at women.



Tokyo Symphony Ch. 02



Ryan Bradshaw wasn't entirely sure what to do with Sakura's assignment. It felt like a bomb that she had lobbed across his desk and into his lap, all with that innocent smile on her face. It was a provocation, he was sure.

For a routine end-of-year creative writing assignment, Sakura had submitted a translation of the first chapter of a novel she was writing, one she had loudly talked about with her friends in class. They all were sure it was brilliant, without seeing a word of it. It was a love story between an American hentai artist living in Japan and a mysterious local girl.

The English was great, with just a few glitches. But the content of the story – an American and a Japanese ingenue, with just enough details changed to maintain plausible deniability – seemed like a come-on to him. The explicitly written blowjob scene was especially aggravating. He had scrawled in the margins Not appropriate for school but he was sure that would just please her more.

Ryan wondered how accurate the depiction of the artist's life had been. It seemed kind of like something Sakura had made up on the spot, gleaned at most from the creator's notes at the back of manga volumes. That was probably it.

Sakura had gotten cleverer, her form of seduction more mature. He remembered her a couple years ago, on the last day of school before break, crying until her face was red and bloated, confessing her love for him in stuttering clichés. He had given her tissues and tried to let her down easy. Ryan had tried to make out like he was a responsible adult with responsible adult desires that didn't include his own students. She was too young then anyway.

But he wasn't. He told that lie every time he got up in front of his senior class looking professional and every time he talked to one of the other teachers. It wasn't the little girls, thank God, but some of these girls were technically adults. Lust – lust for his students, lust for those nubile teenage girls who hung on his every word – was what Ryan kept in his psychic closet, trying not to examine it, but constantly aware of his presence.

Ryan had never slept with any of them, which was more than he could say for some of his colleagues. But the desire felt like it would one day drive him either between the skirt-clad legs of one of his girls or into the nuthouse. It was these last classes, with the seniors, almost -- no, already – women, that really affected him. Some of the girls, eighteen already – he focused on them, to ease his conscience -- strutted around in rolled-up skirts, and for all of his appearance of professionalism (about as genuine as a clip-on tie) Ryan's eyes frequently gaped at those long, milky legs.

He tried to shake these thoughts out of his head and focus on his assignment. He gave Sakura an A, because her English really did deserve it, but he added a comment about choosing appropriate subject matter. His dick was hard in his pants, and he wasn't sure whether it was from the story or from his thoughts about the girls.

There was a knock at the door of his classroom, vacated by students two hours ago and left for him to do the marking in while he still had the energy. Ryan set the folder of already marked papers down on his lap, hiding his erection. His dick complained angrily. "Come in."

It was Mariko, the Science teacher. Thirty years old, coming off a much gossiped-about divorce. "Hey Ryan. How goes the marking?"

"Slow. I'm really worried about sending these kids out into the world with this little English knowledge."

"Well, if worse comes to worse they can always just stay in Japan."

"Nope." Ryan grinned. "We're taking over, baby." Mariko didn't laugh. Maybe the joke hit too close to the genuine national dynamics.

"Anyway, I was wondering if you wanted to get some drinks once you're done? Life's kind of kicking my ass lately, and I need someone to bitch about it to."

Ryan knew he should accept. Going out with your co-worker for drinks, falling into bed together, either making a go at a serious relationship or never speaking of it again – this was what respectable adults did. And Mariko was certainly an attractive women. But as he looked up at her, he could only see the girl she wasn't.

"Sorry, Mariko. But I'm kind of swamped right now."

Mariko blushed but nodded. "Well, maybe some other time then. See you around."

Once she had left Ryan got out the class photos. He had to look at her. Back then she had a half-mohawk and stared angrily at the camera, barely staying still for the photo. Yui Asahara. She looked like just another delinquent, but talking to her he had discovered that she was probably the smartest student – hell, probably the smartest person – in the school. She skipped half her classes, but had just been accepted to Toudai.

Yui was the one whose face, whose body came unbidden to him when he masturbated, trying to focus on pornography in his small room stacked with books and papers. No matter how much he tried to focus on something else, when he came it was images of Yui, Yui undressed, Yui sucking his cock, Yui bent over his desk and screaming with delight as he thrust into her again and again, that played in his mind.

Ryan lusted after many of his students, but Yui was the only one he was worried about falling in love with. It was a good thing she was graduating soon, he guessed, but in the end he couldn't be happy about it.

Ryan Bradshaw wondered if he could trade in his brain for one that worked right.

--

The name Mika Otori haunted Terry for the next day. He knew he had heard it before, but where? It felt just a bit like she had slid naturally into his life, like he had always been waiting for her. But she had vanished, like water slipping through his fingers. Now it seemed like she hadn't been real, just a fantasy born in the afternoon heat.

Terry was distracted by his thoughts of Mika, and had completely zoned out while Naomichi was describing the printing and distribution of their latest doujin. Naomichi waved his chubby hand in front of Terry's face. "Earth to Osmond. You getting all of this?"

"It sounds fine," Terry said.

"Okay, good," said Naomichi. "Good work on this one, by the way. You can really see the motion here."

"Well, I am kind of a professional. Was."

Naomichi smiled. "I knew there was a reason I spend all that time yelling at you to get to work. So, you get to pick the next project. What's it going to be, pro?"

"Actually, I started doing an original the other day," said Terry. "I guess it's a solo project. First one of a series. You can do whatever – I guess you've got to go to work sometime."

Naomichi looked hurt. "Come on man, we're a team. None of this solo project stuff. You helped me on what I wanted to do, and I'm willing to return the favour."

"You don't have to. I mean, I'm sure you've got some stuff you'd like to do by yourself..."

"What's your problem with having me help out? Besides which, it'll take twice as long if you try to do it yourself."

Terry realized that Naomichi had a point. "All right, if you insist you can do some pages. I'll even let you have the sex scene."

"Sweet."

"By the way, Naomichi. Does the name Mika Otori mean anything to you?"

Naomichi thought for a moment, scrunching up his brow. "Oh yeah, I know her. She's an ero model. Smoking hot."

"Well, that was her on the couch the other day."

Naomichi's eyes bugged out. "Are you serious? Man, I guess I can see the resemblance, but I had no idea. That's weird. It's like... I know it sounds awful, but I never thought of her as like a real person, that walks the same streets as us."

"I guess so."

Afterwards, in his room, Terry typed "Mika Otori" into Google and a forest of pictures sprouted. He looked at one photo set, and it was definitely the same girl. Mika in a long, elegant dress. Mika slowly sliding the dress off her body. Mika in profile, as if turned away shyly from the camera, arms folded over her bra, her tone stomach and long legs hanging out for all to see.

Terry realized that he was masturbating, almost instinctively, rubbing his hard dick through his jeans. He made sure the door was shut and shucked his shorts. He returned to the photos. Mika from behind, slowly sliding the bra off her shoulders. You couldn't see her breasts, but her naked back, her shoulders, were almost as erotic. Mika in profile, one pink nipple barely visible. Mika bending down towards the camera, her beautiful, bounteous bosom hanging down. Mika on her back, still topless, a look of desire in her eyes. Mika with one hand down her panties, all of her shame overcome, ready for Terry to grab her and rip her last shred of clothing away and fuck her on his desk. He could see it – her head lolled back in ecstasy, her breasts bouncing with every thrust – but he couldn't feel it, couldn't conjure in his imagination the heat of her cunt or the feel of her legs wrapped around him.

Frustrated, Terry found more images. They were all softcore, exposing her breasts at most, but there was a filthiness to them far beyond their explicit content. In one picture she was pinned against the wall but an unseen male, her clothes ripped, a look of fear and desire in her eyes. In another she wore a bikini, laying on the beach, licking an ice cream cone like she had licked Terry's dick, the entire picture brightness and light.

Terry's hand flew up and down his cock, needing no lubrication. He was barely even sure what was reality any more, whether he was being blown by Mika or just looking at images of her. He found himself thrusting forward, and realized that he was no longer in control of her body.

He found one last picture, this one black and white, Mika topless, licking her lips, looking just like she had when she unbuttoned his pants. Terry exploded. He shuddered and fell back in his chair, dimly aware of the cum pouring from his penis. The first rope had leaped and struck his knee, while the rest poured down his cock and hand, which was still slowly pumping, letting the natural rhythm died down.

As Terry cleaned himself up with tissues (the one thing their apartment never ran short on) he felt a kind of post-orgasmic guilt rising in him, that he hadn't felt since he was young and still not sure whether masturbation was a sin or not. It felt somehow wrong to be jacking it to Mika's pictures without her knowing about it. For some reason knowing the girl on the other end of it made things different. He looked at the picture he had came to, and instead of picturing her legs spreading for him, all he could imagine was what she thought, laying in a cold studio with goony photographers hovering above her, trying her best to muster a sexy face.

Terry decided to stick to hentai for a while. There was no way he would ever meet one of those girls.

--

"Three more days," Natsumi said, sitting down with a tray full of the same cafeteria lunch she'd had almost every day for the past few years. "And let me tell you, I will not miss this place."

"Personally, I had a lot of fun here," said Sakura. "You remember all those times the air conditioning died during the summer? It was like an adventure!"

Natsumi cracked up. "I guess having to repeat math twice was an adventure too."

"Once! I only had to repeat it once."

"My apologies."

Hayato came over to join them at their table. Usually it would be heavily populated with Sakura and Natsumi's quasi-friends, gabby girls that they liked well enough but would probably never see after high school. But in the apocalyptic last few days of school they were all off preparing some last-minute assignment, so the table was empty save for the three of them. "Hey girls. What's up."

"Not much," said Sakura. "Just reminiscing over adventures."

"What kind of adventures?" said Hayato.

"Well, there was that one time I got sucked through a portal to that fantasy world," Sakura said with a grin. "I ended up becoming a princess, but I had to go back to Earth because I had a test the next day."

"Those tests. They ruin everything," Natsumi said. She always felt frustrated and enchanted when talking with Sakura – she couldn't keep up with her wit, but she admired it almost as much as she admired Sakura's beauty. People always said that loving someone for their intelligence was more real than loving someone for their looks, but it made Natsumi feel equally guilty.

Hayato took a tentative bite into the hard cafeteria bread. "So, are you two girls doing anything this Friday?"

"You mean other than studying my ass off?" Natsumi said.

"Why, you asking us out?" Sakura said with a cavalier grin. "Figure if you ask both of us one of us will have to say yes?"

Hayato flushed. "N-no, nothing like that. It's just that Yui invited me to this party her friend is throwing, kind of an end-of-the-year thing, and she said I could bring some friends. I thought I could use some normal people to back me up."

Sakura crinkled her nose, as if she had just smelled something rancid. "Yui? I dunno. What do you think, Natsumi? Feel like spending your Friday night listening to bad punk music and getting vomited on?"

"Well, it's better than studying," said Natsumi.


Sakura shrugged. "Alright, chalk us down as a maybe. I still don't know why you hang out with Yui though."

"She's a nice girl once you get to know her," Hayato said. "Anyway, thanks for your maybe, I guess."

Natsumi was well aware that when Hayato invited them he was staring straight at her. She was an expert on unrequited love, and knew the signs well. But she could no more love Hayato than Sakura could, apparently, love her. Part of her thought she should say no, give a quick and painful end to his infatuation, like ripping a bandage off. But if she was willing to wallow in the field of her love, even knowing it was full of thorns, how could she deny Hayato that right? She sympathized with Hayato, but what he needed from her was something she had already given away.

--

It wasn't terribly hard to find Mika's modelling company. Their website, which looked like it was designed in 1998 and not changed since, had the usual text trying to lure in beautiful girls with low self-esteem, with an address on the outskirts of Tokyo prominently advertised. The only thing Terry was worried about whether the place would be still standing – the site looked old. But he ventured out anyway, and there it was, on the 6th floor of a dingy office building. The sign read Kanashima Modelling Company – Devoted to Beauty.

Terry went in. Behind the receptionist's desk a bored 20-something woman sat painting her nails. "May I help you?"

"Uh, hi. I'm here to speak to Mika Otori," Terry said.

"Mika's not here right now."


"Ah." For some reason, Terry hadn't anticipated this. "Um, could you give me her phone number or some way to reach her, then?"

The receptionist looked up at him, a cynical look in her eyes. "I can't give out the contact information of models."

"Oh, I get it. I'm not like a stalker or anything. Mika knows me."

"Uh huh." She wasn't convinced.

Terry dug through his jacket pockets and found a piece of paper – the receipt from the art store the other day. He scrawled his phone number on it and the word "Teriyaki". "Can you give her this when she comes in? Say, uh, I want to speak to her."

"Sure," the receptionist said, her voice affectless. Terry sighed and walked out of the agency. He wondered if his number would ever make it to Mika.

--

Natsumi didn't know who was hosting the party, but whoever it was was loaded (or, more accurately, their parents were loaded.) The house was spacious, nestled into one of the rich areas, with old sliding doors and wooden floors. Its majesty was diminished by the couple dozen teenagers dancing and chatting under the influence of various intoxicants while American punk music played over the stereo system.

Natsumi and Hayato hung on the edges of the crowd, taking the occasional sips of beer and trying to hear each other over the music. Sakura was in the midst of the throng, jumping and twisting, her black miniskirt flying around her waist like a ring of fins. She was the only one of the three who had dressed up for this, wearing the mini-skirt and a new top she got in Harajuku last weekend. Hayato and Natsumi had just thrown on whatever was at the top of their drawer, as they usually did.

Yui weaved through the crowds of people, carrying a platter full of drinks. "Hey Hayato!" she yelled. "Glad to see you could make it."

"Your corruption of me continues," he said. "Is this your place?"

"Hell no," Yui said. "I couldn't stand living in a fussy old place like this. It's Rin's." She pointed to one of the many bizarre dye-jobs in the crowd, this one forest-green. "Her parents are away. You like the tray? I stole it from my last job."

"Very convenient," Hayato said.

"I thought so," Yui said with a nod. "Anyway, you guys should get in there. You know, make some friends, dance like an idiot."

"I guess so," said Hayato.

Yui playfully slapped him on the ass. "Come on, don't be a wallflower."

Natsumi eventually waded into the fray, awkwardly timing the rhythm of her body with the chaotic music. She tried to move towards Sakura, but her friend was lost in her own mind, surrendering her body to the music. Some of the guys copped a feel, but she would always twist away from them, the next part in her dance. Sweat ran down Sakura's long, toned legs. Natsumi tried not to drool. Of course, Hayato was behind Natsumi trying to get her attention, but she was in turn lost in her own lustful mind, and so it went.

She had expected the party to last long into the night, but apparently word got around about a cooler party, and most of the kids abandoned ship. The remainder made polite noises about needing to work tomorrow and left. In the end it was just the out-of-place trio, Yui, the mysterious host Rin, and some guy with a mohawk passed out on the couch.

"Well that was a bust," Rin said. She rolled the tip of a half-empty beer bottle between her fingers ,causing the beer to jump and splash against the sides.

Yui shrugged. "I had fun. A party can be satisfying without being broken up by the cops."

"I guess so," Rin said, with a depressed sigh.

Sakura staggered over to Hayato and Natsumi. "Hey guys! Man, my legs hurt. I've been dancing for, like, hours."

"It was quite impressive, really," said Hayato.

Sakura giggled and leaned in towards him, running her hands up and down his flank. "Thank you. Hey, Hayato, can you massage my legs? They're really sore."

"I think we should get home," said Natsumi. "I can call my Dad and get him to pick us up if you want."

"Naaah, we're fine," said Sakura. "Hey, uh... you, with the house? Do we have to go?" Rin shrugged. "See, what'd I tell you? Now let's go upstairs so I can get that massage."

