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As we walked around toward the back, I found myself thinking about the power of culture.

“Hey, Adama, culture’s sort of an awesome thing, don’t you think?”

“Why?”

“Look at Iwase. If all this foreign culture had never come to Japan, he’d be a plain old button seller all his life-—he wouldn’t know about Led Zep or Verlaine or tomato juice or anything. It’s sort of scary, isn’t it?”

“Well, hell, you could say the same about me and you. You’re just the son of a plain old schoolteacher, right?”

“Wrong. I’m
the son of an artist
.
I didn’t crawl out of some co—”

I was going to say “some coal mine,” but I decided not to. Adama still hadn’t quite got over the hostess incident.

There was a little garden in the back with cosmos in bloom. Laundry was hanging out to dry there. Iwase had four sisters, so it was mostly petticoats and panties and slips, with only a few pairs of men’s shorts. The flowers nodded in the wind, and from the window of Iwase’s room came the sound of someone playing the guitar and singing.

Shining in a puddle

is a sky deep blue

Walking past together

it’s only me and you

and it’s always winter

always winter
...

“What the hell is that? What’s he doing, chanting sutras? Don’t tell me he’s joined Nichiren?”

Adama got pissed off again and told me to cut the crap. He said we were here to convince Iwase to stay on the production team, dammit. The problem with people from coal-mining towns is that they’re just too serious about everything. Maybe it has to do with all the explosions and cave-ins and what not.

Adama tapped lightly on the window. Iwase stuck his head out and smiled his embarrassed smile.

He was a lot more cheerful than we’d expected. He said he was prepared to be in the movie and help sell tickets and set up the equipment in the hall, but he didn’t want his name connected with the production.

“It’s not your fault,” he told us. “I’m not blaming you guys.”

Adama, though, had taken Iwase’s letter to heart. He thought that maybe his joining up with us had caused a rift between Iwase and me. After that dreamy session in the church, we’d gone to Boulevard, and it was there that we’d decided to drop in on Iwase and try to persuade him to stick with Iyaya.

“But, Iwase, I don’t get it,” he said in his calm coalminer’s drawl. “You’re gonna be in the movie, right? You say you’ve got nothing against me or Ken, right? So why you gonna quit?”

“Adama, you don’t understand, it’s... it’s just that I...
I
can’t stand myself
anymore.”

Adama and I looked at each other.
I can't stand myself.
That was one line a seventeen-year-old must never, ever let himself say—unless he was trying to make it with some chick. There was no one who didn’t feel like that from time to time. Any seventeen-year-old face in the crowd in a provincial city, with no money and no pussy, was bound to know that feeling. It was only natural, considering we were right on the verge of being sorted and classified into different categories of domestic animals. But certain phrases were taboo, and you cast a shadow on the rest of your life if you uttered them.

“Hanging around with you guys, I began to feel like even I was getting to be a bit smarter. It made me feel good, but I didn’t really have anything to do with what was going on, right? I can’t explain it very well, but here I am thinking I’m hot stuff and, I don’t know, it just started to seem ridiculous, you know, I just couldn’t stand it.”

“Gotcha,”
I said. What Iwase was saying was correct, it made sense, but just because something’s correct and makes sense doesn’t mean it’s going to make you feel good about yourself. I didn’t want to hear any more.

“Oh, by the way, Ken-san, you’re going to use Mie Nagayama in the festival opening, right? Listen, I heard from a friend of mine at the industrial arts school that the head of the gang there who’s in love with Nagayama, he’s going around looking for you and telling everybody he’s going to beat you half to death. Maybe you ought to change your mind about using her.”

Iwase said this just as we were leaving. He also reminded us that the guy was the captain of the kendo team.

Adama and I hardly spoke as we walked back along the road beside the river. Iwase was a gloomy fucker. Gloomy people existed by sucking energy from everyone else, and that made them a drag to get involved with. They couldn’t take a joke, either.

