by Ryu Murakami
So an hour later, accompanied by Tatsuo who thought he might have another look for Emiko, they left the factory. The narrow street was lined with tin-roofed shacks, and here and there were the remnants of a cinderblock building invariably marked with red paint. Hashi warned Kiku not to touch the red-splashed walls or the earth itself. “That’s where the stuff that eats holes in your face is worst.” The eaves of the shacks were decked with strings of tiny Christmas lights that attracted swarms of insects. Groups of children played in the occasional empty lot, hopping about, kicking cans, trying to fly a kite, or catching lizards. One little girl stood clutching a rag doll next to the burning body of a dog, while nearby a group of boys pulled the tires from an abandoned car.
The road had been almost entirely stripped of asphalt, revealing a damp red clay that stuck to their shoes, and puddles covered with white foam that gave off a sour smell. Apparently, in this street, all the wooden buildings had been torn down and the scraps used to put up the makeshift shacks. Several of them seemed to be businesses: a grocer’s of some kind, a clothing shop, a liquor store. The night was hot and humid, and they sweated heavily as they walked. As they were passing a place lit from within by a pale, colored light, they could hear a woman moaning and shrieking all at once.
“This whole street is full of crazies,” Hashi said. “If somebody tries to talk to you, just ignore them.”
A crowd of people had collected at the end of the block, all pointing at the roof of a house across the street. One of them, a man with cloudy, yellowed eyes, was shouting, “It’s Superman! It’s Superman!”
Actually, it was a naked baby, perched precariously on the roof and crying at the top of its lungs.
“Fly!” shouted the man with the yellow eyes. “Fly, Banzai Boy!” The ladies of the street, all out for a look in nothing but their slips, were adding comments of their own.
“The sun’s gone down, you silly boy, you won’t get a tan at this time of day!” yelled one. “Poor baby, oh you poor, poor baby!” cried another.
A fat woman in black underwear stuck her head out of a window near where the child was tottering about and bellowed: “It’s my baby!” She then tried to scoop him up in a bug net but, realizing it was a waste of time, turned on the crowd outside and with a “What are you staring at—this ain’t a freak show!” slammed the window shut.
“Did you see the mark on that baby’s butt?” It was the man with the yellow eyes again. “That’s the sign! He’s the one! The one who’s going to save the world. That baby could flap those ears and fly right out of here like a pink elephant. Whaddya think about that, young man? Whaddya think?” He had grabbed hold of Kiku’s shoulder and was shaking it as he spoke.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” said Tatsuo, pulling him loose. Kiku had a sudden urge to run upstairs and beat up the woman in black underwear; and while he was at it, he wouldn’t have minded finding the father-and-child begging team he’d seen in Shinjuku and bashing their heads in, either. Yet it wasn’t exactly that he wanted to get back at parents for mistreating their children: he was just struck by how helpless children were, by the way they could only sit there and cry, even when they got locked away in a box, that there was nothing for them to do but thrash around a bit and wail. He’d once seen on television that a baby giraffe could stand up and run an hour after birth; things would be different if human babies could do the same. If I could have done that, I’d already have beaten the shit out of them all by now, he thought.
They had stopped again. Looking over at Kiku, Tatsuo winked and pointed toward a window where a purple light was hanging.
“If you can manage to keep quiet, this one should be in full swing about now. What do you think, pole boy, want to have a peek?” Tatsuo brought over a large drum filled with rotting fish and signaled to Kiku to climb up on the rim. From this perch, Kiku could see through the window. The first thing that caught his eye was a large Buddhist altar on one wall festooned with little lavender-colored plaques bearing the names of somebody’s ancestors. Beneath the altar was an expanse of white that Kiku first took to be a mattress but gradually came to realize was a woman’s ass. The owner was so flabby that Kiku couldn’t make out where the buttocks ended and the thighs began, but somewhere in the middle, where the wrinkles all seemed to come together, a pale penis could be seen thrusting its way now and again up into the light. And no ordinary penis it was, either, but an enormous thing as thick as Kiku’s arm, though not particularly hard. As Kiku watched, the woman pulled free and rolled off the man. Lumbering over to a washbasin, she scooped up some ice cubes, popped them in her mouth and, like a blimp coming to earth, returned to settle on the owner of the limpish dick. She then began stroking and teasing and icing it down with her tongue, and Kiku was admiring the way her gold teeth glittered in the soft light when Tatsuo gave his trouser leg a tug as a sign that his time was up.
