there's a safety issue
;between planets and sweethearts
;One-shot
;Gen, with slight Ohno Satoshi/Ninomiya Kazunari
;Nino was here
;PG
;Starts as crack and ends as something else.
;One cookie to Johnny Kitagawa.
Nino disappears on a Saturday morning.
His manager leaves him no less than nineteen missed calls on his cellphone and three increasingly angry-sounding voicemails on his answering machine. After listening to Hi, this is Nino. Don’t bother leaving a message. I never check these. for the fourth time, she flips her cellphone shut with an ominous click. Then she flips it open again, and dials Ohno’s number.
Ohno lets himself into Nino’s apartment not with the key Nino had given him (because he’d misplaced it somewhere in his parents’ house) but with the spare key under the potted plant with the Doraemon sticker. He toes off his shoes and pads around the apartment in mismatched socks, peeping first into the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. The bed is already made, grey checkered sheets folded neatly over two white pillows, and a pair of over-washed boxers hangs over the heater. The bathroom looks the same as always; the shelf above the sink is uncluttered, save for a tub of Gatsby Moving Rubber with the Takuya Kimura label still attached and a cup holding a tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes, one for Nino and the other for Ohno (is his the orange one with the white stripe or the blue one with the transparent handle?) for when he stays over.
Ohno shuffles into the kitchen. The refrigerator is still running, and so is the coffee machine. He pours himself some coffee and peers into the fridge. There are four eggs, a Tupperware full of onigiri (courtesy of Mother Ninomiya, he thinks) and a bottle of Calpis that’s half full.
Then Ohno hears a shrill, mechanic tinkling and reaches for his cellphone before remembering that he had left it on silent mode. He turns around and notices, for the first time, the DS that’s sitting on the kitchen counter, next to a mug of coffee with steam still rising off the surface. He leans over the contraption and sees that Chrono Trigger is still on, at level 59, and the game is not paused. Ohno holds the DS in his hands for a while, tracing the well-worn buttons and the tiny scratch at the edge of the screen from when Aiba had borrowed it for “an experiment”. Then he takes out his cellphone and calls Sho.
“Morning, Captain!”
“Nino’s missing.”
--
The media goes crazy.
Ohno sees Nino’s face on every magazine cover and every television programme and hears his name every hour on the radio. Everyday, Sho steps into their dressing room with a bundle of newspapers tucked under his arm and holding a tray of coffee in the other and Jun heads straight for the newspapers instead of the coffee like he used to and Ohno reads the newspaper from cover to cover without checking the fishing column or the sports section.
He keeps seeing headlines like Arashi: Now A Four-Man Band? and Ninomiya Kazunari is MIA and he’d throw his head back and laugh, if only he knew whether he’d stop.
--
It happens when the four of them are stuck in some interview, and the interviewers have been going on and on about their latest single when it’s clear that what they really want to talk about is Nino and they are all so drained and exhausted and if they could just be left alone for just one minute perhaps they could look as though they’re enjoying their jobs again.
When one of the interviewers begins her question with “So, about Ninomiya…” for the third time in the past hour, Sho interjects her mid-question, uncharacteristically rude with his News Zero face, and says, “Nino’s in Albania, teaching the otters to lap dance before Aiba gets there to host his new variety show, fuck you very much.”
Fifteen minutes, two angry interviewers and one baffled crew later, the ten-second clip gets tossed onto the cutting room floor.
Twenty minutes later, the clip gets uploaded on YouTube.
Twenty-three minutes later, ‘Sakurai Sho Tells All’ receives its eight hundred and thirty-five thousand, two hundred and seventeenth hit and approximately two thousand six hundred five-star ratings.
The eight hundred and thirty-five thousand, two hundred and eighteenth hit opens up a new window that says This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Fuji Television Network, Inc.
(Somewhere between the fifth and the sixth hundred thousandth hit the video had been ripped and made available for download in both FLV and MP4 format.)
