69

by Ryu Murakami

  Adama was well aware by now of my tendency to lift ideas from other people. He snorted and said:

  “With chickens? You’re going to suggest chaos in the world with chickens?”

  But if Adama was anything, he was open-minded; he said he’d call a man he knew who had a poultry farm near Slag Heap Mountain. Adama was loyal—not to me, mind you. He was a believer, but it wasn’t me he believed in. He believed in something that was part of the very air we breathed in the late sixties, and he was loyal to that something. It wouldn’t be easy to explain what that something was.

  Whatever it was, though, it made us free. It saved us from being bound to a single set of values.

  We went to the farm that evening.

  It was smack in the middle of a vast expanse of potato fields. The smell of chicken shit was overwhelming, and from a distance the din of hundreds of hens clucking sounded like static on a radio.

  “Whatcha gonna do with ’em?” said the man who ran the place as we walked around inside. He was a small, bald, middle-aged guy who looked exactly as you’d expect a chicken farmer to look.

  “We’re going to use them in a play.”

  “A play? What is it, a play about a poultry farmer?”

  “No, it’s by Shakespeare. And there’s just no way to stage it without chickens.”

  The farmer didn’t know who Shakespeare was. In a dark corner at the far end of the shed, about twenty listless chickens sat bunched together, hanging their heads despondently. The man started snatching them up and stuffing them into feed sacks—two chickens to a sack. The birds made a brief show of resistance, flapping their wings a few times, then gave up and went limp.

  “Awfully relaxed chickens,” Adama said.

  “They’re sick,” the man told us.

  “Sick?”

  “Yeah. You can see there ain’t much spark in ’em.”

  “It’s... it’s not some sort of disease that people can catch, is it?” I asked.

  The man laughed. “Don’t worry ’bout that. After your play you can wring their necks and eat ’em if you want. Nothin’ll happen to you. What I mean by sick is... well, if they were people, I guess they’d be seein’ a shrink.”

  He explained that there were always a few chickens that would suddenly go into a slump and stop feeding.

  Adama and I stood waiting at the bus stop as the sun sank toward the horizon, stretching our shadows a long way down the road. The chickens squirmed and rustled every now and again in the four sacks we were carrying.

  “Adama, I know I said I wanted them as cheap as possible, but look at these birds. They’re practically dead.”

  Hanging around with neurotic chickens was putting even us in a bit of a funk. Being with people—or birds or dogs or pigs, for that matter—who had no spark in them tended to lower a guy’s spirits.

  “Just listen to you. You didn’t want to spend much ’cause you promised Matsui you’d take her out to eat steak after the festival.”

  “Huh? Who told you that?”

  “Sato.”

  “Sato, right, that’s right, I was going to invite you and Sato to go with us, of course.”

  “Bullshit. You were planning to use the ticket money to eat a steak dinner alone with Matsui.”

  “No, wait, you don’t understand what—”

  “Forget the excuses. We’ll all eat together. Everybody.”

  “Everybody? Hey, steak’s expensive, man.”

  “We can afford to go to Gekkin. I already made reservations.”

  Gekkin was a workingman’s Chinese diner that was famous for its homemade meat dumplings. My dream burst like a bubble. I’d been counting on having steak and wine alone with the one I loved, and I’d already invited her to the fanciest restaurant in Sasebo. I planned to take her there after the show, when the sky was the lovely twilight color it had been the evening I took her picture. Lady Jane had smiled and bowed her head, which I’d assumed was a sign of consent. But then she’d gone and told Ann-Margret. I couldn’t believe it. Jane! How could you!

  “Listen, Ken...”

  “What?”

  “I know you’ve got a lot more brains and talent than most people, but...”

  “Thanks. And look, I really did mean to ask you and Sato to come along with us.”

  “What about Iwase?”

  “Oh, yeah, Iwase, too. He was in on it from the beginning, after all.”

