by Ryu Murakami
“C’mon, man, tell me. Please?”
“Promise you won’t freak?”
“Spit it out.”
“Well, it seems your mother talked it over with your father, and they’re thinking about pulling you out of school and putting you to work. You’ve got relatives in Okayama, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Apparently they want you to work in an orchard up there. By next week you’ll be up to your neck in peaches.”
“What’s the matter, man? You’re losing your touch.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Being a brilliant liar was about the only thing you had going for you, too.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Just kidding. Oh, by the way...” Adama chortled. Cool-headed people don’t do much chortling, and when they do it’s not a pretty sound. “Matsui and Sato came to see me yesterday.”
“What!” I said, feigning surprise.
“They said they were on their way home from swimming at Utanoura.”
Utanoura was a beach just down the road from Adama’s house.
“Is that right?” I sounded aloof, indifferent.
“I tell you, though, man, I’m not used to getting things like this from chicks. I don’t really like it, you know?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“This letter I got. It’s just not my kind of thing.”
“Letter? A love letter?”
“Well...”
“A love letter?”
“Well, I guess you’d call it that. It’s in this kind of old-fashioned language. You know, ‘To express my admiration and respect,’ and all that. It’s not for me, man. Give me Rimbaud any day.”
The world went dark before my eyes.
“Oh, yeah, and Matsui asked me to give her your address, so I did. You don’t mind, right?”
“I couldn’t care less about Matsui. Chicks like that, I tell you, man, they got no brains, no culture, no sense of gratitude...”
“You serious?”
“Sure, man, I mean, what kind of a broad is that? I give her a copy of Cheap Thrills and she doesn’t even send me a thank-you note. Look at my father—he writes to thank people every single time he gets a present.”
“Present? That was Ezaki’s record.”
“To hell with her, anyway.”
“I like Matsui, man, she’s got class. I bet you wouldn’t catch her writing this old-fashioned crap, like Sato.”
“What?”
“Sato’s got big knockers, but Matsui’s a lot smarter.”
“Adama. The love letter was from Sato?”
“Yeah.”
A light came on in my brain. Ten thousand watts.
“Matsui’s not human, man, she’s an angel, she’s in human form but she’s an angel sent to me by God.”
After expressing an inability to figure out how my brain worked, Adama told me to hurry up and finish the script, then hung up.
That evening, a bouquet of roses was delivered to my house.
“Aren’t they pretty!” my sister said, clapping her hands. “They’re for you, Ken? It’s like in the movies!” I held her hand and we skipped around the room together singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
There was a note attached to the bouquet: “Hoping these seven red roses will take your mind off your troubles, if only for a while... Jane.”
My sister arranged the flowers in a glass vase for me. I put them on my desk and gazed at them all night long. Camus was wrong.
Life wasn’t absurd.
It was rose-colored.
I finished the film script in two days. The title was Etude for a Baby Doll and a High School Boy. Long titles were popular back then. I stayed up till dawn writing it.
My father once told me about something that happened when I was three, at a swimming pool he took me to. I’d nearly drowned in the sea once before, so I was afraid of water and wouldn’t go in. He tried yelling at me, coaxing me, prodding me with a stick, and bribing me with ice cream, but I just kept screaming and crying. Then a cute little girl about my age appeared. She called to me from the pool. I hesitated but finally jumped in—for her sake.
When I finished the script I took a short nap, then started right in on the text for the play. It took me three days to write it. The title was Beyond the Blood-Red Sea of Negativity and Rebellion. There were only two characters—a young divorcee and her younger brother, who’d failed to get into university.
“A play?” Adama said. “Who’s going to act in it?”
“Me. Me and Lady Jane.”
“Her I can understand. But you? Can you act?”
“Hey, I was the second of the Three Little Pigs in elementary school, man. I’ll direct it, too, of course.”
“You’re not going to have nude scenes and stuff, like Hair, are you?”
“What do you think, you idiot?”
“But I bet you try to throw in a kissing scene or something. Better not, man. Matsui won’t like it.”
I crossed out the kissing scene as soon as we hung up.
One day shortly after the roses died and were carefully laid to rest in a drawer of my desk, Matsunaga showed up, smiling and saying “Good news!”
Our punishment was over.
After one hundred and nineteen days.
AMORE ROMANTICO
I sat at my desk in class for the first time in a hundred and nineteen days. The old school gate, the old courtyard, the old classroom—I wasn’t the least bit happy to see any of them again. They had the same old air of cold indifference they’d had before my suspension.
Except for Matsunaga, all the teachers treated Adama and me as if we were bastard children they’d been stuck with after just one little slipup. We were neither heroes nor villains, merely inconvenient and unwelcome.
The class was English Grammar. The little gnome giving it was baring his gums as he read out sample sentences. His pronunciation was awful. It didn’t sound like English at all; it was a language spoken and understood only in the teachers’ rooms of high schools in provincial Japanese cities. I could imagine this guy in London—they’d think he was mumbling some inscrutable Oriental curse.
