by Ryu Murakami
I knew she and Iwase had been writing to each other. The reason he wanted the job, I figured, was so that he could see her. He’d shown me one of her letters once: Dear Hide-bo. How are you? (Iwase’s given name was Hideo.) I’m listening to a session by Booker Little and Eric Dolphy as I write this. You’re probably right about me being a weak person. I know I shouldn’t care what people think, I should trust my own feelings. But when I think about all the people around me I just lose my nerve... When I asked what she was talking about, Iwase played dumb and said he didn’t know, but it was pretty clear to me that she was involved in some sort of forbidden love: a sales manager, married with kids; a yakuza; her stepfather; her pet dog—something along those lines, probably. If there was one area in which Iwase was more grown-up than I was, it was his connection with this chick. Whenever I mentioned her, he’d smile knowingly and mutter, “She’s a real woman.” I was jealous. For all I knew he might cross the line before I did. I remembered her sitting there in her thin dress. It was true, she did have a “real woman” sort of air about her; not like the whores with their cheap perfume who hung out in bars full of foreigners, but something that ordinary young women working in the real world had. Why should Iwase bring up the Riverside Café now, though, as we were walking to the hideout in the rain? “You’re going there so you can see your salesgirl, right?” I said. “How’d you guess?” he said, nodding and giggling—-if you could call that creepy sound a giggle. With Adama and me taking control of the Northern High JCA Committee, Iwase must have felt insecure about his own position, and this was probably his way of reasserting himself. A vision of that sweet-smelling salesgirl, naked, filled my brain. It pissed me off, and in my heart I shouted: I hope she dumps you like a turd! The hydrangeas along the road were just beginning to change color, and Adama, ignoring us, was poking at them with the tip of his umbrella. Adama was cool.
“Power to the Imagination.”
This was the slogan we decided to paint on the banner. Narushima and Otaki wanted it to be some cliché like “Fight the Good Fight,” but Masutabe and his classmates were overwhelmingly in favor of choosing one of the slogans Adama and I had taken from a collection of graffiti produced during the May Revolution in Paris—things like “Reject Pre-established Harmony!” and “Beneath the Pavement Lies a Desert.”
It was fun thinking up slogans of our own. We all wrote them down on little strips of paper and read them aloud. Outside the window, rain was falling like fine silver needles. All we needed were conical straw hats and we’d have looked like Basho and his boys writing haiku.
“Ken-san,” Iwase said, “the barricade’s one thing, but what about the festival? What about the movie?”
On our way home from the hideout we’d stopped at a café called Boulevard where they played classical music. Iwase was drinking coffee. Coffee was the preferred drink of second-rate students in all small provincial cities in those days.
“We’ll do ’em during the vacation,” I said.
“That’ll give us time to write a proper script,” said Adama. He was drinking soda water. People who came from the sticks to small provincial cities had a thing about soda water in those days. He sucked noisily through his straw, then asked, “What kind of movie we gonna make, Ken?”
“I haven’t decided yet, exactly.”
I was drinking tomato juice. The hippest young people in small provincial cities always drank tomato juice in those days. That’s bullshit, of course. Tomato juice was still a novelty, and most people wouldn’t drink it because it tasted like tomatoes, or because it wasn’t sweet, or because the color turned them off. I forced myself to drink it for the simple reason that I liked to draw attention to myself.
“I told you before, though, didn’t I? That it’ll be surrealistic?”
“Oh, yeah. You did.”
“What was the music gonna be again?” Iwase asked.
“Messiaen.”
It was around this time that I’d begun trying to perfect the art of fucking with people’s minds. I’d figured out that when someone else was hogging the limelight, you could cut him down to size by bringing up a subject he didn’t know anything about. If the other person knew a lot about literature, I’d talk about the Velvet Underground; if he knew a lot about rock, I’d talk about Messiaen; if he knew a lot about classical music, I’d talk about Roy Lichtenstein; if he knew a lot about pop art, I’d talk about Jean Genet; and so on. Do that in a small provincial city and you never lose an argument.
