Almost Transparent Blue

Ryū MURAKAMI

Translated by Nancy Andrew

KODANSHA INTERNATIONAL

Tokyo • New York • London

THE AUTHOR: Ryū Murakami was born in 1952 and grew up in the port city of Sasebo in western Japan. While studying at the Musashino College of Art in Tokyo, he submitted
Almost Transparent Blue
in a competition for new writers conducted by the literary monthly
Gunzō
. Published as a book, the novel won the Akutagawa prize for 1976. Besides continuing with his writing, Murakami has had a weekly disc-jockey and TV interview program, and has directed several of his own movies.

His novel
Coin-Locker Babies
is due out from Kodansha International in 1995.

First published in Japanese as
Kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burù
by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo, 1976.

Distributed in the United States by Kodansha America, Inc., 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10011. Published by Kodansha International Ltd., 17-14 Otowa 1-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112, and Kodansha America, Inc. Copyright ©

1977 by Kodansha International Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Japan.

LCC 80-85383 ISBN 0-87011-469-7 ISBN 4-7700-0957-7 (in Japan) First edition, 1977 First paperback edition, 1981 98 99 17 16 15

It wasn't the sound of an airplane. The buzz was an insect somewhere behind my ear. Smaller than a fly, it circled for a moment before my eyes, then disappeared into a dark corner of the room.

On the round white tabletop reflecting the ceiling light was an ashtray made of glass. A long, thin, lipstick-smeared cigarette smoldered in it. Near the edge of the table stood a pear-shaped wine bottle, with a picture on its label of a blonde woman, her mouth full of grapes from the bunch she held in her hand. Red light from the ceiling trembled on the surface of the wine in a glass. The ends of the table legs disappeared into the thick pile of the rug. Opposite me was a large dressing table. The back of the woman sitting at it was moist with sweat. She stretched out her leg and rolled off a black stocking.

"Hey, bring me that towel. The pink one, O.K.?" Lilly said, tossing the rolled-up stocking at me. She said she'd just got back from work, picked up the cologne, and lightly patted it on her forehead, which was shiny with grease.

"So then what happened?" she asked, wiping her back with the towel as she looked at me.

"Aw, you know, I thought I'd give him some booze, it might cool him down, and besides him there were two other guys in a car outside, everybody high on glue, you know, so I thought I'd give him some booze. Was he really locked up in the juvie pen?"

"He's a Korean, that guy."

Lilly was taking off her makeup. She wiped her face with a little cotton wad, flattened and soaked with a piercingly fragrant liquid. She leaned over to peer into the mirror and took off her false eyelashes; they were like the fins of a tropical fish. The cotton she tossed away was smeared with red and black.

"Ken, he stabbed his brother, I think maybe it was his brother, but he didn't die, and he came to the bar a little while back."

I gazed through the wine glass at the light bulb. Inside the smooth glass sphere the filament was a dark orange.

"He said he'd asked you about me, Lilly, so watch your mouth, O.K.? Don't tell too much to weird guys like that."

Lilly finished the wine that had been set down among the lipsticks and brushes and various bottles and boxes on the dressing table, then right there in front of me she slipped off her gold lamé slacks. The elastic left a line on her stomach.

They said Lilly had done fashion modeling, once.

On the wall hung a framed photo of her in a fur coat. She told me it was chinchilla and cost I don't know how many thousands. One time, when it was cold, she'd come to my room, her face pale as a corpse ; she'd shot up too much Philopon. With a rash around her mouth, shaking violently, she'd fallen in as soon as she'd opened the door.

