Authors: Ryu Murakami
With my father still awake, I couldn’t risk going out the front door. The house stood on a slope, and the back door opened onto one of the long, narrow flights of stone steps that linked all the roads in the neighborhood. My room was on the second floor. First I had to tell my father I was turning in for the night. I knocked on the door of his studio.
“Goodnight, Father dear.”
I guess you know I didn’t really talk to him that way. What I actually said was, “Hey, I’m goin’ to bed.”
He’s sitting there getting his jollies watching the bikini girls on the “11 P.M.” show, but he turns in his chair and fixes me with a solemn sort of look. “Already? Why?” he said, and started telling me about how when he was in middle school before the war he used to stay up studying till 4:00
A.M.;
but then he stopped short, remembering what was on the TV screen probably, and, clearing his throat, said, “Ken, I don’t want you doing anything to upset your mother.” My heart stopped. Did he know what I was up to? No, he couldn’t possibly, but...
I don’t want you doing anything to upset your mother.
Shit. What a time to start preaching at me. I went back up to the second floor, changed my clothes, and climbed quietly onto the clothes-drying platform. There was a full moon. Being careful not to make a sound, I slipped into my basketball shoes. (We didn’t say “sneakers” in those days, we called them
bashu
— short for basketball shoes.) From the platform I crawled down to the first-floor roof. Right in front of me was a little cemetery. A row of gravestones glistened in the moonlight at about the same level as the roof, being higher up the slope. I jumped down into the cemetery—or, rather, I jumped onto a gravestone. I wasn’t what you’d call religious, but I felt a bit guilty doing that. I always used this particular grave when I sneaked out to go to cafés or a porno film or Adama’s boarding-house, and I was sure the occupant would put a curse on me someday. When I was a little kid, my grandfather had a friend, a bald-headed old guy who’d been a commander in the navy. My grandfather had only been a lieutenant commander, so Baldy lorded it over him even then, more than a decade after the war had ended. Baldy would come over in the middle of the day to drink, and my grandfather would tipple right along with him. I liked Baldy because he always brought me a new picture book when he came. But he had a bad habit: whenever he got drunk, he’d step outside and piss in the cemetery. My grandmother hated that and always said he’d be sorry, that one of these days he’d be cursed and die; and then one day his heart gave out and he really did drop dead. I was convinced he’d had a hex put on him. So whenever I slipped out to the all-night porno flicks or whatever, I’d press my palms together as I stepped on the gravestone and say
Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me,
over and over again. I prayed this time, too, but it was different now. I wasn’t going to a dirty movie; I was going to barricade the school. Revolution. Surely the spirits of the dead would let this one slide.
Everybody was there by
midnight
, standing under the cherry tree next to the pool. We divided into two teams: one to paint graffiti, and one to seal off the doorway to the roof and hang the banner. I was with the graffitists. So was Adama. It was more dangerous for the roof team: after barricading the door, they had to climb back down on ropes. I suckered Narushima, Otaki, and all but one of the other kids into taking the roof by telling them it was the most revolutionary part of the whole operation. Adama was afraid of heights, and I just didn’t want to risk getting hurt.
We were all set to roll when Fuse, a dark and filthy-minded little guy said, “Wait a minute.”
“What’s the problem, man? We’ve just gone over everything.”
A hesitant, lecherous smile spread over Fuse’s face.
“It’s just that, uh, well, you don’t get a chance like this very often.”
Chance?
“I checked a while ago, and it wasn’t locked.”
Locked?
“The girls’ changing room. Can’t we just take, like, five minutes and have a look inside?” He gave a horny little chuckle.
There was only one way to respond to this.
“Look, you fucking asshole, we’re here on a sacred mission, and you want to peek in the
girls’ changing room
? If that’s where your head’s at, man, the whole thing’s a failure before we’ve even started.”
But nobody said anything of the sort. We all agreed to Fuse’s plan immediately.
A sweet fragrance wafted here and there inside the room. It wasn’t that the whole place smelled that way. As you groped about in the dark, you’d suddenly get a whiff of the unmistakable scent of a young girl blossoming into womanhood. Nobody swims with their underwear on, which meant that girls got totally naked here—that’s what all of us were thinking. Everybody was running their hands along the shelves against the wall. I told them to stop, that they were leaving fingerprints, but when Masutabe found a slip in the corner of a bottom shelf, they all went apeshit and began a frantic search for other things that might have been left behind.
It pissed me off that they weren’t obeying my rule about wearing gloves, and I conferred with Adama.
“What are we going to do about fingerprints? They’re all over those shelves.”
“Relax. The cops don’t have your prints on file unless you’ve got a record, right?” Adama kept his cool even in the midst of mayhem. “You think they’re going to dust for prints in the girls’ changing room, then check them against every kid in school? No way. It
’
s not like a murder or something.”
“Ken-san...” Nakamura, one of the second-year students, stepped between us. “I’m sorry,” he said in a very small voice, “but... I’m done for.” He seemed on the verge of tears.
“Done for?” Adama tensed up. “What do you mean?”
“My fingerprints. I forgot my gloves, and my fingerprints are on those shelves.”
“Don’t worry. They’re not gonna start poking around in a place like this. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know whose prints they were anyway.”
“They, they’ll know mine. Our first year in junior high, we made salt, okay? As a science experiment. And I got sodium hydroxide on my fingers, and my fingerprints melted off. My brother said there’s probably nobody else in Japan with hands like mine, he said I should go on that TV show
‘To Tell the Truth.’
