69

by Ryu Murakami

  We were all set to roll when Fuse, a dark and filthy-minded little guy said, “Wait a minute.”

  “What’s the problem, man? We’ve just gone over everything.”

  A hesitant, lecherous smile spread over Fuse’s face.

  “It’s just that, uh, well, you don’t get a chance like this very often.”

  Chance?

  “I checked a while ago, and it wasn’t locked.”

  Locked?

  “The girls’ changing room. Can’t we just take, like, five minutes and have a look inside?” He gave a horny little chuckle.

  There was only one way to respond to this.

  “Look, you fucking asshole, we’re here on a sacred mission, and you want to peek in the girls’ changing room? If that’s where your head’s at, man, the whole thing’s a failure before we’ve even started.”

  But nobody said anything of the sort. We all agreed to Fuse’s plan immediately.

  A sweet fragrance wafted here and there inside the room. It wasn’t that the whole place smelled that way. As you groped about in the dark, you’d suddenly get a whiff of the unmistakable scent of a young girl blossoming into womanhood. Nobody swims with their underwear on, which meant that girls got totally naked here—that’s what all of us were thinking. Everybody was running their hands along the shelves against the wall. I told them to stop, that they were leaving fingerprints, but when Masutabe found a slip in the corner of a bottom shelf, they all went apeshit and began a frantic search for other things that might have been left behind.

  It pissed me off that they weren’t obeying my rule about wearing gloves, and I conferred with Adama.

  “What are we going to do about fingerprints? They’re all over those shelves.”

  “Relax. The cops don’t have your prints on file unless you’ve got a record, right?” Adama kept his cool even in the midst of mayhem. “You think they’re going to dust for prints in the girls’ changing room, then check them against every kid in school? No way. It’s not like a murder or something.”

  “Ken-san...” Nakamura, one of the second-year students, stepped between us. “I’m sorry,” he said in a very small voice, “but... I’m done for.” He seemed on the verge of tears.

  “Done for?” Adama tensed up. “What do you mean?”

  “My fingerprints. I forgot my gloves, and my fingerprints are on those shelves.”

  “Don’t worry. They’re not gonna start poking around in a place like this. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know whose prints they were anyway.”

  “They, they’ll know mine. Our first year in junior high, we made salt, okay? As a science experiment. And I got sodium hydroxide on my fingers, and my fingerprints melted off. My brother said there’s probably nobody else in Japan with hands like mine, he said I should go on that TV show ‘To Tell the Truth.’ Almost everybody in my class knows about it. They call me ‘Unprintable.’ So I knew I had to wear gloves tonight, but when I touched that slip Masutabe found, I just forgot all about it, and now what am I gonna do?”

  We reached out and felt his fingertips. Sure enough, the pads were smooth, like scar tissue.

  “Amazing.”

  Eventually we stopped laughing, and Adama was able to persuade him there was nothing to worry about.

  I had slipped into a silent reverie, reflecting that Kazuko Matsui changed her clothes here, too, when Fuse the Lecher found a wallet. He announced his discovery and shone his flashlight on it, waving it for everyone to see.

  “You asshole!” I shouted, and even Adama the Cool clucked his tongue. A wallet was trouble. Whoever lost the thing was sure to report it, and somebody could end up searching the changing room. For all we knew, we might have left some clues behind: a piece of paper, footprints, hair. I told Fuse to put it back where he found it, but he just gaped at me with a moronic expression on his face and said he’d forgotten which shelf it was on. Otaki and Narushima said why bother, just rip it off, and Unprintable Nakamura suggested that if we found out who the owner was we could slip it in her locker later. We decided to look inside. It was your average girl’s wallet, plastic, with a picture of Snoopy on the front. Inside were a couple of thousand-yen bills, one five-hundred bill, and a bus pass. We read the name on the pass and burst out laughing: it belonged to the post-menopausal P.E. instructor I’d pushed into the pool two weeks before. She was an unmarried woman with great sagging buns and jutting cheekbones. Our pet name for her was Fumi-chan. Also inside the wallet were coins, a button, a wrinkled business card, a movie ticket stub, and a photograph. The photo was a black-and-white shot of Fumi-chan as a young woman, standing next to a man with a face like a cucumber in an old Imperial Navy uniform. We all sighed. What could be more pathetic than a dried-up, saggy-assed, war widow P.E. teacher with two thousand five hundred yen in her wallet? “Pick a shelf and put it back,” Adama said, and everybody nodded.

