69

by Ryu Murakami

  “Okay, here’s how we’ll go about it. You listening? Never mind the Godard method—improvisation and all that. We’ll write a script. We’ll make it, you know, how should I put this, sort of, like, muddy, you know, Kenneth Anger style. And the camerawork we’ll do like Jonas Mekas.”

  Adama and Iwase nodded and grunted their agreement as I rattled on, but the truth is that none of us had any idea what sort of film to make. All we knew was that we wanted to make one, like girls whose only ambition is to fall in love.

  On a beautiful afternoon in late April, Iwase, Adama, and I, our hearts all aflutter, went to watch the English Drama Club rehearse. Those lovely young ladies, the pride of Northern High, were cooking up something by Shakespeare in the hope of winning first prize in the All-Kyushu English Drama Competition. The entrance to the auditorium was already overflowing with male students. Most of them were of the Greaser faction, and in the middle of the crowd stood Yuji Shirokushi in bell-bottom pants, snakeskin sandals, and a school uniform jacket with the collar unfastened. Shirokushi had been in love with Kazuko Matsui since our first year in high school. Why is it that the greasy hoodlum types always fall for the classiest women? It goes without saying that the object of his affection wouldn’t have been seen dead with him.

  Shirokushi saw us and waved. “Ken-yan. What are you doing here?”

  “Just, you know, thought I’d brush up on my English a bit.”

  Shirokushi peered at my face and said, “Bullshit.”

  Why is it that the greasy hoodlum types can always tell when a regular guy is lying?

  “Who’d you come to see? Yumi? Masako? Mieko? Sakiko?”

  Yes, there were any number of famous beauties in the English Drama Club. Iwase, Adama, and I exchanged glances, and suddenly Shirokushi seemed to get the picture.

  “Don’t tell me... Not my little Kazuko? Eh? You came to see Kazuko?”

  “Well, yeah, but it’s not what you think.”

  The words were hardly out of my mouth when he whipped a knife out of his pocket and stuck it in my thigh. No, but he did grab me by the collar.

  “Not even you can hit up on Kazuko and get away with it, Ken-yan,” he said menacingly, but when Adama told him to cut it out he immediately released me, smiled, and said, “Just kidding, just kidding.” Adama explained things to him.

  “Yuji, you don’t understand, man. Ken wants to make a movie. You know the eight-millimeter camera we got off that kid? Ken’s gonna make a movie with it.”

  “A movie? So what? What’s that got to do with Kazuko?”

  “Well, you see, it’s just that we were hoping she’d agree to be the leading lady,” I said, trying to sound as suave as possible.

  “Yuji, it’ll be the first time a student at Northern High ever made a movie. Who else could be the star, man? Huh? If we don’t get Kazuko Matsui to be the star, who we gonna get?”

  Leave it to Adama to think of exactly the right thing to say. Shirokushi’s entire face lit up. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Who else could it be but Kazuko?”

  “See what I mean? So if we don’t let Ken have a good look at her, how’s he gonna come up with the right image?”

  Shirokushi nodded several times as Adama spoke, then took my hand and shook it, saying, “Yeah, that makes sense. But listen, man, you better make her look good. Better than Brigitte Bardot, even.” He moved up to the front of the crowd, kicking people in the butt to clear a space for us. The idea of making Kazuko Matsui the star of our film had excited him, and now he was rattling on about how we should use something by Yujiro Ishihara for the theme song, and how about if Kazuko played a bus guide who was raised in an orphanage, and he himself would be a hit man, see, and...

  “Ken,” Adama whispered to me, “this is not cool. If Kazuko Matsui sees this she won’t want to be in the film.” He had a point. If Lady Jane saw us here with Shirokushi babbling, “movie movie movie movie,” she’d freeze us out completely. She hated the guy. Adama didn’t miss a trick.

  “Ken, why don’t you go check it out for yourself. She’s probably in the room backstage right now.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s all chicks back there.”

