Popular Hits of the Showa Era (5 page)

“It’s
essential to maintain a certain distance from the target too, right? He is a man, after all, and if you get too close you run the risk of being overpowered.”

Might as well take a piss while I’m here, who’s gonna stop me, that ugly, ghost-white, sick-ass-looking junior college girl who acted all shocked when she saw my weenie the other day? Ha!

Sugioka stepped closer to the concrete-block wall and opened his fly, and he had just pulled out his equipment when he noticed a woman in a red helmet slowly driving a motor scooter down the wide street toward him. She was wearing a black vinyl jacket and pants, and a smile seemed to gleam beneath the shadow cast by her visor. The woman was Iwata Midori. She brought the scooter to a halt a short distance behind Sugioka and said, “You’re not supposed to pee there.” She was holding the handle of a Duskin dry mop, duct-taped to the end of which was a razor-sharp, brilliantly polished sashimi knife, and when Sugioka turned to say, “Stuff it, lady,” the gleaming blade pierced deep into the flesh of his throat and came back out with a slicing motion. “Take that,” said a voice, and the scooter turned and was gone.

I

Sugioka
was still alive as the bike sped away. In fact, he lived a full two or three minutes after the first geyser of blood.
What’s going on here?
he wondered. Ironically enough, it was the first time he’d ever tried to think about phenomena in an abstract way. That leaden, sleep-deprived morning, placing the edge of his blade against the throat of the Oba-san in the white dress and slashing with all the esprit of commandos in the old war films he liked to watch, then seeing the Oba-san fall to the ground—it all seemed like something from a movie now. As he remembered it, the Oba-san had dropped at a more leisurely pace than anyone in any slow-motion death scene he’d ever seen, the knife was like an aluminum-foil-covered cardboard prop in a children’s play, the street less real than a middle school art-club wall mural, the little boys on the playground like hand-drawn animated figures out of the Beatles’
Yellow Submarine
, and the sun like the sun in a cartoon, with eyes and a smiling mouth. And now that the tip of a brand-new, gleaming sashimi knife had pierced the crepe-thin skin of his own throat and penetrated to a depth of nearly ten centimeters, he experienced the same sense of unreality. The blade rent asunder countless cells and hundreds of blood vessels, and it seemed to Sugioka that another, separate Sugioka was watching from some distance away as the crimson liquid, released from its normal course, issued from his neck in a spray so dense it obstructed his field of vision. This other Sugioka seemed to be laughing, saying not to take this too seriously, that it was nothing but a dream. But why was everything this time so much like that other time? Why was it that you got this weird feeling of unreality both when you murdered someone and when you were murdered? He wondered about this, trying for the first time in his life to reason. As his field of vision darkened from red to black, he was thinking how nice it would be to think about this some more, and talk about it with Nobue and Ishihara and the others, but what that really meant, he ultimately realized, was that he didn’t want to die. At the very end he was seized with absolute terror, but then of course it was all over anyway.

The
meeting of the Midori Society that night resounded as never before with peals of laughter and gleeful shrieks. The meeting was at Takeuchi Midori’s little house, a gift from her ex-husband, on the outskirts of Chofu City. It was a tiny prefab home made of new materials, and it shone from roof to rainspouts with an otherworldly sheen, like a house in a movie set or a diorama. The ground floor comprised only a cramped kitchen and the ten-mat living room, where they were gathered now.

Iwata Midori had been given the seat of honor, and was comfortably elevated on three cushions, with an abundance of delicacies and drinks before her. The others bowed to her repeatedly, laughing and chanting, “Wataa-sama, Wataa-sama! Lead us into the Light!” and passing around the bottles of Château Latour 1987 and Chablis Premier Grand Cru they’d pooled their money to buy at a ritzy shop called Seijo Ishii. They all laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks. Astonishingly, their old habit of rambling on separately about unrelated topics was no longer in evidence; they were actually conversing.

Suzuki Midori took a swig of chablis straight from the bottle. “Wataa, seriously,” she said, “was this Sugioka creep really in the middle of taking a leak when you did him?”

Iwata Midori slurped up the slice of smoked salmon dangling over her lower lip, as if retracting a second tongue, and said, “How many times are you going to make me go over this? He had just opened his zipper and was taking out his thing, which was nothing to write home about, believe me, but, well, not that bad….” A blush mantled her cheek. “So it’s not technically correct to say that he was in the middle of a leak. The pee didn’t come squirting out until just after I stabbed him with the Duskin spear.”

