Popular Hits of the Showa Era (2 page)

Tonight, in addition to One Cup Sake, they were drinking beer and wine. As for cuisine, beef jerky took the starring role. There was also macaroni salad—that begetter of a new era—not to mention various dry snacks, but none of these could compete with the headliner in terms of aroma and sheer visual appeal. The beef jerky had been supplied by Kato, who worked for a small importer of foodstuffs. Kato subsisted almost entirely on his company’s products, but it had never before occurred to him that the things he ate every day could lend pomp to a party. His main staple was giant corn from Peru, though when he wanted meat he would grab a package of this same beef jerky—produced by the American firm Tengu—and rehydrate the strips by boiling them in water à la sukiyaki. When he sensed that his body needed veggies he would open a can of apricots preserved in syrup—a product of the People’s Republic of China—never for a moment doubting that the apricot was a vegetable. He’d brought the beef jerky on this particular evening thinking only that it might mildly please the others, but in fact it was a sensation. When he casually plopped the four packages of Tengu teriyaki-style down on the tatami mats of Nobue’s apartment, a rare hush fell over the room. It wasn’t that none of them had ever eaten beef jerky before. But the excess energy that they themselves knew least what to do with helped lend an otherworldly glow to this austere food product, so redolent of the frontier spirit. None of them said a word, but with an intensity that might have made an impartial observer wonder how they would react to something like stone crab, they began tearing the jerky to shreds and wolfing it down.

Complemented with wine from Yamanashi and Portugal, the beef jerky had rapidly disappeared; Ishihara had ceased laughing like an idiot; and preparations for the rock-paper-scissors showdown were in full swing. But just as they were about to start the actual competition, Nobue made a discovery that turned their entire world upside down.

It seemed an eternity since they’d last seen a light in the window of the room across the parking lot. That light was on now, and through the lace curtains they could make out the silhouette of the woman with the unbelievable body. Sugiyama instantly grew so tense that he squeaked and probably would have gibbered had he not bitten his own left hand. The woman with the unbelievable body was brushing her long hair, and now she casually tossed it back over her shoulders with two or three graceful flicks of her fingers. That was enough to elicit a commotion of sighs and exclamations from Nobue and the others, and Ishihara went so far as to mutter, “Anyone mind if I jerk off?” He wasn’t the only one who was thinking of masturbation, but even as the woman undid the buttons on her blouse, the sublime aura of inviolability she radiated through the curtains prevented them from putting any such thoughts into action. The blouse slid off, the lines of her shoulders and back were revealed, and as she began to wriggle out of her skirt, tears welled up in Yano’s and Sugioka’s and Kato’s eyes. “This must be what it’s like to see a UFO, or the earth from the space shuttle,” Nobue murmured, and everyone nodded breathlessly. The woman shrugged out of her slip and unhooked her brassiere, and then her silhouette disappeared from view.

“Shower time!” shouted Ishihara, and the other five responded almost in unison, like the chorus in a grade-school play:

That’s right! That’s right! It’s shower time!

“She’s going to take a shower now!”

A shower now!

“A nice, hot, steamy, sexy shower now!”

Shower now!

“The shower is a miracle!”

A miracle! A miracle!

“From all those, like, little pinholes in that weird-shaped thing…”

Weird-shaped thing…

“Hot water shoots out—just think of it!”

Just think of it!

“It’s got to be a miracle!”

It is! It is a miracle!

It was only by vigorously chanting this odd sort of call-and-response that the six of them managed to master the excitement bubbling up from deep inside. They now breathed a collective sigh and sat back to finish off the wine and beer, basking in the afterglow of perfect happiness.

And then, at last, the rock-paper-scissors contest began.

The theme song for the evening’s ritual, as has been noted, was “Season of Love.” Instead of the usual “
Jan–ken–pon
,” therefore, you had to count off saying, “Jan–ken–PINKY!”

Nobue was the first to be eliminated, and he collapsed on the tatami mats and thrashed about in despair and frustration. According to the rules, he must now serve as the driver for the night. Sugiyama tossed him the keys, and he slunk outside to warm up the HiAce’s engine.

The ultimate victory went to Ishihara. On conquering his final opponent, he leapt into the air, shouting, “I did it!”—and the moment he uttered these words, the anxiety returned in the form of a chilling question:
Is it really all right to be this happy?

