by Ryu Murakami
At the side of the stairway next to the shop entrance was a sign that said “Northern High Economic Research Group”—if you can call a rain-smeared piece of drawing paper a sign. We climbed the stairs. It was dark in there. I asked Adama why the lighting in Japanese buildings was so bad, and he said it was because the Japanese were hopeless sex fiends. Maybe so.
Nobody was in the hangout. It was a twelve-mat room. Posters of Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, and Trotsky covered the sliding doors. There was a mimeograph machine on a desk and some serious-looking paperbacks, a cheap acoustic guitar, a bullhorn, and copies of the Students and Workers Liberation Front newsletter.
“Looks kind of obscene, doesn’t it?” Adama said. He was eyeing the futon spread out on the floor, and the pillows and tissue paper scattered around it. It may have had something to do with the bad lighting in Japanese buildings, but there was always a seamy sort of feeling to these radical hangouts. If they had a futon, it meant that people spent the night here sometimes. The political faction included some high school girls—not girls from Northern High, apparently, but from the commercial high school. No combination could be more obscene than a futon, tissue paper, and girls from a commercial high school.
Iwase arrived about ten minutes later, dripping with sweat and carrying three cartons of coffee-flavored milk. As I drank mine I wished I had a roll to go with it. Iwase picked up the cheap guitar and started to play “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Ever since Elvis, guitars had been the one thing no kid in the nation wanted to be without. Those who couldn’t afford one made do with ukuleles, which was the only reason there’d been a brief Hawaiian music craze. Electric guitars became the big thing when I was in junior high school. Tesco guitars, Guyatone amps, Pearl drums. Instruments by makers like Gibson and Fender and Music Man and Roland and Paiste existed only in magazines. Once the Ventures fad was over and the era of the Beatles and other vocal-oriented groups arrived, everybody wanted a semi-acoustic like John Lennon’s Rickenbacker. Then, when protest music and demonstrations against the war came along, Yamaha put out a new and affordable type of folk guitar, and everybody scrambled to buy one of these. The guitar here in the Politicos’ place wasn’t a Yamaha, though, but a Yamasa, a name that sounded like a maker of instant soup or something.
After playing “Motherless Child” on the Yamasa, Iwase did “Takeda Lullaby.” Presumably he’d chosen these numbers because neither required more than two or three chords, but they were both mournful tunes, and playing them must have put him in a dismal mood because he now brought up a pretty depressing subject.
“You guys are both going on to college after you graduate, right?”
At the time, Adama still wanted to get into medical school at a national university; he didn’t know yet that this would turn out to be an impossible dream. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking of doing, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t giving it all that much thought. I was already the sort of person who doesn’t spend a lot of time contemplating the future. Not that I was indifferent about the meteoric drop in my grades, mind you—I was actually quite freaked out about it. The thought of ending up a failure scared me. This in spite of the fact that in 1969 failures were having a lot of fun: a high school student had published a book rejecting the whole idea of college education, Japanese hippies were pictured in magazines painting naked women with day-glo colors, and there were always a few beautiful chicks taking part in the demonstrations and marches. But you knew that couldn’t last forever. In the long run, it’s successful guys who get the women. I’m not talking about marriage or whatever; I’m talking about females in general, and lots of them. Unless a young man has some guarantee of getting his fair share of the fair sex, he can’t go on living.
“What do you aim to do, Iwase?” Adama asked. Iwase was in a class made up mostly of hopeless cases.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t guess I’ll be going to college. Ken-san, what about you?”
“I don’t know, either. I might go to an art college, but... no, maybe I’ll study literature... Except, well, I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”
“You’re lucky,” Iwase said. He was strumming an A-minor chord on the guitar. “You’ve got a lot of talent. Adama’s got brains, too. I don’t have anything.”
I figured the reason he was being so gloomy had to do with the sound of the A-minor chord, so I took the guitar away from him and started strumming a G.
