Popular Hits of the Showa Era

by Ryu Murakami

  “It’d be great to listen to this song with, like, a much older woman—you know, a ‘mature lady,’ like they used to call themselves in the telephone clubs—while you’re boning her standing up.”

  The last comment on the subject was Kato’s.

  “Sugioka said that when he first heard this song, his father was beating the shit out of him.”

  This brought on a sudden silence, and they all communed with their thoughts for a while. And then Sugiyama finally came out with the question someone had to ask.

  “Who do ya think killed him?”

  Three days later, Nobue and Ishihara visited the scene of Sugioka’s murder, where they decided, for lack of any better ideas, to relieve themselves as Sugioka had so often done. They had just pulled down their zippers when a female voice said, “Stop that!” Replying with a simultaneous, reflexive, Hai!, they looked back over their shoulders. Standing there was a junior college girl who might have been constructed exclusively from the more toxic components of some gastrointestinal disease. Nobue and Ishihara were both the type of men who tend to regard all females, from toddlers to great-grandmothers, as being in some sense sexual objects, but this junior college girl was a unique exception. She wasn’t deathly pale or exceptionally thin or fat, she didn’t have secretions of various colors oozing from her eyes and nose and mouth, and her skin wasn’t coated with pimples; but an aura of disease emanated from her in a sickly wave powerful enough to have defoliated giant mangrove trees on some South Pacific isle.

  “You’re not supposed to pee there.”

  It seemed as if even her voice were sprinkled with disease dust, like soybean flour on a ripe rice cake. Nobue and Ishihara looked at each other. They were both keenly aware that something strange was happening to them. Normally, whenever they were together and had the opportunity to speak to a female, be she an oddly sexy kindergartner or a refined old lady stopping for dumplings on her way home from the temple, they tended to view each other as rivals, each suspecting the other of trying to steal her away, and to disguise that antagonism they would both laugh like idiots. This, of course, merely frightened and alienated toddlers, elderly widows, and all those in between. But now, face-to-face with this junior college girl who seemed to be made of one hundred percent disease particles, they were united in a lack of competitiveness and an utter inability to laugh. This was a woman they would not be capable of facing unless they worked together, unless they (at least figuratively) held hands, clung to each other, and squealed, I’m afwaid!

  “May I ask your name?” said Nobue. It was the first time since his early years in grade school that he’d been able to address a female in a normal and courteous way. This surprised him, and it surprised Ishihara too.

  “I live in the dormitory over there.” The junior college girl’s voice was neither high nor low, neither clear nor muddy, neither thin nor thick. It wasn’t the sort of voice you would ever remember. But it wasn’t by any means an ordinary voice. “We have a problem with people always urinating here.”

  In spite of, or perhaps because of, the sheer terror they were experiencing, Nobue and Ishihara had never felt or acted so normal.

  “You must forgive us! But even dogs always relieve themselves in the same places, don’t they? Perhaps it’s instinctive.”

  Ishihara wondered why his heart beat so fast as he said the word “instinctive.” He thought he sounded like some sort of youthful prodigy when he used such words. It may be that the junior college girl thought he seemed gifted as well; at any rate, she smiled at him and said, “I’m sure you’ll be more careful next time.”

  Her smile was so horrifying that Nobue ejaculated a line he never would have thought himself capable of.

  “Can we interest you in a cup of tea or something?”

  At the neighborhood ice-cream parlor, the junior college girl drew stares from the other customers and even the waitress. When she walked inside, the temperature seemed to drop three or four degrees. Seated across the table from her in their booth, Nobue and Ishihara finally realized what it was about her face. The eyes were weird. Not the look in the eyes so much as the fact that they weren’t aligned horizontally. When she smiled, the eyes slipped even farther out of line. This feature alone seemed to thrust Nobue and Ishihara into a different and dreadful world, and they both grasped something that Sugioka had only understood a moment before his death. Which is not, of course, to say that they were any more discerning or perceptive than Sugioka had been, but merely to give some indication of the magnitude of this junior college girl’s face and smile and voice.