  “And Fuku-chan? If it weren’t for him we couldn’t have got the amps and speakers, you know.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Then there’s Shirokushi. Shirokushi sold ninety tickets, man, and look how he helped us get out of that mess with the industrial arts gang. And Masutabe lent us his camera. And Narushima and Otaki and Nakamura—they sold a lot of tickets, and they promised to help us set up the equipment.”

  “I really appreciate it, too. All those things.”

  “What do you mean, you appreciate it? If you want to thank them, the right thing to do is to feed them after the festival. Well, isn’t that right? I know I might have expected something like this from you, but I’ll tell you, when Sato told me about the steak dinner it really made me sad, man. Sure, the festival was your idea, but you couldn’t have done it on your own.”

  I realized now how selfish I’d been, and it made me feel so rotten that my eyes filled with tears. Well, not exactly. The only thing in my eyes was a fading vision of a pure white tablecloth, a rosebud in a glass vase, sterling silverware, a sizzling filet mignon, a fragile crystal wineglass, and Lady Jane with a soft blush on her cheeks. And some real vintage wine—nothing like the Red Ball port I drank on the sly from time to time. I’d once read a passage in a novel that said that a fine, blood-red wine was “capable of stripping a woman of her reason.” Stripping a woman of her reason! Lady Jane stripped of her reason!...

  “What are you grinning about, you idiot? You’re imagining yourself drinking wine with Matsui and giving her a big kiss or something, right?”

  My heart stopped. Adama didn’t have much imagination himself, but he was a genius at reading other people’s minds.

  “On the contrary. I was merely contemplating the shortcomings of my unworthy character.” I said this with my eyebrows raised and my nose in the air, trying to be funny, but Adama didn’t laugh.

  Maybe it was because of having my dream of steak and wine destroyed that I now began to feel sentimental and sorry for myself as I gazed at the darkening sky. I wondered what the hell I was doing there at a bus stop on the outskirts of a dying mining town. I was also a bit worried that I’d used up all of Adama’s patience with me.

  “Hell, I guess it can’t be helped,” he muttered, more for his own benefit than mine, apparently. He stared at me. “You’ve got type O blood, right?”

  I nodded.

  “People with type O just don’t seem to care much about anybody else. And you’re a Pisces, right? Pisces is the most selfish sign. Oh, yeah, and you’re the only son, too. A guy with that many strikes against him—hell, it can’t be helped.”

  He’d missed one more: Pisces, type O, the only son, and Grandma’s pet.

  “A guy like you, if you stopped being self-centered, there wouldn’t be anything left.”

  Adama looked down at the feed sacks squirming and rustling under his arms.

  “Ken...”

  “No, but really, man, I was going to invite you and—”

  “Never mind that. I was going to say, do you remember how lonely those chickens looked?”

  He was remembering the twenty birds huddled in a corner by themselves; broilers being forcefed in a cramped little shed. You might be a chicken or a human being, but show a little rebelliousness and the next thing you knew you were all on your own.

  “When the festival’s over, instead of selling them to a butcher or something, let’s set ’em free somewhere out in the mountains,” he said finally, still peering at the sacks.

  On a beautiful, clear Labor Thanksgiving Day, nearly five hu
ndred high school students flocked to the Workers Hall.

  Otaki, Narushima, Masutabe, and the other members of what was once the Northern High JCA Committee stood at the entrance handing out “Smash the Graduation Ceremony!” leaflets and occasionally putting on helmets and making speeches. Yuji Shirokushi and his group of Greasers, their hair stiff with pomade, stood around in sports coats with their babes from Junwa and elsewhere, passing around half-pint bottles of cheap whiskey. The girls had turned up in all kinds of fashions; a lot of them wore their school uniforms, but you also saw painted fingernails and lipstick, tight dresses, pleated skirts, flower-print frocks, pink cardigans and jeans...