Sakura dragged Hayato upstairs, although it wasn't like he was putting up much of a fight. The look in Natsumi's eyes was unmistakeable, that angry, hurt longing as Sakura vanished up that stairway. She sat down on the couch next to Rin. Rin put an arm around her shoulders, which Natsumi shook off.

"I've been there," Rin said.

"She doesn't even like that guy," Natsumi said.

"Look, I know this isn't something you particularly want to hear right now... but you're never going to get anywhere crushing on straight girls. I speak from experience."

Natsumi sullenly stared at her feet. Yui's reaction was less dramatic, but she felt a weird kinship with Natsumi and the scene unfolding before her, neither girl paying her any mind, like she were at a movie.  She thought she would get to corrupt Hayato, but maybe he wasn't as innocent and shy as she thought. Maybe he was already corrupt, he just didn't care for her.

Yui took another drink and wished the night would end.




Tokyo Symphony Ch. 02



--

It didn't take long to find a bedroom in the unfamiliar house. The first one was occupied by a passed-out couple, but they were able to find a free one. It looked like Rin's parent's bedroom, a big bed surrounded by surfaces covered with bills and middlebrow novels. Sakura dragged Hayato there, her hand like a cuff on his wrist, and shoved him down onto the bed.

Sakura straddled Hayato, rubbing up and down on his crotch. "Hey, Hayato," she whispered, then giggled. "I'm really wet right now. Wanna feel?" She grabbed Hayato's hand and slid it up her skirt, then pressed it to her damp panties.

"Wow," was all Hayato could say. He had never seen Sakura like this before, and there was a sexy, adult allure to her, but also a kind of darkness he couldn't put his finger on. His dick was growing stiff underneath her.

"Wow is right." Sakura leaned down and kissed Hayato, and he stopped thinking. Their lips rubbed against one another, explored each other, while their tongues tentatively met. Sakura grabbed Hayato by the back of his head and pressed him to her.

Their hands were suddenly moving furiously, trying to strip each other as fast as they could. Sakura's hands moved like lightning down the buttons of Hayato's shirt. One button was torn off by her force, but no one cared. She pressed his shirt open and moved down, leaving a trail of kisses down to his nipples, which she licked and bit. Hayato was surprised at how good that felt.

Sakura's top was already pulled up far enough to expose her thin torso and black bra. She sat up and pulled it all the way off, tossing it to the side, and then undid her bra and tossed it on top of the shirt. Hayato stared at her breasts, firm and big enough to wrap his hands around, with cute pink nipples jutting out into the air.

"You likey?" Sakura said. Her words sounded increasingly slurred. Hayato nodded dumbly and leaned up to put his hands on her breasts. He rubbed her tits, capturing her nipples between his fingers and squeezing just hard enough. Sakura let out a throaty moan. Hayato kissed her breasts and briefly took them in his mouth, licking them and savouring her warmth.

He wasn't exactly sure when Sakura had lost her skirt and panties but there she was, nude in his arms, their mouths nibbling and sucking at whatever part of each other they could find. There was a hand between them, tugging down his jeans, and he wasn't sure whether it was his or Sakura's. In any case, his pants were added to the pile of clothes on before, and his boxer shorts soon joined them. Hayato had always worried a little bit that his dick was too small, but Sakura didn't seem disappointed in it. She took his erection in her hand and started stroking it up and down, rubbing it with her tight grip.

"You ready to fuck me?" she said. Hayato nodded. "I said, are you ready to fuck me?"

"Yeah," Hayato said. He was surprised to find himself slurring his words. "I'm gonna fuck you, Sakura."

"Good," she said, and smiled. She turned around, clasping the foot of the bed, sticking the globes of her ass proudly into the air. "Fuck me from behind."

Hayato did as he was told. He knelt behind her, his cock nearly twitching with eagerness. From behind she almost looked like Natsumi. Hayato grabbed her hips and, with one sudden thrust, buried himself into her pussy. It was warm, tight and very wet, a perfect little fuck hole.

Sakura let out a gasp and a moan as she felt Hayato enter her. He pulled back and thrust in again, filling her with his cock. They quickly fell into a fast rhythm, thrusting forwards and backwards in synchronicity. There were no words, no more of Sakura's dirty talk, just grunts and moans and the animalistic sound of hips slapping together.

From this position, they could both pretend that it was someone else they were sleeping with, that Hayato was fucking sweet little Natsumi and Sakura was getting reamed by her fantasy man, Mr. Bradshaw. This was the unspoken agreement of their coupling. They couldn't get what they want, so they were taking what they could get. As their fantasies grew deeper and reality got farther away, pleasure coursed through each of their bodies, and they began thrusting harder, as if trying to become one.

"Oh... oh... oh..." Sakura moaned into the bed. She suddenly noticed that her hand was between her legs, stroking furiously away at her clit as Hayato fucked her with all his strength.

Hayato buried his cock in Sakura's cunt with one final thrust and shuddered as he came, pumping her full of his spunk. Sakura kept furiously rubbing her clit until she orgasmed after him. She had expected a sad, dirty climax, but what she got instead blew her away. Sakura screwed her eyes shut as pleasure ripped through her body, and for a moment she could think of nothing, just lay there as her body spasmed with absolute bliss. It took her a while to come down, and when she did she felt like just a warm heap of muscles poured onto a bed, skeleton forgotten.

Despite feeling like an invertebrate, Sakura managed to drag herself up to the head of the bed before passing out. Hayato and Sakura spent the night their, deep in sleep, facing away from each other.

Glossary

ero 9– Short for "erotic"

Harajuku – Tokyo's fashion district

Toudai – Short for Tokyo Daigaku (Tokyo University), the most prestiguous university in Japan with infamous entrance requirements.



Tokyo Symphony Ch. 03



Terry couldn't draw. Every time he tried to the blank page stared back at him, virgin white, and all he could think about was whether Mika would call him. When he had met her, he had experienced a huge spurt of creative energy, and now that she was gone the well was dry. Terry guessed that maybe all that shit about muses was right after all.

He drifted through the next day, pacing around his room like he was going somewhere, continuing his diet of instant noodles, deflecting Naomichi's inquiries about his progress. And then, around 6 PM, the hour when day declines into night, he got the call.

His phone buzzed, coming to life on his desk with a jarring grinding noise. Terry, who had been lying on his bed carefully examining his ceiling, jumped to his feet. He grabbed the phone and saw an unknown number on the call display. He quickly picked it up. "Hello?"

"Hey, remember me?"

"Mika? Of course. Thanks, uh, for calling."

"Don't need to thank me, I had nothing better to do," Mika said. "The stupid secretary just gave me your number now. Impressive job tracking me down though."

"Uh, thanks." Terry was surprised to find himself blushing. "I hope you don't feel creeped out by that."

"Not really," Mika said. "I mean, I gave you my work name, so it's not like I made it too hard."

Terry felt unconfortable at that response, although he wasn't quite sure why. "Your work name? So you're not really Mika Otori?"

"I am Mika Otori," she said. "I'm just also someone else."

"So what's your real name?"

"Maybe some day I'll tell you."

Terry smiled. "I hope that means this call isn't a one-time thing."

Mika laughed. "You're so desperate for conversation you want to keep talking with a drug-addled bimbo like me?"

"I don't think you're a bimbo," Terry said. "And you don't seem that drug-addled to me right now."

There was a pause, and Terry figured that neither of them knew what to say. Finally, Mika spoke. "Anyway, you want to meet up for drinks?"

Terry's heart shuddered. He realized that he hadn't felt this way since high school. "Okay. What time is good for you?"

"I was thinking right now."

The interminable waiting and the sudden rush had Terry feeling whiplashed. "Uh, sure."

Mika told him the location of a bar she liked, which Terry hastily scribbled down in his sketchbook. He then found his nicest shirt, which wasn't really that nice, threw it on, and rushed out the door. He wanted to keep this fairy tale going.

--

The aftermath of the party, roughly in order:

Yui woke up on Rin's couch with a blistering hangover the likes of which she had never experienced in her young life. Rin said that she had a hangover cure, but Yui refused it, saying that she sort of liked the novel sensation.

Sakura and Hayato woke up next to each other and hastily got dressed. They stumbled through the perfunctory conversation about how they should just be friends and left, both embarassed. Hayato tried to remember whether he was really drunk or whether he had taken advantage of Sakura.

Natsumi, who had taken the subway home on her own last night, found a folded piece of paper in her pocket. It contained a phone number and "When you get tired of pining -- Rin". Natsumi threw it away, then later picked it out of the trash can and placed it in her desk drawer.

As soon as she got home Sakura sat down at her computer and wrote more of her novel. The words flowed freely now, as her gaijin artist went to meet up with the mysterious model.

--

To say the bar was seedy was like saying you might be able to buy a drink there. Clouds of smoke clung to the ceiling as men in torn suits huddled over beers. The bartender was an overweight bald guy with a scar that travelled down his forehead and hooked, almost meeting his eye. There was a small stage with two brass poles sticking up out of it, not quite reaching the ceiling, the brass the dingiest thing in the generally dingy building. It would have looked more at home in an American ghetto than in the heart of Tokyo, but Terry supposed that was part of the draw.

Mika waved to him. She sat at a table in the back. "Terry! Kinda surprised you came."

Terry walked over to Mika, feeling as if she could save him from this place. "Wouldn't miss it for the world. Nice place, by the way."

"You should wait until the strippers come out," Mika said. She had a cigarette smoldering at the edge of her lips and a third-full bottle of beer in front of her.

"You know, I've always wondered," Terry said. "Why does everyone in Japan smoke?"

"Why not?" Mika said with a shrug.

"Well, in America people mostly stopped doing it because of health reasons..."

Mika laughed. "Hon, I'm going to be dead by forty if I'm lucky. Cigarettes are the least of my problems." She flicked some glowing ash into the tray. "But to answer your question, it's mostly salarymen trying to find an excuse to take a break. Don't ask me how that makes sense."

Terry started to say something but Mika cut him off, leaning forward. He was suddenly taken with her beauty again, the contrast of her pale skin and her dark hair. "Now that you've asked me about my nationality... what's an American doing in Japan drawing smut? I'd have thought there was enough opportunity for boob-drawing back home."

"Well, I originally came over here to work on anime," Terry said. "There was some new company that was looking to bring in foreign artists, and I jumped at the chance. It sounded too good to be true, and, well, it was. The company collapsed, all my cheques bounced, and I was stuck in Japan without airfare enough to get home. Fortunately Naomichi -- did you meet him? I don't think you did -- anyway, this guy Naomichi, he had a quote-unquote company that I could work for and stay in the country, and that turned out to be a two-man hentai circle. The rest is, as they say, history."

Mika took another sip of beer. "You still haven't got airfare yet?"

"Well, I do, but now I'm looking to get another animation job or get a real manga series published. It's kind of my dream." Terry found himself blushing up to his ears.

Mika crushed an ice cube between her teeth. "Ah! You're an otaku. Why didn't you just say that?"

"I was, at least. Being around this shit every day, having to draw the latest shitty character getting reamed... it's kind of taken my love for that stuff away."

"Aww." Mika put a comforting hand on Terry's shoulder. To him, her touch was like an electric shock. "Don't worry. I'm sure you'll be back to all-night anime marthons soon enough."

"And what about you?" Terry said,t rying to grin. "How did you get into your... career?"

"A woman never reveals her secrets," said Mika. "Anyway, what are you doing without a drink? Yamada! Get this guy some booze!" The pudgy, scarred bartender poured a tall glass and brought it over to their table.

Terry had the feeling that this was going to be a long night.

--

The last day of school was always an emotional one, even for those who tried to hide it. Yui was one of those, strapping on the usual armour of her nonchalant persona, but today it was particularly hard. She made an excuse to part with Rin and the other girls she usually had lunch with, because she just couldn't face the prospect of having one last lunch with them. Of course, they would hang out more, but Yui was a realist. High school friends drifted apart.

Instead, she found Hayato with the usual group of boring girls -- the one he had slept with, the one he wanted to sleep with, and some others she didn't recognize. Yui leaned down and pulled at his ear.

"Ow! What was that for?"

"To get your attention."

Hayato frowned. "You could have just said hi."

"And miss my last chance to physically abuse you?" Yui punched him in the shoulder. "Okay, maybe not quite the last chance. Anyway, where's your sentiment?"

"Drowned in a river when I was a boy."

Sakura looked up and waved sheepishly at Yui. "Hey Yui. Sorry if I was a bit of an ass at the party on the weekend. I had, uh, way too much to drink."

"Hey, you stuck around, which makes you less of an ass than almost everyone else," said Yui. "And having too much to drink is the point."

Belatedly, Yui realized that all of the other girls, with their close-cut black hair and smoothly pressed uniforms, were giving her dirty looks. They looked like clones. It only stung a little -- Yui was used to girls not liking her. Boys too, really.

"So, uh, what are your plans for the summer?" she asked Hayato.

He shrugged. "I dunno. My uncle says he can get me a job, which will probably be crap, but I'll take what I can get nowadays."

"I'm gonna finish up my novel," Sakura said.

"Listen to Miss Future Bestseller over here," said Natsumi, whose airy voice made it clear she was kidding.

"Well I personally am planning to be a low-life bum for the whole break," said Yui. "And I could use some help. Any of you guys want to bum around with me?" There wasn't much of a response.

Then the gaggle of girls started talking about their summers, an endless recitation of bland vacations and blander jobs. Yui supposed that it was the same as the earlier conversation, but when you didn't care about the person speaking it just became inane. She tuned out.

The chime sounded for the next period, and that was it. Hayato wandered off, talking with Natsumi, and Yui realized that she had lost him.

--

The elevator in Mika's apartment building rattled and shook but climbed inexcorably upwards. She had one arm around Terry and was running the other hand up and down his flank. She had downed quite a few shots, but she didn't seem drunk. It made him think of a scene he had just sketched out for his comic, a drunken fling between Sakura and Hayato. He wasn't that drunk, but it still seemed strange, life mimicking art.

The elevator arrived at the top and opened into an industrial gray hall. Terry wondered if this was the source of the weird darkness he felt was hidden in Mika, waking up every morning in this gray brute of a building, but that seemed too simple. The feeling of her hands around his torso and her lips on the back of his neck dispelled all thought.

Mika's apartment was spartan, and almost frighteningly clean. Terry didn't get much of a chance to look at it, though, as she spun him around and kissed him on the lips, and once again he tasted her hot spice, a flavour he wasn't sure how he had lived a couple days without. She unbuttoned his shirt as she dragged him to the bedroom, the two of them slowly spinning in a sloppy drunken dance. What they were drunk off of was anyone's guess.

Terry broke off from her to slide his shirt off, hoping that his flabby chest wouldn't turn her off. Mika didn't seem to notice it. The bedroom was as clean as the rest of the place, with a queen-sized bed shoved against the wall so it would fit, but there were some decorations. They were mostly images of her -- old school photos, a spread of her in a red bikini and G-string with a come-hither look copied from Playboy, and a poster advertising a play. It was the latter that really grabbed Terry's attention. Failed Children -- An Original Play by Mamoru Otori -- Starring Ai Tosaka. The photo was of a younger but still definitely recognizable Mika standing on a snowy street, spouting a punk hairstyle and a cigarette dangling from her lips, jutting out like a dagger. It looked a lot like Yui, and Terry wondered exactly how much Mika had been sneaking into his comics.

"Hey," Mika said softly. "Got something more interesting for you to look at."

Terry turned around and there she was, topless, only a shameless set of black panties hiding her gorgeous nude body. She was there, in the flesh, the girl of his wet dreams, and he couldn't take his eyes off her tits, full and perfectly round, the best in the country he was sure, if not the world. He remembered the youthful pinkness of her hard nipples from the photos, but here in real life it was a different matter entirely, and he just stared.