As it turned out, of course, Ishihara’s anxiety knew exactly what it was talking about.

III

Because
this evening’s song was to be “Season of Love,” it was necessary to determine only first place (lead singer), last place (driver), and fifth place (engineer/roadie). Naturally, if the theme song had been something by Uchiyamada Hiroshi & Cool Five or Danny Iida & Paradise King or the Three Funkys or Three Graces, it would have called for a different ranking system altogether.

Ishihara was so thrilled to have garnered first place that he squealed and began to perform the dance the others called “The Ishihara.” The incomprehensible anxiety was still at work, but it had occurred to him that if he moved his body maybe everything would work itself out. There is a rodent known as the tremuggia that makes its home in the Kalahari Desert and looks like a cross between a chipmunk and a rat, and though there’s no reason to believe that Ishihara was aware of the fact, this dance of his closely resembled that creature’s mating ritual. He bent his knees slightly, stuck out his hindquarters, held his wrists limply at chest level, and bobbed up and down while emitting a distinctive cry:
Kuun! Kuun! Kuun!

They
all carried their things to the HiAce step van and climbed aboard. Yano, who had been the second to be eliminated, took an inventory of the equipment, and when he gave the thumbs-up, Nobue steered the HiAce out to the street and accelerated. In tense anticipation of the ritual, all of the passengers were muttering to themselves—mostly about the brief striptease they’d just watched the woman with the unbelievable body perform. In the dark rear of the van, Sugiyama had narrowed his already narrow eyes until they seemed to form a single line behind his glasses. “That was amazing, amazing,” he mumbled. “Amazing, it was.” Kato was tenderly touching the spot on the back of his head where the hair was thinning. “Well, that was a shocker,” he muttered, “but the real test still lies ahead.” It’s doubtful if even he knew what that was supposed to mean.

Piloted by Nobue, the HiAce crossed the Tama River, sped past Yomiuri Land, entered the Tomei Expressway at the Kawasaki Interchange, and veered down the Odawara-Atsugi Road to Ninomiya, where it exited via the Seisho Bypass and finally rolled to a stop at a deserted spot by the coast that Yano and Kato had discovered. Last-place Nobue was sent to appraise the location by staking out a spot on the beach for a full twenty minutes, as stipulated by the guidelines. He had to make sure the place really was deserted. Once, a vacant lot Yano had found on a warehouse-lined street along Tokyo Bay turned out to be the occasional site of some sort of illicit transactions, and they’d been attacked by a pair of youths on motorcycles who smashed the windows of their van. Nobue and Ishihara and the others all hated that sort of thing. It wasn’t violence that they disliked, mind you. Sugiyama had been studying karate and kick-boxing since middle school and had a habit of going off on opponents who were clearly capable of pounding him into the ground, as a result of which he’d had his skull fractured on four separate occasions; Yano had inadvertently joined a fascist youth organization when he was eighteen and as part of his training had hunted field mice with a crossbow in the remote mountains of Nagano; Nobue and Ishihara had both scored a number of knockouts in drunken brawls—although, admittedly, only when given the chance to attack unsuspecting opponents from behind; Sugioka, who owned a collection of more than a hundred edged weapons ranging from box cutters to Japanese swords, always carried one or two blades and was forever stabbing walls and tree trunks and leather sacks stuffed with sawdust, and when especially piqued had even been known to slash to ribbons the shiny skin of used blow-up dolls; and Kato suffered a chronic, obsessive delusion that sooner or later he would murder—slowly and methodically—an infant or toddler or some other weak and defenseless being, and had come recently to believe that the only way to rid himself of this obsession was to go ahead and act it out. No, it wasn’t violence they disliked: it was contact with strangers. What these young men feared and hated more than anything else was being spoken to by people they hadn’t met, or having to explain themselves to people they didn’t know.

“It’s just like Kato said, not a soul around. A stray dog wandered by with a fish head in his mouth, but I threw a rock at him. Aimed right at his balls, but I missed, but he ran away anyway.”

