Spark

by Naoki Matayoshi

  “OK.”

  “You have to give credit to someone who prepares, shows up on time and delivers. But, say there’s a person who’s a born manzai comedian, but he grows up never knowing it and he goes on to sell quality vegetables like a good citizen—someone like that is a genuine dumbass funny man. Then you get someone who’s totally aware, who gets up onstage and says, ‘Meet my partner who doesn’t know he’s a natural-born manzai comic, and hasn’t noticed because he’s an idiot so he’s still selling vegetables. Why’s he selling vegetables? Because he’s a fool.’ Now, that’s a real straight man’s line.” Kamiya fell silent for a few moments. “But then—” he started, suddenly broke off, started again, “nobody’d laugh at that. So you have to do it with enough conviction to make children, adults and even the gods laugh. Kabuki—it’s just like with kabuki.”

  I was getting it. You had to perform, like they did in kabuki and Noh theatre, which also had their roots in performing for the gods. Otherwise, when there was no one watching you, like today, why bother?

  While we were talking, the other customers had departed, and in their place people who looked like locals were coming in and seating themselves on the raised floor at the back of the pub for a private party.

  Kamiya picked up his glass of shochu and drained it in one gulp, then held the glass in the air and began counting down loudly: ten, nine, eight, seven, six… When he got to one, he drew it out—oooooone—until the waitress came over and put two more glasses of shochu down on the table. I picked up the glass in front of me and was about to drink it down, when Kamiya said, smiling, “We’re not in a hurry.” I looked at him and the thought came to me that even if he wasn’t a local god, this man in front of me did seem like some kind of apparition.

  “A biography usually comes out after someone dies, right?” I suddenly said, not sure why.

  “I think you’re going to live longer than me,” Kamiya said, his eyes seeming to pierce me.

  Whoa, I thought. What’s that about?

  But then, in an abrupt turnabout, he said cheerfully, “Tell you what. Publish the first volume while I’m alive and the second after I die.”

  “Then there’ll be complaints about when the third part’s coming.”

  “That’ll make it interesting, won’t it?”

  Kamiya picked up the tab lying on the table and stood up. Several times he’d said, “This is my treat,” which I took to mean he was really asking me to split the bill, but when I offered, he replied, “Idiot, it’s the done thing in the entertainment world for sempai to treat kohai,” in such a happy way, I realized he’d been wanting to say it.

  Kamiya paid the bill and we gripped hands in a fierce handshake—“like two gorillas,” he said. And then he added, “That was heavy shit.”

  “Thanks for the drinks,” I said, and without meeting my eyes, he replied shyly, “Not at all, it was nothing.” Nervous as I’d been about drinking with a sempai for the first time, Kamiya might have been feeling the same being around an eager kid. Then, with a final farewell of “I’m going this way, see you again”, he raced off into the night.

  I replayed something he’d said: “Write down what you saw today, do it while it’s fresh.” A warm sensation filled my chest. Maybe I was looking forward to writing. Or maybe I was happy at having found someone to share my passion with at last. On the way back to where I was staying, I stopped at a convenience store and bought a notebook and pen. Walking back along the road in the cool sea breeze, I mused over what I would write. There were few people out, the visitors who’d come for the fireworks having settled into their hotels, and I could hear the gentle sound of waves. When I heard a ringing in my ears that sounded like fireworks, I broke into a sprint.

  * * *

  I didn’t see Kamiya again for a long while—he had a big agency getting him work in Osaka, and I was getting gigs in Tokyo. He called me often, though. My mobile would ring at the end of a day during which I hadn’t spoken to anyone, and when the name Saizo Kamiya flashed on the screen, my heart would leap. First thing he’d always ask—in a weird falsetto—was where are you, and when I’d say Tokyo, he’d make this regretful uhhhh, and then start telling me what was up with him. Then, just as he was warming up, the line would cut off, and a few minutes later a text would arrive saying, sorry. no power. catch u later. This happened so frequently it got to be routine.

