by Ryu Murakami
The skyscrapers seemed to have disappeared. Kiku wondered for a moment whether he’d made a wrong turn, before he realized that the buildings on either side of the alley were blocking the view. It occurred to him that the streets of the abandoned town back on the island had once been as crowded and noisy as this one; then, when the mines had closed, things changed almost overnight. Kuwayama always talked about how the butchers on the island had been forced to sell off their stock cheap when their customers started leaving in droves. It was sukiyaki every day for supper, he’d often said, and even then they couldn’t sell it fast enough, and the dogs ended up getting some of it. When the butchers themselves finally pulled out of town, they had left behind whole haunches of lamb that rotted and covered the island with the stench of death. Someday, this place will be like that, thought Kiku to himself.
As he left the narrow streets of the restaurant district, the towers reappeared, so close now it hurt his neck to look up at them. They rose before him, fading in the last light of the sun, and now Kiku could see that they were dozens of times bigger than the apartment blocks back on the island. He went nearer, until the buildings filled the whole sky. Here and there, lights were beginning to come on in the walls of glass, cutting bright squares out of the dark monoliths. He felt dizzy staring at them, and the buildings seemed to swell into gaping holes that threatened to swallow him. We could crush you in an instant, they were telling him. He was close enough now to touch a wall; it was hot, perhaps from the sun, and unpleasantly thick.
Kiku walked among the buildings looking for barbed wire. When he was leaving the hotel that morning for the last time, the dark-skinned hooker—by now an old acquaintance—had told him that there was a place called Toxitown near the skyscrapers and that it was surrounded by barbed wire. In the center of Toxitown, she said, there was something known locally as “The Market” where they sold everything from kittens to old fairies.
“They also have these weird, pale-faced guys peddling every kind of drug and chemical you ever heard of,” she’d confided. “And whatever this stuff is you’re looking for, if you can’t get it there, it can’t be got.”
Kiku’s reconnoitering turned up various things down among the roots of the towers. In the wall of one building was a revolving door with flashing lights leading to a hotel; nearby, under a row of flags, was the entrance to the tower, flanked by an aluminum sculpture that seemed to be infested with bugs that rattled around inside. There was even a fountain with strobe lights. Eventually, as he made his way deeper into the forest of towers, Kiku sensed something in the air, like a stale, damp draft from the cracks in the concrete, as if there were a tunnel somewhere nearby connecting this plaza to a forgotten garden beyond the buildings. He began to run, cutting across the wide boulevard that divided the towers and into an empty lot used for storing leftover building materials. Just where the streetlights gave out, he could see a dozen or so glinting parallel lines: a barbed-wire fence half hidden by tall weeds. From beyond the fence came the familiar smell of ruin and decay; Kiku was sure there would be dogs inside. The Market must be in there, he told himself, and that’s where I’ll find some gabaniazid. Who knows, maybe Hashi will turn up too. One thing’s for sure, if Hashi stood where I’m standing now and smelled that smell, he’d manage to find a way in. We were raised on that smell… Yeah, I bet he’s in there, Kiku told himself as he tried to gauge the height of the fence. Four meters… I’ve jumped higher, he thought.
The next day he showed up early at the office of the High School Track Association and, after announcing that he was in training for the national meet, he managed to borrow a fiberglass pole that was slightly springier than the one he was used to, then headed straight for the athletic field in Yoyogi Park. He was going to practice with a shorter approach and no padding in the pit, as he wanted to learn to land on his feet instead of his back.
A little past noon, an army of men carrying cameras and other equipment filed into the arena. They were shooting a commercial for tennis shoes, and they brought along an official from the track association who asked Kiku if he’d mind appearing in the background practicing his jumps.
“You don’t have to do anything special,” the man assured him, “just go on with your training as if they weren’t there.”