  “I don’t come to places like this very often,” she said, and both Nobue and Ishihara thought, Good! Best to leave a face like that at home!

  But Nobue’s delight in his sudden ability to speak like a normal person was even greater than his fear. He couldn’t have laughed mindlessly if his life had depended on it, but he managed to smile and ask, “Oh? And why is that?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought that to look at you,” Ishihara chimed in with a smile of his own, all the while asking himself what in the world he would have thought to look at her.

  The junior college girl beamed at them. The waitress happened to catch a glimpse of this smile; her face twitched and she let out a small scream as her tray crashed to the floor and the sound of exploding glass shattered the air into jagged fragments. Swept down into a swirling whirlpool of unreality, Nobue and Ishihara were both convinced that the junior college girl’s smile had broken the glasses directly, that she possessed supernatural powers.

  “Wasn’t there an incident at that spot back there recently?” Ishihara asked her. If she had supernatural powers, she probably knew all about it.

  “Mm-hm,” said the junior college girl. “A boy with a surfer haircut was peeing there when a woman on a putt-putt wearing a helmet and shades and carrying a Duskin handle with a knife attached to it stabbed him in the neck. I saw the whole thing.”

  III

  The junior college girl spoke normal Japanese in a normal tone of voice. Nobue and Ishihara couldn’t help wishing she spoke some incomprehensible language. Even if they wouldn’t have understood what she was saying, they would have preferred her to speak Jupiterian or Neptunese or Saiyan or Namekkish…. She was eating her chocolate parfait in a manner all her own. After thoroughly licking her clean spoon, she carefully used it to scoop up only the drippy chocolate syrup. She then licked the spoon clean again, using a lot of wrist action, as if trying to paint her tongue with the chocolate. She continued licking until, holding the spoon up to one eye, she couldn’t detect the slightest smudge; and then, carefully avoiding the chocolate this time and making sure not to touch the fruit or the colorful mint sprinkles, she scooped up a spoonful of pure ice cream and delivered it straight to her tonsils. Nobue, Ishihara, the other customers, and the waitress all observed this performance breathlessly. It was like watching an acrobat, or a butoh dancer, or the fattest woman in the world walking a tightrope. No one had ever seen another human being consume a chocolate parfait in this manner. Nobue and Ishihara were both thinking that at this rate the ice cream would melt and get all mixed up with the chocolate anyway, when a thick bundle of sunbeams, like something out of a medieval religious painting, suddenly illuminated the bench upon which the junior college girl sat. One of the customers gasped, an even deeper hush descended over the room, and the ice cream began visibly to melt. Seeing the vanilla mound surrender its rough edges from the top down, the junior college girl emitted a sigh of either bewilderment or despair and gazed alternately at Nobue and Ishihara, her misaligned eyes brimming with sorrow. Goose bumps sprouted up and down their spines, and it was all they could do to keep from wetting their pants. Ishihara did leak a drop or two, in fact. And that reminded him: hadn’t this junior college girl just described Sugioka’s murderer? Nobue was watching in a dazed sort of way as the girl suddenly changed tactics and began mashing the chocolate parfait with her spoon and shoveling the resulting mush into her mouth
, making it disappear with remarkable speed. He was thinking it would be better for all concerned if she just took the weirdness to its natural extreme and shoved the mess up her nostrils, when Ishihara nudged him in the ribs.

  “Hey, Nobu-chin.”

  He snapped out of his chilling reverie. “What is it, Ishi-kun?” The sensation that his back had turned to chicken skin was all but unbearable, and it was only by a tremendous force of will that he managed to keep from climbing on Ishihara’s lap.

  “Wasn’t this person just saying something about Sugioka’s murderer?”

  “You’re right! I almost forgot. Way to remember!”

  “Thanks. I don’t know how I did it. It took everything I had.”

  “To remember something so important under these conditions! You are amazing.”

  Hearing himself praised like this, Ishihara began making a clucking sound in his throat. It was a sort of hiccupping spasm of the esophageal muscles that sounded like coot, coot, and was a harbinger of the burst of idiotic laughter that arrived a moment later. Nobue joined in. Strangely enough, the other customers and the waitress began laughing as well. Perhaps they instinctively knew that laughter was the only possible defense against the horror unfolding before them.

