Popular Hits of the Showa Era (7 page)

But why was she thinking thoughts like these as she walked the midnight streets home? Iwata Midori paused beneath a streetlamp to take some slow, deep breaths and try to sober up. The karaoke club was just outside Chofu Station, an easy walk from her condo. The other four Midoris had piled into a taxi at the station, singing a shrill Matsuda Seiko song. She’d waved goodbye as their taxi drove off, and as soon as she was alone something unpleasant took hold of her. She called this unpleasant something “harsh reality,” but of course it was really just herself. She walked down the street in front of the station and turned the corner at a narrower, darker street, on the right side of which stood the grounds of a large shrine. The streetlamps were fewer and dimmer here. She passed a video store that had recently gone out of business. Separating the shrine from the street was a narrow concrete irrigation ditch, and on her left were darkened houses. Iwata Midori always enjoyed this ten-minute walk to her condo. It was muggy tonight, though, and her underthings began to cling moistly.

She thought about the songs she’d sung, and the slow dance with the young sales rep type. Henmi Midori had shouted into the microphone, “All right everyone, it’s cheek-to-cheek time!” and launched into a ballad in English—she couldn’t remember the title, but it had a nauseating, syrupy rhythm—and a group of young men had approached their table and asked them all to dance. Some of the young men were better-looking than others, but the sales rep with short hair was the handsomest by far, and he had taken Iwata Midori’s hand. “Waah! Wataa! No fair!” Tomiyama Midori had cried, pushing out her lips in a mock pout. The one who’d held his hand out to Tomii was young but short and hairy and puffy-faced and looked rather dense. At first Iwata Midori had stood apart from the handsome young man with the short hair, holding his hands lightly, but he knew all the right things to say. He began by asking if she came to this place often. As they conversed, he slowly tightened his grip on her hands, then slipped one hand behind her back and let it wander a little, but his face was so beautiful that it didn’t feel creepy at all.

“What a nice fragrance.”

“Complimenting me on my perfume—you’re teasing me, right? Teasing the Oba-san?”

“Absolutely not. I don’t normally care for perfume.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“My mother was a damn nightclub hostess.”

“You shouldn’t talk about her that way.”

“I respect my mother, of course. But you can’t make yourself like something you don’t like.”

“That’s true, I suppose.”

“I do like this fragrance, though. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that way.”

Iwata Midori became aware of herself standing under a streetlamp, smiling as she reconstructed the dialogue. She couldn’t have noticed Yano lurking in the shadows of the dark shrine, breathing quietly.

“What kind of perfume is it?”

“It’s called Mitsouko.”

III

Iwata
Midori was a little surprised to find that she remembered practically every word of her conversation with the young man with the short hair. In her mid-twenties she’d been married to a man whose face she could no longer remember clearly. The divorce had been such a foregone conclusion that there was no way even to explain to friends who asked, “Why? What went wrong?” Not only had she forgotten what he looked like, she couldn’t recall if he’d been a trading company man or a securities firm man or Ultraman or what, and couldn’t care less anyway. She was unable to remember a single conversation she’d ever had with him. It wasn’t that they’d never talked, of course. He was the type of man who liked to talk at noisy sidewalk cafés rather than a quiet bar or a park at sunset or the bedroom at night. He would sit in the sunlight drinking his coffee—refill after refill—and going on and on about all sorts of different things. Not inherently boring subjects like baseball or model trains or board games, but subjects that most people would consider interesting—powerful childhood experiences, for example, or the proper approach to interpersonal relationships in the workplace, or what exactly were the things that made human life worth living—but Iwata Midori, walking along this dark, empty street, couldn’t bring back a single word of any of it. And yet she remembered every detail of the silly, desultory conversation she’d just had with a young man she’d met and danced with at a karaoke club. Part of it, of course, was merely a question of time. Eight years had passed since she’d split with her husband, their marriage having drained away as naturally and inevitably as sand in an hourglass, but it had been only half an hour or so since she’d permitted her dance partner a little kiss goodbye. Time was huge. In fact, maybe time was everything. Wasn’t that what they always said? That time heals all wounds (and “wounds all heels”)? But Iwata Midori wasn’t so sure. A lot of songs too were about time solving problems or healing wounds, but the truth was that problems were solved by somebody taking some sort of concrete action, and as for wounds—well, for physical wounds there were white blood cells and whatnot. And for wounds of the heart? The only way to stop obsessing about hurtful things was to focus your energy, and your hopes or whatever, on something else. It wasn’t that time did the work for you, it was just that the deeper the wound, the longer it took to heal.