“Adama, don’t let it get to you, man,” I said, staring at the ground as we walked along. “Hey, look, you said you liked this bag one time, didn’t you?” I held out my orange shoulder bag. It had my full name written on it, with KEN in big Roman letters. “I’ll swap it for yours if you want.”

Adama looked at me and shook his head. “I don’t believe you, man,” he said. He’d seen through my ploy. Whoever was carrying the bag would be the target when the kendo guy attacked.

Which is what happened, just as we reached the coffee shop Boulevard.

All of a sudden we were surrounded by six high school dudes carrying wooden swords.

APRIL COME SHE WILL

Six dudes carrying wooden swords surrounded Adama and me. They all wore crumpled school caps that could have passed for old rags, and on each cap was the
industrial arts school
badge. The swords gleamed darkly, and looked good and hard. Adama was already as white as a sheet.

“You Yazaki from Northern?” the leader, a big, pimply-faced, Neanderthal type, asked me. I was sure the swords would come crashing down on my head at any moment. I nodded, and my legs started shaking like crazy. To stop the trembling, I breathed in deeply through my nose and tried to look calm. If I let them know how scared I was, it would only encourage them and make it that much harder to fend them off.

For a guy who’d grown up among coal miners, one of the roughest groups of people in Japan, Adama seemed a bit on the wimpy side. What sort of impresarios were we, I thought; why hadn’t we seen to it that we had a bodyguard or two? Too late now, though.

I’d got into fights once in a while up through junior high, but they were only harmless punch-and-wrestle affairs. For me, wooden swords and chains and knives existed only in
comic books
.

“Well? You
are
Yazaki, aren’t you?” Pimples said, adding a menacing growl to his voice.

“Yes, I am. Say, aren’t you guys from the industrial arts high? I’ve been hoping we’d meet up. See, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you. Why don’t we step inside this coffee shop so we can talk?”

I spoke in a voice so loud that people passing on the street turned to look, and when I finished I moved toward the door of Boulevard. Pimples put his hand on my shoulder and stopped me.

“Hold it.”

He glared down at me, thrusting out his chin and raising his eyebrows slightly. He was copying the heroes of the gangster movies that had been popular a decade earlier, films that you could still see in small provincial cities like ours.

“You wanted to talk something over, right?”

My legs were still trembling, but I said this in a quiet, controlled tone of voice. My father had once told me that if I ever found myself surrounded by yakuza, I should be polite but not start groveling. Long ago, when he was in his twenties, he’d used a baseball bat on the chairman of the PTA—who also happened to be a yakuza boss—and the gangster’s goons had cornered him and held a knife to his throat. “If they’d stuck me with that thing, I’d have been dead,” he told me. “You were still a baby, Ken-bo, and I didn’t want to die and leave your mother to raise you on her own, so I apologized. But if you get too humble with those bastards, they’ll be more than happy to kick the shit out of you. So, even while I was apologizing, I suggested in no uncertain terms that if they laid a finger on me, a schoolteacher, their boss’s son wouldn’t have a chance in hell of ever getting anywhere in life. I guess I was pretty lucky, too, but anyway I came out of it without a scratch...”

I walked into the dim interior of Boulevard and headed for the table farthest from the door. The wooden swords and the oversize school uniforms didn’t go too well with the music— Sibelius’s
Finlandia.

Adama and I sat with our backs to the wall, and Pimples and his boys occupied two tables in a semicircle around us. They stood all their swords together against the wall.

We were at least temporarily out of danger of having our heads split open at any moment.

“Is coffee okay with everyone?” I said, looking at each of them. The balance of power had shifted, if only ever so slightly. One look at their uniforms, shiny with sweat stains and torn here and there, was enough to convince you that these were Hardboys of the old school. They didn’t go to game centers or coffee shops, because they didn’t have any money.

Not being used to this sort of place, they were ill at ease. I asked the waitress, whom I knew fairly well, for eight café royals.

“We’ve been meaning to talk to you guys about Nagayama-san because we were afraid you might somehow have got the wrong idea,” I said.

Pimples and his boys looked at one another.

“You got something to say about her?” the big guy said.

