A Japanese Schoolgirl

by Kajihara, Yoko

  I can barely see the man in the densely packed passengers, but, when the train has arrived at the next station, he finally comes into my sight. It is the man of about forty, slender, clean-shaven, and well-dressed. He is repeating himself and there seems to be no end to it. It is an appalling sound of a loop. I have also recognized that the man is wearing a company badge in his lapel. It is the badge of the largest insurance company in Japan.

  Three girls from other school begin to titter. Another girl follows. Then other girlish giggles spread as the voice of the man becomes louder. I often wonder if giggling makes the fear of the unknown go away.

  Reiko says in a small voice, “What a shame. Can you see his badge? That man must have burned himself out too early.”

  “Oh, that’s why I can see smoke coming out of his head,” I respond.

  Reiko laughs short but Maya doesn’t even chuckle at my words; on the contrary, every time the man returns to a certain line, she bites her lower lip with her brows knitted as if in pain.

  The line seems to be this one: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ And I am wondering why Maya appears to be so sensitive about such an ancient cliche.

  Takeshi is not with us this morning. He should have been at school by now to play an early-morning Kendo training match with the members of the club. He is the best and always the winner for the match. There has been a rumor that his skill is probably better than the captain of the Kendo club who is now a senior and waiting for graduation with the slightest chance of winning the game. It is why, according to some members, Takeshi is a favorite with their thirty-six-year-old Kendo master.

  I begin to feel Reiko wriggle against the back of me as the train starts to rock allegretto. She keeps doing it as if to make a dodge from something. I am worried if she is being bothered by chikan the gropers. Allegedly they are here for collecting filthy pleasure from the wicked usage of their hands and fingers and we girls become prey to the display of their particular skill. This packed train might be infested with chikan the gropers. Without turning my head, I ask Reiko whether she is in trouble over someone and she replies that she is fine. I feel sorry for pretty girls who have to go through full of troubles if they are to commute by train in Tokyo. My mother said about pretty girls last Friday while she was leafing through a woman’s monthly fashion magazine.

  ‘Beautiful girls are pitiful because they are constantly watched. They are under constant pressure you know, so they become overly self-conscious about looks and, as a result, come to look worn-out and old for their age. Beauty is an antique. It’s an archaic concept. Period. I know it because I am a graduate of a four-year women’s college. I have already seen what happened to beautiful girls after marriage. Anyway, money can buy beauty anytime today. There are five cosmetic surgery clinics in our small town alone. It’s too many. You need not to be born with a beautiful feature. A scalpel will do.’

  And, then, my mother went out for shopping.

  *

  I am staring at Yukio’s DVD on my desk. The night has fallen. The sky is icy clear with a bright half moon. It looks that we may have no drizzle contrary to weather forecasts on Web. I can hear the splash of my neighbor having a bath. They are a father of his early thirties and his two little daughters who occasionally squeal with excitement. It sounds like Japanese macaque monkeys’.

  An hour ago my mother told us at dinner table that she had seen a man in a dark business suit urinating near the row of bending machines on her way home from shopping.

  ‘I was frozen and utterly wordless,’ she said.

  ‘But, mother, that’s a familiar sight.’

  ‘No, he was wearing a very nice three-piece suit.’

  ‘So?’ asked my father impassively.

  ‘So?’ I mimicked him.

  ‘It’s just unthinkable you know.’

  ‘We humans are animals, just like dogs,’ said my father. ‘You ought not to forget that.’

  I asked her, ‘Does a suit make things different, mother?’

  ‘Of course, it does.’

  Quietly my father rested the tip of his chopsticks against the brim of his rice bowl and asked her with an earnest look if she had seen it. My mother asked him back what he was talking about.

  ‘I’m wondering if you’ve seen it?’ my father repeated.

