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Nakamura was close to tears, but we wouldn’t let him off the hook. Bathed in moonlight, he climbed up onto the desk.

“Don’t look, okay?” he said in a pitiful voice as he pulled down his pants.

“If you think it’s going to get noisy, stop,” Adama whispered, holding his nose.

“Stop? Once it starts coming out, I can’t stop.”

“You wanna get thrown out of school?”

“Can’t I do it in the toilet?”

“Nope.”

Nakamura’s white ass shone in the moonlight.

“I’m too nervous. It won’t come out.”

“Push,” Adama said, and that’s when it happened.

Along with a little whimpering cry, Nakamura let out a tremendous fart. It sounded like a broken bagpipe. Adama ran up to him and whispered, “Keep it down! Plug up your ass with something!”

“It’s too late,” Nakamura said.

The noise was incredibly loud and seemed to go on forever. I got goosebumps all over and turned to look toward the watchmen’s room. If we got expelled for a fart, we’d be the laughingstock of the school, but they still seemed to be asleep. Nakamura wiped his ass with the monthly newsletter of the

Nagasaki Prefectural High School Principals Association, and smiled sheepishly.

The other team had nearly finished barricading the door to the roof with wire and desks and chairs. Otaki told us wistfully that it would have been even better if he’d had welding equipment.

Narushima and Masutabe were the only ones left on the roof. After securing the door from the outside with wire, they had to slide down a rope to a window on the third floor. We all watched them from the courtyard in front of the school. Narushima had been in the mountain-climbing club, so we weren’t worried about him.

“What’ll we do if Masutabe falls?” Otaki said. “Might as well decide that now.”

“We’ll call the cops and run.” It was, of course, Adama who made this decision. “Hell, if we try to help him, we’ll all be busted.”

Masutabe, unlike Narushima, was swaying back and forth on the rope. Fuse said he wouldn’t be surprised if the kid was pissing his pants. I told them about Nakamura’s revolutionary bowel movement, and everyone doubled up laughing.

Masutabe somehow managed to make it down safely. The banner was hanging from the roof.

“Power to the Imagination.”

We all stood silently gazing up at it.

JUST LIKE A WOMAN

At six o’clock in the morning, Adama and I made seven telephone calls: to the local branches of the
Asahi
,
Mainichi
, and
Tomiuri
newspapers, the main offices of both the
Western Japan News
and the
Nagasaki Post
, and the broadcasting stations NHK Sasebo and NBC Nagasaki.

The purpose of the calls was to issue a
communiqué
:

“Before dawn this morning, members of Vajra, the radical organization we belong to, carried out a successful mission to set up a barricade in one of the strongholds of the system’s propaganda machine, Sasebo Northern High School.”

That’s what we’d intended to say, but since we were new to this sort of thing, it turned out more like, “Um, listen, it, uh... it looks like somebody barricaded Northern High in Sasebo, okay?”

It didn’t matter, though. Thanks to this announcement, the mass media discovered the barricade and graffiti before the watchmen, the teachers, the students, or the people in the neighborhood.

NHK and NBC reported it on the 7:00
A.M.
local news.

Too nervous and excited to sleep, I was lying in bed checking for about the hundredth time that there weren’t any paint stains on me, when my father, who’d just been watching the news, came into my room. There was a scary look on his face.

“Ken-bo,” he said, using my childhood nickname. My parents had called me just plain “Ken” since around my last year of elementary school, but whenever relations between us were strained they reverted to “Ken-bo.” Maybe it was their instinctive way of showing they missed the good old days when I was still a little kid. At any rate, I knew the barricade had been on the news as soon as I heard him call me this.

“Ken-bo, look me in the eye,” he said.

