by Ryu Murakami
The rag he was holding was cold, and I didn’t enjoy having it pressed against my neck. I considered punching him one, but I was afraid of drawing attention to myself, so I just glared at this four-eyed, buck-toothed runt, who at seventeen was already going gray, and yelled, “Let go of me!” I couldn’t figure out how he could be so upset. Somebody paints slogans on the walls of your school—is that something to start blubbering over? What was it to him, a holy shrine? People like this were dangerous, though. Very naive. It was people like this who’d murdered and tortured and raped in Korea and China. People like this cried over graffiti, but it was nothing to them if one of their classmates started sucking sailors’ dicks as soon as she graduated from junior high.
“Ken, you backed down.”
Adama had been watching my run-in with the vice president.
“No, I didn’t. That asshole’s really over the top, though.”
“Yeah. It’s amazing that a guy’d get down on the floor and scrub like that. Getting his hands sopping wet.”
“I know. How can they get so intense about it? If I did back down, it was because the guy was, like, overwhelming.”
“There was no fight in you, man.”
“How come, I wonder.”
“Because it wasn’t ‘the good fight,’ maybe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Our motives weren’t exactly pure, right?”
“Our motives? For the barricade?”
“It’s not like we were going to die or something if we didn’t pull it off.”
“What do you know about dying, Adama? Do you have any idea how many people are dying in Vietnam every day?”
Whenever I started spouting clichés like this, I’d suddenly find myself speaking standard Japanese. The kind of stuff the Peace for Vietnam Committee said in their speeches sounded funny in dialect, somehow.
“Vietnam, right.”
“It was bastards like him who went berserk in Nanking and Shanghai and all those places.”
“Nanking, right. But, listen, doesn’t it make you feel sort of weird to see ’em going all out to clean up like that?”
“’Course it does. I didn’t know there were that many supporters of the fuckin’ system here, man.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Oh?”
“I mean, it’s like we created something for them to get all gung-ho about.”
There was an air of sadness about Adama as he said this. He was always like that. He’d say things in a tone that suggested a sense of futility. But he really knew how to get his point across.
A great throng of students stood outside in the July sun, sweating as they worked to strip the graffiti from the windows of the teachers’ room and the wall of the library. Maybe Adama was right: it wasn’t only the honor students who were out there with cleaning rags but even the dimmest kids—kids who, thanks to this school, had such a low opinion of themselves they were practically suicidal.
Nakamura was standing outside the principal’s office, looking as pale as a ghost. He, too, was holding a rag. When he saw Adama and me he gave us a tight little smile.
“What’re you doing with that thing in your hand?” Adama said.
Nakamura licked his lips nervously.
“I didn’t think it would be smart to just sit around. It’d look suspicious. Remember, I’m the guy they call Unprintable. But anyway, listen, Ken-san, it’s really strange...”
“What is?”
Adama suddenly grabbed my sleeve, pulled me down to a squatting position, and started pretending to rub at the floor. Nakamura and I soon followed suit. Walking down the hall toward us were the guidance counselor, the two watchmen, the vice principal, a uniformed policeman, and another man who looked like a plainclothes detective. I glanced at the policeman and shivered. Why do cops jingle and jangle so much when they walk? He was wearing heavy lace-up shoes, and these also made a lot of noise. When the counselor’s slippers stopped right in front of me, I thought my heart was going to burst. The cop’s jingling and jangling and clumping stopped, too.
“You boys,” the counselor said.
I looked up at him, feeling as if all the breath had been knocked out of me.
“You boys will never get the paint off by rubbing at it like that. We’ll have some professionals come in to clean up. I understand how you feel, but I want you to go on back to your classrooms. Homeroom will be starting soon, and we’re going to hold the closing ceremony as planned. Run along, then.”