  His smooth, confident patter was a source of frustration for me. I could never speak so easy, so fast. Whenever I tried to explain any of the million thoughts whirling around in my head, the words seemed just beyond reach, and I could never get them out. It got worse when I was around more than one person. Every word, every phrase I heard started me off on a new train of thought, and that mixing with all the other thoughts in my head made me a lost cause. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Kamiya found this amusing.

  “Just speak fast. The faster you speak, the more stuff you can get out. The more bats you get at the plate the better, right? Sure it’s better to speak fast. But you can’t do that, can you? Never mind, there’s things you can say that nobody else can. Yeah, you’re lucky.” My deprived background, he said, was my ticket to creativity. “I had all the usual toys and games, but you had to figure out how to have fun on your own with your family being so poor and all.” I could have taken that the wrong way, but Kamiya said it in a way that wasn’t mean.

  “I’m jealous, man. The kind of stuff you guys made up,” he told me. Well, it was true my family didn’t have a lot of money. And my sister and I didn’t have any toys at all. Sometimes we would spend a whole day just drawing pictures. Other times we would spread out Dad’s shogi board and make up moves for all the pieces, planning complicated defences for the king in case of attack—and then wait and wait until we figured out nobody was coming to attack. Kamiya, for some reason, thought that was sweet.

  Then there was this other story that he liked to hear me tell over and over. My sister was learning the piano, and because we didn’t have a piano or electric keyboard like her friends did, she used to practise “Chopsticks” and stuff on a keyboard made out of paper, humming the notes as she played them. One day after my mother picked me up from daycare, we went to the Yamaha class to see my sister play. When we got there, the students were playing together, all except for my sister, who was looking panicked and sort of pounding on the keys here and there. What was wrong? Why wasn’t she playing the song? When she told the teacher that the keyboard didn’t have any sound, the teacher leant over and hit the power switch. That was all, but it left my sister stiff and defeated with her shoulders hunched up. It really hurt seeing my kind, dependable big sister like that, and I started to cry.

  “Stop,” my mother said. “She’s doing her best.” But I could see that her eyes were red too.

  At home later, my sister didn’t say anything about what had happened. She just went back to her paper keyboard and practised like she always did, so I sat next to her and hummed along loudly to whatever she was supposed to be playing. Our father, who’d been drinking, yelled at us to stop making noise, but we didn’t stop. A week later, a small, beautiful upright piano was delivered to our tiny prefab house. It was a big surprise for my sister, but our father was not happy—and he shouted at our mother for buying it without consulting him.

  Kamiya loved this story. It seemed to warm his heart, and he’d sniff and say, “Oh, that’s nice. With a background like that, there’s got to be stories only you can come up with.”

  * * *

  After the fireworks in Atami, a year went by with nothing much changing in Kamiya’s career or mine. Meanwhile, a few of our contemporaries—the showy smooth-talkers—were getting on television. I wasn’t so thick as to blame the economy for my lack of success. I knew there was a glaring gap between my talent and theirs.

  Since our agencies didn’t bring in enough work, to earn a spot in TV or stage productions we had to prove our stuff in the auditions held monthly in small theatres. Late at night I
would join the crowd of young comedians crammed into tiny waiting rooms, hungry and grubby but with our eyes shining. It was a surreal scene, and far from glamorous. Each duo performed their routine in front of production writers who were in charge of the live shows. After a long day, it couldn’t have been easy for them either. I sometimes wondered if tiredness ever clouded their judgement. You can tell when someone is physically exhausted because they collapse, but with the brain it’s not so obvious. Still, nobody complained. There was an unspoken rule that you had to earn the right to say what you wanted, and if you didn’t succeed in the auditions, you kept your opinions to yourself. Nobody enforced this rule with us, but we all followed it. Each of us fought for a spot on the stage, for the right to express ourselves and maybe for an escape from poverty.

  Sparks finally scored a couple of appearances at theatres—was that ever nice. Once that happened we got invited to live shows produced by other agencies, and then we got mentioned in magazines as new faces in comedy, and little by little audiences began to remember us.

