Status Updates From Audition

‘Nice person, bad person – that’s not the level this girl is at. I can see you’re crazy about her and probably won’t be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you’d be better off staying away from someone like her. I can’t read her exactly, but I can tell you she’s either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between.’

‘What kind of books do you read?’
‘Foreign mysteries, mostly. Not any particular author, but . . . I haven’t done much travelling myself, so I love reading about foreign towns and cities. In mysteries and spy novels, you get very detailed descriptions of the streets and the buildings and so on, and I really enjoy that sort of thing.’

Aoyama was no stranger to auditions, having supervised a number of them for TV commercials and PR videos. Sitting in a studio, sizing up a row of fifteen or twenty swimsuit-clad hopefuls, he’d always found words like ‘slave trade’ and ‘auction block’ popping into his mind. Of course they weren’t slaves, but there was no denying that the women lined up on that little platform, posing in their bikinis,

I just happen to think that nothing gives a person self-confidence like being classically trained. A person without self-confidence is incapable of being independent, and people who are dependent on their partners always create unhappiness. Always.