  She said she didn’t understand what that it he was referring to. My father said in a frown that she was supposed to know what he meant by it and had to stop playing coy because she was already a woman of forty-two. And my father added impatiently with a stern look that it referred to nothing else but it. Then my mother started having a fit of coughing. So I dropped the answer on behalf of my father.

  ‘Excuse me for interrupting you both, but, Mother, the it my father referred to is penis. It’s penis, mother.’

  ‘Oh, please, Luna,’ uttered my father with a weary sigh.

  My mother, on the other hand, glared at me as if I were a gigantic oily cockroach.

  Her menacing look ended our conversation.

  Although I never anticipated this kind of heavy silence, I did wanted my parents to finish that ridiculous conversation.

  My mother absentmindedly put her chopsticks down on the rest, paused for a while, and then stared at my father and me by turn.

  ‘I’ve finally understood what both of you were trying to say. My dear, that’s why you haven’t been promoted for last four years and, you, this is why you were ranked the sixth for the last midterm.’

  My mother was smiling thin, but her eyes were glaring which looked truly fearsome like those hollowed eyes of Oni mask I had seen in a Noh theater when I was sitting side by side with my grandfather several years ago.

  Facing those eyes, all my father could do was to become mute. He always seemed to refrain from criticism probably because he was adopted into her family. I learned that an adoptive marriage for a male could be psychologically demanding even if it would be economically advantageous.

  The dinner ended prematurely.

  Having retreated from that silent battle ground to my small den, my modest four-and-a-half-mat shelter, I began to scan past e-mails from Yukio and, about fifteen minutes later, I came across this one:

  Some male Japanese in a dark business suit have tendency to sprinkle a fence or a telegraph pole with their urine at night, especially when they are under the influence of liquor. The scene is commonly seen even in downtown Tokyo, right in the bottom of a canyon between skyscrapers. I wonder if they might be still bound by their karma. Through the ancient magical power of liquor they become able to recall how they have been defending each territory in their previous lives. They are, as a matter of fact, the reincarnation of dogs. And their marking behavior also explains the reason why Japanese political parties and corporations are infested with extremely rigid and intricate sectionalism. Think about their frantic rivalry over territory. It is due to their karma, their previous life. Do you want to be a lone wolf in this country? No, I don’t think you do. Japanese society will file you away as a dog with no collar. You will be crucified and soon end up throwing yourself off the thirteenth floor of an office building. Don’t ever try to be a lone wolf. It can be considered as guilty as being an outsider. Ostracism is everywhere. Play safe with the tiny display of your Mobile and ejaculate the seeds of your dream against its slick surface as everyone else does. The game won’t hurt you at all. You can quit the game whenever you wish without tears, whereas you are never allowed to leave the mound or the battlefield in the real life.

  Say sayonara with a sneer.

  *

  Thus spoke Yukio.

  I have another classic glass bottle of Coca-Cola on my desk in order not to let his words reach my nerves. I am now secure against that crippled ghost, no, the disabled phantom.

  Everything is intact.

  So it seems at least up to this very moment.

  Hanging

  Ten minutes ago, the Web News reported this: A forty-six-year-old father t
ook an entrance examination for one of Japan’s top six private colleges under the disguise of his eighteen-year-old daughter. It seemed to be almost impossible for the proctors of the college to suspect that the father was disguised in his daughter’s cloths, specifically, in a sailor middy top and a short pleated skirt. This ingenious disguise was exposed when one of his daughter’s classmates tapped him on the shoulder at the main gate after the examination. The father works at the third largest pharmacological company as a vice-president of its research laboratory. Allegedly he wished his daughter to be accepted at the highly competitive private college to which a prestigious medical school was attached.

  The incident reminds me of what Takeshi said in that shower room the other day: ‘You shouldn’t try to look like someone who is far from the image of your own. It’ll hurt you.’

  It is three minutes past midnight now. My parents are supposed to be fast asleep in the bedroom right below. I can no longer hear their television chatting, cheering, and laughing. There are a classic glass bottle of Coca-Cola and an original Cup-Noodle on my desk. Without them, I am unable to maintain my optimal level.