  “You’re in the newspaper club, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, all you have to do is say you’re getting material together for an article.”

  So I ended up going on my own to that holy sanctuary, the room that housed the English Drama Club. When I looked back over my shoulder, everyone in the auditorium was cheering me on. Some even waved their caps and shouted, “Go get ’em, Ken!” Adama, in the meantime, was trying to smooth things over with Shirokushi, who wanted to go with me.

  The room smelled like a meadow full of flowers. It made you want to start singing “Daisy Chain.” My only problem was that I didn’t know what to say. To start off with something like “Er” or “Good afternoon” or “Excuse me” would have been too ordinary, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I was just toying with the idea of trying a bit of English when the faculty advisor for the club, a guy named Yoshioka, came striding out of the room toward me. He was a middle-aged pain in the ass who plastered his hair down with pomade and thought he was hot stuff because he always wore an English suit.

  “What is it?” he said in a tone of voice that made it clear he meant, How dare you set foot in this sacred place.

  “I’m, uh, in the newspaper club. My name’s—”

  “Yazaki. I know your name. I teach grammar to your class, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Yes, sir’? How would you know? You’re almost never there.”

  Just my luck. I hadn’t expected somebody like this to appear and start laying a rap on me. With him in particular, I was at a disadvantage. Yoshioka was a bastard, but since he was also too much of a gentleman ever to hit anyone, I made a habit of cutting his class. I’d flunked his first exam, too. He peered at me from behind his black-framed glasses.

  “So? “What do you want? Don’t tell me you want to join the drama club. You haven’t a hope.”

  A burst of gay laughter came from inside the room. The foxes were listening to our little dialogue. I couldn’t afford to back down now.

  “I’m here to research an article.”

  “About what?”

  “The war in Vietnam.”

  “That’s news to me. You know how it works: first you ask the advisor of the newspaper club for permission, then the advisor talks to me, and I give the okay. You can’t just decide these things for yourself.”

  In Kyushu, like everywhere else, high school newspaper clubs tended to be dens of rebellion, and in our school no club was allowed to align itself with any other. The teachers’ greatest fear was of the students getting organized. Even if members of the newspaper club wanted to do something as harmless as carrying out a survey or collecting information, we had to clear it with the faculty advisor first. Unofficial gatherings were absolutely forbidden. This system was endorsed by the student council. The school laid down the law and used the yes-men in the student council to make it look as if we had made the rules ourselves. It might as well have been a prison. A colony under military rule. It was sickening.

  “All right, the truth is, I’m not really here to research an article.”

  “What, then?”

  “I just, uh, came to have a little chat.”

  “Can’t you see we’re busy here? No one has time for that sort of thing.”

  Inside the room, the girls were cutting stencils to use for mimeographing the script. Squeak, creak, creak, squeak. Half of them were ignoring Yoshioka and me, and the others were watching us. Kazuko Matsui was watching. She held a stylus thoughtfully against her cheek. She had eyes like Bambi’s. Eyes a man could fight and die for.

  I sneered and said, “How ridiculous can you get?”

  Yoshioka was taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

  “Shakespeare—where’s that at? Thousand
s of people are dying every day in Vietnam, and you’re doing Shakespeare. It’s ridiculous. Mr. Yoshioka...”

  “What?”

  “Look out the window at that harbor. Every day American battleships sail out of there to go and kill people.”

  He was flustered. Teachers this far out in the sticks didn’t know how to handle students with anti-establishment ideas. They couldn’t just slap you around, the way they did the usual deadbeat types.

  “I’m going to report this to the teacher in charge of your club.”

  “Do you like war, Mr. Yoshioka?”

  “What sort of thing is that to say?”

  Yoshioka had lived through World War II. He’d probably known his share of misery. His face clouded over. War was convenient. You could always use it in your arguments with teachers; it made them uncomfortable, particularly when they were obliged in class to say that war was bad. They’d always try to dodge the issue.

  “Yazaki, get out of here. We’re busy.”