The other five greeted Nobue’s announcement with a cheer that sounded more like a collective moan, then grabbed their things and piled out of the van. Nobue and Yano, peons for the night, had to carry all the heavy equipment: spools of thick extension cord, the 3CCD Hi8 video camera and tripod, the five-hundred-watt pinspots and their stands, a gargantuan boom-box, Bose speakers, and a set of Sennheiser microphones. They huffed and wheezed as they lugged everything down the narrow concrete steps to the beach, while Ishihara and the others changed into their costumes: flared velvet pantaloons, patent-leather shoes, frilled silk shirts, cummerbunds, bow ties, and tuxedo jackets with velvet lapels, followed by the top hats, false mustaches, black canes, and white gloves—for the others, that is. Ishihara alone applied bright red lipstick, false eyelashes, and a Cleopatra-style wig, tittering maniacally as he did so:
Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee!
Finally, decked out exactly as Pinky & the Killers had been back in the day, the performers strode down to the beach and stood there facing the sea and the tiny lights of fishing boats far offshore. Ishihara stepped forward and raised his little finger as he took the mike and cooed, “Ready, baby.” Yano, off to one side, turned on the pinspots, and the intro to “Season of Love” came blasting out of the Bose 501 speaker system and echoing across the dark sea and sky. When the first line of the lyric—
I just can’t seem to forget
—reverberated toward the waves in Ishihara’s nausea-inducing voice, all the crabs on the beach scuttled simultaneously into their holes. As for Ishihara himself, he actually
was
able to forget—at least during the time he was singing—the anxiety growing inside him.

The
day after the ritual, that anxiety revealed what it was made of.

The catalyst for it all was a badly hungover Sugioka. After backing up Ishihara on “Season of Love” more than forty times and walking the short distance home from Nobue’s apartment, Sugioka remained too pumped up to sleep, so he chewed some oval sleeping tablets he’d bought from a pasty-faced girl while loafing about in Shibuya one day and washed them down with beer. This knocked him out at last, but he woke at ten in the morning feeling as if his body were made of a particularly dense type of cement. He was irritable and grumpy, as anyone might be under such circumstances, and every part of him seemed in suspended animation except for the squirmy, itchy nerve that connected his lower parts—that is to say, his penis—directly to the corresponding section of his brain. Sugioka had experienced this sensation any number of times, but today it was incomparably worse than ever before, and he spent several long minutes wondering whether to watch an adult video and masturbate until the head of his organ was raw, or to pay a visit to the Pink Salon just outside the south exit of Chofu Station, or to seek satisfaction with Eriko, a blow-up doll to whom he still hadn’t put the knife and who boasted, according to her brochure, Super-Tight Anal Sensation; until weighing the pros and cons of each alternative became such a great bleeding pain in and of itself that he sliced up a perfectly good buckwheat-husk pillow with the twenty-centimeter blade of his Swedish mountain commando knife and stalked out onto the streets of Chofu, squinting in the daylight. Having secured the knife between his belt and jeans, beneath his vinyl raincoat, he was walking along the narrow road behind the Ito Yokado superstore when he noticed a stocky woman in her late thirties—a typical, not to say stereotypical, “Auntie” or Oba-san—apparently on her way home from shopping. The Oba-san was wearing a gauzy vintage white dress and dangling plastic grocery bags stuffed with clams and egg tofu and celery and curry rolls and what have you. Sweat beaded her forehead and dampened her underarms, exuding a strange mixture of odors, and she walked with her ass sticking out. To Sugioka’s bloodshot eyes, it looked as if that ass were saying,
DO ME
—or rather, the Japanese equivalent,
SHI-TE
. And in fact the wrinkles in the back of her dress seemed to spell out the word in hiragana:

So ya want me to do ya, do ya?
thought Sugioka, and quickened his pace until he was just behind the Oba-san and able to get a closer view. From the immediate rear, she was the most ludicrous-looking creature he’d ever seen. Up until then the most ludicrous-looking had been a hippopotamus that was emptying its bladder, a sight that had emblazoned itself on his memory during a childhood field trip to the zoo, but the Oba-san’s calves bulged with red and blue veins and bristled with a number of stubbly black hairs.
Hideous
, thought Sugioka. When he was within perhaps fifty centimeters his nose detected the clams and he spotted several long, wiry hairs growing from a big black mole on the back of the Oba-san’s neck.
The poor thing!
he thought, and tears welled up in his eyes. He was still shuffling along half a step behind her when they came alongside a grade school athletic ground where several little boys were playing soccer, and just as a tall kid with the number 6 on his jersey scored a goal with a diving header, Sugioka gave a thrust of his hips to poke the Oba-san’s ass with his foremost appendage.