69

by Ryu Murakami

  This was no surprise. Whenever the school summoned my parents, it was always my mother who showed up. I preferred it that way, too. I didn’t want to see my father standing beside me apologizing for something I’d done.

  “Look them in the eye,” he said. “When the principal’s dressing you down, don’t look away or bow your head. I don’t want you groveling to those people. There’s no reason to swagger, but you don’t need to be obsequious, either. It’s not as if you killed anybody or held someone up or raped them or something. You believed in what you were doing, and now you’ve got to take the consequences.”

  I felt tears brimming up. Ever since the bust, we’d been under constant attack by adults. My father was the first to offer any sort of encouragement.

  “If the revolution comes, you boys could end up being heroes, and the principal could be the one hanging from a rope. That’s the way these things go.”

  He started waving the sparklers around again. Sparklers burn themselves out in no time at all...

  But they’re beautiful.

  This was the first time I’d ever passed through a school gate with my mother at my side. Even at elementary school, it had been my grandfather who accompanied me to the opening ceremony—my parents couldn’t go because they were both teaching.

  On the way in, we met Adama’s mother. She was tall, with features a lot like Adama’s but more firmly molded. My mother bowed to her, saying, “I don’t know how to apologize for all the trouble my son has caused you.” I pulled her aside and whispered, “What the hell’re you doing? You don’t have to apologize to Adama’s mother.” Her reply was that even as a little boy, I was always the ringleader; “It’s become part of your character,” she said. Adama’s mother looked at me with eyes that said So this is the boy who led my dear little Tadashi astray, but I smiled and gave her a cheerful “Hello! I’m Ken Yazaki.” That was part of my character, too.

  The principal’s ruling was “Indefinite confinement at home.”

  ‘“Indefinite,’ of course, doesn’t mean forever,” he told us. “The period of time will be determined according to the extent to which you are judged to have shown regret for your behavior. Your graduation and admission to college depend on this, so we strongly advise you to avoid any further lapses and hope that both you and your parents will give some serious thought to the reasons for this situation.”

  “He wasn’t expelled,” my mother told my father over the phone, tears running down her face. The word “confinement” made me think of solitary confinement, which was pretty depressing, but the realization that our punishment actually meant I could ditch school without even being sneaky about it cheered me up a lot.

  As we were walking back to the front gate, Yuji Shirokushi, the head Greaser, stuck his head out the window of a classroom in the middle of a supplementary lecture and shouted, “Ken-yan! Adama! What happened?” My mother got all flustered and flapped about in front of me, telling me to behave myself, but I ignored her and shouted back in a voice that echoed all around the courtyard: “We didn’t get expelled! We’re confined to our homes!” The members of my band, and the kids in our class, and Masutabe’s supporters in the second year, and Shirokushi’s Greaser underlings, and, and, and, and, and, and Kazuko Matsui, all looked out the windows of their various rooms and waved. I waved back—to Lady Jane.

  Confinement at home technically meant that you weren’t supposed to step outside your house at all, but since that was likely to drive anyone nuts and undermine the rehabilitation process, we were allowed a minimum of freedom referred to as “neighborhood outings.”

  I didn’t miss anything much. I couldn’t go to any movies or jazz cafés, of course, but my house wasn’t far from the center of town, so I managed to keep myself amused, sucking popsicles and playing with our dog in the park and the area near the base, visiting bookstores and record shops, spying on the house where the groupies tangled with their sailor boys, and meeting my sister’s friend Torigai-san.

  Adama’s situation was hell compared to mine. He’d had to leave his boardinghouse and move back home. The coal mines were on the verge of closing down because of an economic slump, and the place was practically a ghost town. They had a shoe store, a dry goods store, a stationery store, and a clothing store, and that was about it. Just about the only things in the clothing store were white cotton socks, the stationery store had nothing but rag paper, there was no instant curry in the dry goods store, and all the shoe store had in stock were split-toed canvas workshoes. Rumors that the mines were to be closed had been circulating for a couple of years now, and people were leaving in droves. All you saw on the streets were shuffling bands of old geezers who couldn’t have moved away even if they’d wanted to.

  You could hardly expect a seventeen-year-old kid who’d learned about Led Zeppelin and Jean Genet and doggy style to be happy about being stuck in a town like that.

  I, however, was so bubbly and so eager to put on my goody-goody act for the teachers who came to check up on me that more than once my father shook his head and asked me where I’d learned to be such a cunning little bastard. I’d serve them a glass of cold barley tea and smile and chatter away—things that Adama, apparently, found it hard to do.

  “They make me sick.” I don’t know how many times he told me this over the phone. All he did was get into arguments with his supervisors.

  “They make me sick.”

  “Come on, man. Don’t get so uptight.”

  “Ken, they all tell me you’re really sorry about what we did. That true?”

  “It’s just a pose, man.”

  “A pose?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What sort of pose is that? Huh? Where’s your sense of shame? What would Che have said?”

  “Look, man, take it easy, will you?”

  “Ken, what about the festival?”

  “We’ll do it.”

  “You finish the script?”

  “Almost.”

  “Hurry up and send it to me. I’ll start getting the stuff we need together—whatever I can find up here, at least.”

