"Nobody looks at me like that at home. At home I'm looked at like an asset. Like a schedule. Like a face on a magazine cover. In Tokyo, in a tiny apartment I'll never see again, a stranger looked at my naked body like it was the only thing in the world that mattered for the next hour."
CONFESSION #002
SUBJECT: Yu Jimin (Karina) — aespa
DEVICE: iPhone 15 Pro — Natural Titanium
APPLE ID: ████████@icloud.com
FOLDER: 個人 / 日記 / archive
FILE TITLE: (no title)
CREATED: August 12, 2024 — 02:14 AM JST
LAST MODIFIED: August 12, 2024 — 03:47 AM JST
SYNC STATUS: Backed up to iCloud
ENCRYPTION: BREACHED
[ FILE OPENED ]
The city looks fake from up here. All the little red lights on the buildings blinking at the same rhythm like they're breathing. I've been standing at the window for I don't know how long. My feet hurt. My throat hurts. My back hurts in that specific place between my shoulder blades where the wire from the in-ear monitor pack sits during shows. Everything hurts and I don't want to sleep.
I keep telling myself I'll sleep after I write this down. That's the deal I make with myself now. Get it out of my head and into the phone and then close my eyes.
We finished the second Tokyo Dome show four hours ago. Ninety-four thousand people over two nights. Ninety-four thousand people screaming my name in a language I can speak fluently in and pretending I can't for the last two hours of my night.
Let me back up. I'm doing that thing again where I start in the middle. Focus.
The show was good. Really good, actually. I hit the high note in Supernova cleaner than I have all tour. Ningning cried during Melody and I saw her and almost cried too but I did the thing where I bite the inside of my cheek and it snapped me back. Winter squeezed my hand during the ment. She always knows when I'm about to lose it. She has this radar for me that nobody else has. I don't deserve her.
After the encore we did the standard routine. Wave, bow, wave again, exit stage right. Backstage was chaos as always — staff yelling into headsets, dancers stretching, our hair and makeup team already prepping the members for the after-show meet with the sponsors. I told our manager I had a migraine coming on. He believed me because I've been careful to complain about migraines throughout this tour so tonight wouldn't seem suspicious. I'm proud of that. That level of planning. Six weeks of laying the groundwork so tonight I could disappear cleanly.
Giselle asked if I wanted her to come back to the hotel with me. She had that look. The concerned unnie look even though she's younger than me. I said no, I just need to lie down in the dark. She hugged me and I hugged her back and I hate myself a little bit for how easy it is to lie to her.
Back to the hotel by 10:40. Room 4708. Suite because I'm the leader and SM always books me the biggest room like it's some kind of reward. I don't want a bigger room. A bigger room just means more empty space to be alone in.
I showered. I did my skincare. Full ten steps because that's the muscle memory. I put on the hotel robe. I ordered room service and canceled it before it arrived. I sat on the edge of the enormous bed for a while just breathing.
And then I did what I've been planning to do for six weeks.
I opened the bottom of my suitcase. There's a specific fold in the lining where I've been hiding the clothes. Black jeans that don't fit my public image — too baggy, too plain. A black hoodie two sizes too big, unbranded, bought online through a fake account and shipped to a mailbox I rent in Yongsan. A cheap cotton bra. No makeup. No accessories. A black cap and a KF94 mask and a pair of chunky sneakers that I picked because they make me look shorter than I actually am. Shorter is important. Shorter is invisible.
I've done this in five countries now.
That's the thing I keep circling around and not saying. Let me just say it. I've done this in five countries now.
Bangkok. Singapore. Los Angeles. Jakarta. And now Tokyo, again. The first time was Tokyo actually, back in February. I've done Tokyo twice.
I know the pattern. I know the way my hands shake putting the mask on. I know the specific fear of the elevator ride down where every floor that dings I think it's going to open and someone from the company will be standing there. It never has been. Not yet. The service elevator on this floor is at the end of the hall, past the ice machine. It goes down to a loading area and there's a side exit that puts you out on a small street with no cameras. I know because I mapped it the day we checked in. That's what I do the day we check in to any new hotel now. I map the exits.