My father had been an art teacher for twenty years. He frowned and peered at me, confident in his ability to tell when children were lying. I looked back at him with no sleep and the aftermath of intense excitement written all over my face, but apparently he decided I was innocent. Even a veteran teacher can be a pushover when it comes to his own kids. The fact that a lot of ultra-radicals were the sons and daughters of schoolteachers was often attributed to their strict upbringing, but the truth is that just behind that apparent strictness was a tendency to spoil them rotten. Teaching is a strange profession. It’s like being an officer in the Self-Defense Forces, or a policeman. Though most people in these positions are just your average slobs, the general public—at least in the provinces—still treats them almost with reverence. This isn’t something they’ve earned for themselves but a throwback to the prewar years, when respect was their reward for cooperating with the fascist system; and old habits die hard. As a teacher, my father had always been quick to resort to corporal punishment. It wasn’t only students he got rough with, either: he’d been known to slug the principal at his school and the head of the PTA. He never hit me, though. I once asked why, and he said his own children were just so damned lovable he couldn’t bring himself to hit them. He was an honest old guy.

“Okay,” he said. “You didn’t do it, did you.”

I rubbed my eyes, pretending to be still half asleep. “What’re you talking about?”

“Somebody barricaded Northern High.”

I opened my eyes wide and sprang out of bed. I slipped on my trousers in three seconds, my shirt in four, and my socks in two. Seeing what a flap I was in seemed to make my father even more convinced of my innocence. I dashed downstairs and out the door, calling out to my mother that I didn’t need any breakfast, and ran down the road at full tilt for about a hundred meters—then slowed to a saunter.

When I got to the bottom of the hill in front of the school, I could see the banner.

“Power to the Imagination.”

It was a stirring sight. All on our own, we’d managed to change the scenery.

I climbed the hill with my heart pounding. The physics teacher and about a dozen students were at the front gate, trying to scrub off the graffiti. The smell of paint thinner filled the air. There was something downright disgusting about these kids in their eagerness to see the scenery return to normal. Someone from a radio station was interviewing them:

“Who do you think could have done this?”

“It wasn’t anyone here. Northern High students wouldn’t ever do something like this,” said a disgusting girl with blue paint caked under her fingernails. Her voice was choked with tears.

When I got to the classroom Adama smiled at me and winked, and when no one was looking we shook hands.

Eight-thirty came and went, and
homeroom
still hadn’t begun. Announcements over the P.A. system told us to wait in our classrooms, but the whole school was in pandemonium. Helicopters hovered overhead. One team of disgusting students was helping the P.E. instructors dismantle the stuff on the roof. Another object of disgust—the vice president of the student council—was working away with a thinner-soaked rag in an effort to erase the red “Kill!” I’d painted near the front entrance. When he spotted me, he dashed over. His eyes were red; he’d been kneeling there crying as he scrubbed at the paint. He grabbed hold of my collar with the hand that held the rag.

“Yazaki, it wasn’t you, was it? Huh? You didn’t do it, did you, you weren’t the one, were you? I just can’t believe any Northern student would do this to his own school, but tell me, come on, tell me you didn’t do it, tell me, dammit, tell me!”

The rag he was holding was cold, and I didn’t enjoy having it pressed against my neck. I considered punching him one, but I was afraid of drawing attention to myself, so I just glared at this four-eyed, buck-toothed runt, who at seventeen was already going gray, and yelled,
“Let go of me!”
I
couldn’t figure out how he could be so upset. Somebody paints slogans on the walls of your school—is that something to start blubbering over? What was it to him, a holy shrine? People like this were dangerous, though. Very naive. It was people like this who’d murdered and tortured and raped in Korea and China. People like this cried over graffiti, but it was nothing to them if one of their classmates started sucking sailors’ dicks as soon as she graduated from junior high.

“Ken, you backed down.”

Adama had been watching my run-in with the vice president.

“No, I didn’t. That asshole’s really over the top, though.”

“Yeah. It’s amazing that a guy’d get down on the floor and scrub like that. Getting his hands sopping wet.”

“I know. How can they get so intense about it? If I did back down, it was because the guy was, like, overwhelming.”

“There was no fight in you, man.”

“How come, I wonder.”