  I slide Yukio’s DVD into my Notebook. Soon his image appears on the display. Pushing his silver-rimmed glasses up with the middle finger, Yukio starts talking with his usual sardonic smile on his lips.

  *

  You think you know who I am, but you know nothing about me unless you find out how I lost my little brother Akira. It is, of course, not your fault because I have never told anyone about it until now, until this very moment.

  When I was little, I used to spend a week or two in my uncle’s house during summer holidays. It had been like an annual event until he moved to Osaka the Empire of Moneymakers after his wife, my aunt, had died of collagen disease at the age of forty-three. Before the misfortune, the couple was living in their traditional Japanese tile-roofed house in countryside near Kyoto. They had no children but, at least in the eyes of ten-year-old schoolboy, they seemed to be a happy couple.

  It was the middle of summer. The sun was quietly meditating high up in the blue sky that day. It was probably the most deepest and darkest blue sky I had ever seen, or so I would like to remember it. But I cannot recall whether there were some towering thunderclouds which usually appeared above the ridges of mountain. But I do remember that my aunt and uncle went out to do some shopping in downtown Kyoto by a white Nissan sedan. It was a weekly trip.

  After having cups of watermelon sherbet, my little brother Akira and I climbed up a lightweight aluminum ladder to the tiled roof. It felt like biting a forbidden fruit. On the roof we were able to take a view of the village shrine and the grove surrounding it. The shrine was located about half a mile away from there. The rice fields stretched as far as the eye could reach. They were like a large lake covered by green algae. You could see that about half of fields quietly reflected the summer sky, like gigantic solar panels. We pointed at traditional Japanese tile-roofed houses that were interspersed over the field. To me they looked very much alike and seemed unimpressive. What emerged in the distance were hazy bluish mountains surrounding our lush rice fields. We were in a basin.

  My little brother Akira was five and eager to be clad in cape those days for the purpose of transforming himself into Batman. In a chest of aunt’s drawers I found a two-square-foot wrapping cloth so timely I tied it around his neck to make a bowknot, of course loosely, in order not to choke him. His T-shirt had that famous Batman’s bat logo on it and he was wearing swimming trunks and rubber boots.

  Undoubtedly he looked silly. But, to me, in those days, anyone who was an extrovert like my little brother all seemed silly, so it didn’t irritate me. I wore a T-shirt and a short pants just like any other schoolboys. As far as the question of what to wear is concerned, I have always been a conformist since the day I started to wear a diaper.

  Akira was the first to climb up the tiled roof at about ten feet high. I was nervous and shaky but had no intention to hide my feelings so that Akira probably sensed my fear and that was why he seemed to stand on his dignity. He even tried to give me a helping hand even though he was five years younger than I and much smaller.

  On the roof we were surrounded by the incessant chorus of cicadas. It was so continuous my ears had quickly become insensitive to the sound. Akira seemed to enjoy silencing cicadas by a single clapping of hand whenever he wished. I tried to take off my sneakers to test the footing of the slope more directly but the sun heated roofing tiles in such intensity that it was simply impossible to stand barefooted. I crawled after Akira on my hands and knees and he giggled at me every time he turned around and saw me making a grimace with pain from touching heated tiles.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked and then looked up at the blue sky with his chest out while bending his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees with his tiny fists rested on the hipbone.

  ‘I am a friend of the good,’ he said proudly.

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  I think he was truly Batman at that exact moment.

  I warned him not to slip off the roof since I was well aware that I was supposed to look after my little brother. I was the person responsible. But he was already immersed so wholly and deeply in his Batman role he paced around me as if he were on the ground. Suddenly he slipped and fell forward.

  Then he began to slide down about three feet but fortunately stopped at the edge of the eaves by stepping his foot into a rainwater pipe. But the next moment, in order to clamber up the slope, he had accidentally kicked the aluminum ladder away from the roof with another foot. I was completely at a loss what to do about it, while my little brother looked slightly perplexed. We were now both marooned on the sunbaked roof at a height of about ten feet.

