Parade

by Shuichi Yoshida

  I sat down two rows behind him and watched the movie. I hadn’t slept well at the sauna’s nap room, so I dozed off a bit during the film, but as advertised it was grotesque and interesting. At the end when Lecter broke open a man’s skull and was scooping out and eating his brains, I nearly yelled out. I looked at Mr Takashina two rows ahead of me and he was also leaning forwards, glued to the screen.

  When he left the cinema he made straight for Shinjuku Station. He cut through the crowded concourse inside the station and went through the turnstile to the Odakyu Line.

  The train he took was a local one that left two minutes later. It wasn’t exactly packed, but there weren’t any seats left. Next to the door was a ‘silver seat’ reserved for the elderly, and a young guy, a college student by the look of him, gave up this seat to Mr Takashina. The train set off and Mr Takashina was lost in a pamphlet he was reading.

  I stood right in front of him, holding on to a strap, and could see what he was reading. He raised his head once and shot me a look, but he didn’t seem to remember me sitting right next to him in the Lotteria a few hours before.

  The first time I snuck into another person’s house was when I was five. My father was unemployed then and the two of us were living in public housing in Tama New Town. It was a Sunday and my father was watching a golf tournament on TV. He dozed off and when he woke up it was dark outside and he suddenly realised his little boy was no longer next to him. Not that worried, he figured I was playing in the corridor outside or on the stairs and he went out to look for me. I often played on the landing, but this time he didn’t find me there.

  Panicking, my father went around the perimeter of the building – at this time of evening nice cooking smells were coming out of the units – calling out my name. The housewives on the estates were a tightly knit group, and as soon as they heard my father calling out for me, they quickly got together and broke into teams to search – one team searching the park, one the riverbank, another group to keep in touch with the designated fire monitor in each building. They ignored my father and quickly assembled a search party that scoured the grounds of the estate, flashlight beams arcing back and forth in the gathering gloom.

  While all this was going on, I was in the apartment of a newly married couple one floor below. The couple had gone out and had apparently forgotten to lock up. I snuck inside, watched TV, and had fallen asleep.

  It was after ten p.m. when they found me. The search outside had got pretty large-scale, I heard later, with several policemen involved. Naturally the first ones who found me were the young couple, back from shopping in a department store in Ginza, loaded down with shopping bags. They parked their car and found everyone in the estate tense, searching for the lost boy. The young wife had apparently seen me before, playing on the stairs and landing, and despite being tired out from shopping all day, she told the head of the local women’s association that she would help search as soon as she put away her bags. She rushed into her apartment.

  As the young wife ran up the stairs she found her husband standing at their front door. ‘It isn’t locked,’ he told her. ‘That can’t be,’ she replied. ‘It’s true.’ ‘You were the last one out.’ ‘No, you were.’ They argued their way inside. Pale light from the TV filtered out in the dark apartment, and they were startled for a second. And there, on the floor, bathed in the pale light, was a little boy, face up, sound asleep.

  Mr Takashina got off at a station called Soshigaya Okura, directly south of where Chitose Karasuyama would be if you were on the Keio Line.

  Leaving the station, Mr Takashina leisurely strolled towards a long line of shops radiating off from the station, and stopped inside a supermarket with mounds of Florida oranges at the entrance. I thought of following him but decided to wait outside and have a smoke. It was about twenty minutes later that he came out, carrying plastic shopping bags in both hands. He glanced at me for an instant, a brief look of doubt in his eyes. But then, apparently untroubled, he continued walking down the shopping district.

  He came out of the shopping district, walked past the Nihon University School of Commerce and crossed Setagaya Boulevard, where the traffic was backed up. Just the other day Ryosuke and I had ridden in Momoko to this neighbourhood, to a KFC. It was on our way home from going sunbathing next to the Tama River.

  Mr Takashina crossed Setagaya Boulevard and went into the grounds of a housing complex. I was thinking maybe he lived there, but he just stopped a couple of times to shift the bags from one hand to the other and walked through the grounds and out the other side. The road came out under a high cliff. Since the cliff was topped by a fence, I figured the Setagaya Sports Complex must be up there.

