Popular Hits of the Showa Era (9 page)

“Excuse me.” Suzuki Midori made a show of calling to their elderly hostess in the kitchen. “What are those sounds?”

“It’s Kita-Fuji,” the old woman replied in her young girl’s voice. “There’s a Self-Defense Forces training area there, you know, on the north side of Mount Fuji. Nighttime artillery drills.”

Suzuki Midori turned back to the others and said, “You see?”

All of them nodded. They saw.

I

“I
told you. This area has always been popular with young couples and all that, but not many people know that it’s also a treasure trove of weapons.”

Suzuki Midori poured herself some beer from one of the big bottles as she said this, not forgetting to tilt the glass to stifle the foam. Ever since Iwata Midori had taken the bullet that made such a mess of her face and robbed her of her life, Suzuki Midori had gradually assumed, if only tacitly, the role of leader, and now the other Midoris followed her example by filling their own glasses as well. To pour one’s own drink was contrary to custom, and all four of them exchanged glances, fully aware of the significance of their break with convention. It was a bold expression of the plain fact that none of them had a special someone in her life to pour for her, or for whom to pour. This was something they’d never thought about when they were six. Whenever they’d gathered at someone’s apartment or condo in those days, they had always poured for each other in a random sort of way, saying things like,
You’ll have some more, won’t you?
or
Allow me!
Three of the surviving Midoris worked in business environments, and they all knew that in Europe and America it was common for gentlemen to pour for ladies and for the host of a party to pour for each of his guests—especially when fine wines were involved. Further complicating the matter was the fact that recently in their own country there had been incidents in which certain business executives, who’d insisted during company R&R trips that female employees pour the drinks, had been sued for sexual harassment. In any case, it was decidedly not in a spirit of loneliness that each of the four surviving Midoris poured her own beer and watched the others do the same.

“Well, then,” Suzuki Midori said, and they raised their glasses.

Since the deaths of their two comrades, all of the remaining Midoris had come to a more or less unconscious realization. None of them had ever found, aside from their respective fathers, a man who made them feel from the bottom of their hearts that they wanted to pour his beer or have him pour their wine; and now that they were heading into their late thirties it was extremely doubtful whether any of them ever would find such a man. It wasn’t a question of lonely or not lonely, however. Each was convinced that the fact that she’d never burned with passion for a man was due to various circumstances in her life that mitigated against such passion—circumstances in her family, for example, or in her social milieu or workplace or community. And they realized now that their mindless “You’ll have some more, won’t you?” had only served to obfuscate reality by keeping things vague and ambiguous.

But why had this realization, unconscious and unformulated though it may have been, come to them now? Put this too down to the sudden and unexpected deaths of their comrades. The two departed Midoris hadn’t had the opportunity to experience such revelations, and now they never would. It was in order to honor the memory of these unfortunate two that the survivors had filled their own glasses and now prepared to drain them with quiet dignity. It had nothing to do with loneliness. All four shared an unconscious and unspoken conviction that for them, at least, certain possibilities still remained.

“
Kanpai!
”

They quietly clinked their glasses together.

“To a successful operation.”

The
Midoris awoke early on Sunday. To pass the time until evening, when they had an appointment to meet with a certain man, they rented bicycles and explored the roads that rose toward the foothills. Later they would stop for lunch at an Italian restaurant in the forest, a place with an extravagant interior, an impressive menu, and all-but-inedible food. Later yet they’d play tennis and then, toward the end of the day, paddle about the lake in a swan boat.

“I once almost got serious with a man who, whatever vacation spot we went to, could only think of one thing—renting bicycles. It seems like a long, long time ago now, but…I guess it’s only been seven years or so.”

The bicycle rental shop was a tin-roofed shed about ten minutes on foot from the inn. They’d found the straw-hatted old man who ran the place stretched out on a deck chair, roused him, and rented two pink and yellow tandem “Lovers’ Cycles.” They were now pedaling these up a narrow paved road away from the lake, where the fragrance of earth and grass wafted through remnants of morning mist.

“So you cycled together in lots of different places, then?”

