by Ryu Murakami
“We already know the story, whether you talk or not. Your pals told us everything. So now let’s hear it from you. Come on, don’t be stupid. You trying to cover up for somebody? You going to cover up for the clowns that told us they were only following your orders? Does that make you feel good or something?”
The things he was saying weren’t very different from what was going through the mind of the popsicle fan sitting opposite him. He’d mentioned Adama’s name. Adama was the only one I could trust. I had no ideological ties with the others; they were different, they were underachievers, and the only reason they’d gone ahead with the barricade was to try to boost their own feeble egos. I couldn’t bear being lumped together with dickheads like that—they made it all seem meaningless. Algeria and Vietnam were far away. This was Japan, the land of peace. Sure, we heard the roar of Phantom jets every day. An ex-classmate whiled away her time sucking black sailors’ dicks. But no blood was being spilled. No bombs were being dropped. No babies were scarred by napalm. So what was I doing here in this steaming shithole of a room at a police station in a little city on the western edge of a country like this? Was I going to change the world by holding my tongue? The radical movement was already in a shambles even at Tokyo University. I wanted something to hold on to, some grounds for opposing this wrinkled, cloudy-eyed old guy in front of me. I could say “I hate your guts!” and stick out my tongue—but that was about all I could do. The part of me that longed to be sucking on a popsicle kept asking questions: Why did you barricade the school? You’re not an Algerian rebel or a Viet Cong or one of Che’s guerrillas. What are you doing here? I knew damn well I’d done what I’d done because I wanted Kazuko Matsui to like me, but somehow it was hard to respect that as a motive now.
Sasaki shifted in his seat. He sat up straight and gave me a dour look.
“You hoping to become a bum, Yazaki? I’ve seen a lot of ’em, you know. Homeless guys that just wander around with nowhere to go. Maybe you were cut out to be one of them— you seem to like that free and footloose way of life, right? I know a lot of people who’ve gone that way. Yeah, you remind me of some of them. You know, there aren’t many stupid beggars. ’Course, once they become beggars they start losing their marbles, but most of them planned at one time to go on to some good university—Tokyo, Kyoto, that kind of place. Yeah... it’s just that something goes wrong, some little thing, they make one little mistake and the next thing they know they’re living on the street. They stink something awful, you know, those people.”
I drank some barley tea. Then I threw in the sponge.
It was past eleven that night when I got home. Popsicles were the last thing on my mind. My parents didn’t say anything at all for quite a while, but my little sister got out of bed in a cute pair of piggy-print pajamas to welcome me back. “You were out late, weren’t you?” she said. “There’s an Alain Delon movie I want to see. Will you take me?” Either she didn’t know anything or she was just trying to brighten up the atmosphere. “Yeah, sure, I’ll take you,” I said, forcing a smile, which got me an “Oh, goody!” and a kiss on the cheek.
When she was back in bed again, my father muttered, “Alain Delon, eh?” He had his arms crossed and was peering at the ceiling. “What was that movie with Alain Delon and Jean Gabin? You and I and your mother went to see it together a few years back.”
“Melodie en Sous-Sol,” my mother said. You could still see where tears had run down her cheeks.
“Right, right.”
My father fell silent again for several long minutes. At times like this, the ticking of a clock is as loud as a drum. An odd little thought popped into my head: no matter what sort of shit is happening, time just keeps on passing by.
“Ken.” My father turned suddenly and looked at me. “What if you get expelled?”
Obviously the two of them had done some talking while I was gone.
“Well, I'll take the high school equivalence exam. I’ll go to college anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “All right. Go to bed.”
“The police contacted us yesterday. This isn’t a problem that can be dealt with just by reading you the riot act. The principal will announce your punishment once it’s been decided. At any rate, try to keep your noses clean till then.”