  Mr Takashina’s house was below the cliff – an old, two-storey single family home, the grounds surrounded by a high concrete-block wall. He opened the rusty metal gate and went inside, without once looking back.

  I looked through one of the decorative carved openings in the concrete blocks and saw Mr Takashina, from behind, unlocking the front door. It didn’t seem like anyone else was at home. The curtains were closed at all the windows and in the garden there was a layer of withered tulip leaves.

  As soon as Mr Takashina went inside, I slipped through a gap in the metal gate and stealthily snuck up to the front door. The nameplate, which said Tadayoshi and Haruko Takashina, was slightly lopsided. So his wife, who passed away two years ago, was named Haruko. I straightened the nameplate and slipped back out of the gate and outside. I could sneak into this house any time.

  I checked my watch and saw it was almost four. I decided to walk back to Karasuyama by going along the Sengawa River and cutting through Seijo. These days all I seem to do is walk away from somewhere. From the park where I find customers, from hotels where I stay with them, from their apartments, from saunas where I can’t sleep well, from Makoto’s apartment, where he’s been wetting his bed these days because he’s overdosing on speed . . . I walk away from all sorts of places, always walking away, but never arriving anywhere.

  I remembered Naoki’s story of how he ran away from home at fifteen. How when I was working at his company he suspected I was a runaway and told me his own story. Naoki said he’d planned to hitchhike, but took the Chuo Line to Kobuchizawa, then changed to some branch line – which one, he couldn’t recall. He can’t even remember now which station he finally got off at. Anyway, it was a small, unmanned station, with Mt Yatsugatake rising up before him, and when he left the station he saw a sign for a pension in Kiyosato, so he said, laughing, ‘It must have been around there, I guess.’

  When he exited the station, the only person getting off there, he found a path through the forest that looked like no one had taken it in years, and with no particular destination in mind he started off down the slope. All sorts of birds called out in the woods.

  ‘A powdery snow started to fall then,’ he went on. ‘At first just lightly, then soon it was coming down hard. My breath was so thick and white I felt I could grab it with my hand. I’d walked quite a distance from the station, and when it snows in a forest it gets dark very quickly. To tell you the truth, I was getting worried.’

  Naoki had apparently left a note behind to his parents about his pointless running away.

  ‘The whole thing was kind of pitiful. I was thinking that maybe I could get home before my dad read the note.’

  Right then he spotted a mountain cottage beyond the ever-narrowing path. Trampling down the weeds, Naoki started down an animal trail and walked to the cottage.

  ‘It was less a cottage than a kind of holiday lodge. I knocked many times but nobody came to the door. Yatsugatake is a kind of summer holiday spot, come to think of it. I was about to give up and head back to the station when suddenly, quite suddenly – I’m not sure how to put it, exactly – I heard somebody voice’s asking me Can’t you break that window? It wasn’t like I was dying to get inside. Still, that voice was in my head, and it was like I should try getting in, like I had to. The rational part of my m
ind, of course, knew that this cottage was someone else’s property and that breaking the window and trespassing was a crime. But I was kind of worked up, having run away from home, and I wanted to break into that mountain cottage, or more strictly into this mountain cottage that was someone else’s property . . . Force my way in with my body, like I was physically making the cottage move . . . That’s the kind of strange urge that struck me.’

  Naoki picked up a stone that was at his feet. The stone was freezing cold, he said. The falling snow had already dyed the leaves on the trees around him white.

  ‘That sound. I can still remember that sound of the stone cracking the glass. From the perspective of the cottage the window I broke was just a small part of it, but the instant that small hole appeared in the glass, it’s like – I knew all about the cottage, and the cottage knew all about me.’

  Naoki gazed at me with a worried look on his face. ‘Do you understand?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I don’t.’ I honestly didn’t.