“Well, no, it’s just that we were thinking of having her appear in our festival, and, of course, we knew we’d have to discuss it with you first.”

“Listen, don’t fuck with me, man. Maybe we can’t do anything right here, but once we get outside you’d better be ready. It’s gonna cost you at least an arm.”

My legs started trembling again. The threat sounded real enough coming from an old-style Hardboy like Pimples.

“You been selling party tickets,” he said. He meant the tickets for the Morning Wood Festival.

“Yes.”

“You don’t see nothin’ wrong with high school punks doin’ somethin’ like that?”

“Ah, but, see, we’re not out to make money, it’s just that we have a lot of expenses—renting the hall, and the amps and the film projector and things.”

The café royals arrived, Resting on top of each cup was a spoon in which a brandy-soaked sugar cube burned with a pale blue flame. It was unlikely that anyone in Pimples’ gang had ever seen anything like it before; their jaws dropped open and they stared at their cups like people in old Edo seeing an
elephant
for the first time. What was disheartening was that Adama displayed the same reaction. People from coal-mining towns just weren’t any good at pulling off stunts like this. Unless we both sipped casually at our drinks as if we did this every day of our lives, the whole routine was a waste of time.

“Oh, by the way, these are called café royals. What you do is, first you lick the flame from the spoon, real fast, then you drink the coffee.”

This was meant as a joke, of course, but the dumbest-looking of Pimples’ boys actually went and licked the spoon. “Ow! Shit!” he said, throwing it aside and grabbing his glass of water.

“You tryin’ to make a fool of us?”

Pimples reached for his sword. The café royal ploy had only made things worse.

“Listen. You bought Nagayama a
negligee
.
Why?”

We’d already taken in some eighty thousand yen in ticket sales, so I’d invested seven thousand two hundred yen in a white negligee for Mie Nagayama to use on stage and Lady Jane to wear in the film. When I’d shown it to Mie, just a few days earlier, she’d been crazy about it and said she wanted to borrow it for two or three days so she could see how it felt to sleep in.

“Oh, that. It’s just a stage costume.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You can see right through it.”

“You mean you’ve seen it? Don’t tell me you went and ripped it in half or something? That cost nearly eight thousand yen!”

Whoops!
I thought as soon as I’d said this, but it was too late. Adama gave me a look that said:
You fuckup.
Pimples opened his slit eyes as wide as they’d go. He was very angry. I half expected him to stand up and brain me on the spot.

“No, no, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like she’ll be naked underneath, she’s going to put it on over her uniform. See, what we want to express here is the innocence of a young virgin and, at the same time, her longing for, well, for sex, and...”

Adama shook his head as if to say it was all over. Provoking Pimples with that chickenshit question about ripping up the negligee had made me lose my cool completely.

The gang stood up.

“Enjoy the coffee. Enjoy it now, because your mouth is gonna be too mangled for you to taste anything for a while. We’ll be waitin’ for you outside. Make it quick. You got to face the music sometime, man.”

After they’d stepped outside, the waitress came over and asked if we wanted her to call the police. I almost told her yes, go ahead, but if the cops and the school found out about the Morning Wood Festival, there wouldn’t be any festival, so I had to tell her not to bother.

Pimples and company must have thought we were going to call someone for help; there were soon more than a dozen of them outside.

At Adama’s suggestion I telephoned Yuji Shirokushi. “You’ve been too flashy about the way you’re selling those tickets,” the Greaser said. “I heard about dudes from Asahi and Southern and the commercial school, too, who wanted to call you down and teach you a lesson.”

“Well, we got guys outside here right now waiting for us.”

“How many?”

“It was only six at first, but now it’s about fifteen or sixteen.”

“They all on the kendo team?”

“They’ve all got wooden swords.”

“Listen, Ken-yan, that team came in sixth in the All-Japan high school meet. And the captain took first place in the Kyushu finals his second year.”

“So?”

“So even if I bring ten or twenty guys, we don’t stand a chance.”

“But, hell, I can’t call the cops, either.”