by Ryu Murakami
It was quite a walk to the beach. I started calculating. It was now ten in the morning. We’d probably reach the sea by ten-thirty, which would leave us how much time at the beach? The angel’s basket presumably contained our lunch, but even if we lingered over every luscious crumb of it, we’d still have hours to kill; we’d start to freeze sitting around in the cold wind with nothing to do, and end up deciding to head back early. What I wanted was a romantic sunset, the gentle melting sensation of a pale purple sky, when the very air around you is like a wine that strips a woman of her reason.
“You like movies?” I asked her.
At the entrance to the Karatsu shopping arcade was a movie theater. They were showing In Cold Blood. They should have called it The Ruined Picnic.
“Yes,” the angel said.
“Look what they’ve got on. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you?”
Mr. Know-it-all. The fatal bluff.
“No.”
“It’s based on a book by a man named Truman Capote. It’s one of the great masterpieces of our time.”
And so, because I wanted to be on the beach at sunset, we ended up watching a film that definitely wasn’t made for seventeen-year-old couples looking forward to their first kiss. It was a faithful portrait, in documentary style, of two men who lived miserable lives, massacred an entire family, and eventually died in the electric chair. The actors who played these characters had missing teeth; the film was in black and white; the strangulation scenes were more realistic than they needed to be and made even me look away once or twice; and the theater itself had torn, beat-up seats and smelled like a toilet.
In Cold Blood—the ultimate in gruesome true-crime stories—lasted a full two hours and forty minutes. The angel kept covering her eyes and whispering “Oh, no!” or “I can’t believe it!” It wore her out.
I myself was so overwhelmed with fatigue and regret that I couldn’t think of anything to say to her afterward.
“Shall we have our lunch now?” she said when we arrived at the windblown beach. From her basket she took some sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil: cheese, ham, egg, and vegetable, with parsley on the side and little moist handtowels to use as napkins. There was fried chicken, too. The pieces of chicken had foil wound around them to make them easier to eat, and were tied with pink ribbons.
“Looks great!” I said in a hearty voice, but the shock of seeing In Cold Blood still remained, and I felt as if my mouth, my esophagus, and my stomach were lined with sandpaper. I stuffed my cheeks with a sandwich anyway.
There was a strong wind; far out at sea whitecaps were tossing to and fro, and from time to time the sand swirled up around us so that we had to cover our faces and close the picnic basket.
“That movie was something, wasn’t it?” she said, pouring me a cup of tea from the thermos.
“Pretty tiring, you mean?”
“Sort of, yes.”
“Sorry.”
“Why?”
“Making you watch a movie like that... Some date, eh?”
“But it’s a masterpiece, right?”
“Yeah. Well, that’s what I read in a magazine, anyway.”
“I wonder if we need things like that, though.”
“Hm?”
“I wonder if we need masterpieces like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a true story, right?”
“Yeah, it actually happened.”
“Why do they have to go and make a movie out of it, though? I already know...”
“Know what?”
“I know there’s cruelty in the world... Vietnam, and things like, well, the Nazi concentration camps, but I don’t see why they have to make movies about them. What’s the point?”
I had no answer for that, though I understood what she was saying. What answer could you possibly have for a pair of fawnlike eyes asking you why people had to go out of their way to see something ugly or depraved?
Kazuko Matsui was a gentle and beautiful girl raised in a loving environment. Maybe the world depicted in Capote’s story was right next door, maybe it was necessary to take a good look at these things, but, in the end, what really mattered to her was, as she herself put it, “living life like the sound of Brian Jones’s harpsichord.”
We left the winter sea behind. We hadn’t even eaten most of the sandwiches—let alone thought about having a kiss.
That’s how 1969 ended for me.
Adama’s a promoter in Fukuoka now. Coming from a coal-mining town out in the boondocks, he was bound to want a job that was as modern and Westernized as possible. After I took up writing as a career nine years ago and my first novel became a controversial bestseller, he came to see me at a high-rise hotel in Akasaka where I was holed up working on my second book. It’s not that way now, but at the time it felt pretty awkward seeing him again. Having suddenly become famous, I was under a good deal of pressure, and I couldn’t help being wary about getting dragged back into the crazy sort of life we’d led before. We hardly had anything to say; Adama drank a cup of lukewarm coffee from a thermos I had in the room, and then left. Later, when I tried a cup myself, I felt like an absolute shit for having served such lousy coffee to a friend I’d spent my seventeenth year with.
