Popular Hits of the Showa Era

by Ryu Murakami

  As they wept, all five were overwhelmed with a feeling they’d never experienced before. Having come face-to-face with the sobering fact that we all must die eventually, had nothing to do with it. And it wasn’t that they shared the sorrow Yanagimoto Midori must have felt as she lay dying so outrageously and unexpectedly, her body and clothing fouled with her own blood and gore. Nor was it the sadness of losing a friend with whom they had all shared, if not an actual intimacy, at least the custom of getting together occasionally and chattering away without the inconvenience of having to listen to one another. No, the unfamiliar feeling the five remaining Midoris were experiencing was the sense that someone had made fools of them.

  It wasn’t as if the Midoris had lacked men in their lives. Though none of them had managed to achieve lasting relationships, neither had they ever experienced anything they recognized as loneliness. Each was the type of woman who refuses to depend on anyone else. Having made their way through life without ever providing or receiving comfort and affection, none of them had acquired many friends, and they had advanced well into their thirties before finding each other and forming this group of like-minded individuals. They would get together to chat, or to eat brunch at a hotel buffet, or to sing karaoke, or to swim and sunbathe at a public pool, but they never delved into one another’s personal lives. When one of them said something—if, for example, Henmi Midori were to say, “Listen to this, yesterday this guy at my office who has a reputation for being quite the sex fiend? As we were leaving work it was raining and he’d forgotten his umbrella and was getting all wet so I let him in under mine, and as we’re walking along he suddenly looks at me and goes, ‘Henmi-san, would you like to FUCK?’ Can you imagine? I just glared at him like, How dare you! And then he tells me that six of the eight women he’s said something like that to have gone for it, that the direct approach makes them wet. I’m like, Women aren’t wet all the time, buster! But he doesn’t get it. I mean, he’s incapable of recognizing anyone else’s point of view, you know what I mean?”—none of the others would pay any attention to what she was actually saying, but one of them might happen to hear and latch on to some particular detail, such as the word “umbrella,” and begin relating an essentially unrelated experience of her own: “I know, I know, that sort of thing happens all the time, doesn’t it? Once I didn’t have an umbrella, and this man named Sakakibara in my office who’s forty and still single but not necessarily a homo but if you ask me it’s hard to know what he’s up to, he was standing in front of me and it was pouring and I was thinking he was going to let me in under his umbrella but instead he goes to practice his golf swing with it and almost hits me in the face! But I mean it’s typical. Things like that happen all the time nowadays. There’s so many weirdos out there!”

  Nonetheless, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to anyone, the Midori Society had remained intact for a little over four years now. No one—not even the Midoris themselves—could have said what the determining factor was in creating their particular type of personality, but they all had an instinctive distaste for any action that smacked of “healing one’s wounds.” In fact, the responsibility for this lay with their fathers, but none of the ladies were aware of this or cared about such things, and in any case their male parents have nothing to do with our story. To open up to another person and talk about the sources of one’s current anxieties, to have that person accept it all as “normal,” and thereby to heal, was the sort of thing all the Midoris found despicable. For whatever reason, they couldn’t afford to be conscious of their wounds. The strange, unfamiliar feeling they experienced as they sat weeping before the corpse of Yanagimoto Midori, therefore, was nothing less than an implacable rage brought on by the realization that the “wound” had come from the outside world to open them up by the throat.

  They continued to weep for more than three hours after everyone else had left. Tomiyama Midori, the first to stop sobbing, began in a tiny voice to sing “Stardust Trails,” a perfect match for the rhythm of the rain against the reinforced concrete wall of their late friend’s one-bedroom apartment; and one by one, as they stopped weeping, the others joined in. It was the first time in the four years of their association that all of them had sung the same song together. They sang it again and again, reprising “Stardust Trails” for more than an hour, and it was only when they were done singing that Henmi Midori produced the silver badge and held it up for all to see.

  “I found this at the scene of the crime,” she said. “Does anyone know what it is?” The badge was passed around from hand to hand. “I believe it belonged to the murderer.”

  Suzuki Midori said, “I saw where that stupid-looking detective was saying it seemed to be a random killing, which meant they might never find the murderer,” and Iwata Midori said, “I read in the local news section that the police are looking for eyewitnesses,” and Tomiyama Midori said, “I know this badge!

  “I see my son once a week, right? So I always want to feed him something delicious, because his father’s a man with no ambition whatsoever and I’m afraid he’s robbed the poor boy of even the will to eat delicious things, which it would be better if he lived with me but I have to work and I know my son understands that, but anyway he always wants to eat at MOS Burger, teriyaki burgers with double mayonnaise, three of them, and then we go to this store called Kiddy Kastle, and out in front of the store is a video game he likes to play, and if you score over three hundred thousand points you get one of these badges, and there’s a poster with a list of all the people who’ve won a badge.”

  For the very first time, only one person was talking, and everyone else in the group was listening.

  II

  “So if we investigate all the names on the list, I bet we’ll find the killer.”