I was mad at myself for being so scared—I’d pictured us being arrested and strung up on the spot—but I felt a lot better when I saw the troubled expression on the counselor’s face and the deep creases between his eyebrows. This was the guy who’d caught me in a jazz café listening to Antonio Carlos Jobim, taken my glass of Coke away, slapped me forehand and backhand about ten times, and got me suspended from school for four days; the sort of bastard who got his rocks off preaching about the evils of delinquency, complete with quotes from Confucius or whatever, every time we had an assembly or ceremony of some kind. He was a tall guy with silver hair who’d written several books about criminal law in the ancient world, and his way of dealing out shit was as mean as they come. He wouldn’t ever lose his temper, just eye you coldly and say, “You’re trash, we don’t have enough time to try to make a decent student out of you, so why don’t you just drop out or find some other school if you don’t like it here?” This was the prick who was now shuffling off toward the teachers’ room with drooping shoulders and a gloomy face. I heard the vice principal say something about “the biggest disgrace in the history of the school.”
In the history of the school. Adama and I grinned at each other and shook hands again.
Adama suggested we take a look at the roof. Nakamura came along with us.
“You were saying something was strange,” Adama said to him as we climbed the stairs.
Students with rags swarmed around the columns we’d defaced at the top of the stairs.
“Yes, well, you see, it was sort of weighing on my mind, so the first thing I did when I got to school was check out the principal’s office, and you know what?—it didn’t even smell or anything.”
“I’m not surprised. A turd’d be the first thing they’d clean up.”
“Ah... now that you mention it, I did think I could smell disinfectant or something.”
“Probably the watchmen. They would’ve been awake by six or so. After they found the graffiti, they must’ve freaked out and gone straight to the teachers’ room and the principal’s office. Soon as they saw that mess they’d have mopped it up. After all, a pile of shit is... Well, it’s not exactly funny.” Adama was as calm and logical as ever.
“Eh? What do you mean ‘not funny’?”
“Nakamura,” I said, “do you think there’s any ideology in shit?”
“Ideology? In... shit? No, I guess not.”
“Even back before the war, the secret police used to give political offenders at least a little bit of leeway, but people whose crimes weren’t based on any sort of ideology, they’d crucify ’em just like that. And we’re talking about shit, man. It’s not only filthy, it’s, like, unthinkable, totally insane.”
“Wait a minute, Ken-san.” Nakamura came to a halt halfway up the stairs. “You’re the one who told me to do it!” he whimpered.
“How many high school students do you think would take a crap on a desk just because someone tells ’em to? Don’t you know a joke when you hear one?”
By now he was almost crying. Adama put an arm around his shoulders and tried to calm him down.
“Ken’s only kidding. He’s just teasing you, man, take it easy.” As it turned out, the “doo-doo” incident never did come to fight; it wasn’t mentioned in the papers, the radio and television reports, or the police statements, and not even the principal ever referred to it, as far as I know. So the watchmen probably had cleaned it up, and decided to keep it their own little
secret.
To get even with me, Nakamura said, “Ken-san, it was you who wrote ‘To Arms’ on the library wall, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, that was me.”
“You got the kanji wrong.”
“Eh?”
“You used the one for ‘exams’ instead of ‘arms.’ Everybody was talking about it. They said it couldn’t have been a Northern student because if anybody here was that stupid, all they’d need to find out who did it would be a kanji test.”
Adama burst out laughing. Nakamura looked a bit happier, too.
They’d nearly finished breaking through the barricade. Aihara was cutting the wire with pincers, and Kawasaki was pushing aside the chairs and desks that were piled up against the door. Both were drenched with sweat. Aihara stopped what he was doing, looked at me, and grinned.
“Yazaki. What’re you doing here?”
This was one fucker I wasn’t about to grovel in front of. I didn’t want to tell him some cowardly lie like “I’ve come to help dismantle the barricade,” and, in any case, my scorn and loathing for the prick would have shown on my face and given me away.
“I just wanted to see what a barricade looks like. Sir.”
Aihara’s grin vanished and he glowered at me.