It was the morning that summer supplementary classes were due to begin. Matsunaga, the guy in charge of our class, had called Adama and me into the teachers’ room. There was a strange atmosphere in the place. It was nothing like when you were discovered smoking in the john or got caught cutting an exam to go and listen to some jazz. The teachers were cold and distant. “You again, Yazaki?
You jerk. Why don’t you try getting called in here for doing something right once in a while?”—nobody said anything like that. The P.E. instructors and the guidance counselor sat at their desks across the room and stared at us. Some of the teachers even looked down at their desks when our eyes met. I suppose they just didn’t know how to deal with the whole thing. After all, it was the biggest disgrace in the history of the school...
It was the same in the classroom. The other kids were reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, trying to look as if nothing had happened. People like Adama and me were as much of a puzzle to them as to their teachers, here in darkest Kyushu. Between classes, a few close friends gathered around the two of us. I started talking in a loud voice about how much fun it had been. I told them about the planning, the execution, and the police interrogation, playing it up for laughs. The part about Nakamura’s “doo-doo” was punctuated by one burst of laughter after another, and the crowd around us grew till it included about half the kids there. Telling the story made me a star. I learned something from that. If you got all gloomy and apologetic, you’d be on your own. No one there was capable of judging the right or wrong of it all. No one was capable of assessing the barricade in ideological terms. Victory went to whoever had the most fun. Behind the blasé front, of course, I was afraid of being expelled, but to put everyone else at ease it was best just to shrug it all off and tell them what a ball we’d had. The fact is that most of that crowd—or at least half of them—would have liked to have done it themselves. The rest, no doubt—the ones who thought I should get down on my knees and beg for mercy— only hated me more than ever. Aware of their hostility, I kept on talking. Even if I am thrown out, my heart was warning them, you’re the ones who lose. My laughter will ring in your ears for the rest of your miserable lives.
After class, Adama, Iwase, and I had a talk in the library.
“How did they find out?” Iwase asked.
“Fuckin’ Fuse,” Adama said. “Fuse lives way out in the suburbs, right? The dumb fuck rode his bicycle home in the middle of the night with paint splattered all over himself. So a cop stops him. Nobody rides a bike around in the middle of the night way out in the sticks except a burglar or something, right? If he’d come up with a good story—I mean, country cops don’t know shit, right? It would’ve been easy as hell to bullshit your way out of a situation like that. But Fuse starts babbling and screws everything up. At that point the cop’s got no reason to suspect he’s coming back from barricading the school, of course, but he asks Fuse his name and the name of his school just in case, because he’s acting so suspicious. Once he heard the news—I mean, even the dumbest cop is going to start putting two and two together. They picked Fuse up right away, and he just spilled his guts.”
“Yazaki-san.”
It was the voice of an angel behind us. Kazuko Matsui was standing there with a concerned look on her face. Right beside her was Yumi Sato, the Ann-Margret of the English Drama Club.
“I was talking it over with Yumi-chan. We’re thinking about starting a petition... against them kicking you out of school.”
If I’d been a dog, I would have rolled around on the floor, pissed all over myself, foamed at the mouth, and wagged my tail till it snapped off.
LYNDON JOHNSON
All the third-year girls were assembled on th
e main playing field to practice for the opening ceremony of the National Athletic Meet. Supervising them was the war widow, Fumi-chan. Instructors at driving schools are the worst example of it, but all teachers get off on using their positions to intimidate the people in their charge. That’s their way of trying to fill up the voids in their own lives. Dark, lonely lives create sadistic teachers.
“You there, you three girls! There aren’t any boys watching you. The only reason you’re not lifting your legs high enough is because you’re worried about how you look. Nobody’s looking at your silly legs. Lift them higher!”
Fumi-chan was shouting through a bullhorn. Adama and I were in low spirits in spite of the fact that we were gazing down on a sea of seventeen-year-old girls, about three hundred of them altogether. The principal was going to announce our punishment the following day. Lady Jane and Ann-Margret’s idea of organizing a petition had never got off the ground. The school authorities had got wind that something was up and applied pressure before anything could happen.