Henmi Midori, already red in the cheeks from the Château Latour, flushed a deeper red. “And did he…I mean, you know what they always say about prisoners who are hanged…. That it swells up when they…”

My! Hemii! I don’t believe it! What a thing to say! And on a night when a promising youth just lost his life!

They all leaned back and roared with laughter. Iwata Midori, with unflappable aplomb appropriate to her status as the star of the evening, fanned herself with a regal handkerchief and said, “If I had been looking down there I couldn’t very well have pinpointed the carotid artery like Tomii taught me. I needed all my concentration.”

“Concentration…” Tomiyama Midori breathed the word like a sigh, her crow’s-feet twisting until they resembled the contour lines on a topographical map. “You don’t know what that word means to me. I’ve always had this image that one day someone—one of my friends—would speak that word while I sat there beside her with a dreamy look in my eyes. Now I feel like it’s finally happened…. This is a great victory.”

Iwata Midori closed her eyes and nodded deeply any number of times.

“You’re so right,” she said. “Concentration isn’t something women our age are familiar with, unless they follow some religion or whatever. I’m not even sure most women understand the meaning of the word…. But you should have seen the way I was dressed!”

Takeuchi Midori crunched a slice of grilled stingray fin between her teeth and said, “Did my Janis run well for you?”

Iwata Midori reached for a slice of her own.

“‘Janis’?” she said.

“My scooter.”

“So I gathered, but why ‘Janis’?”

“I used to really like Janis Ian.”

WAH!
Me too! Me too! Really? You too? Yes! I forget the titles, but she had a lot of sad songs, right?
I’m ugly and maybe no one will ever love me but I know the true value of love
, or
I tried to make a boy notice me by pretending to call another boy, but I wasn’t fooling anybody
—songs like that. She was so good at expressing the psychology of the average girl who doesn’t stand out….

The Janis Ian symposium continued for some time. They were all getting seriously drunk when Iwata Midori muttered, “I thought I looked like the Moonlight Rider.”

None of the others knew who this early TV hero was, but they all laughed.

“I was wearing the sunglasses and everything.”

When
everyone had assembled at Nobue’s apartment and Kato reported the murder, saying that according to the evening news Sugioka had “died of a stab wound to the throat,” no one knew how to react. They resorted as usual to mindless laughter, but for once it felt and sounded strained. Everyone noticed this, but Ishihara and Nobue were the most sensitive to it. Nobue forced himself to stop laughing with a sudden, mournful,
Ohhh,
and made an extraordinary face—one that might have caused an impartial but morbidly depressed observer to finally end it all. Ishihara managed to stop laughing only by opening his already large eyes as wide as he could, stretching to the limit the skin and muscles around them and exposing a bloodshot-red Pollock-like pattern on the bulging sclera, making a face that might have given an impartial but acutely manic observer a terminal case of the giggles. But when the other three saw these faces, they gasped, swallowed, and fell silent.

“Fools!” shouted Nobue, following the remark with a line he’d never uttered before in his life: “This is no time for laughing!”

No one thought to ask any constructive questions, such as who might have killed Sugioka, or why; nor did any of them realize that it was simply their own sorrow and rage that had stifled the laughter. It was the first time any of them had experienced these emotions. Some part of Nobue’s unconscious was making an effort to find the proper facial expression for sorrow and rage, but owing to inexperience all it came up with was a sort of vermiculation of the facial muscles. Ishihara happened to see this and, to keep from bursting into laughter again, burst instead into song. He sang “Chanchiki Okesa,” which Kato had suggested as the theme song for tonight’s gathering.

The others joined in, all thinking the same thought:

We’re one voice short.

II

They
sang “Chanchiki Okesa” for a long time, joined from the street at one point by a passing migrant worker, and before it was over they were all shedding tears. Sugioka had been merely an agreeable, lightweight, shifty, incomprehensibly cheerful, knife-loving wanker who was remarkable only for having a new Mac and barely knowing how to use it. None of them had ever thought of him as anything other than a deviant of some sort, but now they all agreed that at least he’d had an ear for a really good song. As they sang, they did what Japanese men have done since time immemorial when enraptured with a tune, but rather than tapping ceramic rice bowls with chopsticks, they rapped out a beat with plastic forks and knives and spoons on styrofoam plates and containers. The resulting sound wasn’t a nostalgic
ting ting
, therefore, but a dry, emotion-free
pash pash
, like synthesized drums. And when they’d finally finished singing, they all sat there talking about what a great song “Chanchiki Okesa” was.