“It wasn’t you, was it?” Kawasaki said. His shirt was stuck fast to his skin. I tried to dodge the question with a smile, but my cheeks twitched and it didn’t quite come off. Luckily, at this point almost all the teachers thought the barricade had been the work of outsiders.
“Fnff,” I went, in an attempt to laugh through my nose.
“If I find out you were involved in this,” Aihara said, “I’ll strangle you.”
In one of the corridors I ran into Lady Jane, walking along with her hands clasped behind her back, humming ‘Just Like a Woman.” She smiled at me. I was relieved to see that she wasn’t carrying a rag and sweating—which meant, of course, that she hadn’t been helping remove the graffiti. “Good morning, Yazaki-san,” she said in a high, clear voice like a spring breeze. She left a scent of lemon shampoo behind her as she went by. Courage welled up inside me. I was proud, really proud, of what we’d done.
From in front of the main building I watched the banner being taken down. Aihara and Kawasaki rolled it up and stuffed it, along with its legend, into a big cardboard box.
Helicopters hovered in the air, and above them powerful cumulonimbus clouds marched through the clear blue sky of July. Our barricade had lasted less than half a day, but it seemed as if even the clouds and the sky were on our side.
It was on the third day of summer vacation that it happened, as I sat at home sucking a popsicle and watching a rerun of some melodrama on TV.
Four detectives paid a visit to my house.
ALAIN DELON
Detectives always turn up without any warning. “Hello, I’m a police officer and I’m on my way to your house to arrest you, so please be sure to be there”—that’s something you’ll never hear. Anyone who’s had a visit from them has discovered an important fact about life: namely, that misery grows up all by itself, in a hidden place, without your even being aware of it, and then one day, suddenly, it knocks on your door. Happiness is just the opposite. Happiness is a cute little flower on your veranda, or a baby canary. You can see it growing, little by little, right before your eyes.
It had been mild and sunny all morning. Everything was the same as usual; the TV shows were the same, and the wedge-shaped popsicle I was licking had the same sticky sweetness. When the doorbell rang, my mother went to see who it was. There were four men outside, and they didn’t come in. My mother, looking a bit shaken, called for my father. I still didn’t realize what was going on. The men didn’t look as if they’d come to collect on the gas bill, though, and I had a bad feeling about them. A bad feeling is like a thin, cold mist that hangs in the air, then suddenly thickens into a definite shape. One of the men was looking through the doorway at me. My parents turned and looked at me, too. The mist grew thicker. My mother sank to her knees on the carpet, and my father walked over to where I was sitting.
“Those men are detectives,” he told me. “They say you’re a suspect in the barricading of Northern High, and they want to take you with them.”
I couldn’t taste the popsicle anymore. The mist was thick as soup. My brain went numb. I’d been found out. But how? Doubts and anxieties whirled around inside me, and my throat was bone dry.
“I told them it must be some sort of mistake, but... Well, Ken? Did you do it?”
The popsicle was melting and dripping on the floor.
“Yeah, I did it.”
“Ah.”
My father stared at the little drops on the carpet for a few seconds, then walked back toward the detectives with a pained look on his face.
A police station is like nowhere else on earth. You could compare it to a teachers’ room in the worst sort of high school, but even that would be stretching things.
I walked into the interrogation room muttering to myself I know nothing I know nothing I know nothing I know nothing I know nothing. Sitting across the shabby desk from me was a detective named Sasaki who was in the early stages of senior citizenship. When our eyes met he smiled and chuckled quietly. There were bars on the windows. Sasaki’s shirt was open to his chest, and he was waving a fan with a peacock painted on it. It was hot. The sweat ran down my forehead and cheeks and neck, and it was all I could do to keep wiping it off.
“You hot?” Sasaki said.
I didn’t answer.
“I’m hot, too. Your pals—Yamada, Otaki, Narushima— they told us the whole story.” Sasaki took out a Hi-Lite and lit up. “They all said you were the leader. That true?”