Evidently, the shot they wanted featured a smiling model hitching up her long lace wedding dress to reveal her tennis shoes just at the instant Kiku sailed into the background. For this they needed a generator and a bank of blinding lights, even though it was midday and sunny. The unnatural lighting, with the high-kicking model going over and over her lines, began to make him feel a bit sick.
“What flies?” she kept saying. “Airplanes and balloons, helicopters and gliders, birds and kites, butterflies and bugs… And one more thing… the well-dressed bride in Herman’s Hermits Sneakers.” Just as she said “And one more thing,” she was supposed to hoist up her dress and smile, but the girl seemed a little uncertain about how to do the line—not, apparently, because she was nervous but because she found the whole thing ridiculous. When some clouds moved in temporarily, the director called for a break and the model wandered over in Kiku’s direction.
“Hot, isn’t it?” she said, but Kiku hardly heard her; he was busy looking at her enormous eyes. She reminded him of a picture he’d once seen of a woman in a wedding dress standing against a gray, lowering background: “Lonely Bride,” it had been called.
“Is there a way I could have some of that milk without anybody seeing?” asked the girl, pointing at the half-finished carton Kiku had been drinking from. He wasn’t surprised she was thirsty, wearing that dress in this heat. “They won’t let me drink while we’re shooting ’cause they say my stomach sticks out,” the Lonely Bride explained.
She squatted down in front of him, pretending to be deep in conversation as she palmed the milk and emptied it in one suck. A drop escaped from the corner of her small mouth and ran down her chin. Watching the way the line of her neck undulated as she swallowed, Kiku was amazed how beautiful she was.
“You like to pole vault?” she said, looking straight into his eyes and delicately wiping her lips.
“Why do you ask?” said Kiku, looking down in confusion.
“Because I love it, that’s why,” she answered.
“I guess I’ve always liked flying,” he said.
“Since you were a kid?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“I thought people who liked to fly usually turned out to be pilots,” said the bride. “But they say you have to be smart to be a pilot, and me, personally, I can’t stand anything you have to be smart for.” One of the camera crew yelled at her not to get sunburned, and, without bothering to answer, she opened the parasol she was carrying as a prop.
“Picky, aren’t they?” said Kiku.
“You think so too?”
“Lights in the middle of the day—seems pretty weird to me.”
“I’m glad you agree.”
“When I see guys like that, I always think they’d be better off dead,” said Kiku, at which the Lonely Bride’s eyes got very wide.
“I once read this novel,” said the girl, apparently changing the subject, “where the sun expands and the whole earth gets real hot. Places like Tokyo and Paris are like Tahiti, and everybody moves to places that used to be too cold to live in.”
“Like Hokkaido?”
“No, much colder, like the North and South Pole. Hokkaido would be like the tropics.”
“And what happened to Tokyo?” asked Kiku.
“Tokyo? It turned into a swamp.”
“Why a swamp?”
“’Cause the South Pole melted and the sea level went way up, and I think it rained all the time too.”
“Neat,” said Kiku.
“And you know what else? There was just this one man and woman in the Tokyo swamp, and they were in love.”
“But I thought it was supposed to be too hot, hotter than the tropics. How did they survive?�
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“They drank a lot of beer,” said the girl. From time to time she dabbed the sweat from her upper lip, careful not to disturb her elaborate makeup. Kiku noticed how thin her skin seemed; the pale blue veins in her eyelids blended with her eye shadow to form mysterious patterns that made his head swim. If you pricked her with a needle, he thought, her skin would burst like a balloon and she’d disappear into those patterns.
“If you tell me when you have a meet, I’ll come watch,” she was saying.
“I don’t go to meets,” Kiku told her.
“You mean you just practice?”
“Not exactly, but I don’t go to meets.”
“I just thought it would be fun to cheer for you a little,” she said, sounding a bit disappointed.
“Well, if you just want to watch me jump…” The girl nodded. “Then come tonight and wait between the Sumitomo Building and the Overseas Union Bank. I’m jumping barbed wire tonight.”