  Then I heard from Kamiya that he was planning to move to Tokyo. He’d been in the business six years now and felt he’d reached his limits in Osaka. Many of his contemporaries there were getting opportunities in television programmes, and those who didn’t were quitting. Kamiya was tired of being the old man among all the young guys in the theatres. The ideal career path was to make a name for yourself in Osaka first, then go to Tokyo, but it wasn’t uncommon for those who fell through the cracks of the theatre system to move to Tokyo and make a new start there. Tokyo wasn’t easier, but some manzai duos managed to break through there. It was also true that a select few would do well anywhere.

  The agencies all preferred obedient young comedians over older guys with chequered histories. Kamiya’s artistic sense was—even for me, his apprentice—unsettling. Distinctive, but unsettling. And he was clumsy in his interpersonal skills too. Both members of the Doofuses were. They may not have been well known to the general public, but among entertainers they were notorious. By most social standards, the Doofuses were a couple of complete idiots. Kamiya’s partner, Obayashi, had the reputation of being a hood, but typical of tough guys, he was also soft-hearted. Violence—or a threat of violence—was his only defence against spite. Kamiya was a little like that too—hard-edged and scary on the surface but a different person on the inside.

  So when I heard Kamiya was coming to Tokyo, I couldn’t be sure if what I felt was happy anticipation, or apprehension.

  * * *

  One morning in autumn, I was walking in my neighbourhood, looking for the sweet osmanthus tree whose scent had filled the air during the night. The young guy I usually saw pimping for customers outside the oral sex café went by on his bicycle. Just as I approached the main drag and decided to turn back, a text arrived from Kamiya: will live in kichijoji. where r u? peaches everywhere. Immediately I replied: Koenji. On my way to Kichijoji now. Weeping osmanthus. I ran to the station, dashed up the stairs to the platform and jumped on the Sobu Line train before I could calm down. He was here! As the train carried me along to Kichijoji, I looked out the window down on a city tinged by fall colours.

  The north exit of Kichijoji Station on a Saturday afternoon was packed with students and family groups. I spotted Kamiya standing amidst the river of people streaming toward their respective destinations, with a serious expression on his face and cloaked in an air of heaviness, as if all gravity in the vicinity was concentrated on his shoulders. In this everyday setting, he was a bundle of awkwardness.

  When he noticed me, he broke into a broad smile. “I thought it was some strange ghost coming at me, but then I saw it was you,” he said.

  “Don’t steal my line. Get outa here. Go back to Osaka,” I laughed.

  As we walked together, Kamiya launched enthusiastically into a monologue on why autumn feels so melancholic. It’s because getting through winter used to be a life-and-death struggle for humans, just as it was for animals, and many people didn’t make it, so the heaviness we feel in autumn is a hangover of the fear of a killing winter. That was logical enough, but I couldn’t really get into it.

  “Aren’t you impressed?… Nothing to say?”

  Kamiya’s question jerked me back. “Oh, sorry.”

  “Nah, don’t apologize. I was looking forward to telling you this stuff, getting some respect, you know, ever since the bus left Osaka.”

  Kamiya was never one to be embarrassed about revealing what he really hoped or feared. It was one of the things I liked about him. And it disarmed me. “Well, you see,” I started, “I feel down all year round. Maybe my ancestors were in permanent danger?”

  “Could be. But maybe if they’d lived somewhere with no danger at all, they’d find something else to make them nervous,” Kamiya rattled off in quick reply.

  “If that’s true, they were sorta dumb.”

  “Yeah, well, who knows.”

  We set out walking aimlessly for a couple of hours around town, then at some point found ourselves part of the stream of people heading for Inokashira Park.

  Wind blew through the autumn leaves on the trees and bushes, brushing our cheeks as we made our way down the stairs. Time seemed to flow more slowly, and Kamiya blended in at last with all the people wandering and mingling. I had a special thing for the park at twilight and was happy Kamiya was here to experience it with me.

  Alongside the lake, a young guy had set up his things and was beating a long, narrow drum. His expression was dull and listless, and he played that way too. There was something about him that bugged me, but Kamiya lost no time before he went and planted himself right in front of the guy, standing there looking at him and at the instrument in turn. The musician stopped playing, unnerved by the attention, and looked up, frowning.

