Kiko Mizuhara

I kept seeing her face all over Tokyo. Harajuku, Shibuya, the magazine racks at every bookstore, the convenience stores, the fashion shops. Kiko Mizuhara, everywhere at once, smiling from posters and covers in this blur of commercial imagery that made up the visual language of the city.

I didn’t know who she was at first. Just another face. But then I found out her real name was Audrie Kiko Daniel, that she was from Texas, half Korean. There was something about that combination that made seeing her face everywhere seem less random—like she’d arrived from somewhere else entirely and somehow become the symbol of Tokyo’s visual culture, the girl you’d see a thousand times without knowing anything about her.

She’d acted in things—Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, that violent manga adaptation Helter Skelter. She modeled and sang and had all these magazine covers. There was a photo series she’d done called Dandelion Flower for Union Magazine, though I never really understood why a dandelion mattered.

Her Twitter was strange in the way celebrity Twitter could be—she wrote about music and shows and her life in these short bursts that felt weirdly personal even though 300,000 people were reading them. It made her feel less like the girl on the walls and more like an actual person, which somehow made the whole thing more unsettling.

By the end of my time in Tokyo, I couldn’t walk through the city without seeing her. Maybe that’s the whole thing about being a celebrity in a place like that—you become part of the city before anyone even knows who you are. Your face is everywhere, doing the work, and all you have to do is exist.