Popular Hits of the Showa Era (6 page)

“I live in the dormitory over there.” The junior college girl’s voice was neither high nor low, neither clear nor muddy, neither thin nor thick. It wasn’t the sort of voice you would ever remember. But it wasn’t by any means an ordinary voice. “We have a problem with people always urinating here.”

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the sheer terror they were experiencing, Nobue and Ishihara had never felt or acted so normal.

“You must forgive us! But even dogs always relieve themselves in the same places, don’t they? Perhaps it’s instinctive.”

Ishihara wondered why his heart beat so fast as he said the word “instinctive.” He thought he sounded like some sort of youthful prodigy when he used such words. It may be that the junior college girl thought he seemed gifted as well; at any rate, she smiled at him and said, “I’m sure you’ll be more careful next time.”

Her smile was so horrifying that Nobue ejaculated a line he never would have thought himself capable of.

“Can we interest you in a cup of tea or something?”

At
the neighborhood ice-cream parlor, the junior college girl drew stares from the other customers and even the waitress. When she walked inside, the temperature seemed to drop three or four degrees. Seated across the table from her in their booth, Nobue and Ishihara finally realized what it was about her face. The eyes were weird. Not the
look
in the eyes so much as the fact that they weren’t aligned horizontally. When she smiled, the eyes slipped even farther out of line. This feature alone seemed to thrust Nobue and Ishihara into a different and dreadful world, and they both grasped something that Sugioka had only understood a moment before his death. Which is not, of course, to say that they were any more discerning or perceptive than Sugioka had been, but merely to give some indication of the magnitude of this junior college girl’s face and smile and voice.

“I don’t come to places like this very often,” she said, and both Nobue and Ishihara thought,
Good! Best to leave a face like that at home!

But Nobue’s delight in his sudden ability to speak like a normal person was even greater than his fear. He couldn’t have laughed mindlessly if his life had depended on it, but he managed to smile and ask, “Oh? And why is that?”

“I wouldn’t have thought that to look at you,” Ishihara chimed in with a smile of his own, all the while asking himself what in the world he
would
have thought to look at her.

The junior college girl beamed at them. The waitress happened to catch a glimpse of this smile; her face twitched and she let out a small scream as her tray crashed to the floor and the sound of exploding glass shattered the air into jagged fragments. Swept down into a swirling whirlpool of unreality, Nobue and Ishihara were both convinced that the junior college girl’s smile had broken the glasses directly, that she possessed supernatural powers.

“Wasn’t there an incident at that spot back there recently?” Ishihara asked her. If she had supernatural powers, she probably knew all about it.

“Mm-hm,” said the junior college girl. “A boy with a surfer haircut was peeing there when a woman on a putt-putt wearing a helmet and shades and carrying a Duskin handle with a knife attached to it stabbed him in the neck. I saw the whole thing.”

III

The
junior college girl spoke normal Japanese in a normal tone of voice. Nobue and Ishihara couldn’t help wishing she spoke some incomprehensible language. Even if they wouldn’t have understood what she was saying, they would have preferred her to speak Jupiterian or Neptunese or Saiyan or Namekkish…. She was eating her chocolate parfait in a manner all her own. After thoroughly licking her clean spoon, she carefully used it to scoop up only the drippy chocolate syrup. She then licked the spoon clean again, using a lot of wrist action, as if trying to paint her tongue with the chocolate. She continued licking until, holding the spoon up to one eye, she couldn’t detect the slightest smudge; and then, carefully avoiding the chocolate this time and making sure not to touch the fruit or the colorful mint sprinkles, she scooped up a spoonful of pure ice cream and delivered it straight to her tonsils. Nobue, Ishihara, the other customers, and the waitress all observed this performance breathlessly. It was like watching an acrobat, or a butoh dancer, or the fattest woman in the world walking a tightrope. No one had ever seen another human being consume a chocolate parfait in this manner. Nobue and Ishihara were both thinking that at this rate the ice cream would melt and get all mixed up with the chocolate anyway, when a thick bundle of sunbeams, like something out of a medieval religious painting, suddenly illuminated the bench upon which the junior college girl sat. One of the customers gasped, an even deeper hush descended over the room, and the ice cream began visibly to melt. Seeing the vanilla mound surrender its rough edges from the top down, the junior college girl emitted a sigh of either bewilderment or despair and gazed alternately at Nobue and Ishihara, her misaligned eyes brimming with sorrow. Goose bumps sprouted up and down their spines, and it was all they could do to keep from wetting their pants. Ishihara did leak a drop or two, in fact. And that reminded him: hadn’t this junior college girl just described Sugioka’s murderer? Nobue was watching in a dazed sort of way as the girl suddenly changed tactics and began mashing the chocolate parfait with her spoon and shoveling the resulting mush into her mouth, making it disappear with remarkable speed. He was thinking it would be better for all concerned if she just took the weirdness to its natural extreme and shoved the mess up her nostrils, when Ishihara nudged him in the ribs.