--
Management flies into the biggest uproar in nearly a decade. Sho spends most of his day with his arms plastered to his sides and his upper body bending at a ninety-degree angle, apologising to his shoes.
When Sho’s finally allowed to retire to the dressing room, back aching and shoulders more slumped than usual, Ohno tries to be a leader, in the best way he knows how, sitting beside him on the couch and putting Sho’s head on his shoulder. Sho folds pliantly, just as Aiba squeezes in on his other side and Jun sits on the floor by their feet. If they hear their managers yelling in the room next door, they don’t say a word.
Talks of disbanding begin the next week, and Ohno turns up for work not knowing whether he’ll spend the day singing or holding a press conference announcing the end of Arashi.
On Friday, Ohno rushes past the boardroom and skids to a stop when he hears about a dozen voices whispering in hushed tones inside. Words like “brilliant gimmick” and “media attention” jump out at him, but he’s already twenty minutes late for hair and make-up and his new stylist is a modern-day Nazi with a pair of tweezers, so he shakes his head, and makes a mad dash for the elevators. His manager finds him later, wincing as yet another stray eyebrow is plucked and tells him, with barely suppressed glee, that their thirty-first single has topped the Oricon charts for the week (even beating out Mr. Children!) and viewership for Shukudai-kun has increased (by twofold!).
Within the next few days, Jun gets an offer for a new movie, Sho receives two drama scripts and Ohno gets the lead role in a play he didn’t even know he had auditioned for. Aiba gets a new variety show investigating the lives and natural habitats of semi-aquatic mammals that will premiere in Albania for the first week. Arashi stays.
--
One day, Ohno gets bored of memorising his lines in the dressing room and wanders to the notice board hanging on the wall above the couch and checks on their schedule for the week. He feel tired after reading about their third consecutive photo shoot on Tuesday, and ends up covering the entire notice board with several blank music sheets he finds lying around. Then he gets a pen and writes 1. Teaching otters in Albania to lap dance on the top left-hand corner of the board.
Like all the things done out of boredom in his life, it escalates into something Ohno never planned for it to be.
--
2. Challenging the locals in Bora Bora to see how many piña coladas they can down in one sitting
--
3. Working as a stripper in a cabaret in Ginza wearing a French maid costume!
*Nobody is to let Masaki near the board
--
4. Black hole
--
It has become their inside joke, of sorts. They can give any reason they want whenever they’re asked The Question, and just to make sure that they don’t give the same reason twice, there’s a small tick against the ones they have already used (and maybe a cross against some of those they haven’t used but are contributed by Aiba).
Ohno’s personal favourite is no. 19, which he uses on an episode of Utaban because with one less member, he’s been told to do more talking and less pissing-Nakai-off.
“Nino’s on the moon,” he says.
It is probably one of their more ridiculous reasons, even more so than the one they last gave (34. Trying to straighten The Leaning Tower of Pisa) or the one Jun had given Popolo (61. Abducted by aliens *see: The X-Files), but Ohno remembers their previous Odoroki episodes, and how Nino had wanted to go for the Zero Gravity experiments instead of the Leave-It-Be experiments where he had to “watch fucking tomatoes grow in fucking star-shaped moulds,” and it gives him a bit of satisfaction to imagine Nino laughing as he cracks an egg in outer space.
For the next issue of Wink Up, Ohno just sends in one entry.
To Kazu (Ninomiya Kazunari)
I hope you get what you want, and dream dreams bigger than the moon.
When it gets published, Jun buys two copies. He cuts out Ohno’s section and pins it on the board along with a part of the cover page, the part that's just above the barcode and beside one of Hey! Say! JUMP’s right kneecap. Everytime Ohno passes the board for the rest of the day, he pauses, and stares at the glossy square of blue and red.
--
On one of the rare occasions where Ohno is the earliest to report to work, he dumps his bag on the couch and contemplates writing down reason no. 130 when he sees the words Nino was here, scribbled messily at the corner between no. 23 and the margin of the paper.