  The only one who didn’t laugh was the junior college girl herself. Nor did it seem to occur to her to wonder if all this mirth was at her own expense. She silently went about the business of demolishing her chocolate parfait.

  Thanks to the efforts of Kato, who’d been closest to Sugioka, it didn’t take long for them to discover the Midori Society. Each day for a week, Kato staked out the grave of Yanagimoto Midori, the woman Sugioka had killed. It was located in a vast public cemetery in Hachioji, near Kato’s family home. He endured three rainy days and then three cloudy and muggy ones, during which time he completely cleared four new Game Boy titles, and on the sunny seventh day he suddenly detected a pungent smell of perfume. He saved the game he was playing and ducked down behind the gravestone he’d chosen to spy from, so nervous that he began laughing in a way that he alone was capable of, opening the mouth in the normal position of laughter but forcing the air exclusively through the nose. Nobue and Sugiyama and others had on occasion tried to imitate this laugh, but none had succeeded. The sound it produced was wet and high-pitched, like the cry of some amphibious creature, but fortunately it didn’t carry.

  All the Midoris were wearing suits and, possessed of the knowledge that fragrances tend to dissipate more quickly on sunny days, none of them had skimped when applying their various brands of perfume to various parts of their bodies—hair, earlobes, nape of neck, shoulders, armpits, breasts, elbows, heels, ankles. One of them had even daubed Poison on her private parts. Iwata Midori had always wanted to try this. She had long cherished the memory of a scene from a very bad novel in which a married woman had perfumed her pubes before setting out for a secret rendezvous. The married woman’s lover in the novel, she remembered, had ignited with shameless desire when he inhaled the perfume mixed with the scent of her juices. But what was the likelihood that Iwata Midori, already in her late thirties, would ever have a chance to experience something like that? She had asked herself this question many times but never found an answer—or any likelihood whatsoever—so she’d made up her mind to try it today before visiting the cemetery. As long as I’m with my friends, she told herself, it’s safe to be a little adventurous.

  Kato put on his earphones to eavesdrop on the Midoris’ conversation via the tiny cordless microphone he’d hidden in the gravel in front of the grave. Along with the crunch, crunch of Oba-san shoes came a lone voice. Tomiyama Midori’s opening line put an end to Kato’s nasal giggling.

  “Nagii! You have been avenged!”

  At the party that night, Nobue announced that they would refrain from karaoke, and no one objected.

  “Something huge has happened.”

  Having said this much, he laughed idiotically for several moments, clamping both hands over his mouth, and then asked Kato to report his findings. Kato executed his high-degree-of-difficulty giggle before speaking. He wasn’t used to this sort of thing, and spoke in an odd voice reminiscent of newscasters on public TV.

  “As you are all aware, it appears that the police and the media have given up any hope of finding Sugioka’s murderer. What we need most is accurate information. Please look at the materials before you, which contain data I obtained with the assistance of my Kenwood portable recorder. At the upper left-hand corner of page one, under the heading ‘The Midori Society,’ you will find a list of names, and below and continuing on to the next page please notice the photographs of each member of the group.” He then brought his report to a close with an inexplicable, “Have a pleasant evening, and we’ll look forward to seeing you again soon.”

  “I wonder which of these Midoris killed Sugioka,” Yano mused out loud while chewing a piece of dried squid. “Not that it matters, right?” he added, and for some reason burst into muffled laughter. He was like a Vietcong guerrilla hiding in the dark, bowing his head and trying to stifle his mirth as he remembers a recent surprise attack and the unique look of shamefaced terror on an enemy’s face in the split second before death. Yano continued to gurgle for some time.

  “There can be no mercy or forgiveness for people like this,” Nobue declaimed, adding, “What is it about this revenge stuff, though? It makes you feel all gooey inside!” He clamped his hands over his mouth and laughed idiotically once again.

  Sugiyama, his eyes forming the narrowest of slits behind his glasses, gave tongue to everyone’s feelings, punctuating his words with flying spit.

