Go

by Kazuki Kaneshiro

  I stood absolutely still and listened as she continued to sob.

  A man who might’ve been an uncle came by and pulled her away from my chest. As I watched her being ushered into the room where Jeong-il would be cremated, someone hit me on the shoulder from behind. When I turned around, a bunch of guys wearing school blazers were standing in front of me. I gave the one I’d assumed had hit me a gentle punch in the stomach. Won-soo jokingly grabbed his stomach with both hands and said with a smile on his rough, square-jawed face, “Long time, no see. You never call.”

  “You, too.”

  We smiled at each other somewhat awkwardly.

  Won-soo and I had been partners in crime since elementary school. Anytime I was up to no good, he was always by my side. It was Won-soo who hit the cop car with the paint-filled water balloon and who went on the trip to Nagoya with me. And by the way, Won-soo was the one who tailed me, spied me going into a cram school, and then ratted me out to everyone back in the third year of junior high. Since I’d started going to a Japanese high school, we hadn’t seen each other once.

  “You haven’t gone chicken on me, have you?” said Won-soo, drawing his face up to mine. His breath reeked of nicotine. I punched him in the stomach hard this time. Won-soo let out a groan.

  “We had a deal.”

  Won-soo and I made a promise to quit smoking in the summer of our second year in junior high school. The deal was if we caught the other breaking that promise, we were allowed to punch him as punishment, no complaints.

  Rubbing his belly with a satisfied smile, Won-soo said, “Why don’t we kick up some trouble tomorrow, like the old days?”

  “Doing what?”

  “We’re going on a manhunt.”

  “For who?”

  “The bastard friends of the kid who killed Jeong-il.”

  “You know who they are?”

  “Damn if I know,” Won-soo spat out. “I’m sure if we grab someone that goes to the same school and knock them around a little, they’ll talk.”

  Saying nothing, I looked into Won-soo’s eyes. Then I looked at the familiar faces of the old friends standing behind me. They looked hungry for a sacrifice.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “What was that?” A deep line creased his brow.

  “What happened to Jeong-il got some attention in the media. You know the police are going to be watching the schools to keep a lid on things.”

  “So what?” A dark look of violence came over Won-soo’s face. “You want us to forget what happened because of the police? Is that it?”

  “What do you think is going to happen if you go after those bastards? It’s not going to bring—”

  Won-soo cut me off midsentence, jabbing his two fingers against my chest. He quickly pulled them back and gave them a curious stare. His fingers had touched the part of my chest that Jeong-il’s mom had been crying on. After wiping the damp tips of his fingers on his blazer, he said, “So are you in or out? Which is it?”

  “I’m out,” I answered plainly. “And Jeong-il wouldn’t want this either.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” said Won-soo in a muted voice. “It’s a tragedy what happened to Jeong-il. But he’s dead. Gone. Which is why it’s up to us, the living, to settle the score that he left behind. And the person Jeong-il wants most to do it is you. But here you are, talking like some kind of chicken.”

  “Listen to yourself,” I answered in a choked voice. “What do you know about Jeong-il? Did any of you even take the time to talk to him? You’re only looking to start trouble. In that case, why don’t you go mess around with some gangs?”

  A terrible air of violence hung over where we stood. Won-soo’s glare—shared by the bunch behind me—seemed to stab me until it hurt. I let out a short sigh and said, “Let Jeong-il go in peace.”

  “What’s happened to you?” asked Won-soo with a troubled look. “Did you sell your soul to the Japanese in that school of yours?”

  Hearing the word “soul” reminded me of the time Jeong-il recited the passage about the Japanese spirit from I Am a Cat. But I couldn’t remember how it went. After some thought, I said, “I don’t know anything about souls. But if I had something like a North Korean soul, I wouldn’t think twice about selling it. You guys want to buy it?”

  Won-soo looked at me with a distant gaze.

