Popular Hits of the Showa Era

by Ryu Murakami

  If it wasn’t for this guy right here, Nobue was thinking as he gazed at Ishihara, I would have lost my mind long ago. They were in Nobue’s apartment, some seven months after the incident at Atami. The wound in Nobue’s cheek had healed over, but he was still recovering and haunted by the trauma he had suffered that night. His tongue was mutilated, his scarred cheek pinched and tended to twitch, and he still couldn’t speak normally. He had quit his part-time job in computer sales, but he wasn’t in particularly straitened circumstances. His parents, in response to their son’s misfortune at having been maimed in a senseless but spectacular attack that had been big news in all the national media, faithfully sent him a regular and rather considerable allowance. As for Ishihara, how he managed to pull it off is anyone’s guess, but since the attack he had continued to commute each weekday to his job at a small design firm. And when Saturday came around, he was sure to show up at Nobue’s apartment, calling, No-o-bu-u–chi-i-n! as he climbed the stairs outside. In short, there was essentially no change in him whatsoever.

  At the moment, Ishihara was nudging Nobue’s shoulder and saying, “Nobu-chin! Nobu-chin, say ‘Congratulations on the New Year’!” The closest Nobue could get was something like, Kon raw yoo rayon la la Roo Ya, at which Ishihara collapsed on the tatami and rolled about, laughing hysterically. Nobue didn’t mind. He knew now that when you’ve been badly damaged emotionally or physically, it isn’t the people who are mournfully sympathetic or overly careful about your feelings that help you out so much as those who treat you as they’ve always done. “GYAAAAAH!” Now Ishihara was on his feet again, nudging Nobue’s shoulder and bouncing up and down. “Nobu-chin, please, I’m begging you, now say, ‘Red pussy blue pussy yellow pussy.’ Please please please. I swear I won’t laugh.” As Nobue gazed at his old friend, a tear of gratitude rolled down his cheek. All at once he realized how much he loved this person, and he grabbed the hand nudging his shoulder and clasped it tightly in his own. “Thank you, Ishi-kun,” he said hoarsely. Ishihara was so startled by both the gesture and the sentiment that he wondered if his friend had finally broken under the strain and gone mental. He pressed his forehead against Nobue’s to see if the poor lad wasn’t running a fever.

  They would need a little more time before they’d be ready to rise to the final battle.

  II

  More than half a year went by. There had been no Saturday Karaoke Blasts in all that time, of course, since the troupe of six had been diminished by four. Nobue’s rehabilitation continued. On a sunny afternoon in late fall, he and Ishihara were strolling along shoulder to shoulder and all but hand in hand beside Koshu Avenue in Chofu. They were like the last two specimens, both male, of a soon-to-be-extinct species, exploring their narrow game preserve. Now that his cheek wound had healed to a permanent scar, Nobue in particular felt as if he’d aged tremendously. They were passing the Koganei Electronics Institute when he said, with only a barely noticeable speech defect, “There was a guy named Sugioka once, wasn’t there?” Ishihara was carrying a Garigari-Kun popsicle in each hand, licking now one, now the other, and chanting things like, “Popsicles for autumn, popsicles in autumn, two popsicles on a warm autumn day! Two skinny weenies getting sucked, sucked off! The first one to squirt’s gonna win first prize!” But at the mention of Sugioka’s name he stopped. “Nobu-chin, what sort of a guy was Sugioka again?” he asked, and began to skip in a circle. It was, by any measure, a strange sight—a small man in his mid-twenties with a remarkably large head and eyes, sucking alternately on two popsicles and skipping in circles around another man of about the same age with equally oversized peepers, a nasty scar on his cheek, and a prematurely receding hairline. Other pedestrians on the street would catch a glimpse of Ishihara and quickly lower their gaze to avoid any sort of eye contact or interaction as they passed. “Quit dancing around me like a crazy Indian,” Nobue kept saying, though in fact he was enjoying the silliness. Finally Ishihara skipped to a halt and squatted abruptly on the pavement, holding his head and complaining of dizziness. Then he bounced up again. “Garigari-Kun A,” he said to the bare popsicle stick in his right hand, “may you rest in peace. Garigari-Kun B, now it’s your turn to die!” After chomping down on what remained of the second popsicle, he turned to Nobue and said, “Seriously, I can’t remember—what was Sugioka like? I seem to recall that he was skinny and had a narrow face and loved knives and mumbled a lot and you couldn’t tell if he was gloomy or cheerful, but there’s lots of guys like that. I wish I could picture him clearly, like in a flashback in a movie or somethin’, but I can’t.”