Hey, will you take off my nail polish, it's all sticky and nasty. I'm sure she said something like that as I hugged and lifted her. That time she was wearing a backless dress and was so drenched with sweat that even her pearl necklace was slippery. As I'd wiped her fingernails and toenails clean with paint thinner, since there hadn't been any polish remover, she'd said in a low voice, Sorry, there was something kind of rough at work. While I was holding her ankle and rubbing her toenails, Lilly just stared out the window, breathing deeply. I slipped my hand under the hem of her dress and felt the cold sweat on the inside of her thighs as I kissed her and slid her panties down. With the panties tangled around one foot and her legs spread wide on the chair, Lilly said then, I'd like to watch TV, you know, there should be some old flick with Marlon Brando, some Elia Kazan. The flower-scented sweat on my palms had taken a long time to dry.

"Ryū, you shot up on morphine at Jackson's house, right? Day before yesterday." Lilly was peeling a peach she'd taken out of the refrigerator. Legs crossed, she was sunk deep in the sofa. I waved aside her offer of the peach.

"Well, don't you remember a girl there, red dye-job, short skirt, good style, good ass?"

"I don't know, there were three Japanese girls there, you mean the one with the Afro hairdo?"

I could see into the kitchen from where I sat. A black bug, maybe a cockroach, was crawling around on the dirty dishes piled in the sink. Lilly talked on as she wiped peach juice off her bare thighs. She dangled a slipper from one foot, in which I could see the red and blue blood vessels. I always think these are lovely, seen through the skin.

"So she was lying, that bitch, she cut work, said she was sick but she was playing around all day with guys like you—No thanks! Did she shoot up, too?"

"Jackson wouldn't let her do that, would he? It's really a bummer, the way he says girls shouldn't shoot up. So she was from your place, huh? She sure laughed a lot, smoked too much grass and laughed a lot."

"You think she should get fired?" "But she draws them in, right?" "Yeah, well, with that kind of ass."

The cockroach had stuck its head on a dish covered with globs of ketchup ; its back was shiny with grease.

When you smash cockroaches, the juice comes out in different colors. Maybe the belly of this one was full of red now.

Once, when I killed a roach crawling on a paint palette, the juice was a bright fresh purple. Since there'd been no purple paint on the palette, I thought red and blue must have mixed together in that little belly.

"So what happened about Ken? Did he go home all right?"

"Aw, I let him in and said there're no girls, will you have some booze, but he said sorry, make it a coke, I'm high already. He actually apologized."

"Really dumb, huh?"

"The guys waiting in the car picked up a chick who was just passing by, she was pretty ripe."

What makeup there was left on Lilly's cheeks shone faintly. She tossed the stone of the peach into the ashtray, pulled out the pins to take down her dyed hair, and began to slowly brush its waves, a cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth.

"Ken's sister used to work at my place, a long time ago, she was pretty smart."

"She quit?"

"Seems she went back to the country, said her home was somewhere up north."

Her soft red hair clung to the brush. After straightening the rich mass of hair, she got up as if she'd just remembered something and took a silver box containing a slender syringe out of the cabinet. She held a small brown bottle up to the light to see how much was inside, drew just the right amount of liquid up into the syringe, and leaned over to shoot it into her thigh. Her other leg trembled slightly. I suppose she put the needle in too deep, because when she took it out, a thin trickle of blood ran down to around the knee. Lilly massaged her temples and wiped away the saliva that had dribbled from the corner of her lips.

"Lilly, you've got to sterilize that needle every time."

Without answering, she lay down on the bed in one corner of the room and lit a cigarette. The thick blood vessels in her neck moved as she puffed out the smoke weakly.

"You want to shoot up, Ryū? There's still some left."

"Not today, I've got some at my place too, and some friends are coming over."

Lilly reached over to the bedside table, picked up a paperback copy of The Charterhouse of Parma, and started reading. As she blew smoke on the open page, she seemed to chase after the words with a peaceful absentminded expression.

"Your sure read at weird times, silly Lilly," I said, picking up the syringe that had fallen from the shelf and rolled along the floor. She said, "Yeah, this is good," in a voice that got tangled up in her tongue.

