Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (10 page)

“I can't help you there! I only picked up a few words and phrases—”

“C'mon now, let's not be modest! A man of your background, I'll bet you speak like a native if you're in the country for half a year!”

“I did stay in Mexico City, but I didn't concentrate on learning Spanish.”

“You can say that till you're blue in the face, but I know how easy it is for a
sensei
like you to pick up a language. You take my boys, now that's a different story! As long as they're at training camp they're only allowed to use Spanish. It's a solid year with no furloughs and no Japanese books allowed in the dormitory. No newspapers or television either. Not even radios. There's a few of them have taken to speaking Spanish in their sleep. The trouble is, they wake up, you get my meaning? By now they must be starved for Japanese; someone got hold of a cartoon magazine one of the kids in swimming school had brought with him and the whole gang was all over it like sharks, tearing it out of each other's hands until pages went flying. I caught them in the act and threw the whole lot into the changing room and made them run the gauntlet buck naked. I was careful to make sure that none of the children were peeking in—the director here is pretty fussy about discipline. If you ask me, you can't do better than a little whomping on the buttocks, you get my meaning? Anyways, I'd really like you to speak to them in Spanish. About half this gang used to be right-wing fanatics, and the other half were Commie agitators. All of them would love to have a discussion with you, I'm not sure why. The ones who studied with M
Sensei
”—Mr. Shumuta abruptly mentioned the name of the famous novelist who had committed suicide a number of years ago—“are the keenest—”

“I really can't speak Spanish—I have enough trouble with English if I don't prepare in advance.”

“There you go again! You don't have to be so cautious. My boys
are former
radicals; now they've seen the light and they're off to Mexico in search of a new world, they're not into violence. It's debate they want, just debate, you get my meaning? Think it over—how about sometime around the tenth anniversary of M
Sensei's
suicide? Wouldn't that be something! I'd appreciate it!”

I noticed Eeyore's eyes peering anxiously in at us through the heat-resistant glass, as though disturbed by Mr. Shumuta's explosive laughter, and I stood up and left the sauna. I was feeling curiously guilty about the invitation he had offered me in a voice that was both amused and a challenge. The truth was, I did speak Spanish—I wondered whether it wasn't simple cowardice that was making me so cautious about these
former
rightists and leftists who were said to be interested in me?

Following my conversation with Mr. Shumuta, I couldn't help thinking about his young men, and my interest in them led directly to personal issues of my own. As it happened, the tenth anniversary of M's suicide was approaching, and posters for commemorative events to be sponsored by various groups on that day began appearing on street corners.

Meanwhile, one of the club's members had come to his own conclusions about Mr. Shumuta's group that cast them in a different light than their leader. He seemed to place particular importance on the tenth anniversary of M's death. This member's name was Minami, and while there were those who felt that his critique was based on negative rumors that were motivated by resentment of the group for monopolizing the Members Pool at designated times and locking others out, he was, after all, an assistant professor studying the physical and psychological dimensions of sports medicine at Keio University, where Mr. Shumuta had formerly taught, and this gave him a degree of credibility. On the other hand, he and the other regular members of the exercise club retained a certain happy-go-lucky quality from their student days and teased one another in a manner that appeared jocular but concealed malice. All the while he spoke, sitting in the sauna—Mr. Shumuta happened not to be there—a smile had played around his gentle, feminine eyes in counterpoint to the murky darkness of his subject.

Minami held that it was not quite the case, as Mr. Shumuta had represented, that some of the young men in the group had studied with M. In fact, while it was true that the group was split between extreme positions on the Left and the Right politically, the bond that united all its members was their adherence to M's philosophy and M's action. Not all of them had belonged to his private army, but most of them in their individual loneliness had read and admired his writing, and had felt abandoned when he committed suicide. It wasn't until after his death that they had formed a group to study his thinking and his action. At some point, a student who had been a member of Mr. Shumuta's athletic club had served as the middleman in bringing his former coach and the group together. Mr. Shumuta had become friendly with M at the gym where he lifted weights.

