Popular Hits of the Showa Era

by Ryu Murakami

  At the moment of the explosion, Nobue had been stepping out of the HiAce to return to the beach and Ishihara had been in the rear, fiddling with the dials on the mixing console. The blast caused the entire van to shake and teeter, and both of them were knocked off their feet. Nobue face-planted on the ground outside, and Ishihara’s head slammed against a corner of the generator. But the HiAce remained upright and more or less intact, and it had shielded them from the blast and the tetrapod fragments. Blood was gushing from a gash in Ishihara’s forehead and flowing down his face, however, and this threw him into a panic. In reaction to the intense burst of light and the overpowering noise, his brain was frantically spinning its wheels, and he was about to try forcing an idiotic laugh in a bid to gain a grip, when Nobue jumped back inside the battered van and shouted:

  “They’re coming after us with knives!”

  III

  “What’s ‘knives’?” Ishihara asked. He was staring at a palmful of blood he’d collected from the miniature geyser at the top right corner of his forehead. “You mean knives like with blades?” Though unable to grasp what was happening, he was terrified in his own way. He’d never had blood squirt from his head before. Worried that it might prove fatal, he was desperately trying to push the blood back inside.

  “Drive, dammit!” Nobue shouted. “They’re coming this way! With knives! It’s fuckin’ crazy! Yano-rin and O-Sugi and Kato-kichi are dead! They’re all in pieces!”

  Ishihara looked at him uncomprehendingly, pressing his blood-soaked palm against the gash in his head. “Where’s ‘pieces’?” he asked, then added, “It’s strange, you know—all this blood coming out but it doesn’t even hurt. Why do you think that is, Nobu-chin? I mean, if you just cut the tip of your finger a little it hurts so bad you could scream, so how come this doesn’t?”

  It didn’t look as if Ishihara would be doing any driving. Nobue spun toward the driver’s seat, but as he did so he saw through the windshield the four masked, knife-wielding figures, who were now within a few steps of the van. He dived for the switches and locked all the doors. The four black-attired attackers, their faces hidden behind woolen ski masks, reached the van just as the locks clicked shut, and in an animalistic sort of frenzy they began pounding on the vehicle and rocking it back and forth. The explosion had blown out all the lights, and it was pitch-dark around the HiAce, but the dim interior lamp was just enough for Nobue to make out the figures outside. When all four of them raised the knives in their fists, Nobue too succumbed to panic, and urine soaked his boxer shorts as he plopped into the driver’s seat. Ishihara was on the bench in the rear, still trying to push blood back inside his head. The driver’s-side window was cracked where fragments of concrete had hit it, and two of the shadowy figures outside picked up baseball-sized rocks and began pounding them against the glass.

  The window didn’t break, however. Such was their frenzied state that Takeuchi Midori and Henmi Midori weren’t even aware that all strength had drained from their arms. Nobue, meanwhile, was trying to turn an ignition key that wasn’t there. His thumb and forefinger pressed against the ignition, gripping the nonexistent key and twisting clockwise and back, clockwise and back. He even tried going, Vrooom, vrooom, with his voice, but this of course had no effect either. “What’s wrong with this thing?” he was muttering when, outside, Suzuki Midori shouted, “Gangway!” and slammed a rock the size of a baby’s head against the side window. The glass folded in with a strange, fingernails-on-chalkboard sort of sound, which caused Ishihara finally to remove his hand from his head and look up. His face was smeared with blood on one side and completely drained of color on the other.

  “Did you just hear like a super ultra mega-creepy sound, like somebody grinding their teeth?” he asked Nobue, who was still trying to start the van with the nonexistent key.

