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So you could say things like:

“Hi! I’m Yazaki from Northern High, this is Yamada, that’s Iwase. You’re from the commercial high? Come on in. What’s in the bag? Eh? Rice crackers? Open ’em up. Hey, we’re all comrades, right?”

Their names were Teiko and Fumiyo—straight out of a melodrama about prewar factory girls. I rapped with them about Eldridge Cleaver and Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Franz Fanon, pointed out the similarities between Machiavelli’s
The Prince
and the emperor system in postwar Japan, and argued about whether Che Guevara’s activities in Bolivia exemplified the fundamental aims of anarchism. Which is all a lie, of course. Munching rice crackers, I picked out Simon and Garfunkel’s “April Come She Will” on the guitar and explained how unhealthy it was for high school girls to remain virgins and how all the teachers at Northern High had given up on Otaki and Narushima because of their low IQs. The two factory girls, however, gave every indication of being the Politicos’ squeezes; they went with the futon and pillows and tissue paper. I’d already heard that Otaki and Narushima went around dropping hints that joining their committee was a sure way of getting laid. So it was true. The slimeballs. Why didn’t they take the cause more seriously? It made me sick, and so envious I could have wept.

*

I was just explaining that it wasn’t an immutable fact that throwing water on mating dogs would make them separate, that there were exceptions, and had the two factory girls cackling with laughter, when Narushima and Otaki and a string of seven of their followers showed up. One of them was a college student wearing a helmet. The others were Fuse and Miyachi, two creeps from the debating team; a guy named Mizoguchi, who’d come within an inch of being expelled for swiping someone’s bicycle; Masutabe, the owner of the eight-millimeter camera; and two other second-year students.

Narushima looked at me and smiled uncomfortably. They’d both been in my class in our second year. Neither of them did well in school. I was going around spouting about the evils of imperialism—without really knowing what I was saying, of course—before either of them knew Lenin from lemonade. They’d been your average lousy students in those days, just beginning to resign themselves to the fact that they weren’t very bright. The Joint Campus Action Committee changed their lives: it showed them that even under-achievers could become stars. When they began sneaking leaflets into school from the Students and Workers Liberation Front at Nagasaki University, I still couldn’t take them seriously, and even now I knew they felt inferior to me. But what with the futon and pillows and tissue paper and the fact that they had other backward types to push around, they seemed a bit more confident nowadays.

“What’s this?” Narushima said. “What brings you here, Yazaki?”

“You want to join up?” Otaki asked. When he’d first come up with the idea of forming a JCA Committee at Northern High, I’d told him to count me out. I’d done a lot of soul-searching and decided that the time just wasn’t ripe yet for that sort of thing. No, scratch that. I turned him down because I didn’t like the idea of being punished by the school for joining a radical group, and, besides, I thought making films would be a shorter path to futons and pillows and tissue paper. But that was all beside the point now. This was for Kazuko Matsui. Bambi, my little fawn, liked men who rallied to the cause.

“Yeah, I want to join,” I said.

Otaki and Narushima were surprised at first, then delighted. They shook my hand and introduced me to the guy in the helmet, saying I was a brilliant theorist who’d been reading Marx and Lenin since my junior year. Helmet said theory alone wasn’t much use and gave me a look. He seemed like a jerk. I was dealing with nine people, though. I needed to
take control
in one swift move.

“All right, then. Otaki, let’s hear your strategy for the struggle from here on,” I said.

Otaki and Narushima looked at each other uncertainly. Fat chance they’d have anything like a course of action in mind. They didn’t have the brains or the balls to actually do anything.

“Well, I don’t know if you’d call it a strategy, but we’re going to form a study group with people from Nagasaki U. and work on leaflets with the Peace for Vietnam Committee and try to get more recruits and—”

“Look,” I interrupted, “let’s barricade the school.”