"You can touch, you know," Mika said with a confident smirk.

Of course he could touch, because she was no longer just an image any more, and somehow Terry had crossed into the world of his fantasy. He reached out and experimentally brushed her breasts, as though they might disappear. He ran his hands over them, feeling their firmness and their unbelievable warmth. She was touching his chest too, her fingertips running electrical currents through him.

Terry leaned forward and took one of Mika's breasts in his mouth. She grabbed his blonde hair and pressed him to her, and he just took more of the tit between his lips, licking and suckling. Mika groaned and then let out a cute little gasp.

They tumbled down across her bed, too wrapped up in what was between them to stand. Terry alternated from breast to breast, feeling like he was at a buffet, leaving long strings of saliva across them as he worshipped Mika's mammaries. She in turn gasped and held him closer. At some point one of them slid his pants off and he was sliding against her, skin against skin. Terry took one of Mika's nipples in his mouth and bit down ever so softly.

She let out a shriek and spasmed against him, humping his torso, her tits smacking into his head spasmodically. Mika dug her nails into his back and gripped for all she was worth. After a moment it passed and she fell back again on the bed, her flace flushed red.

"Just from that?" Terry said, incredulous.

"My tits happen to be very sensitive," said Mika, already regaining her cocky smirk.

Terry peeled her panties, now soaking wet, off of her and took another moment to stare at her gorgeous, implausible body. He stroked his cock a bit just out of instinct. And then Mika wrapped her legs around him and he really had no choice but to drive into her wanting pussy.

Their sex was athletic and raucous, a marathon of hard thrusting and grunting. Mika squeezed her tight cunt around his prick, and Terry just thrust into her harder and faster, their hips slamming together. He was constantly touching, kissing or licking her breasts, an every time he touched them she would squeal with delight.

"Come on... fuck me harder, baby..." Mika said, throwing her hips up to capture more of his hard cock. "Treat me like your little whore. Harder... HARDER!"

She lost the capacity for speech and let out a guttural scream, thrusting her head back and her hips up as she came. That was all Terry could take. Elation filled him as he poured his seed out into her. Both of their eyes were glassy and unfocused, totally blissed out. They kept thrusting for a while longer, as if they had forgotten how to stop, but the rhythm eventually slowed, until they just rested on top of each other. Terry slid off of her, removing his limp dick, covered in juices, from her well-fucked cunt.

"That was nice," he said. Mika just nodded.

Terry rolled over. The play poster was staring him in the face. He said something just to break the post-sex silence. "So, Mamoru Otori? He your brother or something?" He really hoped he wasn't her husband.

"Nah, just a guy I got half my name from," Mika said. "College boyfriend, wannabe playwright. Kind of a creep in retrospect, but I was a sucker for that type back then." She rolled over and saw the confused look on Terry's face. "I told you I didn't use my real name, right?"

"Yeah, you did." Terry still found it strange to think of Mika as not Mika. "So you're really, um, Ai Tosaka?"

"Only to my mother," Mika said with a laugh. "Honestly, just call me Mika."

"So, uh, is that just a stage name or..."

Mika straddled him. "Okay Terry. Do you want to rehash the distant past, or the very recent past?"

"I don't understand." Terry thought his Japanese might be failing him.

Mika sighed. "We can keep talking or we can fuck again. Your choice."

It wasn't a hard decision.

--

The hours crawled on, as the school settled down into its spring slumber. Ryan Bradshaw sat staring at paperwork and unmarked tests. The school year was over, and they were all gone forever. He thought that he should eventually get used to it, but every year he was overcome with the same sadness, that the students he had spent so much time with were suddenly, abruptly ripped from him, never to be seen again, except maybe in a checkout line with a cheerful smile and forced pleasantries.

Yui was the worst of all. She had been the last to file out of the room, and Ryan had hoped for another one of their long, rambling philosophical conversations that usually happened when they both should have been doing work. At the very least he expected a tearful goodbye.

"Good luck at Todai, Yui," Ryan had said. "It's been great teaching you."

She looked up and flashed him a smile. "Thanks. Goodbye, Mr. Bradshaw." And with that she had whisked out of the room and out of his life. Ryan had just stood there, gaping like a fish, until his next class started filing in and he managed to compose himself.

He guessed that he had just been delusional. He wasn't these kids' friends. He didn't mean anything to them. He was just a guy who taught them English, another authority figure to bow to or resist. For Yui, he could have been anyone else in the world. 

The door creaking open distracted Ryan from his bleak train of thought. He turned, expecting to see another teacher, but instead it was Sakura who went through the door, her rolled-up school skirt swishing around her thighs. Ryan looked up at her.

"What are you doing here so late?" he said. Sakura never seemed like the type to stay after school for long.

She shrugged the question off. "I just wanted to thank you for teaching me for all these years. I know I'm kind of an idiot, but you kept trying anyway."

"You're not an idiot," Ryan said.

"So, Mr. Bradshaw," Sakura said, her lips curling into a smile. "I guess you and I aren't teacher and student any more."

"Well, there are still exams..."

Sakura sat up on his desk, spreading her legs. "Really, we're just two adults, aren't we? Finally on a level playing field..."

Ryan was about to say something, but the words got trapped in his throat. Through Sakura's spread legs, wrapped in that plaid uniform skirt so many men fetishized, he could see her pussy, not concealed by any kind of underwear but bare and obvious before him. Her pretty pink snatch was shaved bare and was moist and waiting. It looked so enticing, glimmering with youthful eagerness. Most of all he was struck by the fact that Sakura hadn't forgotten him, that she needed him so much she would resort to this desparate, last-minute, vulgar display.

"You can touch," she said invitingly, in a mature, seductive voice that was not her own.

Ryan reached forward, his hand shivering, across the table. There was a golden barrier that lay between them, built up with guilt and regulation, that separated a healthy student-teacher relationship and sin. But it seemed so, so flimsy now. He pressed up against it and, with a strange firmness, broke through it, slipping his finger into Sakura's waiting cunt.

She moaned, and they were still for a moment, caught in a sinful tableau, stunned by their amazement that this was really happening. Ryan was surprised that he barely felt guilty at all. He slowly reached his thumb up and flicked her clit, just to see if he could go further. She groaned in response, and suddenly they were moving again.

Ryan stood up and Sakura wrapped her legs around his hips, thrusting her longing cunt against both his hand and his dick, still in his pants but quite hard. Ryan thrust two fingers in her, fucking her with them and rubbing the bottom of his palm against her little nub of ecstacy. Sakura threw her head back and gasped.

"Mr. Bradshaw..." she said, managing to choke out words through a throaty moan. "I want you inside of me.




Tokyo Symphony Ch. 03



Wordlessly, he undid his belt and slid his pants down to his ankles. In one solid motion he buried his cock inside of her. Both of them let out a long gasp, both of pleasure and relief. And then they fucked.

Their movements were rapid, hands flowing over each other, hips thrusting like machine pistons, trying to take as much as possible in during a short amount of time. They fucked, Sakura spread out on the desk, still fully clothed in her uniform, the bounce of her breasts constrained by the fabric. Ryan's mental facilities had just about shut down, and he was just plowing this beautiful girl, giving in to pure animal lust.

It didn't last long. Sakura threw her head back and went to let out a scream, but in a rare moment of cognition Ryan threw his hand over her mouth, muffling the shout. She bit down on his palm, but he barely noticed as her pussy muscles squeezed and shuddered around him. As Sakura's orgasm ripped through her Ryan thrust a few more times, and came, shooting his cum into her waiting cunt.

Ryan staggered back after orgasming, pulling out of her, until he collied with the blackboard. Sakura stared up at him, dazed and giddy. It suddenly occurred to Ryan, in the crushing post-orgasmic guilt, that he could never undo this.



Tokyo Symphony Ch. 04



They sat there in little stapled magazines, surprisingly real. Their titles read School Hearts in English (it was originally going to be Entwined Hearts, but Naomichi insisted that no one in Japan knew what "entwined" meant). The first issue's cover was graced with an image of Yui, the second's by one of Sakura. The covers were done in black and white, partly to attract attention and partly because they couldn't afford any more colour ink. Every couple of minutes Terry would take a moment to pick up a copy and flip through it, amazed that his vague ideas had become solid paper and ink.

It almost insulated him from the raging storm of otaku around him. Comiket was the time when all the nerds, freaks, and losers of Japan came out of their burrows to get their wank material. It was a massive convergence, throngs of flesh pulsing through makeshift streets and alleyways, doe eyes and bare breasts staring out from everywhere the eye went. Of course, being on the other side of the tables wasn't much better.

Terry and Naomichi had wound up squeezed into a corner between two yaoi artists, so most of their audience just swerved away from their corner at top speed. A few got pressed there by the sweaty throng and picked up a doujin or two, but the neatly photocopied stack of School Hearts issues was untouched.

Naomichi took another swig of his soda, while Terry polished off his fourth coffee. Neither had slept last night, too busy scrambling to get everything done and ready for the convention. "I'm gonna see what's for sale, maybe pick up some stuff," Naomichi said, raising to get out of his seat.

Terry grabbed his arm. "We can't afford to buy anything. We've been living off ramen for a week."

"Come on man. You know this stuff is going to be way more expensive if we try to get it afterwards."

"Who says we have to get it at all?"

Begrudgingly Naomichi settled down in his seat. "I don't think you're approaching this as an art form man." The truth was, Terry wanted him as a shield against all this foreign-ness, to avoid being the lone white guy in a sea of Japanese. Being by himself also kind of made the ruse of "Taro Ozaki" a joke, although he didn't particularly care about that.

One of the girls at the yaoi tables leaned over. "Hey, at least you guys have got ramen. Last night I was seriously wondering whether I could eat cat food." The girl had close-cropped night black hair and was a little chubby. Before her was spread out a colourful smorgasbord of pretty-boys with their arms around each other and the top buttons of their shirts undone.

"No offence, but I think you girls are driving away our customers," said Naomichi. "People just think this is the yaoi section."

"More like your ugly face is repelling our audience," said the girl with a grin. "Or maybe it's just this pairing -- not that popular. Ah well. The things we do for love, eh?"

After a couple more minutes of no traffic, the girl from the next table leaned over and started inspecting Terry and Naomichi's work. "This isn't bad. Too much boob, obviously, but if I swung that way..."

Terry shrugged. "Well, usually the boob is what attracts people."

"I'm sure. You guys do realize that there's an entire other half of the population that mostly doesn't want to stare at tits and girls making retarded faces when they come?"

"And there are even more people who just aren't that interested in buttsex," Naomichi said.

The girl grinned. "Hey, tell you what. I'll buy some of your stuff if you buy some of ours. I think we have the same prices, so we can just do an even swap."

"That doesn't exactly help us make money," Terry said.

"No, but at least you'll feel like you sold something."

Terry laughed. He had to admit that the full stack of his comics was getting him down. "Okay, let's do it. But I'll have to find a really good hiding place for all this yaoi."

"When I have a boyfriend I keep 'em in a locked cabinet at home," said the girl, handing over a couple of her doujins. "Don't want him to think I'm too weird." The name Erika Otsuka was scribbled next to the boys embracing.

And that was how Terry (sort of) sold the first copy of School Hearts.

--

Ryan Bradshaw's studio apartment overlooked Tokyo and all its celestial lights. The elevator ride up had been long and painful, him and Sakura standing on opposite sides, wary of discovery, hearts pounding in their chests. Sakura had spent most of the time staring at Bradshaw's face despite herself. His expression was inscrutable. She wondered if he was feeling conflicted, trying to banish his guilt, or whether he was just planning all the wicked things he was going to do to her. She shivered and hoped it was the latter.

The whole thing felt sort of surreal, like she had stepped inside one of her fantasies. When they got to the apartment, a sprawling home with pristine white walls, that feeling doubled. "Have I died and gone to Heaven?" Sakura wondered out loud.

"That's just what I was about to say." Ryan embraced her from behind, and she could feel the heat of his breath on her ear, the itch of his five-o'-clock shadow against her cheek, and his tumescent hard-on against her ass.

"I didn't know JET teachers got paid this well," Sakura said, giggling.

"They don't. I'm what you might call, uh, independently wealthy, and I decided to spring for a nice place." Sakura's heart fluttered, and she found herself out of breath. She chided herself for being materialistic, but Mr. Bradshaw was seeming more and more like a fantasy come to life. He brought his hand up to her cheeks, feeling the heat of her flush, making her blush even more. "Sit down. Let me pour you a drink."

Sakura slowly made her way to the leather couch and dropped herself down on it. She was unsure whether she could even walk properly right now. Her head was dizzy with sexual intoxication, and her pussy still throbbing from their earlier sex.

Ryan returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Sakura giggled. "Oooh, offering an underage girl drinks? You're gonna get in trouble."

"I'm already in trouble," Bradshaw said, keeping a straight face as he poured the sparkling beverage. "And as far as I'm concerned, any eighteen year-old who hasn't gotten drunk in their lives is an eighteen year-old who needs to liven up."

Sakura grinned and took a sip of the wine. She didn't really like the taste, which struck her tongue as unreasonably bitter, but kept it to herself. She didn't want to spit it out like a little kid in front of Mr. Bradshaw.

He sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. Sakura felt a little weird, but shrugged it off. She looked at her teacher's face again, trying to get pass that icy expression with those ever-so-slightly upturned corners of his lips. "What are you thinking about right now, Mr. Bradshaw."

"Call me Ryan. Well, right now I'm wondering what the fuck I did to deserve such a beautiful young girl in my arms."

It was cynical flattery, but Sakura loved it nonetheless. She dipped her index finger into her wine glass and swirled it around a little before removing it and offering the wine-soaked finger to Ryan. He took it into his mouth and licked it sensually, slowly stripping every drop of flavour from it. Sakura felt like she was about to melt.

He leaned forward and before she knew it they were kissing, tasting the bitter wine on each others' lips and as their lips rubbed against each other and their tongues slowly, tentatively met, she felt a great force building inside her, a knot of nervous momentum in her stomach, and she felt that if she kept still, that if her clothes kept binding her skin into this little girl shape, she was going to explode.

Sakura broke off just for a second, to tug the top of her school uniform over her head. She tossed it to the side, using the movement to sling her hair back like she had seen in movies. Ryan licked his lips, and she felt the heady rush of being an object of desire. Sakura wore a lacy black bra that contrasted with both her pale skin and the innocence of her schoolgirl skirt.

Ryan broke from her and started licking his way down her. Sakura let out a light, angelic murmur as the tip of his tongue travelled over her chin and down her neck, following the route traced by her blood vessels, pale blue and visible to the naked eye. When he got to her chest he reached behind her and unhooked her bra with expertise that surprised her, used to the fumblings of teenage boys. Ryan took her bra in his teeth and tossed it aside animalistically.

And then he was pressing her down to the couch with his weight again, reaching forward and capturing her breast between his teeth, biting down just hard enough to make her feel it, while his tongue lashed out at her nipple, swirling around and provoking it to full hardness. Sakura gasped and arched her back, trying to drive her breast further into Ryan's mouth. Her teacher switched over to the other breast, giving it the same exquisite treatment. Sakura was clawing at the couch, feeling like she was going crazy, and Ryan hadn't even gotten past her breasts yet.

He took his time worshipping her tits. They were there for what felt like hours, his lips tied to one breast, the tip of his tongue flitting out to leave ghostly sensations, while his hand caressed the other and rolled the rock-hard nipple between his fingers. But eventually he broke off, leaving a sheen of saliva across both orbs. He leaned down and they kissed again, passionately, appreciatively.