  “Smash the National Athletic Meet.”

  I wrote this on one pillar of the school’s front gate in blue paint, slapping it on hard so it would sink into the rough stone surface. On the other pillar Adama wrote “Fight the Good Fight.” I told him not to use corny crap like that, but Adama, cool as ever, said it was good camouflage, that it would make it harder to come up with a clear profile of the culprits.

  We’d banned the use of flashlights inside the school grounds. In the front courtyard was a carefully tended flower bed and, above it, the V-shaped main building, looming up as a dark triangle in the moonlight. Just looking at the building made me sick. On the window of the teachers’ room I wrote “Running Dogs of the Power Structure” in blue paint, except for “Dogs,” which I did in red. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but it felt muggy to me, and I’d begun to sweat inside my thick T-shirt. “To Arms, Comrades,” I daubed on the wall of the library. Nakamura came up and whispered that the roof team had entered the school via the emergency exit next to the gym. “All right, let’s go inside,” I said.

  As soon as we’d got in, I stopped, afraid of leaving any evidence behind: I’d let some drops of sweat fall on the concrete floor, and I waited for them to dry before moving on down a long corridor where the third-year science classrooms were. The graffiti team consisted of Adama, Nakamura, and me. “I’ll probably never be this nervous again in my whole life,” Nakamura sputtered through trembling lips. “Shut up, you asshole,” Adama hissed. Though I was sweating, my own lips were bone dry and my throat was parched. We went past the teachers’ room, the administrative office, and the principal’s office to the front entrance. Most of the kids at school came in through these doors each day of the week. With large strokes of red paint, I wrote “Kill!” on the wall. Nakamura gasped and asked if that wasn’t going too far. Adama hissed at him again and pointed off to the right of the entrance. The watchmen’s room. There were two watchmen, an old guy and a young one. The light wasn’t on, though; they’d probably watched the “11 P.M.” show and gone to sleep. On the floor just inside the main doors I scrawled “You’re All Brain-dead! Fuck Higher Education!” Nakamura began shaking like a junkie in withdrawal. He was squatting next to one of the columns, doing nothing to help. “This isn’t cool,” Adama whispered to me. I could tell he was nervous, too—he kept licking his lips. The building was absolutely silent, and the only light was from the moon, streaming in through the windows; it was like being on a different planet. The fact that this was a place we clattered through in a noisy crowd almost every day only made the tension worse. We pulled Nakamura to his feet and dragged him away from the entrance, as far as the door of the principal’s office. Getting away from the watchmen’s room was a bit of a relief, but now Nakamura was hyperventilating. “Asshole,” I said. “Go back to the pool.” Nakamura shook his head. “You don’t understand. I... I...” Sweat was pouring down his face. “What? What is it?” Nakamura wagged his head again. Adama shook him by the shoulders. “Tell us. What is it? Ken and me are scared, too, man. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. What’s the problem?”

  “I ha
ve to go doo-doo.”

