by Ryu Murakami
“Adama, don’t let it get to you, man,” I said, staring at the ground as we walked along. “Hey, look, you said you liked this bag one time, didn’t you?” I held out my orange shoulder bag. It had my full name written on it, with KEN in big Roman letters. “I’ll swap it for yours if you want.”
Adama looked at me and shook his head. “I don’t believe you, man,” he said. He’d seen through my ploy. Whoever was carrying the bag would be the target when the kendo guy attacked.
Which is what happened, just as we reached the coffee shop Boulevard.
All of a sudden we were surrounded by six high school dudes carrying wooden swords.
APRIL COME SHE WILL
Six dudes carrying wooden swords surrounded Adama and me. They all wore crumpled school caps that could have passed for old rags, and on each cap was the industrial arts school badge. The swords gleamed darkly, and looked good and hard. Adama was already as white as a sheet.
“You Yazaki from Northern?” the leader, a big, pimply-faced, Neanderthal type, asked me. I was sure the swords would come crashing down on my head at any moment. I nodded, and my legs started shaking like crazy. To stop the trembling, I breathed in deeply through my nose and tried to look calm. If I let them know how scared I was, it would only encourage them and make it that much harder to fend them off.
For a guy who’d grown up among coal miners, one of the roughest groups of people in Japan, Adama seemed a bit on the wimpy side. What sort of impresarios were we, I thought; why hadn’t we seen to it that we had a bodyguard or two? Too late now, though.
I’d got into fights once in a while up through junior high, but they were only harmless punch-and-wrestle affairs. For me, wooden swords and chains and knives existed only in comic books.
“Well? You are Yazaki, aren’t you?” Pimples said, adding a menacing growl to his voice.
“Yes, I am. Say, aren’t you guys from the industrial arts high? I’ve been hoping we’d meet up. See, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you. Why don’t we step inside this coffee shop so we can talk?”
I spoke in a voice so loud that people passing on the street turned to look, and when I finished I moved toward the door of Boulevard. Pimples put his hand on my shoulder and stopped me.
“Hold it.”
He glared down at me, thrusting out his chin and raising his eyebrows slightly. He was copying the heroes of the gangster movies that had been popular a decade earlier, films that you could still see in small provincial cities like ours.
“You wanted to talk something over, right?”
My legs were still trembling, but I said this in a quiet, controlled tone of voice. My father had once told me that if I ever found myself surrounded by yakuza, I should be polite but not start groveling. Long ago, when he was in his twenties, he’d used a baseball bat on the chairman of the PTA—who also happened to be a yakuza boss—and the gangster’s goons had cornered him and held a knife to his throat. “If they’d stuck me with that thing, I’d have been dead,” he told me. “You were still a baby, Ken-bo, and I didn’t want to die and leave your mother to raise you on her own, so I apologized. But if you get too humble with those bastards, they’ll be more than happy to kick the shit out of you. So, even while I was apologizing, I suggested in no uncertain terms that if they laid a finger on me, a schoolteacher, their boss’s son wouldn’t have a chance in hell of ever getting anywhere in life. I guess I was pretty lucky, too, but anyway I came out of it without a scratch...”
I walked into the dim interior of Boulevard and headed for the table farthest from the door. The wooden swords and the oversize school uniforms didn’t go too well with the music— Sibelius’s Finlandia.
Adama and I sat with our backs to the wall, and Pimples and his boys occupied two tables in a semicircle around us. They stood all their swords together against the wall.
We were at least temporarily out of danger of having our heads split open at any moment.
“Is coffee okay with everyone?” I said, looking at each of them. The balance of power had shifted, if only ever so slightly. One look at their uniforms, shiny with sweat stains and torn here and there, was enough to convince you that these were Hardboys of the old school. They didn’t go to game centers or coffee shops, because they didn’t have any money.
Not being used to this sort of place, they were ill at ease. I asked the waitress, whom I knew fairly well, for eight café royals.