I noticed Adama looking in my direction. He looked bored. When he glanced away toward the window, I did the same. A group of elementary school kids was marching in pairs along the road outside. A field trip, probably. Beyond the steep hill in front of the school was a thickly wooded little mountain where there was a children’s recreation area. They’d probably have a picnic and play Drop-the-Hanky or Who’s-Got-the-Pickle. I envied them.
I remembered how, in elementary school, if I stayed at home with a cold for even three days, I used to miss my friends and the atmosphere of the classroom and everything. The reason I didn’t feel the same way about this place after an absence of a hundred and nineteen days was that this was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us—except, maybe, the baby pigs that got roasted whole in Chinese restaurants—were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.
Between classes, Adama came over and sat on my desk.
“Narushima and Otaki were saying we should all get together.”
“Get together and do what?”
He shrugged. “You going to pull out, Ken?”
“Pull out of what?”
“You know. Political action.”
“You really think we can call it that?”
Adama laughed through his nose.
To me, there’d been more fun than function in what we’d done. You could say the same, in fact, about the fight against the Enterprise. Sure, some blood had been spilled, but blood was spilled at parties sometimes, too. Had they actually hoped to accomplish anything with their campaign? The roar of one Phantom jet was enough to drown out all the speeches and chanting. If they’d really wanted to break through at Sasebo Bridge,
they should have thrown down their banners and placards and picked up rifles and bombs.
I was explaining this to Adama when I heard my name called in a soft, angelic voice.
Kazuko Matsui was standing in the doorway. As soon as I saw her face, my mind went blank. A hush fell over the room. The seven girl students looked up from their English dictionaries with jealous eyes, and the herd of male domestic animals averted theirs as if in the presence of something holy. Some of them even dropped their slide rules, fell to their knees, pressed their palms together and prayed. Not really, but I, for my part, was so flushed with pride my cheeks grew hot. I suppressed an urge to shout “Check it out—this is the woman who sent me a bouquet of roses!” and ran up to her.
“Um, I just thought I’d give you back your Janis Joplin,” the angel said.
Next to her stood the busty nymph Ann-Margret, staring at Adama with fire in her eyes.
“It’s good to have you back in school,” the angel murmured. I felt like Alain Delon being greeted by a mistress on his release from jail.
“You could have given it back any time. There was no hurry.”
From a corner of the classroom, Ezaki, the rightful owner of Cheap Thrills, howled “My record!” Lady Jane looked puzzled, and I made a mental note to kick the guy’s ass later.
“That’s Ezaki, grew up in a beauty parlor. His brain turned to mush from breathing hairspray. They say he’s going to be put away soon.”
She looked at me as if she wondered about my own sanity, then shook her head and laughed, a sound like the world’s most beautiful bell—some relic of the Ottoman Empire, made of jade and purest gold.
“Listen, thanks for the roses,” I said. “It’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.”
“What?”
“I mean, nobody ever sent me any flowers before.”
“Never mind, don’t talk about it, it’s embarrassing. It was the first time for me, too.”
The first time... She was a virgin! I was so stoked I asked her right then and there to appear in the film and the play. When the bell rang to start the next class, she mentioned the name of a coffee shop where we could talk about it after school, then hurried off. I walked up to Adama singing Gigliola Cinquetti’s golden oldie, “Amore Romantico,” and slapped him on the back.
“Don’t go all goofy on me, man. What’re we gonna tell Narushima and Otaki?”
“About what?”
“About what we were just talking about. You gonna tell them you think terrorism is the only way?”
“Terrorism? What’re you talking about? Lady Jane was a virgin, man, it was the first time she ever sent roses to anybody.”
“God, what a jerk.”
Adama put on his famous I-give-up look.
During lunch hour, as I was on my way to the debating clubroom where Narushima and the others were waiting, I ran into the angel again. She had bad news.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t meet you later after all. We have to practice for the opening ceremony of the National Athletic Meet.”
National Athletic Meet. Was there anything uglier than the sound of those three words?
“Also, I heard that the boys have clean-up. You’re supposed to clean the athletic grounds.”
No one had the right to break up my date with her, least of all for reasons like those.
I walked into the clubroom shaking with rage.
“What do you think, Yazaki?” one of them was saying. “It’s like, since the barricade, a lot of groups from universities all over the place have taken notice of us, and the Students Anti-Imperialist League at Nagasaki U. has officially offered to join us in a campaign against the graduation ceremony.”
I was fed up. Absolutely fed up with it all. Was anyone there really serious about this stuff? I knew it was my fault that they’d landed in the shit—but who cared? If it weren’t for the fact that they’d had a hand in getting me a bunch of roses, I would have told them to go fuck themselves and stormed out of there. Instead, I said:
“I’m pulling out. I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, so listen. Wooden poles, helmets, you’re never going to get anywhere with crap like that, whether or not you join forces with Nagasaki U. or Kyushu U. or anybody else. I’m not saying I regret doing the barricade, because I don’t, it was a good thing, but, look, I told you before, right? In a school like this you’ve got to use guerrilla tactics or you’ll be crushed like flies. The same trick won’t work twice. Anyway, what’s the point of talking about disrupting the graduation ceremony when, after being suspended all that time, we can’t even be sure we’re going to be in the graduation ceremony?”
