Popular Hits of the Showa Era (13 page)

One of them came down the metal staircase, mumbling something under his breath. He got in the step van and started the engine. Henmi Midori pressed the
SEND
button on her phone again.

“Everyone’s leaving the office, darling. Hurry up and come get me.”

I

The
rock-paper-scissors contest ended with Yano taking first place, followed by Kato, Sugiyama, Nobue, and Ishihara, in that order. Nobue and Ishihara loaded the costumes and equipment in the HiAce, and everyone climbed aboard. Ishihara drove. “I don’t get it, I just don’t get it,” he kept muttering in a singsongy sort of way as he steered. He’d never, ever, come in dead last before, and therefore it was the first time he’d ever had to drive. The rock-paper-scissors competition wasn’t a tournament but rather a showdown: all players at once. The contestants shouted, jumped up and down, laughed hysterically, rolled on the floor, knocked their heads against walls, went into spasms in every limb, and occasionally even vomited from overexcitement. The peculiar thing was that these frenetic performances actually seemed to affect the outcome. Things like statistical probabilities and psychic foresight were useless with a group like this; the deciding factor seemed to have more to do with concentration. Like the Yoruba or Herero or other warlike West African tribes performing rituals prior to battle, they would tense their entire bodies, jump about feverishly, bug out their eyes, and screech or roar at the top of their lungs, and for some reason the one who succeeded in most intimidating the others in this way always seemed to win. Ishihara was usually able to completely shred his opponents’ jan-ken-pon rhythm. When the count began he would take on the aspect of a Tarahumara shaman with a bellyful of peyote, or a cabaret hostess who’s shot up too much speed, or a Siamese cat with hot pepper stuffed up its ass. No one was able to pierce his concentration barrier and force him to stick to the proper rhythm. Instead, they’d lose their own rhythm laughing nervously in response to his sudden, explosive, and utterly unhinged cackling. And yet tonight, for the first time ever, Ishihara had been defeated in round one. Not only was he forbidden to participate in the performance; he wasn’t even permitted to drink. His job was simply to drive them to the location, help set up the lights and video cameras and sound system, wait soberly until the performance was over, and then drive them all back to Nobue’s.

He knew it wasn’t that he’d lacked his normal vigor tonight. He’d led the others in the count while performing a series of so-called Erotic Calisthenics, which he claimed to have learned from an article in a sex rag and which involved pumping his limbs, twisting his body, and rolling his neck—simultaneously and at astonishing speeds—while laughing so explosively that it seemed as if the skin might peel off his face. At “pon” he threw down paper. Nobue too had paper—and both of them were eliminated, Yano and Sugiyama and Kato showing scissors. In the playoff with Nobue for last place, Ishihara changed tactics and performed a certain physical ceremony that he believed to be an esoteric form of yoga. While producing a dolphinish, ultra-high-frequency squeal from somewhere deep in his throat, he used both hands to scratch himself feverishly from crotch to scalp while shuffling his feet like Muhammad Ali—a tactic that usually resulted in his opponent suddenly deciding that there were more important things in life than rock-paper-scissors. Nobue, faced with Ishihara performing his ceremony and shrieking, “Not when I do YOGAYOGAYO-GAAAAAAAAAH!” had already admitted defeat to himself as he backed away and meekly held out scissors. Ishihara, scratching at his crotch and chest with his left hand, certain of victory and caterwauling his war cry, came up once again with paper. He stood there for some time, stunned and staring blankly at his open palm. Then he turned and trudged outside to warm up the van. His face was smiling, his eyes glittered in the late autumn moonlight, and he emitted a flickering aura that might have triggered seizures in an impartial but sensitive child, and yet he was strangely depressed.
I just don’t
get
it
, he kept muttering.

By the time they reached Fuchu Avenue, the party was in full swing in the rear of the van. Kato, testing his sea legs in the swaying and rocking vehicle, was selecting the costumes for the evening. Yano, beside himself at having taken first place for the first time in some eight months, was smiling and babbling to himself.