“It’s going to be avant-garde, right?” Adama said, taking out a notebook and ballpoint pen. “Could you just give me a rough idea of the story?”
“Why?”
“Well, if we’re going to shoot it this summer, we’ve got to start preparing now, right? Equipment, staff, props...”
Adama was a born production manager. I was impressed—impressed enough to tell him as much of the story as I’d thought up so far.
“It’ll be like a combination of Andalusian Dog and Scorpio Rising... We’ll start out with a dead black cat hanging from a tree, and we’ll pour gasoline over it and burn it up, tree and all, with smoke rising from the ground, all backlit, see, and then, vrrrooom!, three bikers come roaring out through the smoke, and...” It suddenly occurred to me that there was no place for Kazuko Matsui in a film like this. My little Bambi and surrealism didn’t mix.
“Scratch that,” I said.
Adama looked up from his notebook, where he’d written “Dead cat (black) / Gasoline / Three bikers,” and said “Eh?”
“Scratch that—films like that are a drag. Wait a minute. Okay, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll change the story completely.”
Iwase and Adama looked at each other.
“Here we go. The first scene will be a meadow in the highlands, in the morning. With the mist still hanging in the air. Somewhere like the meadows up on Mt. Aso.”
“The highlands? Morning?” Adama burst out laughing. “How do you get from a dead black cat to morning in the highlands?”
“Imagery, man, imagery. That’s the important thing, pure images. You understand that much, don’t you? Okay, the highlands. Then we’ll have the camera zoom down to a boy holding a flute.”
“Masutabe’s camera doesn’t have a zoom.”
“Adama, put a sock in it. We’ll worry about the details later, all right? So then the boy with the flute plays a tune. Something really beautiful.”
‘“Daisy Chain?”
“Right, that’s good. Any time you get a good idea like that, I wanna hear it. Then, after that, the girl appears,”
“Lady Jane.”
“Right. She’s wearing white clothes. Pure white. Not like a wedding dress, though, more like a negligee, something you can almost see through. We’ll have her ride in on a white horse.”
“Horse?” Adama, who was writing “Flute / White clothes (like negligee, not wedding dress),” raised his head and said, “A horse? A white horse?”
“Yeah.”
“Forget it. How we gonna get a white horse?”
“Don’t go all realistic on me, man. Imagery, imagery.”
“Imagery or no imagery, you can’t film something we haven’t got. You’re never gonna find a white horse—you can hardly even find a regular horse these days. Ken, how about a dog? The people next door to me have got a big white Akita.”
“A dog?”
“Yeah, name’s Whitey. He’s big enough, he could probably carry a girl on his back if he had to.”
“You have Kazuko Matsui come in riding on an Akita hound, everybody’s gonna crack up. Listen, you prick, you trying to turn this into a comedy?”
“Hey, cool it, guys,” Iwase said, and we stopped arguing immediately. Not because of Iwase’s intervention, though. An almond-eyed Claudia Cardinale look-alike wearing a Junwa Uniform had just walked in. She sat at the table next to ours and ordered tea with lemon. While the man who ran Boulevard was taking her order, I asked him to play Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, with
Zubin Mehta conducting. “Here we go again,” said Iwase. “Mr. Debonair. Berlioz, Mehta—that’s the only combination you know.” “Fuck you,”1 said. “I know The Four Seasons by I Musici, too.” Now it was Adama who was saying “Cool it, cool it.” Claudia Cardinale stood up with a shopping bag in her hand and disappeared into the restroom. When she reappeared, she was a different person: her hair was curled slightly inward to frame her face, she was wearing eyeliner and pink lipstick, her white and dark blue uniform had been transformed into a cream-colored dress, her black flats had become high heels, and the smell of nail polish hung in the air around her. We looked at her gleaming fingernails and sighed. She glared back at us and said, “What?” “Nothing, nothing,” we muttered, shaking our heads feebly, and she sniffed, brandishing a Hi-Lite Deluxe between her fingers and puckering her lips to expel a stream of blue smoke into the air, where it mingled with the first movement of Symphonie Fantastique. Ignoring Iwase, who was whispering “Don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it,” I turned to Claudia and said, “Would you like to be in a movie?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“We’re going to make an eight-millimeter movie. We’d like you to be in it.”
