Authors: Ryu Murakami
“Ken-san,” Iwase said, “the barricade’s one thing, but what about the festival? What about the movie?”
On our way home from the hideout we’d stopped at a café called Boulevard where they played classical music. Iwase was drinking coffee. Coffee was the preferred drink of second-rate students in all small provincial cities in those days.
“We’ll do ’em during the vacation,” I said.
“That’ll give us time to write a proper script,” said Adama. He was drinking soda water. People who came from the sticks to small provincial cities had a thing about soda water in those days. He sucked noisily through his straw, then asked, “What kind of movie we gonna make, Ken?”
“I haven’t decided yet, exactly.”
I was drinking tomato juice. The hippest young people in small provincial cities always drank tomato juice in those days. That’s bullshit, of course. Tomato juice was still a novelty, and most people wouldn’t drink it because it tasted like tomatoes, or because it wasn’t sweet, or because the color turned them off. I forced myself to drink it for the simple reason that I liked to draw attention to myself.
“I told you before, though, didn’t I? That it’ll be surrealistic?”
“Oh, yeah. You did.”
“What was the music gonna be again?” Iwase asked.
“Messiaen.”
It was around this time that I’d begun trying to perfect the art of fucking with people’s minds. I’d figured out that when someone else was hogging the limelight, you could cut him down to size by bringing up a subject he didn’t know anything about. If the other person knew a lot about literature, I’d talk about the Velvet Underground; if he knew a lot about rock, I’d talk about Messiaen; if he knew a lot about classical music, I’d talk about Roy Lichtenstein; if he knew a lot about pop art, I’d talk about Jean Genet; and so on. Do that in a small provincial city and you never lose an argument.
“It’s going to be avant-garde, right?” Adama said, taking out a notebook and ballpoint pen. “Could you just give me a rough idea of the story?”
“Why?”
“Well, if we’re going to shoot it this summer, we’ve got to start preparing now, right? Equipment, staff, props...”
Adama was a born production manager. I was impressed—impressed enough to tell him as much of the story as I’d thought up so far.
“It’ll be like a combination of
Andalusian Dog
and
Scorpio Rising
... We’ll start out with a dead black cat hanging from a tree, and we’ll pour gasoline over it and burn it up, tree and all, with smoke rising from the ground, all backlit, see, and then,
vrrrooom!
, three bikers come roaring out through the smoke, and...” It suddenly occurred to me that there was no place for Kazuko Matsui in a film like this. My little Bambi and surrealism didn’t mix.
“Scratch that,” I said.
Adama looked up from his notebook, where he’d written “Dead cat (black) / Gasoline / Three bikers,” and said “Eh?”
“Scratch that—films like that are a drag. Wait a minute. Okay, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll change the story completely.”
Iwase and Adama looked at each other.
“Here we go. The first scene will be a meadow in the highlands, in the morning. With the mist still hanging in the air. Somewhere like the meadows up on Mt. Aso.”
“The highlands? Morning?” Adama burst out laughing. “How do you get from a dead black cat to morning in the highlands?”
“Imagery, man, imagery. That’s the important thing, pure images. You understand that much, don’t you? Okay, the highlands. Then we’ll have the camera zoom down to a boy holding a flute.”
“Masutabe’s camera doesn’t have a zoom.”
“Adama, put a sock in it. We’ll worry about the details later, all right? So then the boy with the flute plays a tune. Something really beautiful.”
‘“Daisy Chain?”
“Right, that’s good. Any time you get a good idea like that, I wanna hear it. Then, after that, the girl appears,”
“Lady Jane
.
”
“Right. She’s wearing
white clothes
. Pure white. Not like a wedding dress, though, more like a negligee, something you can almost see through. We’ll have her ride in on a
white horse
.”
“Horse?” Adama, who was writing “Flute / White clothes (like negligee, not wedding dress),
” raised his head and said, “A horse? A white horse?”
“Yeah.”
“Forget it. How we gonna get a white horse?”
“Don’t go all realistic on me, man. Imagery, imagery.”
“Imagery or no imagery, you can’t film something we haven’t got. You’re never gonna find a white horse—you can hardly even find a regular horse these days. Ken, how about a dog? The people next door to me have got a big white Akita.”
“A
dog
?
”
“Yeah, name’s Whitey. He’s big enough, he could probably carry a girl on his back if he had to.”
“You have Kazuko Matsui come in riding on an Akita hound, everybody’s gonna crack up. Listen, you prick, you trying to turn this into a comedy?”
“Hey, cool it, guys,” Iwase said, and we stopped arguing immediately. Not because of Iwase’s intervention, though. An almond-eyed Claudia Cardinale look-alike wearing a
Junwa Uniform
had just walked in. She sat at the table next to ours and ordered tea with lemon. While the man who ran Boulevard was taking her order, I asked him to play Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique
, with Zubin Mehta conducting. “Here we go again,
” said Iwase. “Mr. Debonair. Berlioz, Mehta—that’s the only combination you know.
” “Fuck you,”1 said. “I know
The Four Seasons
by I Musici, too.
” Now it was Adama who was saying “Cool it, cool it.
” Claudia Cardinale stood up with a shopping bag in her hand and disappeared into the restroom. When she reappeared, she was a different person: her hair was curled slightly inward to frame her face, she was wearing eyeliner and pink lipstick, her white and dark blue uniform had been transformed into a cream-colored dress, her black flats had become high heels, and the smell of nail polish hung in the air around her. We looked at her gleaming fingernails and sighed. She glared back at us and said, “What?