I feel insane writing that. But it's just a fact. That's what I do now.
Out on the street it was still warm. Tokyo in August is disgusting. Humid. I walked six blocks before I felt safe enough to take the mask off. The mask always comes off first. Then I fix my hair under the cap. Then I let myself breathe.
By the time I got to Shinjuku, I was somebody else.
I want to write about her. The girl who exists in this hoodie and this cap and these sneakers. She doesn't have a name. I've never given her one because naming her would make her too real. But she's the one who walks into these places. Not me. Not Karina. Not Yu Jimin either. Someone in between them.
She walked into the bar I've been to before. The one behind the third alley off Kabukicho, past the karaoke place with the broken neon sign. It's underground, no windows. The bartender doesn't ask questions. Half the clientele are hiding from something. There's a specific etiquette in that place where nobody looks at anybody for longer than half a second.
She sat at the end of the bar. Ordered a highball. Waited.
Here's the part that I need to actually be honest about.
The waiting is the best part. Genuinely. The moment right after ordering the drink and before anyone approaches. That thirty or forty minutes of pure potential. Where the entire night could go a hundred different ways. Where I've made all the decisions I need to make — I've decided to leave the hotel, I've decided to come here, I've decided to be open to whatever happens — but nothing has actually happened yet. It's the freest I ever feel. Free-er than being on stage. Free-er than being in my own apartment. Because in that bar, sipping that drink, waiting, I am nobody's product. Nobody's investment. Nobody's leader. I am a body on a barstool with money in her pocket and nowhere to be until sound check at 2pm the next day.
Sometimes nobody approaches me and I go back to the hotel and I sleep like a stone. Those nights are okay too. The freedom is enough by itself.
But most nights someone approaches. Because I know how to sit in a way that says I'm available. That's a skill I've developed. It's not the same as sitting in an idol photoshoot. It's the opposite. You have to slouch. You have to look at your drink. You have to be alone in a way that reads as chosen loneliness rather than sad loneliness. Men understand the difference. They can smell it.
Tonight he approached at maybe 11:30. I was on my second drink. He sat two seats down first, which is the correct etiquette — you don't invade immediately. He ordered something. Then he asked in Japanese if the seat next to me was taken.
Here's where I did the thing.
I looked at him with a slightly confused expression. I tilted my head. I said in bad, broken Japanese: "Sumimasen... Nihongo... sukoshi."
I speak fluent Japanese. Business fluent. I've done Japanese interviews without an interpreter. I can read a menu, negotiate with a driver, order at a restaurant without missing a beat. My accent is good enough that Japanese people compliment it constantly.
But she doesn't speak Japanese. The girl in the hoodie. She's a tourist. She's Korean but she doesn't work here, she's just visiting, she barely knows how to say hello. Her English is okay but limited. She smiles a lot to compensate for what she can't say.
He switched to English. Broken English, but functional. He introduced himself. I'll call him T because I don't want to write his real name even here. He was maybe late thirties. Salaryman type but not the polished kind — the rumpled kind, tie loosened, hair a little messy, drinking away whatever his day had been. Not handsome. Not ugly. Utterly, blessedly, gloriously normal.
We talked for maybe an hour. I gave the girl a fake name. Not going to write it here either. I gave her a fake job — teacher. I gave her a fake reason for being in Tokyo — vacation, alone, four days, staying in a small hotel in a different neighborhood. Every detail I invented on the spot. I've gotten good at improvising the girl's life.
He was a little drunk. Not too drunk. Just loose. He touched my arm at one point when he was laughing at something I said. It didn't feel calculated. It felt automatic. That's the difference between the men who approach me at industry parties and the men who approach me in bars like this. Industry men touch you like they're testing your reaction. Bar men touch you like they've forgotten you're a person they just met.
I liked it.
