Mori Keaki published this essay book the month before her retirement as Top Star of Snow Troupe. It is mainly a memoir of her personal journey in Takarazuka, as well as her early life. Her writing/formatting style is kind of unique, and I tried to reproduce or reflect it as much as possible. 120% Darling has around 24 chapters, and I plan to post one every Friday.

It’s a really lovely book, that ended up making me cry many times. I hope you enjoy it!

For a table of contents with links to all the chapters, go here.

I’m gonna be a man!!

Well, I suppose I should start writing.

To begin with…

The story of the junior performance of my debut show.

In the Takarazuka Revue, usually, in the middle of the ‘main performance’, which is the one that everyone will see, there is something called a ‘junior performance’.

So generally, although the performance is centered around the current Top Star, and performed mainly by the senior students (Author’s note: all of us performers are considered ‘students’, so the older ones are called ‘senior students’), for one day, the junior students will take over their roles for a performance.

So that is a ‘junior performance’ (currently, there is only 1 junior performance per main performance, but at the time of my debut there were 2)¹.

In Takarazuka, there are 4 troupes, Flower, Moon, Snow, and Star².

And in each troupe, there are around 80 members.

Added to that, there are the ‘specialty members’ of Senka: these are senior students not assigned to troupes, who have some extraordinary skill in dance or acting or something like that. To put it in basic terms, they are a group of borderless professionals. So they are there too.

This means that Senka members will perform roles as needed in productions of any troupe.

As for the junior students…well, they’re still learning the ropes, and if they manage to get any noticeable role or anything, they’re extremely happy.

And then there’s one more group.

In Takarazuka.

Those are the ‘new debuts’, Ken-1. Ken-1 is short for ‘Post-Graduate Year 1’. So the first year after debut is Ken-1.

And during the one year period of being Ken-1, they are not assigned to a troupe³.

So for example, I wouldn’t be able to say ‘I am Mori Keaki of Snow Troupe.’

I was just Ken-1 student Mori Keaki.

However.

The main performances are all done by the actual troupes.

So if you think about it logically.

For a mere Ken-1 student to get any kind of a role in a junior performance is…

Something to be really, amazingly grateful for.

And!!

What the heck?

Ken-1, new debut Mori Keaki.

Was given a role for that junior performance~~~~~~~!!

It was a show written and directed by Shibata Yukihiro, The Scarlet Pimpernel⁴.

While my role didn’t come with any lines, I would be visible on stage as one of the 8 members of ‘the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel’…

I was so excited about it.

I knew I had to put everything I had into it!!

But I was still only a new debut.

In Takarazuka, once you decide ‘I’m going to be an otokoyaku!’, there’s only a short time afterwards before your debut.

So basically, I was a total newbie otokoyaku!!

…So.

Looking back on it now, I end up watching myself with a sort of bitter amusement… But at the time, I was totally focused on ‘I have to do this!!’

The members of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel did a lot of dashing around all over the stage.

So, Mori Keaki…

Was very naively earnest about the whole thing.

I went and watched.

Actual men running around.

Thinking ‘I’ve got to be as much like a real man as I can!’ I went and did ‘manly research’ (!!) day after day. …Recalling this, I can’t help but think I must have seemed a bit creepy…

So what I did was.

In the evening, I would stand around on the veranda of my house, or by the road that went past the house, and staaaaaaare at one of the neighborhood guys out jogging. (And what was I supposed to do if he misunderstood what was going on!? I couldn’t just say ‘I was studying how you were running’ – he would never have understood what I meant. I didn’t have any romantic feelings or anything!!)

And also.

If I was in a mall or a train station or something and I saw ‘a man running’, I would stop in my tracks and diligently study how he moved his arms, the angle of his body, his facial expressions, and everything like that.

‘I’m gonna be a man~!!’

Ken-1 Mori Keaki thought this so very earnestly.

So in that way, I put everything into my determination of ‘I’m a man!!’…

While I can laugh about it now, when it came to the actual performance I was so restrained.

Even though there was a scene where I was singing with my hand on the shoulder of my senior who was performing the lead role…

I was so scared, and so certain that I was going to do something wrong, that I got too nervous and ended up singing with my hand hovering about 2 centimeters above her shoulder…

So that was the sort of pathetically innocent state of mind of the Takarazuka Ken-1 student.

But, for a member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a manly sort of man, to be doing that kind of thing…it’s a really weird pose, isn’t it!? (Even though I had worked so hard studying real-life men…)

I didn’t realize that contradiction until way, way, afterwards, though.

New debut Mori Keaki was…

Totally determined that

‘I’m gonna be a man~!!’

And that was the start of my life as a Takarazuka otokoyaku.

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1 – Meaning 2 separate casts for the junior performances, each performing once in Takarazuka and once in Tokyo. This practice seems to have ended in the early 80s, likely because the sizes of graduating classes became smaller.

2 – This book was published 5 years before the inauguration of Cosmos Troupe.

3 – Currently, troupe assignments occur within a few months in most situations, but it used to take longer for the assignments to take place.

4 – This is an older show which seems to be based closely on Orzcy’s play, rather than the Broadway adaptation which Takarazuka first performed in 2008.