After summer school two days before, I’d been discussing Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck with Adama and some other friends. We were trying to decide which of them could play faster, then which could run faster, which could eat faster, and so on. I said I bet that even when Janis Joplin farted, it came out sounding raspy, and everybody laughed. Then one guy suddenly stopped laughing and pointed at the entrance to the classroom, and we all fell silent. An angel was framed in the doorway, looking in our direction.
“Yazaki-san, do you have a minute?” she said, lowering her eyes. I floated toward her, suppressing an urge to start singing “My Little Butterfly.” The angel stepped out into the hallway, leaned weakly against the wall with her hands behind her back, and looked at me with her head slightly bowed. I'd do anything, I thought, even march off to war, to be the focus of those eyes.
“Yazaki-san, I...” The angel spoke in a tiny voice. To hear her, I had to move closer, close enough to smell her shampoo. I went into a sort of trance, gazing at the tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead, the fine wrinkles on her pink lips, and the flutter of her long eyelashes, wondering what it would be like to kiss that lovely oval face. The others were in the classroom doorway, peering out at us. Adama was grinning. Another guy flashed an obscene gesture, making a fist and poking his finger inside.
“Shall we go, like, to the library or someplace?” I suggested.
“This is fine,” she said. “The thing is, well, Yumi-chan and I, and some other friends, we were going to start a petition, but our teacher said he wanted to see us, and, well, I’m so embarrassed, I didn’t think I’d be able to tell you this, but I know it would keep bothering me if I didn’t, so I want to apologize because...”
I saw it all. The teachers had threatened her. Talk about sadistic. I could imagine exactly how they’d gone about it; their methods were basically the same as the ones the cops and the secret police used. The entire system was on their side. “What’s your problem? Let’s hear it. Living in a free and peaceful country like this, going to a school with the best college entrance results in the prefecture, getting on with your studies to help you prepare for the future... what have you got to complain about?” This would have been their line of attack.
“I’m sorry.” She was biting her lower lip, unable to forget, presumably, the way they’d bullied her. I could have murdered them for this. The only thing that turned those bastards on was stability. “Getting into college,” “getting a job,” “getting married”—all their arguments were based on the premise that these things alone could lead to happiness. And it wasn’t easy to deny a premise like that, at least for high school kids who hadn’t yet found any real identity of their own.
“You’re in class C, aren’t you?” I said.
She nodded.
“Who’s in charge of it? Shimizu?”
“Mr. Shimizu, yes.”
Shimizu was the nasty bastard with the pointed chin whose profile looked like a crescent moon. I started doing an imitation of him. “Matsui, what on earth are you up to? Eh? How can you want anything to do with that slob Yazaki? Eh? You’d better think this over carefully. Eh?” Shimizu had graduated from the department of Japanese Literature at Saga University, the drabbest department in the drabbest university in Japan. Saga Prefecture had a Fountain of Seven Colors in front of its capitol building, the ruins of an old castle, and about a million miles of nothing but rice paddies. It was hard to find a decent bowl of noodles, or a woman under ninety, anywhere in the area. No one can tell me a guy who studied Japanese Literature in a dismal place like that had any right to say anything at all to a brave and beautiful girl like Kazuko Matsui.
My imitation of Shimizu wasn’t very good, but she covered her mouth with her hand and giggled.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” I said. “Wait here a minute.”
I went back into the classroom and whispered to a guy named Ezaki, whose father ran a chain of beauty parlors, that I wanted to borrow the record he’d just shown me. Ezaki frowned and said “But, but, but—” “No buts, asshole, just hand it over,” I said and glared at him till he opened his bag and pulled out his brand-new copy of Cheap Thrills. “But I haven’t even listened to it yet,” he moaned. I ignored him and ran back to where the angel was standing. Adama was telling Ezaki: “Forget it, man, let it go. When Ken’s like this, it wouldn’t matter if you were a cop, or a teacher, he’d walk off with the thing anyway. It’s fate, man, let it go.”
