Parade

by Shuichi Yoshida

  No matter how happy-go-lucky a guy he was, Sakuma went home discouraged. I felt sorry for my only friend and confronted Koto. ‘Even if the way you acted was just a product of your psyche,’ I told her, ‘the way you treated him was awful.’ Psyche, by the way, means ‘the unconscious’, and is a term Mirai started using all of sudden after she read a comic book version of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. It’s become a buzzword around our apartment.

  1.2

  I did some occasional squats as I stood there in the convenience store, reading my fill of magazines. Finally I ran out of things to read so I started looking through Cosmopolitan, where I happened to run across a short interview with Tomohiko Maruyama. I decided to buy it as a present for Koto. In the interview Maruyama said, laughing, ‘When I like a girl I want to be with her all the time. I’m very possessive that way.’ Considering what a possessive boyfriend she has, it’s amazing that Koto still finds time to never miss an episode of A Nurse’s Work.

  The convenience store is right in front of the building we live in. When I left the shop, I waited for a break in the traffic and crossed the road. Inside the lobby of our building I saw that the lift was under maintenance, so I took the emergency stairs instead. As I got to the landing on the second floor I heard somebody above me, sobbing.

  So I wouldn’t surprise whoever it was, I clomped loudly up the stairs, humming. I rounded the corner up to the fourth-floor landing, and came across a high school girl sitting there on the stairs, in her school uniform, her feet quite pigeon-toed. She was clutching a handkerchief to her face, which was the same level as mine as I stood on the landing. It was too narrow to just squeeze by without a word, but I wanted to avoid what happened the other day when I ran across another girl like this and spoke to her and was told in no uncertain terms to get lost. The girl this time, though, unlike the other sobbing girl, had a normal-length skirt and hair that wasn’t dyed.

  ‘Um, I wonder if . . .’

  I wonder if you’d let me by, or I wonder if you’re okay. My opening left it fuzzy which one I meant.

  The girl looked up from her handkerchief, startled for a moment, and hurriedly stood up. The book bag on her lap slipped off, and crashed to my feet. As I picked it up I asked, hesitantly, ‘Did, uh, something happen?’ The girl snatched the bag away, said, ‘It’s nothing,’ and she tried to push past me to go downstairs. On a sudden impulse I grabbed her wrist. I had such a tight grip that after trying to break free she gave up, her arm going limp.

  ‘Actually I saw another girl like you the other day – she was crying on the stairs. You went to apartment 402, didn’t you? I live next door, in 401.’

  When I said apartment 402, the girl’s face instantly tightened. I looked directly into her eyes and said, ‘If there’s anything you’d like to talk about, I’d be happy to . . .’

  The girl’s eyelashes were wet with tears and their dampness made them look thicker, and longer. I slowly released my grip on her wrist and in a small voice she murmured, ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘But what about—’

  I was growing more insistent, but she quietly replied, ‘It’s okay. Really. I’m the one who decided to come here, so there’s nothing you can do.’ With her skirt fluttering as she ran, she sped off down the narrow staircase. I was on the verge of pursuing her, but thought she’d just respond with another get lost. So somehow my feet wouldn’t budge.

  I went back to the apartment in a foul mood. Now Koto was in front of the mirror, plucking her eyebrows.

  ‘Koto, I saw it again.’

  ‘Saw what?’ She turned around and her eyebrows were definitely an uneven thickness.

  ‘Apartment 402 . . .’

  ‘An old guy? Or a young woman?’

  ‘A young woman. Actually just a high school student. She was on the stairs, crying.’

  ‘Hmm. Sometimes the girls cry when they leave, but others seem happy enough. I guess there are all kinds . . .’

  ‘How can you be so blasé? The apartment next door is a brothel, for God’s sake.’

  ‘We don’t really know that, do we?’

  ‘Listen, a sleazy middle-aged guy lives there. And other middle-aged guys who look like they have money come there, and young girls who look like they don’t have any. What else could it be but prostitution?’