  Tomiyama Midori stopped there, and an eerie silence filled the room. It was a silence pregnant with heart-tingling anticipation, the sort of thing the Midori Society experienced only rarely—most recently when the six of them had decided to take their first trip abroad together (and ended up on a five-day, four-night excursion to Singapore and Hong Kong). None of the Midoris had ever been big on travel, and though they were always trying to think of things to do together, somehow the idea of going overseas had never before occurred to them. Every one of them had always thought of travel abroad as an extravagance she had no need for. They believed it was wrong to want things you didn’t need, and that the people who flaunted Celine scarves, for example, or Louis Vuitton bags or Chanel belts or Hermès perfumes, were essentially people who had no self-esteem. Somewhere deep in their internal organs the Midoris carried the conviction that buying such things was just an attempt, albeit on an extremely primitive level, to “heal one’s wounds,” but it goes without saying that they too aspired to Celine and Louis Vuitton and Chanel and Hermès, not to mention world travel. Which was why, on that day when they’d gathered at Suzuki Midori’s apartment for a dubious culinary experience billed as “Box Lunches of Seven Major Train Stations” and Iwata Midori said, “How about taking a trip overseas, somewhere nearby maybe?” this same sort of tingly silence had descended. Everyone was thrilled but hesitated to be the first to admit it.

  “So we find out who the killer is…and then what?” Henmi Midori, who tended to overdo the facial packs and whose forehead and cheeks shone so brightly as a result that they reflected the individual bulbs in the ceiling lamp, spoke these words, and there followed another, even deeper silence. All five lowered their eyes shyly, like young ladies meeting a proposed marriage partner for the first time and finding him just to their liking. Iwata Midori plucked at the loose threads of the carpet next to her cushion; Henmi Midori unclenched an incipient fist and gazed at her fingernails; Takeuchi Midori hummed tunelessly; Suzuki Midori raised her empty beer glass to her lips; and Tomiyama Midori fluttered her long false eyelashes—the kind you don’t often see anymore.

  No one spoke, so Henmi Midori, discoverer of Yanagimoto Midori’s corpse, took her question a step furth
er.

  “Are we going to kill him ourselves?”

  What followed was the deepest silence yet.

  On Saturday of that week, Tomiyama Midori met her son, Osamu, at a station on the Keio Line. “How’s your father?” she asked, stroking his hair and reflecting that she couldn’t care less how his father was, and as always Osamu just tilted his head to one side and didn’t reply. Tomiyama Midori loved this unaffable child of hers, however, as only a mother could. In fact, it was only by thinking about her son that she was able even to grasp the concept of love. Love wasn’t about feeling at ease with someone, or bubbling with happiness as a result of just being with them. Love was when you felt compelled to expend every effort to see that they enjoyed their time in your company. In a sense, the time she spent with Osamu was fairly agonizing for her. He would stay one night and leave the following evening, and if he smiled once during that time, she would feel that she’d accomplished something of vital importance. Osamu’s was a strictly conservative temperament. He would meet his mother at the ticket gate in the station, walk with her through the arcade to MOS Burger, play the video game at Kiddy Kastle, have her buy him a new computer game and three volumes of various manga, ride the bus to her housing complex, hopscotch with rigorous precision over the flagstones, play the new computer game in her third-floor condo, read his manga after dinner, get in the bathtub at exactly eighteen minutes past the hour, and go to sleep holding his mother’s hand. The two of them didn’t do a lot of actual talking, but Osamu would always smile at least once. Tomiyama Midori would be on edge until he did, however, and sometimes it wasn’t until he was on the train platform to head back home.

  On this particular day, Osamu smiled just moments after they met. At Kiddy Kastle, Tomiyama Midori copied down the names of all the players who’d scored more than three hundred thousand points. In accordance with the strategy she and the other Midoris had jointly devised, she told the manager of the store that she worked in the marketing department of a major video game manufacturer and wanted to contact the high scorers and ask them to try out a new shooting game. “Could you possibly give me their addresses?” she asked him.

  “Don’t know their addresses,” said the manager, whose face was like a squashed orange. “But I got a list where they go to school.”

  There were seven names:

  Shinkai Yoshiro, Sakuragi Middle School, second year

  Sakai Minenori, Chofugaoka Elementary School, fifth year

  Sakuma Toshihiro, Shimofuda Elementary School, sixth year

  Naka Atsushi, Nishiboshi Middle School, first year

  Sugioka Osamu, Koganei Electronics Institute

  Fujii Masatsugu, Shimofuda Elementary School, sixth year

  Maeda Takumi, Yamanobe Middle School, third year

  It bothered her a bit that the given name, Osamu, was the same as her son’s, but Tomiyama Midori felt there could be no mistake. She drew a star next to Sugioka’s name. He had scored 370,000 points. “That guy’s awesome!” Osamu said, and smiled once again. Tomiyama Midori patted his head.

  Sugioka didn’t notice that he was being tailed by two inconspicuous Aunties as he came out the front gate of the electronics institute. The sun was shining for the first time in many days, and he giggled meaninglessly as he sauntered along in the thick shade of the old cedars that lined the street. Following him at a distance were Iwata Midori and Henmi Midori.

  “I thought he’d look like more of a degenerate.”

  “Did you see those bangs? I suppose there are girls who think that’s cute.”

