“Hey,” he said, greeting me as he puffed on a Short Hope cigarette, “Maki says sorry about New Year’s.”
I guessed he was referring to what happened the last time I was at Maki’s place. At New Year’s the three of us did the traditional thing and went to the Musashino Hachimangu shrine in Kichijoji, then headed back to Maki’s for a kimchi hotpot. I was drunk as usual and going on and on about manzai this and manzai that, when Maki, at Kamiya’s direction, made a face at me—crossed her eyes and poked out her tongue—which I told her to quit doing, but she did it again, and I said it again, and we kept this stupid argument up until it totally degenerated, and Maki got up and left, then reappeared to give me the finger.
When the lights at the scramble crossing turned green, Kamiya got rid of his cigarette and we set off. He bumped into other pedestrians a lot. I did too. As we got to the other side, he said, “Tokunaga, I know this isn’t your strong point, but we’re meeting some girls today.”
Apparently we were headed for a pub near the Udagawa police box, where these girls would be waiting for us. The building that housed the pub was a lot more modern than the places where we usually drank in Kichijoji, and I was nervous by the time we put a foot on the stairs leading up. I’d never been at a drinking party with girls before.
Three girls and one of Kamiya’s kohai from his agency were waiting for us. The guy hadn’t been in the comedy business as long as I had and greeted me politely enough, but I might have come across as unfriendly.
Kamiya was more outgoing that evening than he usually was with Maki and me, while I kept quieter than usual: I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would be appropriate in this company. The girl sitting next to me kept talking into my ear in a really irritating manner.
Kamiya held the stage and the girls laughed at everything he said. Annoyingly, the girl next to me kept whispering, “You OK?” trying to force me into a twosome space with her. The more she did it the more relaxed her eyes looked. But I’d come here to listen to Kamiya, not this girl. I went to the toilet and when I came back, I sat down next to him.
“Hey, where do you think you’re sitting!” Kamiya exclaimed.
The girls all laughed. I said nothing and just stared at the plate of cold fried chicken.
“Aww, doesn’t he like me?” said the girl I’d been sitting next to.
I stayed silent. Those girls kept looking at me like I was some kind of strange animal. That night I didn’t get drunk at all.
“Like a schoolboy, isn’t he?” Kamiya asked, and everybody except me nodded in agreement.
Before then I’d been conscious of the huge gulf in talent between Kamiya and myself, but I had never felt so distant from him as a person as I did now. He was like someone from another world. Nevertheless, I knew him better than anyone else there, so I depended on his lead in this situation. But when he said, “He might not look it, but this guy gets off listening in on private moments, you know,” I could see the others were shocked. “Don’t you?” Kamiya said to me.
“Yes,” I answered, and everybody laughed for some reason.
“No kidding, better watch out for him,” Kamiya’s kohai said, causing the girls to giggle loudly.
It wasn’t pervy like Kamiya was making it seem. I didn’t use a bug or anything like that. Kamiya was talking about what happened late one night when we were walking along a street and heard some moaning coming from an apartment, so of course we stopped and listened. It was a woman moaning. We listened—for maybe twenty minutes. I went back to the same spot the next night to see if I could hear it again. I did this for a few nights but didn’t hear anything. And then I started to think that maybe it wasn’t a real woman that first night, maybe the moaning came from a television or video or something. But it sounded real, and the fact that neither of us thought it came from a TV was proof that it wasn’t. Once I started doubting I went back for maybe another week because then I wanted to know if it was real or not. That’s why I didn’t like being referred to as some kind of weirdo who did this for kicks.
“So, apart from the obvious, what’s so interesting about listening in?” one of the girls asked a little aggressively.
I didn’t want to answer, but I also didn’t want to throw cold water on the party. So I said, “Because the individual is projecting sound on the assumption nobody will hear it. As a result, it’s something we wouldn’t ordinarily hear.”
“A scientist!” another girl exclaimed, and everybody laughed.
That didn’t bother me. But it hurt that Kamiya seemed to find this funny too and laughed along with the others. If my sensei was taking their side, it was hard for me to dismiss their comments as worthless.
I was a fish out of water that night right to the end. All I wanted was to get out of there, and in answer to my prayers the thing ended before the trains stopped running. Kamiya exchanged contact details with all the girls and then the two of us headed back to Kichijoji on the Inokashira line.
Kamiya was looking very pleased with himself. “You gonna listen in to some more moaning tonight?” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
“Hey, don’t bring that up again,” I said, not amused, not looking at him.
“Look, if we only talked to each other, we’d be stuck in our own little fantasy world. You have to get out and have conversations with other people sometimes, find out what kind of person you are. We had a good laugh, eh?”
“Nope. I just got laughed at.” Suddenly I felt insecure.
“Make ’em laugh, don’t get laughed at. Isn’t that what they say? That all sounds well and good but that little saying should never’ve been heard outside backstage,” Kamiya said.
At Shimokitazawa a ton of passengers got off, but just as many got on.