  About a quarter of the window glass had given way, but now Suzuki Midori hesitated, unsure of what to do next. Surely if she had been thinking clearly she would either have (a) thrust her knife through the available opening or (b) knocked out the rest of the glass, unlocked the door, and forced her way inside. Neither of these alternatives occurred to her in the heat of the moment, however. The SDF man, Sakaguchi, hadn’t shared any details on how to mop up survivors after a firefight. She knew she had memorized such sections in Green Beret manuals and guerrilla handbooks, but what with the roar and the blinding light of the explosion, the acrid smell of gunpowder, and the spectacle of three living bodies being literally blown apart, her brain seemed on fire and suddenly empty of any information whatsoever, including her own name and where she was and what she was doing. The other Midoris, whose ski-mask mouths resembled those of inflatable dolls, were trembling violently as they urged her on: “Stab them! Kill them all!”

  “What’re you doing, Nobu-chin?” said Ishihara. He was standing behind Nobue now, nudging his shoulder. “How can you start the engine when I’ve got the key?” Nobue didn’t respond but continued to gape wide-eyed at the four attackers outside the windshield and side window. “Hey,” Ishihara said, looking up, “there’s some strange people out there wearing masks and—EEEK!—they’ve got knives!”

  Suzuki Midori slammed the big rock against the window once more. A shower of bursting glass sprayed over Nobue, eliciting splotches of color on his pallid face, and the rock landed in his lap.

  “Ishi-kun!” he screeched.

  “Yes?” Ishihara replied, as if reading from a script.

  “Help! They’re trying to kill us!”

  The Midoris, standing just outside the windowless door, heard him say this, of course. They were so close to Nobue that they could have stood on their tiptoes, leaned forward, and kissed him. Takeuchi Midori was shouting, “Suzuu, hurry up and open the door! Open the door!”

  “What the fuck?” said Nobue, scooting away from them. “Ishi-kun, they’re women! Oba-sans!”

  As he tried to scramble over the seat to join Ishihara in the rear of the van, shards of glass rained from his clothing. A gloved hand reached through the window and lifted the lock button, and Suzuki Midori wrenched the door open and climbed aboard, awkwardly thrusting at Nobue with her Randall knife—a lagniappe Sakaguchi had thrown in with the rocket launcher. It was an unstudied move, but the weight of her body was behind it as she clambered aboard, and the tip of the blade was just at the right elevation to sink into the flesh of Nobue’s cheek and slice through his gums, stopping only when it came into contact with the teeth on the other side. Nobue looked for a moment as if he didn’t understand what had just happened, then tried to scream but found that the hardware inhibited his ability to produce any sounds. The other three Midoris screamed in his stead when they saw Suzuki Midori’s blade buried in the enemy’s cheek. It was this close-up view of a knife lodged in a face that finally drained the frenzy out of them. Henmi Midori felt something hot drip down the inside of her thigh and wondered if her period had begun unexpectedly, but of course it was only urine.

  Tears had immediately formed in Nobue’s eyes and were now streaming down his face. “It hurth!” he said, but moving his mouth made the blade twist and only intensified the pain. Suzuki Midori stood frozen for some moments after stabbing him. She felt as if she’d turned to stone, and her mind was still a complete blank—a state she’d never experienced before. The hand gripping the knife handle was trembling; so, in fact, was her entire arm. Time seemed to have come to a standstill, and no one knew what to do next, until Ishihara shuffled forward, reached out, and lifted the ski mask covering her face. She let out a startled, “Kyaah!”

  “You’re right, it really is a woman,” Ishihara said, and then, as if to release all his tension and fear, he began laughing the most powerful, eldritch, and supernatural laugh he’d ever produced. It was like an exorcistic incantation recorded and played back at high speed and earsplitting volume, and it vibrated in one’s brain and burrowed into one’s stomach and seemed capable of causing the air and all living beings along the entire seacoast to freeze solid
and then quickly decompose. In the short intervals between bursts of laughter, Ishihara tossed out words whose meaning wasn’t clear—woman, Oba-san, pig, hullabaloo, jerk-off, sex, I love you, and so forth—and Suzuki Midori, suddenly seized with unspeakable fear, began puking. Trying to cover her mouth, she let go of the knife, which then fell out of Nobue’s cheek and clattered heavily to the floor. The other Midoris rushed to support the sagging and still-regurgitating Suzuki and began their retreat, dragging her along with them. Ishihara pressed his handkerchief against Nobue’s cheek and, chuckling, took the ignition key from his own pocket.