None of the high schools in Kyushu had ever been barricaded; it hadn’t even been done at Nagasaki U. For people in a small city in the wilds of western Kyushu, tear gas and barricades were like Godard and Led Zeppelin—the stuff of dreams. Everybody was blown away by the idea.

“I’ve already decided the day. July 19, the last day of school. We’ll barricade the roof.”

“That’s crazy,” Helmet said. “Totally off the wall.”

“Listen, pal, you keep out of this. This involves Northern High, not college boys who’ve never got around to taking any action themselves.”

Masutabe and the other second-year kids looked at me, their eyes aglow with new respect.

“The problem is, we’re talking about an organization with, what, less than ten members. We let them know who’s behind it and we’ll be expelled, just when we’re getting started.”

The more I talked, the more confident I felt.

“Until we get more people on our side, we’ve got to keep it all secret. Go underground. We’ll barricade the place, but won’t hang around. Hit them, and withdraw. Guerrilla tactics.”

I was really rolling now.

“One of our tactics will be graffiti. We’ll cover the walls with slogans. And we’ll hang a giant banner from the roof. We’ll block off the stairs and the entrance to the roof so they won’t be able to take the banner down. We’ll do it all late at night, in true guerrilla style. And, by the way, we’re going to need a different name for the committee, otherwise Otaki and Narushima’ll be kicked out in no time. As long as there’s only a handful of us, we can’t let anything like that happen. Che wrote something to that effect in
Guerrilla Warfare
, I think.

Nobody said anything. Adama alone was smiling and nodding. He was the only one who knew this was all for Lady Jane’s sake.

“With a group this small, it won’t cost much to set it up. The reason we do it on the last day of school is that it’ll make it harder for them to investigate, and it’ll also have more impact on the students. They’ll be coming to school feeling great because summer vacation’s about to start. They’ll see the banner, and they’ll freak out. Then, during the vacation, since they won’t have much contact with the teachers—less chance of having their minds warped by reactionaries—they might even read some Marx or think about the war in Vietnam. ‘Smash the National Athletic Meet’—that’ll be one of our slogans. The Athletic Meet is a counterrevolutionary ritual devised by the government to keep us all in line. There’s a lot of bad feeling about it, too—girls are upset, for example, because all the practice for the opening ceremony interferes with studying for entrance exams. We use that. It’s easier to expand the scale of the struggle if there’s a concrete problem to focus on—one that people care about enough in private to fight against in public. Naturally we won’t advertise the fact that any of this was planned by people at Northern High, but we won’t say it was the work of outsiders, either. We’ll
hint
that it
might
have been an inside job—that’s about as far as we’ll go.”

Otaki raised his hand and asked me to hold on a second.

“What are we going to call ourselves, if not the JCA Committee?”

I told him not to worry. “I’ve already thought of a name:
Vajra
. It’s Sanskrit for the gods of lust and anger. Pretty cool, eh?”

“Far out!” shouted Masutabe, and everyone applauded. And that’s how I became the leader of Vajra, the new dissident movement at Northern High.

CLAUDIA CARDINALE

A few days after the midterm exams, which I’d screwed up badly on, I was climbing the hill to the hideout with Adama and Iwase.

“Ken-san,” Iwase said, “you remember last year when we went to Hakata?”

“Sure. The time we spent the night in the movie theater, right?”

He was talking about one weekend the previous summer when he and I had taken a train to Hakata to see some films. We’d heard they were having an all-night Polish film festival.

“Remember the jazz place we went to?
”

“Yeah.”

“What was the name of it again?
”

“Riverside Café, wasn’t it? It was right beside a river.”

“I’m thinking about getting a job there during summer vacation.”

“At the Riverside? Oh, yeah?
”

“Yeah. The owner was a nice guy, remember? I sent him a letter.”