“That little bit of wisdom’s made it harder to act dumb on purpose to get laughed at. The audience are thinking that guy’s playing the fool, but we know he’s really smart. Jeez, that’s not something they need to know. Now they’re judging us by a new standard, when it would’ve been so much better if they could just laugh at fools without thinking about it. Now they know they’re being manipulated into laughing. A real shame they’ve got so aware—helluva waste.”
“But don’t new standards spark new kinds of creativity?”
“Yeah, to a degree, I suppose—but if you have a master piece and try to touch it up and end up with too much paint on it, you can’t go back to the original, so you end up not knowing what to do. As for you, you still haven’t figured out why you’re so funny,” Kamiya said, then paused. “That’s good.”
“Who’s the real fool then?!”
“Keep it down,” Kamiya said.
A crowd got off at the Meiji University stop, and at last we had space to breathe. Kamiya was back to his usual self, not like how he’d been in the pub. Which let me relate to him better. Every so often Kamiya would say he worried people would think he was a hypocrite for hanging out with me. At first I took it as a joke, even though there was an element of scorn in what he said. It’s hard to be objective about yourself, but thinking about how I acted at the party that night, I could see it might not necessarily be a joke. Those girls’d probably go off and talk about the weird guy they’d met. And Kamiya’s kohai was probably thinking how slow-witted I was for a comedian.
Pardon me for talking so much about myself, but people often think I’m cynical—even hostile or aggressive—when the fact is, I come off looking stiff and unapproachable because I’m nervous and insecure. It doesn’t mean I’m not interested in people. When I first heard somebody say, half-mockingly, that I did what I wanted and didn’t get my hands dirty with other people, I thought, Well, maybe that’s what I should do, even though that’s not what I had in mind to begin with, and so, little by little, I started talking and acting that way. Then that was taken as proof of what people had been saying—that I was aloof, followed my own path, didn’t care about what anybody thought, that sort of thing. The worst thing, though, was nobody said a
nything about my talent. Like it wasn’t there. I was trying to form myself into a comedian but I didn’t have anything solid to stand on; I was so uncertain I didn’t know if I was confused, or if that was actually the real me. The long and short though is I was recognized as a real pain in the neck.
Until now I never seriously considered the possibility of people being prejudiced against Kamiya for hanging out with someone as boring and troublesome as me, and calling him a hypocrite for it. I thought Kamiya and I were the same—incapable of playing up to others—but that wasn’t so. There was an absolute difference between us: while I would never be able to, Kamiya could but chose not to. Kamiya didn’t get defensive with me like other people did, and though he might have made fun of me at times, he also gave me honest praise. He was always straight with me, judging me by nobody else’s standards, only his own.
I got used to that. But I was so close to him, and so in awe of his eccentric behaviour and talent, that I was blinded: I got to believing that being abnormal was right, the way to go, the path to take. That might be an asset for comedians, and Kamiya sure was good at it, but me, I was just awkward—so awkward I couldn’t capitalize on it, sell it. And somewhere along the line, I’d confused Kamiya’s peculiarity with my own awkwardness. They were not the same. The situation was a lot more serious than I thought.
At Eifukucho, people got off the train, but nobody got on. Cold wind swept through the open doors, wrapping itself around our feet. In our reflection in the windows, our faces looked unearthly.
“Kamiya, are you and Maki, like, an item?” I asked to change the mood, a question that’d been on my mind awhile.
“Nah, she just lets me stay there.”
“Oh.”
Since first meeting Maki, Kamiya had invited me back to the apartment many times. Often the three of us met at some place to eat and then went back there. Maki was devoted to Kamiya and kind to me as well. She’d crossed my mind repeatedly this evening while we’d been out with those girls. I liked just the three of us going out much better. One reason I liked Maki was because she recognized Kamiya’s talent. Watching her when he spoke, I could see she was in love with him from the bottom of her heart.
“I thought she was your girlfriend.”
“Did you?” Kamiya replied evenly.
“Don’t you like her?”
“Talking with you is like being in school again.”
“Well, I’d be in a senior year now if I’d gone to college.”
“Wouldn’t know about that. But yeah, I don’t pay rent, and she does a lot for me so I’d like to do right by her, but it’d be hell for her to be with someone like me.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“You don’t have to agree,” Kamiya said in a detached voice, looking straight ahead. “If I say I’m meeting you, she always gives me money. That’s how I can hang out with you every day.”
“But living together like that, don’t you ever talk about getting together?”
“Yeah, a few times. I told her to find a proper boyfriend.”
Kichijoji, the last stop, was announced over the loudspeakers. The train brakes seemed to screech almost politely as the train slowed down.
“What does Maki say?”
“She understands.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
Maki worked in a cabaret hostess club in Kichijoji. Apparently she’d quit her job in a karaoke club and started nights at the cabaret around the time Kamiya moved in.
As we got off at Kichijoji, the wind felt colder than in Shibuya, but that might’ve been because I had got chilled to the core. We passed through the ticket gates and headed out the north exit. The familiarity was soothing. I felt a sense of relief.
“Wanna go to Harmonica Alley?”
“Yeah, let’s go.”
In a city where even the vomit on the roadside was frozen, people walking the streets knew nothing about us, and we knew nothing about them.