Quietly, Kiku hopped down from the drum.
“Well, how was it?” Tatsuo asked.
“She’s beautiful,” he whispered as Tatsuo clambered up and peered through the curtain.
“Whaaaat?!” Tatsuo squealed, his voice rising in volume. “You liar! Beautiful? She’s a pig!” As he turned toward Kiku, he lost his footing on the rim and slipped down among the fish, toppling the drum and sending a wave of half-decayed things into the street. In a moment, a cloud of flies had gathered, and before he could get clear, the woman, her head draped in a cotton scarf and her body wrapped in a towel, leaned out the window.
“Excuuuuuse me! Young man! Who exactly were you calling a pig? Not me by any chance?” She lit a cigarette and glared at him, flapping her hand to keep the flies away. “If you were referring to me, I assure you you’re mistaken. I don’t much appreciate rude jokes, dear boy. You see, I used to be in the movies, in Hong Kong; made almost fifty pictures. I may be getting a bit loose around the edges, but I’m not finished yet. Oh no. You betcha I’m not finished… and I swear I’ll murder the motherfucker who calls me a pig!” Her voice had risen to a howl.
At this point Kiku and company thought they should withdraw, but when they turned to go, another woman blocked their path, brandishing a kitchen knife.
“Was it you guys turned over the goldfish bowl? Didn’t you know? If you turn over the bowl, the fish die. Guess you’ll have to clean it up.” Meanwhile, the woman in the window was offering to inject Tatsuo’s prick with a shot of silicon, an offer that made him giggle nervously.
“What’s so funny, punk? Sounds like you’re just itching for that shot,” the fat woman screamed, shaking her hair into a wild bush and finishing with a tearful “Baaaastard!”
By this time, the neighbors were peering out of their shacks.
“Why the fuck do I have to take this from these bastards?” she continued. “Where does a punk like this get off calling me a pig?”
“Can’t blame a guy for telling the truth,” laughed one of the spectators just loudly enough to be heard from her window. For his trouble, the woman threw an empty bottle at him, breaking the pane of glass next to his head.
“Shit, lady, what the hell do you think you’re doing? It’s bad enough without having to watch the sows wallow in their sty.” While improvising other insults, he knocked the rest of the pane out of the window and jumped down into the street. The man, who was about three times the size of Tatsuo, may in fact have had a neck but his shoulders were too knotted with muscle for it to be visible. He wore nothing but boxer shorts and a T-shirt, which he peeled off and began to twirl around his head.
“Laaaaadies and gentlemen! In the red corner, at two hundred and ninety-nine pounds, Ortega Saito!” he bellowed as he danced in a little circle. When he’d finished his introduction, he carefully set the drum the right way up, then asked his audience, “Now which of you assholes is to blame for this?”
“Him! HIM!” cried the fat lady, pointing at Tatsuo. “He killed the goldfish, and he called me—me, the most famous cunt in Hong Kong—a PIG! It’s all his fault!”
The words had scarcely left her mouth when Tatsuo felt himself being lifted off the ground by a fistful of his hair.
“They say,” he heard the neckless wrestler tell him in a friendly voice, “that pulling the hair smooths the face and relieves depression. Did you know that?” Tatsuo, mute with pain and fear, said nothing. “I’m asking how you like the massage, buddy. Say something,” the man shouted in his ear. Kiku chose this moment to aim a kick at the wrestler’s belly, but succeeded only in numbing his own leg; the man hardly flinched. Seconds later, an arm lashed out and knocked Kiku back head over heels into the gutter, where he came to rest with a thud and lay still for a while.
“You’re that Filipino kid, aren’t you?” the wrestler asked Tatsuo. “I had a tag-team partner once, a guy from the Philippines. He was another wimp, too, like you. Used to spray his balls with cologne before every match, but they stank anyway… And you know,” he added, yanking Tatsuo a little higher, “the thing is, I just replaced the glass in that window day before yesterday. Now I take it you were peeping in the lady’s room, that it? Well, as punishment, what we’re going to do is rip an ear off here.” He grabbed his ear and began to pull. Tatsuo let out a piercing scream.
“Please, mister!” This came from Hashi. “I’ll pay for the window; just let him go.”