  “It seems his name is the same as Tomii’s son.”

  “She said she was absolutely certain this was the one, right?”

  They might have been two perfectly average housewives discussing their children’s entrance exams, so much a part of the scenery that no one would have looked at them twice. From their position behind Sugioka, they couldn’t see that he was grinning moronically. He was remembering the last party, at which, while everyone was laying waste to the beef jerky and dried squid and macaroni salad and pork dumplings, he had stood up and announced what he’d done, instantly becoming a hero and lifting the mood of the room to a fever pitch. “You probably won’t believe this,” he’d said as he placed on the table a newspaper clipping with the headline “RANDOM MURDER.” He then produced the commando knife, which hadn’t been cleaned and was still crusty with dried, blackened blood. “This is the blade that slit that Oba-san’s throat,” he said, adding with a high-pitched laugh, “The actual murder weapon.”

  No one doubted him. They knew that Sugioka always carried knives and liked to stab things. This, however, was something else altogether. Ishihara was particularly impressed. Envisioning the Oba-san’s throat opening like Pac-Man’s mouth, he realized now what his original anxiety had been all about, but not knowing how to express this he merely mumbled, “Well, I’ll be,” and squirmed on his cushion, gurgling with laughter. The others weren’t sure how to react at first, but when Yano, whose only thought was that Sugioka had totally succeeded in abandoning something, burst out with a cackle like that of a crazed Vietcong soldier exiting a spider hole in full attack mode, Nobue too began chortling and clapping his hands, saying, “That’s incredible! So you’re a murderer!” Sugiyama lowered his eyes and muttered, “Maybe it’s time for me to do something with my life too,” finishing off with a chuckle like part of the syllabary—ka, ki, ku, ke, ko!—and fashion-conscious Kato gazed at Sugioka with eyes so wide they were nearly round and cried, “Now, that’s what I call STYLIN’!” And for the next thirty minutes or so they had exchanged no more words but lots of stunned looks and sporadic bursts of uncontrollable laughter. Now, as he walked down this tree-lined street, Sugioka was remembering that laughter, and sniggering to himself. He recalled with special fondness the question someone had posed when the laughter had subsided somewhat—“So, like, what sort of Oba-san was it?”—and how everyone had focused on him as he told his tale.

  “Well, you know, after we did the Pinky & the Killers show, I’m kind of embarrassed to say it but I was so excited I couldn’t sleep, so I took a bunch of sleeping tablets I’d bought from some street kid in Shibuya, but even then I couldn’t sleep, and in the morning, you know how it is on mornings like that, you get a hard-on so bad it hurts, and I went out on the street with mine, carrying this knife with me too, which now makes me think that right from the start I was planning to take somebody down—yeah, not kill ’em but take ’em down, that was the feeling—and I saw this Oba-san in a white dress come out of the rear entrance to Ito Yokado, a white dress that looked like it was made out of jizz, and she smelled like shellfish too.”

  III

  “I instinctively understood that this Oba-san was the one I needed to take down, and I’ll tell you why I knew. It’s because I’m a hunter. Not that I’ve ever done any actual hunting per se, but I read this book by a guy who calls himself Japan’s Number One Hunter, and this guy, normally he works in a little advertising agency as a whaddayacallit, a copywriter, and his wife left him and he doesn’t have much money and lives in Tama New Town, and he drinks a lot and gets into fights, and even though he always loses he still thinks of himself as the Number One Hunter in Japan, whether or not he’s ever actually bagged any game, which he hasn’t, by the way, but anyway I read this book he wrote, and when you read it you’re like, Now, this is a true hunter, because this guy, in his mind he’s always got a shotgun with him, even though he doesn’t really have one because he failed the written exam for the license, which is multiple choice and, like, ridiculously easy, like the written exam for a driver’s license. I mean, the questions are like, ‘After hunting or target practice, you find you have some live, unused shells left over. What should you do with them? A: Use proper care in taking them home and storing them in a safe place. B: Divide them up amongst any children who happen to be nearby. C: Heave them into the nearest body of water, shouting SCREW YOU! at the top of your lungs.’ Well, this guy would always ch
oose B or C because, see, he’s honest, that’s his downfall, he can’t tell a lie. So, anyway, he doesn’t actually have a gun, so what does he do? He goes jogging, and as he’s jogging he visualizes himself shooting down all the living things he sees on the road. He started with ants and caterpillars and things, then graduated to praying mantises and cabbage butterflies, turning all the jogging courses around Tama New Town into killing fields, and then after a while he conquered his fear and started targeting dogs and cats. The way he puts it in the book, I don’t remember the exact words, but it was like, ‘It’s not only deserts and savannas and mountain forests that can serve as hunting grounds, but the city itself. Right in the middle of the city, that’s my hunting ground, and it’s mine alone.’ That’s what he says, and then he says that survival of the fittest is just another namby-pamby philosophy that can’t really help you when you’re living in the city. He goes: ‘What’s important is humanism. We need to realize our hunting in the imagination, being true to that incomprehensible teaching known as humanism, and if possible to realize it in reality too.’ Pretty cool way to put it, eh?”