Popular Hits of the Showa Era (4 page)

On this particular day, Osamu smiled just moments after they met. At Kiddy Kastle, Tomiyama Midori copied down the names of all the players who’d scored more than three hundred thousand points. In accordance with the strategy she and the other Midoris had jointly devised, she told the manager of the store that she worked in the marketing department of a major video game manufacturer and wanted to contact the high scorers and ask them to try out a new shooting game. “Could you possibly give me their addresses?” she asked him.

“Don’t know their addresses,” said the manager, whose face was like a squashed orange. “But I got a list where they go to school.”

There were seven names:

It bothered her a bit that the given name, Osamu, was the same as her son’s, but Tomiyama Midori felt there could be no mistake. She drew a star next to Sugioka’s name. He had scored 370,000 points. “That guy’s awesome!” Osamu said, and smiled once again. Tomiyama Midori patted his head.

Sugioka
didn’t notice that he was being tailed by two inconspicuous Aunties as he came out the front gate of the electronics institute. The sun was shining for the first time in many days, and he giggled meaninglessly as he sauntered along in the thick shade of the old cedars that lined the street. Following him at a distance were Iwata Midori and Henmi Midori.

“I thought he’d look like more of a degenerate.”

“Did you see those bangs? I suppose there are girls who think that’s cute.”

“It seems his name is the same as Tomii’s son.”

“She said she was absolutely certain this was the one, right?”

They might have been two perfectly average housewives discussing their children’s entrance exams, so much a part of the scenery that no one would have looked at them twice. From their position behind Sugioka, they couldn’t see that he was grinning moronically. He was remembering the last party, at which, while everyone was laying waste to the beef jerky and dried squid and macaroni salad and pork dumplings, he had stood up and announced what he’d done, instantly becoming a hero and lifting the mood of the room to a fever pitch. “You probably won’t believe this,” he’d said as he placed on the table a newspaper clipping with the headline “RANDOM MURDER.” He then produced the commando knife, which hadn’t been cleaned and was still crusty with dried, blackened blood. “This is the blade that slit that Oba-san’s throat,” he said, adding with a high-pitched laugh, “The actual murder weapon.”

No one doubted him. They knew that Sugioka always carried knives and liked to stab things. This, however, was something else altogether. Ishihara was particularly impressed. Envisioning the Oba-san’s throat opening like Pac-Man’s mouth, he realized now what his original anxiety had been all about, but not knowing how to express this he merely mumbled, “Well, I’ll be,” and squirmed on his cushion, gurgling with laughter. The others weren’t sure how to react at first, but when Yano, whose only thought was that Sugioka had totally succeeded in abandoning something, burst out with a cackle like that of a crazed Vietcong soldier exiting a spider hole in full attack mode, Nobue too began chortling and clapping his hands, saying, “That’s incredible! So you’re a murderer!” Sugiyama lowered his eyes and muttered, “Maybe it’s time for me to do something with my life too,” finishing off with a chuckle like part of the syllabary—
ka, ki, ku, ke, ko!
—and fashion-conscious Kato gazed at Sugioka with eyes so wide they were nearly round and cried, “Now, that’s what I call STYLIN’!” And for the next thirty minutes or so they had exchanged no more words but lots of stunned looks and sporadic bursts of uncontrollable laughter. Now, as he walked down this tree-lined street, Sugioka was remembering that laughter, and sniggering to himself. He recalled with special fondness the question someone had posed when the laughter had subsided somewhat—“So, like, what sort of Oba-san was it?”—and how everyone had focused on him as he told his tale.

“Well, you know, after we did the Pinky & the Killers show, I’m kind of embarrassed to say it but I was so excited I couldn’t sleep, so I took a bunch of sleeping tablets I’d bought from some street kid in Shibuya, but even then I couldn’t sleep, and in the morning, you know how it is on mornings like that, you get a hard-on so bad it hurts, and I went out on the street with mine, carrying this knife with me too, which now makes me think that right from the start I was planning to take somebody down—yeah, not kill ’em but take ’em down, that was the feeling—and I saw this Oba-san in a white dress come out of the rear entrance to Ito Yokado, a white dress that looked like it was made out of jizz, and she smelled like shellfish too.”

III

“I
instinctively understood that this Oba-san was the one I needed to take down, and I’ll tell you why I knew. It’s because I’m a
hunter
. Not that I’ve ever done any actual hunting per se, but I read this book by a guy who calls himself Japan’s Number One Hunter, and this guy, normally he works in a little advertising agency as a whaddayacallit, a copywriter, and his wife left him and he doesn’t have much money and lives in Tama New Town, and he drinks a lot and gets into fights, and even though he always loses he still thinks of himself as the Number One Hunter in Japan, whether or not he’s ever actually bagged any game, which he hasn’t, by the way, but anyway I read this book he wrote, and when you read it you’re like,
Now,
this
is a true hunter
, because this guy, in his mind he’s always got a shotgun with him, even though he doesn’t really have one because he failed the written exam for the license, which is multiple choice and, like, ridiculously easy, like the written exam for a driver’s license. I mean, the questions are like, ‘After hunting or target practice, you find you have some live, unused shells left over. What should you do with them? A: Use proper care in taking them home and storing them in a safe place. B: Divide them up amongst any children who happen to be nearby. C: Heave them into the nearest body of water, shouting SCREW YOU! at the top of your lungs.’ Well, this guy would always choose B or C because, see, he’s honest, that’s his downfall, he can’t tell a lie. So, anyway, he doesn’t actually have a gun, so what does he do? He goes jogging, and as he’s jogging he visualizes himself shooting down all the living things he sees on the road. He started with ants and caterpillars and things, then graduated to praying mantises and cabbage butterflies, turning all the jogging courses around Tama New Town into killing fields, and then after a while he conquered his fear and started targeting dogs and cats. The way he puts it in the book, I don’t remember the exact words, but it was like, ‘It’s not only deserts and savannas and mountain forests that can serve as hunting grounds, but the city itself. Right in the middle of the city, that’s my hunting ground, and it’s mine alone.’ That’s what he says, and then he says that survival of the fittest is just another namby-pamby philosophy that can’t really help you when you’re living in the city. He goes: ‘What’s important is humanism. We need to realize our hunting in the imagination, being true to that incomprehensible teaching known as humanism, and if possible to realize it in reality too.’ Pretty cool way to put it, eh?”

