While Mai, Satomi, Miki and Seri were in SoCal with me, we rehearsed on about $30,000 worth of equipment I bought for that purpose. We wrote every night for 4-5 hours, too. I took them on a guided tour of the L.A.-Orange County basin and we went to Hollywood and bought a bunch of rockstar type clothing. After that, we had an appointment over at a salon known to be used by rock musicians. We had already talked about our look and agreed that we would all wear our hair long since our likely mostly male audience would like that. Also, we weren't going to dye it since the more we emphasized our Japanese-ness the more exotic and thus alluring we would seem.

I got into contact with a couple of local graphic designers and one of them created a logo for us. We also did a photo session so I could put together a publicity kit. After that, we spent a week in a recording studio doing a seven song demo, during which I had someone shoot video footage of us recording and talking about ourselves. I had the whole  mess edited together, subtitled it into English for the Japanese-only bits and had it put on CD-ROMs (DVD's weren't yet a factor). They were then sent out to various rock magazines across the world.

Over the course of all this, Seri and Cindy seemed to be getting pretty friendly with each other even though Cindy spoke no Japanese. Seri had only ever spoken Japanese to me. A couple days before we were supposed to return to Japan, I had gone downstairs around 11 p.m. to get a tomato juice and, when I passed Cindy's room, I heard a couple of voices moaning. I put my ear to the door and picked up the sound of Seri's voice and she was trying to say in English that Cindy was beautiful. Then there was a bunch of kissing and more moaning. I was guessing that Cindy was fingering Seri and was also kissing her while she was doing it. "You're so cute, Seri," Cindy enthused. "I wish I knew Japanese so I could communicate better with you," she told her. "Is okay," Seri averred.

Seri was really girly, so I guess she was the femme half of this new relationship. I had no idea Seri was gay, though. She never made any passes at me. They sat together on the plane ride to Japan. However, Cindy stayed with me when we arrived there. "So I guess you and Seri are an item now, huh Cindy?" I wondered, grinning knowingly. "Oh my God Aiko, she's so sweet. And she's hot, too," Cindy bubbled. "Well, I guess that makes our rhythm section tighter," I joked. That sent Cindy into a fit of hysterical giggling.

The next night, I met Tsutomu after he got off of work and we ambled over to a love hotel and did the wild thing, this time au natural (no condom). His performance was improving the more he was becoming used to sleeping with me and, more importantly, increasingly comfortable with having sex. I slept all night with his cum inside me (well, at least that which didn't leak out of me) and it made me feel closer to him.

The thing was, though, that Cindy was still insistent on sleeping in the same bed (though no longer having sex with  me) and cuddling me. I guess in a country where she didn't understand the language or know that much about the culture I was someone she could hold on to when Seri wasn't around. Cindy told Seri I knew they were both lesbians and that I was bisexual myself, but she may not have entirely understood what Cindy was saying to her. Finally, after one rehearsal, I took Seri and Cindy to a local bar and, while we drank, I revealed to Seri in Japanese that I knew and I didn't care. So if she wanted to come to Cindy's hotel room to have sex with her or just hang out that was okay with me. I promised not to tell the other band members. We then went back to our hotel with Seri and I grabbed a book from my room and went back down to the hotel's restaurant bar to have a beer and read. I went back up a couple of hours later and the light was out when I entered the room. I flipped it back on and there were Cindy and Seri both nude and slumbering away. I gazed at Seri's fit body. She had sweet little round B cups and it appeared she had her pubic area bikini waxed.

It was almost 11 now and the trains would stop running soon. So I woke the two of them up and we walked Seri down to the station so she could get home and not have her parents and younger sister worry about her.

The next night, following another rehearsal, the entire band went out drinking together. Mai and Satomi wanted to know what my plans were for Tsutomu and whether I would quit when he asked me to marry him. I replied that I wouldn't quit unless the band breaks up and that I was going to put off having children until I turned 30. I already talked with Tsutomu about all this and, at least for now, he was okay with it. He definitely wanted me to be a stay at home mom if we became parents. I then ran the idea by him about him being a stay at home dad. He gave me another one of those, "what, are you from Mars?" kind of looks. I knew he would react like that. But there was an easy way to solve this.

That Sunday, we rented a so-called "light truck" and hefted ourselves and our equipment down to Harajuku along with a gas powered generator. We were all decked out in leather outfits that featured navel baring midriff tops and did our debut gig. We angled our amps and PA to minimize our sound bleeding over into that of the other street performers. Mai's mom Mina shot video of it while we posed, preened and riffed our way through a 30 minute set. We could easily have played longer, but our equipment was so much bigger than everyone else's that it would have been an imposition on them. Nonetheless, a pretty good crowd of about 50 stood there to watch us. We sold 11 copies of our CD-ROM at 500 yen a throw. Cindy got A LOT of attention from the spectators and more than a few guys wanted their picture taken with her.