  Nobue responded with a suggestion.

  “Why don’t we go look at the place where he was killed? It’s not far from here.”

  On a late November afternoon like this, when the weather was fine and the sunshine warm on your shoulders, any normal person would be outside if possible, so naturally the junior college girl was in her room. Spying Nobue and Ishihara out her window, she opened it to lean out and call to them, “Hi! What a surprise!” Nobue, on hearing that voice and looking up to see that face protruding from the window, felt as if the wound on his cheek had been reopened and his tongue resliced. Ishihara let out a terrified, “GYAH!” and buckled at the knees. “Run!” they whispered to each other, but the junior college girl said, “Wait there! I happen to be free just now! I’ll be down in a sec!” and a moment later they heard the rapid dan dan dan dan dan of her steps on the wooden stairs. Nobue and Ishihara were in a state resembling sleep paralysis as their brains tried to process the afterimage of the junior college girl’s face. Unable to move, they were still shivering at the image when the actual face materialized before them, seeming to cause the blue sky to crack in two and the yellow ginkgo leaves to turn to scraps of rotting flesh, fluttering in the breeze. Both of them felt as if they’d just slurped up their own vomit.

  “Long time no see! Did you come to visit your friend again?” the junior college girl said, twisting her already asymmetrical face even further out of line with what was probably meant to be a smile. What a relief it would be, Nobue and Ishihara were thinking, if only the skin of that face would just go ahead and peel back to reveal a reptilian alien or a beast of the underworld or something. Their legs felt as if rooted to the ground.

  “For boys with such funny faces, you sure are loyal to your friends!”

  Nobue wondered what sort of face he had, if the owner of one such as this thought it funny. An image flashed through his mind of Hundred Eyes, the ghostly goblin from Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro, and he had the sickening sensation that he had been transformed into some such goblin or ghost. Without thinking he raised two limp wrists and moaned, “Mark me…” There was nothing funny about this, but the junior college girl cried, “Stop it!” and put both hands over her mouth, giggling exactly like the protagonist of a girls’ manga: Ku ku ku ku ku ku! Ishihara felt as if his entire brain had broken out in a bumpy rash. Instinctively sensing that he must act or risk a sudden descent into madness, he hollered a meaningless, “Yo-de-lady-who!”

  “You two are so funny!” the junior college girl said, and giggled again, and it seemed as if the nightmare might repeat itself endlessly. “That friend of yours…” she said. “What was his name again?”

  Nobue felt as if he were going to pee his pants. “Su…Sugioka,” he said, unwisely lifting his eyes. This gave him a close-up of the junior college girl’s face, and he actually did leak a few drops.

  “Oh, that’s right, Sugioka-kun. He still comes here a lot, you know. He just stands there crying and crying.”

  Ishihara let out a shriek and sank to his haunches, and hot tears filled Nobue’s eyes. The tears were not for Sugioka, of course, but simply a product of abject terror.

  “Sometimes, when conditions are right, I see things like that. Like in my room in the dormitory here, now and then I see this girl in her early teens standing by the bookcase, and then one time I noticed that her feet kept disappearing, and it dawned on me that she was a ghost, because the ghos
ts in stories always don’t have feet, and that explained a lot. Sometimes I see them at the pool too, but…”

  No! Ishihara and Nobue inwardly cried out. Please don’t take a face like that to a swimming pool! But paralysis prevented them from displaying any emotion.

  “I see mostly little kids there, floating in the water with their hair all spread out and wavy. It happens a lot when my body’s exhausted or my nerves are frayed.”