  “Come on, do it properly!” Kamiya yelled.

  Which shocked me. Kamiya was scowling at the guy, eyes wide. The musician froze for a moment, touched the brim of his red cap, then looked down in embarrassment, a movement that suggested he didn’t want to believe this was happening.

  But Kamiya wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

  I wondered if Kamiya had lost his head in that moment. I thought about intervening. But I was also curious where this was all going.

  “Look, you’re supposed to be performing—right? If you don’t want anybody to hear you, do it at home. No big deal. But if you’re gonna do it outside, and along I come, and I’ve never seen an instrument like that before… Think about it. It’s freaking cool, man, that drum. I wanna know what kind of sound it makes. Get it? Come on, don’t be a lazy bastard, give us something to listen to.”

  The guy looked up at Kamiya. “It’s not that kind of thing,” he said sullenly.

  “Not what kind of thing?” Kamiya turned and looked at me uneasily. “You think I’m being some kind of jerk?”

  “Yup, total jerk,” I said, laughing. Which Kamiya didn’t seem to appreciate.

  Anyway, I apologized to the guy and said we’d move on soon but could he play some more first. Reluctantly, he began beating on the long, narrow drum. Kamiya stood there with eyes closed and arms crossed, tapping out the rhythm with his right foot. Relieved, the guy upped the tempo a bit. People looked at us curiously as they passed by. The guy was putting more energy into his playing now. He raised the tempo even more and began a kind of drum roll. Kamiya, still keeping rhythm with his right foot, put out his right hand, palm open, and pushed against the air twice. In response the drummer reined in the beat, bringing it down to a level that seemed to satisfy Kamiya. The guy kept a tight rhythm as he lost himself in the performance again. Several young women gathered round to watch and listen. Seeing an audience, the guy broke into a funky rhythm, whereupon Kamiya once again raised his hand to bring the performance under control, all the while keeping time with his foot. The drummer broke off the funk and went back to his previous style. Kamiya was conducting this scene! Sweat ran down the drummer’s face and the c
rowd around us grew, my head nodding, unconsciously beating time, as an echo of the beats lingered and merged into a kind of melody, one of which Kamiya was an integral part. The drummer shook his long hair under the red cap, still lost in his drumming.

  And then, abruptly, Kamiya burst loudly into song—a nonsense kind of chant: “Drum-drum, drummer boy! Drum-drum, drummer boy! Drummer boy in a red cap! Wake up, dragon! To the beat of the drum!” I tried to shush him, but nothing could stop him now.

  Drops of rain began to fall in the deepening violet dusk. The crowd took this as a sign to disperse, but the young man continued beating his drum, oblivious. When the rain grew heavy, Kamiya, the conductor and lead singer of this chaos, and I dashed off. Rain was bouncing off the road by the time we caught sight of a sign for the Musashino Coffee Shop.

  Opening the door to the café, we were met with a warm glow from light fixtures on white walls and classical music playing quietly in the background. It seemed like a dream after the noise and confusion we had just left. We sat down next to the window and watched as people scurried towards the station.

  I asked for a blended coffee, and Kamiya wanted just a slice of cheesecake, but when he was told that he needed to have a cup of coffee since this was a speciality coffee shop, Kamiya with surprising meekness ordered a cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain, the most expensive on the menu. “Cool policy,” he said. “I’d be pissed if someone asked me to sing instead of hearing comedy.”

  In these pleasant surroundings, it was fun to sip our coffee and laugh about the feverish scene in the park a short while before.

  That then led Kamiya to start philosophizing: “The essential thing, Tokunaga, is to disrupt things. Disrupt the colourful, beautiful world, and another unreal, more awesomely beautiful world will appear all on its own. That dude in the park had a radical instrument, but he wasn’t doing anything with it. An instrument like that has to be taken seriously. There’s no beauty in a world where it isn’t. I dunno how he got that instrument, but somehow he did, so now he owes it to the world to play the hell out of it. You can’t just go through the motions—it has to be done with total heart.” And then he sipped his very expensive coffee.