Claudia laughed loudly, showing us a set of pretty pink gums.
“You guys’re from Northern, aren’t you?” she said, ignoring my question. She mentioned the name of a certain punk in Shirokushi’s group and asked if we knew him. “Went to Aimitsu Junior High? Tall guy, kinda dreamy?”
We nodded, and she smiled and said to say hi to him. I asked her her name. It was Mie Nagayama. I’d leaned over to tell her a bit more about the movie when Iwase suddenly stood up, urging Adama to do the same, and they each grabbed one of my shirt sleeves and dragged me toward the door. Near the cash register we stepped aside to let three guys in the uniform of the industrial arts school pass. They all had flattops, high collars, and bell-bottom pants. They eyeballed us, and we did a quick about-face to avoid their gaze. It was the leader of a notorious Hardboy gang and two of his thugs. They sat down at Mie Nagayama’s table. When Mie waved goodbye to us, the gang leader turned and gave us a look. We paid our check in a hurry, stepped outside, and sprinted about a hundred meters. “So that’s Mie Nagayama,” Iwase said, panting and wheezing. Apparently she was famous. It wasn’t as if she was the gang leader’s property, he explained—she didn’t belong to anybody in particular, but she played around so much that she was always on the verge of being expelled. “Okay,” I said, “it’s decided. We’ll use her in the opening act of the festival.” Iwase glumly reported that the gang leader was in the kendo club and was in love with her. “He’ll beat you half to death with a wooden sword, Ken-san. Forget it.”
Adama laughed cheerfully. “Beaten to death with a wooden sword. Don’t come crying to me if that happens.”
The dreary rainy season came to an end. During a pool-cleaning session at school, I sneaked up behind the girls’ post-menopausal P.E. instructor and pushed her into the dirty water. Somebody snitched on me, and Cauliflower Aihara gave me thirteen hard ones across the face. On the achievement tests, Adama dropped eighty places. He’d been at the top in chemistry the year before, but this year he was down near the very bottom. The college entrance advisor yelled at me, saying I was trying to destroy the kid’s future. (Adama’s scores go down, and I get yelled at—I couldn’t figure that one out.) Iwase had his heart broken for the third time in his high school career, by a spiker on the girls’ volleyball team. As for Kazuko Matsui, I’d only had one more chance to speak to her, in the hallway at school. She asked me about Bookends. I stammered that I’d bring it next time, next time for sure. “Don’t worry,” said Bambi, with all the tenderness of an angel, “any time’s fine.” I had to make a success of the barricade at all costs, for my angel Bambi Lady Jane.
We were making good progress with the preparations. We would strike, as planned, the night before the end-of-school ceremony on July 19. We had the paint and a long roll of cloth for the banner, and the hideout was a hive of activity. The barricade required a total capital investment of 9,255 yen. Each of us chipped in a thousand.
“Everyone listen up.”
I was about to give them the final rundown.
“We’ll assemble at midnight, under the cherry tree by the pool. Whatever you do, don’t come by taxi. Otaki? You’ll walk from your house? Okay. Narushima, you’re walking, too, right? Fuse? Miyachi? You’re staying with Narushima? Good. Masutabe’s place is an inn, so I want Mizoguchi, Nakamura, and Hori to spend the night there. Leave the house separately, don’t walk together. Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourselves. And just to remind you: we’ll take the paint and wire, pliers, rope, and banner, one by one, to Masutabe’s and Narushima’s places beforehand. I want everybody to wear black that night. No leather shoes. Whatever we have left over—empty paint cans, extra rope, and so on—we’ll take back with us. Yamada and I will call the newspapers.”
Then, using red paint on the white cloth, I wrote “Power to the Imagination.” It felt great.