” “Nothing, nothing,
” we muttered, shaking our heads feebly, and she sniffed, brandishing a Hi-Lite Deluxe between her fingers and puckering her lips to expel a stream of blue smoke into the air, where it mingled with the first movement of
Symphonie Fantastique.
Ignoring Iwase, who was whispering “Don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it,” I turned to Claudia and said, “Would you like to be in a movie?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“We’re going to make an eight-millimeter movie. We’d like you to be in it.”
Claudia laughed loudly, showing us a set of pretty pink gums.
“You guys’re from Northern, aren’t you?” she said, ignoring my question. She mentioned the name of a certain punk in Shirokushi’s group and asked if we knew him. “Went to Aimitsu Junior High? Tall guy, kinda dreamy?”
We nodded, and she smiled and said to say hi to him. I asked her her name. It was Mie Nagayama. I’d leaned over to tell her a bit more about the movie when Iwase suddenly stood up, urging Adama to do the same, and they each grabbed one of my shirt sleeves and dragged me toward the door. Near the cash register we stepped aside to let three guys in the uniform of the industrial arts school pass. They all had
flattops
, high collars, and bell-bottom pants. They eyeballed us, and we did a quick about-face to avoid their gaze. It was the leader of a notorious Hardboy gang and two of his thugs. They sat down at Mie Nagayama’s table. When Mie waved goodbye to us, the gang leader turned and gave us a look. We paid our check in a hurry, stepped outside, and sprinted about a hundred meters. “So that’s Mie Nagayama,” Iwase said, panting and wheezing. Apparently she was famous. It wasn’t as if she was the gang leader’s property, he explained—she didn’t belong to anybody in particular, but she played around so much that she was always on the verge of being expelled. “Okay,” I said, “it’s decided. We’ll use her in the opening act of the festival.” Iwase glumly reported that the gang leader was in the kendo club and was in love with her. “He’ll beat you half to death with a wooden sword, Ken-san. Forget it.”
Adama laughed cheerfully. “Beaten to death with a wooden sword. Don’t come crying to me if that happens.”
The dreary rainy season came to an end. During a pool-cleaning session at school, I sneaked up behind the girls’ post-menopausal P.E. instructor and pushed her into the
dirty water
. Somebody snitched on me, and Cauliflower Aihara gave me thirteen hard ones across the face. On the achievement tests, Adama dropped eighty places. He’d been at the top in chemistry the year before, but this year he was down near the very bottom. The college entrance advisor yelled at me, saying I was trying to destroy the kid’s future. (Adama’s scores go down, and I get yelled at—I couldn’t figure that one out.) Iwase had his heart broken for the third time in his high school career, by a spiker on the girls’ volleyball team. As for Kazuko Matsui, I’d only had one more chance to speak to her, in the hallway at school. She asked me about
Bookends.
I stammered that I’d bring it next time, next time for sure. “Don’t worry,” said Bambi, with all the tenderness of an angel, “any time’s fine.” I had to make a success of the barricade at all costs, for my angel Bambi Lady Jane.
We were making good progress with the preparations. We would strike, as planned, the night before the end-of-school ceremony on July 19. We had the paint and a long roll of cloth for the banner, and the hideout was a hive of activity. The barricade required a total capital investment of 9,255 yen. Each of us chipped in a thousand.
“Everyone listen up.”
I was about to give them the final rundown.
“We’ll assemble at midnight, under the cherry tree by the pool. Whatever you do, don’t come by taxi. Otaki? You’ll walk from your house? Okay. Narushima, you’re walking, too, right? Fuse? Miyachi? You’re staying with Narushima? Good. Masutabe’s place is an inn, so I want Mizoguchi, Nakamura, and Hori to spend the night there. Leave the house separately, don’t walk together. Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourselves. And just to remind you: we’ll take the paint and wire, pliers, rope, and banner, one by one, to Masutabe’s and Narushima’s places beforehand. I want everybody to wear black that night. No leather shoes. Whatever we have left over—empty paint cans, extra rope, and so on—we’ll take back with us. Yamada and I will call the newspapers.”
Then, using
red paint
on the white cloth, I wrote “Power to the Imagination.” It felt great.
Three days before the big event, Iwase came to our classroom to tell Adama and me he wanted out. In the deep shade cast by the glaring summer sun of Kyushu, he told us, with tears in his eyes, that the idea of a barricade just didn’t agree with him. “I’m sorry, Ken-san, I’m sorry, Adama. I’ll help set things up, and I’ll help with the festival, but I don’t like this barricade stuff...” The gist of what he was saying seemed to be that there wasn’t any serious political motive behind it, that I was just doing it to look like a big shot. This really got me down, and I confessed as much to Adama when Iwase left. “What’s the difference?” he said. “Who needs politics? We’re doing it because it’s fun, aren’t we? Ken, if it’s fun, that’s enough.” Even so, I could tell he felt as bummed out as I did.
And then
July 19
arrived.
POWER TO THE IMAGINATION
I had to leave my house at eleven, and that wasn’t easy to do. My mother and little sister and grandparents were all asleep, but my father was still up. He was watching the
“11 P.M.”
show. Every night since this program began, he’d been staying up past his bedtime.
Our house, like most houses in Sasebo, was built on the side of a mountain. The only ones on the narrow strip of level ground belonged to the American military and a handful of people who’d got rich catering to them in one way or another.