“It’s a sorrowful song, yet cheerful.”

“It makes you feel that, even if there’s no hope whatsoever, you still want to go on living.”

“You get the image of someone who has to crawl to survive, but also of a beautiful bird spreading its wings to fly.”

“I wonder if perhaps the most striking aspect of this song isn’t its refusal to fit into any particular category. It’s not classical or jazz or hip-hop or house. If anything, it’s closest to salsa.”

“There’s something in the chorus and refrain that makes you feel that even in these difficult times, true inspiration must still exist. And yet it seems to transcend the times and to issue a challenge to us when we decline to act in any given situation.”

Such was the general meaning behind various remarks the five exchanged over the course of an hour or so. To transcribe some of these remarks directly:

“I dunno, I’m like, I feel kinda sad about everything, kinda like after yanking myself off to the lady on that children’s show
Open! Ponkikki
.”

“If you were drinking at some
oden
stand you’ve never been to before, and some homeless guy comes by and sneaks a skewer of oden, and a thug with no pinky finger beats him half to death, this is the kind of song you’d want to be listening to.”

“At this convenience store I always go to, in the place where they keep the tofu and potato salad and stuff, there’s always three or four cockroaches running around, and if there’s three of ’em I say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, YMO!’ and if there’s four of ’em I go, ‘And now…the Beatles!’ and for some reason every time I say that they wriggle away like sperm cells or somethin’.”

“Assholes call this ‘traditional music,’ or even, like, ‘Japanese folk music,’ but really it’s more like reggae or salsa, innit?”

“It’d be great to listen to this song with, like, a much older woman—you know, a ‘mature lady,’ like they used to call themselves in the telephone clubs—while you’re boning her standing up.”

The last comment on the subject was Kato’s.

“Sugioka said that when he first heard this song, his father was beating the shit out of him.”

This brought on a sudden silence, and they all communed with their thoughts for a while. And then Sugiyama finally came out with the question someone had to ask.

“Who do ya think killed him?”

Three
days later, Nobue and Ishihara visited the scene of Sugioka’s murder, where they decided, for lack of any better ideas, to relieve themselves as Sugioka had so often done. They had just pulled down their zippers when a female voice said, “Stop that!” Replying with a simultaneous, reflexive,
Hai!
, they looked back over their shoulders. Standing there was a junior college girl who might have been constructed exclusively from the more toxic components of some gastrointestinal disease. Nobue and Ishihara were both the type of men who tend to regard all females, from toddlers to great-grandmothers, as being in some sense sexual objects, but this junior college girl was a unique exception. She wasn’t deathly pale or exceptionally thin or fat, she didn’t have secretions of various colors oozing from her eyes and nose and mouth, and her skin wasn’t coated with pimples; but an aura of disease emanated from her in a sickly wave powerful enough to have defoliated giant mangrove trees on some South Pacific isle.

“You’re not supposed to pee there.”

It seemed as if even her voice were sprinkled with disease dust, like soybean flour on a ripe rice cake. Nobue and Ishihara looked at each other. They were both keenly aware that something strange was happening to them. Normally, whenever they were together and had the opportunity to speak to a female, be she an oddly sexy kindergartner or a refined old lady stopping for dumplings on her way home from the temple, they tended to view each other as rivals, each suspecting the other of trying to steal her away, and to disguise that antagonism they would both laugh like idiots. This, of course, merely frightened and alienated toddlers, elderly widows, and all those in between. But now, face-to-face with this junior college girl who seemed to be made of one hundred percent disease particles, they were united in a lack of competitiveness and an utter inability to laugh. This was a woman they would not be capable of facing unless they worked together, unless they (at least figuratively) held hands, clung to each other, and squealed,
I’m afwaid!

“May I ask your name?” said Nobue. It was the first time since his early years in grade school that he’d been able to address a female in a normal and courteous way. This surprised him, and it surprised Ishihara too.