  ‘Well the girl I saw said Thank you very much! and politely bowed. You think a girl engaged in prostitution says Thank you very much! and bows when she leaves? I think it’s some kind of weird religion. Best not to get involved. If it turns out to be Aum, then what? They’ll kill us.’

  I went to the kitchen, opened the fridge and saw a glass bottle with iced tea in it.

  ‘Koto, did you put this in here? Can I have some?’ I was already pouring it out into a glass.

  ‘You’d better not. That’s not mine, it’s Naoki’s. It’s jasmine tea or something he brewed up this morning.’

  When I heard that it was Naoki’s – Naoki Ihara is one of our roommates – I poured it back in the bottle. Knowing Naoki, he probably drew a line on the bottle so he’d know how much he’d left.

  ‘Has Naoki said anything? About 402?’ I asked Koto’s back as she continued to pluck her eyebrows.

  ‘He said, “Well, what about us? We live like we’re in a commune, or like illegal aliens, without telling the management company. We’re in the same boat.”’

  ‘Illegal aliens?’ I muttered and poured some flat cola into a glass.

  Why am I living a communal life like this? It’s hard to explain, and I don’t really feel like trying. Lots of people, including my friends at college, have asked me why. The more I try to explain it, the more it feels like I’m getting further away from the real reason. I asked Koto the same question once. ‘Why are you living here with everyone, Koto?’ I asked. Her answer was simple: ‘Because Tomohiko lives in a company dorm and I can’t live with him.’ In other words, for Koto there are only two choices: Living with Tomohiko Maruyama and Everything else.

  Our apartment is laid out like this: there’s a bathroom on the right as you come in, then you go down a short hallway where there’s a kitchen on the left. This isn’t one of those dinky half-kitchens that you find in a studio apartment – it’s generous enough so you could easily gut and clean an entire tuna. Next to the kitchen there’s a sliding door, which leads to the guys’ room, an eight-mat Japanese-style room that Naoki and I are sharing. Naoki sleeps on a loft-style pipe bed, while I sleep on a futon below, on the tatami. There’s a desk, but we all use it for ironing and it’s cluttered with spray starch and a misting bottle. A sliding glass door leads out from the guys’ room to the balcony. It’s not too small, but not big enough to make you want to do some gardening or put in a wood deck or anything.

  Go back to the kitchen and slide open the glass door, which doesn’t slide open easily, and there’s the large living room. The south side is all windows and it’s a little noisy with the traffic from the Kyukoshu Kaido Boulevard below, but it’s a sunny room and when Koto hangs out her underwear, it dries in an hour or so. As I said, Koto spends almost every day in the living room. She has a mobile so she could get Tomohiko’s calls anywhere, but she insists that the chances of him calling are greater if she stays put. (I have my doubts . . .) An awful light-purple fake leather sofa and a glass table round out the living room.

  Beyond the living room is a slightly smaller Western-style room that the women occupy. It isn’t off limits to the guys, and when we get together to drink we often use their room, especially since Mirai likes to stretch out when she drinks. Mirai sleeps in a double bed, while Koto, like me, prefers sleeping on the floor in a futon. This is where the four of us live.

  I was sitting on the sofa in the living room, finishing up the flat Coke, when I remembered the copy of Cosmopolitan. ‘Here you go,’ I said as I handed it to Koto, who was still engrossed in plucking her eyebrows.

  She seemed to have already read it, and flipped through the magazine without much interest. ‘Oh, yea
h,’ she said. ‘Someone named Umezaki called.’

  ‘You mean the Umezaki from my club? What’d he want?’

  ‘I don’t know. He asked whether you’re going on the trip with him or not.’

  Umezaki, who is a few years older than me and used to be in my club at college, had invited me to join him on a weekend trip to Izu Kogen. A couple that was supposed to join him had backed out at the last minute and, with no one else to invite, he’d phoned me and suggested I join him, and bring a girl along.

  ‘Are you free next weekend?’ I asked Koto, whose face was all scrunched up as she plucked her eyebrows. As I expected, she said, ‘As long as Tomohiko isn’t going to call me.’

