Popular Hits of the Showa Era

by Ryu Murakami

  Complemented with wine from Yamanashi and Portugal, the beef jerky had rapidly disappeared; Ishihara had ceased laughing like an idiot; and preparations for the rock-paper-scissors showdown were in full swing. But just as they were about to start the actual competition, Nobue made a discovery that turned their entire world upside down.

  It seemed an eternity since they’d last seen a light in the window of the room across the parking lot. That light was on now, and through the lace curtains they could make out the silhouette of the woman with the unbelievable body. Sugiyama instantly grew so tense that he squeaked and probably would have gibbered had he not bitten his own left hand. The woman with the unbelievable body was brushing her long hair, and now she casually tossed it back over her shoulders with two or three graceful flicks of her fingers. That was enough to elicit a commotion of sighs and exclamations from Nobue and the others, and Ishihara went so far as to mutter, “Anyone mind if I jerk off?” He wasn’t the only one who was thinking of masturbation, but even as the woman undid the buttons on her blouse, the sublime aura of inviolability she radiated through the curtains prevented them from putting any such thoughts into action. The blouse slid off, the lines of her shoulders and back were revealed, and as she began to wriggle out of her skirt, tears welled up in Yano’s and Sugioka’s and Kato’s eyes. “This must be what it’s like to see a UFO, or the earth from the space shuttle,” Nobue murmured, and everyone nodded breathlessly. The woman shrugged out of her slip and unhooked her brassiere, and then her silhouette disappeared from view.

  “Shower time!” shouted Ishihara, and the other five responded almost in unison, like the chorus in a grade-school play:

  That’s right! That’s right! It’s shower time!

  “She’s going to take a shower now!”

  A shower now!

  “A nice, hot, steamy, sexy shower now!”

  Shower now!

  “The shower is a miracle!”

  A miracle! A miracle!

  “From all those, like, little pinholes in that weird-shaped thing…”

  Weird-shaped thing…

  “Hot water shoots out—just think of it!”

  Just think of it!

  “It’s got to be a miracle!”

  It is! It is a miracle!

  It was only by vigorously chanting this odd sort of call-and-response that the six of them managed to master the excitement bubbling up from deep inside. They now breathed a collective sigh and sat back to finish off the wine and beer, basking in the afterglow of perfect happiness.

  And then, at last, the rock-paper-scissors contest began.

  The theme song for the evening’s ritual, as has been noted, was “Season of Love.” Instead of the usual “Jan–ken–pon,” therefore, you had to count off saying, “Jan–ken–PINKY!”

  Nobue was the first to be eliminated, and he collapsed on the tatami mats and thrashed about in despair and frustration. According to the rules, he must now serve as the driver for the night. Sugiyama tossed him the keys, and he slunk outside to warm up the HiAce’s engine.

  The ultimate victory went to Ishihara. On conquering his final opponent, he leapt into the air, shouting, “I did it!”—and the moment he uttered these words, the anxiety returned in the form of a chilling question: Is it really all right to be this happy?

  As it turned out, of course, Ishihara’s anxiety knew exactly what it was talking about.

  III

  Because this evening’s song was to be “Season of Love,” it was necessary to determine only first place (lead singer), last place (driver), and fifth place (engineer/roadie). Naturally, if the theme song had been something by Uchiyamada Hiroshi & Cool Five or Danny Iida & Paradise King or the Three Funkys or Three Graces, it would have called for a different ranking system altogether.

  Ishihara was so thrilled to have garnered first place that he squealed and began to perform the dance the others called “The Ishihara.” The incomprehensible anxiety was still at work, but it had occurred to him that if he moved his body maybe everything would work itself out. There is a rodent known as the tremuggia that makes its home in the Kalahari Desert and looks like a cross between a chipmunk and a rat, and though there’s no reason to believe that Ishihara was aware of the fact, this dance of his closely resembled that creature’s mating ritual. He bent his knees slightly, stuck out his hindquarters, held his wrists limply at chest level, and bobbed up and down while emitting a distinctive cry: Kuun! Kuun! Kuun!

