The Resonance Cage: The Amplifier Named “Beautiful Girl”
Kenta Sakurai’s thirties had hardened along with the calluses on his fingertips.
He stood in a damp basement—the dressing room of a live house. Facing walls stained with the smell of cigarette smoke and mold, he stared at his fingers. After rubbing strings tensely tens of millions, hundreds of millions of times, his fingertips had lost sensation, turning as hard as rock. That hardness was his “war record,” and at the same time, the only anchor keeping him from sinking entirely into the bottomless swamp of music.
“Good job, Sakurai. …You had three customers tonight.”
The manager of the live house placed a few thousand-yen bills on the counter with an apologetic look. It was literally “pocket change,” not even covering the performance fee. Kenta took it in silence, slung his heavy gig bag over his shoulder, and headed up to the surface.
The streetlights of the shopping district illuminated him with a certain cold indifference. Thirty-one years old. His peers were building houses, talking about their children’s growth, and living with a solid mass within the gears of society. Meanwhile, what about him? Only the weight of the guitar on his back kept his existence tethered to the ground.
“Is there even any value in my music…?”
The murmur vanished into the exhaust fumes. Suddenly, a stone torii gate caught the corner of his eye. It was a path he must have walked countless times. But tonight, the shrine sat in a strange silence, like a “hole” opened in space.
Drawn to it, Kenta climbed the stone steps. In front of the main shrine, he pressed his hands together as if vomiting up mud.
(Just once more… Give me the joy of playing the guitar until my fingertips tremble. Give me the light…)
It was a desperate prayer, one bordering on a curse. In that instant, his vision exploded. A high-frequency noise seemed to pierce his eardrums. His brain fluid felt like it was boiling, and kaleidoscopic light swirled behind his eyes.
“…ghk… ah!”
The taste of iron spread in his mouth as he tried to scream. His consciousness was sucked into the dark sky like a kite with a severed string.
When he woke, the world was “excessive.”
“Mai-chan! Hey, are you okay? You look pale.”
A high-pitched voice hammered against his eardrums. Kenta bolted upright. But the movement was so “light” that he felt a sudden illusion that his body might fly off somewhere.
“Eh… ah…”
No voice came out. Or rather, the voice that did emerge was not the muddy baritone he knew. It was a trembling soprano, sounding like silver bells rolling, yet terribly fragile. Looking around, he found himself in a music room bathed in afternoon sunlight. Strange high school girls were peering down at him with concern.
Kenta looked at his “hands.” White, slender, translucent skin. Veins faintly blue beneath the surface of palms with thin layers of fat. And above all—the calluses, his “pride,” were gone from his fingertips. The fingers of a seventeen-year-old girl: soft as a baby’s and utterly defenseless.
“…You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Staggering, Kenta stood before a full-length mirror on the wall. Reflected there was a girl named Mai Sato—an ordinary, yet overwhelmingly radiant beauty possessing the light of “youth.” The legs extending from the uniform skirt were incredibly thin and unreliable. On his chest sat the gentle weight of flesh that he’d never had as a man. His center of gravity was low. The shape of his pelvis had changed, and the world wobbled just by standing up.
“Mai-chan, we’re starting the rehearsal. Grab your guitar.”
Urged by a friend, Kenta picked up the Fender Stratocaster lying on the floor.
“…It’s heavy!”
The words leaked out unintentionally. The piece of wood weighing a little over three kilograms, which he had handled like air as a man, now bit into his fragile shoulders with several times the pressure. The strap pressed against his thin collarbone, making his breathing shallow.
With trembling fingers, Kenta gripped the pick. His callus-free fingertips transmitted the coldness of the strings and the texture of the steel to his brain with an abnormal sharpness. The sensations that had been dulled in his male body were now amplified several times through the girl’s nerves.
(Can I play it…? With these thin fingers?)
Kenta summoned the blues phrases he had spent over a decade polishing while cursing himself. The thought reached his fingertips. One strum—Jaran.
“Eh…”
The high school girls around him fell silent in an instant. It wasn’t just a chord stroke. It held the obsessive “attack” and the “vibration of the strings” that a thirty-one-year-old man had cultivated while crawling through the mud—techniques difficult even for pros.
Mai’s body responded to Kenta’s superior skill with an incredible “honesty.” Perhaps, in his male body, the hardened calluses had been killing the delicate vibrations of the strings. But these innocent fingertips picked up even the slightest quiver of the metal and sent it into the amp.
His physical form had transformed into the ultimate amplifier.
“What was that just now…? Was Mai-chan always that good…?”
The friend’s words didn’t reach Kenta’s ears. He was nearly drowning in the sea of sound produced by his own fingers. A kaleidoscopic vista of sound he could never reach when he was a man.
Within the “cage” named a beautiful girl, he trembled with a maddening sense of omnipotence like never before. But he had not yet realized. This omnipotence did not spring from his own flesh; it was merely a fleeting “doping” effect brought about by a borrowed skin.
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