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Grabbing me by the hair again, he proceeded to drag me all the way down to the teachers’ room. Shirokushi, Adama, and Iwase gaped at us as we went by. “Don’t... don’t tell me,” the Greaser said. “Don’t tell me he tried to jump Kazuko!”

They made me stand there in a corner for an hour. The worst part about it was that every time a teacher passed by he’d ask me what I’d done, and I’d have to explain it all over again. The man in charge of the newspaper club and the faculty advisor both had to apologize to Yoshioka, Kawasaki, and Aihara. Which meant that two teachers had to eat dirt because of me. And I hadn’t even had a chance to talk to Lady Jane.

“Masutabe-chan—that’s quite a name you’ve got. Mind if we just call you ‘Handjob’?”

Only Adama and I enjoyed the joke. Tatsuo Masutabe— the second-year student who’d “lent” us his eight-millimeter camera—was a serious little guy. He was also a member of the political group headed by Narushima and Otaki, and he’d come to tell us he wouldn’t let us use the thing unless we were going to make a film with a radical theme. Adama tried to reassure him by saying that even if we didn’t deal directly with the people’s struggle, there were lots of ways to go about it, like, for example, Godard-type symbolism and so on, right? But Masutabe asked us to talk it over with his group.

“Good morning.”

It was a voice like a spring breeze. I stopped on the hill in front of the school and turned around, and there stood my Bambi: Kazuko Matsui. A shiver ran through me.

“Oh, hi there,” I said with a smile, putting my arm around her shoulders and stroking her hair. Fat chance. I could hardly even speak.

“Bus?” she said. She was asking how I got to school.

“No. On foot. You?”

“Bus.”

“Bus crowded?”

“Yes. But not too bad.”

“Oh. Urn, you know, I was wondering... Who started calling you ‘Lady Jane’?”

“An upperclassman.”

“From the Stones song?”

“Uh-huh. I used to like that song.”

“It’s a good one. You like the Stones?”

“I don’t know that much about them, really. I like Dylan, the Beatles... But my favorite is
Simon and Garfunkel
.”

“Oh yeah? I like them, too.”

“Have you got their records?”

“Sure.
Wednesday Morning 3
a.m.
,
Parsley
,
Sage
,
Rosemary & Thyme
, and, uh,
Homeward Bound
.”

“What about
Bookends
?”

“Got it.”

“Really? Could I borrow it?”

“Sure.”

“Honest? Thanks! I love that song ‘At the Zoo.’ Don’t you think the lyrics are great?”

“Oh, yeah—fantastic.”

I was trying to think of a way to get my hands on
Bookends.
I’d have to buy it today, no matter what. I’d scrape up the money somehow, get Adama and Iwase to contribute. Surely they’d see the necessity. Anything for our leading lady.

“Are you always thinking about those things?”

“What things?”

“The things you were saying to Mr. Yoshioka the other day.”

“Ah. Vietnam, and all that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not especially, but it’s everywhere you look, right? In the news and stuff.”

“Do you read a lot of books and things?”

“Sure.”

“If there’s anything interesting, would you lend it to me?”

I was wishing this hill in front of the school would never end. I wanted to go on talking to her for ever and ever. It was the first time I’d ever realized how wonderful just walking with a beautiful woman could make you feel.

“You know how on TV you see a lot of students demonstrating and barricading school buildings and everything? It’s like a completely different world to me, but... but I feel like I understand them.”

“Oh?”

“You said Shakespeare was ridiculous, didn’t you? I think so, too.”

“You do?”

“Simon and Garfunkel, people like that, you can really understand what they’re talking about. Shakespeare’s not like that, though.”

We reached the school. I promised to lend her
Bookends
, and we said bye-bye and went our separate ways. Even after we’d parted, I felt as if I were in a meadow full of flowers.

Adama was surprised when I suddenly suggested we
barricade the school
.
I was somehow under the impression that Kazuko Matsui had said she was attracted to boys who got involved in barricades and demonstrations.

“Well, we promised Masutabe anyway,” he said. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to go check out the Politicos’ place one time.”