  It wasn’t fair: why should his bowel problems give us a stomachache? I rolled on the floor trying to smother my laughter, with my right hand over my mouth and my left holding my belly, heaving with hiccoughing spasms. Adama was doing the same. Tension only encourages laughter: it’s never so hard to stop laughing as when you mustn’t laugh. All we had to do was mutter “doo-doo” and the giggles would burst in our guts, then come bubbling up our throats. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the saddest things that had ever happened to me: the New Year’s Day when my parents hadn’t bought me the Patton tank model I’d wanted; the time my father had had an affair and my mother left home for three days; my little sister being hospitalized with asthma; the pigeon that didn’t come back when I let it loose; the time I dropped my pocket money at a local festival; a penalty shootout in the prefectural junior high soccer finals, which our team lost. None of them worked. Adama had both hands over his mouth and was shuddering and wheezing. I’d never realized how hard it could be to control the giggles. I drew a picture of Kazuko Matsui in my mind: her slender, milky calves, her Bambi eyes, her white arms, the awesome curve of the nape of her neck—and the spasms finally stopped. Such is the power of beautiful women: they can even stifle laughter, make a man sober and serious. After a while Adama, too, stood up, drenched with sweat. He told me later he’d pictured the charred corpses he’d once seen after a mine explosion. Being forced to remember a scene like that must have made him angry: he rapped Nakamura on the head with his fist.

  “Asshole. I thought I was going to lose my mind,” I said and quietly opened the door to the principal’s office. “Hey, Nakamura.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it diarrhea?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you do it right away?”

  “It’s already poking its head out.”

  “Do it up there.”

  “Eh?” he said, and his jaw dropped. I was pointing at the principal’s desk. “I can’t do that.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t do it? It’s your punishment for making us laugh and nearly getting us busted. If we were real guerrillas, we’d have killed you right then and there.”

  Nakamura was close to tears, but we wouldn’t let him off the hook. Bathed in moonlight, he climbed up onto the desk.

  “Don’t look, okay?” he said in a pitiful voice as he pulled down his pants.

  “If you think it’s going to get noisy, stop,” Adama whispered, holding his nose.

  “Stop? Once it starts coming out, I can’t stop.”

  “You wanna get thrown out of school?”

  “Can’t I do it in the toilet?”

  “Nope.”

  Nakamura’s white ass shone in the moonlight.

  “I’m too nervous. It won’t come out.”

  “Push,” Adama said, and that’s when it happened.

  Along with a little whimpering cry, Nakamura let out a tremendous fart. It sounded like a broken bagpipe. Adama ran up to him and whispered, “Keep it down! Plug up your ass with something!”

  “It’s too late,” Nakamura said.

  The noise was incredibly loud and seemed to go on forever. I got goosebumps all over and turned to look toward the watchmen’s room. If we got expelled for a fart, we’d be the laughingstock of the school, but they still seemed to be asleep. Nakamura wiped his ass with the monthly newsletter of the

  Nagasaki Prefectural High School Principals Association, and smiled sheepishly.

  The other team had nearly finished barricading the door to the roof with wire and desks and chairs. Otaki told us wistfully that it would have been even better if he’d had welding equipment.

  Narushima and Masutabe were the only ones left on the roof. After securing the door from the outside with wire, they had to slide down a rope to a window on the third floor. We all watched them from the courtyard in front of the school. Narushima had been in the mountain-climbing club, so we weren’t worried about him.

  “What’ll we do if Masutabe falls?” Otaki said. “Might as well decide that now.”

  “We’ll call the cops and run.” It was, of course, Adama who made this decision. “Hell, if we try to help him, we’ll all be busted.”

  Masutabe, unlike Narushima, was swaying back and forth on the rope. Fuse said he wouldn’t be surprised if the kid was pissing his pants. I told them about Nakamura’s revolutionary bowel movement, and everyone doubled up laughing.

  Masutabe somehow managed to make it down safely. The banner was hanging from the roof.

  “Power to the Imagination.”

  We all stood silently gazing up at it.

  JUST LIKE A WOMAN

  At six o’clock in the morning, Adama and I made seven telephone calls: to the local branches of the Asahi, Mainichi, and Tomiuri newspapers, the main offices of both the Western Japan News and the Nagasaki Post, and the broadcasting stations NHK Sasebo and NBC Nagasaki.

  The purpose of the calls was to issue a communiqué:

  “Before dawn this morning, members of Vajra, the radical organization we belong to, carried out a successful mission to set up a barricade in one of the strongholds of the system’s propaganda machine, Sasebo Northern High School.”

  That’s what we’d intended to say, but since we were new to this sort of thing, it turned out more like, “Um, listen, it, uh... it looks like somebody barricaded Northern High in Sasebo, okay?”

