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Chiba Airi finds herself on a stage from the moment she wakes up. The second she’s born to the world, she is under the already familiar bright light that she will learn to call home. Soft arms cradle her with a mother’s love for the first and last time as a voice echoes in her ears.
The voice tells her of dreams, of stars, of the same bright lights and clicking cameras. She is a wide-eyed baby with the whole world ahead of her. She doesn’t know anything. She’s just a child.
Chiba Airi blinks, and she’s three years old. She’s playing with dolls in front of the TV, where her dad is watching a sports game. She sits with the doll in her hand, a beautiful, small doll of blonde hair and curls, and imagines a life for her. She’s a person, Chiba thinks. Able to run around, have fun, and play, the same as Chiba can. She feels bad for the doll. She will never be a person, after all. Her life is confined to the movements of another.
Behind her, her father groans at her, telling her to play with her stupid dolls somewhere that doesn’t disrupt his view of the game. She isn’t old enough to think that watching her wasn’t good enough for him, but it sticks with her for some reason. Her mother shooed her away, telling her to play with dolls upstairs like a good girl. She balances another job on her arm, constantly stacking more, ignoring the possibility of everything falling to her daughter below her. She’s a little bit like her doll, Chiba thinks. She will always be forced to do something, even if she doesn’t want to do it. But she doesn’t know anything. She’s just a child.
Chiba closes her eyes for a second, and a year has passed. She’s sitting cross-legged in front of her mother, star-eyed, watching a pamphlet waving in front of her eyes, swinging, almost hypnotising. “Chiba”, her mother drawled, “Do you want to be a star?” Chiba had always dreamed of the stars in the sky, the view from the window she plays at, and the scenery at the top of the hill. So, she agrees. She doesn’t like the light that the star casts, but she likes talking to the others around her. Chiba was always a talkative girl, child-like innocence gleaming in every word. Perhaps that’s what made her shine.
She gets her first role a few months later. The director looks at her with the same spark in his eyes that her mother had, seeing potential, a new limit in her, the making of an actress. He tells her instructions, smile, twirl, give a wink and a wave to the camera. Make us look good, doll. Suddenly, the light looks dimmer. She’s pulled away from school, away from her friends, away from a normal life, so that the light she casts can be manufactured brighter and brighter. She is brushed gently with hairbrushes, smoothed with beauty blenders, and perfected with lipstick. She knows the words already. She gets onto the stage, gives her largest smile, and performs for the camera. She doesn’t know anything. She’s just a child.
Chiba dreams, for just a moment. She wakes up at age six to her mother crying on the floor, surrounded by papers. She doesn’t know what’s happening, but she knows that she loves her mother. So, she sneaks down the hall at night, opening the box the papers belong to. She’s not very good at tutoring, but she can recognise the numbers glaring at her from the top of the page. An unknown pang hits her chest. She feels responsible for the numbers she reads. If only she were a better star, a good child, she wouldn’t be leaving her mother to cry on the floor. She’s ignored her mother’s pleas to enjoy acting, all because she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t want to fall completely into the fantasy of acting. She will learn to suck it up, to be a better child, and her mother will never cry again. But she doesn’t know anything. She’s just a child.
Chiba finds herself at seven years old, staring at the small pill in her mother’s hands. She opens her mouth, listening to her mother desperately trying to justify her own actions, takes the water, and swallows the pill. Her mother smiles in delight, hugging her, telling her how proud she is of her little star. “Now,” she grins, “You won’t burn out. What use is a star if it’s burning?” Chiba can feel the bags under her eyes deepen every day. The weight of the star is weighing on her, pulling her mind and body further apart. She stands on stages, waving at the kids behind the screen, begging any supernatural force to swap places with any child that is allowed to be a child.
Her co-stars are no better. They are supposed to be children, like her, but their conversations aren’t real. They don’t play, they don’t run around, they perform for an audience of grinning cameras and hungry directors. It doesn’t matter, as long as the number at the top of the paper isn’t there, as long as her mother smiles at the end of the day. She collapses into her brand new bed in the brand new city, wishing for the comfort of their house, of her mother, of the nonexistent love of her father. She cries into a pillow, exhausted, pills wearing off, waiting for her cycle to repeat the next day. She doesn’t know anything. She’s just a child.
At age nine, Chiba stares into a mirror, her mother looming behind her. Her hands poke her, prod her, pointing out every slight difference in her skin, in her body. She sees every new feature of her body in red, poking herself, trying to mould her body into the same childlike body she’d had only a year ago. Her mother repeats a mantra to her: cries of “Nobody will love you if you’re this big!” and “You look nothing like a star” repeat in her head day after day. She can’t shine as long as she looks like herself. So, she’s handed a small tube, and the suffocation starts. Her lungs fill with the torture of breathing, her mind clouds, she hates it, she hates everything, she hates the stars in the sky, the view of the hill. The tears start to roll again, and through her hazy mind, she can smile through gritted teeth. She has learnt to grin, put on a performance, and stop being Chiba Airi to become a star instead. She thinks she knows everything. She’s just a child.
Chiba forces her eyes open at age twelve, staring mindlessly at the obscured faces pointing the cameras at her. She smiles as she always does, delivers her line perfectly, and turns around to pout at her mother and father. They’re not real, she has to keep reminding herself, but on stage, she can convince herself that she is the little girl she’s playing. On stage, she’s allowed to play the child she never got to be herself. At home, she pokes herself more, highlighting the areas on her body that need to go. Everything needs to go; her body needs to change, she needs her body to change. She sobs desperately, trying to change her body with her own hands, crying to someone to help her fix herself. The inevitability of age has come for Chiba, the same as it comes for everybody else.
She takes another pill, a pill to stop her from feeling the hunger that changes her body, her mother’s old words worming into her stomach the same way they always did. She will never perform on a full stomach again. The caffeine rests in her brain, cigarette in her mouth, pills in her stomach, the number dropping on the scale becoming her only comfort. But because she’s young, nothing can distract her from the hunger, the exhaustion, the loneliness she feels. She’s a child in the industry, behaving like an adult, going home to sob like a baby being cradled against her mother’s chest.
Chiba begs and pleads to quit, finding herself trapped inside a wall of tears and fake promises. She can’t make her mother upset with her. She has to play the part, be the perfect doll, Chiba, smile and wave, let the directors move her. She is a doll herself at this point, a mindless figurine existing to influence younger girls than her and look pretty. The sadness is a familiarity, the slight burning of smoke becoming all she can smell. Wherever she looks, she’s burning. Chiba Airi, the twelve-year-old girl that she’s dreamed of being, lives on stage, and her perfect mother, father, and brothers love her. She can almost pretend it’s real. She’s the little girl who lives on set, she’s still three years old, playing with her dolls. Nothing can hurt her on stage, as long as she says her lines correctly. If she’s perfect on stage, nothing can hurt her again. She thinks she knows who she is, now. She’s just a child.
Chiba Airi is declared dead at seventeen, but she knows that isn’t true. Chiba Airi died at twelve, lying in bed, struggling to stay awake, feeling the most energised she’d ever been, shaking from the cigarettes, pills, and malnutrition. She’d died as a child, and would live as a child forevermore.
She didn’t know anything. She was just a child.