If I’d been trying really hard not to forget him, I’d probably remember some of the things he said
, she thought.
Or, then again, maybe not. In school I used to write down things I wanted to remember, things I’d heard or read that seemed really important, and now I couldn’t tell you what any of them were. And what do I remember about all those books that made me cry when I read them back in middle school? Nothing. Words themselves aren’t that important. Even if somebody says words that shock you, or make you want to kill them, or make you tremble with emotion, the words themselves you tend to forget in time. Words are just tools we use to express or communicate something. Or no, they’re not even tools, they’re more like means to an end. Maybe words are like money. Money’s just a tool for transactions, right? What’s important is the thing you buy with the money, not the money itself. So what’s important about words is the thing they communicate…which is—what?

She was reminded again of the scene in that trashy novel. The adulterous protagonist, before going out for her afternoon rendezvous, had sat at her dressing table applying perfume to her private parts. It was just something in a cheap, soft-porn novel, and she’d had difficulty believing that anyone would do such a thing, and yet she still remembered it so vividly. Why would she still remember a chapter out of some third-rate serialized novel she’d happened to read in a magazine long ago?
It’s not about the words, but about something much stronger than words
, Iwata Midori was thinking, slowing her steps again. At the heart of that much stronger “something” was sex, to be sure, but sex wasn’t just about two people getting naked and tangled up together. A lot of other things were involved, things that make you feel so good you forget who you are, and things that feel so creepy you literally get goose bumps, and things you hold so dear you’re afraid to go to sleep, and things that make you so happy you want to bounce up and down—layer after layer of things like that, all mixed up into a sticky mess with the blood and sweat and love juice. Those things got imprinted in your body—not the way the brain remembers words, but engraved or branded on your internal organs. She remembered the anatomy pictures in science class all those years ago—the reddish brown liver and red and blue blood vessels, and the nerves like tree roots, and the cells. An emotion occurred, and the nerves threw switches to alter the blood pressure and heartbeat, and electric pulses shot through the cells, so it wasn’t just a metaphor—these things got imprinted in a solid, physical, biological way.

Three and a half years I was with that man, and he didn’t imprint anything at all on my body. He was like one of those dolls whose tummy you press to make them talk. And the young man with the short hair? Did he imprint something?

“You’re not saying I remind you of your mother, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“I am quite a bit older than you, after all.”

“I think age is irrelevant, in a sense.”

She’d been particularly struck by the words “in a sense.” The young man with the short hair looked at first glance as if he might be somewhat frivolous—interested only in things like fashion, for example—but his subtly nuanced conversation had impressed her. And she felt as if those words had indeed been imprinted on her body. Some part of her had reacted directly to them. It was similar to the sensation of someone’s tongue reaching for your throat in a deep kiss, or the penis being inserted in the act of love. “Meaning” was something that entered your body.

“What do you mean, ‘in a sense’?”

“I think there’s either a mutual attraction or there isn’t. Maybe it’s chemical. Some guys like women with very pale white skin, for example, and others like a darker look. Some like serious, quiet women, and some seem to go out of their way to find women like crazed witches.”

At the words “mutual attraction,” her body had responded again. Now that she thought about it, though, there were any number of men who used words like that. It was because he, the young man with the short hair, had spoken them, that they’d entered her body. Having reasoned this far, Iwata Midori suddenly sensed that she was on the verge of realizing something important, and once again she stopped beneath a streetlamp. She felt that she finally understood why it was that she remembered nothing about the man she’d spent three and a half years with, locked in the powerful institution called marriage. There were things that got imprinted on you and things that didn’t. These were different for each individual, but there were things that got imprinted on most people, and things that almost everyone was drawn to—the way all the members of the Midori Society were drawn to Janis Ian songs.

Something tantalizing swirled around in Iwata Midori’s head, something that hadn’t yet crystallized into coherent thought. It was like the little winged creatures of the night flocking to the streetlamp above her, as if trying to coalesce into a single entity.

“Well, I don’t feel like anyone’s ever gone out of his way to find
me
.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong about that. Maybe you just didn’t notice.”

When the young man had said this to her, she knew there was something she wanted to say in reply, but she didn’t know what it was. Now, as she stepped out from beneath the streetlamp, the words she should have said came to her.