  They all carried their things to the HiAce step van and climbed aboard. Yano, who had been the second to be eliminated, took an inventory of the equipment, and when he gave the thumbs-up, Nobue steered the HiAce out to the street and accelerated. In tense anticipation of the ritual, all of the passengers were muttering to themselves—mostly about the brief striptease they’d just watched the woman with the unbelievable body perform. In the dark rear of the van, Sugiyama had narrowed his already narrow eyes until they seemed to form a single line behind his glasses. “That was amazing, amazing,” he mumbled. “Amazing, it was.” Kato was tenderly touching the spot on the back of his head where the hair was thinning. “Well, that was a shocker,” he muttered, “but the real test still lies ahead.” It’s doubtful if even he knew what that was supposed to mean.

  Piloted by Nobue, the HiAce crossed the Tama River, sped past Yomiuri Land, entered the Tomei Expressway at the Kawasaki Interchange, and veered down the Odawara-Atsugi Road to Ninomiya, where it exited via the Seisho Bypass and finally rolled to a stop at a deserted spot by the coast that Yano and Kato had discovered. Last-place Nobue was sent to appraise the location by staking out a spot on the beach for a full twenty minutes, as stipulated by the guidelines. He had to make sure the place really was deserted. Once, a vacant lot Yano had found on a warehouse-lined street along Tokyo Bay turned out to be the occasional site of some sort of illicit transactions, and they’d been attacked by a pair of youths on motorcycles who smashed the windows of their van. Nobue and Ishihara and the others all hated that sort of thing. It wasn’t violence that they disliked, mind you. Sugiyama had been studying karate and kick-boxing since middle school and had a habit of going off on opponents who were clearly capable of pounding him into the ground, as a result of which he’d had his skull fractured on four separate occasions; Yano had inadvertently joined a fascist youth organization when he was eighteen and as part of his training had hunted field mice with a crossbow in the remote mountains of Nagano; Nobue and Ishihara had both scored a number of knockouts in drunken brawls—although, admittedly, only when given the chance to attack unsuspecting opponents from behind; Sugioka, who owned a collection of more than a hundred edged weapons ranging from box cutters to Japanese swords, always carried one or two blades and was forever stabbing walls and tree trunks and leather sacks stuffed with sawdust, and when especially piqued had even been known to slash to ribbons the shiny skin of used blow-up dolls; and Kato suffered a chronic, obsessive delusion that sooner or later he would murder—slowly and methodically—an infant or toddler or some other weak and defenseless being, and had come recently to believe that the only way to rid himself of this obsession was to go ahead and act it out. No, it wasn’t violence they disliked: it was contact with strangers. What these young men feared and hated more than anything else was being spoken to by people they hadn’t met, or having to explain themselves to people they didn’t know.

  “It’s just like Kato said, not a soul around. A stray dog wandered by with a fish head in his mouth, but I threw a rock at him. Aimed right at his balls, but I missed, but he ran away anyway.”

  The other five greeted Nobue’s announcement with a cheer that sounded more like a collective moan, then grabbed their things and piled out of the van. Nobue and Yano, peons for the night, had to carry all the heavy equipment: spools of thick extension cord, the 3CCD Hi8 video camera and tripod, the five-hundred-watt pinspots and their stands, a gargantuan boom-box, Bose speakers, and a set of Sennheiser microphones. They huffed and wheezed as th
ey lugged everything down the narrow concrete steps to the beach, while Ishihara and the others changed into their costumes: flared velvet pantaloons, patent-leather shoes, frilled silk shirts, cummerbunds, bow ties, and tuxedo jackets with velvet lapels, followed by the top hats, false mustaches, black canes, and white gloves—for the others, that is. Ishihara alone applied bright red lipstick, false eyelashes, and a Cleopatra-style wig, tittering maniacally as he did so: Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee! Finally, decked out exactly as Pinky & the Killers had been back in the day, the performers strode down to the beach and stood there facing the sea and the tiny lights of fishing boats far offshore. Ishihara stepped forward and raised his little finger as he took the mike and cooed, “Ready, baby.” Yano, off to one side, turned on the pinspots, and the intro to “Season of Love” came blasting out of the Bose 501 speaker system and echoing across the dark sea and sky. When the first line of the lyric—I just can’t seem to forget—reverberated toward the waves in Ishihara’s nausea-inducing voice, all the crabs on the beach scuttled simultaneously into their holes. As for Ishihara himself, he actually was able to forget—at least during the time he was singing—the anxiety growing inside him.