DANIEL COHN-BENDIT

The Sasebo Northern High School Joint Campus Action Committee.
This was the name of the organization headed by Otaki and Narushima, and their hangout was above Sasebo Station. When I say “above,” I don’t mean it was on the second floor of the station. Sasebo, like Nagasaki, is a town with a lot of hills. It’s a perfect natural harbor, with mountains behind the town providing protection from the wind, and a low, curving coastline—a narrow strip of level ground packed with department stores and movie theaters and shopping streets and, of course, the American military base. The base occupies the very best land, as it does in every town that has one.

The headquarters of the Northern High JCA Committee was on the second floor of a cigarette shop at the top of a long, steep hill north of the station.

“Doesn’t this hill ever end?” Adama said. Sweat was dripping down his face. About ninety-eight percent of the citizens of Sasebo lived up on these slopes. The children would scramble down the hills to play in town, then trudge back home, tired and hungry.

*

Like most cigarette shops, this one was equipped with an old lady who you weren’t quite sure was still alive.

“Good afternoon!” we called out cheerfully, but she didn’t so much as twitch. I thought she was dead. Adama thought she might be a wax figure, a display of some sort. She wasn’t asleep; she was sitting hunched over, with her hands folded on her lap, and her eyes were open. We were a bit worried about her and decided to wait and see if she blinked, but her eyelids were as droopy as eyelids can get, and we had to watch closely. Beneath the eaves was a bed of withered cosmos or something. The wind played through the old lady’s thin hair. Just as we’d come to the conclusion that she really was a wax figure, or a mummy, her eyelids sagged shut and creaked open again. Adama and I smiled at each other.

At the side of the stairway next to the shop entrance was a sign that said “Northern High Economic Research Group”—if you can call a rain-smeared piece of drawing paper a sign. We climbed the stairs. It was dark in there. I asked Adama why the lighting in Japanese buildings was so bad, and he said it was because the Japanese were hopeless sex fiends. Maybe so.

Nobody was in the hangout. It was a twelve-mat room. Posters of Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, and
Trotsky
covered the sliding doors. There was a mimeograph machine on a desk and some serious-looking paperbacks, a cheap acoustic guitar, a bullhorn, and copies of the Students and Workers Liberation Front newsletter.

“Looks kind of obscene, doesn’t it?” Adama said. He was eyeing the futon spread out on the floor, and the pillows and tissue paper scattered around it. It may have had something to do with the bad lighting in Japanese buildings, but there was always a seamy sort of feeling to these radical hangouts. If they had a futon, it meant that people spent the night here sometimes. The political faction included some high school girls—not girls from Northern High, apparently, but from the commercial high school. No combination could be more obscene than a futon, tissue paper, and girls from a commercial high school.

Iwase arrived about ten minutes later, dripping with sweat and carrying three cartons of coffee-flavored milk. As I drank mine I wished I had a roll to go with it. Iwase picked up the cheap guitar and started to play “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Ever since Elvis, guitars had been the one thing no kid in the nation wanted to be without. Those who couldn’t afford one made do with ukuleles, which was the only reason there’d been a brief Hawaiian music craze. Electric guitars became the big thing when I was in junior high school. Tesco guitars, Guyatone amps, Pearl drums. Instruments by makers like Gibson and Fender and Music Man and Roland and Paiste existed only in magazines. Once the Ventures fad was over and the era of the Beatles and other vocal-oriented groups arrived, everybody wanted a semi-acoustic like John Lennon’s Rickenbacker. Then, when protest music and demonstrations against the war came along, Yamaha put out a new and affordable type of folk guitar, and everybody scrambled to buy one of these. The guitar here in the Politicos’ place wasn’t a Yamaha, though, but a Yamasa, a name that sounded like a maker of instant soup or something.

After playing “Motherless Child” on the Yamasa, Iwase did “Takeda Lullaby.” Presumably he’d chosen these numbers because neither required more than two or three chords, but they were both mournful tunes, and playing them must have put him in a dismal mood because he now brought up a pretty depressing subject.

“You guys are both going on to college after you graduate, right?”