  “What’s that likely to be? Workshoes? I don’t think we’re gonna need any slag heaps, either.”

  Adama in confinement didn’t appreciate jokes like this. He slammed the phone down. I called him right back and apologized.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. Don’t be so touchy, man. I’ll finish the script soon and mail it to you, I promise. And listen, I was thinking about the opening—for the festival, I mean. Remember that girl we met at Boulevard? Mie Nagayama, the one from Junwa? We’ll have her wearing a negligee and holding a candle in one hand, and the music’ll be Bach, the Brandenburg Concerto no. 3, see, and she’ll have an axe in her other hand, and up on the stage there’ll be big plywood boards with pictures of Northern High teachers and the prime minister and Lyndon Johnson, and she’ll start hacking away at them with her axe. Pretty cool, eh?”

  This restored Adama’s spirits a little. The festival was the only thing that was keeping him going. I knew how he felt. With the barricade now behind us, we were all looking forward to the next celebration.

  CHEAP THRILLS

  Matsunaga, the teacher in charge of our class, was one of the skinniest people I’ve ever known, having had TB for years when he was young. He was a mild-mannered guy, the type who’d probably never raised his voice in his life.

  Throughout summer vacation he came to my house at least every other day. Being a quiet sort of person, though, he never said much other than “How’s it going?” or “You’re not letting this get to you, I hope.” He also looked in on Adama just as often. Adama, apparently, would snarl at him, accusing all teachers of being stooges or capitalist lackeys, but Matsunaga would just nod and smile wryly and comment on the sunflowers in the garden or whatever, and then, after a while, he’d leave.

  His visits came on top of a full day of giving supplementary lessons at school, and involved taking a bus to my place, then going on later to Adama’s mining to
wn. I could see the bus stop from my bedroom window. After getting off the bus, you had to walk up a narrow lane and a long flight of stone steps. I used to watch Matsunaga huff and puff his way up the slope, stopping any number of times to rest—a teacher with a history of lung problems trudging uphill to arrive at my house dripping with sweat, not to lecture me or anything but just to ask how it was going... I soon found it hard to hate him.

  “You may not understand this yet, Yazaki, but I’ll tell you anyway. When I was in teachers’ college I had six major operations—my chest is a mass of ugly scars. I even had fainting spells and so on. It was frightening, but, you know, people can get used to anything. I actually got used to the operations and the anesthesia and the blackouts, and I started to think, oh well, nothing really matters that much. In summer, for example, there are sunflowers and cannas and other things in bloom, and all I have to do is look at them to feel that way—that nothing really matters much.”

  Matsunaga used to say things like this from time to time. I’d stopped putting him down and had even begun to respect him, to think he was a hell of a teacher, in fact, but Adama and I were both a long way from “nothing really matters.”

  Adama was growing surlier each day, and by the time the second semester started, I too was getting pretty restless. The streets of a provincial city are empty of kids and grownup men on weekday mornings; there’s no one around but housewives and pensioners and infants and dogs. I remembered how unfamiliar the town had seemed whenever I came home early from elementary school. The smell of cut flowers would drift from under the half-raised shutter of the florist’s; the owner of the shoe store would be just opening up for the day, dusting his shelves and yawning; the sounds of TV shows I’d never seen would murmur out of open windows; nursery school children would be dancing in a circle behind a wire fence, and old men would be crouched in the shade of trees, laughing together. The town was like a stranger to me then.

  This was the town I was confined to now that summer vacation had ended. I began to worry about my attendance figures, because I’d ditched a lot of classes even before my suspension. Just to think about being held back a year was enough to make me shudder. There was no way I could take another year at that school.

  One day when it was too rainy to take the dog for a walk and I was sitting at home playing the drums, the doorbell rang. Standing on the front step was Adama’s mother.

  “Do you remember me, Ken? I wonder if I could have a word with you.”

  She sounded pretty miserable.

  “Please don’t tell Tadashi about this, though. He’d be angry.”

  I was surprised to find that there wasn’t a trace of Adama’s accent in her voice.

  “I know coming here won’t solve anything, but I don’t have anyone else to discuss it with. I suppose you know that the mines in our town are on the verge of closing? Well, these are difficult times for my husband, and he’s just too busy right now to concern himself with Tadashi’s problems.”

  She stiffened slightly and pressed a white handkerchief to her neck and forehead. Oh, no, I thought. What if she starts crying on me?

  “I haven’t talked to him for two or three days,” I said. “Is he doing all right?”

  Adama’s mother gave a heavy sigh and shook her head. She didn’t say anything for a while. Don't tell me he's gone insane, I thought, and the thought terrified me. It was always the cool, calm, and collected types like Adama who tended to suddenly crack under pressure. Don't tell me he's tying ribbons in his hair, wearing a flower-print yukata, and sitting at the organ, drooling and playing “My Little Butterfly”...

  “To be honest, I’ve never seen Tadashi like this before.”

  So it was true... I bet he sits outside at night howling at the moon rising over the slag heaps.