“Hey, Nobu-chin.”

He snapped out of his chilling reverie. “What is it, Ishi-kun?” The sensation that his back had turned to chicken skin was all but unbearable, and it was only by a tremendous force of will that he managed to keep from climbing on Ishihara’s lap.

“Wasn’t this person just saying something about Sugioka’s murderer?”

“You’re right! I almost forgot. Way to remember!”

“Thanks. I don’t know how I did it. It took everything I had.”

“To remember something so important under these conditions! You are amazing.”

Hearing himself praised like this, Ishihara began making a clucking sound in his throat. It was a sort of hiccupping spasm of the esophageal muscles that sounded like
coot, coot,
and was a harbinger of the burst of idiotic laughter that arrived a moment later. Nobue joined in. Strangely enough, the other customers and the waitress began laughing as well. Perhaps they instinctively knew that laughter was the only possible defense against the horror unfolding before them.

The only one who didn’t laugh was the junior college girl herself. Nor did it seem to occur to her to wonder if all this mirth was at her own expense. She silently went about the business of demolishing her chocolate parfait.

Thanks
to the efforts of Kato, who’d been closest to Sugioka, it didn’t take long for them to discover the Midori Society. Each day for a week, Kato staked out the grave of Yanagimoto Midori, the woman Sugioka had killed. It was located in a vast public cemetery in Hachioji, near Kato’s family home. He endured three rainy days and then three cloudy and muggy ones, during which time he completely cleared four new Game Boy titles, and on the sunny seventh day he suddenly detected a pungent smell of perfume. He saved the game he was playing and ducked down behind the gravestone he’d chosen to spy from, so nervous that he began laughing in a way that he alone was capable of, opening the mouth in the normal position of laughter but forcing the air exclusively through the nose. Nobue and Sugiyama and others had on occasion tried to imitate this laugh, but none had succeeded. The sound it produced was wet and high-pitched, like the cry of some amphibious creature, but fortunately it didn’t carry.

All the Midoris were wearing suits and, possessed of the knowledge that fragrances tend to dissipate more quickly on sunny days, none of them had skimped when applying their various brands of perfume to various parts of their bodies—hair, earlobes, nape of neck, shoulders, armpits, breasts, elbows, heels, ankles. One of them had even daubed Poison on her private parts. Iwata Midori had always wanted to try this. She had long cherished the memory of a scene from a very bad novel in which a married woman had perfumed her pubes before setting out for a secret rendezvous. The married woman’s lover in the novel, she remembered, had ignited with shameless desire when he inhaled the perfume mixed with the scent of her juices. But what was the likelihood that Iwata Midori, already in her late thirties, would ever have a chance to experience something like that? She had asked herself this question many times but never found an answer—or any likelihood whatsoever—so she’d made up her mind to try it today before visiting the cemetery.
As long as I’m with my friends
, she told herself,
it’s safe to be a little adventurous
.