  The day after the ritual, that anxiety revealed what it was made of.

  The catalyst for it all was a badly hungover Sugioka. After backing up Ishihara on “Season of Love” more than forty times and walking the short distance home from Nobue’s apartment, Sugioka remained too pumped up to sleep, so he chewed some oval sleeping tablets he’d bought from a pasty-faced girl while loafing about in Shibuya one day and washed them down with beer. This knocked him out at last, but he woke at ten in the morning feeling as if his body were made of a particularly dense type of cement. He was irritable and grumpy, as anyone might be under such circumstances, and every part of him seemed in suspended animation except for the squirmy, itchy nerve that connected his lower parts—that is to say, his penis—directly to the corresponding section of his brain. Sugioka had experienced this sensation any number of times, but today it was incomparably worse than ever before, and he spent several long minutes wondering whether to watch an adult video and masturbate until the head of his organ was raw, or to pay a visit to the Pink Salon just outside the south exit of Chofu Station, or to seek satisfaction with Eriko, a blow-up doll to whom he still hadn’t put the knife and who boasted, according to her brochure, Super-Tight Anal Sensation; until weighing the pros and cons of each alternative became such a great bleeding pain in and of itself that he sliced up a perfectly good buckwheat-husk pillow with the twenty-centimeter blade of his Swedish mountain commando knife and stalked out onto the streets of Chofu, squinting in the daylight. Having secured the knife between his belt and jeans, beneath his vinyl raincoat, he was walking along the narrow road behind the Ito Yokado superstore when he noticed a stocky woman in her late thirties—a typical, not to say stereotypical, “Auntie” or Oba-san—apparently on her way home from shopping. The Oba-san was wearing a gauzy vintage white dress and dangling plastic grocery bags stuffed with clams and egg tofu and celery and curry rolls and what have you. Sweat beaded her forehead and dampened her underarms, exuding a strange mixture of odors, and she walked with her ass sticking out. To Sugioka’s bloodshot eyes, it looked as if that ass were saying, DO ME—or rather, the Japanese equivalent, SHI-TE. And in fact the wrinkles in the back of her dress seemed to spell out the word in hiragana:

  So ya want me to do ya, do ya? thought Sugioka, and quickened his pace until he was just behind the Oba-san and able to get a closer view. From the immediate rear, she was the most ludicrous-looking creature he’d ever seen. Up until then the most ludicrous-looking had been a hippopotamus that was emptying its bladder, a sight that had emblazoned itself on his memory during a childhood field trip to the zoo, but the Oba-san’s calves bulged with red and blue veins and bristled with a number of stubbly black hairs. Hideous, thought Sugioka. When he was within perhaps fifty centimeters his nose detected the clams and he spotted several long, wiry hairs growing from a big black mole on the back of the Oba-san’s neck. The poor thing! he thought, and tears welled up in his eyes. He was still shuffling along half a step behind her when they came alongside a grade school athletic ground where several little boys were playing soccer, and just as a tall kid with the number 6 on his jersey scored a goal with a diving header, Sugioka gave a thrust of his hips to poke the Oba-san’s ass with his foremost appendage.

  The look on her face as she spun around.

  Perspiration was melting her makeup, outrage dilated her nostrils, her badly penciled-on eyebrows twitched indignantly, and she appeared to be on the verge of spewing green foam. Sugioka didn’t realize he was grinning; all he knew was that he had a hard-on like a tree. He thrust his hips forward a few more times, and the Oba-san began wailing like a fire-engine. “Aaaooooooooooh! Pervert! Aaooooooooooooh! What do you think you’re doing? I’ll call for help!” Sugioka, disrespected by what seemed to him the lowest form of life on earth, now caught a powerful whiff of ripening clams wafting up from the Oba-san’s lower regions. Seized with a nameless fear, he pulled out his commando knife, pressed the blade against the still-wailing siren of her throat, and sliced horizontally. Her neck opened as if it were a second mouth, and there was a whooshing sound followed immediately by a gusher of blood. Sugioka snickered to himself as he ran away. He glanced back just in time to see the Oba-san crumple to the pavement.