  Inside the cottage there were lots of canned goods, still not past their expiry date, smoked hams, and other food. The first night he spent there he was kind of timid, but the next day he grew bolder. He gathered firewood that was underneath the house and on the second night lit a fire in the fireplace. Seated in front of the fireplace, wrapped in a warm blanket, he drank whisky for the first time in his life. After it got light outside, he went for a walk in the forest. A pure white forest bathed in winter sunlight.

  ‘The time I spent there was wonderful. Wonderful isn’t exactly a word people use much nowadays, I know, but the few days I spent there were really wonderful . . . Wonderful. Yep, seriously wonderful.’

  It took me nearly two hours to get back to the apartment in Karasuyama, walking along the Sengawa River, cutting through Seijo.

  I opened the front door and was crouching down among the scattered shoes, untying the laces of my trainers, when Koto called out from the living room, ‘Hey, Satoru’s back!’

  ‘I’m back,’ I called out.

  Koto said, ‘Come here! Hurry up!’

  At the same moment Ryosuke clomped out to the entrance. ‘Where were you?’ he scolded me.

  ‘Why’re you asking?’ I said, a little frightened.

  ‘I’ve been waiting since yesterday.’

  ‘How come?’

  Ryosuke was carrying what looked like a couple of thick study guides. I tugged off my trainers and stepped inside.

  ‘Take a look,’ Ryosuke said, looking proud, thrusting the study guides into my chest.

  ‘What are these?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? They’re study guides.’

  ‘Study guides?’

  I dodged past him and went into the living room. Two hours of walking and I was looking forward to plopping down on the soft sofa. As soon I entered the living room Koto – dressed in her usual tracksuit – said, ‘Thank goodness! He was about to make me take the University Entrance Qualifying Exam instead of you, Satoru.’

  ‘Qualifying Exam?’

  When I sat down on the sofa my legs suddenly went limp from all the walking I’d been doing since last night.

  ‘Don’t you remember what you told me? When we went on that drive to the Tama River?’ Ryosuke was still clutching the study guides as he stood there in front of me. I was kind of spacing out and didn’t realise he was talking to me until he kicked the sofa.

  ‘Huh? Tama River? Did we go there?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? You said you wanted to get a suntan so I took you in Momoko.’

  ‘Oh – that time we picked up KFC on the way back?’

  ‘That’s the time. Didn’t you say that then?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘That you want to go to college.’

  Ryosuke began lining up the study guides on top of the table.

  ‘There’s no going back now. Ryosuke’s totally into it,’ Koto said, thrusting a study guide that said Maths I on the cover towards me.

  ‘You’re kidding. You want me to read this study guide?’

  ‘If you don’t, then who will? You’re the one who’s going to take the test, right?’

  ‘H-hold on a second.’

  I hurriedly pulled my hand back from the study guide I was about to take.

  It’s true that as Ryosuke and I tanned our pale skin on the banks of the Tama River, our conversation somehow drifted to the subject of college.

  ‘What are you going to do after you graduate from college?’ I remembered casually asking him.

  ‘I’m going back to my hometown,’ he answered calmly.

  ‘Really? But after spending all this time in Tokyo you should get a job here.’

  ‘No way. Three years here has taught me that I’m not cut out for Tokyo. Even now I spend almost all my summer and winter breaks back home.’

  ‘Does everybody know this?’

  ‘Who’s everybody?’

  ‘Naoki and the others.’

  ‘No need to tell them.’

  ‘So after you graduate you’re moving out of the apartment?’

  It was an obvious question, and Ryosuke simply nodded. It was right after this, I think, when I murmured, ‘I wonder if my life would change a little if I went to college.’ I might have muttered this, but it was just me talking to myself and I never intended to actually go.

  Now that I think back on it, though, when I said this Ryosuke, slathering on sunscreen, had this sudden glint in his eyes. A sharp gleam in the eye like he’d spotted his prey.

  ‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll put everything I have into tutoring you.’

  ‘It’s okay! You don’t need to.’