“Yeah, but not really ‘vacation spots’ so much, now that I think about it. I guess the place that made the biggest impression on me was Canada.”

“You went to Canada? Lucky you! I’ve seen TV shows about Canada. It’s supposed to be really beautiful, right?”

“All I really saw was Vancouver. The man I almost got serious about had to go there on business, and we decided I’d visit him sort of secretly, but I could only stay three days. It was definitely a pretty place, the scenery and everything, but there wasn’t much to do. Seems like all we did was ride bikes.”

“Hemii, you never told us about this before! You were married then, weren’t you? You mean you were having an affair?”

“My husband and I were already separated by this time, and the bicycle-lover was in the same sort of situation. Anyway, there wasn’t that much you could do or see on a bicycle in Vancouver, but at the close of each day we’d end up at this little zoo. I mean, I guess you’d call it a zoo. It wasn’t on the scale of Ueno Zoo or Tama Zoo or anything, but the entrance or whatever, the gate where you bought tickets, was really magical, like something out of a fairy tale, and there was a big painting of one of the animals, but without anything tacky about it, if you know what I mean. I still remember that place. Or maybe I should say, that’s about all I do remember.”

“What kind of animal? A grizzly bear? Or a moose or something?”

“A white wolf. This wolf was the biggest attraction at the place, kind of like the panda at Ueno, and there were usually lots of people in front of its cage, but we always got there around sunset, when most of the people were leaving. I still remember buying the tickets and going in to see the wolf, and even though I was already in my thirties my heart was pounding like a little girl’s.”

“Because of the white wolf?”

“That was a big part of it, yeah, though of course there was the bicycle-lover too—but the funny thing is, I can hardly remember anything about
him
. Of course, we only dated for a short time but, I mean, why is it that I barely remember a man I almost got serious about but can still close my eyes and see that white wolf so clearly? He was all by himself, because the other wolves were in a separate cage—I mean, they weren’t cages so much as these fenced-in spaces that looked like mountain scenes, with big rocks and everything—and each of the three times we went there that white wolf was sitting in this very noble sort of pose on top of the highest rock, kind of looking off into the distance and not moving a muscle. I remember asking the man, ‘Is it alive?’ And to this day, every time I go cycling, which isn’t very often because, I mean, when do you get the chance? But each time I do, I remember that white wolf sitting there like a statue on those gray rocks, and I remember saying those words.
Is it alive? Is it alive? Is it alive?
”

The Italian restaurant was nestled in a wooded area dotted with small villas and summerhouses. The building itself was unusual, in that its exterior walls were made of concrete poured into molds to resemble square, round, and triangular logs, and the name of the place was almost too long to say without pausing for breath: Monte Varvarini di Noventa. When the Midoris arrived on their bicycles they were greeted at the entrance by a foreigner wearing a threadbare tuxedo and bleating, “
Irasshaimase!
”—not an Italian man, apparently, but one from the Middle East or South America or someplace. They ordered spaghetti and carpaccio and minestrone and linguine. The fact that there were no other customers in the restaurant made it seem a sort of showcase for the bursting of the economic bubble, and the spaghetti carbonara was, to everyone’s astonishment, garnished with crumbled scraps of hard-boiled eggs.

“In my office there’s this twenty-three-year-old who recently got married, and she invited me to her wedding because we used to have tea together sometimes, and she always just struck me as an average sort of girl, but then the other day she called me up and said, ‘Takeuchi-san, I’m having an affair!’”

“My! And she just got married, right?”

“Just a couple of months ago. But the guy she’s having an affair with, she was seeing him even before she got married, and she says he was actually more her type but he wouldn’t ask her to marry him, so she was like,
All right, you’re not the only man in the world
, and she married this other guy she was seeing at the same time. The one she married is some sort of civil servant and very serious and conservative and when they have sex it’s over before she knows it and the things he talks about bore her to death, and the other one works in a boutique in Aoyama and plays in a band and knows how to get any drug you might want, and he seems to have other girlfriends too, but she sees him two or three times a week, and then about a week ago the civil servant found out about it, and the way he found out was because she didn’t know the other guy’s condom had slipped off and was still inside her and her husband found it when they went to have sex, and she just thought,
Oh, to hell with it
, and told him everything, and would you believe it? He started bawling like a baby and pleading with her, going, ‘It’s okay if you want to keep seeing the guy, just please don’t leave me!’”