I asked him — using the girl's broken English — if he lived nearby. He said yes. Small apartment. Very small. Not nice. I did the smile I've been practicing. The one that's not Karina's smile. Karina's smile is symmetrical and photogenic and stops at the lips. The girl's smile is uneven and shows too much of her top teeth and reaches her eyes because she doesn't care what she looks like.
I said "show me?"
He blinked. He asked "you sure?" in English.
Here's the thing about the language game. And this is what I want to actually write about because it's the piece I don't think I've admitted to myself before.
The language barrier is a lie. But the lie is what makes it work.
Because when he asked "you sure?" I did the confused-tourist face. I shrugged. I laughed nervously. I said "sorry, I don't... it's okay?" and let him interpret it however he wanted. And he interpreted it as consent, because of course he did, because I got up from the barstool and put on my jacket and looked at him expectantly.
But the whole night, from that moment forward, I had an out. I had a permanent, unshakeable out. Because if at any point I wanted to stop, I could just retreat into the language. I could pretend not to understand. I could freeze up and go blank and become the confused foreigner and any decent man would back off immediately.
I never use the out. That's the thing. I never have.
But knowing it's there is what lets me say yes to everything else.
His apartment was a fifteen minute walk. He held my hand on the way there and I let him. Tokyo at midnight in August smells like drain water and cigarette smoke and food from all the ramen shops still open. The neon reflected off the wet pavement. I remember thinking very clearly: this is a memory I'm going to think about during the flight home. This exact moment. His hand in mine. My breath through the mask still hanging around my neck. The specific way the street lights caught in the puddles.
I take these snapshots on purpose now. So I have things to think about later when I'm back in a boardroom or a green room or a livestream.
The apartment was tiny. Genuinely tiny. Maybe twenty square meters. A single room with a kitchenette in one corner and a futon rolled up against the wall and a small television on a low stand and a window that looked directly at another building three meters away. The bathroom door was open and I could see the shower was one of those combo tub-shower things with the plastic curtain that never fully closes.
I loved it. I loved every square inch of that terrible apartment. I loved that there was nothing in it worth photographing. I loved that there was no gift bag from a brand, no leftover album from a fansign, no framed award, no mirror ring light, no evidence anywhere that anybody had ever tried to package a life for public consumption. It was just a small room where a normal man lived a normal life and did normal things and would forget about tonight in a week.
He unrolled the futon. He asked if I wanted water. I said okay. He got me a glass from a shelf. The glass had a cartoon character on it — I think it was from a convenience store promotion, one of those things you get free with a bottle of soda. I drank the water while sitting cross-legged on his futon.
He sat next to me. He asked, in his broken English, if I was nervous.
I did the girl's shrug. I said "little bit."
He kissed me.
Okay. This part I'm going to write in detail because I don't want to be a coward about it. If I'm going to write this note at all I'm not going to soften it.
He kissed me and it was clumsy and his mouth tasted like whiskey and cigarettes and I hadn't kissed anyone in three months and my whole body reacted like I'd been electrocuted. I made a sound into his mouth that wasn't planned. He took that as encouragement. His hand went under the hoodie. Rough hands. Not calloused-rough, just dry, the way office men's hands get from too much hand sanitizer and cheap soap. He touched my stomach first, then my ribs, then my breast over the cheap bra I'd worn specifically because it was cheap and forgettable.
I let him take everything off. I want to be clear about this because it matters. I let him. I didn't participate in the undressing. I lay back on the futon in that ugly little apartment and I let him unwrap me piece by piece and I watched his face while he did it. He looked hungry. Not romantic. Not tender. Just hungry. Like I was food and he hadn't eaten in a long time.
That's what I go there for. To be looked at like that.
Nobody looks at me like that at home. At home I'm looked at like an asset. Like a schedule. Like a face on a magazine cover. In Tokyo, in a tiny apartment I'll never see again, a stranger looked at my naked body like it was the only thing in the world that mattered for the next hour.
I want to write about what he did but my hands are already shaking and I have to be careful.