  Retreating across the beach, the Midoris had no choice but to view once again what remained of Yano and Kato and Sugiyama. They didn’t want to see but couldn’t avoid looking down, as they had to watch their steps in the darkness. Sugiyama’s stomach was ripped open vertically, and his intestines were hanging out, looking exactly like the dae-chang Henmi Midori had once eaten at a Korean barbecue place, and she too vomited. One of Yano’s eyes had melted and was oozing out of its socket, and the lower half of Kato’s face was missing, so that his head resembled a grotesque but marvelously realistic half mask. Takeuchi Midori, seeing someone’s hand lying all by itself at her feet, noted its resemblance to a starfish and began to weep. Crabs and sea lice were already feasting on Yano’s melted eye, and when Tomiyama Midori happened to catch a glimpse of this, she screamed and then doubled over, holding her stomach and heaving. The four Midoris were still moaning and retching when they finally reached the car, and all of them were thinking something along the same lines: That’s it. No more. That’s enough revenge.

  9

  Dreams Anytime

  I

  The four Midoris disbanded the Midori Society and decided not to meet or even to contact one another for the time being. The rocket attack at the seashore just above Atami was treated as big news in the media. The authorities were investigating it as the probable work of some extremist political faction, and the four Midoris avoided all suspicion. Their names never even came up in the investigation. For one thing, the Midori Society wasn’t on anyone’s list of dangerous groups—left-wing terrorists, right-wing fanatics, organized crime syndicates, motorcycle gangs, and what have you. Local law enforcement enlisted the help of the National Police Agency, and the forensic analysis upon which Japan prides itself was brought into full play but got no further than identifying the weapon as a portable rocket launcher. The authorities had no idea how anyone could have gotten their hands on such a weapon. The Self-Defense Forces publicly announced that M72s were not among the weapons in their arsenal, and off the record they cast suspicion on American forces in Japan. The American military, for their part, took the attitude that it wasn’t their problem if a nation of dimwitted peaceniks wanted to make such a fuss over something that amounted to a virtual nonevent when compared to, say, the Los Angeles riots—which attitude was vehemently criticized in Asahi Shimbun editorials.

  Nonetheless, had Ishihara been an average human being, or Nobue a normal one, the four members of the Midori Society might very well have been called in for questioning. Ishihara had gotten a look at Suzuki Midori’s face, and it’s possible that if he had said, I saw one of the killers. It was an Oba-san, the investigating officers might have thought of connecting the incident to the murder of Iwata Midori, the woman who’d been shot with a Tokarev. But it wasn’t as if Ishihara were holding anything back out of concern about the investigation widening to include the Tokarev incident. Both he and Nobue were called in to talk with the police several times, but the investigators couldn’t make sense of anything they said. The noun “Oba-san” did issue from Ishihara’s mouth from time to time, but always seemingly at random, in the midst of a confused and disconnected ramble, so that it never piqued the investigators’ interest.

  “Nobu-chin took a knife in the cheek and I lost at rock-paper-scissors but before that the girl in the apartment across the way got bare-ass naked—Gyah ha ha ha! I mean bare-ass! Suppon-pon! Turtle soup’s on! What? BARE ASS me again! Ha ha!—and I couldn’t concentrate on the rock-paper-scissors, so I lost, I went with paper and lost and it made me so mad I thought about peeing all over the karaoke set and speakers but I didn’t have to pee and nothing came out but I was thinking, you know, when Nobu-chin got stabbed with the knife it was so intense, it reminded me of when they cut a wedding cake, and I thought about singing the wedding song, like dan danka dan! but I couldn’t remember the melody and nothing came out but instead it was like on The Bold Shogun where there’s this villain who always wears a mask but when they unmask him he turns out to be an Oba-san, and the Oba-san goes, like, ‘What are you insinuating?’ but the truth is she’s really evil and I always end up watching it because it’s on right after Sailor Moon, but not really like wedding cake but more like when one of the villain’s thugs skewers like a weak little kid with his sword and it goes pu-shutt, that’s what it reminded me of, I mean, it was really funny and everything, but then…”

