Popular Hits of the Showa Era (15 page)

I

The
four Midoris disbanded the Midori Society and decided not to meet or even to contact one another for the time being. The rocket attack at the seashore just above Atami was treated as big news in the media. The authorities were investigating it as the probable work of some extremist political faction, and the four Midoris avoided all suspicion. Their names never even came up in the investigation. For one thing, the Midori Society wasn’t on anyone’s list of dangerous groups—left-wing terrorists, right-wing fanatics, organized crime syndicates, motorcycle gangs, and what have you. Local law enforcement enlisted the help of the National Police Agency, and the forensic analysis upon which Japan prides itself was brought into full play but got no further than identifying the weapon as a portable rocket launcher. The authorities had no idea how anyone could have gotten their hands on such a weapon. The Self-Defense Forces publicly announced that M72s were not among the weapons in their arsenal, and off the record they cast suspicion on American forces in Japan. The American military, for their part, took the attitude that it wasn’t their problem if a nation of dimwitted peaceniks wanted to make such a fuss over something that amounted to a virtual nonevent when compared to, say, the Los Angeles riots—which attitude was vehemently criticized in
Asahi Shimbun
editorials.

Nonetheless, had Ishihara been an average human being, or Nobue a normal one, the four members of the Midori Society might very well have been called in for questioning. Ishihara had gotten a look at Suzuki Midori’s face, and it’s possible that if he had said,
I saw one of the killers. It was an Oba-san
, the investigating officers might have thought of connecting the incident to the murder of Iwata Midori, the woman who’d been shot with a Tokarev. But it wasn’t as if Ishihara were holding anything back out of concern about the investigation widening to include the Tokarev incident. Both he and Nobue were called in to talk with the police several times, but the investigators couldn’t make sense of anything they said. The noun “Oba-san” did issue from Ishihara’s mouth from time to time, but always seemingly at random, in the midst of a confused and disconnected ramble, so that it never piqued the investigators’ interest.

“Nobu-chin took a knife in the cheek and I lost at rock-paper-scissors but before that the girl in the apartment across the way got bare-ass naked—Gyah ha ha ha! I mean
bare-ass
!
Suppon-pon!
Turtle soup’s on! What? BARE ASS me again! Ha ha!—and I couldn’t concentrate on the rock-paper-scissors, so I lost, I went with paper and lost and it made me so mad I thought about peeing all over the karaoke set and speakers but I didn’t have to pee and nothing came out but I was thinking, you know, when Nobu-chin got stabbed with the knife it was so intense, it reminded me of when they cut a wedding cake, and I thought about singing the wedding song, like
dan danka dan!
but I couldn’t remember the melody and nothing came out but instead it was like on
The Bold Shogun
where there’s this villain who always wears a mask but when they unmask him he turns out to be an Oba-san, and the Oba-san goes, like, ‘What
are
you insinuating?’ but the truth is she’s really evil and I always end up watching it because it’s on right after
Sailor Moon
, but not really like wedding cake but more like when one of the villain’s thugs skewers like a weak little kid with his sword and it goes
pu-shutt
, that’s what it reminded me of, I mean, it was really funny and everything, but then…”

Ishihara was sent for a psychological evaluation and diagnosed as suffering from either schizophrenia or advanced and probably untreatable mania. The investigators had no choice but to give up on trying to get information from him. As for Nobue, since the knife had pierced his cheek, sliced through his gums, and shredded his tongue, he was unable to speak intelligibly even after leaving the hospital and gave the appearance of being severely mentally challenged. Eventually the police formed an unspoken consensus that murdering such unsalvageable youths was probably a service to the nation anyway, and the mass media, for its part, gradually moved on to other sensational stories. The real wall that the investigation had run up against, however, was the lack of any discernible chain of events. Crimes that don’t have any clear motive are the most difficult to solve, and tying a rocket attack at the beach to three random murders in Chofu was a leap far beyond the imaginative powers of the police. The investigators briefly pursued the theory that the attack might have been perpetrated by a tribe of local juvenile delinquents angered by the late-night karaoke sessions, or by a roving motorcycle gang that claimed the roads in that region as their own territory, but after some five months with no concrete results the investigation was terminated.

