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.