“You jump at night?” she asked in a slightly dubious voice.
“You don’t have to come if you’re not interested.”
“I’ll be there,” she said. She was being called again; apparently they wanted to fix her hair before they started shooting. As she stood up to leave, Kiku thought to ask her name. Lifting the hem of her long dress, she looked back over her shoulder as she walked away.
“Anemone,” she said.
That evening, Kiku arrived early and spent a long time calculating the exact distance between the uppermost line of barbed wire and the tip of the pole as he held it vertical. Then, when he was satisfied that his measurements were correct, he marked a spot and dug a hole twenty centimeters deep. This he filled with sand to form a makeshift box for planting the pole in; the sand would help absorb some of the shock. Next he strung a piece of rope along the ground perpendicular to the fence and, standing on the rope, made a right-angled triangle, with his body—arms stretched over his head—as the hypotenuse and the pole and the ground as the legs. Where his feet were placed would be the take-off mark. From there he paced off an even number of steps, counting two steps walking for each he would run. Then he lined the path from the take-off mark to the starting point with small white pebbles and removed the rope.
His preparations completed, Kiku went over to Anemone, who was waiting in the bushes with a Polaroid camera around her neck—“to take a picture of the jump,” she’d told him.
“When I make a new friend, I always take their picture. Kind of a souvenir, see?” It occurred to Kiku that Anemone was the first person he had met since coming to Tokyo who kept her word, seeing that she’d actually turned up. When he told her that he planned to jump the barbed wire to get into Toxitown, she tried to make him change his mind. She talked fast and what she said was a little muddled, but as far as Kiku could make out, it seemed he would end up with holes in his face, that the entire area was contaminated with some kind of poison, and—worse—if he were discovered trying to break in, he’d be fried alive by a flamethrower. Something like that. If he simply had to get in, she conceded eventually, she could show him a way; but when she led him to the hole in the fence that the boy with the rotting face had once shown her, they found it had been repaired. As they walked, Kiku studied his guide; she had removed all the makeup from that afternoon and was wearing jeans with a red enameled belt and a silver lamé blouse with ducks printed on it.
The guards had passed by on their rounds three times during the preliminaries, and each time Kiku and Anemone had huddled together in the bushes. During their second circuit, Anemone had started to whisper something and Kiku had pressed his hand over her mouth to shut her up. There were still red marks from his fingers on her pale cheek.
“Kiku, guess what, I have a pet crocodile,” she whispered at last, as the lights of a car passing in the distance showed for a moment that the red weals were gradually fading. The shadows of the bushes fluttered across her face, hiding her eyes. Kiku thought again how pretty she was, but he had the feeling that he could forget her in no time simply by shutting his eyes.
“His name is Gulliver. What do you think?”
“What do I think about what?” he asked, confused.
“About raising a crocodile,” she said.
“Pets are all the same; they’re cute but they’re a lot of work.”
“He’s a big crocodile—very,” she added, her lips pursed as she whispered this new bit of information. Her breath was warm on his ear, and from the nape of her neck came the smell of soap.
“A crocodile, huh? I only saw one once, in an aquarium. Looked a bit stupid to me,” said Kiku.
“You want to come see mine sometime? It’ll make you feel like you’re in the jungle.” Kiku wanted to tell her that he felt as though he were already in a jungle: hot and a little bothered. “So when you’ve taken care of whatever it is you have to do, come by sometime and see him.”
“Tonight’s out,” Kiku said.
“You know there’s a brand of whisky called Crocodile Tears?” She had changed the subject again.
“Tonight’s impossible,” Kiku repeated.
“Doesn’t matter when. Come whenever you like.”