“Is that right?
”

We’d set out for Hakata after lunch on a Saturday, skipping afternoon homeroom. First we went to Kyushu University to look at the wreckage of a Phantom jet that had crashed into one of the buildings there, then, after a bowl of noodles, we headed for the movie theater district. Right across the street from the little place showing
art films
was a marquee in bright primary colors. Adorning the marquee was a huge pair of pink boobs, and written on it were three titles:
The Angel's Entrails
,
The Fetus Poachers
, and
Inflatable Wives in the Wilderness.
I stopped and peered at it. Iwase saw what was coming and tried to drag me toward
Pasazerka
,
Mother Joan of the Angels
, and
Kanal.
“Wait wait wait wait, Iwase, that’s a film by a great director, man—look, Polish flicks are fine but they’re not even showing
Ashes and Diamonds
, we don’t have enough money for a hotel, we’re going to have to stay in the theater all night, and how are we gonna sleep with Polish partisans and nuns writhing in agony all over the screen?” Iwase, ever serious-minded, insisted we flip a coin, and I lost. I lost, but I told him I wasn’t going to watch a bunch of fucking Nazis anyway and headed for the pink boobs. The next day, in the afternoon, we went to the Riverside Café to listen to some jazz. Iwase asked them to play a slow, moody piece by Coltrane, and I chose a bossa nova by Stan Getz. In between Coltrane and Getz they played something by Carla Bley, requested by a group of girls in their early twenties who worked in the ladies’ clothing section of a local department store. Salesgirls listening to Carla Bley—that was the late sixties for you. One of them was just Iwase’s type. She was like the epitome of all junior-college-graduate department store salesgirls: plain and simple, with long hair, dark skin, and narrow eyes...

I knew she and Iwase had been writing to each other. The reason he wanted the job, I figured, was so that he could see her. He’d shown me one of her letters once:
Dear Hide-bo. How are you?
(Iwase’s given name was Hideo.)
I’m listening to a session by Booker Little and Eric Dolphy as I write this. You’re probably right about me being a weak person. I know I shouldn’t care what people think
,
I should trust my own feelings. But when I think about all the people around me I just lose my nerve...
When I asked what she was talking about, Iwase played dumb and said he didn’t know, but it was pretty clear to me that she was involved in some sort of
forbidden love
: a sales manager, married with kids; a yakuza; her stepfather; her pet dog—something along those lines, probably. If there was one area in which Iwase was more grown-up than I was, it was his connection with this chick. Whenever I mentioned her, he’d smile knowingly and mutter, “She’s a real woman.” I was jealous. For all I knew he might cross the line before I did. I remembered her sitting there in her thin dress. It was true, she did have a “real woman” sort of air about her; not like the whores with their cheap perfume who hung out in bars full of foreigners, but something that ordinary young women working in the real world had. Why should Iwase bring up the Riverside Café now, though, as we were walking to the hideout in the rain? “You’re going there so you can see your salesgirl, right?” I said. “How’d you guess?” he said, nodding and giggling—-if you could call that creepy sound a giggle. With Adama and me taking control of the Northern High JCA Committee, Iwase must have felt insecure about his own position, and this was probably his way of reasserting himself. A vision of that sweet-smelling salesgirl, naked, filled my brain. It pissed me off, and in my heart I shouted:
I hope she
dumps you like a turd!
The hydrangeas along the road were just beginning to change color, and Adama, ignoring us, was poking at them with the tip of his umbrella. Adama was cool.

“Power to the Imagination.”

This was the slogan we decided to paint on the banner. Narushima and Otaki wanted it to be some cliché like
“Fight the Good Fight,”
but Masutabe and his classmates were overwhelmingly in favor of choosing one of the slogans Adama and I had taken from a collection of graffiti produced during the May Revolution in Paris—things like “Reject Pre-established Harmony!” and “Beneath the Pavement Lies a Desert.”

It was fun thinking up slogans of our own. We all wrote them down on little strips of paper and read them aloud. Outside the window, rain was falling like fine silver needles. All we needed were conical straw hats and we’d have looked like Basho and his boys writing haiku.