And then Ryan was travelling down down down, past her navel, which he took a brief moment to explore with his tongue, and to the hem of her skirt. A desperate Sakura plunged her thumbs into the side of her panties and pulled her and her skirt down at the same time. She kicked them off, leaving her nude except for her alluringly virginal white socks. Ryan spread her legs, paused momentarily, and dove in.

Sakura immediately let out a cry. Her boyfriends had rarely went down on her, and when they did it was an earnest but clumsy effort. But Ryan knew what he was doing down there. His tongue was warm and gentle, running along her lower lips until they drooled, and flicking up to caress her clit. Sakura whimpered and clamped her thighs around Ryan's head, hoping he would never leave.

Ryan played her like a musical instrument, drawing out at first low moans and then higher-pitched squeals. He snuck a hand in between the vice-like grip of her thighs and strummed her clit while his tongue delved into her hungry cunt.

Sakura's orgasm ripped through her suddenly, catching her off guard. Her hips were thrashing of their own accord, grinding her slick cunt into Ryan's face. The orgasm was fierce and invigorating, like a sudden affirmation that what they were doing was right. She came down eventually, and only realized then that she had been screaming. Ryan was looking over at her, a smile on his girlcum-slicked face.

"That was great," Sakura said, beaming. "Now let's see if I can do something for you."

Ryan didn't need any further temptation. He discarded his pants and shirts in record time. Sakura crawled across the couch on all fours to get to him, tits swaying. This was her first chance to see Mr. Bradshaw naked, something she had imagined for a long time. He was hairier than she'd thought he'd be, but she didn't mind that much. It made him look virile, somehow more masculine. And his hard cock, straining forward to meet her, lived up to her fantasies.

Sakura leaned forward and took just the head of Ryan's cock between her lips. He groaned, and that continued as her tongue flickered over the underside of his shaft. Sakura slowly slid more of his cock into her mouth, enjoying the feeling of its pulsing warmth against her tongue, and especially enjoying Ryan's vocal responses of pleasure.

She began bobbing up and down, releasing his cock just for a second to give the precum-slick tip a kiss and then sliding it back down her mouth. Her fingers lightly played with Ryan's balls, hanging heavy with his cum, all for her. He let out a deep grunt, and she thought he might cum right there. Sakura anticipated his hot cum hitting the back of her throat, but instead he pulled her off him.

"Sakura, baby," he said. "If you keep up like that I'm gonna cum."

"That was the idea," she said.

"An old man like me's got to save his hardness." She giggled. "As great as that was, I still want to fuck you some more today."

Sakura nodded and obeyed. She slung her leg over Ryan's hip and sunk herself down on his hardness. She let out a gasp. Somehow, in the hour or so since they had fucked on his desk, she had forgotten about how huge he felt inside her, how full and completely satisfied she felt as his cock slid between her pussy lips. She slowly slid herself down on his shaft, shutting her eyes so she could just focus on the sensation.

"You look really cute," Ryan said. Sakura could feel herself blushing. Ryan reached up and grabbed her breasts, still shining with his saliva, and caressed them. Sakura gasped and began to rock her hips, slowly bouncing up and down on his shaft. He grabbed her ass and started using it to move her, causing her to slam down on his cock faster and faster. The pleasure was overwhelming Sakura, growing out of her control and expectations.

Just when she was about to come again Ryan sat up. "Let's go to the bedroom." Sakura nodded weakly, a bit delirious. He stood up, still embedded in her, and she wrapped her legs around his back. He carried her through his apartment like that, cock thrusting into her as they moved, his pelvic bone bumping up against her clit. She let out a steady stream of gasps and moans.

After what seemed like hours they got to his room. Sakura didn't have much time to take it in before he laid her down on the soft black sheets and, grabbing her legs, pulled her to the base of his cock. Standing up and looking over her body as it heaved and flushed, he began thrusting, starting slowly but quickly rising to a mad rhythm. Sakura thrust back as well as she can, but she realized that this was not a mutual effort, and it was she who was getting well and truly fucked. She was more than okay with that.

 Sakura felt her orgasm welling up inside her again, so close but refusing to burst. With every thrust of Ryan's cock her body tremored. She managed to lift a weak-feeling arm and reach down to stroke across her clit. Once was enough, and she exploded.

Sakura lost all of her senses except for a feeling of pleasure coursing through her whole body. It was as if she was a creature made up solely of joy. Slowly she came back to reality, felt the sweat slicking her body, the feel of the soft sheets against her back, saw Ryan red-faced and pumping away madly, in the same state she had been in a minute ago.

Soon he reached his own orgasm, letting out a wolf-like howl. Sakura could feel his cock shudder as it pumped his seed into her. He collapsed on top of her, his slowly softening cock still embedded in her. They kissed.

They didn't speak for a while. There was no need for words. Sakura just lay there, her arms around Ryan Bradshaw, their naked flesh pressed together. She felt like she had stepped into one of her dreams, and she was never going to leave.

--

Mika had promised to stop by Comiket at some point that day, and Terry had been anticipating it since this morning. In the end, she made him wait a while, but she showed up eventually. It wasn't hard to make her out -- her tall, model-like figure shifting through a crowd of huddled-over otaku. Terry stood up and waved at her wildly. Mika smiled and eventually managed to worm her way to his booth. She was wearing sunglasses and a big puffy coat.

"What's with the get-up?" Terry said.

Mika shrugged. "I don't want to have to deal with a thousand 'Hey, I saw you stripping on the Internet' conversations right now. And if I'd ever get recognized in a crowd it would be here."

"Don't you think it'd help your career?" Naomichi said. "You know, you could be the otaku idol. Pose with nothing but a doujin in front of your breasts..."

"Naomichi, why don't you go check out some other doujins like you were talking about?" Terry's partner in crime was gone in a flash.

Mika sat down next to Terry. "So, how are the sales going down her in Sodom and Gomorrah?"

"Slow," he said. "Here, you want this yaoi comic I got? The girl over there wrote it." Erika waved from the next table over.

"Terry, I didn't know you were into that," Mika said. She took the doujin and flipped through it. "This is good."

They sat there manning the tables for a while. With Mika, the comics sold a lot faster, and Terry even managed to sell half the stack of School Hearts. Even with half her face buried beneath the large sunglasses, Mika's smile was like a magnet.

Naomichi eventually returned with a treasure trove of smut under his arms. "Wow, we're doing good," he said, looking at the depleted stacks of comics under their tables.

"Looks like you were driving away the customers," Mika said. She was joking, but there was just a bit of bite under it.

She stood up so that Naomichi could take his seat back, but she wasn't done. Mika picked up one of the books he'd bought and flipped through it. "I swear, I don't know how guys can read this crap."

"What do you mean?" said Naomichi.

"I mean, it's so fake. The sweet, virginal young girl who feels ashamed of her desire, but is eventually won over by the reader insert character gives her... that's not what real life is like."

"Well, people don't read hentai for real life. They read it for a fantasy. The whole point is that it's something you couldn't find in the real world."

"Sure, sure." Mika gestured to the throng of otaku around her. "But look at these people. Is it really good to live in a fantasy all the time?"

"And what about the shit you make?" Naomichi said. "Do your little photo spreads show what women are really like?"

Mika looked hurt, for just a second, but then it was gone. "I guess you have a point."

Naomichi nodded. "Of course I do. Hey, we smut peddlers have got to stay together."

"I guess so," she said, trying to suppress the tinge of weakness in her voice.

--

Ryan wasn't sure how long they had been in his apartment, but he knew it was days. After the first couple of minutes they hadn't worn a stitch of clothing the entire time. Sakura periodically would call home, lying damp with sweat and other juices in his mess of a bed, and make up increasingly implausible stories about where she was and when she would be home. They fed off crackers and chips they found around the apartment, sitting around the kitchen like an urbanized Adam and Eve.

Sakura had a seemingly bottomless well of desire, and her lithe young willing body excited Ryan enough to keep up with it. He lost count of the individual acts, as they all sort of blurred into one eternity of fucking. His dick hurt, and was by this point barely producing any cum, but he still managed to shudder to climax after climax in her hot slick cunt, under the caresses of her tongue, between her sweat-slicked breasts...

He was behind her now, somehow hard again and embedded in that paradise of a pussy. He had his hands clenched firmly around her hips and she was rocking back against him, driving the globes of her ass into his chest. Ryan reached around and strummed her engorged clit, and she responded with moans and mewls.

They were both red and panting, lost to the animal desires of the moment, thrusting as hard as they could towards each other. Sakura's hair and breasts bounced back and forth with the force of their conjoined thrusts. Ryan let out a steady stream of gasps and grunts. He had no idea how long they had been going at this, and he felt lost in a carnal haze.




Tokyo Symphony Ch. 04



"Oh god Mr. Bradshaw..." Sakura said, her voice a mere squeak. "Fuck me! Fuck me harder!"

"Oh baby..." he muttered in English. Their hips kept slamming together, the drumbeat behind their vocals.

Sakura screamed out and came again. Her thighs were slick with her juices and his. Sometime it took him a while to enter her, his cock sliding along her skin. Ryan couldn't take the feeling of her young cunt, already tight, squeezing and pulsing around his dick. He let out a shudder as he felt his orgasm, pain mixed with amazing pleasure, course through them. The two of them collapsed to the bed, his weight on top of hers.

"You're so amazing," he whispered into her ear, still in English.

"You better believe,"she said, raising up a V for victory with weak arms.

He loved laying here with her like this, feeling her chest rise and fall as they both breathed heavily. It was like they were one being, one set of lungs in one body.

As his senses slowly came back to him Ryan realized that the room reeked of sex. He wondered if he would ever be able to get the smell out -- that animal mixture of their body odours and the sweet smell of their arousal. He wondered if he would ever want to. A part of his mind insisted that there was a world outside of this apartment, that he had other responsibilities besides thrusting away into Sakura, but he didn't really believe it.

His phone rang, disturbing the small universe around his bed. Ryan looked at Sakura, uncertain. "Answer it," she said. He reluctantly rolled off her and did so.

It was Mariko, the science teacher still clearly nursing a crush on him. She was just calling to check in on him, see how he was doing with the last pile of marking, so on and so forth. He tried to shake her off, but her small talk muscled past all his defences.

As he listened to Mariko, he looked over at Sakura and felt guilt resurfacing for the first time in days. No matter how adult she seemed, she was still a girl just barely over eighteen, and still one of his students. He had a girlfriend back home, one he talked to in increasingly less frequent long-distance calls. He had work to do.

Worse than all that, he had finally succumbed to his darkest desires. He had proven to himself that his willpower couldn't hold off his lust, that he was a creature not of determined morals but of overpowering sick lusts. What if next time it was a younger student, one who wasn't about to graduate? He had no more confidence in his ability to keep his hands off anyone, especially not after a moment of weakness had turned into a marathon of indulgence.

Eventually he managed to get off the phone with Mariko. He turned to Sakura, who was looking at him with a coy smile on her face. Her desire for him suddenly made him feel worse, aware of how he was taking advantage of a childish crush on the teacher.

"Look, Sakura, I think you'd better go home."

She frowned. "How come?"

"Don't worry. It's just that I have some marking to do and you'd better get home before your parents call the cops or whatever. We want to keep this a secret, after all."

Sakura still looked a little puzzled at the sudden change, but obediently rolled out of bed and started scrounging for her clothes. Ryan realized that they both still reeked of sex. "Maybe you should take a shower first."

Twenty minutes later he was standing at the door in a T-shirt and boxers, saying goodbye to a freshly showered and dressed Sakura. "When can I see you again?" she said.

"Soon," he said. "After I'm done with the work for this school year, let's say. I'll give you a call."

Sakura nodded, still looking a little shocked from the sudden immersion back into the real world. "Make sure you do."

They kissed, and then kissed again, and their bodies grew closer as if by gravitational force. Ryan broke away before they ended up on the couch again. "See you soon babe."

"I love you," Sakura said as she was heading out the door. Ryan winced as the ball of guilt in his stomach grew spikes.

--

It was a long day, but even the longest days ended. A mass of artists and otaku stumbled towards the subway station, ready to go home and rest up for the next day of the convention. Terry looked up at a subway clock. How was it only 5:10? It felt like he had spent a week behind that table.

Naomichi was talking with Erika and a couple other artists, leaving Terry and Mika to walk alone.

"I think I still have the energy to go for some drinks," Terry said.

"Nah, I'm good," said Mika. "You should rest."

Terry looked at her, surprised by her refusal. Her expression was unreadable. "Hey, is something wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," she said, bristling a bit. "Why would you think something's wrong?"

"It's just..." Terry realized that he couldn't put his feeling of unease into words. "Never mind. Are you gonna stop by tomorrow?"

Mika shrugged. "Maybe if I get off work early. We'll see."

On the subway, they said nothing. Terry just stared at Mika, and felt that the darkness he sensed in her, that unease he couldn't explain, was growing.



Tokyo Symphony Ch. 05



Sakura's disappearance was abrupt and unexplained. She was missing, like a visible hole, from the last-day-of-school party, showed up late to all her exams in a wrinkly uniform and greasy hair, then brushed off Natsumi when she tried to talk to her afterwards. At the post-exam party (Natsumi sometimes felt her life was nothing but a procession of identical parties) Sakura was again missing in action, leaving Natsumi to drift around with Hayato, enduring his awkward flirtation and puppy-dog eyes.

"Hey, do you know what's going on with Sakura?" Natsumi asked one of Sakura's fashionable friends she didn't know too well. The tall beautiful girl just looked at Natsumi strangely and shook her head.

"Still chasing after her, huh?" said Rin, appearing as out of nowhere. Her green hair had turned into streaks of black and orange.

"None of your business." Natsumi took a long gulp of her beer, trying to look disinterested. Rin just looked on with knowing, smug eyes. Natsumi wanted to throttle her, but instead she just returned to Hayato.

He was pushing back against the wall again, as if wanting to merge with the paper. Natsumi tossed him a drink, seeing as how she had finished with her last one. "Your little shoulder devil not here either?"

Hayato shrugged. "Yui? I guess this party is too mainstream for her or something."

"Well, it looks like we're the squares now." Natsumi raised her bottle to clink against Hayato's. "Drink up."

A few hours later things were starting to wind down. There had been a fistfight and the friends of the two combatants had left in seperate sulking camps, leaving only a smattering of people to linger in the ruined atmosphere. Natsumi and Hayato ended up on the couch. He had his arm around her, and she wasn't sure when that had happened. She felt strange, like the air around her was heavy liquid beating down on her, turning everything anyone said into distorted echoes. She was warm. Really warm. She had probably had too much to drink.

Hayato was grabbing the back of her head, turning her towards him, and kissing he on the lips. Time was syrupy and variable, the movement of his head to hers passing in a milisecond and the kiss lasting hours. She felt her hands go up to clasp the back of his head and hold him to her without her command or consent. She felt distantly alarmed that parts of her body were mutinying.

Natsumi supposed she should try kissing back. After all, every other girl liked kissing boys, would be thrilled to be in this position. But it was like kissing a fish. Everything felt wrong -- there was just something about the subtle proportions of the face, the rapacious tongue, the stubble that ground against her chin and felt like it would slice it open -- all of it felt slightly wrong in a way she couldn't quite define.

Hayato reached out and grabbed her breast. It was then that Natsumi broke away from him. The room was still spinning, but she no longer felt like she was swimming in syrup, and everything was moving in regular time now. He looked shocked. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean--"

Natsumi shook her head. She realized that she had given him a moment of hope there that would torment him for a while. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, but I-- I can't. I really can't."

He looked at her with a mixture of confusion and accusation. Natsumi stood up, tugging her purse around her shoulder. "Sorry, I-I have to go." It wasn't the right thing to do. She should have stayed with him and tried to talk him through his inevitable heartbreak, but she just couldn't do it tonight. She couldn't unravel her own hopeless affection, let alone someone else's.