  Ishihara was sent for a psychological evaluation and diagnosed as suffering from either schizophrenia or advanced and probably untreatable mania. The investigators had no choice but to give up on trying to get information from him. As for Nobue, since the knife had pierced his cheek, sliced through his gums, and shredded his tongue, he was unable to speak intelligibly even after leaving the hospital and gave the appearance of being severely mentally challenged. Eventually the police formed an unspoken consensus that murdering such unsalvageable youths was probably a service to the nation anyway, and the mass media, for its part, gradually moved on to other sensational stories. The real wall that the investigation had run up against, however, was the lack of any discernible chain of events. Crimes that don’t have any clear motive are the most difficult to solve, and tying a rocket attack at the beach to three random murders in Chofu was a leap far beyond the imaginative powers of the police. The investigators briefly pursued the theory that the attack might have been perpetrated by a tribe of local juvenile delinquents angered by the late-night karaoke sessions, or by a roving motorcycle gang that claimed the roads in that region as their own territory, but after some five months with no concrete results the investigation was terminated.

  By that time, the four Midoris had let down their guard somewhat and begun communicating occasionally by telephone, although they still forbade any meetings in person. Strangely, all four of them were leading much more fulfilling lives than ever before and exuding newfound self-assurance. One of the Midoris became the most popular person in her workplace, and another was employee of the week seven weeks in a row. A third found that communication with her son had improved dramatically: he now opened up to her about his feelings and interests, his performance at school was improving, and he no longer spent hours at a time silently playing computer games. And the fourth Midori fell in love with a much younger man she’d met at a karaoke club. You have this serenity about you…that’s so soothing to the heart…and at the same time…this vibrant, electric tension…. How do you do it? Such were the things the handsome, aquiline-nosed twenty-six-year-old graduate of Kyoto University, who was employed by a think tank for a major brokerage firm, would whisper to the mid-thirties Midori as he treated her to passionate and tender cunnilingus. What all four Midoris shared was an indelible, very serious, and very real secret—a secret that served both to bolster their self-confidence and to lend them a certain air of mystery. And that combination of self-possession and intrigue is what makes a woman truly appealing, especially when she herself seems unaware of it.

  Outwardly, the Midoris’ daily lives differed in no significant way from those of their coworkers and neighbors. But the three shredded corpses, the knife in Nobue’s cheek, and Ishihara’s more-powerful-than-a-rocket-launcher laughter were not the sorts of things one simply dismisses from one’s mind. It was surprising how many things in this world could remind one of coils of intestines protruding from a ruptured stomach, or thirty centimeters of blackened, mangled tongue hanging
from a ruined mouth, or a burned and detached, starfishlike hand. Organs and body parts that had been separated from their parent bodies and lost all purpose or function did not really resemble anything else in this world, and precisely for that reason almost any unusual sight or smell was enough to trigger those memories. Normally, for people who’ve witnessed such horrors—soldiers returning from foreign wars, for example—flashbacks of this sort are often harbingers of severe post-traumatic stress disorders. Even a single experience of something as unimaginably gruesome as what they’d witnessed can cause PTSD, and there have been countless reports of people developing such disorders after seeing friends or relatives die before their eyes in traffic accidents, fires, or natural disasters. But for the Midoris, who possessed a blind and unshakable belief in their own righteousness, the memories had the opposite effect. The battle at Atami had been a kind of holy war for them—they were, after all, avenging the murders of valued friends—and as such it was not something they felt any need to be ashamed of. The experience had, in fact, boosted their self-esteem, and they seemed to ooze fulfillment from every pore. They were, nonetheless, of the gentler sex and not without maternal instincts. The recurring image of those mangled corpses naturally helped to dampen their exhilaration and to prevent their becoming overly intoxicated with themselves. And so they lived with their real-life nightmare, neither glorifying nor denying it. In any case, they had emerged victorious.