  Tired, are you? Then why don’t you go lie down somewhere for, like, FOREVER? Try the Elephants’ Graveyard!

  “I always see Sugioka-kun standing right over there with a big open gash in his neck, and it looks like all the blood has drained out of him, because he’s about twice as skinny as when he was alive and used to pee there all the time, but I feel sorry for him because he just stands there and looks frustrated and cries. He says he can’t go anywhere else, he’s afraid to, and no one comes to help him. ‘All I can do is stand here and cry,’ he says, ‘but nobody notices me, and it was always my dream to go jogging with a pretty girl but now I don’t have any feet so I’ll never be able to do that, and my friends are all being murdered, getting blown to pieces and dying with their guts spilling from their stomachs and their eyeballs hanging out, and all I can do is stand here and cry, and it’s boring and lonely but now it’s too late to change anything,’ he says.”

  The two of them slogged back to Nobue’s apartment, unable even to speak as they suppressed simultaneous urges to urinate, defecate, and regurgitate and battled dizziness, palpitations, and chills. The junior college girl’s face and voice, and her figure and words and body odor, had drained them of every last scintilla of energy, and both of them were reliving all the unfortunate turns of events and traumas and physical and emotional wounds and maledictions and enmities and jealousies they’d ever experienced. Under the terrible weight of these various evils they collapsed just inside the door and slumped there, incapable even of raising their heads.

  “Wa-water…somebody give me water,” Nobue said, but Ishihara couldn’t move, and though he made an effort to laugh several times he couldn’t get the muscles of his mouth and cheeks to budge either. Suddenly realizing that he’d forgotten what laughter was, he wondered if this might be the end, if this was how he was going to die.

  Eventually the sunny late autumn afternoon drew to a close. As the room sank into darkness, Nobue began to weep. Between convulsive sobs, he spat out the words, “Fucking hell!” Ishihara picked up on the rhythm and tried to imitate it. Hic, hic, hic. Fucking hell! What is that rhythm? he wondered. It’s like reggae. Hic, hic, hic, hic. Fucking hell! Hic, hic. Through the window on the far side of the darkened room they saw a light go on in the apartment across the parking lot. Maybe one of these nights they’d see the woman with the unbelievable body dancing in nude silhouette again, they were both thinking even as they continued their Fucking hell! duet. After repeating bar after bar of the sobbing reggae rhythm and intoning the words a couple of hundred times, they stopped and looked at each other. Something, they sensed, had begun to take shape inside them, something that might just serve to revive their flagging spirits. They didn’t know it at the time, but that something was rage.

  III

  The two of them were now getting together not just on Saturdays but more or less on a daily basis. Ishihara often spent the night as well, and Nobue’s neighbors had come to regard them as a devoted homosexual couple. They didn’t actually engage in sexual activity together, but they did frequently embrace for no particular reason, laughing meaninglessly, and often cooked their own specialties for each other—mostly things like instant ramen or plastic packaged retort foods or reheated box lunches. They would dine facing each other across Nobue’s small table, after which they’d sit side by side hugging their knees and watching a video of Rain Man or Stand By Me or Lethal Weapon or some other saga of male bonding. And at night, when anxiety or fear made sleep impossible for either of them, they would lie together in one futon, even going so far as to hold hands.

  Another month went by. On a night when a cold wind was blowing and drifts of fallen leaves rustled and shivered and swirled in corners of the parking lot, the two of them agreed that they wanted to eat something that would warm even the cockles of their hearts, and with that goal in mind they set out for the convenience store. On the way, Nobue stopped any number of times and pressed his hand to his cheek. Each time he did so, Ishihara would skip around him, chanting in that singsongy way of his, “What’s the matter, Nobu-chin? Nobu-chin, what’s wrong? Your cheek’s all red, are you okay? Tell me, Nobu-chin!”

  “It hurts whenever the cold wind hits it,” Nobue would reply, and invariably add, “Fucking hell!”

  “I love that expression,” Ishihara said this time, and launched into a strangely coherent reminiscence.