  ‘When will you know if he’s going to call?’

  ‘By next weekend.’

  ‘You mean when next Saturday and Sunday are over you’ll know?’

  ‘Yeah . . . I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t know how you put up with it. Waiting so patiently every day for him to call you. Don’t you ever think you’re wasting your life?’

  It wasn’t like I was dying to take Koto with me to Izu. It’s just that if she didn’t watch what she was doing, she was going to wind up with no more eyebrows.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, really. I mean I’m the one stuck here all day waiting for the phone to ring.’

  ‘See what I mean? But you’re pretty calm about it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Being that calm is pretty scary, I think. A woman you supposedly broke up with waiting for ever for you to call. All the while calmly plucking out her eyebrows.

  ‘So can you go?’ I asked.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Oh, that’s right . . . Umezaki invited me to go with him next weekend to Izu Kogen.’

  ‘Have I ever met him? On the phone he said “It’s been a while,” and I was thrown for a second.’

  ‘You remember – he’s the older guy in my club who brought over the washing machine.’

  ‘Oh, yeah – that kind of intellectual-looking older guy?’

  ‘That’s him. Anyway, that older, intellectual-looking guy’s asking us to join him on a trip next weekend to Izu Kogen.’

  ‘Izu Kogen? What’re you going to do there?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . tennis, maybe?’

  ‘Play tennis, with this intellectual guy, in Izu Kogen?’

  ‘Yep. Interested?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’

  Koto had tweezed out enough eyebrows, but still went back to plucking. Like she wanted to make absolutely sure the right and left eyebrow were perfectly even. I gave up on inviting her, rolled up the Cosmopolitan I’d wasted my money on, and stood up. ‘Anybody drying clothes on the balcony?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so . . . You going to do some laundry?’

  ‘Um. You have anything you want me to wash?’

  ‘Yeah, I do.’

  Tweezers in hand, Koto scurried over to the bathroom. As I was going into the guys’ bedroom she thrust a balled-up toilet seat cover at me.

  ‘This? All right. I’m not going to use any fabric softener. Is that okay?’

  I obediently took the seat cover, went into the guys’ bedroom, closed the door, and flung the seat cover as hard as I could against the wall.

  1.3

  I was watching the pink toilet seat cover and my underwear and shirts sloshing around in the dirty water of the washing machine, when for some reason I thought of Shinya.

  Etsuko, who’d been a classmate of mine from junior high and was in the same basketball club in high school, had phoned me a month ago. ‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, ‘did you hear? Shinya died.’ She’d called because Disney Sea had just opened and she and Noriko and Risa, also from the basketball club, were planning a trip to Tokyo and thought we should get together. After we caught up on various news she said, ‘I’ll call you again when our schedule’s set.’ She was about to hang up when she came out with that Oh, by the way and told me about Shinya’s death. She was so casual about it, like she was reporting that her neighbours had built a fence or something, that at first all I could manage in response was a simple, ‘Really?’ According to Etsuko, Shinya had died in a motorcycle accident that just involved him. ‘You weren’t that close to him at all, were you?’ Etsuko said, and I let it go at a simple, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

  Shinya and I were classmates in junior high. I think it’s the same in most schools, but you could divide the boys in our class into four groups. You have the clear-headed brainy ones who sit in the first row, then the jocks who sit behind them and doze off in class (that’s the group you could mostly find me in). Then in the seats next to the hallway are the members of a subculture or the science nerds who, during break, would get all excited talking about Bruce Lee or pro wrestling. Then finally there are the bad boys, including Shinya, who sit in nice sunny spots near the window.

  I don’t have any recollection at all of enjoying talking to Shinya at school. All I recall is we were both big fans of the actress Naoko Iijima and he forced me to buy a photo book filled with pictures of her.

  Occasionally I’d spot him, out of his school uniform, in the shopping district in town, and it was hard to imagine him shouldering a regulation school backpack. He looked more like a gang member who’d just done time in jail.

  But just after the summer holidays in our last year of junior high, this classmate I hardly knew randomly called me.