“Because it wasn’t ‘the good fight,’ maybe.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Our motives weren’t exactly pure, right?”

“Our motives? For the barricade?”

“It’s not like we were going to die or something if we didn’t pull it off.”

“What do you know about dying, Adama? Do you have any idea how many people are dying in Vietnam every day?”

Whenever I started spouting clichés like this, I’d suddenly find myself speaking standard Japanese. The kind of stuff the Peace for Vietnam Committee said in their speeches sounded funny in dialect, somehow.

“Vietnam, right.”

“It was bastards like him who went berserk in Nanking and Shanghai and all those places.”

“Nanking, right. But, listen, doesn’t it make you feel sort of weird to see ’em going all out to clean up like that?”

“’Course it does. I didn’t know there were that many supporters of the fuckin’ system here, man.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, it’s like we created something for them to get all gung-ho about.”

There was an air of sadness about Adama as he said this. He was always like that. He’d say things in a tone that suggested a sense of futility. But he really knew how to get his point across.

A great throng of students stood outside in the July sun, sweating as they worked to strip the graffiti from the windows of the teachers’ room and the wall of the library. Maybe Adama was right: it wasn’t only the honor students who were out there with cleaning rags but even the dimmest kids—kids who, thanks to this school, had such a low opinion of themselves they were practically suicidal.

Nakamura was standing outside the principal’s office, looking as pale as a ghost. He, too, was holding a rag. When he saw Adama and me he gave us a tight little smile.

“What’re you doing with that thing in your hand?” Adama said.

Nakamura licked his lips nervously.

“I didn’t think it would be smart to just sit around. It’d look suspicious. Remember, I’m the guy they call
Unprintable
. But anyway, listen, Ken-san, it’s really strange...”

“What is?”

Adama suddenly grabbed my sleeve, pulled me down to a squatting position, and started pretending to rub at the floor. Nakamura and I soon followed suit. Walking down the hall toward us were the guidance counselor, the two watchmen, the vice principal, a uniformed policeman, and another man who looked like a plainclothes detective. I glanced at the policeman and shivered. Why do cops jingle and jangle so much when they walk? He was wearing heavy lace-up shoes, and these also made a lot of noise. When the counselor’s slippers stopped right in front of me, I thought my heart was going to burst. The cop’s jingling and jangling and clumping stopped, too.

“You boys,”
the counselor said.

I looked up at him, feeling as if all the breath had been knocked out of me.

“You boys will never get the paint off by rubbing at it like that. We’ll have some professionals come in to clean up. I understand how you feel, but I want you to go on back to your classrooms. Homeroom will be starting soon, and we’re going to hold the closing ceremony as planned. Run along, then.”

I was mad at myself for being so scared—I’d pictured us being arrested and strung up on the spot—but I felt a lot better when I saw the troubled expression on the counselor’s face and the deep creases between his eyebrows. This was the guy who’d caught me in a jazz café listening to Antonio Carlos Jobim, taken my glass of Coke away, slapped me forehand and backhand about ten times, and got me suspended from school for four days; the sort of bastard who got his rocks off preaching about the evils of delinquency, complete with quotes from Confucius or whatever, every time we had an assembly or ceremony of some kind. He was a tall guy with silver hair who’d written several books about criminal law in the ancient world, and his way of dealing out shit was as mean as they come. He wouldn’t ever lose his temper, just eye you coldly and say, “You’re trash, we don’t have enough time to try to make a decent student out of you, so why don’t you just drop out or find some other school if you don’t like it here?” This was the prick who was now shuffling off toward the teachers’ room with drooping shoulders and a gloomy face. I heard the vice principal say something about “the biggest
disgrace
in the history of the school.”

In the history of the school.
Adama and I grinned at each other and shook hands again.

Adama suggested we take a look at the roof. Nakamura came along with us.

“You were saying something was strange,” Adama said to him as we climbed the stairs.

Students with rags swarmed around the columns we’d defaced at the top of the stairs.