Ohno can’t remember what happens for the next fifteen minutes, except for running to the bathroom, then over to hair and make-up (you’re early, Ohno-san!), then to the boardroom before finally going back to the dressing room, breathless and feeling more adrenaline pumping in his system than he had for months, and seeing the three of them sitting on the couch, and Aiba with the guiltiest expression on his face.
Aiba doesn’t stop apologising and Ohno has to grip him hard by his elbows and smile and tell him that it’s stupid, but it’s okay. He starts apologising again five minutes later and this time Ohno doesn’t try stopping him, because it makes one of them feel better and Ohno tries to be a leader, in the best way he knows how.
For the recording of Shukudai-kun that day, an AD manages to find the old cardboard cutout of Nino which they had lugged around when he was in L.A. and asks Ohno if he wants to bring it out again. Ohno says thank you, but no, because this is real life and Nino’s not in L.A. and let’s be realistic, Nino’s never going to be on the fucking moon. The AD carries the cutout under his arm and shuffles away with his head down while someone comes over to powder Ohno’s nose, and nothing tastes good for the next hour.
--
They don’t erase Aiba’s tiny fuck up, and although Ohno never admits it, he likes it there, sitting quietly in the corner. Sometimes, when it’s way too early in the morning or if he’s left to rot for three whole hours before his turn for the shoot, he looks at the words and says them in his head again and again and again till they are no longer words (and therefore not a lie). Ohno’s not delusional, but sometimes, just sometimes, he lets himself squint, and the words almost resemble a familiar uphill scrawl.
--
Ohno wakes up one day and realises that he cannot remember how Nino looks like in the mornings.
On the way to work, he hugs his bag to his chest and thinks, the tip of his tongue peeking out of his mouth. By the time he reaches the dressing room he manages to come up with the cowlick that always stands up at the back of his head and the pillow creases imprinted on his cheek and Ohno supposes it’s enough, but he feels full and hollow at the same time, and wonders how that could be.
So Ohno goes to the board and writes Miss you in tiny, neat handwriting under Nino was here, and leaves it at that.
;One-shot
;Gen, with slight Ohno Satoshi/Ninomiya Kazunari
;Nino was here
;PG
;Starts as crack and ends as something else.
;One cookie to Johnny Kitagawa.
Nino disappears on a Saturday morning.
His manager leaves him no less than nineteen missed calls on his cellphone and three increasingly angry-sounding voicemails on his answering machine. After listening to Hi, this is Nino. Don’t bother leaving a message. I never check these. for the fourth time, she flips her cellphone shut with an ominous click. Then she flips it open again, and dials Ohno’s number.
Ohno lets himself into Nino’s apartment not with the key Nino had given him (because he’d misplaced it somewhere in his parents’ house) but with the spare key under the potted plant with the Doraemon sticker. He toes off his shoes and pads around the apartment in mismatched socks, peeping first into the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. The bed is already made, grey checkered sheets folded neatly over two white pillows, and a pair of over-washed boxers hangs over the heater. The bathroom looks the same as always; the shelf above the sink is uncluttered, save for a tub of Gatsby Moving Rubber with the Takuya Kimura label still attached and a cup holding a tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes, one for Nino and the other for Ohno (is his the orange one with the white stripe or the blue one with the transparent handle?) for when he stays over.
Ohno shuffles into the kitchen. The refrigerator is still running, and so is the coffee machine. He pours himself some coffee and peers into the fridge. There are four eggs, a Tupperware full of onigiri (courtesy of Mother Ninomiya, he thinks) and a bottle of Calpis that’s half full.
Then Ohno hears a shrill, mechanic tinkling and reaches for his cellphone before remembering that he had left it on silent mode. He turns around and notices, for the first time, the DS that’s sitting on the kitchen counter, next to a mug of coffee with steam still rising off the surface. He leans over the contraption and sees that Chrono Trigger is still on, at level 59, and the game is not paused. Ohno holds the DS in his hands for a while, tracing the well-worn buttons and the tiny scratch at the edge of the screen from when Aiba had borrowed it for “an experiment”. Then he takes out his cellphone and calls Sho.