  Come on. Don’t look at me like that. Did you forget? You and I didn’t have money for a hotel the night we got to Nagoya, so we ended up sleeping in the parking lot next to the pachinko parlor. We lay spread out on the asphalt, looking up at the stars, and talked about going as far away as possible. We can do that, Won-soo. We can go right now . . .

  Won-soo jabbed me in the chest again with two fingers.

  “I’m finished with you. The next time you see me on the street, keep on walking. If you so much as try to get close to me, I’ll jump you.”

  To the others, he said, “Let’s go.” They made their way past me. One of them, in passing, whispered contemptuously in my ear, “Traitor. Friendless bat.”

  After they all walked past me, I turned around only once. Won-soo had stopped and was looking at me. His face was frighteningly expressionless. I forced a smile on my face and directed it at Won-soo. He ignored me and turned his back.

  I left the funeral hall. I overshot my intended bus stop by four stops, got on the bus going back in the opposite direction, and then overshot the stop again—by five this time. By the time I got to the train station, it was early evening.

  Friendless bat. Going down the stairs to the train platform, for some reason I heard the voice echoing in my ear. God, I wish I were a bat. I could fly away anywhere, I thought, when a sudden dizziness came over me, causing me to almost lose my balance. I did an ass-plant in the middle of the stairs. The dizziness quickly went away, but then my chest began to hurt. I let out a low groan. Ooooo ooooo.

  It was in my second year of junior high school. The basketball team that I played on had advanced to the finals of the national tournament for North Korean schools. Maybe it was because the team we were playing against was from Osaka, but the game took on the atmosphere of a Giants versus Hanshin rivalry game and became strangely heated. Things got so physical on the court that players were hurt; fights even broke out in the stands, causing more injuries. I was playing point guard and took four punches in the face by the kid guarding me. I got him back with a knee kick, elbow, head butt, and finger in the eye. The ref caught me poking the kid in the eye and charged me with a foul.

  We lost the game by one point. Afterward, we went into the locker room and hung our heads in silence. Had any one of us started crying, it would likely have infected the whole team in an instant, and we would have all burst into tears. The coach came inside the locker room with the school principal.

  “You did a good job. I’m proud of all of you.”

  Upon hearing these words, one of the first-year players began to cry. Just as everyone’s cry button was about to get switched on, the coach went up to the first-year, pulled back his arm like an Olympic discus thrower, and smacked him across the face. The kid went flying and slammed into the lockers with a great big crash! The rest of us shuddered at the sound. In a terribly calm tone, the coach said to no one in particular, “Never cry in front of others. You boys live your lives surrounded by enemies. Shedding tears before the enemy is the same as begging for pity. The same as admitting defeat. Your admitting defeat means all North Koreans are admitting defeat. That’s why you can’t ever get into the habit of crying in front of others. If you want to cry, go do it alone in the privacy of your room.”

  The coach glanced over at the principal. The principal gave a slight nod as if nothing had happened.

  The coach said, “Now hurry up and get dressed. The principal would like to take you to dinner as a reward for your efforts today.”

  The coach and principal went out of the locker room. A heavy pall hung over the room. A third-year senpai went over to the first-year who had gotten slap
ped and patted him on the head. Seeing this, the captain suddenly began to let out a low groan, Ooooo ooooo. His eyes were red. The groans quickly became contagious. Ooooo ooooo. We all let out groans, our eyes red. We kept on groaning, desperate to keep from crying. Since then, whenever we had something unbearably hard or sad happen to us, letting out this mournful groan—Ooooo ooooo—became a secret custom of the basketball team.

  And so I sat in the middle of the stairs and groaned. Ooooo ooooo. Although the station was teeming with rush-hour commuters, no one came near me. Occasionally, some young salaryman in a suit grumpily clicked his tongue at me. You guys are my enemies?

  The face of Jeong-il, my steady ally, floated into my head. I gave up groaning and talked to Jeong-il. “So what was that awesome thing you wanted to tell me about? Was it more awesome than mitochondrial DNA? Was it the secret to ridding the world of discrimination—something like that? It really would be awesome if something like that really existed. Hey, you didn’t get a girlfriend, did you? I would’ve liked hearing that better. I mean I’ve never seen you with a girl. What a waste—you could’ve gotten any girl you wanted if you’d gone to a Japanese university. There isn’t anyone like you. Why did you have to die, Jeong-il? It’s going to be pretty tough doing this alone. Why did you have to die?”