Kato put on his earphones to eavesdrop on the Midoris’ conversation via the tiny cordless microphone he’d hidden in the gravel in front of the grave. Along with the
crunch, crunch
of Oba-san shoes came a lone voice. Tomiyama Midori’s opening line put an end to Kato’s nasal giggling.

“Nagii! You have been avenged!”

At
the party that night, Nobue announced that they would refrain from karaoke, and no one objected.

“Something huge has happened.”

Having said this much, he laughed idiotically for several moments, clamping both hands over his mouth, and then asked Kato to report his findings. Kato executed his high-degree-of-difficulty giggle before speaking. He wasn’t used to this sort of thing, and spoke in an odd voice reminiscent of newscasters on public TV.

“As you are all aware, it appears that the police and the media have given up any hope of finding Sugioka’s murderer. What we need most is accurate information. Please look at the materials before you, which contain data I obtained with the assistance of my Kenwood portable recorder. At the upper left-hand corner of page one, under the heading ‘The Midori Society,’ you will find a list of names, and below and continuing on to the next page please notice the photographs of each member of the group.” He then brought his report to a close with an inexplicable, “Have a pleasant evening, and we’ll look forward to seeing you again soon.”

“I wonder which of these Midoris killed Sugioka,” Yano mused out loud while chewing a piece of dried squid. “Not that it matters, right?” he added, and for some reason burst into muffled laughter. He was like a Vietcong guerrilla hiding in the dark, bowing his head and trying to stifle his mirth as he remembers a recent surprise attack and the unique look of shamefaced terror on an enemy’s face in the split second before death. Yano continued to gurgle for some time.

“There can be no mercy or forgiveness for people like this,” Nobue declaimed, adding, “What is it about this revenge stuff, though? It makes you feel all gooey inside!” He clamped his hands over his mouth and laughed idiotically once again.

Sugiyama, his eyes forming the narrowest of slits behind his glasses, gave tongue to everyone’s feelings, punctuating his words with flying spit.

“In short, we can do whatever we want to them. If it was up to me, I’d take these Oba-sans and strip ’em all naked and, you know, do the sort of thing you always hear about—force a wooden pestle up their ass and piss on ’em and then rape ’em and kill ’em and shit. I think that’s what we should do. After all, they’re guilty of murder. Murder, my friends! We can’t let ’em get away with
that
.”

None of them thought to wonder how
that
was any different from what Sugioka had done.

“I think we should try to think of a lot of different ways to do it,” Sugiyama went on. “Gather tips from like the Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Army and Bosnia and stuff. I mean, it’s totally justified. An eye for an eye and all that—it’s the only thing that
is
justified in this world. I mean, they talk about reasonable self-defense, but nobody ever talks about a reasonable sneak attack!”

Yano sat with his head bowed, snickering to himself. But he sounded strangely confident—as if he already had an answer to his own question—when he looked up and asked:

“What’ll we use for a weapon?”

I

“Buki?”
said Nobue, repeating the operative word of Yano’s question in the original Japanese. He shivered with excitement. “Oh, what an awesome point you raise, Yano-rin!
Buki
…buki…How that word goes straight to the
corazón
! It’s like hearing Frank Nagai’s deep voice played at full volume over a JBL Paragon system! Buuukiii…Buki, as I recall, is ‘weapon’ in English, but ‘weapon’ doesn’t have the right ring to it, right?” He laughed and began humming a sentimental melody.

“‘Weapon’ sounds like ‘tampon’ or ‘simpleton’ or somethin’,” Ishihara said, and started humming along. The others joined in too, and soon they were all on their feet, belting out the words to “Meet Me in Yurakucho.” Kato, reflecting that it was he who had triggered all this excitement with his report, took the Emporio Armani scarf from his neck and wrapped it around his head like a turban. Sugiyama put his glasses on upside down, and even the normally withdrawn Yano, thrilled that his mention of buki had resulted in such an inspired choral outpouring, clamped a large beer bottle between his legs and wiggled his ass. “Meet Me in Yurakucho” was not meant to be sung in this manner but rather in a sad, echoey whisper in a fifties-style cabaret, while beads of light from a mirror ball swirl slowly around the walls; but any pop song in this particular country, when sung by several citizens at once, tended to turn into a mindless celebration devoid of any genuine sense of melancholy.