  “In short, we can do whatever we want to them. If it was up to me, I’d take these Oba-sans and strip ’em all naked and, you know, do the sort of thing you always hear about—force a wooden pestle up their ass and piss on ’em and then rape ’em and kill ’em and shit. I think that’s what we should do. After all, they’re guilty of murder. Murder, my friends! We can’t let ’em get away with that.”

  None of them thought to wonder how that was any different from what Sugioka had done.

  “I think we should try to think of a lot of different ways to do it,” Sugiyama went on. “Gather tips from like the Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Army and Bosnia and stuff. I mean, it’s totally justified. An eye for an eye and all that—it’s the only thing that is justified in this world. I mean, they talk about reasonable self-defense, but nobody ever talks about a reasonable sneak attack!”

  Yano sat with his head bowed, snickering to himself. But he sounded strangely confident—as if he already had an answer to his own question—when he looked up and asked:

  “What’ll we use for a weapon?”

  4

  Meet Me in Yurakucho

  I

  “Buki?” said Nobue, repeating the operative word of Yano’s question in the original Japanese. He shivered with excitement. “Oh, what an awesome point you raise, Yano-rin! Buki…buki…How that word goes straight to the corazón! It’s like hearing Frank Nagai’s deep voice played at full volume over a JBL Paragon system! Buuukiii…Buki, as I recall, is ‘weapon’ in English, but ‘weapon’ doesn’t have the right ring to it, right?” He laughed and began humming a sentimental melody.

  “‘Weapon’ sounds like ‘tampon’ or ‘simpleton’ or somethin’,” Ishihara said, and started humming along. The others joined in too, and soon they were all on their feet, belting out the words to “Meet Me in Yurakucho.” Kato, reflecting that it was he who had triggered all this excitement with his report, took the Emporio Armani scarf from his neck and wrapped it around his head like a turban. Sugiyama put his glasses on upside down, and even the normally withdrawn Yano, thrilled that his mention of buki had resulted in such an inspired choral outpouring, clamped a large beer bottle between his legs and wiggled his ass. “Meet Me in Yurakucho” was not meant to be sung in this manner but rather in a sad, echoey whisper in a fifties-style cabaret, while beads of light from a mirror ball swirl slowly
around the walls; but any pop song in this particular country, when sung by several citizens at once, tended to turn into a mindless celebration devoid of any genuine sense of melancholy.

  After the final chorus, Nobue shouted:

  “To arms!”

  The others responded with a rousing, “Oh!” and thrust their fists toward the low, sagging ceiling of his apartment.

  With Yano guiding the way, the five set off, frolicking as if on their way to a used computer blowout sale, taking the Joetsu Line from Ueno to Kumagaya to purchase a certain weapon. On the train, they played shiritori, a simple game in which one person says a word and the next person uses the last syllable of that word as the first syllable for a new word, and so on. Sugiyama had lobbied for drop the hankie, but because of space considerations none of the others supported him, so he went into a snit, saying that if he couldn’t play his game he wouldn’t play shiritori either, and sat pouting and staring out the window at the scenery. The Limited Express took about forty minutes to reach Kumagaya from Ueno Station, and in that time they managed to advance only eight words. Ishihara, who had suggested they play shiritori, said, “I’ll start, then. The first word is shiritori. Next! Something that starts with ri.” He didn’t stop there, however, but began to laugh and shout “RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI!” for a full two minutes. Yano, who was next, joined in toward the end and then continued—“RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI!”—for another three minutes or so, laughing so hard he fell off his seat and rolled on the floor. His spittle was a fine mist permeating the car when he finally sputtered: ringo.*

  “Ringo?” Nobue growled, then fell silent, and a strange tension gripped the four players. “Why ringo?” he shouted. “Why not banana?”† All of them laughed till fluids leaked from different orifices. Kato, who was next, repeated “GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!” twelve or fifteen times and then, seeing that everyone was too busy laughing to pay attention to him, began chanting the syllable to the rhythm of the train as it sped over the tracks—“GOGOGOGO! GOGOGOGO!”—finally finishing with the word gorufu.‡ This process had taken another eight minutes.