“We’ve been meaning to talk to you guys about Nagayama-san because we were afraid you might somehow have got the wrong idea,” I said.
Pimples and his boys looked at one another.
“You got something to say about her?” the big guy said.
“Well, no, it’s just that we were thinking of having her appear in our festival, and, of course, we knew we’d have to discuss it with you first.”
“Listen, don’t fuck with me, man. Maybe we can’t do anything right here, but once we get outside you’d better be ready. It’s gonna cost you at least an arm.”
My legs started trembling again. The threat sounded real enough coming from an old-style Hardboy like Pimples.
“You been selling party tickets,” he said. He meant the tickets for the Morning Wood Festival.
“Yes.”
“You don’t see nothin’ wrong with high school punks doin’ somethin’ like that?”
“Ah, but, see, we’re not out to make money, it’s just that we have a lot of expenses—renting the hall, and the amps and the film projector and things.”
The café royals arrived, Resting on top of each cup was a spoon in which a brandy-soaked sugar cube burned with a pale blue flame. It was unlikely that anyone in Pimples’ gang had ever seen anything like it before; their jaws dropped open and they stared at their cups like people in old Edo seeing an elephant for the first time. What was disheartening was that Adama displayed the same reaction. People from coal-mining towns just weren’t any good at pulling off stunts like this. Unless we both sipped casually at our drinks as if we did this every day of our lives, the whole routine was a waste of time.
“Oh, by the way, these are called café royals. What you do is, first you lick the flame from the spoon, real fast, then you drink the coffee.”
This was meant as a joke, of course, but the dumbest-looking of Pimples’ boys actually went and licked the spoon. “Ow! Shit!” he said, throwing it aside and grabbing his glass of water.
“You tryin’ to make a fool of us?”
Pimples reached for his sword. The café royal ploy had only made things worse.
“Listen. You bought Nagayama a negligee. Why?”
We’d already taken in some eighty thousand yen in ticket sales, so I’d invested seven thousand two hundred yen in a white negligee for Mie Nagayama to use on stage and Lady Jane to wear in the film. When I’d shown it to Mie, just a few days earlier, she’d been crazy about it and said she wanted to borrow it for two or three days so she could see how it felt to sleep in.
“Oh, that. It’s just a stage costume.”
“Don’t give me that shit. You can see right through it.”
“You mean you’ve seen it? Don’t tell me you went and ripped it in half or something? That cost nearly eight thousand yen!”
Whoops! I thought as soon as I’d said this, but it was too late. Adama gave me a look that said: You fuckup. Pimples opened his slit eyes as wide as they’d go. He was very angry. I half expected him to stand up and brain me on the spot.
“No, no, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like she’ll be naked underneath, she’s going to put it on over her uniform. See, what we want to express here is the innocence of a young virgin and, at the same time, her longing for, well, for sex, and...”
Adama shook his head as if to say it was all over. Provoking Pimples with that chickenshit question about ripping up the negligee had made me lose my cool completely.
The gang stood up.
“Enjoy the coffee. Enjoy it now, because your mouth is gon
na be too mangled for you to taste anything for a while. We’ll be waitin’ for you outside. Make it quick. You got to face the music sometime, man.”
After they’d stepped outside, the waitress came over and asked if we wanted her to call the police. I almost told her yes, go ahead, but if the cops and the school found out about the Morning Wood Festival, there wouldn’t be any festival, so I had to tell her not to bother.
Pimples and company must have thought we were going to call someone for help; there were soon more than a dozen of them outside.
At Adama’s suggestion I telephoned Yuji Shirokushi. “You’ve been too flashy about the way you’re selling those tickets,” the Greaser said. “I heard about dudes from Asahi and Southern and the commercial school, too, who wanted to call you down and teach you a lesson.”
“Well, we got guys outside here right now waiting for us.”
“How many?”
“It was only six at first, but now it’s about fifteen or sixteen.”
“They all on the kendo team?”