  There was no one else on the street.

  2

  Stardust Trails

  I

  The murdered woman’s name was Yanagimoto Midori, and the first one to discover the body—or, rather, the first to do anything about it—was a friend of hers named Henmi Midori. After Sugioka’s hurried departure from the scene, a total of eleven people had passed the spot where Yanagimoto Midori lay with bubbles of blood burbling from her throat, but they all pretended not to see her—although it would have been impossible to miss her on a street like this, barely wide enough for two cars to scrape past. Her frilly white dress was saturated with red; the curry-filled buns she’d bought lay squashed beside her, the yellow curry smeared over the concrete like vomit; and in the torrid sunlight breaking through the rainy-season clouds, the clams that had spilled and scattered from her shopping bag promptly began to broadcast the fragrance of decaying shellfish. Each of the eleven passersby caught at least a glimpse of Yanagimoto Midori before looking away and pretending they hadn’t. A young housewife, walking by with a toddler who pointed and said, “Look, Mama! That lady’s lying on the ground!” went so far as to scold her child: “Don’t look! The lady’s just playing!” When a passing prep school student saw the victim, his first instinct was to try and help her, or at least summon the police, but he was wearing a white shirt and on his way to a date. “Sorry, Oba-san,” he muttered as he walked on. “I can’t mess up this shirt. Besides,” he reasoned to himself, “there’s a big pile of shit or something right next to her.”

  Yanagimoto Midori’s heart had stopped beating a mere fifty seconds after Sugioka slit her throat, so it wasn’t as if trying to help her sit up or notifying the police might have saved her, but any undue delay in acknowledging the discovery of one’s remains is of course a serious blow to one’s pride. By the time Henmi Midori came upon her dead friend and screamed her nickname—“Nagiiiii!”—the latter was scarcely recognizable. In her agony, Yanagimoto Midori had clawed at her wound and her face. Part of her esophagus now protruded from the gash in her throat, along with various blood vessels; a good ten centimeters of tongue sagged from one side of her mouth; her right eyeball had been gouged from the parent socket; and her right fist gripped a clump of hair she’d torn from her own head. Bending down for a closer look, Henmi Midori accidentally added to the mess by vomiting explosively upon her friend’s ravaged face, and it was just after doing so that she spotted a vital piece of evidence. It was a little silvery badge that had fallen from Sugioka’s raincoat as he’d turned to flee the scene. Before the police arrived, Hen
mi Midori instinctively plucked the badge from the ground and dropped it into her handbag.

  Yanagimoto Midori had been divorced and living alone, her ex having assumed custody of their only son, so her group of friends, known collectively as the Midori Society, took it upon themselves to host the wake. Shortly after ten p.m. the last of the relatives and acquaintances left, followed by the ex-husband and child, but the Midoris remained. All of them—Henmi Midori, Iwata Midori, Takeuchi Midori, Suzuki Midori, and Tomiyama Midori—shared with the late Yanagimoto the same given name. They had met one another in hobby circles and culture centers and what have you, and though their backgrounds differed considerably, they had in common the fact that each was alone and inept at making friends. They had now been associating for several years, however, all on the basis of, “My! Your name is Midori too?” Tonight, with the remains of Yanagimoto Midori before them, they all wept profusely. From time to time one of them stifled her sobs to say, “And she was such a good person!” or “To think we’ll never hear Nagii sing ‘Stardust Trails’ again!” or “Was it just me, or did her ex-husband look sort of relieved?”—but as usual none of them seemed to hear anything the others had to say. These women were all unmistakably of the fearsome tribe known as Oba-san. Born in the middle of the Showa Era, they were all in their late thirties, all originally from somewhere outside Tokyo, all graduates of high school or junior college, all sturdy of frame and far from beautiful, all karaoke enthusiasts, and all strangers to Orgasmus. The late Yanagimoto Midori was not the only one in the group who hadn’t managed to sustain a successful marriage. They were all divorcees, some with children and some without. Tomiyama Midori had been through three husbands and shared a son with ex number two, and Takeuchi Midori had given birth at seventeen to a daughter who’d grown up to marry a foreigner and now lived in Canada.