  “Of all our children, Tadashi is the most like me. He was always such a good boy, so well-behaved. If anything, I sometimes worried if he wasn’t a bit too... placid for a child. He never got emotional about things.”

  I thought about telling her she was wrong there, that I’d seen him almost in tears after watching the boxing cartoon “Joe Tomorrow,” and snorting and gulping as he flipped through girlie magazines, but I decided not to.

  “And now he gets so worked up, so rude to his teachers... He’s become more and more distant, even with me.”

  I considered telling her that it would be even stranger for a high school senior to be still clinging to his mother’s apron strings, but I didn’t. Her eyes were filling with tears.

  “Before he was confined to the house, he used to talk about you often, about his friend Ken. I... That’s why I thought I’d like to talk with you a bit. What do you think about all this?”

  “All what?”

  “Well, college entrance exams, for example.”

  “What do I think of college entrance exams? Not much. Education in Japan today is designed not just to turn out useful members of society, but to sort people out and classify them as tools of the capitalist nation-state...”

  I went on and on, discussing everything from the Joint Campus Action movement, Marxism, the lessons of the 1960 Security Treaty fracas, Camus’s absurdist novels, suicide and free sex, Naziism, Stalin, the emperor system and religion, the mobilization of students, the Beatles, and nihilism... down to the degenerate apathy of the old man who ran the local barbershop.

  “I’m afraid I don’t really understand most of that...”

  I could hardly say “Of course you don’t; I don’t really understand it either,” so I told her that the generation gap was no one’s fault and nothing to be ashamed of. I hadn’t talked so much in a long time, and it made my throat dry. It was no fun talking to Matsunaga—all you got for your efforts was a wry smile—and it was too embarrassing trying to talk to my parents about things like this because we used the local dialect. Try discussing, for example, Camus’s The Plague in dialect and it would come out sounding something like: “Da Plague, see, it don’ be jus’ ’bout some disease. Be a metaphor, be a symbol for Fascism, Communism, stuff like dat.” Anybody could tell immediately that you were just mouthing someone else’s ideas. Chatting with your friend’s mother, though, was a breeze. She’d never changed your diapers, or slapped you and made you cry after you’d fought with your little sister over a sweet roll, or worn herself out carrying you around strapped to her back. You could say the first thing that came into your head and convince yourself it sounded intelligent.

  “But I do understand to some extent. During the war I did clerical work for an antiaircraft battalion, and I saw soldiers being killed in air raids. You and Tadashi, you’re trying to make a world where things like that don’t happen, aren’t you?”

  I wasn’t about to tell her that, no, I was only trying to draw attention to myself and attract girls.

  “Actually, I think Tadashi’s beginning to calm down a bit. Friends come to see him sometimes now, and... Oh, well, I know it’s not really allowed, but Mr. Matsunaga has been kind enough to overlook it once or twice. Just yesterday two very nice girls dropped by on their way home from the beach.”

  “Eh?” 1 raised my head and gaped at her. “Girls? You mean from our school?”

  “Yes. They’re in a different class, though, I believe. A very sweet girl named Matsui-san, and another called Sato-san, I think, tall and rather attractive...”

  Blood rushed to my head, and I didn’t hear the rest. Lady Jane and Ann-Margret had been to Adama’s house. Why would two refined, intelligent, courageous, and beautiful women go visit a guy who spoke a dialect you needed an interpreter to understand? And how could any “Lady” be so fickle as to deceive and abandon the knight-in-shining-armor who’d presented her with a copy of Cheap Thrills? On their way home from the beach, did she say? Don’t tell me they were in their bathing suits? No, surely not, but still... Lady Jane, with white strap-lines decorating her shoulders, fragrant with suntan lotion, goes way way way way way out in the boondocks, where there’s nothing but slag heaps, to e
at watermelon pulled fresh from some farmer’s patch and cooled in a nearby mountain stream. And me? I get to console Adama’s mother. Air raids? So what? You want to talk about real injustice? When Meursault shot the Arab, he blamed it all on the sun. I felt like Camus.

  Life is absurd.

  I telephoned Adama, still burning with rage.

  “Hey, Ken,” he said. “My mother went to your house today, right?” What the hell. He knew all about it. “Sorry. She still there?”

  “Just left.”

  “Your parents there?”

  “They’re both teaching.”

  “Oh, that’s right. So you were alone together?”

  “I was the perfect host. Gave her a baumkuchen and a glass of barley tea.”

  “Listen, you didn’t, ah... you didn’t...”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t try to kiss her, did you?”

  “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “Hey, just kidding. No, see, when she asked me for your address today, I figured she was going to your place. So she really went, eh? What’d she have to say?”

  I didn’t answer. I was pissed off, and I had my pride to maintain. How was I supposed to bring up the Lady Jane problem? A man who’s been deceived by the one he loves is at a big disadvantage.

  “What did you talk about? Don’t tell me you sat there bad-mouthing me together.”

  “No, the truth is... Listen, Adama, don’t let this get you down.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t go into shock on me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nah, never mind. I can’t bring myself to tell you anyway.”

  “What? Let’s hear it.”

  “I’d cut out my tongue before I’d tell you.”

  “It’s about me?”

  “Of course it’s about you.”