It wasn’t that I didn’t notice. I didn’t
want
to notice.

And if, after that, she had said,
But what if it were someone like you…?

What would have happened then? She gave a self-conscious little laugh and walked on, imagining her own face as it might look if she were naked in the arms of the short-haired young man. The image was by no means unpleasant and even produced a certain dampness in the crotch of her panties, but then a series of other images followed—the strangely shaped bed of some love hotel, the cheap side tables, the hideous tile in the bathroom, the tacky curtains…. And in the end she decided that the young man and her own elusive libido would never have meshed. As soon as she decided that, she drew once again to a halt, her heart pounding. Wasn’t this exactly what she’d been trying to get at? She’d simply never found anyone whose libido meshed with her own!

Such was the epiphany she was experiencing, when an oddly shaped black thing materialized before her eyes. It was the Tokarev, and it was in Yano’s hand.
Who are you?
Iwata Midori was about to ask when the black thing spat out a short
bang
, and she felt something drill through her face.

I

It
wasn’t as if the bullet pierced cleanly through her face. Because it was spinning like a drill, the slug pulled her whole face inward, twisting the flesh as if it were a wrung rag. Of course, Iwata Midori was aware of this for only the fraction of a second it took the bullet to reach her brain, at which point physical sensation ended. Strangely enough, however, though all physiological functions had ceased, her consciousness remained in operation for some moments. She tried to scream:
I don’t want to die!
It wasn’t fair that her life should end before she’d ever found an individual who could unlock her libido. She didn’t waste time wondering who’d killed her, therefore, but raged against the fact that she had to go now, so suddenly, with so much left unresolved. And then her consciousness too disappeared in the milky white mist.

Yano, sniffing the gunpowder on his hand, gazed at the splattered blood and the scattered bits of bone and brain tissue for some time, then whispered, “Ready, set, GO!” and began running as fast as he could.

When
he got back to Nobue’s apartment with the Tokarev still clenched in his hand, Yano was humming his favorite song—“A Hill Overlooking the Harbor,” which his elder sister had taught him when they were kids. The others noticed with some concern that he was still holding the gun and asked if he was sure nobody’d seen him with it. “La la la la la la la la la no worries! La la la la la la la la la…” Yano squeezed the words into the gaps in the melody, smiling brightly all the while. “La la la la la la la la la la la la I was going to hide the Tokarev la la la la la in my bag but la la la la my fingers wouldn’t la la la la la let go so I took off my shirt and la la la wrapped it around my hand, so everything’s cool la la la la la la!” He was gripping the pistol so tightly that his hand was chalk-white from wrist to fingertips. His lips were smiling, but his hair was standing on end and the corners of his eyes were twitching, as were his nostrils and temples, and if you listened closely you could hear his teeth chattering as he la-la’d. Nobue took hold of his pale right wrist and held it down while Sugiyama tried to pry the index finger from the trigger. “Watch what you’re doing,” Nobue said with a solemn furrowing of the brow. “If that thing goes off it’ll put a hole in my new carpet. How ya like it, by the way? Bought it last week at Tokyu in case I start living with a chick. Chicks dig carpeting more than tatami, right?”

Sugiyama went red in the face with the effort of trying to separate Yano’s finger from the trigger. It seemed to be welded on. “I give up,” he said finally. “Look at that thing, it’s like a gold-fish with rigor mortis or somethin’. It’s white and cold as ice.”

Ishihara leaned in for a closer look. “It’s hopeless,” he pronounced with a laugh that seemed to be caused by vibrations of brain matter rather than vocal cords and sounded like an out-of-tune piccolo played by a genius musician who’d finally cracked under the strain. Nobue and the others gaped at him slack-jawed, as if it had just dawned on them what an odd person he was. Between bursts of laughter so high-pitched that they played havoc with the eardrums, Ishihara now began rhythmically chanting, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” in a falsetto voice and jumping up and down to a slightly different rhythm.
Looky here
, he said.

“Looky here, I think we’re going to have to cut the finger off, don’t you think? Eh? Eh? Eh? Eh? Cut it off! Cut it off! Cut it off!” He was bouncing up and down the way a child might do when pleading with Mother to make rice balls instead of sandwiches for the picnic. “It’s not that easy to cut off a finger, though,” he pointed out. “Ever seen a Yakuza movie? Eh? There’s no way you can do it with a carving knife or a Swiss Army knife or whatever. Hey! We’ll need some sort of saw.”