A man like that, the four Midoris all agreed, had no business being alive.

After lunch they headed for the tennis courts.

II

They
rode the tandem bicycles down a dirt road to the courts and rented rackets and balls at the little log-cabin-style office from a young man with no shortage of pimples. He directed them to Court B, where they split into two teams for a doubles match. None of them had ever played before, so their serves were rarely within the lines and nothing resembling an extended rally ever occurred, but the four Midoris enjoyed themselves immensely, cheering and shrieking every bit as energetically as the younger groups on either side of them. They had reserved the court for two hours, but after an hour of playing their particular style of tennis, in which all four players jump up and down and squeal with delight whenever one of them manages to hit the ball, they’d had their fill and sat down on the benches, drinking sports drinks and chattering excitedly. None of them had produced so much as a drop of perspiration, but they had achieved one of their dreams—tennis by the lake—and spirits were high. Tomiyama Midori peered up at Mount Fuji, looming right in front of them, and said,
Come to think of it
…

“I used to come here when I was little, not the tennis courts but Lake Yamanaka. I wonder why I’ve forgotten about that for so long. My father worked in a bank that had a lodge where the employees could stay on their holidays. Judging from the position of Fuji, I’d say it was on the far end of the lake, like if you walked halfway around the lake from here, that’s about where the lodge was. It seems like we went there every summer when I was little, but of course my father was just an average clerk in the bank, so he could never get a vacation of any length, more like three days at a time, and I even seem to remember trips where we stayed at the lodge just one night, but anyway we went there many, many times. I wonder how old I was when this thing happened—I remember my father carrying me on his shoulders, so I must’ve been really small, first or second grade, maybe. It wasn’t much of a lodge or anything, nothing special about it, just a dining hall and three or four rooms upstairs lined with bunk beds, but it was on this gently sloping hill, and out in the garden was a barbecue, just a simple one made out of bricks with a heavy iron screen kind of thing sitting on top, and I remember the last dish we’d cook would always be
yaki-soba
noodles, but we grilled all sorts of things, steaks and potatoes and hamburgers and frozen prawns, and the adults drank beer and we kids drank orange pop, and then, before going to bed, we always had fireworks. My father usually took his vacation after the Obon holidays, so it was just about the time of year it is now, but it’s funny, isn’t it, that I’d suddenly remember this? I had this one big firework called a Rainbow Fountain, because it would shoot out this fountain of colorful sparks for like forever, but the fuse was damp and it wouldn’t light. We always started with the little ground spinners and sparklers and things and gradually went bigger and bigger, and this one that wouldn’t light was the one I’d been saving for last, so it made me really sad and I started crying, and my father came up to me and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and I just pointed at the dud firework, and he squatted down and reached for it, and wouldn’t you know, just as he’s reaching for it the damn thing goes off. He managed to cover his face with his left hand, but his right hand got really badly burned. You know, fireworks are incredibly hot, hotter than fire even, and my father’s hand turned all white, but he didn’t want me to worry, so even though he was biting his lip to keep from screaming he tried to smile. He held his hand under the faucet and ran cold water over it, and then they put on some ointment, but after a while it swelled up to about twice the normal size. But he kept telling me it didn’t hurt, didn’t bother him at all. And then, years ago, the last time I remember thinking about all this, I was trying to make some porridge with this turtle soup stock that one of the girls at my office had given me, and as I was heating it up I accidentally touched the pot and burned my finger—just a little bit, but it really hurt—and that made me remember my father’s burn, which had covered the whole palm of his hand, and I couldn’t even imagine how painful that must have been, and yet he tried to act like it was nothing at all—just because he didn’t want me to worry, right? It made me feel like, you know, like he really cared about me. But it’s funny, isn’t it? I’d forgotten all about that this entire time. I wonder why I’d remember it right now.”