“Come on, give yourself a break,” Adama said gently between sips of his coffee-flavored milk. “Look at John Lennon. You read what he said in Music Life, didn’t you? He said he didn’t have anything going for him at all as a kid. You don’t know if you’ve got any talent yet or not.”
Iwase looked at the floor and smiled, as if touched and embarrassed by Adama’s attempt to cheer him up. Then he shook his head.
“Believe me, I know. I can tell. But it doesn’t matter. You’ll always be my friends, won’t you? Both of you. Even after we graduate?”
I realized now what was getting him down. He saw himself slipping into the background as Adama and I grew closer. Before I met Iwase, he’d just been an ordinary, below-average student, a softhearted kid on the soccer team who was a major fan of some of the ugliest girls in school. Then after we became friends he started reading the Beat poets and listening to Coltrane, stopped following porkers around, and quit the soccer team. But it wasn’t me who’d changed his life; I was just the one who introduced him to poetry and jazz and pop art and so on, and those are the things that changed him. He fell under their influence only because there was nothing to stop him from falling, and by now he knew a lot more about jazz and pop art and underground theater and poetry than I did. He’d always been my main man, my partner in crime. But since Adama had joined up with us, he must have thought his own role had become uncertain, and that buying us coffee-flavored milk was about the only thing he was good for.
You’ll always be my friends, won’t you? He looked really lonely when he said that. I hadn’t seen him looking that way for a long time, not since we were first-year students. Back then we had a Classical Japanese teacher with a long, narrow face named Shimizu. Shimizu was a nasty bastard who used to rap us on the head with a wooden ruler if we fucked up on his exams: one whack for seventy points, two for sixty, three for fifty, four for forty, and so on. Iwase and a few other guys always got four or five whacks apiece. Toward the end of our second semester, as he was returning test papers, Shimizu said, “The year’s almost over. We’ll never finish the textbook if I have to spend most of my time hitting people. From now on I won’t give anyone more than three whacks.” Most of us were glad to hear this, but the worst students sort of stiffened. Shimizu gave Iwase his paper and said, “Lucky you, eh, Iwase?” That meant he’d got forty points or less, and we all laughed. Iwase just bowed his head and smiled his embarrassed smile, but, seeing how lonely he looked afterward, I realized he would probably have preferred being smacked on the head to being ignored.
“Oh!... Isn’t Otaki here?”
The gloomy atmosphere Iwase had created was broken by the sound of a female voice. Two girls wearing commercial high uniforms—gorillas compared to Kazuko Matsui, but a million times better than no chicks at all—appeared in the doorway. They looked at Adama and giggled. Adama came in handy at times like this. Girls got the giggles when they met good-looking guys. It weakened their defenses.
So you could say things like:
“Hi! I’m Yazaki from Northern High, this is Yamada, that’s Iwase. You’re from the commercial high? Come on in. What’s in the bag? Eh? Rice crackers? Open ’em up. Hey, we’re all comrades, right?”
Their names were Teiko and Fumiyo—straight out of a melodrama about prewar factory girls. I rapped with them about Eldridge Cleaver and Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Franz Fanon, pointed out the similarities between Machiavelli’s The Prince and the emperor system in postwar Japan, and argued about whether Che Guevara’s activities in Bolivia exemplified the
fundamental aims of anarchism. Which is all a lie, of course. Munching rice crackers, I picked out Simon and Garfunkel’s “April Come She Will” on the guitar and explained how unhealthy it was for high school girls to remain virgins and how all the teachers at Northern High had given up on Otaki and Narushima because of their low IQs. The two factory girls, however, gave every indication of being the Politicos’ squeezes; they went with the futon and pillows and tissue paper. I’d already heard that Otaki and Narushima went around dropping hints that joining their committee was a sure way of getting laid. So it was true. The slimeballs. Why didn’t they take the cause more seriously? It made me sick, and so envious I could have wept.