After the final chorus, Nobue shouted:

“To arms!”

The others responded with a rousing, “Oh!” and thrust their fists toward the low, sagging ceiling of his apartment.

With
Yano guiding the way, the five set off, frolicking as if on their way to a used computer blowout sale, taking the Joetsu Line from Ueno to Kumagaya to purchase a certain weapon. On the train, they played
shiritori
, a simple game in which one person says a word and the next person uses the last syllable of that word as the first syllable for a new word, and so on. Sugiyama had lobbied for drop the hankie, but because of space considerations none of the others supported him, so he went into a snit, saying that if he couldn’t play his game he wouldn’t play shiritori either, and sat pouting and staring out the window at the scenery. The Limited Express took about forty minutes to reach Kumagaya from Ueno Station, and in that time they managed to advance only eight words. Ishihara, who had suggested they play shiritori, said, “I’ll start, then. The first word is shiritori. Next! Something that starts with
ri
.” He didn’t stop there, however, but began to laugh and shout “RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI!” for a full two minutes. Yano, who was next, joined in toward the end and then continued—“RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI! RI!
RI!
”—for another three minutes or so, laughing so hard he fell off his seat and rolled on the floor. His spittle was a fine mist permeating the car when he finally sputtered:
ringo
.
^*

“Ringo?”
Nobue growled, then fell silent, and a strange tension gripped the four players. “Why ringo?” he shouted. “Why not
banana
?”
^†
All of them laughed till fluids leaked from different orifices. Kato, who was next, repeated “GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!” twelve or fifteen times and then, seeing that everyone was too busy laughing to pay attention to him, began chanting the syllable to the rhythm of the train as it sped over the tracks—“GOGOGOGO! GOGOGOGO!”—finally finishing with the word
gorufu
.
^‡
This process had taken another eight minutes.

When they reached Kumagaya Station even Sugiyama, who had been pouting all through the commotion on the train, came back to life and began dancing about, saying, “It’s the countryside! Even the station smells like country!” None of them knew what to do now, however. Intoxicated with Yano’s simple declaration—“You can buy a Tokarev in Kumagaya”—they had lost no time in liquidating all their assets and jumping on the Joetsu Line, but now what?

“Yano-rin, where do they sell the Tokarevs?” Nobue said, ceasing for the moment to jump up and down. Yano too had been bouncing around and shouting, “It’s the country! Outside the station is a barbecue stand, not a Parco!” but now he stopped abruptly, extracted a notebook organizer from his briefcase, and opened it.

“Sources indicate that Tokarevs can be purchased at a hardware store near the border with Gunma Prefecture for between fifty and a hundred thousand yen.”

“That’s the country for you!” Nobue said, and resumed jumping. “Where else can you can buy a handgun at a hardware store?”

They
climbed on a bus to take them to the border. Each time the name of a local bus stop was announced, they clamped hands over their mouths to stifle their mirth. Though the resulting, oddly metallic
ku, ku, ku, kutt!
sound they made was plainly audible, the other passengers paid no attention whatsoever to the five of them. No matter how loudly they carried on, none of these young men ever stood out, imbued as they were with the aura of having been utterly ignored since childhood.