On the way home, the subway car was near-empty and quiet except for a pair of drunken salarymen telling filthy jokes to each other and responding with undue roars of laughter. The darkness of the tunnels, lit only by the occasional industrial orange light that made things even worse, seemed like it wasn't far from smashing the windows and flooding the car and carrying off all of the passengers who might then have the dignity to kick and scream.

As she stepped off the train the chirpy techno-pop ringtone of Natsumi's phone went off, seeming like a noise from so far away. Natsumi wondered if she was just a sad drunk. The ring went off again. Grudgingly she dug the phone out of her pocket. A message from Sakura. Her stupor melted off her.

It was a series of messages from Sakura, actually, a confession poured out over 140-character chunks. She had been with Mr. Bradshaw (or, as she called him, "Ryan"). In his apartment all those days and nights, screwing their souls away. Natsumi felt like she was about to vomit. She had always thought Sakura's crush on the teacher was one of those harmless hopeless things, like Natsumi and Hayato and seemingly everyone she knew harboured within them, letting it grow in spite (perhaps because) of the impossibility of it ever being fulfilled.

Sakura seemed happy, although worried about how she would explain everything to her parents now that she had to finally return to Earth. She gushed about Bradshaw to Natsumi, everything from his taste in music to the length of his cock. Natsumi's first fear was that he was taking advantage of Sakura, and would leave her washed up in a pile of other disposable schoolgirls, popped cherries in a pile like collected box-tops. But then she tried to be generous to Bradshaw, assume that he was genuinely in love with Sakura -- and that scared her more. What if they would be like this forever, wrapped up in their own little world while Natsumi helplessly orbited them?

Natsumi mustered up a couple lame replies to Sakura's barrage of texts, congratulating her and adding in a few gossipy demands for more. Right now she knew that she should support her friend no matter what she thought of the relationship. And that meant being the gushing BFF and not the sad lesbian stalker.

Sakura was either oblivious or uncaring to Natsumi's lack of enthusiasm and let her textual desire continue on, showering her friend with the gory details. This was what friends did, right?

--

The Saturday morning sun strolled into Terry's room like an old friend. He sat there, basking in comfort, arm around the still-sleeping Mika. He gazed in wonder at her perfect face, the kind of perfection he only wished he could draw, her hourglass figure which formed an appreciable bump underneath his blanket... what in the world had he done to deserve to wake up next to a girl like her?

As if pricked by his gaze, Mika began to stir, her body slowly rumbling and coming to life. She opened up her ocean blue eyes and stared at Terry. "Hi there."

Terry waved jokingly at her. She caught his hand and kissed the knuckle, staring up at him smokily. Mika took one finger between her lips and sucked on it like it was a little cock, swirling her tongue around it and leaving a thin sheen of saliva. Terry slid in closer to her, eager to be lost in the thrill ride that was her body.

Mika suddenly broke off from him. "I uh... I need to pee." She threw on a T-shirt and panties and sprinted out of his room and to the bathroom. Terry sat up and sighed at the tent in the sheets made by his newly insistent erection.

She returned after what seemed like forever and sat next to him, although without removing her clothes. "Sorry to run out on you like that, but when nature calls..."

"No problem." Terry chuckled in an attempt to put her at ease. "So, uh... let's talk about fantasies."

Mika wrinkled her brow. "Fantasy? Like, uh, dragons and elves and shit?"

"No, I mean like sexual fantasy. I was reading this thing online and it said that couples should talk about stuff like this."

"Was this one of your porno sites?"

"No! It was an article."

Mika rolled over and gave him a cheesy grin. "One of those magazines you read for the articles, eh?"

"Listen, can you stop making fun of me and tell me a fantasy?"

Mika looked at him for a little bit, face propped up by her hands like a kid. Maybe she was wondering if he was serious. After a little while she relented and spoke while raising a challenging eyebrow. "Well, I've always kind of wanted to be gang-banged."

"Really?"

"Yeah. You know, surrounded by a bunch of guys in a dark alley, used and abused for their physical pleasure, left covered in their dirt and cum but strangely satisfied... I know it's not the most politically correct thing, but whenever I masturbate the image just pops into my head, and it makes me cum like you wouldn't believe." Her hand wandered down her body and to her panties, encouraging him to imagine it.

Terry gulped, not sure what to make of that. "Uh, wow. That's good, that's good... it's important to share, you know?"

Mika laughed. "So how about you? What's this fantasy you've been dying to get off your chest."

Terry couldn't even remember what he was going to bring up. "Uh, well, I've always been kind of curious about anal."

Mika stiffened. "Not happening."

"Well you're not making this a very fun couples exercise."

"Sorry, but my butt is exit-only. Go ask some other slut."

Terry wished he was better at reading people -- especially when speaking in Japanese, where the nuances of emotion got lost behind the complicated mental apparatus of translation. He wasn't sure whether Mika was genuinely pissed off or just playing around. "Sorry, I won't bring it up again. How about your tits?"

"What about them?"

"Can I fuck them?"

Mika rolled over and gave Terry a long look, as if she was also trying to gauge his seriousness. While doing so she slipped off her shirt to unveil the body parts in question, as if presenting them as court evidence. They were heavy but stood out proudly like two missile tops, shaded tan with mocha kisses for nipples. She turned onto her back with a roll of her eyes. "Do you know how many guys I've been with that have asked to do that?"

"Um..."

"All of them." Mika cupped her breasts together, tightening up the exquisite valley between them that Terry was suddenly beginning to think of as the promised land. "What is it about these big ol' things that men just can't get enough of? I have two other perfectly good, warm, wet holes ready for their cock, but all they can think about is giving me a titfuck like they see in the porno movies." She turned to Terry, looking coy. "Can you explain it to me?"

At the mention of her warm wet holes in a sultry tone of voice Terry's already stiff dick had pulsed with almost painful need. He tried to form syllables with his mouth, but it felt like the language department of his brain was turning out the lights and going home to party. "Um... uh... well... I guess that's just the way men are."

Mika pulled the American onto her. Her panties had vanished sometime during the conversation. "Why don't you show me some more of what men are like? What they feel like... what they taste like... teach me, oh wise master."

Terry slipped into Mika's pussy before he even knew he was aiming for it. It was every bit as wet and hot and willing as she had promised. Beneath him her body was red hot, pumping back against him and writhing, raking her hard nipples against his chest. Mika grabbed him by the hair and pressed her lips to him, spearing her tongue into his mouth.

There was a special quality to morning sex, coming so soon after waking up and before their bodies had a chance to get jaded by the daily procession of mundanity. Every inch of Terry's skin was like a live wire, sending him acutely observed sensations and feelings. Quite aside from the slick inferno that was her cunt, he felt like he could get off just on the sensation of skin rubbing against skin. He thrust into Mika slowly in a long movement while pressing tightly against her, trying to fuck her entire body.

If he was trying to slow down and take in every ounce of experience, she was going crazy, thrusting her hips up like a piston and demanding that he match her. Mika began making raw animal noises under him, speaking a private language.

"Do it!" she gasped.

Terry just let out an incoherent groan, not sure what she was talking about it.

"Fuck my tits!" Mika yelled. "If you want to so bad, fuck my goddamn tits!"

In a daze, Terry pulled out from her cunt, which was still clinging to him for dear life, and slid up her body. Mounting her chest, his hungry red cock poked straight down that heavenly valley. Mika grabbed her heaving breasts and held them togeter, forming a tight tunnel around his cock. His cock slicked with her juices, Terry begin to thrust up and down into her cleavage, enjoying the feel of the voluminous mounds but mostly the sight of his hard member disappearing between those breasts, those magnificent breasts. Beneath him Mika was furiously finger-fucking herself, spasming and moaning. 

It was big sex, so decadent and over-indulgent that it was hard to believe he was even here, doing this, and when the realization came that this was actually his life and not a porno Terry came suddenly, throwing his head back as he was taken by his own set of shudders.

He still saw, out of the corner of his eye, the first jet of his cum land between Mika's eyes, defiling her beautiful face. Terry leaned back, more out of losing control of his body than intention, and the next few lesser spurts showered over her tits, which were soon gleaming with his pearly seed. He looked at Mika, covered with his essence, and thought it might be the sexiest thing he'dd ever seen in his life.

"Happy now?" she said, smirking and licking her lips. He nodded dumbly.

Terry rolled off her, still trying to form a coherent thought. Mika sat up, cum running down her nose and off her breasts and dripping onto the sheets. "I think I need a towel."

In the distance Terry could hear Naomichi banging around. He blushed, wondering if his roommate had heard Mika screaming about fucking her tits. Well, she certainly couldn't go out as she was. Terry put on his boxers and darted across to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and dashed back all in front of an eyebrow-raising Naomichi.

He offered her the towel and she wiped his cum off her. "I really have to get going," Mika said. She began pacing the room, trying to recover all the pieces of the outfit that had been scattered haphazardly

"Come on, you can stay a while," Terry said, trying not to sound like he was pleading.

"No, really, I have a shoot today, and I have to go home and get ready." Mika checked her reflection in Terry's computer monitor and wiped a spray bit of cum off her forehead. "Thanks for the good time though."

"Let's do this again," Terry said. "How about Friday?"

Mika looked at him in a way Terry couldn't decipher. "Sure. But next time bring some friends, because we're totally doing the gang-bang thing."

She left the apartment with her purse swining like a metronome timing her steps. On the outside she was all smiles and cheer, but Terry couldn't help but feel that inside there was something dark that he just couldn't get at. Mika was easily the most beautiful girl he'd ever known, let alone slept with, but he could never imagine what she was thinking. Unlike his previous girlfriends, for the most part nerdy white chicks, he just couldn't figure out her mental interiority. It was frustrating. He still had no idea how she felt about that morning's events.

Naomichi offered Terry a cup of coffee. "She's one hell of a girl, man."

"She certainly is."

--

Yui had decided to stay home tonight. There was another drunken gathering at another semi-friend's house, but she honestly didn't feel up to it. Besides which, her hair was beginning to grow out, the dull black roots clawing up out of her scalp and putting the obvious lie to the painted colours of the rest of it. She had bought some more dye, but somehow she couldn't even work up the effort to spend a couple minutes bowed in front of a tub rubbing strange liquid into her hair. In her lethargic summer state anything momentarily unpleasant was a no-go, no matter what the long-term (or even medium-term) benefits would be.

So Yui was spending the night in her room, lying on her bed with the stereo going full blast and staring at a Banana Yoshimoto novel that deflected all her attempts to read it. It wasn't heaven, but it was comfortable.

The music died down and, in the momentary pause between sounds Yui could hear pounding at her door, that sounded a bit like a jackhammer. She dragged herself off the beg and opened the door a crack.

It was her mother, nose scrunched up as usual at the wall of noise. "Yui, dear, I've been knocking for over a minute--

"Yeah, yeah, I didn't hear you," said Yui. "What is it?"

"There's a friend here to see you," said her mother. Yui opened the door a bit wider and could now see Hayato standing in the apartment hallway, leaning against the wall. Her mother looked as skeptical as any mother would when their daughter gets a clearly drunk male visitor around midnight.

"Oh hi Hayato," said Yui, trying to act scandalously casual. "Come on in."

Yui's mother walked away as Hayato walked to her room, his slow and careful steps telling sagas. He got to the room and shut the door behind him. "Man, Yui, I don't know why you listen to this crap. It's just some losers with second-hand instruments making as much noise as possible. That's not even music."

"Well, I'm sorry that it offends you," she said, switching the stereo off. By the time she had turned around Hayato had draped his coat over her desk chair and sat down on the edge of her bed.

"So yeah, I guess I just came to say you were right. I'm never gonna be with Natsumi. She's a fucking dyke, just like you always said, and the only person in the world she cares about is that bitch Sakura."

"She's not that bad," Yui said. "You can't really blame a person for not liking you."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

Yui held up her hands defensively. "Just that people are gonna be attracted to who they're attracted to, and there's not much you can do about it. You in the general, not you in the specific. Not an insult."

"Thanks," Hayato said bitterly. He stood up off the bed and stepped closer to Yui. Another step closer, and now he was almost touching her. "You know, I've been a dumbass. Chasing after some dyke all this time when there's a perfectly good girl right in front of me. You know what I mean?"

"I... I..."

Hayato pressed his lips to Yui's. The kiss was forceful and tasted of booze and someone else's lipstick. It was what Yui had wanted for a long time, but now it just felt wrong, vulgar and sloppy. It took her a moment to work up the will, but when she did she reached up to push Hayato away. He stumbled on a stray piece of dirty laundry and wound up sprawled on his ass, looking up at Yui in confusion.

"Geez, I guess I was pretty dumb to think at least one girl liked me."

"No, no..." Yui muttered. She reached down to offer him a hand up. "It's just... I don't want to be your consolation prize. When you come to me... if you come to me... I want it to be because of me, not because Natsumi rejected you and you're drunk and want to piss her off or want to get laid or something like that."

Hayato got to his shaky feet. He looked like he didn't understand.

"Look," said Yui. "Call me tomorrow, once you've sobered up. If you're still interested, we'll grab drinks. Capiche?"

Hayato nodded slowly. Geez, he really was drunk. Yui opened her bedroom door and led him outside. "Are you okay getting home?" she asked.

"Yeah," said Hayato in a barely comprehensible slur. "Look, I'm sorry about everything."

After he left, Yui's mother turned to her with a raised eyebrow. "And what was that all about?"

"Just another heart I had to break." Yui ruffled her hair mockingly. "It's not easy being me."

--

Terry looked over at the page he had just finished. It was going well -- the drawings were getting to be a matter of instinct, and the story, which had started out as some vague misty lump in his mind, was starting to turn into something that might have an end. He thought he could wrap it up in the next issue, draw all his plot threads together and turn this from a series of wandering pornographic vignettes into a true novel.




Tokyo Symphony Ch. 05



It was a strange way to fame, but he thought it could work. After all, some of the big names in manga had made their start on doujinshi. He was sure that he could claw his way from the gutter.

The sky outside was starting to turn orange, and the sun was the shade of eager lipstick. He had agreed to meet up with Mika tonight. He would pick her up at her apartment, go see a movie or something, and then hopefully go back to his place or her place for some more mind-blowing sex. There had been a long sluggish period in his life, but it seemed like finally things were coming together.

Naomichi was in the kitchen, watching a cup of instant ramen slowly rotate inside the microwave. "Hey," he said, raising a hand in greeting and quickly letting it flop back down.

"Hey." This was where most of their conversations ended.

"So Erika says that she knows this guy in manga publishing." Naomichi said, still raptly watching his dinner being irradiated. "Runs some shoujo magazine. I forget the name."

Terry was surprised that his roommate appeared to be making conversation. "Oh yeah? That's cool."

"She said that she showed him your stuff and he was pretty impressed. Got you an interview for, uh, next Thursday? Yeah, I think that was it. It's on a note on the table."

Terry was having a hard time keeping all of this straight. "Shouldn't she have told me all of this stuff and not you?" Naomichi shrugged. Oh well. Terry was used to dealing with people with weird social complexes. And hey, this was a shot at real, legitimate publication. Just another thing that was finally paying off

Even the subway ride over, a long journey through a tunnel of annoyance and collision, couldn't let him down. It was as if the other people with their too-loud conversations, the filth of the car floor and the annoying ads all faded away from his mind and instead there was only him and Mika, the two of them dancing a waltz around the big city that had been laid out entirely for their benefit.

He was humming a tune that he couldn't quite identify as he headed into Mika's apartment building. It clashed quite badly with the rattle of the elevator, but he didn't mind.