One of those CD-ROMs was sold to a college activities coordinator who was looking for entertainment to book for their student festival, which was the first week of October. He called the number on the back of the sleeve the CD-ROM came in (which was actually Mai's home phone) and we had our first real show scheduled two weeks later in the school's main quad, where they erected a stage. It was a daytime concert at 4 p.m. just as the sun was going down (they don't have daylight savings time in Japan). In order to maintain control over the presentation, we brought our own PA, monitors and lights (all bought with my money) and even hired a pyrotechnician for it. So that two week interval was busy as hell just getting everything arranged.

Satomi and I walked out on stage as the floor lights came on and we did a brief exchange of speedy classical sounding lead runs while Cindy sat in her drum chair before the pyro went off on both sides of the stage in front of about a 500 strong audience, which cheered. The other members ran on and Mai, doing her best David Coverdale style poses, began screaming out the lyrics to  "Out of the Shadows," which was paced at a near thrash metal tempo. The first solo up was me and I used a mixture of tapping and legato to make my musical point before Satomi kicked in with some blazing fretwork of her own before we took it home. "Good evening!  We're Ominous Twilight!" Mai conveyed to the audience. Then in a very rough male speech form, she declared in Japanese, "and we're going to kick some righteous ass tonight!" Miki opened the next song, "Canon and Fugue in Evil Minor," with some Bach like organ riffing and then Satomi and I joined in, as the three of us played off of each other while Mai played rhythm guitar. The tune had three time changes in it. That finished off with me playing an unaccompanied coda that ended on a long, sustained note before we slipped into "Thunder Conquers All." a romping, stomping bit of sonic brutality that featured Cindy's ferocious pounding on the skins.

Our next song was another instrumental, "18th Century Slam Dance," which was a thrash metal tune I wrote that featured dissonant minor key riffs. Mai could never quite master the rhythm correctly, so she had a time out behind our back line, which was five Marshall stacks on each side (though only one was on for each of us at any one time. The extras were rented more for show and as backup than anything else). We were killing and once we finished that song, we launched into a  cover of Purple's "Burn," with me and Satomi doing the main fast lead break in a third harmony.

Mai stood on stage surveying the crowd and asked how we were doing, which elicited loud cheers. She announced our next song, a power ballad called, "Don't Turn Your Back on My Tears," which was inspired by something that happened during one of Mai's past relationships, and it was capped off by an achingly touching end solo from Satomi.

The next compositiion was a playful loping rocker we dubbed, "Summertime Breakdown," which was written by me and based on the proposition of what would happen if you mixed the Dixie Dregs with Bach's Air on a G String and Beach Boys style vocal harmonies.

After that, it was 30 minutes of fast tempo songs, scalding lead breaks and brutal double bass drums and our main set was over. We got called back for an encore, where we did a cover of Van Halen's "Light Up the Sky" and then one of our tracks, "Everyday Terror." We ran off to loud applause and the clapping kept going on and on, so we came out again and did another one of our instrumental selections, "Afterburner," with me and Satomi running all over the stage and pulling out every guitar showbiz trick in the book save lighting our instruments on fire. Mai announced that the next track was indeed going to be the final one of the night. "(My Home is) Wherever You Are," was another power ballad that let the crowd down easy. And we sold out of all 100 CD-ROMs we brought with us afterward. I thought the 100 number was overly optimistic, but we could have sold another couple dozen if we had them.

"How did it look from up there?" I asked Cindy. "They were going fucking bonkers, Aiko," she reported. "At least bonkers by Japanese standards, so there weren't any mosh pits, but they were engaged the whole show." The organizers of the event came up to us while we were breaking our equipment down and expressed their happiness at the manner in which the students received our performance. It was too bad, though, that we didn't have it videotaped. It would have been a nice artifact. I was keeping a diary of everything we did just in case, which turned out to be a good idea in the end.

We were allowed to use the girls gym to shower and change into our street clothes after we finished loading up the truck. Getting offstage is kinda weird. It's like becoming Clark Kent again after being Superman for 90 minutes or two hours or whatever. Playing music just by itself is exhilarating, but when you factor in that kind of crowd reaction, then that euphoria gets greatly amplified. I have to say, though, that night, as I laid in Cindy's arms, I had never slept so well in my life because of all the energy I had expended during the day.