“They’ve all got wooden swords.”
“Listen, Ken-yan, that team came in sixth in the All-Japan high school meet. And the captain took first place in the Kyushu finals his second year.”
“So?”
“So even if I bring ten or twenty guys, we don’t stand a chance.”
“But, hell, I can’t call the cops, either.”
“You got any money?”
“Money?”
“You got twenty thousand on you?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s all from ticket sales.”
“I’ll have a word with this yakuza guy I know. You stay where you are. I’ll call him right now.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Shirokushi?”
“What?”
“Can you get a discount?”
“Listen, Ken-yan, they crack your head open, you’ll never be able to study again. They crush your balls, you’ll never have another hard-on.”
Shirokushi called back in a few minutes to say it was all set up, and before long the yakuza arrived. He was half black and, by coincidence, had once been a student of my father’s. He brought Pimples into Boulevard with him. We reached an understanding over a glass of soda water, and Pimples retreated. He looked back at me as he left, the hatred in his eyes tempered by sheer astonishment that I knew anyone like this.
The yakuza snatched up the twenty thousand yen with his pinkyless right hand, then asked me how my father was doing.
“He used to slap me around a lot, but he was a good teacher. I remember once I did a picture of a church, and he said it was really good. Your father plays pinball, doesn’t he?”
“Every once in a while, I guess.”
“Tell him to come to the Palace Pinball Parlor. I’ll make sure he wins.”
He said he didn’t think I’d be having any more problems of this sort, but that if I did I could call him any time. Then he shuffled off in his sandals, his black sports coat hanging loose over his shoulders and flapping in the breeze.
*
We began filming Etude for a Baby Doll and a High School Boy—an extravaganza on standard eight-millimeter film, part color and part black and white.
The first day, we filmed Iwase’s face from the nose down and Lady Jane walking down a long corridor in the negligee. There was no story. It was a surrealistic treatment of the daily life of a student in a boys’ high school who couldn’t feel love for anyone except a milk-drinking baby doll.
Iwase played the student, a born loser who finds the doll lying naked in front of his grandfather’s grave. He falls in love with it, and the doll stimulates certain dreams in his mind. Lady Jane appeared in the dream sequences.
The Bell & Howell we’d borrowed from Masutabe made a satisfying whir as it rolled. Unfortunately, I got the expo sure wrong, and the first and second reels came out blank, but it was still great fun making a movie of our own.
Partly because of the twenty thousand yen I’d paid in protection money, we had to give up on having Lady Jane ride a white horse across a meadow in the highlands. Adama kept pushing for the big white dog, but I was dead against it, and in the end we settled for a white goat that lived near his place. So one day we all boarded a bus and headed out there to film on location.
“I made some lunch for us,” the angel said, holding up a basket that smelled of sweet egg rolls. I sat there wishing I could eat lunch alone with her. The conductor on the bus, a man with a hideous face, eyed us sourly as we played a silly little game called “Gorilla Boogers.” To any question anyone asked you— “What’s your name?” “What’s your favorite food?” “What’s your house made of?” “What’s your hobby?”—you had to answer “Gorilla boogers,” and whoever laughed first lost. Lady Jane and Ann-Margret always cracked up at the first question, and Adama won hands down. “Gorilla boogers,” he’d say, again and again, without ever seeming to find it the least bit funny.
Once we were past the suburbs, the bus rolled along beside a river, then headed up a mountain road. The autumn sunlight glistened in Lady Jane’s hair, and the soft swells in Ann-Margret’s blouse jiggled each time the bus swayed. The ugly and ignorant-looking conductor stared at us with loathing in his eyes as we laughed and shouted. That stare of his felt great. It seemed to me that we were just like the high school kids I’d seen in American movies of the fifties.
The goat was in a field beside a lazy river where pampas grass waved in the breeze. I set up the camera on a slope overlooking the field, intending to film Lady Jane walking along behind the goat, holding it by a rope, but the goat kept turning its ass to the camera and dropping little balls of shit or taking to its heels so suddenly that Lady Jane was jerked off her feet. Eventually the animal broke free, and Adama chased it for about five hundred meters.