“Morning, Captain!”
“Nino’s missing.”
--
The media goes crazy.
Ohno sees Nino’s face on every magazine cover and every television programme and hears his name every hour on the radio. Everyday, Sho steps into their dressing room with a bundle of newspapers tucked under his arm and holding a tray of coffee in the other and Jun heads straight for the newspapers instead of the coffee like he used to and Ohno reads the newspaper from cover to cover without checking the fishing column or the sports section.
He keeps seeing headlines like Arashi: Now A Four-Man Band? and Ninomiya Kazunari is MIA and he’d throw his head back and laugh, if only he knew whether he’d stop.
--
It happens when the four of them are stuck in some interview, and the interviewers have been going on and on about their latest single when it’s clear that what they really want to talk about is Nino and they are all so drained and exhausted and if they could just be left alone for just one minute perhaps they could look as though they’re enjoying their jobs again.
When one of the interviewers begins her question with “So, about Ninomiya…” for the third time in the past hour, Sho interjects her mid-question, uncharacteristically rude with his News Zero face, and says, “Nino’s in Albania, teaching the otters to lap dance before Aiba gets there to host his new variety show, fuck you very much.”
Fifteen minutes, two angry interviewers and one baffled crew later, the ten-second clip gets tossed onto the cutting room floor.
Twenty minutes later, the clip gets uploaded on YouTube.
Twenty-three minutes later, ‘Sakurai Sho Tells All’ receives its eight hundred and thirty-five thousand, two hundred and seventeenth hit and approximately two thousand six hundred five-star ratings.
The eight hundred and thirty-five thousand, two hundred and eighteenth hit opens up a new window that says This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Fuji Television Network, Inc.
(Somewhere between the fifth and the sixth hundred thousandth hit the video had been ripped and made available for download in both FLV and MP4 format.)
--
Management flies into the biggest uproar in nearly a decade. Sho spends most of his day with his arms plastered to his sides and his upper body bending at a ninety-degree angle, apologising to his shoes.
When Sho’s finally allowed to retire to the dressing room, back aching and shoulders more slumped than usual, Ohno tries to be a leader, in the best way he knows how, sitting beside him on the couch and putting Sho’s head on his shoulder. Sho folds pliantly, just as Aiba squeezes in on his other side and Jun sits on the floor by their feet. If they hear their managers yelling in the room next door, they don’t say a word.
Talks of disbanding begin the next week, and Ohno turns up for work not knowing whether he’ll spend the day singing or holding a press conference announcing the end of Arashi.
On Friday, Ohno rushes past the boardroom and skids to a stop when he hears about a dozen voices whispering in hushed tones inside. Words like “brilliant gimmick” and “media attention” jump out at him, but he’s already twenty minutes late for hair and make-up and his new stylist is a modern-day Nazi with a pair of tweezers, so he shakes his head, and makes a mad dash for the elevators. His manager finds him later, wincing as yet another stray eyebrow is plucked and tells him, with barely suppressed glee, that their thirty-first single has topped the Oricon charts for the week (even beating out Mr. Children!) and viewership for Shukudai-kun has increased (by twofold!).
Within the next few days, Jun gets an offer for a new movie, Sho receives two drama scripts and Ohno gets the lead role in a play he didn’t even know he had auditioned for. Aiba gets a new variety show investigating the lives and natural habitats of semi-aquatic mammals that will premiere in Albania for the first week. Arashi stays.
--
One day, Ohno gets bored of memorising his lines in the dressing room and wanders to the notice board hanging on the wall above the couch and checks on their schedule for the week. He feel tired after reading about their third consecutive photo shoot on Tuesday, and ends up covering the entire notice board with several blank music sheets he finds lying around. Then he gets a pen and writes 1. Teaching otters in Albania to lap dance on the top left-hand corner of the board.
Like all the things done out of boredom in his life, it escalates into something Ohno never planned for it to be.