  ‘Hey, how you been?’ Shinya said.

  What do you mean how you been? I thought. Didn’t you just see me in class today? ‘Uh, yeah. I’m fine,’ I managed to reply. Had I done something to offend him enough to pick a fight with me? Was it going to be like in a TV drama where he’d force me to meet him behind our school building, or on an embankment next to a river? I started to imagine myself as some bullied kid.

  ‘You free today?’ Shinya asked. He sounded almost embarrassed.

  ‘Uh – what’s going on?’ I asked, still totally convinced I was heading for a beating.

  ‘No, I was just thinking, like, if you’re free, you could come over and we could hang out at my place . . .’

  Hang out with him? I didn’t get it. Maybe hang out was some kind of code word? I stammered something and Shinya said, ‘Yeah – I’m not sure how to put it . . . but you’re studying for the high school entrance exams, right?’

  ‘Ah, yeah. Sort of . . .’

  Our conversation was finally sounding like something you’d expect between junior high students, and I felt relieved. I still couldn’t figure out why he called me, but at least it didn’t sound like he was going to take me behind the school and beat the crap out of me. He repeated his invitation to hang out and I didn’t have any excuse not to go, so I said okay, hung up, and rode my bike over to his house.

  When I got there and went up to his room, the first thing that took me by surprise was the strawberry shortcake and tea set out nicely on a table. He’d apparently done this for me. I looked at him, seated there, and noticed he had no eyebrows. There was an awkward silence for a while, and then the words that came out of his mouth startled me even more than the strawberry shortcake. ‘Could you help me study?’ he asked.

  I was really surprised. I asked him to repeat himself a few times, and though the way he said it grew more rough, going from I’d like you to help me study to Help me study to Come on! You’ve got to help me!, the message remained the same. Shinya was telling me he wanted to go on to high school. I don’t know anyone else I can ask, he added.

  After that day I used to stop by his house a few days each week, after school. He’d sworn me to secrecy about the tutoring – I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody else in our class where I rushed off to after school. The rumour started to spread around the basketball club that I had a girlfriend. Things got blown out of proportion to the point where they were whispering things like I hear she lives in the next to
wn over and is as ugly as sin.

  Honestly, I didn’t feel like teaching Shinya, and besides I wasn’t that great a student to begin with. I kept going to see him because he wasn’t as bad a guy as he looked. Actually the more we talked, about how much we liked Naoko Iijima, among other things, the more I realised how well we got along. Every time he invited me, I was happy to go over to see him, and we’d just sit there, talking about all kinds of crazy things until his parents yelled at us from downstairs to be quiet. We never touched the textbooks spread out on the table. After a while, I started hanging out at his place even when he hadn’t called me. Shinya enjoyed laughing at all kinds of random crap, and I’d never imagined how seriously he was thinking about his future. His natural gentleness helped him get along well with others, but this proved a handicap, making him fall behind everyone else, and I think he was truly trying to get his life together. I was just a normal, healthy junior high student, son of the owner of a small sushi shop, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone like him was such a mess.

  In the end Shinya didn’t even apply for the high school he had hoped to attend. ‘No way I could get in, even if I took the test,’ he explained. I wanted to insist that he should at least try and take the exam, but it wasn’t even clear that I’d be able to get in either. So I was pretty sure my pupil wouldn’t make the grade.

  Shinya wasn’t stupid. If our classmates hadn’t studied at home or attended after-hours cram schools – if they just took tests based on what they learned at school – I think he might have had better grades than anybody. But life isn’t that easy. Like the race between the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise doesn’t win because he plods along, doing his best. He wins because he doesn’t let the hare see him plodding along.

  After I graduated from junior high, my relationship with Shinya suddenly came to an end. But we’d always kept it a secret, so from the outside it looked like nothing had changed.

  The last time I saw him was the week before my high school graduation ceremony. (I was the only kid from my junior high who passed the exam and attended that high school.) I ran into him on the bus. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, so we had lots to catch up on. ‘Next month I’m going to Tokyo,’ I told him.