Terry knocked on her door. No response. A second knock, and still nothing. He checked his watch. It was the time she had said in the e-mail. Unless maybe he had got the date wrong? No, that couldn't be it. A third knock finally yielded a muffled shout. Well, he would take that as an invitation.

The door was unlocked. Inside the apartment was dark, so dark Terry's eyes couldn't adjust. He groped along the wall and finally found a switch to flick. The ceiling light flickered before transforming into a solid glow that illuminated the whole room in painful detail. It illuminated Mika looking like a coat someone had thrown on the couch, her body gooey and covered in sweat. It illuminated the empty syringe laying on the floor and the twine still tied around her bicep.

"Mika?" Terry said, as if hoping this wasn't actually her. "Are you okay?" The girl on the couch turned to look at him without lifting her head. Her face was impossible to read.

Terry rushed over to her, climbing onto the couch. He had to help her. He had to help her, just like the first time on that sidewalk. No time to think about what might have been in the needle, no time to judge her. He grabbed her by the arm. "Mika, talk to--"

Her other hand collided with his cheek in a resounding slap. "Don't touch me!"

Her arm fell limp. He was silent. They were both silent for a long time. The only sound was the traffic pumping by steadily outside.

Mika raised her head, sweat-soaked tresses falling down around her shoulders. "Do you know how modelling works? How the filthy perverted shit I do works? The photographers, the agents, everyone... they all want to sample the product. Because that's what I am, a product. I tried saying no at first. They didn't listen. Some of them did it in my ass, and it hurt like hell and I had to see the doctor afterwards because I was shitting blood for a weak and they didn't care about me at all, not even when I was crying and pleading with them to stop. And you know what, Terry? You know what, Taro fucking Ozaki? They all wanted to fuck my tits. They all wanted to come on my face."

Terry felt like he should say something, although the air was so thick around them he didn't know whether his lungs would work. "Mika... I'm so sorry. You should have said--"

"Shut the fuck up!" The volume of her own yell made me her cringe. "Guess what? I'm not one of the girls in your comics. I'm not this perfect little pile of flesh you can project your fantasies onto."

"I never thought--"

Mika would not be interrupted. "Well, look what you've got instead. A junkie slut who's been jacked off to by every web-surfer in the country. Just another crate of damaged goods." She looked down at the spotless floor of her apartment. She was beginning to cry.

Terry reached out to put an arm around her, but she smacked him away. He wanted to explain how wrong she was about him, how he genuinely cared for her, but he wasn't sure he could convince himself right now. He wasn't sure he could speak in his native tongue, let alone a foreign one. So silence reigned again.

Mika looked up at him, as though he was a bug that she had already swatted. "Get out already," she growled. Terry got to his feet and stumbled out the door.

He stood there in the hallway for a minute, wondering if she would open the door and apologize, rush out for the tearful reunion like this was some kind of bad rom-com. But there was nothing. She was probably just back to laying in an opiated puddle in there. His eyes stung as he stabbed the elevator's down button with one finger.

It wasn't fair, Terry thought petulantly. She had never told him any of these things, her insecurities, her weaknesses. She had gone along with everything, with a smile at least. Hell, she was the one who had initiated things the first time, dropping to her knees in his room what seemed like forever ago. If he had thought of her as a Barbie doll with working genitals, it had only been because that was what she presented herself as. And now she was blaming him for not psychically sensing her distress?

He began to tremble with sadness and rage. Just a few moments ago it had seemed like the world was a place where fantasies came true, but now he knew that those fantasies were shooting up in the backroom. It was like the rushing feeling of shame and disillusionment that came right after he masturbated, except intensified ten -- no, a hundredfold. He suddenly became convinced that he wouldn't get a job with that publisher, that School Hearts would never be recognized as anything but another drop in the sea of doujinshi, that he would continue to be a lonely smut peddler until he was forced to give up the dream and go back to America with his head hung.

The world wasn't the soft-focus fleshland of hentai manga. The world was a rotating sphere of dogshit that brought you up only to bring you crashing back down again.

He knew the ending to School Hearts now.

--

Natsumi's parents were gone to one of their resort weekends where they could drool over each other and have gross sex in Kyushu or Hokkaido or wherever it is they were this time. This left her on her own to practise her home cooking skills. Outside, it had just started to rain, but it was coming down pretty fast -- one of those sudden showers that soaked the city and then vanished before the hour was up. She was meditating on a pot full of rice, hoping it wouldn't burn like last time, when there was a knock at the door. Humming a tune, Natsume walked over to answer it.

It was Sakura. She was still dressed in her school uniform, dirty and wrinkled, and her entire body was soaked from the rain. She looked up at Natsume and shuddered. The skin around her eyes was raw like a recently carved canyon. She had been crying.

"Sakura..."

"He's gone," she said, barely more than a whisper. "Went back to America. Said his rent was up, his visa was gonna expire, blah blah blah."

Natsume pulled her friend to her and into a big hug. A part of her got a guilty thrill from the cold and wet body against her, Sakura's breasts straining against the weakened material of her shirt.

"He couldn't even tell me to my face." She was crying again. "I was just halfway to his place to see him, to surprise him, when he sent me a text saying that he was on a plane."

"Asshole."

Sakura shook her head. "I love him. I'm sure he'll be coming back."

"Listen, Sakura, it's just a dumb crush. You'll get over it. You'll get over him. A year from now we'll look back at this and laugh." Natsumi realized that she sounded like a mom, and not a terribly convincing one either. After all, how could she say that with any degree of genuineness when she was still holding onto her own dumb crush and was sure it would last forever?

Sakura moved past Natsumi and collapsed on the nearest available surface, which happened to be the family couch. She stared down at the coffee table. "God, you know, I had this big fight with my Mom. She said I was grounded for like a year for disappearing for a week, but I left again anyway this afternoon, just to go be with Ryan. God, I'm an idiot."

"You're not an idiot," Natsumi said. She sat down and wrapped her arm around Sakura. It was like talking to a brick wall.

"I can't go back there. I don't have anywhere to go. Do you--"

Sakura had turned to Natsumi to plead for a place to stay, but at that moment Natsumi had leaned forward and kissed her. It was the most spontaneous thing she had ever done.

Sakura's eyes rendered nothing but blind suprise, wide and bewildered. Natsumi kept her lips pressed to her friends', feeling vaguely that if she released them there would be hell to pay. Eventually Sakura's body softened under her, becoming accepting, and she was just slightly -- could Natsumi just be imagining it? -- moving into the kiss.

Natsumi grabbed the back of Sakura's head, that long black hair she had helped truss up before parties, and held the girl closer to her. Sakura's lips parted just a sliver and Natsumi shot her tongue in desperately. And then the two girls were prone on the couch, making out in earnest, and Sakura was discovering how thin the difference was between the lips of a boy and a girl.

They were both running their hands along one another, Natsumi able to feel the goosebumps in Sakura's skin through her wet white uniform shirt. She felt desperate to do it all at once, to seize this possibly evanescent chance and take every liberty she could imagine with the nubile body before her, damn the consequences. It was with that in mind that Natsumi pulled her tongue out of Sakura's mouth only to fasten it on Sakura's neck at the same time her hands began to undo her top.

The wet material stubbornly resisted being removed, but between the two of them they made it work. Sakura hadn't worn underwear, maybe as an attempt to arouse Bradshaw, so her breasts just stood there, high, proud and speckled with dew. Natsumi put her face to them and drank it all in, the rain and the sweat and the chilled flesh of her best friend. Her tits looked just like she had imagined them. Not that there had been much imagining to do, all those gym classes where Natsumi had dared to peak out of the corner of her eye at an oblivious Sakura, those sleep-over parties where she had had to excuse herself to the bathroom to frantically rub herself to climax, so enflamed was she by the other girl's casual undress... God, she had been waiting for this for a long time.

She kissed Sakura over and over again on her breasts, on those cherry-coloured nipples forming into hard breasts, on the perfect roundness of that curving skin, on that heavenly valley between them. Sakura was simply lying back and clawing at the couch, taking in the sensation.

Natsumi moved downward, compelled by strange gravitation. With one smooth motion she pulled the rolled-up schoolgirl skirt down past her thighs, then her knees, and then past her ankles and into the air, where it sailed away and landed onto the lamp. And then those long slender legs opened up for her, knowing the steps even with a strange partner. Natsumi felt like she should take her time, suckle toes and kiss her way up thighs, but in the end her willpower gave out and she simply dived in for the soft pink treasure that was right in front of her.

Sakura's pussy tasted different from how she had imagined it. Not bad, just different. And with that first suckle of juices was the amazing realization that she was actually eating out Sakura, that one of her hundreds of near-identical fantasies had crossed over the boarder to the real world, and that body Natsumi had covertly ogled for so long was now spread out before her and longing for her touch. It all felt too good to be true, but she wasn't about to pinch herself.

Despite having watched a copious amount of lesbian porn, Natsumi actually a novice to the art of cunnulignus. She was, in fact, a virgin. So having fastened her upper lips to Sakura's lower ones, she wasn't really sure what to do next. In the videos this part was usually blocked off by the head of the, er, diner.

Natsumi took an experimental lick. The taste was a little salty, although she couldn't really compare it to anything else. She licked again, and Sakura shuddered in response. She ran her tongue along the pink folds of Sakura's pussy, licking up the glistening moisture. She soon fell into a steady rhythm, responding almost automatically to Sakura's body. Her world contracted to those pale thighs, and her mind could only focus on bringing her friend pleasure.

Sakura's clit sprang up, hardened and desperate. Natsumi licked it once and the other girl seized up, her body going entirely stiff. She decided to take that as a good sign and focused on the rosebud, while her fingers traipsed a past around Sakura's pussy. She was bucking against her and breathing hard, her body out of her control.

When Natsumi drove a finger into Sakura's pussy at the same time as one last flicker of her tongue on the girl's clit, Sakura let out a startled yelp and grabbed the cushions as her body was wracked by what Natsumi thought (or at least hoped) was one hell of an orgasm.

It took a minute, but eventually it seemed like Sakura had stopped cumming. Natsumi crawled up the length of the couch again and planted a kiss on her best friend's cheek. She was still slightly in a state of shock that this had actually happened, but for now she was managing to restrain herself from jumping up and down and doing a cartwheel in the kitchen. She hadn't even realized that she was still fully clothed even as Sakura lay nude before her.

In the few minutes of silence punctuated only by their breathing Natsumi began imagining a life together with Sakura. It was a lot like their old life, but difference: they would go clothes shopping like always, but duck into the change rooms to make out periodically; they would take the train to college hand in hand, damn what anyone else thought; they would go to parties just to turn down boys, laugh at them, and go home to fuck each other time and time again. She was sure it would be glorious.

All the same, she was slightly surprised to discover hot tears on her face. At first Natsumi thought she was the one that was crying, but when she opened her eyes she discovered it was Sakura, now shuddering for a completely different reason. Natsumi wasn't sure how to respond. Was she one of those people who cry after sex? She just put her hand on Sakura's cheek and tried to wipe away the tears.

"Natsumi... why..." Sakura gestured down to her glistening nakedness, not quite able to speak the question out loud.

"I love you," Natsumi said. The words came easier than she would have thought. "I've always loved you, Sakura."

Sakura smiled, although there was a strange tinge of bitterness to the grin. "All this time, I thought you were the one person who didn't want to fuck me." Natsumi didn't know how to respond to that.

Sakura rolled over and started putting her clothes back on. She stood up and tried to smooth out the wrinkles in her skirt. Natsumi reached out for her hand, which jerked just out of her grasp. "Don't go. Please." She felt like if Sakura went this whole moment would vanish like a soap bubble, and it would have never happened. Plus, underneath all of her emotional turmoil she was now the horniest she had ever been in her life, and was hoping Sakura would reciprocate.

Sakura didn't respond, just walked towards the door. Natsumi wanted to jump at her, to hold onto her and prevent escape, but she seemed so far away. And then she was out the door, leaving the room still and quiet.

A second later Natsumi found her feet and started to run after her friend. The elevator was already engaged, going down. She instead ran to the stairs and started running down as fast as she could. She was five floors up.

She knew it wasn't going to work. When she got to the lobby, the elevator was still once more, and Sakura was nowhere to be seen. All she had done was exhausted her out-of-shape body.

When she got back up to her apartment Natsumi smelt smoke. In all the excitement her rice had quietly burnt. "Shit!" She rushed over and yanked the pot of the stove, but the damage was already done, and black specks of what was once food were clinging doggedly to the pot's interior.

--

Sakura had took the train out to Odaiba, more out of instinct than any conscious decision. It was late now, so the families and tourists had mostly thinned out, leaving a hulking pack of deserted tourist attractions. The hulking ferris wheel still glowed its sickly-sweet colours. Sakura remembered being a kid and being shocked that anything could be so big. She refused to ride it, trembling at the sheer size. The replica Statue of Liberty, a cockeyed younger sibling of the American icon, was another thing that flabbergasted her with its hugeness. Now they just seemed ungainly and a little sad, overgrown hunchbacks who clumsy hands belied their gentle souls.

She walked over to the artificial beach and sat down there. Swimming was forbidden, but there was no one around. Like everything else around her, it boasted of so much but was ultimately so ordinary and frail.

It wasn't that she wished she could be a kid again. Sakura had never believed that ignorance was bliss. Even if she could regain those childish illusions, that superheroes were real and grown-ups could be and do whatever they wanted and people could care about her for reasons other than wanting to fuck her -- even if she managed to believe those again, the illusions would still be punctured eventually.

What had happened was that Sakura had written a book of her life. It very much resembled the paperback romances she loved. In it there was a young but confident student, and a moral but attracted teacher, and the wise-cracking helpful best friend, and there would be complications of course -- what plot doesn't have those? -- but they would end up together in the end. The hero would never just vanish with only a text message of explanation. Sakura looked at that book, that ink that looked so solid hours ago, and it was just blank pages. You have to understand, she was never very good at coming up with endings.

Sakura walked into the water, heedless of the signs. As she got further in the water flowed up and underneath her skirt, pushing it up until it hung around her waist like a fin. She kept walking.



Tokyo Symphony Ch. 06



The shoujo magazine's office was a world removed from the cramped bedrooms and convention halls that Terry associated with comic production. It was on the eighteenth floor of a towering dark green office building, and staffed by the same army of cubicle-dwelling salarymen as all of the other businesses. As he passed by their workstations he noticed that every one seemed identical: computer and phone in exactly the same spot, pictures of families that all looked the same all facing at the exact same angle, and a half-finished cup of coffee sitting like an old grudge. He shivered. He supposed that these were the people in sales or finance or something along those lines – surely all of the artists were at home drawing their asses off.

He waited in a posh modern-looking room that was, despite the decor, still a waiting room. The secretary did manage to sound genuinely sorry for the delay. Terry was a little impressed.

Finally she answered the phone, listened to it in silence, and nodded to him. A lanky young woman (the previous applicant, perhaps) exited the office and Terry went in.

The editor was an old man with a rough beard and an expensive suit. The expression of surprise on his face when Terry walked in made the artist's heart sink inside his body. Clearly Erica hadn't mentioned that this artist friend of hers had happened to be a gaijin. Terry sat down anways, although he wasn't hopeful.

"Well, mister..." The old man checked a sheet. "...Ozaki..."

"It's a pen name," Terry said.

"Clearly. Well, not to worry, you'd be using a female pen name if you got hired anyway." He pulled a stack of papers out of a manilla envelope. Terry could see that it was a bunch of pages from School Hearts, ripped out of the doujinshi seemingly at random.

"Um, I have other sketches if you want to see them." He dug into his bag and produced a folder of carefully rendered, decidedly PG sketches. He realized that his hands were shaking and desperately willed them to stop, but the rebellious appendages just kept quivering.