As he was speaking, Sugioka looked around the room and noticed that for once everyone was listening carefully and trying to follow what he was saying. Nobue knitted his brow—a rare sight—and said, “Amazing. He sounds like a truly amazing man.” Ishihara’s eyes were shining as he added, “I’ll say. But this book—where can you buy it? Who’s the publisher? Kadokawa, I bet, yeah?” Sugiyama stared down at his hands and muttered, “Deep. That shit is deep!” while Yano, looking like a hopped-up Vietcong fighter preparing for an attack on a moonless night, shouted, “He’s a DOER, that’s what he is! Not a Thinker, like that Rodin guy, but a Doer,” and a dewy-eyed Kato murmured, “Now,
that’s
the sort of gentleman who should carry a shoulder bag by Hunting World!” Thrilled with the reflection that this had never happened before—all eyes on one person, all ears on one tale—Sugioka kept talking.

“In other words, you visualize bringing something down, but you can’t do that with just the power of your own will, you need some sort of help. Like in my case it was morning wood and not enough sleep, but it can’t be something like ideas or ideology or whatever—things like that aren’t worth squat, according to this guy. He says that after targeting dogs and cats and things he started visualizing himself taking down human beings, but that was it, that’s as far as he went, just visualization. But then one morning who should put his teachings into practice in the real world but me? I mean, just because I came up behind that Oba-san and poked her in the ass with my tent pole, she starts screaming like a banshee. I’m not about to put up with that kind of shit. Anybody would’ve lost it, right? I mean, what about my dignity? So I broke through the imagination barrier and took out my knife in the real world and slit her throat, guerrilla-style, and that was it. It was the right thing to do too.”

Everyone agreed. “It’s true. You’ve got to take things to the limit,” somebody said, and somebody else said, “When you come right down to it, murder’s the only thing that has any meaning these days.”

Such were the triumphal moments Sugioka was remembering as, snickering to himself, he reached his apartment building. Henmi Midori and Iwata Midori made a note of the address.

The
five remaining Midoris gathered at Iwata’s home to conduct a study group on the subject of How to Commit a Murder. Iwata Midori’s three-room condo was relatively upscale but made of flimsy new “engineered materials,” and the walls were so thin that the Midoris had to speak quietly and suppress the volume on the videos they’d acquired to aid in their research. Various murder methods were proposed and analyzed. In hushed voices they argued the pros and cons of poisoning and bludgeoning and strangulation, and all were shocked and profoundly moved when they realized that they were actually listening to one another’s opinions. Iwata Midori was the first to remark on it. “We’ve never really shared ideas like this, and listened to each other like this before, have we?” she said. “I know,” said Henmi Midori. “It’s like, if you listen carefully to what other people are saying, you can really understand what they’re trying to say, you know what I mean?” And Takeuchi Midori summed it all up: “It kinda makes you see that the other person is really another person.”

After nearly four decades of life on this planet, the Midoris had discovered other people. And by the end of the evening, once they’d scientifically chosen and agreed upon a murder method, they would all hold hands and weep. For women of this particular nation, who had basically never known anything beyond the Banzai Charge, it was a transformative and revolutionary night.

“The
most important thing is to make sure we don’t get caught.”

Sugioka
was grinning to himself again as he took the usual route back home from school. He stopped at the concrete-block wall in front of the Flower Petal Women’s Junior College dormitory, where he liked to urinate. A wide street led to the dormitory but dead-ended at this wall, so cars were few and far between. What’s more, at three or four in the afternoon, which was when Sugioka usually passed by, most of the girls were away from their rooms attending classes. It was the perfect time and place for an inherently timid person like him to express his inner pervert by peeing in public.

“After
considering all these options, I’d say we’d best keep it simple—but with a bit of a twist.”

Sugioka
hadn’t stopped to play the video game at Kiddy Kastle that day. The only thing on his mind was the party to be held the following evening at Nobue’s apartment. The thought of the last party still made him grin. He had never been the center of attention before—never once in his life—and he felt extremely grateful.
But who should I give thanks to?
he wondered, and the answer was immediately obvious. Who else but Japan’s Number One Hunter?

“Chanchiki Okesa” is tomorrow’s theme song, thanks to me, since Kato chose it after I played it for him. What a great song that is, practically a blues tune, a really sad song that makes you really happy, which is exactly what the Number One Hunter in Japan is all about, joy in the midst of sorrow. I think I’ll start jogging too, buy some jogging shoes and run through this rotten, dying town looking for game. Everyone agreed that murder was where it’s at, first time we all agreed about anything, except maybe that woman with the unbelievable body, but how awesome would it be to do her just like I did that clam-smelling Oba-san? Can’t do it alone, though, I’ll need everyone’s help. It’ll be a bonding experience, and what’s more important in a man’s life than cementing the bonds of friendship?