“Oh, it’s you, the fairy. You want me to let your friend go? OK. Then you’ll have to entertain us—do one of those tricks you fairies do, whistle with your asshole or something.” Tatsuo was still wailing, and his legs twitched uncontrollably. There was blood where his earlobe was beginning to peel away from his head. “Or better still,” said the wrestler again, “how ’bout having the Filipino kid tell us what he saw in the lady’s boudoir. Go on, kid, tell us a story.”
At some point in all this, a skinny man with a large bulge in his underpants had appeared framed in the window next to the fat lady. He looked around shyly as Tatsuo just managed to choke out: “They were… doing… it… owwww, help! Owwww, shit! Owwwww!”
“What’s that ‘it’ mean, eh? Doing what exactly? Or do you want to lose this ear?” asked the wrestler, giving a harder tug that made Tatsuo’s legs jerk about even more. The blood was now dripping on the ground, and he was close to fainting. As his head lolled back and his eyes bulged, the crowd rocked with laughter.
Hashi clutched the wrestler’s leg and began to beg.
“Please, I’ll do anything, pay anything, just let him go.” The wrestler looked down at Hashi for a moment, then answered slowly:
“OK. Here’s the deal, faggot. You sing me a song; if I like it, I let the Filipino go…”
A high, thin sound that reminded Kiku of birds singing in the hills back on the island greeted him as he came to and lifted his face out of a puddle. His right eye still hurt where the wrestler’s hand had landed, and the people in the street all looked a little blurry. As the whistling of the birds gradually grew and formed a melody, he realized for the first time that Hashi, still kneeling at the wrestler’s feet, was singing. The song, however, was the oddest one he’d ever heard. Hashi’s voice now sounded like a telephone ringing in the distance, or tiny speakers playing in his ear. The sound was constant, faintly oppressive, as though an incredibly thin membrane had covered the whole area, sticking to everyone’s skin and seeping in to disturb the nervous system, stimulate the memory. Soon after he started singing, everybody within earshot could feel the effect: vision blurred, colors and smells faded, the air became damp, heavy, and you began sinking to the bottom of the sea, into a private vision summoned by the song.
Kiku found himself watching a jet black horse galloping through a park at dusk. The vision, however, wasn’t like a dream, the scene wasn’t projected in front of his eyes; instead he was pulled into it, as if sucked down into the whorls of paint on a canvas. The horse, pitch black yet bathed in an orange glow, was charging through a grove of trees at a terrific pace. It whinnied as it ran, but the sound grew imperceptibly until it was more a series of small explosions, and Kiku suddenly noticed that the animal’s smooth, shiny coat had changed to metal. He was riding a huge motorcycle through a valley of silver windows. Yet he wasn’t exactly riding the bike; somehow his viewpoint was slightly behind it, following at exactly the same hectic speed, as though he saw everything through the viewer of a movie camera mounted on rails. Things passed in a whirl—he lost track of what was moving so fast. Was he hurtling through space? Or the camera? Or the motorcycle? Or maybe it was the lights and buildings lining the road that were moving and he was standing still? He began to feel dazed, and anxious to get out of the painfully beautiful vision.
“Stop, please!” a woman’s voice begged, and Kiku’s motorcycle vanished. The fat lady was clinging to the man with the big, soft penis and crying uncontrollably. Kiku managed to get to his feet and make his way over to Hashi. He could see the rest of the crowd, frozen where they stood like zombies, their pupils dilated, eyes staring into the distance. Hashi’s song had drawn them back into memories of the deep past, when their brains were still mushy, their minds yet to be formed. The wrestler, lost in his own maze of recollection, had released Tatsuo and fallen on his knees where he tore at his chest and muttered things that made little sense.
“Momma, don’t make such scary faces. Your eyes are funny, a funny color… a scary color. I promise I won’t be naughty any more, Momma—please stop beating the cat…”
“That’s enough,” said Kiku, standing next to Hashi. “Enough.”
“I’ve practiced every day,” said Hashi as they continued on their way to The Market. “I try it out on the kids with holes in their faces or one of my friendly perverts, the cum-and-go crowd. And what I realized is that its power has got nothing to do with the tone or the melody itself; what you have to do is create an environment, a sound that’s no sound at all. You see what I mean? Silence—I mean total silence—stirs up people’s most primitive memories. I base the whole thing on the mating call of the West African pygmy hippo, and it seems to work on everybody—crazies, cripples, and particularly people who think they’re ‘normal.’ You see, everyone carries their own personal silence inside; all my song has to do is bring out a little corner of that silence.”