The old man (presumably some sort of editor) took the papers and gave them the same placid, unreadable glance that he had the more explicit drawings. "Do you understand the job you're applying for, Mister Ozaki?"

"Well, as I said, uh, actually I didn't say but I should have, my real name is Terry Osmond. You can call me Terry, er, if you want. And Naomichi – Erika's friend, well I guess I'm her friend too, well he didn't say much about it."

"We're launching a new series. It's a magical girl story aimed at seven to nine year olds. We've already signed on a writer and editor who are working on hammering out the specifics. We also have some preliminary character designs here."

This time it was the old man offering him a sheet of paper, on which were stencilled an army of generic-looking big-eyed little girls. It was enough to make Terry want to puke, but he held his tongue. He could work on this, but it wouldn't be a labour of love, that was for sure. Still, it would be nice to have a real job.

"Well, I have to say that my previous work wasn't exactly pitched at that audience," Terry said with a chuckle. The man didn't laugh. Terry adjusted his tie nervously.

"Yes, I can see that. This is... well, I like your art style, although it'll need to be shifted a bit more towards the house style if you do end up doing this. And you have some grasp on anatomy, which is more than I can say for most manga artists nowadays."

"Thank you," Terry said, carefully inspecting his shoes.

The interviewer returned his gaze to the School Hearts pages. "I have to say, it's a shame that an artist of your calibre is reduced to drawing pornography."

"I don't think of it like that."

"What do you mean?"

Terry had just blurted the last part out, and now he had to explain it. Great. "Well, it's like, hentai is just a genre right? Like, you have shounen comics and they're centred around fight scenes, and you have shoujo and they're centred around romance and angst and you have hentai and it's centred around sex. In all of that you have to give the people what they want while structuring it into some kind of narrative that makes it feel worthwhile."

"So you're saying that what our magazine publishes is just like..." He rapped a page of Sakura in explosive climax with his fingertips. "...this."

"No, I'm saying that maybe it should be." Terry realized he was digging himself into a deeper hole, and threw his hands up in a "stop" motion. "I mean, I'm not saying that your comics, need to be closer to hentai, I'm just saying that hentai needs to me more like mainstream comics... I mean, you know, not just trying to be something you masturbate to, but having a story and characters as well as that more visceral appeal. That's what I'm trying to do with School Hearts."

"I see." The old man kept staring at that page, Sakura's hard-nippled breasts jutting out, her head twisted back in a scream of primal ecstacy. "Let me ask you a question, then. Do you honestly think anyone would read this, would care about this, if it didn't have the sex? Would you?"

Terry saw his point. Take out the extensive sex scenes and the screaming climaxes and all you had was a fairly banal romantic drama, not to mention a much shorter work. "Well, I would hope so." But in his heart he knew that sex was still the draw of his comic, not the characters and certainly not the story. He had hitched his pornography to a cheap storyline, and maybe that did make it better, make the sex scenes more effective – but it didn't make it the art he had convinced himself it was.

He suddenly thought of Mika, slurring her screams at him, babbling about him treating her like a blow-up doll. It wasn't that he hadn't thought she had a personality. But maybe he had been thinking of her like one of the girls in his comics, where the personality was an accessory to augment their hotness, everything ultimately subservient to the sex.

"Well, fortunately we're not looking to hire you on as a writer." The old man gave him the kind of grin that always accompanied backhand insults. "Anyway, we'll be in touch."

Terry walked out of the door, his head spinning. He was trying to convince himself that the old man whose name he had never learned was wrong, that School Hearts was genuinely worthwhile as more than just titillation, but somehow it didn't work.

--

At first no one was worried. Sakura had vanished before, and everyone was sure she had just ran off to be with Ryan or some other boy she had now become obsesed with. Only Natsumi, having seen that terrible look in Sakura's eyes as she left the apartment, clothes wrinkled and body sticky, had a suspicion that things might not turn out well this time.

They found her body two days later, washed up on the shore of one of Odaiba's artificial beaches. She looked hideous in death, her body bloated with water, her clothes half torn away by the force of the surf. Her waterlogged eyes stared blankly up at the cloudy sky. The coroner said it was a drowning, and declined to speculate as to how it happened. Everyone knew it though.

Her parents held a small ceremony. Natsumi attended and wept the whole way through. She wasn't so much crying for Sakura, who was gone and could not be hurt any more, but for herself, who knew she had drowned the girl as much as if she had held her underwater herself. How could be so stupid, taking her vulnerable and betrayed best friend and thinking only of sex, thinking only of her stupid dyke crush and not what Sakura needed right then?

Natsumi's cell phone hummed with messages of commiseration – Hayato, Yui, Rin... she didn't respond to any of them. What was there to say?

--

It was three long, excruciating days of satying by a telephone, hoping against hope that he was going to get the call. In those three days every cup of instant ramen seemed cheaper, the apartment walls looked to be closing in on him, and his wallet felt constantly lighter. As the money and stability of an actual legitimate industry job were jerked farther and farther away Terry desired them more and more.

In the meantime he tried to start on the sixth chapter of School Hearts, which he had decided would be the last. He could keep the story going on indefinitely, throwing in another new character or love complication every once in a while, but what would be the point? Better to wrap things up and move onto something that didn't completely suck. But every page he tried to draw ended up in the trash-bin. His art, that basic grasp of anatomy that the old man had praised, was all skewed and the kids had hands and legs going off at weird angles and tits that looked like blobs of jelly and dicks that looked like dildos. And as far as the story went, he had no idea how to bring things to a satisfying end. In real life, of course, the story would end here – one character dead, another departed, the sacred love pentagon broken and its members cut adrift. In real life they would all be heartbroken for a couple months or years and then move on, finding new partners to obsess over and maybe marry and have a house in the suburbs and become office workers or whatever. But as an ending to a story, that didn't feel satisfying.

Terry wondered if maybe that should be the ending – the plot not wrapping up but just kind of dispersing. It would be realistic. But then again, what about the comic had ever been realistic? The girls didn't look realistic. The melodrama wasn't realistic. It would be like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping chest wound.

He rolled over and looked at the published issues again. They were crap. Art-wise they barely rose above the standard half-assed manga style, and plot-wise they were a mess. He chucked the whole bunch into the recycling bin and staggered out to his kitchen. What were they going to do?

And there in the kitchen was Erika Otsuka, heading out of Naomichi's room, buttoning up her shirt. She flushed and stared at the floor. "Uh... hi."

Terry blinked several times. "Uh... hi."

The second Erika slid her top button into place she grabbed her purse and rushed towards the door like it was an oasis in the desert. "Uh, bye. Nice seeing you."

Curious, Terry poked his head into Naomichi's room. He was lying on his bed shirtless and staring up in wonderment. Naomichi's unclothed torso was certainly not easy on the eyes, but there was a kind of poetic beauty to the scene anyway.

"You dog," Terry said.

"My friend, I've seen heaven."

And that was when Terry realized it. He had always viewed Naomichi as a supporting character, the comic relief in his life, the schlub that made him stand out as truly unusual, especially for his profession. But there was a story with Naomichi at its centre too, a story of long loneliness followed by unexpected romance and the joyous embrace of mutual nerdery. And he had been too self-involved to even notice it was going on.

But then again, every one of the millions in Tokyo, of the billions around the world, were the star of a story, a narrative every bit as worthwhile as anyone else's. It was a simple, almost banal epiphany, but he thought that maybe the world would be a better place if people started paying attention to others' stories, realized that they may only be another supporting character. Like another in a long line of perverted, uncaring boyfriends.

"I... I have to go write," Terry said.

Naomichi scratched his head, looking embarassed. "Sorry... I'll get dressed."

Terry was already in his room, tearing through his papers. This was the core of the story, he was sure – all these characters completely unaware of each other, thinking of them as only bit parts in their grand narratives. But how to write a story that didn't ultimately reaffirm that idea, a story that openly stated it was no more important than any other story? How to write the story of an entire city, an entire world, at once?

That was probably beyond his calibre right now. But he would at least finish School Hearts. Because he knew that it was cruel to leave any story incomplete. And now he knew the ending, or at least an ending.

--

It was another weekend, another party, another vacant house or apartment. It was the same people as always, gyrating and chatting and drinking. Yui was in the midst of it all, taking everything she could. Usually she stayed somewhat sober, but tonight she had never met a drink, drug, or boy that she didn't like. At the moment she was trying to decide if she should raid the medicine cabinet that gleamed enticingly in the bathroom.

Because it all seemed so far away, that crazy manic energy of infinite possibility that always used to the accompany these parties, these celebrations of immortality that they held weekly at the least. The more she desperately strove for that kind of joy, the more it slunk away, sliding through her fingers like a lump of slime.

She had heard of Sakura's death secondhand. It had travelled down the rumour mill like every break-up or infidelity or other stupid teenage crap they cared about for some reason. Still, Yui felt like she shouldn't be too depressed. It was a sordid story, for sure, but it wasn't like she had really known Sakura. A friend of a friend, a crush of a crush of a crush. So why did she feel so out of sorts?

Maybe she had just taken some bad combination of intoxicants. Her stomach lurched and she rushed towards the bathroom, shoving her way through clumps of sweaty revellers. After emptying her guts, she felt a little more clear-headed but even more miserable.

Yui flushed the toilet, rinsed the vomit taste out of her mouth, and checked herself in the mirror. She looked like a wreck. She was covered in sweat, there were heavy bags beneath her bloodshot eyes, and her roots were showing beneath her elaborately dyed hair. Her clothes were wrinkled and dishevelled. God, she looked like a homeless person.

There was an angry pounding at the bathroom door. Yui sighed and opened it, letting the next person rush in, clutching his stomach. A line had already built up for the toilet. She was about to head back into the throng searching for happy abandon again, but then she noticed who was at the end of the line. It was Natsumi with a half-full beer bottle clutched in her hand.

"Hey," Yui said, offering a half-hearted wave. "I, uh, heard about your friend. I'm really sorry."

Natsumi shrugged. "What are you sorry for?"

"Well, I mean to say that I feel bad about it. I know how you, er, felt about her. How are you holding up?"

The look in her eyes was eviscerating. "How do you think I'm holding up?"

"Right, uh, stupid question." Yui was at the rockiness of the conversation. "Look, do you want to talk about it? I can't say I'm good at many things, but I like to think I'm a good listener."

"Not really. Everyone wants to talk to me about it. God, I wish they would just leave me alone." Apparently forgetting her pressing business in the bathroom, Natsumi turned to storm off.

Yui reached out and grabbed her by the arm. Natsumi whirled around, ready to strike. "Okay, okay, you do what you want, but just remember that you have friends. And you don't have to go through this alone."

"You're not my friend," Natsumi said under her alcohol-laden breath.

"Well if you want me to be, I will."

Natsumi looked slightly perplexed at the idea, but then nodded before heading away and disappearing into the crowd. Yui sighed. The hollow feeling of the party that raged around her wasn't going away. Everyone else had genuine smiles on their face. They were happy, so why wasn't she?

Yui pushed her way to the kitchen in search of more booze.

--

When she woke up the next morning it felt like a railroad spike had split her head open. She bolted upright, clutching at her sweat-drenched bangs. Her stomach made her regret the sudden movement. Yui looked around. It was hard to tell, with a dim darknesss clinging to the borders of her perception, but this didn't look like her room.

She spent entirely too long groping for a bathroom whose location she did not know. When she found it she flung herself at the toilet bowl in relief and emptied her body of all its various fluids through all available orifices. She felt a little bit better. Now, to find out where she was.

"Hey," a familiar voice said, somewhere from the world beyond the bathroom door. "Are you okay, Yui?"

She managed to get to her feet and open the door. Hayato was standing there, dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. "What are you doing here?" she said.

"I live here."

"Oh!" Yui looked around the apartment. She couldn't remember ever going to Hayato's before. It was always a question of luring him out to some den of sin, not staying home and chilling out. "How, uh, did I get here?"

"Uh, you showed up on my doorstep last night drunk as fuck and muttering something about Natsumi and a lame party. My dad's on a business trip, so I let you crash in his room."

Yui blushed. She had always thought that she had more self-control than that, that she would never be unable to remember the events of a previous night. But no matter how hard she pushed her beleaguered brain, she couldn't make it past that conversation with Natsumi -- every attempt to reach beyond that resulted in a pulse of pain. She guessed she was turning into a regular shit-show after all. "I'm really sorry. I had way too much..."

"Don't worry about it." Hayato shrugged. "I did the same to you a little while ago, so it's only fair." God, he looked so cute like that. How could someone who looked so plain, such a peaceful law-abiding citizen, be so attractive despite – no, because of that plainness?

Yui massaged her forehead, feeling the mother of all headaches coming on. "I don't even know how I got here. Like, I don't even know your address."

"I'm sure I must have told it to you once," said Hayato. "Or maybe it was just your drunken intuition. Anyway, I'm mixing up some hangover cure for you. It's my secret recipe."

Yui said nothing, just contemplated the swimming patterns on Hayato's walls. Did she have anything left in her to vomit?

"I have to make these for my dad all the time," Hayato said. "I don't know who drinks harder – teenagers or salarymen."

Five minutes later Yui was gulping down the fowl concoction formed by Hayato's secret recipe. The secret recipe seemed to be grabbing random items from the fridge and cupboard and tossing them in a blender. Well, it was a recipe designed for a drunk person to follow, she supposed. By holding her nose she was able to choke it down. Well, she did feel a little less hung over, if only because the vileness on her taste buds distracted her from other sensations.

"Thanks," Yui said. She realized she had reached out and was holding Hayato's hand. "I can't believe I blacked out... I mean, I don't even remember coming here. I guess maybe I need to cut back."

Hayato shrugged. "Well, uh, it's your life. But that might be a good idea."

"Thank you so much for taking care of me. I mean, it was a lot more kindness than I showed you in the same situation. You're a good guy, Hayato."

"It wasn't the same situation. I was acting like an asshole."

His hand was stroking her hair, feeling it's hard edges, comforting like a child but also undeniably a bit like a lover. And then maybe it was the sorrow or maybe it was the left over booze but he leaned in and kissed her on the lips. They stood there, silent, in that kitchen for a short but eternal moment, taking in that warm soft feeling of flesh on flesh.

Hayato broke off from her. "Jeez, that really does taste like shit."

Yui laughed. "Hang on, I'll get rid of it." All of the queasiness and bitterness was gone, and all she wanted to do was get his arms back around her. She quick-stepped to the sink and rinsed her mouth out with a glass of water, then rushed back to Hayato.




Tokyo Symphony Ch. 06



She slung her arms around his shoulders like a sleazy boyfriend. "Now where were we?"

He seemed hesitant this time, but she leaned in nonetheless, taking another sample of his lips. They kissed repeatedly, light butterly kisses, chaste first-boyfriend kisses that were somehow enough for them.

"Look, I don't know if this is a good idea..." said Hayato, breaking away from her.

Yui backed him up against a cupboard. There bodies were now pressed together, and she could feel a reluctant hardness straining against his boxers. "I think it's a fucking great idea."

"I don't love you."

It was brutal, as it was meant to be, but for some reason Yui didn't feel that hurt. "Look, what do you think love is? Is love just that weird heart palpitation you get when you see a cute girl and she smiles at you, and then you start obsessing over her? Is it some romantic crap about sacrificing yourself, about living entirely for your beloved's sake. Because let me tell you, that's how I feel about you, and I honestly think it's a load of shit. I know a girl that walked into the ocean and drowned because of that kind of love."

"You know, talking about dead people isn't really a turn on."

