Stardust House: 1st Year Spring

CHAPTER 14: The Rediscovery of True Love

Sunday Night (the day after the Parent-Teacher Conference Day)

Saturday night was epic fail.

The goukon that the 1-A girls and I were supposed to go got canceled. Apparently one of the dudes from Barakuma Boys’ High School got grounded for getting caught smoking on school grounds with some other dudes in his class. Knowing the federal laws regarding legal ages, smoking when you’re younger than twenty was obviously against the law, and obviously, against school regulations. Japan isn’t exactly famous for its stop smoking advocacy, but if this particular guy ended up being the dude who ends up having interests in me, Dad would seriously going to disapprove. For one thing, the Iries were also known for having a series of allergies and cigarette smoke happened to be one of them. Grandpa used to be a chain smoker when he was in his younger days, however second-hand smoking seriously affected Grandma and all of their kids, Dad, all my uncles, and Aunt Ibuki altogether. He quit smoking right after Grandma died and look where Grandpa is right now: medically disabled. Before reaching this word to Dad, it would reach Tai-nii first, and he would obviously not going to approve either. Like Dad, he too also became allergic to cigarette smoke. On top of that, Kaito, Shunta, and Yuki were also allergic. As for me, cigarette smoke just plain stinks. Never mind that it was unhealthy, but seriously, it frickin’ stinks. How on earth do these people able to breathe on that? Gross. Just gross.

We ended up hanging out at Cafe Gillette instead. It was actually karaoke night on Saturdays so to make up for not being able to attend that new karaoke center at Hayashinohe City. We even heard the new releases in the J-Pop music industry and we ended up getting addicted to this new rock-ish song called “Miraculous Love.” The one who sang this was an up and coming teen idol vocalist named Ren Tsubasa, and even though he was not a StarPros talent, he had been the latest talk of the town among the teen idol scene, even around school. The girls and I were just so caught up with the Swag 6x project with Ken-senpai and Gin-senpai that we didn’t even bother paying attention to what was going on in the mainstream. In short, we were way too close to the teen idols in 1-A up to the point that we’ve forgotten that they were celebrities in the first place. We only learned about this song and Ren Tsubasa from the cafe’s manager, Mondonosuke Ito, who had been doing a good job keeping up with the latest trends and buzzes in today’s modern Japanese society.

Chie happened to be the most informative among us girls when it came to the latest trends in Japanese pop culture. As expected, she knew about this Ren Tsubasa dude and his debut single “

Kiseki no Koi

~ Miraculous Love.” The song was just so damn catchy and the words were so positively uplifting that I decided to buy the digital single one of these days and upload it in my iPod. Chie though showed us a photo of this Ren Tsubasa guy and like Kaito and the others, another angel-faced ikemen. He looked really mature then, but Chie reminded us that he was only fourteen-going-on-fifteen. He started off in showbiz when he was only five-years-old and it wasn’t until lately that he decided to get in to the music industry. He was a young veteran in the acting world from stage plays, musicals, and of course, through serious TV dramas shown in more prominent channels like NHK and such. Another plus that Chie gave us was that this Ren Tsubasa guy happened to be bilingual as well. The thing is, no one knows (yet) regarding the other language that this guy is fluent at. Japanese and… what? His father was Japanese and his mother was half-Japanese and half-something— some European blood or whatever, I forget. He was born in Japan but grew up overseas at some country and started his path in showbiz as a child actor on stage plays. Eventually they moved back here in Japan and the rest is history.