Mr. Shumuta had been advising the group for ten years; but they had been training at a camp with their numbers reduced only since the end of the year before last. A majority of voices had called for culminating their activities on the tenth anniversary of M's suicide, and when they had dissociated themselves from those who demurred, the remaining number had built a training camp in the woods along the Odakyu train line with funds that Mr. Shumuta had raised from a powerful figure on the Right with whom he was also said to be friendly. Land in Mexico was indeed being held for them, and they were currently in training to immigrate there, which explained the emphasis on Spanish. As it happened, one of Minami's young colleagues was teaching Spanish at the camp. It was apparently true that only Spanish was allowed at the training site, but the instructor had reported that the young men were most zealous about weapons training with converted sheath knives and other gear. “I don't know what Shumuta is plotting, but I don't believe those young braves are intending to start all over in Mexico because things have gone from bad to worse in the ten years since M died—how do you know they're not thinking now is the time to rise up and use those knives they've been honing for ten years! When M was alive, he said more than once that he hated your politics, right? And after the incident you criticized his suicide. You show up to give a talk, what's to stop them from taking you down as first blood on their way to battle in the streets? They could even be planning to use their Spanish as code when they storm the Tokyo Garrison in Ichigaya to avenge M.…”

New posters about the tenth anniversary of M's death were appearing in the streets every day. And one day a few of Mr. Shumuta's students deserted while they were at the club. This gave rise to new thoughts about the group. Although I wasn't there at the time, I happened to be present at a conversation about the incident between Mr. Minami and Mr. Shumuta and learned some of the details.

One afternoon early in November when I arrived at the club with Eeyore and we went downstairs, no one was swimming in the Members Pool. As we were on our way there after taking a shower, a student who was working at the club part-time came running over to let us know that it was closed. There had been an accident that morning, he said, and the wall of glass brick facing on the street had been broken. Peering through the glass on this side, I could see that the far corner of the exterior wall across the pool was caved in as though it had been tunneled. Three men in coveralls seemed to be inspecting the hole; they were probably estimating the cost of repair. Meanwhile, Mr. Shumuta was moving his hard, inflated-rubber-tire body busily back and forth, talking volubly in what appeared to be high spirits.

With no idea of what had happened, I took Eeyore to the main pool and waited for the break between swimming-school classes to let him practice his slow-motion underwater approach to swimming. Then I sat him down on a bench alongside the pool and swam some laps myself, kicking hard to save time.

When we went upstairs to the sauna, Mr. Minami and Mr. Shumuta were in the middle of a conversation they appeared to be enjoying. I sat down apart from them and began lathering Eeyore's body with soap to avoid having to say hello.

“Glass brick has gone way down! I thought we'd be looking at ten thousand but it's only a fraction of that and they're not even charging for the repair—I started feeling guilty …” As he spoke, Mr. Shumuta's head moved back and forth on a neck that was thick as a bull's and soaking wet with what was clearly sweat and not hot water from the tub.

“The important thing is that no one was injured,” Minami said woodenly, as though he were trying to distance himself from Mr. Shumuta.

“That's because they've been tempered! It would take a lot more than that to hurt them. Even if they couldn't avoid injury they wouldn't get into that much trouble. Light stuff, nothing major! Those bodies have been tempered! Now they're like me—an ordinary person would have lost a foot in that accident I had!”

“They say that two of them lifted the bench and the third guided it from the back and they slammed it into that wall to open an exit for themselves. Then apparently they used the bench as a bridge to the outside over the broken glass. They had a perfect plan, like pros!”

“Pros at running away are no use to anyone.”

“So what now? Did you inform the police?”

“
Sensei,
this is none of the police's business! Whoever wants to run away should do it. Boys like that would be of no use to us even if we brought them back. At my place, we have strict rules about how we live but nobody's watching to see that people don't run away.”