This prompted a long speech from Narushima, full of secondhand ideas about counterrevolutionary rituals and authoritarian governments and blah blah blah. He was in the middle of his spiel when the guidance counselor and two P.E. instructors poked their heads in through the doorway.
“What’s going on here?”
The Politicos exchanged panicky looks, as if to say, How the hell did they find out about this? The idiots. It was only natural they’d find out. Our first day back in school, they were bound to be keeping an eye on us.
“You know you’re not allowed to assemble like this,” the counselor said in a low, raspy voice that cut through the room like a saw.
“But, sir, we’re not assembling,” I told him. “It’s just that, since we were all suspended and this is our first day back, we thought we should get together and discuss where we went wrong, and how to go about being better students from now on, sort of like group therapy, isn’t that right, guys?”
I said this with a big, sunny smile on my face, like an actor in the TV drama “Junior High Journal,” but the others just stared at me blankly. Adama was the only one who put his hand over his mouth to hide a smile.
Our meeting broke up and I was taken to the teachers’ room, where I was made to kneel formally in front of the guidance counsellor while about a dozen other teachers stood in a circle around me. Then they strung me up from the ceiling by my feet, dunked me in a barrel of water, whacked me across the face with a bamboo sword, pressed red-hot pokers against my back, and burned my thighs with blow-torches. No, but they did yell at me a lot and kick my legs with their slippered feet.
“Just because you’re trash,” I was told, “doesn’t mean you can drag other students down with you. If there’s something you don’t like about Northern High, go on and change schools, the sooner the better. We met a group of alumni last week, and do you know what they told us? They all said they’d like to strangle you for dragging the name of Northern High in the mud.”
The bell rang. I asked them to let me go back to my classroom.
“I’m paying tuition, I have a right to attend classes.”
I said this without lowering my eyes, just as my father had told me to do. From the side, a hand flashed out and connected with my cheek. It belonged to the running coach, Kawasaki. I almost started crying, not because in hurt, but out of shame and rage at being slapped by a cretin like that. You couldn’t let someone stronger than you see any tears, though; it made them think you were begging for mercy, even when you weren’t. I blinked and took a deep breath.
And that’s when it happened.
A chime sounded suddenly and an announcement came over the P.A. system.
“Attention all third-year students: assemble in the courtyard immediately. A rally will be held concerning today’s opening ceremony practice and the cleaning of the athletic grounds. I repeat: attention all third-year students...”
Aihara and Kawasake tried to dash out of the room to stop whoever was making the announcement, but Adama, Iwase, and a crowd of other students stood in the doorway, blocking their path.
Blue veins popped out on Kawasaki’s forehead as he screamed at them:
“What is this? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Let Yazaki go,” said Adama. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”
Behind him s
tood Shirokushi and his boys, my band, and various members of the rugby team, the track and field team, the basketball team, and the newspaper club, plus seven or eight fans of Adama’s from our class. It had been probably one of the last group—someone with an anonymous-sounding voice—who’d made the announcement.
People were beginning to gather in the courtyard. Not all of the third-year students came, of course. You couldn’t expect the gung-ho graffiti removers, for example, to join a spontaneous rally like that. Adama, in addition to being Mr. Cool, was a brilliant strategist, which accounted for the fact that Narushima and Otaki weren’t among the group blocking the doorway. Those two were the dumbest of students, weren’t any good at sports, and didn’t stand out in any way, with the result that nobody gave a shit about them. Adama must have realized that if they were involved, he’d lose the support of the others. Shirokushi, on the other hand, as well as Nagase the rugby player, “Anthony Perkins” Tabara from the basketball team, and Fuku-chan, the bassist in our band, were all popular and had a wide range of fans. What’s more, popular guys were used to leading the good life, so they were likely to have firm opinions about being forced into unpleasant tasks like cleaning the athletic grounds.
The courtyard was in a state of pandemonium. You could hear teachers bellowing at everyone to return to their classrooms. Three hundred or so students—about one-third of the senior class—were standing in the yard outside the teachers’ room. When I saw Lady Jane among them I rose to my feet. My legs were numb from kneeling there, and I staggered at first, but resolutely steered my way toward my friends. The guidance counselor said something to me, but I didn’t look back.
Adama greeted me with a handshake.
“Right on! Now for the rally,” someone said, and we all shuffled off toward the courtyard.
“Ken, wait a minute.” Adama grabbed my arm and whispered, “What do we do now?”
Apparently he hadn’t thought this all the way through. Adama was great at making things happen, but there were definite limits to his imagination.
“You mean you haven’t decided on anything?”