“I can’t believe it! To think that I—
I
—will sing lead vocal…. I haven’t achieved anything like this since grade school, when I did an imitation of Tony Tani singing “Abacus Cha-cha-cha” at the school talent show, and they called me back for an encore, gave me a standing ovation and everything, and…”

Nobue tried to interrupt to ask Yano what song he wanted to sing tonight, but he couldn’t get through, so Kato selected a song instead. “Yano-rin, Yano-rin, ‘Love Me to the Bone’ is okay with you, right?” Kato shook him by the shoulder, but Yano just smiled to himself and went on with the story no one else was listening to.

“The thing is, I was level one with the abacus, and there was this asshole in my class named Nakayama, and I challenged him with his electronic calculator, and I won, I beat him. But the thing about this Nakayama, when he was fourteen, for some reason, even though he wasn’t sick or anything but I guess just because his hair was a little thin, he started wearing a toupee. I guess it was his parents’ idea, but one time during an earthquake drill it slipped off and everybody found out he wore a rug, and he went ballistic, started hitting and kicking everybody. That’s the sort of asshole he was, but of course the toupee incident was way after I beat his calculator with my abacus, but…” The story was of no interest whatsoever to anyone, but there seemed no indication that it would ever end.

Sugiyama had come in third, which meant he was one of the backup singers, so he was warming up his voice, going,
AAAAHHHHH
, between slugs of booze, which he was urging upon the others as well. Yano and Kato had bought several two-liter aluminum “kegs” of beer and a large bottle of Suntory White whiskey at Goro-chan, the corner liquor shop, and they were shunting the bottle and kegs around as if they were rugby balls. In short order they were all shitfaced. Kato selected, from the nearly twenty costumes they’d pooled their money to buy, a suit of the sort worn by
enka
singers in cheesy cabarets—blue satin with faux-gold-foil lapels, a matching shirt, and a “butterfly” bow tie. He changed into the suit, though doing so while drunk in a moving vehicle was bound to cause the nausea of which he promptly and cheerfully complained. When he was finished dressing himself he undressed Yano, even as the latter obliviously continued his tale of the abacus, and then, as if changing the clothes on a mannequin or a Barbie doll, poured him into a leather bondage suit criss-crossed with zippers. The bottom of the leather suit was a miniskirt, and the straps on top had two metallic red roses attached at nipple level. It fit the emaciated Yano like a dream, and Sugiyama and Kato lifted their voices in a raucous cheer that was visible as a fine, beery mist. The abacus tale rolled on even as Kato slicked back Yano’s hair, applied lipstick to his lips, and packed him into black fishnet stockings and high heels. Sugiyama, meanwhile, was rehearsing the night’s song in a sequined rayon kimono, but he had tied the obi too tight and suddenly regurgitated. Yano slipped on the vomit in his high heels and fell to the floor as Sugiyama, never missing a beat, belted out the final words to “Love me to the Bone” and then shouted for Ishihara to play the tape again. As they entered the Tomei Expressway, Ishihara was singing along with the others but, partially because he hadn’t had any alcohol since leaving Nobue’s apartment, he just couldn’t shake an odd, nagging feeling that something was wrong. By the time they reached the Odawara-Atsugi Road, the usual chaos and confusion in the rear of the van had attained new levels of dementia, and even the normally rather calm and collected Kato was standing with his head out the side window, fluids oozing from his eyes and nose and ears as he sang, between spasms of projectile vomiting: “To the bone, to the bone, want you to love me to the bone!”

Watching Yano and Sugiyama and Kato guzzling the beer and whiskey and singing refrain after refrain, Nobue couldn’t help but smile. The three of them, usually relatively subdued, were in incredibly high spirits tonight. There was vomit all over the floor of the van, yes, but—hell, at least they were having fun. Savoring the cold air coming in through the window, Nobue decided to have a smoke and climbed into the passenger seat next to Ishihara.

“What’s the matter, Ishi-kun?” he asked as he lit his cigarette. “I mean, I know you lost at rock-paper-scissors and everything, but I’ve never seen you so quiet. Anything wrong?”

Ishihara’s eyes were extravagantly bloodshot. Unaccustomed to driving, he always kept his eyes open as wide as they would go when behind the wheel.

“Kato and Yano and Sugiyama are totally out of their minds,” Nobue went on, rolling down the passenger-side window. “There’s hardly any whiskey or beer left back there. It’s, like, the first time those three have ever really let go like this.”

“Nobu-chin,” Ishihara said, his eyes still protruding abnormally. “I don’t know. I’ve got a bad feeling about this….”