  It didn’t matter, though. Thanks to this announcement, the mass media discovered the barricade and graffiti before the watchmen, the teachers, the students, or the people in the neighborhood.

  NHK and NBC reported it on the 7:00 A.M. local news.

  Too nervous and excited to sleep, I was lying in bed checking for about the hundredth time that there weren’t any paint stains on me, when my father, who’d just been watching the news, came into my room. There was a scary look on his face.

  “Ken-bo,” he said, using my childhood nickname. My parents had called me just plain “Ken” since around my last year of elementary school, but whenever relations between us were strained they reverted to “Ken-bo.” Maybe it was their instinctive way of showing they missed the good old days when I was still a little kid. At any rate, I knew the barricade had been on the news as soon as I heard him call me this.

  “Ken-bo, look me in the eye,” he said.

  My father had been an art teacher for twenty years. He frowned and peered at me, confident in his ability to tell when children were lying. I looked back at him with no sleep and the aftermath of intense excitement written all over my face, but apparently he decided I was innocent. Even a veteran teacher can be a pushover when it comes to his own kids. The fact that a lot of ultra-radicals were the sons and daughters of schoolteachers was often attributed to their strict upbringing, but the truth is that just behind that apparent strictness was a tendency to spoil them rotten. Teaching is a strange profession. It’s like being an officer in the Self-Defense Forces, or a policeman. Though most people in these positions are just your average slobs, the general public—at least in the provinces—still treats them almost with reverence. This isn’t something they’ve earned for themselves but a throwback to the prewar years, when respect was their reward for cooperating with the fascist system; and old habits die hard. As a teacher, my father had always been quick to resort to corporal punishment. It wasn’t only students he got rough with, either: he’d been known to slug the principal at his school and the head of the PTA. He never hit me, though. I once asked why, and he said his own children were just so damned lovable he couldn’t bring himself to hit them. He was an honest old guy.

  “Okay,” he said. “You didn’t do it, did you.”

  I rubbed my eyes, pretending to be still half asleep. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Somebody barricaded Northern High.”

  I opened my eyes wide and sprang out of bed. I slipped on my trousers in three seconds, my shirt in four, and my socks in two. Seeing what a flap I was
in seemed to make my father even more convinced of my innocence. I dashed downstairs and out the door, calling out to my mother that I didn’t need any breakfast, and ran down the road at full tilt for about a hundred meters—then slowed to a saunter.

  When I got to the bottom of the hill in front of the school, I could see the banner.

  “Power to the Imagination.”

  It was a stirring sight. All on our own, we’d managed to change the scenery.

  I climbed the hill with my heart pounding. The physics teacher and about a dozen students were at the front gate, trying to scrub off the graffiti. The smell of paint thinner filled the air. There was something downright disgusting about these kids in their eagerness to see the scenery return to normal. Someone from a radio station was interviewing them:

  “Who do you think could have done this?”

  “It wasn’t anyone here. Northern High students wouldn’t ever do something like this,” said a disgusting girl with blue paint caked under her fingernails. Her voice was choked with tears.

  When I got to the classroom Adama smiled at me and winked, and when no one was looking we shook hands.

  Eight-thirty came and went, and homeroom still hadn’t begun. Announcements over the P.A. system told us to wait in our classrooms, but the whole school was in pandemonium. Helicopters hovered overhead. One team of disgusting students was helping the P.E. instructors dismantle the stuff on the roof. Another object of disgust—the vice president of the student council—was working away with a thinner-soaked rag in an effort to erase the red “Kill!” I’d painted near the front entrance. When he spotted me, he dashed over. His eyes were red; he’d been kneeling there crying as he scrubbed at the paint. He grabbed hold of my collar with the hand that held the rag.

  “Yazaki, it wasn’t you, was it? Huh? You didn’t do it, did you, you weren’t the one, were you? I just can’t believe any Northern student would do this to his own school, but tell me, come on, tell me you didn’t do it, tell me, dammit, tell me!”