He asked Nobue where the toolbox was, then actually went and fetched a foldable pruning saw. When he unfolded it and saw the jagged teeth of the blade, his laughter edged upward in volume and pitch, and he began blinking rapidly. Ishihara’s eyes didn’t resemble those of any other member of the human race—or of any known reptile or amphibian or bird or fish or protozoan or movie alien either, for that matter. His eyelids made a clicking sound each time he blinked—at least, “click” is about as close to the sound as onomatopoeia can get. It wasn’t like a quietly closing door, however; more like the sound glass makes when it cracks.
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
he chanted to one rhythm while jumping up and down to another, producing that arresting cracking-glass sound with his eyelids and laughing that genius-musician-with-broken-piccolo-suffers-psychotic-episode laugh.

“I got a saw, I got a saw, I got a saw, Yano-rin’s no Yakuza, but watch me cut his finger off! Yay! Yay! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! I’m right, right? You write the kanji for ‘correct’—one, two, three, four, five strokes—and how do you read it?
Tadashii
, and that’s my name, Ishihara Tadashi. Correct? Right! Yay! Yay! Yay! Yay! I’m right, right? Hold him good, and I’ll make like Kikori no Yosaku:
kii-i, ko-o, rii-i, no-o
, off comes Yano-rin’s FINGER!”

Ishihara seemed to be directing the words to his inner self rather than to anyone else in the room, but the powerful waves of energy he emitted went rippling through the others. Nobue was the first to join in the laughter and begin bouncing up and down alongside him. “That’s right, that’s right, Ishi-kun’s right!” he declared, and soon all except Yano were pogoing about the room in agreement. The floor seemed on the verge of collapse as they bounced and shouted, “Off with his finger! Off with his finger! Off with his finger!” Nobue and Sugiyama and Kato grabbed hold of Yano—who was still desperately humming “A Hill Overlooking the Harbor,” though no one could hear him for all the noise—and when Ishihara, brandishing the saw, modulated to an even higher-pitched ululation—
Hyu lu lu lu lu lu lu lu lu!
—Yano suddenly found himself coming into contact with a mysterious, transcendent sort of power. Returning at once to his senses, he let go of the Tokarev. It hit the floor, and Ishihara said,
Oh, poo.

“Oh, poo. You’re no fun.”

“When
you hear the name Tokarev, you can’t help but think of the former Soviet Union, but…”

Yano’s right index finger was as white and swollen as if it had been soaking in brine for days, but he’d regained his composure. Everyone was glad to see that he was himself again—with the exception of Ishihara, who was still cradling the saw, repeating the words, “You’re no fun,” and pointedly ignoring whatever it was that Yano was going on about.

“I’m sure you all know this already, having read the articles in the newsweeklies and so forth, but that model was actually the T-54, manufactured in China.”

Yano had begged them to let him keep the Tokarev, but Nobue and the others had convinced him that it needed to be disposed of. They decided to drop it in one of the huge dumpsters for noncombustible trash near the housing projects on the border with Fuchu City. They’d all go there together, if only to make sure Yano didn’t back down.

“It’s the most common handgun on the Japanese black market these days, though of course it’s the first time I personally have ever handled one.”

Yano had agreed to abandon the gun but was still dawdling. First he’d fooled around coating one side of it with ink and trying to print the impression on paper as a keepsake, the way some people do with fish they’ve caught. He had then completely disassembled the Tokarev and replaced several components with similar parts from model guns. Now he was wrapping the harmless hybrid around and around with duct tape. Yano had made an exhaustive study of novels and films in which handguns play a prominent part, and he performed the procedure with obsessive precision.

“The truth is, we shouldn’t even call it a Tokarev. It’s really a Black Star. The Black Star, as you all know, was first produced in 1951.”

None of them had known any such thing, of course.

“The 54 was an improved model based on the 51, but because it’s essentially the same as later models of the Tokarev TT-33, I suppose there’s no harm in referring to it as a Tokarev, as we’ve been doing, but the thing about this particular gun is, if you don’t put it right up to the person’s temple, or right in their face like I did with that Oba-san, you’re probably going to miss. Even Yakuza say they’re afraid to use the T-54 because you never know where the bullets are going to go. But on the other hand, those nine-millimeter rounds are way lethal.”