By that time, the four Midoris had let down their guard somewhat and begun communicating occasionally by telephone, although they still forbade any meetings in person. Strangely, all four of them were leading much more fulfilling lives than ever before and exuding newfound self-assurance. One of the Midoris became the most popular person in her workplace, and another was employee of the week seven weeks in a row. A third found that communication with her son had improved dramatically: he now opened up to her about his feelings and interests, his performance at school was improving, and he no longer spent hours at a time silently playing computer games. And the fourth Midori fell in love with a much younger man she’d met at a karaoke club.
You have this serenity about you…that’s so soothing to the heart…and at the same time…this vibrant, electric tension…. How do you do it?
Such were the things the handsome, aquiline-nosed twenty-six-year-old graduate of Kyoto University, who was employed by a think tank for a major brokerage firm, would whisper to the mid-thirties Midori as he treated her to passionate and tender cunnilingus. What all four Midoris shared was an indelible, very serious, and very real secret—a secret that served both to bolster their self-confidence and to lend them a certain air of mystery. And that combination of self-possession and intrigue is what makes a woman truly appealing, especially when she herself seems unaware of it.

Outwardly, the Midoris’ daily lives differed in no significant way from those of their coworkers and neighbors. But the three shredded corpses, the knife in Nobue’s cheek, and Ishihara’s more-powerful-than-a-rocket-launcher laughter were not the sorts of things one simply dismisses from one’s mind. It was surprising how many things in this world could remind one of coils of intestines protruding from a ruptured stomach, or thirty centimeters of blackened, mangled tongue hanging from a ruined mouth, or a burned and detached, starfishlike hand. Organs and body parts that had been separated from their parent bodies and lost all purpose or function did not really resemble anything else in this world, and precisely for that reason almost any unusual sight or smell was enough to trigger those memories. Normally, for people who’ve witnessed such horrors—soldiers returning from foreign wars, for example—flashbacks of this sort are often harbingers of severe post-traumatic stress disorders. Even a single experience of something as unimaginably gruesome as what they’d witnessed can cause PTSD, and there have been countless reports of people developing such disorders after seeing friends or relatives die before their eyes in traffic accidents, fires, or natural disasters. But for the Midoris, who possessed a blind and unshakable belief in their own righteousness, the memories had the opposite effect. The battle at Atami had been a kind of holy war for them—they were, after all, avenging the murders of valued friends—and as such it was not something they felt any need to be ashamed of. The experience had, in fact, boosted their self-esteem, and they seemed to ooze fulfillment from every pore. They were, nonetheless, of the gentler sex and not without maternal instincts. The recurring image of those mangled corpses naturally helped to dampen their exhilaration and to prevent their becoming overly intoxicated with themselves. And so they lived with their real-life nightmare, neither glorifying nor denying it. In any case, they had emerged victorious.

If it wasn’t for this guy right here
, Nobue was thinking as he gazed at Ishihara,
I would have lost my mind long ago
. They were in Nobue’s apartment, some seven months after the incident at Atami. The wound in Nobue’s cheek had healed over, but he was still recovering and haunted by the trauma he had suffered that night. His tongue was mutilated, his scarred cheek pinched and tended to twitch, and he still couldn’t speak normally. He had quit his part-time job in computer sales, but he wasn’t in particularly straitened circumstances. His parents, in response to their son’s misfortune at having been maimed in a senseless but spectacular attack that had been big news in all the national media, faithfully sent him a regular and rather considerable allowance. As for Ishihara, how he managed to pull it off is anyone’s guess, but since the attack he had continued to commute each weekday to his job at a small design firm. And when Saturday came around, he was sure to show up at Nobue’s apartment, calling,
No-o-bu-u–chi-i-n!
as he climbed the stairs outside. In short, there was essentially no change in him whatsoever.