I was really thirsty. The sticky sweetness of the popsicle was still in my throat.
“You’re not going to talk?”
Another cop came in with two glasses of cold barley tea and set them down in front of us. I didn’t touch mine; I was afraid to. I somehow felt that if I drank it, I’d end up telling them everything.
“I see. Well, then, this is going to take some time. Yamada and the others’ll probably be back home by noon or so. You’re going to stick it out, though, huh? Look, you’re only seventeen, and technically you’re here of your own volition. We probably won’t hold you overnight even if you don’t cooperate. We’ll get you to come back tomorrow morning. By then we should have the other statements all sorted out, and maybe we’ll arrest you.”
When I’d left the house, my father had said, “Ken-bo, the police know everything. Be honest with them—as honest as you can be without squealing on your friends—and hurry back home. It’s not as if you killed someone, after all.” I was impressed to see him remain so calm while his son was being dragged off by the cops.
“Listen, Yazaki, we’re the police, it’s our job to do this sort of thing. You understand? We sit in hot, cramped little rooms like this talking to suspects, and they’re not all high school kids on their way to Tokyo University, either. Yeah, I spoke to your teacher—Mr. Matsunaga? He says you’re pretty smart.”
It doesn’t take the police any time at all to get the goods on you. Misery develops before you even know it’s coming, like a cavity in a tooth.
“They aren’t all people like you. We get hoods, bums, hookers who’re half out of their minds, junkies who you can’t make head or tail of what they’re jabbering about... It tires you out. Hot in the summer, freezing cold in winter... I’ve got neuralgia, it’s no fun for me, but what can I do? One, two in the morning, you just want to get the hell out of here, but if it’s your job, well, that’s all there is to it. You’re studying for college entrance exams, right? That’s no fun, either, I know... You still don’t want to talk? You can come back tomorrow morning at eight, then. And if you keep this up tomorrow, we’re going to have to arrest you.”
I have no idea what the expression on my face was like right then, but I know I was feeling pretty depressed, and the whole business was beginning t
o seem ridiculous. The trouble was, I had nothing to fall back on, no stand I could take. All I could rely on was the anti-authority thing, the idea that whatever I did I wasn’t going to play along with the fucking cops. But the urge just to get out of that awful place was gradually gaining the upper hand.
“You know how we found out?”
I shook my head. Drops of water ran down the sides of the cheap plastic glass of barley tea and soaked the peeling surface of the desk. How was a high school student supposed to know that the gloomy atmosphere of interrogation rooms was meant to be that way, to help break down the resistance of suspects and witnesses? A seventeen-year-old from a middle-class family had no way of understanding that confessions were obtained by whittling down a person’s pride bit by bit. All I knew was that I wanted to go home and enjoy a popsicle the way they were meant to be enjoyed.
“You don’t know, do you? We couldn’t have found out unless somebody talked, right? Well? You agree?”
My pride was slipping. I searched around for something to latch on to. When was it I’d gone with my father to see The Battle of Algiers? The rebels in Algeria didn’t break down and confess even when blowtorches were used on their bare backs. It was better to die than to betray your comrades... But what did that have to do with me? All I wanted was to go home and suck on a popsicle. Was this Algeria? Was the man in front of me a member of the French secret police? Was I fighting a war of national independence? Would it mean someone’s life if I talked?
“Look at this.” Sasaki pointed at a stack of papers on the edge of the desk. “Your friends’ reports, with all the details.”
That got to me. All the details? Did Nakamura tell them about the pile of shit? About Yazaki making him take a dump on the principal’s desk? I was getting scared. It was just as Adama had said: a turd wasn’t funny. There was no ideology in shit. I’d read a lot of accounts of student protests, but I didn’t remember any of them listing defecation as a tactic. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of the charges against me becoming more serious; I was afraid of being treated like a pervert. There was nothing romantic about a turd...