  “Are you against war?”

  I wondered if he’d served in the military. Being small, and an arty type, he would have been bullied like hell.

  “If you’re against it, it’s cowardly not to speak out.”

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “Plenty. American troops are using our harbor. To kill people.”

  “That’s not for high school students to worry about.”

  “So who’s supposed to worry about it?”

  “Yazaki, deliver yourself of these opinions once you’ve graduated from college, got a job, married, and had children of your own. Once you’re a full-fledged adult.”

  Dipshit. “Deliver yourself,” my ass.

  “Oh. So you can’t be opposed to war unless you’re an adult? Does that mean children don’t die in war? High school students don’t die in war?”

  Yoshioka’s face turned beet red. Just then the running coach, Kawasaki, passed by with the judo coach, Aihara. I didn’t notice them. I was telling Yoshioka that not to do anything about something was the same as approving of it, and asking him if it was okay for a teacher to approve of killing people, when Aihara came up behind me, grabbed me by the hair, slapped me across the face three times, and threw me to the floor. “Yazakiiiiii!” he shouted. Aihara was a bonehead from some crummy right-wing college, but he was also a scary guy with cauliflower ears who’d once been the national middleweight judo champion. “On your feeeet!” he screamed. First he knocks me down, then he tells me to stand up. This pissed me off, but the cauliflower ears and squashed nose commanded a certain respect, so I rose groggily to my feet. “You little turrrrd! Who do you think you’re talking tooooo!” He slapped me again. The palms of his hands were thick and hard, so even a slap packed quite a punch. “For somebody who can’t even run a race you run off at the mouth just fine, don’t you?” This was Kawasaki’s contribution. Why did he have to bring up that race crap at a time like this? I could feel tears of vexation welling up in my eyes. If I cried, it was all over: Kazuko Matsui was watching. Aihara grinned. When you were a guy with a chip on your shoulder about graduating from some shit college, nothing in life gave more satisfaction than beating up kids like me. Yuji Shirokushi and his group got their share of grief from Aihara, too. During judo practice, he’d throw them down with a choke-hold, or crush their nuts, or hurl them against the wall, or grab them by the ear and kick their feet out from under them, stuff like that. You don’t stand much of a chance against a teacher with muscles.

  Grabbing me by the hair again, he proceeded to drag me all the way down to the teachers’ room. Shirokushi, Adama, and Iwase gaped at us as we went by. “Don’t... don’t tell me,” the Greaser said. “Don’t tell me he tried to jump Kazuko!”

  They made me stand there in a corner for an hour. The worst part about it was that every time a teacher passed by he’d ask me what I’d done, and I’d have to explain it all over again. The man in charge of the newspaper club and the faculty advisor both had to apologize to Yoshioka, Kawasaki, and Aihara. Which meant that two teachers had to eat dirt because of me. And I hadn’t even had a chance to talk to Lady Jane.

  “Masutabe-chan—that’s quite a name you’ve got. Mind if we just call you ‘Handjob’?”

  Only Adama and I enjoyed the joke. Tatsuo Masutabe— the second-year student who’d “lent” us his eight-millimeter camera—was a serious little guy. He was also a member of the political group headed by Narushima and Otaki, and he’d come to tell us he wouldn’t let us use the thing unless we were going to make a film with a radical theme. Adama tried to reassure him by saying that even if we didn’t deal directly with the people’s struggle, there were lots of ways to go about it, like, for example, Godard-type symbolism and so on, right? But Masutabe asked us to talk it over with his group.

  “Good morning.”

  It was a voice like a spring breeze. I stopped on the hill in front of the school and turned around, and there stood my Bambi: Kazuko Matsui. A shiver ran through me.

  “Oh, hi there,” I said with a smile, putting my arm around her shoulders and stroking her hair. Fat chance. I could hardly even speak.

  “Bus?” she said. She was asking how I got to school.

  “No. On foot. You?”

  “Bus.”

  “Bus crowded?”