There was blood on the end of the syringe. When I went into the kitchen to wash it off, the cockroach was still working on the dishes in the sink. I rolled up a newspaper and, careful not to break the plates, smashed it after it moved onto the small table by the sink.

"What're you doing?" Lilly asked, scraping the blood from her thigh with her fingernail. "Hey, come over here." Her voice was very sweet.

The juice from the roach was yellow. Smashed on the edge of the table, it stuck there, the antennae still stirring slightly.

Lilly slid off her panties, called me again. The Charterhouse of Parma had been tossed on the rug.

A sharp odor filled my room, the smell of an old pineapple on the table. I couldn't remember when I'd cut it. The cut end had gone black, completely rotten, and the syrupy juice lay congealed on the plate.

As Okinawa got ready to shoot up, the tip of his nose glistened with sweat.

Seeing that, I thought it really was a hot sticky night, just like Lilly had said. As she'd rocked her body—which must have been growing heavy—on the damp bed, she'd kept saying Hey, aren't you hot, today's really hot.

"Hey, Ryū, how much was that smack?" Reiko asked as she took a record by The Doors out of a leather bag. When I answered $10, Okinawa said loudly,

"Oh wow, that's cheaper than back in Okinawa." He was heating the needle of a syringe with a lighter. After sterilizing it with a hunk of cotton soaked in alcohol, he blew on it a couple of times to make sure that the hole wasn't blocked.

"You know, I was really freaked out to see how the walls and the john and stuff had been fixed up, over there at the lockup in Yotsuya, you know, and this young guard bastard was a real blabmouth, right? And he kept making dumb jokes like saying, this is better than the police dorm, and some old guy played along with him by laughing real loud, so I felt really down."

Okinawa's eyes were a muddy yellow. He was drinking odd-smelling liquor from a milk bottle, and he was already pretty drunk when he got to my room.

"Hey, were you really in a drug rehab center back there?"

I asked Okinawa as I opened the aluminum foil with the heroin in it.

"Yeah, my old man put me in, a good ol' Yank-run drug center, since the guy who'd busted me was an M.P., right? First they put me in that G.I. place and had me take a cure, then sent me back here. Hey, Ryū, America's really, you know, advanced, I really thought so."

Reiko, who'd been looking at The Doors' record jacket, cut in, "Yeah, Ryū, don't you think it'd be great to get shot up on morphine every day? I'd like to get into some Yank drug center, too."

Scraping together the heroin from the edges of the foil with an earpick, Okinawa said, "Shit, I told you, small-time users like you can't get in; they only let in real junkies like me, right? Nobody but real addicts—needle marks on both arms, right? There was this nurse there called Yoshiko, kind of sexy, you know, and I got shot up in the butt by her every day. I'd stick out my butt, like this, see? And while I'd be looking out the window at everybody outside, they're playing volleyball or something, she'd shove it to me right in the ass, right? But I was so wasted my cock was all shriveled up and I didn't want Yoshiko baby to see it. A big butt like yours, Reiko, just couldn't make it in there."

Reiko went humph in annoyance, said she wanted something to drink, went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

"Isn't there a-anything?"

Okinawa pointed to the pineapple on the table and said, "Have some of this, it tastes just like home, right?"

"Okinawa, you sure do love rotten things, don't you? What about those clothes, huh? They stink!" Reiko said as she drank some watered-down Calpis, moving an ice cube around in her cheek.

"I'm going to be a junkie real soon, too. I'll just get worn out if I'm not as much of an addict as Okinawa after we get married, and so after we're both hooked we'll live together, right? And then I'd like us to go off it bit by bit."

"You'd have your honeymoon in a drug center?" I laughed.

"Hey, Okinawa, that's what we'll do, O.K.?"

"That's cool, that's what you should do, you could line up your butts together, real nice, and get shot up with morphine while saying I love you to each other, right?"

Okinawa laughed a little, said, "Shit, stop putting me on," and with a napkin dried off the spoon he'd been soaking in hot water.