* * *
The death of the legendary manzai comedian Yumeji Itoshi. I’d watched him and his brother, who were the Itokoi duo, on television ever since I was a kid and they were an inspiration. They showed me that you don’t have to be extremely cheerful, or fast-talking, or obnoxiously loud to perform original manzai. When I entered the manzai world, I realized how difficult it is to actually construct a routine using pure narrative technique, without relying on personality to pull it along. Like they did. They were amazing; they brought you back to the basics of manzai and made you understand what it’s all about—a supremely funny conversation between two people.
After hearing the news, I couldn’t settle. Suddenly I had the urge to practise, so I called up my own manzai partner, Yamashita, and asked him to meet me in the park not far from my place in Koenji. Usually we met at a coffee shop in Shinjuku to think up material, but mostly we came to this park for standing practice. Yamashita wasn’t the type to humour me, so I didn’t say what prompted the unscheduled call. Unlike me, who liked to rehearse every spare moment, Yamashita didn’t like to practise unless there was a live gig coming up.
From the moment I heard the squeak of his bike brakes, I could tell Yamashita was not in a good mood. I suggested we go over material for the next audition, but it did not go well. We seemed to be tuned in to completely different tempos, and although we did our stuff over and over, it only got worse and worse. Yamashita wasn’t hearing me. And because he didn’t listen, his tone was off. I tried waiting until he finished saying whatever he was saying before coming in, but that meant there was a momentary pause. Which might have been fine in everyday conversation, but not at the manzai speed Yamashita was speaking; it sounded odd, off, like there was a lag. I asked him to listen more carefully.
“What’s that gonna do? We’ve already been over this gag so many times,” he replied sharply.
I almost slugged him. The guy didn’t understand anything—with attitude like that, we’d never find our rhythm. We could make up new gags every day if we wanted. But that’s not what manzai is about. We sat down on a bench and said nothing for a while. The sun was getting low, and the smell of food cooking drifted over from Junjo shopping street behind us. Girls going home from after-school activities walked by our bench, laughing. They were each carrying a long object wrapped in black cloth, a bow or a wooden sword.
“I know practice is important,” Yamashita said, “but I have things to do too, you know, so don’t call me here without warning.”
What the hell was he saying? We both moved to Tokyo to pursue manzai, so nothing was more important. “You should’ve said that before we came here!” I yelled. I hardly ever raise my voice, but I did then. In the heat of the moment, I leapt up to storm off, but immediately was yanked back down to the bench. The chain on the wallet in my back pocket was attached to my belt loop, and it had got caught in a gap in the bench, so instead of making a grand exit, I found myself back on the bench next to Yamashita. He looked down, suppressing his laughter. Carefully, I pried the chain out with both hands, while he watched the whole process, not saying a word. He made out like nothing had happened while I just looked pathetic.
I went to the toilet to cool off. We’d had many disagreements before, but always over differences in opinion rather than differences in direction. Maybe I was overexcited. Kamiya practised nearly every day with his manzai partner, Obayashi, so I thought it made sense for aspiring young comedians to do that too. When I was done with the lavatory, instead of going back to Yamashita, I rang up Kamiya. I told him briefly about my quarrel with Yamashita, leaving out the wallet-chain fiasco. That might have sounded funny when I didn’t want it to.
“I’m ready to hit him,” I said.
“If you hit him, you’ll break up. Don’t raise your fist,” Kamiya said gently.
Over the phone I could hear voices in the background, talking and laughing.
“I’m so mad,” I said childishly.
I heard Kamiya take a gulp of something and a glass being put on the table.
“When you’re finished, come over. We’ll eat,” he said. “What food do you like most?”
I assumed he was offering me dinner. “Grilled meat,” I answered straight.
“No, no. What food do you like most?” Kamiya repeated.
Was he asking me to be realistic about what we could eat at his place?
“What’s your favourite food? That’s what I’m asking.”
Aha, got it. He was doing that Itokoi routine. “It’s hotpot.”
Kamiya said nothing for a while. A crowd of laughing voices resounded in the silence.
Finally he spoke, “Hotpot, eh?”
“Yes, hotpot.”
“You eat pots?”
“No, you know, the stuff that goes with it.”
“You must have extremely strong teeth.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“My teeth aren’t strong so I couldn’t do it, but what do you like better: metal pots or earthenware pots?”
All of a sudden Kamiya was playing the fool.
“What are you talking about?”
“Which one’s easier to chew?”
“No, I don’t mean eat the pot.”
“Didn’t you say you eat hotpot?”
“Yeah, but I meant what’s in the hotpot.”
“What’s in it?”
“Yeah.”
“Ah, what’s in it! What part of the pot do you peel to get to what’s in it?”
“Not like that. I mean hotpot cooked with broth or kimchi, you know, like we always have.”
“I get it, you’re talking about hotpot cuisine?”
“Yes, of course. Why’re you being the idiot all of a sudden? You don’t give up, do you. Had me a bit worried.”
“OK, then. I’ll go buy some cow beef.”
“Beef is cow, stupid.”
Kamiya sniggered at my rudeness. “Oh, that’s tough. How about mutton instead?”
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