At the time, Adama still wanted to get into medical school at a national university; he didn’t know yet that this would turn out to be an impossible dream. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking of doing, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t giving it all that much thought. I was already the sort of person who doesn’t spend a lot of time contemplating the future. Not that I was indifferent about the meteoric drop in my grades, mind you—I was actually quite freaked out about it. The thought of ending up a failure scared me. This in spite of the fact that in 1969 failures were having a lot of fun: a high school student had published a book rejecting the whole idea of college education, Japanese hippies were pictured in magazines painting naked women with day-glo colors, and there were always a few beautiful chicks taking part in the demonstrations and marches. But you knew that couldn’t last forever. In the long run, it’s successful guys who get the women. I’m not talking about marriage or whatever; I’m talking about females in general, and lots of them. Unless a young man has some guarantee of getting his fair share of the fair sex, he can’t go on living.

“What do you aim to do, Iwase?” Adama asked. Iwase was in a class made up mostly of hopeless cases.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t guess I’ll be going to college. Ken-san, what about you?”

“I don’t know, either. I might go to an art college, but... no, maybe I’ll study literature... Except, well, I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

“You’re lucky,” Iwase said. He was strumming an A-minor chord on the guitar. “You’ve got a lot of talent. Adama’s got brains, too. I don’t have anything.”

I figured the reason he was being so gloomy had to do with the sound of the
A-minor
chord, so I took the guitar away from him and started strumming a
G
.

“Come on, give yourself a break,” Adama said gently between sips of his coffee-flavored milk. “Look at John Lennon. You read what he said in
Music Life
, didn’t you? He said he didn’t have anything going for him at all as a kid. You don’t know if you’ve got any talent yet or not.”

Iwase looked at the floor and smiled, as if touched and embarrassed by Adama’s attempt to cheer him up. Then he shook his head.

“Believe me, I know. I can tell. But it doesn’t matter. You’ll always be my friends, won’t you? Both of you. Even after we graduate?”

I realized now what was getting him down. He saw himself slipping into the background as Adama and I grew closer. Before I met Iwase, he’d just been an ordinary, below-average student, a softhearted kid on the soccer team who was a major fan of some of the ugliest girls in school. Then after we became friends he started reading the Beat poets and listening to
Coltrane
, stopped following porkers around, and quit the soccer team. But it wasn’t me who’d changed his life; I was just the one who introduced him to poetry and jazz and pop art and so on, and those are the things that changed him. He fell under their influence only because there was nothing to stop him from falling, and by now he knew a lot more about jazz and pop art and underground theater and poetry than I did. He’d always been my main man, my partner in crime. But since Adama had joined up with us, he must have thought his own role had become uncertain, and that buying us coffee-flavored milk was about the only thing he was good for.

You’ll always be my friends
,
won’t you?
He looked really lonely when he said that. I hadn’t seen him looking that way for a long time, not since we were first-year students. Back then we had a Classical Japanese teacher with a long, narrow face named Shimizu. Shimizu was a nasty bastard who used to rap us on the head with a wooden ruler if we fucked up on his exams: one whack for seventy points, two for sixty, three for fifty, four for forty, and so on. Iwase and a few other guys always got four or five whacks apiece. Toward the end of our second semester, as he was returning test papers, Shimizu said, “The year’s almost over. We’ll never finish the textbook if I have to spend most of my time hitting people. From now on I won’t give anyone more than three whacks.” Most of us were glad to hear this, but the worst students sort of stiffened. Shimizu gave Iwase his paper and said, “Lucky you, eh, Iwase?” That meant he’d got forty points or less, and we all laughed. Iwase just bowed his head and smiled his embarrassed smile, but, seeing how lonely he looked afterward, I realized he would probably have preferred being smacked on the head to being ignored.

“Oh!... Isn’t Otaki here?”

The gloomy atmosphere Iwase had created was broken by the sound of a female voice. Two girls wearing commercial high uniforms—gorillas compared to Kazuko Matsui, but a million times better than no chicks at all—appeared in the doorway. They looked at Adama and giggled. Adama came in handy at times like this. Girls got the giggles when they met good-looking guys. It weakened their defenses.