“You like Janis Joplin?” I asked her.
“Oh, I know this record. The lady with the husky voice, right?”
“Yeah. It’s a good one.”
“The only singers I know much about are the ones who came out of folk—Dylan, Donovan, Baez, people like that. But I know this record. ‘Summertime’ is on it, right?”
Lady Jane was a sweetheart. She didn’t even mention Simon and Garfunkel, whose record I’d promised to give her and still hadn’t produced.
“It’s for you. Look, don’t worry about the petition. I don’t think we’re going to be expelled anyway.”
“This hasn’t been opened! You haven’t even listened to it yet, have you?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m going to be under house arrest or suspended or whatever, so I’ll have plenty of time on my hands. I’ll listen to it then.”
I stared out the hall window at the mountains in the distance, wearing what I hoped looked like a lonely smile. Lady Jane still had her head bowed slightly and was peering at me from under her eyelashes. When I saw the look in her eyes I knew I’d pulled it off, and I felt like dancing up and down the hallway. The angel left, turning to look back at me several times as she walked away. Joining my friends again, I found Ezaki muttering darkly about people who only thought about themselves, but Adama said, “Way to go, man. You played it perfectly.”
Now, with the drive to save us from expulsion having fizzled out, all we could do was wait for the principal’s verdict.
“I wonder why watching this stuff makes me so sick,” Adama said about the scene below, where girls were running up and down the chalk lines and jumping around in time to the music. I’d never seen Adama looking this edgy before—he was usually so cool-headed and laid-back. He never showed any anger or disgust or sadness in front of other people. It’s true he came from a coal-mining town in the middle of nowhere, but his father had a job in management and his mother was from a good family and had graduated from higher school. Adama grew up with all the love and material comforts a kid could ask for. He’d even taken organ lessons till the age of five—something that in the world of coal miners practically qualified him as a member of the aristocracy.
This Adama of ours was really down now, though. The decision about our punishment must have been weighing pretty heavily on him.
Fumi-chan’s shrill voice—“No, no, no! How many times do I have to tell you?”—grated on our ears. Blue and red veins stood out on her scrawny neck, and she was jiggling her ass in exasperation. What right
did someone like that have to act so high and mighty? I didn’t need Adama to tell me how sickening it was—I already felt like puking. There were, admittedly, some grotesque specimens among them, but to see seventeen-year-old bodies being ordered around was disgusting. Seventeen-year-old bodies weren’t put on earth to be dressed in colorless gym clothes and forced to march around in some prearranged pattern. A few of them looked like hippos, it’s true, but most seventeen-year-old bodies, with their smooth, elastic flesh, were designed to go running along some seashore playing tag with the waves and shouting with glee.
So it wasn’t only the verdict, just one day away now, that was getting us down; watching the girls practice their routines was depressing, too. Just to see people being bullied into doing things was a bummer.
Neither of my parents mentioned the punishment question during dinner. When the meal was over, I went outside in my yukata to set off fireworks with my little sister. She told me she was going to invite a classmate she called Torigai-san over to our house soon. Torigai-san was half American and strangely sexy for a sixth-grader. I was always after my sister to introduce me to her. The reason she remembered and brought it up now was that she somehow must have sensed, in spite of my attempts to fool around and be cheerful, how low I was really feeling.
My father was standing on the veranda watching us. He stepped down into the garden in his bare feet and said, “Let me give it a try.” He took three sparklers in one hand, lit them, and waved them around in a circle. My sister clapped her hands, saying it was beautiful.
“Ken, about tomorrow,” he said. I was busy painting a mental picture of Torigai-san’s blue eyes and budding breasts and didn’t realize at first that he was referring to the announcement. “I’m not going with you. I’ll ask your mother to go along. If I went, you know, it could end up in a fight.”