Yano was eating shrimp-flavored rice crackers and drinking 100% apple juice. He had finished with the duct tape and was taking a sip of the juice when Nobue, with a grimly serious squint, said,
Yeah, but wait.

“How come that Oba-san didn’t scream or try to run when you shoved the gun in her face? Most people would try to get away, right?”

Yano tilted his head to one side.

“She looked like she was remembering something,” he said. “She stopped walking and was just standing there, like she’d realized she left something important behind.”

II

The
Midori Society was down to only four members now. A group of four, it goes without saying, is completely different from a group of five or six—or two or three, for that matter. The headline in the paper had said “UNEXPLAINED MURDER” and, beneath that, “Drug-Fueled Thrill Kill?” The article included comments by a source at police headquarters to the effect that, as there was no discernible motive behind the killing and no weapon or any other clues had been found, it was unlikely that the coward who’d committed the crime would ever be apprehended.

Henmi Midori’s abode was the smallest of any of the Midoris’, and the most modestly furnished and decorated. She rented one section of an old house that had been divided into three. The house, in one of the more nostalgic sections of Chofu, had a small garden, and the precisely fitted tatami mats conspired with the pillars and walls and ceiling of traditional materials to lend a certain calm and somber atmosphere appropriate to the evening of the day they’d said their last farewells to a dear, departed friend.

“So it’s just the four of us now,” Suzuki Midori said. She felt it was up to her to assume the burden of leadership now that Iwata Midori was gone, though it hadn’t necessarily occurred to the others that there was any need for a leader. The sun had long since gone down and night was deepening, but the four surviving Midoris were for once drinking only green tea, and no one had even touched the chocolate cookies or the hand-basted soy-sauce-flavored rice crackers, which lay neatly arranged on a red lacquer tray before them.

“Four is an odd kind of number,” said Henmi Midori. “All this time there were six of us, and now, having this happen to Nagii, and then to Wataa, one after the other…”

It was a sad thought at a sad time, and yet it couldn’t dispel a certain unlikely sense of optimism that permeated the room. Iwata Midori’s wake and funeral had been held in her hometown in Shizuoka, so of course her remains weren’t here with the surviving Midoris. But the absence of her corpse had nothing in particular to do with the air of optimism. Ordinarily, if you were quietly sipping green tea on your return from the funeral of a dear friend who’d been brutally murdered, you would experience a profound emptiness and sorrow, a fretful sense of powerlessness against the things in this world that, once done, can never be undone—but it wasn’t like that for the Midoris. What all four of them were thinking, remarkably enough, was,
We’ll settle this one way or another
. Perhaps this mentality of theirs was related to the one that gave rise, during the great war so far in the past now, to those famous group suicide attacks. For the Midoris, presumably, the brain circuitry that allowed such thoughts as,
What’s done is done, and since we can’t change it we might as well accept it
, had never existed in the first place.

“Speaking of groups with four members,” said Tomiyama Midori, “you can’t help but think of the Beatles.”

Her tone of voice showed that this was keenly felt, but there was also a certain rosy hopefulness in the thought that helped take the edge off the others’ feelings.

“So, before this happened to Wataa, I guess we were the Rolling Stones?” Takeuchi Midori said with a little laugh and a smile.

“Were there any bands with six members?” Suzuki Midori wondered, and with this, the air of optimism that permeated the room began swirling with chatter.

“I’m pretty sure Uchiyamada Hiroshi & Cool Five were six people.”

“Six isn’t a very convenient number for doing most anything, is it?”

“Then again, a family with four children, if you include Mama and Papa, that makes six, right?”

“When I was still married, my little boy and I set a record of five MOS Burgers between the two of us but, sure enough, we never made it to six.”

“The Sobu Line used to have six cars to a train. Did you know that?”

“The Audi logo is four circles, and the Olympics is five.”

“So if we were only three, what would we be?” Henmi Midori asked. “The Kashimashi Sisters?”

Being likened to a slapstick comedy trio didn’t sit well with the others.

“That’s not funny,” Suzuki Midori snapped. She stood up and extracted a bottle of Canadian Club from the tea cabinet. After draining the remaining green tea from her cup, she replaced it with the fragrant rye, then knocked the stuff down in one gulp, like a kamikaze pilot just before takeoff. “The Kashimashi Sisters, my ass! We haven’t gone through all we’ve gone through in our lives to end up like that!”

“Hear, hear! What would the last two be then, a cross-talk act?”

“And if we were only one…Miyako Harumi?”