"Sorry. But, I mean... look, we need each other. I need you to keep me sane and to hold my hair back while I vomit, you need me to get you out of the house and help you get over that poor lesbian. So what if it's not the plot to a fucking shuojo comic? I think the two of us being together would be a good idea."

Hayato smiled. He ran his hand along the back of her shoulder, feeling her taut skin pulsing underneath. "You make it sound like a business deal."

"Well, if that doesn't convince you, then there's always the fact that two attractive young people having great sex is never a bad proposition."

"How do you know it would be great sex?"

"I've just got a feeling." Yui cocked her head sideways with a bemused smirk on her face. "You want to test it out?"

Hayato surged forward and kissed her on the lips again. This was unlike the cautious meeting of lips moments ago – it was a wanton, hungry, desperate kiss. They backed up against the kitchen cupboards, their tongues surging into each others mouths, exploring every inch of the foreign orifice. The two tongues wrapped around each other as if trying to suck the taste out of the other one.

Still locked by their lips and their arms around each other, the two teenagers slowly began spinning, trying to get back to Hayato's room without stopping touching each other for a minute. They knocked over a couple things on the way, but they didn't care.

Hayato tossed Yui onto his bed, which was the romantic way of saying that they both tripped over a set of dirty jeans on the floor and he grabbed onto his nightstand for balance while she fell onto the bed harmlessly. Still, he could get used to the sight of her spread out before him. Her long legs, her breasts that were just a perfect handful, and that wanton, dirty look on her face... he could definitely go with this.

She was unbuttoning her shirt, revealing that Holy Grail of the pubescent male imagination. Her toned and tanned stomach gleaned in the light. Hayato walked towards the bed as in a trance. He sunk down onto her and then was kissing her shoulder, her collarbone, licking up around her neck. She threw her head back and let out a throaty moan as he continued to feed on her. The drunken haze was gone from her voice, replaced by a lusty velvet undertone.

Hayato pawed at her bra, and she obligingly showed him how to undo the front clasp. It snapped open to reveal her pert tits with cherry-red nipples. Hayato reached out experimentally to touch them. Their warmth surprised him. It was like there was a supernova buried in her ribs that was trying to burn its way out.

Feeling that he should reciprocate, Hayato tugged off his shirt, leaving him practically nude on the bed. He wasn't sure that girls really got off on seeing guys shirtless in the same way it was in reverse, but Yui certainly seemed appreciative as she shoved him down on his back and began licking his chest. She took one of his nipples in her mouth and treated and tormented it, licking the tip until it stood up tall and proud and then biting down on it just hard enough to hurt. She ran her hands along his thighs and fondled his boxer-wrapped crotch. He let out a surprisingly loud moan. He had never been treated like this before.

His few previous experiences had been all about the genitals. But Yui took her time, kissing and massaging parts of his body that he had never thought about sexually but were now sending bolts of pleasure coursing through his body. She smiled as he saw his reaction – his rapturous expression as he hung halfway off the bed, his body twitching with each move she made. He looked like such a wanton slut. When she tugged off his boxers, he offered no resistance, and his cock sprung up hard and red with impatience.

Yui took the same circuitous route, first licking his balls, then taking the twin sacks into her mouth one by one. She ran her tongue up the shaft, curling it around the tip, but not quite engulfing him yet. Hayato groaned with the pain of delayed ecstacy. Finally, when she thought he was good and ready, she slowly eased his stiff hard-on into her mouth.

That caused Hayato to sit straight up. There she was, his old tormentor and temptress Yui, with her lips wrapped around his cock, her multi-coloured hair bobbing up and down as she sucked his dick in and out. Her mouth was paradise, a warm and wet wonderland in which--

"Oh shit!" he yelled out. The orgasm came on him suddenly, and he belatedly tried to fight it, but there was nothing he could do. Hayato's hips thrust up into her mouth on their own and he felt his seed pumping out into the back of her throat. The orgasm was rapturous, but with it came a tinge of guilt and inadequacy. Yui didn't say anything. She just spat out the glob of cum from her mouth, letting it pool on the bedsheet. It was a message: look what you did, you filthy boy.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice feeling as weak as his knees. "I wanted to hold out, but..."

Yui pressed a shushing finger to his lips. "Oh no, I'm terribly offended because you came when I was blowing you. Relax, kid. We've got plenty of time to enjoy ourselves."

"I wish you wouldn't call me kid," said Hayato. "For the last time, we're the same age."

"My bad. So, old man, you ever ate a girl out before?"

"Um..." Now that Hayato thought about it, he hadn't. When he had had sex before it was all drunken one-night stands that skipped right to the main event, like the one with Sakura (he winced at the memory of her, like he had torn a bandage off roughly and prematurely.) His actual girlfriends were too nice and proper to go beyond a handjob. So as he shifted over to position his head between Yui's legs he was in completely foreign territory.

She had stripped off her jeans somewhere, probably when he was still in shock from his sudden orgasm, and now was clad in just a set of red panties that looked positively tiny on her curvy body. Taking a cue from her he kissed her thighs and rubbed them with his fingers before starting to peel off her last stitch of clothing.

Her pussy was moist and lightly carpeted by raven-black hair. For some reason he had expected it to be the same chemical red as the hair on her head, even though that was obviously a dyejob. He lowered his face down to kiss her nether lips and then slowly began licking. It was just, he thought, like making out.

Yui began bucking her hips up and down as his tongue ventured into her cunt. With one hand she held Hayato's hair, stopping him from escaping even if he watned to, while she strummed her clit with the other. Hayato batted the hands away and kissed her emerging clit before swirling his tongue around the little nub.

She lay back, clenching the sheets, letting strange little squeaks and moans – way more high-pitched than her normal voice – escape her body. Occasionally Yui would let out an instruction in between the gasps but the truth was that the kid was a natural. For a while it felt like she was just floating, being slowly encased in pleasure, and then she felt it building up in her body. Her torso was accumulating tension like a spring, and everytime she was sure it was about to burst it didn't, just built up more and more as Hayato kept licking, sucking, and fingering.

Insane with pleasure, she ran her hand over one of her engorged nipples, and that was all it took. She let out a soprano scream that was on the verge of breaking glass as her hips pumped furiously. It was raw, pure animal satisfaction. In that moment she forgot everything that had ever troubled her, because there was no trouble, just her and her body and this hot male body that was making her feel so good.

They lay with their heads on opposite ends of the bed for a little while, trying to catch their breath again. They didn't say anything, because speech was pointless right now. Both felt as though all they needed was a raw physical ritual, unmitigated pleasure as a way of defying the darkness that was invading their lives.

Yui noticed Hayato's dick returning to a semi-hard state. She grabbed ahold of it and gave a good experimental pump. It instantly stiffened until it was a hard tower pointing straight up at the ceiling. "Looks like someone's recovered."

"Maybe." Hayato offered her a shy smile. He ran a hand along her long leg, the onely thing he could really reach from where he was.

Yui sat up and slung a leg over the torso of Hayato, straddling him. She had produced a condom from somewhere – her purse, he guessed – and was rolling it onto his erection. "You ready for me, hot shot?"

"I think so."

She laughed before sitting up on her haunches. Her tits were dangling in his face, and he couldn't resist taking one between his lips and giving a quick suck. While he was thus preoccupied he didn't notice her shifting until he felt the wet heat of her cunt descending on his cock.

"Oh shit," he groaned. Mounting him confidently, Yui began riding him in earnest, bringing her hips down on his at a faster and faster rate. The feeling of her tight, electric pussy slamming down on his cock was astonishing. He could do nothing but grab onto her hips and enjoy the ride.

She arched up, her tits just standing there in the air, bouncing up and down in time with her thrusts. Hayato reached out and thumbed her clit as she rode him, making her gasp with pleasure. In it's own way hearing that gasp from Yui was as pleasurable as her pussy's hot tight grip on his cock.

He was used to seeing Yui dolled up in her own quasi-punk way, with mascara and blindingly red lipstick, her pale skin contrasting againsst her dark clothes. Now her skin was flushed and sweaty, her body nude and undisgusied with all its flaws – a small ring of fat, random patches of freckles – fully visible, her voice divested of her usual arrogant smoothness and transformed into harsh gasps and breathy pleadings for more, more, more... It was a different kind of beauty. It was real and human and inviting, not the cold perfect surface he was used to. He could never fall in love with the Yui that bit back witty remarks at him, but he could just maybe fall in love with the girl tossing her head back and crying out her pleasure in front of him, the joy mixing into strange tittering laughs. Of course, maybe that was just because she was riding his cock with the force of a hurricane.

Yui was slamming her hips down trying to fuck out every ounce of frustrated lust and unreturned affection that had built up over months and months but the more she poured out into him the more there was inside her, just looking at the rapturous expression of this beautiful boy with his skinny, lightly muscled torso and those soft, almost feminine features... God, she just wanted to take him home with her and keep him in her apartment as a fuck-slave for the rest of her days.

She paused for only a moment, her hips a little tired, and then he was slamming into her, rolling her hips back and forth on top of him. After letting Hayato drive for a while and revelling in the raw endorphin pulses Yui began her own thrusts again. The two of them worked in synchronicity, bodies colliding together with their two movements merging together into one giant force between them that threatened to blow them both apart.

"Oh fuck," Yui groaned. They were chest to chest, her tits rubbing against his pectorals with delicious friction. "I'm gonna come..."

"Me too..." Hayato had his face scrunched up, trying to restrain himself from another premature climax.

Yui exploded first, although you would need a stopwatch to tell. She began laughing uncontrollably as she climaxed, feather-light girlish giggles punctuated by sharp gasps. As her cunt clamped down on his cock Hayato shuddered his release, spraying his seed into the condom's tight embrace.

The two lay against each other for a long time, spasming and crying out, until eventually they regained control of their bodies. Even after that they were laying there feeling him deflating inside her and listening to each other's heavy breathing.

"So," Hayato said finally. "How was it?"

Yui grinned. That manic taunting side of her was back, and he guessed he could live with that too. "Not bad, not bad."

"Just a not bad? It sure looked like you were having fun."

"Yeah, but I have fun with my vibrator." She scanned his face to see if he was genuinely insulted, but he was still protected by post-sex bravado. "We've got a lot of time to improve on it."

He put his arm around her and hugged her body close to him. Next to what they had just done it seemed like nothing, but there was a hidden world of intimacy and trust inside the action. "So, there's gonna be an encore."

"Now that I've finally got you in my clutches?" Yui did an evil laugh. "You bet. But seriously, as long as we don't go overboard and start thinking we're living in a romance novel... I think this could work out."

Hayato nodded. He wasn't even sure what this practical romance idea of Yui's meant, but if it meant more moments like this, their bodies entwined in a state of pure comfort, he could go along with it. "I think things are going to work out too."

--

Natsumi's gut felt like a rock sitting hard in the centre of her body. She was there, at the apartment she had visited so many times before, but now things were different. Still, she decided to knock quickly, figuring that whatever was inside couldn't be worse than standing inside this border between good and bad memories.

Sakura's mother answered the door. Natsumi had never paid much attention to her, but she had Sakura's looks, put through the wringer of age. In another world, where everything had worked out the way she wanted it to, maybe a couple decades down the line she would come home to a woman who looked like this.

The mother embraced Natsumi desperately. Despite feeling a bit like she was being smothered, Natsumi returned the hug. "Thank you for coming. It's just been such a nightmare these past couple days, and we have no idea what to do..." There was, of course, no manual for how to bury your child.

Natsumi was there that day to sort through everything Sakura had left behind and figure out what to do with it. She had surgically removed her parents from her life like every teenager, living outside the house and behind locked bedroom doors. Now they found a room full of foreign objects and had to turn to someone else for expertise.

Most of it was junk – fashion mags and dime-store erotica, clothes that felt sacriligeous to save. There were a couple keepsakes that Natsumi dropped into her bag. She had a right to cling to objects like these, she reassured herself. She had a right to grieve, to not get over it.

Finally, she checked Sakura's computer. The password, predictably enough, was "bradshaw". She hadn't seen the teacher at the funeral – she wondered if he even knew. On the computer was the first real surprise. In a private file, concealed from the rest of the world, Sakura had been quite the writer. The computer was filled with poems, stories, and unfinished fragments of novels. She had told Natsumi once or twice about the book she was writing, about the gaijin hentai artist, but Natsumi had assumed that was just to impress Bradshaw. How had she missed an entire secret, creative life in the girl she had called her best friend and would have called her lover?

The work was of varying quality, but there was a certain magic to the words, Sakura's command of language, that had Natsumi tearing up a couple times. It wasn't just from what she was reading, but the ever-growing sense of loss – the loss of a girl who was so much more than even she had known.

And then, finally, there was Taro Ozaki. It was the longest thing Sakura had written, but it still ended abruptly, at the narrative's lowest point. The romance between the titular hentai artist and his ero-model girlfriend was in shambles, due to a confrontation involving heroin and titfucking. Some of the passages made Natsume's ears turn red, but she pressed on.

At the end was a simple blank page. Maybe Sakura had wanted to get to it later. It definitely seemed like the last few doom and gloom pages were composed in a rush, bearing an unusual number of spelling mistakes and run-on sentences. Maybe sometime during that fateful night she had floated back here to try and vent her grief onto the characters.

Natsume pulled up Sakura's rolling desk chair. She couldn't save Sakura – she had magnificently fumbled her one attempt to do so. But she could save Taro Ozaki. She could make sure at least one aspect of Sakura's life had a happy ending.

Natsume started writing.

--

And that was it. Taro removed his pen from the final page, a full-page spread of Natsume sitting in the midst of Sakura's abandoned room. It was ended. The ending wasn't that great but it was, after all this turmoil, finally over.

There was a sense of disbelief inside him, something that wanted and fully expected to move onto the next chapter. He had always had trouble with finality. When he was younger he had read shounen comics that went on forever, revelling in the fact that they could always be relied upon, that he would never run out of them. He guessed he had come to assume that School Hearts would now be a constant presence with him but, like everything else, it had ended.

Terry sighed. A kind of depression began to creep into his mind. He knew he needed to but the ending behind him and replace it with a beginning. He needed to start something new. But what?

What did he want to create?

The idea came to him like divine intervention. It was so perfect, he wondered why it hadn't been obvious. He grabbed his cell phone, found Mika's number with quick-moving fingers, and hit call. He desperately hoped she would answer. She had to answer. 

After three rings, there was the abrupt silence of a pick-up. "Mika?" The word rushed out of his mouth.

"Oh, hi Terry," said the silky but tired voice on the other end of the line. There was the sound of a man barking orders in the background. "I'm at a shoot so I can't stay long. I just want to say that I'm really sorry about the other night, I was out of my mind and..."

"No. You were right. I haven't been treating you like, you know, a person."

"I was high. You shouldn't pay attention to what I said then."

"Look, the thing is... I feel like I don't really know you. Like I know the surface you, but I think there's a lot of deeper stuff, and some of it isn't pleasant, but I want to explore it anyway. Even if it takes years. I'm willing to put the time in, or whatever you want me to do."

A long pause. "Is that all?"

"No." Terry realized that the back of his throat was sandpaper-dry. "I'm starting a new comic. It's going to be hentai, but it's going to be about a girl like you, and since I don't really know anything about you... I want you to write it."




Tokyo Symphony Ch. 06



"I'm not a very good writer."

"You don't have to be. Just... put yourself into it."

"I'll warn you, my memories aren't all that arousing. Well, actually, given what your readers are into..."

Terry laughed. "Don't worry about it. Look, I just... want to bring things back to reality. Something can be real and still erotic, don't you think?" He looked at the School Hearts books and pages that covered his desk. He was already thinking of that as a failed experiment, a work that had tried but failed to escape the gravity of the genre. But this would work. They would make it work. Together.

"Yes," said Mika. "I think it can."

FIN