--
2. Challenging the locals in Bora Bora to see how many piña coladas they can down in one sitting
--
3. Working as a stripper in a cabaret in Ginza wearing a French maid costume!
*Nobody is to let Masaki near the board
--
4. Black hole
--
It has become their inside joke, of sorts. They can give any reason they want whenever they’re asked The Question, and just to make sure that they don’t give the same reason twice, there’s a small tick against the ones they have already used (and maybe a cross against some of those they haven’t used but are contributed by Aiba).
Ohno’s personal favourite is no. 19, which he uses on an episode of Utaban because with one less member, he’s been told to do more talking and less pissing-Nakai-off.
“Nino’s on the moon,” he says.
It is probably one of their more ridiculous reasons, even more so than the one they last gave (34. Trying to straighten The Leaning Tower of Pisa) or the one Jun had given Popolo (61. Abducted by aliens *see: The X-Files), but Ohno remembers their previous Odoroki episodes, and how Nino had wanted to go for the Zero Gravity experiments instead of the Leave-It-Be experiments where he had to “watch fucking tomatoes grow in fucking star-shaped moulds,” and it gives him a bit of satisfaction to imagine Nino laughing as he cracks an egg in outer space.
For the next issue of Wink Up, Ohno just sends in one entry.
To Kazu (Ninomiya Kazunari)
I hope you get what you want, and dream dreams bigger than the moon.
When it gets published, Jun buys two copies. He cuts out Ohno’s section and pins it on the board along with a part of the cover page, the part that's just above the barcode and beside one of Hey! Say! JUMP’s right kneecap. Everytime Ohno passes the board for the rest of the day, he pauses, and stares at the glossy square of blue and red.
--
On one of the rare occasions where Ohno is the earliest to report to work, he dumps his bag on the couch and contemplates writing down reason no. 130 when he sees the words Nino was here, scribbled messily at the corner between no. 23 and the margin of the paper.
Ohno can’t remember what happens for the next fifteen minutes, except for running to the bathroom, then over to hair and make-up (you’re early, Ohno-san!), then to the boardroom before finally going back to the dressing room, breathless and feeling more adrenaline pumping in his system than he had for months, and seeing the three of them sitting on the couch, and Aiba with the guiltiest expression on his face.
Aiba doesn’t stop apologising and Ohno has to grip him hard by his elbows and smile and tell him that it’s stupid, but it’s okay. He starts apologising again five minutes later and this time Ohno doesn’t try stopping him, because it makes one of them feel better and Ohno tries to be a leader, in the best way he knows how.
For the recording of Shukudai-kun that day, an AD manages to find the old cardboard cutout of Nino which they had lugged around when he was in L.A. and asks Ohno if he wants to bring it out again. Ohno says thank you, but no, because this is real life and Nino’s not in L.A. and let’s be realistic, Nino’s never going to be on the fucking moon. The AD carries the cutout under his arm and shuffles away with his head down while someone comes over to powder Ohno’s nose, and nothing tastes good for the next hour.
--
They don’t erase Aiba’s tiny fuck up, and although Ohno never admits it, he likes it there, sitting quietly in the corner. Sometimes, when it’s way too early in the morning or if he’s left to rot for three whole hours before his turn for the shoot, he looks at the words and says them in his head again and again and again till they are no longer words (and therefore not a lie). Ohno’s not delusional, but sometimes, just sometimes, he lets himself squint, and the words almost resemble a familiar uphill scrawl.
--
Ohno wakes up one day and realises that he cannot remember how Nino looks like in the mornings.
On the way to work, he hugs his bag to his chest and thinks, the tip of his tongue peeking out of his mouth. By the time he reaches the dressing room he manages to come up with the cowlick that always stands up at the back of his head and the pillow creases imprinted on his cheek and Ohno supposes it’s enough, but he feels full and hollow at the same time, and wonders how that could be.
So Ohno goes to the board and writes Miss you in tiny, neat handwriting under Nino was here, and leaves it at that.