We sat on the bank of the river to eat our picnic lunch. There were rice balls, pickles, egg rolls, fried chicken and cauliflower, and even pears for dessert. While the birds warbled and chirped in the trees, Iwase played the guitar and we all sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “April Come She Will.”
One day when the festival was only a week away, Lady Jane and I found an opportunity to be alone together. Coelacanth wanted to have a slide show behind them while they were playing, and I decided some photos of her would be just the thing.
We met at Boulevard and had a poignant cup of English tea, then headed for the American base. You couldn’t go inside, but there were a lot of picturesque buildings nearby that I thought would make good backdrops: a cream-colored movie theater that looked like a Greek temple; the officers’ quarters, with their ivy-covered walls; a Mickey Mouse clock tower; a church with its steeple painted pink and blue; a beautifully groomed baseball diamond; a cobblestone street where people took their collies for walks; a road lined with plane trees whose fallen leaves danced in the wind; a row of red brick warehouses...
“Is the film finished?” said Lady Jane, smiling into the lens and sweeping her hair back with long, delicate fingers.
“All except the editing.”
“Do I look funny?”
“No, you look great.”
“Did you keep the part with the goat?”
“No, the goat’s out. The image is all wrong.”
She suggested we go to the beach when winter came.
“Winter? It’ll be cold.”
“I know. But I’ve never seen the sea in winter before.”
I imagined us clinging to each other in the cold wind, and my heart began to pound.
Hours went by without my having any sense of time passing, and the next thing I knew the sky was the pale purple of sunset.
“I love this time of day,” she said, her hands clasped behind her back as we headed home. I was taking care not to step on her shadow. “It’s over so soon, and then it’s night. But it’s so pretty. I wonder if the way I feel will be like that—if it’ll change all of a sudden.”
“The way you feel?”
“Come on, don’t be
mean. I told you how I felt by sending you those roses.”
I stopped and focused the camera. “I,” I said, and clicked the shutter. “Love,” I said, and clicked the shutter again. “You,” I said. Lady Jane smiled shyly. It was a smile to end all smiles, but it got lost in the gathering darkness and didn’t show up in the prints.
VELVET UNDERGROUND
“Chickens?” Adama said, more loudly than he needed to. It was at lunchtime, four days before the Morning Wood Festival.
Almost all our preparations were complete. Thanks to Ann-Margret’s over-the-top, weepy-voiced method acting and Father Saburo’s meddling, Beyond the Blood-Red Sea of Negativity and Rebellion was a long way away from what I’d conceived it to be, but we were through rehearsing and ready to roll.
I’d finished editing the film, too, and we’d made arrangements to secure a projector and all the musical instruments and amps and speakers.
“Chickens?” he said again.
“Yeah. I’d like to get about twenty of ’em, but eight or so would do. You know any place we can buy them?”
“Butcher shop, I guess, but how we gonna eat eight whole chickens?” He must have thought I wanted them for a party afterward.
“You got it all wrong. I want live chickens.”
“What the hell for? Don’t tell me you’re gonna wring their necks, rip ’em to pieces, and slurp up their blood on stage?”
I showed him a photograph I’d torn out of Art Today. It was a Velvet Underground concert in a ballroom in New York. On the ballroom floor were cows and pigs, glass cases full of mice, parrots on perches, a chimpanzee on a leash, and even a pair of tigers in a cage.
“Pretty cool, eh?”
“Tigers and monkeys and parrots—yeah, that’s cool. But chickens? It’ll look like an egg farm.”
“That’s where you’re mistaken.” As usual when I was playing the intellectual, I chose my words carefully. “The important thing is the spirit behind it. Lou Reed used birds and animals at this concert to suggest the chaos in the world today. The least we can do is make a gesture in the same direction.”