  “You know, Nobu-chin, I was always a good kid, and my father was a good guy too, so we never had any big problems when I was growing up, but when I was in middle school, I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but the fact that we never had any problems started to feel like a lot of pressure on me, because I wasn’t just like him—we were different—but I didn’t know how to get that across to him, and it bothered me a lot, I really worried about it, and I still remember one night, him and me and my mother, we were watching this comedy show on TV—it might’ve been The Drifters—and one of the comedians came out with some stupid gag that wasn’t even funny, just some dumb catchphrase like, ‘Oops! I’m a ba-a-a-a-ad boy!’ or whatever, and my father starts laughing like crazy, and as he’s laughing he’s tapping me on the head—tap! tap! tap!—and I told him not to do that because it hurt, and he’s like, ‘Oh, don’t be such a grouch,’ and keeps on tapping, and finally I knocked his hand away and shouted, ‘STOP IT!’ at the top of my lungs, and my mother’s, like, stunned, and my father gets all flustered and goes, ‘What got into you all of a sudden? You’re not going to let a little thing like this bother you, are you?’ and he raps me on the head again, only harder, trying to make a joke out of it, like we’re just playing around, and that’s when I felt myself snap. It was a definite physical sensation, and I knew I was just about this close to stabbing him with a kitchen knife or bashing his head in with a metal bat or something, but instead I said, Fucking hell! And when I said that, my father exploded. He’s like, ‘HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT TO ME!’ But then, right after shouting at me like that, with the audience on TV still screaming with laughter, he suddenly starts crying like a little girl, just blubbering, and my mother puts her arm around his shoulder, like this, and goes, ‘He didn’t really mean it, dear!’ But the truth is, if it hadn’t been for Fucking hell! I’m pretty sure I would’ve killed him. And then, after that, every time I shouted Fucking hell! it was like, I don’t know, like whatever I was feeling would turn into something I could see with my eyes, oozing right out of me. I mean, not all mushy like puke or something, but…I mean, it would suck if it looked like puke, right? Yuck.”

  There were hardly any other customers in the convenience store, it being a weekday and a slow time of the evening. The two of them made straight for the magazine corner as if drawn by gravitational force and spent the next thirty minutes leafing through periodicals with pictures of naked girls. “Whoa—look at the size of these nipples,” Nobue would remark, and Ishihara would say, “This one’s got teats like a goat,” and start bleating. Nobue pointed at another picture and wondered, “Why does she have this, like, dark red five-o’clock shadow on her crotch?” and Ishihara said, “Here’s one with pimples on her butt, and they’re in the shape of the Big Dipper!” They both burst out laughing at that one and bounced up and down twelve or fifteen times, magazines still in hand. Ishihara then approached the register and asked the clerk, a sweet-faced youth of about his own age, “Do you have any food that can warm the cockles of hearts?” The young clerk tilted his head, thinking. “Let me see…cockles of hearts, that’s a difficult one. May I ask you to wait a moment?” He called for the manager, a serious-looking, be
spectacled man of maybe thirty. “The customer is looking for a dish that will warm cockles of hearts,” the sweet-faced clerk said, and the manager muttered, “I see,” and with his arms crossed and a look of intense concentration began walking up and down the aisles. The clerk marched along behind him, and Ishihara and Nobue followed. Finally the manager selected a package of nabeyaki udon, an earthy noodle dish that required only fire and water to prepare. “This ought to do the trick,” he said.

  Dangling their plastic bags containing the nabeyaki udon and, for dessert, two Ricecake Snow Creams, they next visited the video store, where they rented a tape of the old TV series Combat! entitled “Tanks vs. Artillery.” On the way back to the apartment, Ishihara stopped at a vending machine and bought a jar of One Cup Sake, which he opened on the spot and proceeded to drink as they resumed walking. A middle-aged drunk was heading toward them from the opposite direction, singing quietly. Whether he’d been in a fight or simply fallen down somewhere, the man was bleeding from a cut on the edge of his lip, his white shirt was muddy, his thinning hair pointed in every direction, and his necktie was stretched out of shape and wrinkled, but as he passed them he was still singing contentedly to himself.