Ishihara
parked at their spot by the seashore, some ten kilometers short of Atami. It was down a narrow, inconspicuous road that branched off from the Manazuru Highway and ended at an enormous concrete breakwater. Yano and Kato and Sugiyama had piled drunkenly out of the van and were standing unsteadily on the beach with microphones in their fists, shouting “Hurry up!” while Ishihara and Nobue struggled with the karaoke machine, lights, and video cameras. Nobue switched on the van’s interior lamp to give Ishihara some light to work by, then ran out to the beach. None of them noticed the four middle-aged women hiding behind a gigantic concrete tetrapod a mere twenty meters away.

II

The
small beach lay in a horseshoe cove beyond the curving concrete breakwater. The breakwater was about three meters high, and the narrow, winding road that led to it was bordered on either side by thick groves of pine and other trees. No one would be able to see them from the road or from up or down the coast, even after they’d turned on the lights. Only from the sea could they have been spotted, but few fishing boats are out late on Saturday nights in Atami Bay. Nor was this cove the sort of place any tourists or locals would ever visit for sightseeing or romantic walks. The random jumble of giant concrete wave-dissipating tetrapods, like mutant versions of children’s jacks, marred the scenery; an ambient smell of sewage hung over the beach, which was approximately the size of a basketball court and consisted more of rocks than sand; and rusted jumbles of steel—the discarded engines of fishing boats, perhaps, or trucks—added a cold, metallic vibe to the already desolate and forbidding atmosphere.

Some two years earlier, Yano, finding himself with absolutely nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon, had sat in his apartment listening over and over again to a recording of house-style noise music until he became convinced that he was literally on the verge of losing his mind. Hoping to avoid a psychotic break, he’d called on Kato and dragged him out for a long bus journey that involved any number of transfers and ended at the seashore, along which they were walking silently when they’d stumbled upon this cove. It didn’t occur to them at the time that it might be a good place for Karaoke Blasts (this being before the advent of the ritual), but Kato discovered at one end of the beach a pair of discarded, blood-drenched panties and later reported this discovery to Nobue. Things had progressed from there. “The penetrator always returns to the scene of the crime,” Nobue had declared, and each Saturday for the next ten weeks the entire group had come here to stake out this beach. On the tenth trip, Yano had said, “It might not’ve been a virgin getting her cherry popped, you know. There’s no proof that those panties didn’t belong to some fifty-year-old Oba-san who forgot her tampons, right?” No sooner had this seed of doubt been vocalized than everyone awoke as if from a dream. They suddenly saw that it was perhaps overly optimistic to conclude from no more evidence than a single pair of muddy, bloodstained panties that they would soon be in a position to witness the rape of an angelic but ultimately lascivious nymphet of the sort who populate adult videos. Nonetheless, it seemed a waste to abandon this spot they’d visited each week for two and a half months, so Ishihara had proposed that the cove be designated their permanent multipurpose special event space, and so it had remained ever since.

In the past, the winners of the top four places in the rock-paper-scissors showdown had always been granted the right to sing, but since Sugioka’s death that number had been reduced to three. The division of responsibilities was clearly defined, and staff and cast never changed places in the course of a given night. Ishihara would therefore be stuck inside the van, along with the noisy portable generator, which was strapped down in the rear to keep the racket it made from interfering with the performances. Two cords extended from the generator through a narrow opening in the window and out to the beach, where they were connected to two video cameras, one secured to a tripod for the master shot of everyone on stage and one handheld by Nobue, who was to move around taking close-ups of each singer. The cameras were portable Sony 3CCD VX1s, the microphones cordless Sennheiser SY3s, and the speakers BOSE 501s. There was also a portable DAT deck and a simple mixing board in the van, the operation of which was up to Ishihara.

“Ishi-kun, please hurry!” Yano was shivering in his skimpy bondage gear. “Luckily I’m drunk, but it’s fuckin’
cold
in this costume!” The three singers were facing the sea, waving their dead mikes impatiently and muttering,
One, two, one, two! Test, test!
Unfortunately, Ishihara had always been hopeless with mechanisms of any sort. In middle school, when the Walkman first came out, a classmate of his had tricked him into inserting the earbuds in his nostrils. It wasn’t a big surprise that he couldn’t get the sound working now.