“Then why did they wait until they got to the pool to escape? I mean, shattering a glass wall with a bench and fleeing in a bathing suit is a dangerous stunt; one false move and they could have been seriously injured—”

“Those bodies don't make false moves.” Mr. Shumuta laughed his hearty laugh again. “I'm not sure why they didn't have the good sense to change clothes. Were they afraid of running into me upstairs? Or did that wild hair they caught when they were down at the pool feel like it just couldn't wait?”

“Probably both.” In Minami's curiously clipped reply there was no trace of the young girl's bashfulness that normally played around his eyes when he spoke.

“But look here, most of them stayed right where they were even though that wall was breached and I wasn't around—”

Without responding, Minami rose and headed for the locker room. Mr. Shumuta turned in my direction, his enigmatic eyes like deep wrinkles in a face that was otherwise illuminated by a meaningless smile, but I had no desire to take over the role of listener and kept my concentration focused on scrubbing Eeyore's hair.

“That's a big mistake,
Sensei,
that kind of coddling is no good for a retarded child! I bet he still wets his bed at night. You've got to give him a sense of independence, and that means you've got to temper him!” Mr. Shumuta knit his skimpy eyebrows in a scowl, but his face retained the look of a cheerful giant baby and the effect was merely grotesque. At that moment, Minami returned for his goggles and bathing suit and began to talk and, though I felt a little sorry for Mr. Shumuta, I took the opportunity to hurry out of the sauna with Eeyore in tow.

“Shumuta
Sensei,
shouldn't you be getting back to your students right away? How do you know the fugitives aren't plotting to sneak back and dragoon the others? There's a group that's using the photograph of M's severed head for a rally poster, and there's a rumor going around at school that they're plotting something for the tenth anniversary of the Ichigaya coup d'etat.

Your boys are cut off from news about the outside world, but what would happen if that poster were shoved in their faces? I wouldn't be surprised if the whole gang joined in!”

M had chosen to die by his own hand on November 25, the anniversary of the patriot Shoin Yoshida's death. The day arrived, and there were special programs about the incident on radio and television from morning till night. I had been out of the country at the time, but there were images and sound bites that brought back the moment with a vividness that made me feel I had witnessed it in person. I did observe that the horrific photograph of M's severed head did not appear on the television screen or in the newspapers, and that coverage of the student rally that had used the photo as a poster was also suppressed.

Early that afternoon, Eeyore returned from special school with a note from the physical education teacher. According to Eeyore's own report, which he delivered as though he were reciting it, he had been asked how his swimming was progressing and had replied only that he didn't remember. The teacher was recommending that we should resume swimming lessons, and when I suggested we might go to the pool that day, Eeyore was enthusiastic.

When we arrived at the club, as if Mr. Shumuta had accepted a challenge to bring his young men to a pool in the middle of the city on M's anniversary, his group (whose roll call must now have ended with
doce
) had already occupied the Members Pool and was thrashing around in the water. The swimming school was also in full session, and for the moment I was unable to find a lane that Eeyore and I could use. We sat down on a bench on the exit side of the showers to wait for the next recess in classes; winter weather had arrived, and it felt awkward and out of place to be sitting there naked without even going into the water while people outside in the street were in their overcoats against the cold. The bench was positioned above the pools: from where we sat we could survey the expanse of the twenty-five-meter pool on the left and the locked glass partition around the Members Pool. The deep, narrow pool reserved for diving and scuba diving was immediately in front of us.

At the far end, an instructor from the university who was also well known in the swimming world—I had used his book to correct my stroke in the crawl—was coaching a schoolgirl the club was grooming to be a competitive diver. Standing at the long edge of the pool, which put his back to the glass partition, the instructor had the girl dive repeatedly from a board that was adjustable with a round handle; but the basis of the judgments that caused him to nod or shake his head in the brief moment when the girl was in the air between the board and the water's surface was imperceptible to the eyes of a novice. Even so, there was something enthralling about watching her young body tense for an instant, contract, explode, and finally release into a state that appeared utterly relaxed.