  Iwase was selling mimeographed copies of a collection of his poems for ten yen apiece. He’d never let on to any of us that he was writing poetry. The gang from the industrial arts high showed up—to keep an eye on Mie Nagayama, no doubt—but without their swords. Being Hardboys, they got flustered and turned red when a girl from Yamate with a cigarette dangling between scarlet fingernails approached them and tried to strike up a conversation. Four black GIs asked if they could get in, and I let them through. Anything was allowed at festivals— except murder, maybe. The owner of Four Beat was there, and the waitress from Boulevard arrived with a bunch of flowers for Adama. The girls of the English Drama Club brought about a million balloons and filled the hall with them, and the half-black yakuza who’d smoothed out our problem with Pimples came dragging a pushcart and two partners in crime to sell bits of grilled food to the crowd.

  Mie Nagayama walked on stage as the Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 boomed out over the PA. system. Wearing the negligee over a bathing suit, she took an axe to some placards bearing pictures of the prime minister, Lyndon Johnson, and the main gate of Tokyo University. Coelacanth started their first set with Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” Fuku-chan, as usual, sang “Don’tcha know, don’tcha know,” again and again. Ann-Margret was the first to dance, making the great mounds in her blue T-shirt heave and quake. She was trying to loosen up for her part in the play. The black GIs whistled at her. Mie Nagayama started dancing, too, dressed now in her usual skintight black satin pants. I turned spotlights on the two of them, and Mie’s silver lame blouse glittered and sparkled. As if drawn by that brilliance, more and more people joined in, and as the circle of dancers grew, the balloons began to burst. Coelacanth played three sets, in between which we staged the play and showed the film. Iwase grinned and blushed when a close-up of his face appeared on the screen. My yakuza friend came up to say he couldn’t make head or tail of the movie, but he didn’t walk out. No one left early, in fact. The angel was right beside me throughout it all. Coelacanth played “As Tears Go By” during their second set, and the angel and I stood face to face, gazing into each other’s eyes and swaying to the music.

  After a feast of meat dumplings, beer, and wild laughter, Amada fixed things so that Lady Jane and I could slip out for a walk by the river. In exchange for the candlelit dinner he’d deprived us of, he was offering an intimate stroll on an autumn evening.

  The moon’s reflection was shimmering on the water.

  “It was all over so quickly,” the angel said. “Do you think I looked okay?”

  “In the film?”

  “Yes. I looked funny, didn’t I?”

  “No...”

  I wanted to say “You looked beautiful,” but my throat had gone completely dry on me, and the words wouldn’t come out. Beside the path along the river was a little park with a seesaw and swings. We sat side by side on the swings. The creaking sound they made seemed sexier to me than a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo.

  “I always thought you reminded me of somebody,” she said. “Today I figured out who it was.”

  “Who?”

  “Chuya Nakahara.”

  My brain was in such a muddle that this didn’t ring a bell at first. I couldn’t remember any actors with that name, but then I’d never been told I looked like any actors anyway. Then it came to me: Chuya Nakahara was a poet. A poet who died young.

  “Jane...” My heart felt like it was going to burst, but I went ahead and said what I’d already decided to say. “Have you ever been kissed?”

  She laughed. I was so embarrassed I turned red from my ears to my toenails. After a while she stopped and looked into my eyes and shook her head.

  “Is that strange?” she said. “Does everybody do it?”

  “I don’t know.” It was a dumb reply, but it was the best I could come up with.

  “It’s funny. I like love songs by Dylan and Donovan and people like that, but I’ve never even kissed anybody.”

  We both stopped swinging, and the angel closed her eyes. My heart was pounding, saying Go on go on go on go on go on go on go on. I got off my swing and stood in front of her. To say my knees were trembling would be a hopeless understatement; my entire body was shimmying like the moon on the river. It was hard to breathe. I wanted to run away. I crouched down and looked at the angel’s lips. They seemed like a wondrous, separate living being, like nothing I’d ever seen before, a beautiful creature breathing pale pink in the dim light of the moon and the street-lamps, quivering faintly. I didn’t have the courage to touch them.

  “Jane,” I whispered, and she opened her eyes. “Let’s go to the beach this winter.”

  It was all I could do to say that much.

  The angel smiled and nodded.

  IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY

  Time drags a bit after a celebration like that.