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and got up off the stairs. I went down the rest of the stairs to the platform and looked for a pay phone. Spotting one next to a kiosk, I started walking. As soon as I grabbed the receiver off the cradle, I realized I’d forgotten my telephone card at home and stuck my hand in my pockets for some change. I couldn’t find any ten-yen coins, so I dropped a hundred-yen coin and slowly pushed the numbers for Sakurai’s house. Sakurai was supposed to be out at the opera.

  We met at a café near Ginza 4-chome.

  “I saw this show the other day about how the direct ancestor of modern humans isn’t Peking man or Neanderthal man but the australopithecines that originated on the African continent two million years ago. They figured this out by comparing the Neanderthal to modern human mitochondrial DNA sequences—it’s all pretty complicated, so I’ll explain mitochondrial DNA to you another time. The australopithecines originating in Africa continued to evolve until they came to be the genus Homo. Gradually, there were groups that moved out of Africa and spread all over the world. This migration might have been caused by a power struggle, or maybe climate change was the cause.

  “When the earth entered the Ice Age roughly 130,000 years ago and Africa became too cold, humans might’ve set off for warmer places. I actually think we migrated for completely different reasons, but I’ll tell you about that later. The humans leaving Africa eventually split into two groups somewhere in the Middle East: one headed for Europe and the other for Asia. This split marked the beginning of the so-called Caucasoid race and us, the Mongoloid race. The group that chose to become the Mongoloid race headed down into Asia, while gradually adapting their body and facial features according to the environment. They never stopped moving their feet. When parents died, their children took over and kept on moving. Then at the end of nearly a hundred thousand years and tens of thousands of miles, a group of Mongoloids found themselves in Japan. This group would later come to be known as the Jomon people and were the ancient inhabitants of Japan. Normally the story would end happily ever after here, but this is where it gets interesting.

  “There were some that didn’t stop moving even after getting to the Far East. They traveled up the Eurasian continent until they reached Siberia and walked across the Bering land bridge, which was exposed when the sea level dropped during the last ice age, and to the westernmost part of the American continent: Alaska. But they weren’t satisfied with just crossing to the Americas. They began to move south, down the length of the continent, founding the Mayan and Aztec civilizations along the way. And then they reached the southern edge of South America. It was a journey that took generation after generation to finish, but the courage and glory of those humans who took the first steps remain in the bodies of their descendants. Research proved that these people belonged to the same group as the Mongoloids who stayed in Japan.

  “A comparison between the mitochondrial DNA sequences of the Ainu descended from the Jomon people and the indigenous people of the Andes showed them to be basically the same. Isn’t that amazing? If you count the distance from Africa, that’s a journey of fifteen thousand miles. And you know what? I don’t believe that a power struggle or the declining environment was what pushed them to travel all that way. They just had to see what kind of place the edge of the earth was. I’m sure of it. And the genes encoded with this ridiculously simple impulse remained no matter how many generations passed. Besides, humans never had it in them to settle in one place. And then something called agriculture was invented—”

  “So what are you trying to say, Sugihara?” asked Sakurai, a gentle smile floating across her lips.

  “What I’m trying to say,” I said, looking her in the eyes, “is that they’re really cool, and I want to be like them.”

  Her smile grew wider as she said, “You’re just trying to impress me, right?”