  I stealthily pushed the study guides on the table away with my foot so the others wouldn’t notice them. As I did, Ryosuke said, ‘There’s no need to be shy about it.’

  ‘I’m not! But I only graduated from junior high.’

  ‘I know that. That’s why they have this kind of test in the first place.’

  ‘I’m telling you, it’s impossible. Totally impossible.’

  ‘You won’t know that until you try!’

  Ryosuke’s voice was so intense I flinched. Koto, obviously enjoying this back and forth, said, teasingly, ‘There’s no going back now. Your teacher’s totally up for this.’

  ‘But I’m telling you, it just won’t work.’

  I was about to make my escape when Ryosuke grabbed me by the arm.

  ‘It’s too late now,’ he said, ‘’cause I made up my mind to do this.’

  ‘You can make up your mind as much as you want, but I’m telling you I can’t do it.’

  ‘Well, then what am I supposed to do with all these study guides? I paid money for these.’

  ‘What do I care?’

  I tried to brush his arm aside but instead he grabbed me and put me in something close to a sleeper hold – a professional wrestling move. Koto looked at me, choking, gasping for air, and said, breezily, ‘You never know unless you try. Why not give it a shot?’

  ‘It’s ridiculous, I tell you. I mean, I can’t even do fractions.’

  ‘So I’ll teach you!’

  Ryosuke choked me even harder.

  ‘Hey! That hurts!’

  ‘You’ll do it?’

  ‘I told you it’s impossible!’

  ‘Then I won’t let go.’

  Ryosuke applied even more pressure. As he choked me my tongue swelled up.

  Koto, flipping through a study guide, laughed. ‘I’ll help, too,’ she said. ‘I can’t help with your studies, but I’ll do things like, you know, make late-night snacks for you, sew good-luck charms onto your clothes, try to avoid unlucky words like flunk and fail, words like that, and be like a helicopter mum, hovering over you nervously.’

  ‘You’ll do it? You’ll do it, right?’

  As if it were responding to Ryosuke, suddenly the picture on the TV started to go fuzzy again. TVs aren’t that expensive these days, but no one here has volunteered to buy a new one. They even compe
te to see who’s best at fixing it.

  With Ryosuke’s arms still around my neck, I dragged us both over to the TV and, as I’d been taught, pounded its side hard – hard – and then soft.

  ‘Don’t worry about the TV. You’ll do it, right?’

  ‘Okay, okay! I’ll do it. I’ll do it, I tell you,’ I said, just to get him to stop choking me.

  Freed from his grip, I held my throat, coughing like crazy. Koto, seated next to me, said, ‘There’s like this sense of tension in the air, now that we have a student studying for the entrance exams.’ She sounded innocently happy about it.

  To tell the truth, I might have stayed here too long. If I go along with playing house any more with them I might find myself not just taking the entrance exam, but working for some top corporation.

  NAOKI IHARA (28)

  5.1

  I HAD A wisdom tooth out today. Or maybe it wasn’t actually pulled out. I can’t feel my tongue, so I’m not totally sure. The dentist said, ‘The anaesthetic doesn’t seem to work well on you, so I gave you twice the usual amount.’ He probably had to do that because I didn’t get enough sleep the night before.

  The dental clinic is on the other side of the station. After they pulled the tooth I got some painkillers at the reception desk, and as I was paying the bill, holding my numb chin, a little boy waiting in the waiting room on the vinyl sofa looked over at me with terror in his eyes. I smiled, trying to put him at ease, but the boy shuddered and quickly looked away. Because of all the anaesthetics maybe my smile was kind of weird-looking.

  I left the clinic and walked down the shopping area in front of the station. As I was waiting at the level crossing for a train to pass, the warning bell, which usually bothered me, sounded far away. All my senses were numb.

  Back at the apartment, as soon as I opened the door Koto flew out to me from the living room. Behind her stood Mirai, looking pale and hungover, in need of sleep.

  ‘Koto got caught by a salesman. What should she do?’