  My father once told me about taking me to my first Festival of the Souls dance, one summer when I was three. Apparently I was fascinated by the giant drum perched high atop its scaffolding, and toddled straight toward it through the ring of people dancing under the spell of that throbbing beat. He said it was seeing me standing there with shining eyes that first made him worry about me, wondering if I’d become the sort of person whose only goal in life is to find out where the next party is.

  And he was right to worry. In 1969, when I was seventeen, it was the Morning Wood Festival, but even now, as a thirty-two-year-old writer, I always seem to be on the lookout for new excuses, and new ways, to celebrate. The rhythm of the drum that turned me on at three linked up with the jazz of the fifties and the rock of the sixties, and in one form or another it’s led me all over the planet in search of bigger and better thrills.

  What exactly that rhythm meant to me, I’m not sure, but I suspect it was just the promise of endless fun.

  *

  There’s something empty and unreal about winter in Sasebo, but I found myself looking forward to it, knowing that Lady Jane and I had made a promise to go to the beach together.

  The day we decided on was Christmas Eve.

  We met at the city bus terminal. I’d soft-soaped my mother into buying me a hooded McGregor coat for the occasion by massaging her shoulders for a couple of hours and saying things like: “College? Of course I’m going to college. I might even become a schoolteacher—after all, it’s in my blood... Come to think of it, Mom, maybe that’s why you still look so young—because you teach little kids. You know what Yamada said to me the other day? He said, ‘Ken, your mother looks just like Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls.'”

  The coat was a cream-colored, double-breasted affair with a fluffy orange lining, and the rest of my outfit—shoes, socks, pants, sweater—was equally preppy. Grinning at myself in the mirror, I applied a handful of my father’s aftershave and imagined strolling through some little fishing village in this getup and saying, “Those fish there drying in the sun—they’re flying fish, surely?” The locals were bound to think I came from Tokyo.

  Lady Jane was waiting for me in a navy blue coat and lace-up boots, a basket dangling from her arm. As I walked through the crowded terminal toward those fawnlike eyes, giving a little boy who was singing “Jingle Bells” a pat on the head, I thought it seemed just like a scene from a movie. If everyone could feel as I felt at that moment, dressed in my preppy sweater and McGregor coat
and about to set out on a little journey with my Bambi-eyed girlfriend on Christmas Eve, all the conflicts in the world would vanish. Mellow smiles would rule the earth.

  Our destination was Karatsu.

  The bus was nearly empty. Apart from gifted, sensitive Simon-and-Garfunkel fans like ourselves, the only people likely to go to the beach on Christmas Eve were broke, defeated families who, unable to make it through New Year’s, had decided to kill themselves.

  Karatsu was known for its beautiful pine woods, its beach with somewhat bigger-than-average waves, and its pottery.

  “You’re going to college, aren’t you?” I asked her.

  “Yes. Well, I plan to.”

  “You decided where yet?”

  “I applied to Tsuda and Tokyo Women’s and Tonju.”

  I wasn’t familiar with the stuff they printed in magazines about different universities, so I didn’t know what “Tonju” stood for. From the name it sounded like a fun place, though, so I said maybe I’d apply there too.

  “What?” The angel laughed. “Tonju is Tokyo Women’s Junior College.”

  “I know, I’m just kidding,” I said, turning crimson.

  “Where are you going to go, though? Your class is all pre-med students, isn’t it?”

  “Ninety percent. But I don’t stand a chance of getting into medical school.”

  “No? I think it would be great to be taken care of by a doctor like you.”

  I got all shook up wondering what she meant by this. Did it include the idea of me removing her blouse and feeling her chest, or having her lie on her back and spread her legs?... The image was too rich for my blood that early in the day—we hadn’t even got off the bus yet—so I summoned up a picture of Adama’s face and had him tell me to get my mind out of the gutter. That helped cool me down.

  The last stop on the bus route was in downtown Karatsu. The conductor told us they didn’t go all the way to the beach in the off-season. I wondered if he wasn’t just jealous and saying it out of spite.