69 (13 page)

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 stood 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?”

“No. I just figured if we got enough people together...”

“If I made a speech or something, I’d—”

“You’d be a
hero
.”

“Don’t be stupid—I’d be expelled. Listen, I’ll go to the principal’s office. You tell everybody I’m negotiating with him.”

“And then what?”

“Just wait and stall everybody. I’ll think of something. Oh, and tell Hisaura—you know, the student council guy—that I want to talk to him.”

I went to the principal’s office and knocked on the door. “It’s Yazaki. Can I come in? I’m alone.”

Most of the kids had joined the rally just for the hell of it. If we kept them waiting too long, they’d get bored and end up doing as the teachers told them. I had to come up with some sort of results before that happened. Personally, I would just as soon have set fire to the whole place, but there wasn’t anyone else insane enough to go along with that; and I had no desire to go through home confinement again or to be kicked out for good. I explained things to the principal.

“We’d like you to call off the rehearsal and the clean-up. If you do that, we’ll disband the rally. I’ll take responsibility for making everyone return to their classrooms. There’s no telling what they might do otherwise. Not that it has anything to do with me, mind you—nobody’s organizing this, it just sort of happened spontaneously.”

The principal said he’d talk it over with the other teachers and told me to go back to my classroom.

When I walked out of his office I found Hisaura, the student council president, standing there.

“Listen, the principal just told me he’s scrapping the rehearsal and the clean-up. Go tell everybody that. You want them to disperse, right?”

Only a jerk who was starving for attention would run for president of the student council at a college-prep high school. Hisaura was no exception. He was an ugly, useless dickhead who’d grown up on an orchard out in the boondocks near the sea. He swallowed my story in one gulp. The poor bastard didn’t have a clue as to how to go about thinking for himself.

After scurrying off to get a bullhorn, Dickhead made the announcement exactly as I’d told him to. The kids in the courtyard let out a great cheer and began heading indoors, babbling about how groovy rallies were.

I didn’t have my date with the angel, though, after all. The business of cleaning the athletic grounds was called off, but the other thing went ahead as scheduled, since it was a joint rehearsal with other schools.

All the same, it was clear that we’d achieved a victory. From that point on, the teachers stopped getting on my case. Even when I was late for school, or cut a class, or went home early, no one said a word. It was the same with Adama. They turned a blind eye on whatever we did, as long as it didn’t involve other students. They seemed to have decided just to get us graduated and out of their hair as soon as possible.

Matsunaga was the only exception.

“Yazaki, you’re a hopeless case,” he once told me. “I don’t see how you’re going to survive out there in the real world.” Then he added: “But something tells me you’re the type who’ll bounce right back no matter how many times you get pounded down.”

“Iyaya”
was the name I gave our festival production team. I took it from the “I” of Iwase, the “Ya” of Yazaki, and the “Ya” of Yamada. We decided the name for the event itself as well: the Morning Wood Festival.

Both my angel and the nymph Ann-Margret were eager to lend a hand.

And so a spell of rose-colored days began.

WES MONTGOMERY

With the help of Lady Jane and Ann-Margret, we were at last going to start making the film and rehearsing for the play; we’d get the Claudia Cardinale of Junwa High, Mie Nagayama, to appear in the festival opening wearing a negligee; and I’d sell tickets to the girls at Koka and Asahi, as well as to the radio tubes at Yamate High, boasting that this would be the first rock festival ever staged in Sasebo. The teachers ignored what was happening, but, piled on my desk at school every morning as the word spread, I found bouquets of flowers and stuffed animals and boxes of chocolates and girls’ personal histories complete with photos and letters saying ‘I’m all yours, body and soul,” and cash and checks and savings passbooks. Not quite, but it is true that I spent the entire day each day with an irrepressible smile on my face. Adama, however, whose sad destiny it was to have been born practical and realistic, tried to keep my free-soaring spirit anchored firmly to earth.