He didn't ask about protection. He didn't reach for anything. I saw the moment he registered the question in his own head and I saw the moment he decided not to ask, and I did nothing to prompt him. I let it happen. That's on me. That's a choice I made by not making a choice.
I told myself if it becomes a real problem he'll pull out. He didn't.
He was inside me for what felt like a long time. I don't know how long actually. The lights were off except for the neon from the pharmacy across the street bleeding through the curtain — everything was a strange sick pink. He held my wrists above my head at one point and I said "please" in Korean because I forgot to be the girl for a second, and he didn't understand it, and I let him not understand it. He took it as encouragement. Everything I did or said or didn't say, he took as encouragement, because the language barrier gave him permission to interpret me however he wanted, and I gave him the barrier on purpose.
I came twice. The first time was quiet. I bit the inside of my wrist. The second time I didn't bother being quiet because I realized halfway through that the neighbors probably didn't speak Korean either and any sounds I made would just be noise in a language they couldn't identify. So I let myself be loud for the first time in I don't know how long. Actually loud. Not the controlled porn-star sounds I used to make with the one boyfriend I had during my trainee years. Just noise. Ugly noise. My real voice.
When he came he pressed his forehead against my collarbone and made a sound I'm going to remember for a while. Something halfway between a groan and an apology, like it wasn't planned, like he couldn't held back anymore. I felt everything. I felt him finish inside me and I felt him stay there for a few seconds catching his breath and I felt him pull out slowly and I felt the specific wet warmth spreading down my thigh onto the futon cover that he probably doesn't wash as often as he should.
He rolled onto his back next to me and stared at the ceiling and I stared at the ceiling too and neither of us said anything for maybe three minutes. That silence was the most honest conversation I've had in six months.
Eventually he asked, in the broken English, if I wanted to shower. I said yes. His shower was tiny and the water pressure was terrible and the soap was some drugstore brand that smelled like fake lavender and I stood under the lukewarm water and washed a stranger out of me while looking at his single toothbrush in the cup on the sink.
I got dressed while he was still in the futon. He offered to walk me back but I said no, I was fine, I'd call a taxi. I stepped over his clothes on the way to the door. He didn't ask for my number. I didn't offer. Both of us understood what this had been. Both of us were grateful, in our different ways, for the other's silence.
The walk to the taxi stand at Kabukicho was maybe eight minutes. I put the mask back on the second I hit the street. Back in the car I felt him leak out again onto my underwear and I stared out the window and I didn't feel guilty. That's the part that I keep coming back to. I have never felt guilty. Not after Bangkok, not after Los Angeles, not tonight. I feel other things — I feel exhausted, I feel electric, I feel like I've been holding my breath for months and I finally exhaled — but not guilt. And I've stopped waiting for the guilt to arrive because it's been five countries now and it hasn't shown up and I don't think it's going to.
I got back to the hotel at 01:48 through the same service exit I left from. Nobody saw me. Nobody ever does. Nobody in my life has any idea that this is a thing that I do.
Winter texted the group chat at some point during the night. She asked how my headache was. I just saw it. It's 03:39 now. I'll respond in the morning. I'll tell her it's better. I'll thank her for checking. She'll send a heart. I'll send one back.
I'm going to be in her wedding one day. That's a thing I think about. She's going to get married eventually because she's the type who will, and I'm going to be one of her bridesmaids, and I'm going to give a speech about how she's been my sister for over a decade, and every word of it will be true, and she will still not know that her leader used to disappear in foreign cities to fuck strangers who didn't speak her language.
I don't know if that makes me a good sister or a monster. Maybe both. Maybe those aren't as different as I used to think.
I have to sleep. I really do. I have media day at 11 and interviews all afternoon and then the flight to Fukuoka in the evening and another dome show the day after that. My body already hurts. My throat is going to be shot tomorrow. I'll drink honey water and do the exercises the vocal coach taught me and I'll be fine. I'm always fine. That's my whole thing.
Tomorrow we fly to another city. Another concert. Another thousands of peoples screaming my name. I wonder if there's a bar there too.
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