  I nodded earnestly. After letting out a giggle, she peered into my eyes and said, “I saw this show the other day about a retirement home for guide dogs in Hokkaido. It’s this place where old dogs that can’t do their job anymore can go to live out their last days. The fact that a place like that even existed moved me so much that I couldn’t take my eyes off the TV. And then they showed a woman saying goodbye to her guide dog. It was a blind woman and a male golden retriever couple, and she just held him in her arms completely still for a good hour until finally the staff had to pull them apart. As the car drove away from the retirement home, the woman leaned out of the window and waved, shouting, ‘See you,’ and ‘Bye-bye,’ and the dog’s name, but the dog just sat there and watched the car go. But that’s the way it had to be. It’s how guide dogs are trained. They aren’t allowed to show any excitement, and they aren’t allowed to bark. Even after the car was gone, the dog didn’t move an inch from where they said their goodbyes, and he kept looking in the direction the car disappeared. For hours. The woman who’d been by his side for ten years wasn’t there anymore. He must have been so devastated he couldn’t move. They said goodbye around noon, and in the evening it started to rain. Really hard. The dog that had been looking straight ahead until then looked up like he was watching the rain come down and started to howl. Waoon waoon. Like that—again and again. He didn’t look the least bit sad or pathetic. He bayed with his back stretched, and the line from his chest to his chin perfectly straight like a beautiful sculpture. I cried my eyes out. Waoon waoon. Just like that.”

  “So what are you trying to say, Sakurai?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to say that I want to love someone the way that dog did. His howl was more beautiful than any music I’ve ever heard. I want to be the kind of person that can love someone right and then cry the way that dog did if I lost someone. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

  After giving her a firm nod, I reached out and put my hand over Sakurai’s on the table. For a while, we looked into each other’s eyes and said nothing. The café waiter came by and refilled our water glasses.

  Sakurai said, “You’ve been looking like you’re about to cry.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked down, averting her eyes from mine, and let out a breath. Her chest shook slightly.

  When I asked, “What’s the matter?” she looked up and stared into my eyes.

  “Would you like me to be with you tonight?”

  “Huh?”

  “I can stay with you until you go to sleep and wake up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Please don’t make me say it again.”

  We left the café and headed for Yurakucho Station. While Sakurai called home from a pay phone inside the station, I went to put my school uniform jacket in a pay locker near
by. I stood in front of the coin-operated locker and took out two envelopes from my inner pocket. With me arriving late to the funeral and the run-in with Won-soo, I’d forgotten to give Jeong-il’s mom my condolence money. First I pulled out 30,000 yen of my own money from one envelope and put it in my pants pocket. Then I opened the envelope my father had given me. He couldn’t go to the funeral on account of urgent business. There were ten crisp 10,000-yen bills inside. I put them in my pocket, too. I had a feeling Jeong-il and my father would forgive me.

  When I returned to the station, Sakurai was still on the phone. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was ten minutes to ten.

  At exactly ten o’clock, Sakurai finished her call and came running back.

  “Any trouble?”

  Sakurai hastily shook her head.

  “Everything’s great. I told my father that I was staying at a friend’s house.”

  We headed for the Imperial Hotel. Since we weren’t doing anything wrong, I walked right into the lobby without caring too much about being in shirtsleeves and my school trousers. I parted with Sakurai at the lobby and asked her to wait on the sofa near the tearoom.

  I walked up to the front desk. Showing no hint of surprise at the sight of me, the young clerk bowed politely, saying, “Welcome.”

  “I’d like a room, please,” I said.

  “Do you have a reservation?”

  “No.”

  And then for the next couple of minutes, he gave me a rundown of the various room types and prices. The prices varied according to what floor the room was on and which way it was facing. After a careful consultation with the clerk, I decided on a deluxe room on the twelfth floor facing Hibiya Park. The view was apparently very nice. The condolence money would more than cover the cost.

  “Will you be paying with a credit card or cash?” asked the clerk.

  “Cash.”

  I stuck a hand in my pocket, thinking payment had to be made up front, but the clerk said that the bill would be settled when I checked out. Next, the clerk handed me a guest card, so I began filling it out. To avoid any hassle, I decided to pretend Sakurai and I were married and put down “Sugihara” for both our last names. The problem was with Sakurai’s first name, and since it would be weird to go ask her, I decided to give her a random name. So she became “Keiko.” I got the room key and walked away.