  ‘Look what you’ve done.’

  ‘I did nothing wrong.’

  ‘Who has done it then?’

  ‘Batman did it.’

  Then he let his cape flutter in a hot summer breeze.

  I scowled at Akira and began crawling up to him on my hands and knees. As I approached, he screamed playfully as if he had encountered a hideous monster. As I reached out my hand to grab his ankle, he climbed over the ridge and disappeared into the other side of the slope. It was like the faintest dream that would vanish the moment you awoke.

  Calling him back, I was anxious to go over the ridge, because my body was beginning to slide down little by little.

  I froze with panic and quickly lay on my belly. Then I heard a strange sound. It sounded as if a cat had retched. No, the sound was rather similar to a cry that could probably be heard when someone happened to find human excrements in an immaculately polished white bathtub. The sound was short and low but alarming.

  I called out his name. The chirring of cicadas in chorus ceased at once. Akira didn’t answer but I had no courage to go over the ridge. A dreadful silence fell on the roof. I called out my little brother again to see if he was safe and fine but there was yet no response. The heat of the sun became heavy on my back still more. I shouted out his name repeatedly but received no response as before. Soon cicadas started chirring again. Having crept flat on the roof, I noticed that there was this jet-black crow, no, a hill mynah staring down at me from on the rim of a satellite dish antenna whose top half was seen over the ridge. The antenna had been set up on the other side of the roof. I wondered whose crow, no, hill mynah it was and where it came from. All of a sudden I became unable to crawl up or edge up or even move my hands. I seemed to have been petrified by a fear of heights, although I had never been conscious of being acrophobic until that moment.

  ‘Answer me, Akira. I know where you are. You can’t hide from my eyes.’

  I started crawling sideways and finally reached the edge. I peeked down a small Japanese garden ten feet below. It was made by my uncle himself with white sand and small rocks and several dwarf trees in handmade pots. The surface of the sand was so raked as to look like an ocean with rippling waves. (Later I learned that he borrowed the idea from the famous dry l
andscape garden of Temple Nanzen in Kyoto.) Although fearfully, I stuck my head a little out of the edge and then twist the neck to see the corner of the opposite slope where the dish antenna was being set up.

  There was however neither the silhouette nor the sign of Akira at all. I also noticed that the jet-black hill mynah had already flied away.

  ‘Batman. Answer me. I know where you are.’

  Repeatedly calling him aloud, I was irritated, anxious, and furious. My limbs had been already exposed to the sun for more than an hour and I sensed myself being inescapably wrapped up in the sweltering chorus of cicadas. There was no one around and the sun was cruel. I regretted that I had forgotten my big straw hat that used to be my fetish. I became confused, worried, and scared. Before long I was dazed by heat and lost consciousness.

  When I opened my eyes, the sun had considerably declined and my body was in the shadow of a maidenhair tree. The waning sun also cast the elongated shadows of small rocks on the white wavelet-like surface of the Japanese sand garden: and I found something unusual down there. It was a peculiar shadow that lengthened across the sand garden. It was a shadow of something hanging down from the eaves near the opposite corner. I tried to figure out what it was and finally came to realize that it was the elongated shadow of my little brother Akira. The shape told me that he seemed to be hanging from the base of the dish antenna by the cape.

  I went numb with dread.

  The shadow of Akira seemed like a scarecrow with its shoulders dropped sadly. I was unable to see Akira himself so that I probably came to the conclusion that he might have had lost consciousness. In order to wake him up I again tried to call his name but, this time, couldn’t utter a single word because my lips began to tremble, nor could I move because my whole body started to shudder. I was completely petrified with the sight in which the hanging shadow began to crawl onto one of small rocks in wavelet-like sand. Before long I started to weep under the crimson sky.