The
border between Saitama and Gunma prefectures was an indescribably desolate and lonely place. Kato was reminded of a movie he’d watched with his father when he was a kid—
The Last Picture Show
. He felt like he was going to burst into tears, and then he actually did. Before them was a big river with wide banks where weeds rippled in the wind, and nearby were a large pachinko emporium, a car dealership, and a noodle shop, the signs of which were all written in English. But the shape of the English script, the languid manner in which the weeds rippled, and the colors and designs of the exteriors of the buildings—as well as the cars, the tables in the noodle shop, and the clothing people wore—were uniquely depressing.
Can there really be such insidious colors in this world?
Kato asked himself in his inner newscaster voice as the tears flowed.
What paints would you have to mix to come up with colors like this, and why would you do it? Why go to such lengths to make colors that strip away everyone’s courage and spirit?

They were all feeling it. Nobue clapped a sympathetic hand on Kato’s shoulder. “Let’s go get that Tokarev,” he said, and then, choking back his own tears, began to hum the intro to “Meet Me in Yurakucho.” The scenery they walked through was horrifying. There wasn’t anything to rest your eyes on. It was the sort of scenery that seemed to rip all the beauty right out of the world, with shapes and colors that robbed you of the will and energy to act. Because they were all originally country boys, the scenery resonated with them and made them glumly pensive. How was the country different from Tokyo? they asked themselves. Well, Tokyo was so crammed with stuff that it was difficult to see the reality, and more care went into choosing building materials and English scripts on signs. That was about it, they realized, but still—it beat the country. For the briefest of moments they seemed to glimpse the truth of what had made them the sort of people they were. This was expressed well in Ishihara’s words as he set off walking toward a sign that read
NOGAMI HARDWARE.

“It’s not just that the country’s boring or shabby. It’s like it slowly sucks the life out of you from birth on, like mosquitoes draining your blood little by little. Heh, heh, heh, yeah.”

At the entrance to Nogami Hardware was a sign in the shape of a huge hammer, and a thick old wooden plaque below it
COMMEMORATING 250 YEARS SINCE OUR FOUNDING
. “They’ve been selling hardware for two hundred and fifty years?” Yano said. He pictured people of the sort you see in period dramas on TV, men with topknots and women with blackened teeth and shaved eyebrows, rolling up to purchase sickles and spades, and he wondered how much things like that cost in those days and what sorts of coins they used and whether they got a receipt, and if they had something like the Ag Co-op to get discounts by buying things in bulk. With all these questions swirling through his mind, he led the way inside and strode toward the cash register. The storekeeper was sitting behind the counter and looked as if he might have been there for the entire two hundred and fifty years. He didn’t have wrinkles on his face so much as a face hidden among the wrinkles, a face that not even Hollywood’s most advanced special effects studio could have reproduced, with skin like a dust rag used for a century and then marinated in acid. He was reading a three-month-old issue of
Central Review
, and beside him was a portable TV tuned to CNN News.

“Excuse me,” Yano said to the old man. An impartial observer might have said that there was a certain resemblance between the two of them.

“Yes, what is it, the trivets are behind that shelf, the charcoal lighter fluid’s right next to them,” the shopkeeper said in a smooth and surprising baritone. It was the sort of voice that gets scouted by choral groups.

“Eh?” Yano wavered at the subtle but intense power of the old man’s speech. “What’s a trivet?”

“A trivet’s something you have to have if you want to grill meat over charcoal. You boys must enjoy barbecue parties like all the other young folks, yes?”

Yano shook his head emphatically and said:

“Do you have any Tokarevs?”

II

Central
Review
fell flapping from the storekeeper’s lap. His small eyes peered at Yano from deep inside the wrinkles. Then, with something like a sob in his baritone voice, he said:

“I have. What do you want one for?”

Yano’s eyes widened with emotion. He opened them so wide, in fact, that some of the dried blood vessels burst with audible pops.

“You have?” he said, bending forward until his face was no more than five centimeters from the storekeeper’s. It looked as if he were offering him a kiss.

“I said I did, didn’t I?” The storekeeper raised his voice, spraying spittle and moving his own face two-point-five centimeters closer. “And I asked you what you wanted it for.”

The tip of Yano’s nose briefly came into contact with that of the storekeeper before he backed up, stood at attention, and saluted.