*
I was just explaining that it wasn’t an immutable fact that throwing water on mating dogs would make them separate, that there were exceptions, and had the two factory girls cackling with laughter, when Narushima and Otaki and a string of seven of their followers showed up. One of them was a college student wearing a helmet. The others were Fuse and Miyachi, two creeps from the debating team; a guy named Mizoguchi, who’d come within an inch of being expelled for swiping someone’s bicycle; Masutabe, the owner of the eight-millimeter camera; and two other second-year students.
Narushima looked at me and smiled uncomfortably. They’d both been in my class in our second year. Neither of them did well in school. I was going around spouting about the evils of imperialism—without really knowing what I was saying, of course—before either of them knew Lenin from lemonade. They’d been your average lousy students in those days, just beginning to resign themselves to the fact that they weren’t very bright. The Joint Campus Action Committee changed their lives: it showed them that even under-achievers could become stars. When they began sneaking leaflets into school from the Students and Workers Liberation Front at Nagasaki University, I still couldn’t take them seriously, and even now I knew they felt inferior to me. But what with the futon and pillows and tissue paper and the fact that they had other backward types to push around, they seemed a bit more confident nowadays.
“What’s this?” Narushima said. “What brings you here, Yazaki?”
“You want to join up?” Otaki asked. When he’d first come up with the idea of forming a JCA Committee at Northern High, I’d told him to count me out. I’d done a lot of soul-searching and decided that the time just wasn’t ripe yet for that sort of thing. No, scratch that. I turned him down because I didn’t like the idea of being punished by the school for joining a radical group, and, besides, I thought making films would be a shorter path to futons and pillows and tissue paper. But that was all beside the point now. This was for Kazuko Matsui. Bambi, my little fawn, liked men who rallied to the cause.
“Yeah, I want to join,” I said.
Otaki and Narushima were surprised at first, then delighted. They shook my hand and introduced me to the guy in the helmet, saying I was a brilliant theorist who’d been reading Marx and Lenin since my junior year. Helmet said theory alone wasn’t much use and gave me a look. He seemed like a jerk. I was dealing with nine people, though. I needed to take control in one swift move.
“All right, then. Otaki, let’s hear your strategy for the struggle from here on,” I said.
Otaki and Narushima looked at each other uncertainly. Fat chance they’d have anything like a course of action in mind. They didn’t have the brains or the balls to actually do anything.
“Well, I don’t know if you’d call it a strategy, but we’re going to form a study group with people from Nagasaki U. and work on leaflets with the Peace for Vietnam Committee and try to get more recruits and—”
“Look,” I interrupted, “let’s barricade the school.”
None of the high schools in Kyushu had ever been barricaded; it hadn’t even been done at Nagasaki U. For people in a small city in the wilds of western Kyushu, tear gas and barricades were like Godard and Led Zeppelin—the stuff of dreams. Everybody was blown away by the idea.
“I’ve already decided the day. July 19, the last day of school. We’ll barricade the roof.”
“That’s crazy,” Helmet said. “Totally off the wall.”
“Listen, pal, you keep out of this. This involves Northern High, not college boys who’ve never got around to taking any action themselves.”
Masutabe and the other second-year kids looked at me, their eyes aglow with new respect.
“The problem is, we’re talking about an organization with, what, less than ten members. We let them know who’s behind it and we’ll be expelled, just when we’re getting started.”
The more I talked, the more confident I felt.
“Until we get more people on our side, we’ve got to keep it all secret. Go underground. We’ll barricade the place, but won’t hang around. Hit them, and withdraw. Guerrilla tactics.”
I was really rolling now.
“One of our tactics will be graffiti. We’ll cover the walls with slogans. And we’ll hang a giant banner from the roof. We’ll block off the stairs and the entrance to the roof so they won’t be able to take the banner down. We’ll do it all late at night, in true guerrilla style. And, by the way, we’re going to need a different name for the committee, otherwise Otaki and Narushima’ll be kicked out in no time. As long as there’s only a handful of us, we can’t let anything like that happen. Che wrote something to that effect in Guerrilla Warfare, I think.