At the moment, Ishihara was nudging Nobue’s shoulder and saying, “Nobu-chin! Nobu-chin, say ‘Congratulations on the New Year’!” The closest Nobue could get was something like,
Kon raw yoo rayon la la Roo Ya
, at which Ishihara collapsed on the tatami and rolled about, laughing hysterically. Nobue didn’t mind. He knew now that when you’ve been badly damaged emotionally or physically, it isn’t the people who are mournfully sympathetic or overly careful about your feelings that help you out so much as those who treat you as they’ve always done. “GYAAAAAH!” Now Ishihara was on his feet again, nudging Nobue’s shoulder and bouncing up and down. “Nobu-chin, please, I’m begging you, now say, ‘Red pussy blue pussy yellow pussy.’ Please please please. I swear I won’t laugh.” As Nobue gazed at his old friend, a tear of gratitude rolled down his cheek. All at once he realized how much he loved this person, and he grabbed the hand nudging his shoulder and clasped it tightly in his own. “Thank you, Ishi-kun,” he said hoarsely. Ishihara was so startled by both the gesture and the sentiment that he wondered if his friend had finally broken under the strain and gone mental. He pressed his forehead against Nobue’s to see if the poor lad wasn’t running a fever.

They would need a little more time before they’d be ready to rise to the final battle.

II

More
than half a year went by. There had been no Saturday Karaoke Blasts in all that time, of course, since the troupe of six had been diminished by four. Nobue’s rehabilitation continued. On a sunny afternoon in late fall, he and Ishihara were strolling along shoulder to shoulder and all but hand in hand beside Koshu Avenue in Chofu. They were like the last two specimens, both male, of a soon-to-be-extinct species, exploring their narrow game preserve. Now that his cheek wound had healed to a permanent scar, Nobue in particular felt as if he’d aged tremendously. They were passing the Koganei Electronics Institute when he said, with only a barely noticeable speech defect, “There was a guy named Sugioka once, wasn’t there?” Ishihara was carrying a Garigari-Kun popsicle in each hand, licking now one, now the other, and chanting things like, “Popsicles for autumn, popsicles in autumn, two popsicles on a warm autumn day! Two skinny weenies getting sucked, sucked off! The first one to squirt’s gonna win first prize!” But at the mention of Sugioka’s name he stopped. “Nobu-chin, what sort of a guy was Sugioka again?” he asked, and began to skip in a circle. It was, by any measure, a strange sight—a small man in his mid-twenties with a remarkably large head and eyes, sucking alternately on two popsicles and skipping in circles around another man of about the same age with equally oversized peepers, a nasty scar on his cheek, and a prematurely receding hairline. Other pedestrians on the street would catch a glimpse of Ishihara and quickly lower their gaze to avoid any sort of eye contact or interaction as they passed. “Quit dancing around me like a crazy Indian,” Nobue kept saying, though in fact he was enjoying the silliness. Finally Ishihara skipped to a halt and squatted abruptly on the pavement, holding his head and complaining of dizziness. Then he bounced up again. “Garigari-Kun A,” he said to the bare popsicle stick in his right hand, “may you rest in peace. Garigari-Kun B, now it’s your turn to die!” After chomping down on what remained of the second popsicle, he turned to Nobue and said, “Seriously, I can’t remember—what was Sugioka like? I seem to recall that he was skinny and had a narrow face and loved knives and mumbled a lot and you couldn’t tell if he was gloomy or cheerful, but there’s lots of guys like that. I wish I could picture him clearly, like in a flashback in a movie or somethin’, but I can’t.”

Nobue responded with a suggestion.

“Why don’t we go look at the place where he was killed? It’s not far from here.”

On
a late November afternoon like this, when the weather was fine and the sunshine warm on your shoulders, any normal person would be outside if possible, so naturally the junior college girl was in her room. Spying Nobue and Ishihara out her window, she opened it to lean out and call to them, “Hi! What a surprise!” Nobue, on hearing that voice and looking up to see that face protruding from the window, felt as if the wound on his cheek had been reopened and his tongue resliced. Ishihara let out a terrified, “GYAH!” and buckled at the knees. “Run!” they whispered to each other, but the junior college girl said, “Wait there! I happen to be free just now! I’ll be down in a sec!” and a moment later they heard the rapid
dan dan dan dan dan
of her steps on the wooden stairs. Nobue and Ishihara were in a state resembling sleep paralysis as their brains tried to process the afterimage of the junior college girl’s face. Unable to move, they were still shivering at the image when the actual face materialized before them, seeming to cause the blue sky to crack in two and the yellow ginkgo leaves to turn to scraps of rotting flesh, fluttering in the breeze. Both of them felt as if they’d just slurped up their own vomit.