Fuku-chan, the bassist and singer in Coelacanth, now lives in Fukuoka, too. He runs a record shop there, specializing in jazz, and also helps produce concerts occasionally. He always sends me a copy of any good new salsa or reggae record. Every time we meet, we sing Janis Joplin songs together, and when we forget the words it’s still “Don’tcha know, don’tcha know.”
It’s been years since I heard from Otaki and Narushima, the leaders of the Northern High Joint Campus Action Committee, but when I first came to Tokyo, after taking the general exam and getting into a city college, I visited the boardinghouse they were living in. Scattered about in their room were helmets and wooden poles and leaflets, and a girl in a blouse and jeans and no makeup. We listened to some protest songs and had cups of instant noodles.
Yuji Shirokushi, the head Greaser, became a doctor. I met him once when he was still in medical school. He said that of all the bar girls and strippers he’d met at the joints he went to, only two so far had refused to spend the night with him after he’d shown them his med school I.D. card.
The nymph Yumi “Ann-Margret” Sato is happily married and still in Sasebo as far as I know.
When I first arrived in Tokyo I saw a lot of Iwase, but for the past several years I haven’t been able to get in touch with him. Someone told me he was playing guitar and singing in a downtown strip joint, though I’m not sure if it’s true. Back then he was living with a girl who wanted to be a painter, but the last time I saw him he said they’d split up.
Mie Nagayama became a beautician.
Sasaki, the detective who interrogated me, always sends me a New Year’s card.
Happy New Tear. There's nothing likable about the juvenile delinquents nowadays...
“Pimples,” leader of the industrial arts gang, lost four fingers of his right hand in a hydraulic press while working at Sasebo Heavy Industries. He’s given up kendo.
The half-black yakuza went straight and now runs a coffee shop in Sasebo. My autograph hangs in a frame on the wall there.
Kawasaki and Aihara, the P.E. instructors, took jobs at other schools and are no longer in Sasebo.
My homeroom teacher, Matsunaga, left Northern High to work at a girls’ high school somewhere. Recently, he told me off in the same tone of voice he’d used when I was still a student.
“Yazaki, get a haircut. You look terrible.”
The vice president of the student council—the guy who’d clung to my collar and cried the day after the barricade—joined the Red Army Faction while he was at Kyoto University, and was later arrested in Singapore.
Nakamura, of “doo-doo” fame, now works as a PR man in Nagasaki. I bumped into him once when I went there to give a lecture. He’d been reading the monthly installments of thi
s novel in a magazine and told me, “I was always afraid you’d write about that business sometime, and now you’ve gone and done it, haven’t you?” He looked pleased.
My love affair with the angel Kazuko “Lady Jane” Matsui came to an end on a rainy Sunday in February 1970, after she’d had a change of heart.
The angel had found herself an older boyfriend.
The boyfriend went to medical school at Kyushu University, while she was a student at Tonju. I continued seeing her occasionally—even though we were now “just friends”—up to the time she announced, in a park where the last petals on the cherry trees were falling, that she was going to marry him. That night I consumed an entire bottle of Suntory Kaku whiskey, half a bottle of Suntory White, a bottle of Red Ball port, two plates of curry and two bowls of beef stew; then, in the wee hours of the morning, I pulled out my flute and started playing it, as a result of which a young yakuza who lived in my apartment building informed me that I was disturbing his sleep and punched me four times in the face.
Since becoming a novelist, I’ve received several letters from her and one phone call. When she telephoned I was listening to Boz Scaggs’s “We’re All Alone.”
“That’s Boz Scaggs, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still listen to Paul Simon?”
“No, not anymore.”
“I suppose not. I still do, though, sometimes.”
“How are you getting on?”
She didn’t answer that one. A few days later she sent me a letter.
Hearing your voice, with Boz Scaggs in the background, made me feel I was back at school. I like Boz Scaggs, too, but I don’t listen to him these days. My life has been just one lousy thing after another for the last twelve months, so I listen to Tom Waites a lot. I’m trying to forget about the bad stuff, but I guess the only way to do that is to start a new life...
At the end of the letter, typed in English, was a line from a Paul Simon song:
“Still crazy after all these years...”
The chickens that took part in the Morning Wood Festival were released by Adama in the mountains near his home after the mines had closed down. They were featured once in a local paper:
WILD SUPERCHICKENS
TEN METERS IN A SINGLE BOUND!