Kiku wondered why he was having trouble breathing; it had started about the time he left the red marks on the girl’s cheek, an act that had seemed quite brutal to Kiku even as he was doing it. The cheek had been cool and soft, and Kiku had wondered what it would be like on the inside; still cool but probably a little gooey. The graceful curve of her jaw and neck, and that slightly pursed lower lip, were visible from time to time in the light that filtered down from the office towers, as if lit by the lighthouse back at home. The silhouette shifted subtly when Anemone whispered or smiled or caught her breath. He reached out to touch her cheek again, tracing the faint marks with his finger.
“So you’ll come see my crocodile?” she was saying. “Come any day, just phone first.”
“OK. I guess it’s about time,” said Kiku, straightening his legs. He went to get the pole he had hidden in the grass. As he shouldered it, Anemone gasped.
“It’s beautiful, like a laser beam,” she whispered as the opalescent shaft caught the light. “Make it a nice jump,” she added, “… for the camera.”
After warming up, stretching his calves, and running in place for a moment, Kiku stood at the starting line staring at the top of the fence. Anemone crouched nearby, camera at the ready. Then, going fast, he set off down the makeshift runway, conjuring the essential image: his body being sucked up into the air and over the barrier—except in this case the image featured the jagged spikes of the wire rather than the harmless bar. At the halfway point, his stride evened out and his speed picked up; and then, one step before the take-off mark, he planted the pole in the sand hole. His body dug in, the pole bent… and somewhere, just at that instant, a whistle blew.
“Halt!” a voice yelled, as two guards in white protective suits charged from the shadows. One fired a warning shot, but Kiku was already airborne and the shot merely broke his concentration as he was clearing the fence. His left hand came off the pole, his body twisted, and the prongs of the barbed wire flashed before him. One barb caught his cheek at the corner of his mouth and sank in like a knife, so, to avoid being ripped to pieces, he instinctively caught hold of the wire and came to rest suspended on the strands. Directly below stood the helmeted guards, their guns pointing at his head. Feeling his mouth fill with blood, Kiku tried to plug the hole with his tongue, but numbness was setting in and there was little he could do about it.
“Don’t move or we’ll shoot,” one guard ordered, waving a flashlight in Kiku’s face. “Now climb back down on this side.” Kiku caught a glimpse of Anemone hiding in the bushes at the edge of the circle cast by the spotlight overhead. She was busily snapping pictures. Strange girl, thought Kiku, smiling to himself.
“Listen, asshole, don’t mess with us,” the guards yelled at him, apparently angered by the smile. “We have orders to fire at will. You want to die right there
?” Bored with endless circuits around the barbed-wire perimeter, they seemed to fancy the idea of actually killing somebody. One of them raised his gun to aim right between Kiku’s eyes, his helmet bobbing with excitement; but before anything could happen another guy appeared under the spotlight—a strange, huddled figure on the inside of the fence, who lurched forward clutching a gun of his own and, just as the guards swung toward him, opened fire. Buckshot spat from the wide barrel, tearing through the fence and ripping fine black holes in the white uniforms as the guards were hurled backward. Kiku turned to see a small, dark-skinned, toothless man beckoning to him. Smoke was still pouring from the barrel of his gun.
“What do you think you’re staring at? If you hang around up there, they’ll fry your butt. Get down here, pole boy!” Kiku did as he was told, but as he struggled down from the fence, more guards, apparently drawn by the shots, came racing toward them in an armored car. He looked back just long enough to see Anemone waving at him and making her escape, and then he followed the little man into the darkness. When they were safely hidden, his guide stopped and pointed toward a low, shadowy building from which a shaggy figure was approaching. It was Hashi.
9
“So this is the great Kiku? You know, you’ve got to stop pulling stunts like this. If we hadn’t shown up when we did, you’d be a cinder by now… Hashi tells me you’re a big-time pole vaulter. No shit? A real live jock? Boy, that’s bad; in fact there’s nothing as bad as jocks with sweat glands where their brains ought to be, getting all razzed up, yelling ‘Go, team, go!’ How can you stand yourself?”