  “Yes. But not too bad.”

  “Oh. Urn, you know, I was wondering... Who started calling you ‘Lady Jane’?”

  “An upperclassman.”

  “From the Stones song?”

  “Uh-huh. I used to like that song.”

  “It’s a good one. You like the Stones?”

  “I don’t know that much about them, really. I like Dylan, the Beatles... But my favorite is Simon and Garfunkel.”

  “Oh yeah? I like them, too.”

  “Have you got their records?”

  “Sure. Wednesday Morning 3 a.m., Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, and, uh, Homeward Bound.”

  “What about Bookends?”

  “Got it.”

  “Really? Could I borrow it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Honest? Thanks! I love that song ‘At the Zoo.’ Don’t you think the lyrics are great?”

  “Oh, yeah—fantastic.”

  I was trying to think of a way to get my hands on Bookends. I’d have to buy it today, no matter what. I’d scrape up the money somehow, get Adama and Iwase to contribute. Surely they’d see the necessity. Anything for our leading lady.

  “Are you always thinking about those things?”

  “What things?”

  “The things you were saying to Mr. Yoshioka the other day.”

  “Ah. Vietnam, and all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, not especially, but it’s everywhere you look, right? In the news and stuff.”

  “Do you read a lot of books and things?”

  “Sure.”

  “If there’s anything interesting, would you lend it to me?”

  I was wishing this hill in front of the school would never end. I wanted to go on talking to her for ever and ever. It was the first time I’d ever realized how wonderful just walking with a beautiful woman could make you feel.

  “You know how on TV you see a lot of students demonstrating and barricading school buildings and everything? It’s like a completely different world to me, but... but I feel like I understand them.”

  “Oh?”

  “You said Shakespeare was ridiculous, didn’t you? I think so, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Simon and Garfunkel, people like that, you can really understand what they’re talking about. Shakespeare’s not like that, though.”

  We reached the school. I promised to lend her Bookends, and we said bye-bye and went our separate ways. Even after we’d parted, I felt as if I were in a meadow full of flowers.

  Adama was surprised when I suddenly suggested we barricade the school. I was somehow under the impression that Kazuko Matsui had said she was attracted
to boys who got involved in barricades and demonstrations.

  “Well, we promised Masutabe anyway,” he said. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to go check out the Politicos’ place one time.”

  DANIEL COHN-BENDIT

  The Sasebo Northern High School Joint Campus Action Committee. This was the name of the organization headed by Otaki and Narushima, and their hangout was above Sasebo Station. When I say “above,” I don’t mean it was on the second floor of the station. Sasebo, like Nagasaki, is a town with a lot of hills. It’s a perfect natural harbor, with mountains behind the town providing protection from the wind, and a low, curving coastline—a narrow strip of level ground packed with department stores and movie theaters and shopping streets and, of course, the American military base. The base occupies the very best land, as it does in every town that has one.

  The headquarters of the Northern High JCA Committee was on the second floor of a cigarette shop at the top of a long, steep hill north of the station.

  “Doesn’t this hill ever end?” Adama said. Sweat was dripping down his face. About ninety-eight percent of the citizens of Sasebo lived up on these slopes. The children would scramble down the hills to play in town, then trudge back home, tired and hungry.

  *

  Like most cigarette shops, this one was equipped with an old lady who you weren’t quite sure was still alive.

  “Good afternoon!” we called out cheerfully, but she didn’t so much as twitch. I thought she was dead. Adama thought she might be a wax figure, a display of some sort. She wasn’t asleep; she was sitting hunched over, with her hands folded on her lap, and her eyes were open. We were a bit worried about her and decided to wait and see if she blinked, but her eyelids were as droopy as eyelids can get, and we had to watch closely. Beneath the eaves was a bed of withered cosmos or something. The wind played through the old lady’s thin hair. Just as we’d come to the conclusion that she really was a wax figure, or a mummy, her eyelids sagged shut and creaked open again. Adama and I smiled at each other.