Nobody said anything. Adama alone was smiling and nodding. He was the only one who knew this was all for Lady Jane’s sake.
“With a group this small, it won’t cost much to set it up. The reason we do it on the last day of school is that it’ll make it harder for them to investigate, and it’ll also have more impact on the students. They’ll be coming to school feeling great because summer vacation’s about to start. They’ll see the banner, and they’ll freak out. Then, during the vacation, since they won’t have much contact with the teachers—less chance of having their minds warped by reactionaries—they might even read some Marx or think about the war in Vietnam. ‘Smash the National Athletic Meet’—that’ll be one of our slogans. The Athletic Meet is a counterrevolutionary ritual devised by the government to keep us all in line. There’s a lot of bad feeling about it, too—girls are upset, for example, because all the practice for the opening ceremony interferes with studying for entrance exams. We use that. It’s easier to expand the scale of the struggle if there’s a concrete problem to focus on—one that people care about enough in private to fight against in public. Naturally we won’t advertise the fact that any of this was planned by people at Northern High, but we won’t say it was the work of outsiders, either. We’ll hint that it might have been an inside job—that’s about as far as we’ll go.”
Otaki raised his hand and asked me to hold on a second.
“What are we going to call ourselves, if not the JCA Committee?”
I told him not to worry. “I’ve already thought of a name: Vajra. It’s Sanskrit for the gods of lust and anger. Pretty cool, eh?”
“Far out!” shouted Masutabe, and everyone applauded. And that’s how I became the leader of Vajra, the new dissident movement at Northern High.
CLAUDIA CARDINALE
A few days after the midterm exams, which I’d screwed up badly on, I was climbing the hill to the hideout with Adama and Iwase.
“Ken-san,” Iwase said, “you remember last year when we went to Hakata?”
“Sure. The time we spent the night in the movie theater, right?”
He was talking about one weekend the previous summer when he and I had taken a train to Hakata to see some films. We’d heard they were having an all-night Polish film festival.
“Remember the jazz place we went to?”
“Yeah.”
“What was the name of it again?”
“Riverside Café, wasn’t it? It was right beside a river.”
“I’m thinking about getting a job there during summer vacation.”
“At the Riverside? Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. The owner was a nice guy, remember? I sent him a letter.”
“Is that right?”
We’d set out for Hakata after lunch on a Saturday, skipping afternoon homeroom. First we went to Kyushu University to look at the wreckage of a Phantom jet that had crashed into one of the buildings there, then, after a bowl of noodles, we headed for the movie theater district. Right across the street from the little place showing art films was a marquee in bright primary colors. Adorning the marquee was a huge pair of pink boobs, and written on it were three titles: The Angel's Entrails, The Fetus Poachers, and Inflatable Wives in the Wilderness. I stopped and peered at it. Iwase saw what was coming and tried to drag me toward Pasazerka, Mother Joan of the Angels, and Kanal. “Wait wait wait wait, Iwase, that’s a film by a great director, man—look, Polish flicks are fine but they’re not even showing Ashes and Diamonds, we don’t have enough money for a hotel, we’re going to have to stay in the theater all night, and how are we gonna sleep with Polish partisans and nuns writhing in agony all over the screen?” Iwase, ever serious-minded, insisted we flip a coin, and I lost. I lost, but I told him I wasn’t going to watch a bunch of fucking Nazis anyway and headed for the pink boobs. The next day, in the afternoon, we went to the Riverside Café to listen to some jazz. Iwase asked them to play a slow, moody piece by Coltrane, and I chose a bossa nova by Stan Getz. In between Coltrane and Getz they played something by Carla Bley, requested by a group of girls in their early twenties who worked in the ladies’ clothing section of a local department store. Salesgirls listening to Carla Bley—that was the late sixties for you. One of them was just Iwase’s type. She was like the epitome of all junior-college-graduate department store salesgirls: plain and simple, with long hair, dark skin, and narrow eyes...