“We seek revenge,” he said.

“Revenge, you say?” The storekeeper fell back in his chair, a deep crease forming between his eyebrows. The crease was particularly conspicuous owing to the fact that all the rest of his wrinkles were horizontal. “Against whom and why? Speak!”

His voice was even louder now, and he seemed to be getting angry—all the wrinkles were shifting toward vertical.

“Our friend was murdered by a middle-aged Oba-san, and with an unprecedented weapon—a sashimi knife duct-taped to the end of a Duskin handle!”

“What kind of Oba-san?”

“What kind?”

“The type whose husband left her and who’s hurting for money but can’t work in a massage parlor or soapland because she’s getting too old, and—”

“According to our investigations, no. Not the type who buys her clothes at Ito Yokado bargain sales either, but rather at boutiques or specialty stores.”

“Ah. So, not the sort of Oba-san who sits behind the counter at a stand bar preparing little dishes of pickled daikon strips, but the sort who puts on a nice dress and sings fashionable pop songs by people like Frank Nagai in a karaoke club with chandeliers?”

“That’s correct. Frank Nagai or Nishida Sachiko or Yumin.”

“And eats spaghetti with mushrooms in some restaurant with big glass windows that everybody on the street can look in through?”

“Yes, sir. Also doria and onion gratin soup and Indonesian-style pilaf and so forth.”

The storekeeper squeezed his hands into fists and clenched his jaw. He looked to be fighting back tears.

“And why,” he asked more quietly now and between gritted teeth, as his wrinkles ebbed and surged in complicated patterns, “would an Oba-san like that want to murder your friend?”

“The reason isn’t entirely clear. Apparently she was bored.”

“Gotcha,” the storekeeper said, and rose to his feet. “Wait right there a minute.” He shuffled into the back and soon returned with something wrapped in oiled paper, which he placed on the counter in front of Yano.

“There are ten live rounds in the magazine. It’s a hundred and thirty thousand yen, but since your motives are pure, I’m going to give you a discount. Make it a hundred and ten thousand.” Yano collected money from the others, counted out eleven ten-thousand-yen bills, handed the stack to the storekeeper, and asked one last question.

“Do you sell these to just, like, anybody?”

The storekeeper laughed, his wrinkles fanning out like rays of the sun.

“Hell, no. Only to people I feel good about. I like your spirit. They always say that when human beings are extinct, the only living thing left will be the cockroach, but that’s bullshit. It’s the Oba-san.”

As
she walked back to her apartment from the karaoke club, Iwata Midori was thinking about her sex drive, or, rather, wondering why she didn’t seem to have one. Tonight the Midori Society had met at the usual club with the silvery microphones, and a young sales rep type had flirted with her. She had visited the beauty salon that day and taken extra care with her makeup. All the Midoris prepared in a similar manner for karaoke nights, and they always wore suits or one-piece dresses to the clubs. Iwata Midori wondered if she was the only one who felt such gratitude to the jacket of her suit. It efficiently covered her soft, bulging tummy and love handles, her dark, oversized nipples, and the three Pip Elekiban magnetic patches on her shoulders. Whenever the Midori Society met at a karaoke club instead of someone’s apartment, Iwata Midori would spend several minutes trying to decide whether or not to remove the patches, which did so much to relieve the age-related stiffness in her shoulders and neck. She only went to these clubs to enjoy the karaoke and knew perfectly well she wasn’t going to meet a man or anything, but—well, you never knew. What if she were to meet someone who was just her type and drink too much and lose her head and end up in a love hotel, and he, helping her undress, were to find the magnetic patches she’d forgotten all about? The shame would be unimaginable. It wouldn’t simply be a question of a man she was attracted to discovering her Pip Elekiban. The shame would be in the fact that, just when she’d managed to awaken her sex drive with alcohol, the man would glimpse her reality, thereby becoming a part of that reality, and she’d have to quit pretending there was any real libido at work inside her.