Three days before the big event, Iwase came to our classroom to tell Adama and me he wanted out. In the deep shade cast by the glaring summer sun of Kyushu, he told us, with tears in his eyes, that the idea of a barricade just didn’t agree with him. “I’m sorry, Ken-san, I’m sorry, Adama. I’ll help set things up, and I’ll help with the festival, but I don’t like this barricade stuff...” The gist of what he was saying seemed to be that there wasn’t any serious political motive behind it, that I was just doing it to look like a big shot. This really got me down, and I confessed as much to Adama when Iwase left. “What’s the difference?” he said. “Who needs politics? We’re doing it because it’s fun, aren’t we? Ken, if it’s fun, that’s enough.” Even so, I could tell he felt as bummed out as I did.
And then July 19 arrived.
POWER TO THE IMAGINATION
I had to leave my house at eleven, and that wasn’t easy to do. My mother and little sister and grandparents were all asleep, but my father was still up. He was watching the “11 P.M.” show. Every night since this program began, he’d been staying up past his bedtime.
Our house, like most houses in Sasebo, was built on the side of a mountain. The only ones on the narrow strip of level ground belonged to the American military and a handful of people who’d got rich catering to them in one way or another.
With my father still awake, I couldn’t risk going out the front door. The house stood on a slope, and the back door opened onto one of the long, narrow flights of stone steps that linked all the roads in the neighborhood. My room was on the second floor. First I had to tell my father I was turning in for the night. I knocked on the door of his studio.
“Goodnight, Father dear.”
I guess you know I didn’t really talk to him that way. What I actually said was, “Hey, I’m goin’ to bed.”
He’s sitting there getting his jollies watching the bikini girls on the “11 P.M.” show, but he turns in his chair and fixes me with a solemn sort of look. “Already? Why?” he said, and started telling me about how when he was in middle school before the war he used to stay up studying till 4:00 A.M.; but then he stopped short, remembering what was on the TV screen probably, and, clearing his throat, said, “Ken, I don’t want you doing anything to upset your mother.” My heart stopped. Did he know what I was up to? No, he couldn’t possibly, but... I don’t want you doing anything to upset your mother. Shit. What a time to start preaching at me. I went back up to the second floor, changed my clothes, and climbed quietly onto the clothes-drying platform. There was a full moon. Being careful not to make a sound, I slipped into my basketball shoes. (We didn’t say “sneakers” in those days, we called them bashu— short for basketball shoes.) From the platform I crawled down to the first-floor roof. Right in front of me was a little cemetery. A row of gravestones glistened in the moonlight at about the same level as the roof, being higher up the slope. I jumped down into the cemetery—or, rather, I jumped onto
a gravestone. I wasn’t what you’d call religious, but I felt a bit guilty doing that. I always used this particular grave when I sneaked out to go to cafés or a porno film or Adama’s boarding-house, and I was sure the occupant would put a curse on me someday. When I was a little kid, my grandfather had a friend, a bald-headed old guy who’d been a commander in the navy. My grandfather had only been a lieutenant commander, so Baldy lorded it over him even then, more than a decade after the war had ended. Baldy would come over in the middle of the day to drink, and my grandfather would tipple right along with him. I liked Baldy because he always brought me a new picture book when he came. But he had a bad habit: whenever he got drunk, he’d step outside and piss in the cemetery. My grandmother hated that and always said he’d be sorry, that one of these days he’d be cursed and die; and then one day his heart gave out and he really did drop dead. I was convinced he’d had a hex put on him. So whenever I slipped out to the all-night porno flicks or whatever, I’d press my palms together as I stepped on the gravestone and say Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, over and over again. I prayed this time, too, but it was different now. I wasn’t going to a dirty movie; I was going to barricade the school. Revolution. Surely the spirits of the dead would let this one slide.
Everybody was there by midnight, standing under the cherry tree next to the pool. We divided into two teams: one to paint graffiti, and one to seal off the doorway to the roof and hang the banner. I was with the graffitists. So was Adama. It was more dangerous for the roof team: after barricading the door, they had to climb back down on ropes. I suckered Narushima, Otaki, and all but one of the other kids into taking the roof by telling them it was the most revolutionary part of the whole operation. Adama was afraid of heights, and I just didn’t want to risk getting hurt.