“What’s the name of the song?” asked Tatsuo.
“It’s an original,” Hashi answered. “I may call it ‘The St. Vitus’s Blues.’ As far as I can tell, people who have convulsions get real calm when they hear it, but everybody else is in for a treat too…”
At the entrance to The Market, a foreigner dressed like a priest was preaching from the pulpit of an empty industrial spool, backed up by scratchy recorded hymns. An open-collar shirt, black pants, and high rubber boots were complemented by a knotted rope around his neck, and the whole ensemble was topped off with a garland of hibiscus flowers. He was flanked by a sign that read “REPENT!” in enormous letters and “Cleanse your soul at the Church of Our Lady Juanita” in smaller ones. His Japanese was impeccable, except for an “e” sound that occasionally crept in where an “i” should have been.
“Brothers and sesters, go away from thes place! You come here to satesfy the lust of the flesh, but your money will only buy you greater loneliness. Look on thes place! Who are these women? They are mothers and wives and sesters. They are your mothers and wives and sesters! What can your money buy you here? Shame and misery, that’s what! And some of you others, you’ve come for the pitiful HO-MO-SEX-UAL, and you see hem puff his cigarette and weggle his pretty behind and you fall under hes spell. But what does JESUS have to say to the HO-MO-SEX-UAL? JESUS does not SUFFER the HO-MO-SEX-UAL! I say unto you, the judgment of SODOM is coming to thes place!”
The Market was a four-lane highway that ran through a tunnel in the area. The guards had apparently been bought off so that the tunnel could serve as a ready link between customers on the outside and the services provided inside. The system seemed to work, since the stalls that lined the road were doing a brisk business—with one difference: the commerce was almost completely silen
t. Not a voice could be heard as buyers and sellers, whatever the commodity, conducted their transactions in whispers, their lips pressed against each other’s ears. The street stalls were fairly rudimentary, just a table and some chairs set up along the side of the road where the customers sat down and waited for the prostitute in attendance—in some cases a woman, in others a man—to quietly bring them a drink. The list of drinks was simple: watered-down beer or a kind of sweet wine in dark bottles. The freelance whores lining the street advertised with creative postures but rarely went out of their way to approach a passing customer. The men, it seemed, had been there from the beginning, but the number of women had increased suddenly when the underground highway had opened. Now they lined the tunnel, leaning against the walls, smoking with one hand and hiking up their skirts with the other. One woman had got hers up further than the rest, and the silver ring embedded in the fleshy lips between her legs glittered in the ancient yellow fluorescent light. A black woman languidly sucked grapes from a bunch, skinning them deftly with her mouth and letting them roll on her tongue like green marbles. Her dress, split down the back to the top of her ass, barely covered the sour, velvet skin beneath. A young girl was dancing in the street in toeshoes tied with white ribbons. On her thigh was a tattoo of a hydrofoil, and around her neck she wore a snakeskin collar complete with leash. A pair of twins had been painted on her buttocks, one per cheek, and they seemed to be clutching the real, lighted candle protruding between them.
In addition to the women, the tunnel walls were lined with makeshift drugstores which dealt almost exclusively in tranquilizers, the non-addictive drug of choice for both the working girls and their customers. A tranquilizer called Neutro, in fact, could almost have been said to be the pillar on which the social system of The Market was built. It was Neutro that one had to thank for the placid whispers, the smooth conduct of commerce minus the usual irritations and problems. Under a Neutro-induced haze, activity along the subterranean road was reduced to mutters, sighs, and muffled coughs, the sound effects of a concert hall between the movements of a symphony. The Market was a circus with the soundtrack left off, a silent parade, a muted ballet with only a light ringing in the ears gently lulling the spectator into the general torpor. Not silence exactly, but an odd, noiseless noise, like rustling silk, or soft footsteps on wet concrete—like a tongue sucking at a gap between two teeth, or skin on skin, or clear sake being poured into a glass. The Market was a masked ball with only the sound of the feathers fluttering on a thousand strange costumes. Those who saw it for the first time invariably said they thought they had died and gone on to some other life.