Almost everybody in my class knows about it. They call me ‘Unprintable.’ So I knew I had to wear gloves tonight, but when I touched that slip Masutabe found, I just forgot all about it, and now what am I gonna do?”
We reached out and felt his fingertips. Sure enough, the pads were smooth, like scar tissue.
“Amazing.”
Eventually we stopped laughing, and Adama was able to persuade him there was nothing to worry about.
I had slipped into a silent reverie, reflecting that Kazuko Matsui changed her clothes here, too, when Fuse the Lecher found a wallet. He announced his discovery and shone his flashlight on it, waving it for everyone to see.
“You asshole!” I shouted, and even Adama the Cool clucked his tongue. A wallet was trouble. Whoever lost the thing was sure to report it, and somebody could end up searching the changing room. For all we knew, we might have left some clues behind: a piece of paper, footprints, hair. I told Fuse to put it back where he found it, but he just gaped at me with a moronic expression on his face and said he’d forgotten which shelf it was on. Otaki and Narushima said why bother, just rip it off, and Unprintable Nakamura suggested that if we found out who the owner was we could slip it in her locker later. We decided to look inside. It was your average girl’s wallet, plastic, with a picture of Snoopy on the front. Inside were a couple of thousand-yen bills, one five-hundred bill, and a bus pass. We read the name on the pass and burst out laughing: it belonged to the post-menopausal P.E. instructor I’d pushed into the pool two weeks before. She was an unmarried woman with great sagging buns and jutting cheekbones. Our pet name for her was Fumi-chan. Also inside the wallet were coins, a button, a wrinkled business card, a movie ticket stub, and a photograph. The photo was a black-and-white shot of Fumi-chan as a young woman, standing next to a man with a face like a cucumber in an old Imperial Navy uniform. We all sighed. What could be more pathetic than a dried-up, saggy-assed, war widow P.E. teacher with two thousand five hundred yen in her wallet? “Pick a shelf and put it back,” Adama said, and everybody nodded.
“Smash the National Athletic Meet.”
I wrote this on one pillar of the school’s front gate in blue paint, slapping it on hard so it would sink into the rough stone surface. On the other pillar Adama wrote “Fight the Good Fight.” I told him not to use corny crap like that, but Adama, cool as ever, said it was good camouflage, that it would make it harder to come up with a clear profile of the culprits.
We’d banned the use of flashlights inside the school grounds. In the front courtyard was a carefully tended flower bed and, above it, the V-shaped main building, looming up as a dark triangle in the moonlight. Just looking at the building made me sick. On the window of the teachers
’
room I wrote “Running Dogs of the Power Structure” in blue paint, except for “Dogs,” which I did in red. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but it felt muggy to me, and I’d begun to sweat inside my thick T-shirt. “To Arms, Comrades,” I daubed on the wall of the library. Nakamura came up and whispered that the roof team had entered the school via the emergency exit next to the gym. “All right, let’s go inside,” I said.
As soon as we’d got in, I stopped, afraid of leaving any evidence behind: I’d let some drops of sweat fall on the concrete floor, and I waited for them to dry before moving on down a long corridor where the third-year science classrooms were. The graffiti team consisted of Adama, Nakamura, and me. “I’ll probably never be this nervous again in my whole life,” Nakamura sputtered through trembling lips. “Shut up, you asshole,” Adama hissed. Though I was sweating, my own lips were bone dry and my throat was parched. We went past the teachers’ room, the administrative office, and the principal’s office to the front entrance. Most of the kids at school came in through these doors each day of the week. With large strokes of red paint, I wrote “Kill!” on the wall. Nakamura gasped and asked if that wasn’t going too far. Adama hissed at him again and pointed off to the right of the entrance. The watchmen’s room. There were two watchmen, an old guy and a young one. The light wasn’t on, though; they’d probably watched the “11 P.M.” show and gone to sleep. On the floor just inside the main doors I scrawled “You’re All Brain-dead! Fuck Higher Education!” Nakamura began shaking like a junkie in withdrawal. He was squatting next to one of the columns, doing nothing to help. “This isn’t cool,” Adama whispered to me. I could tell he was nervous, too—he kept licking his lips. The building was absolutely silent, and the only light was from the moon, streaming in through the windows; it was like being on a different planet. The fact that this was a place we clattered through in a noisy crowd almost every day only made the tension worse. We pulled Nakamura to his feet and dragged him away from the entrance, as far as the door of the principal’s office. Getting away from the watchmen’s room was a bit of a relief, but now Nakamura was hyperventilating. “Asshole,” I said. “Go back to the pool.” Nakamura shook his head. “You don’t understand. I... I...” Sweat was pouring down his face. “What? What is it?” Nakamura wagged his head again. Adama shook him by the shoulders. “Tell us. What is it? Ken and me are scared, too, man. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. What’s the problem?”
“I have to go
doo-doo
.”
It wasn’t fair: why should
his
bowel problems give
us
a stomachache? I rolled on the floor trying to smother my laughter, with my right hand over my mouth and my left holding my belly, heaving with hiccoughing spasms. Adama was doing the same. Tension only encourages laughter: it’s never so hard to stop laughing as when you mustn’t laugh. All we had to do was mutter “doo-doo” and the giggles would burst in our guts, then come bubbling up our throats. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the saddest things that had ever happened to me: the New Year’s Day when my parents hadn’t bought me the Patton tank model I’d wanted; the time my father had had an affair and my mother left home for three days; my little sister being hospitalized with asthma; the pigeon that didn’t come back when I let it loose; the time I dropped my pocket money at a local festival; a penalty shootout in the prefectural junior high soccer finals, which our team lost. None of them worked. Adama had both hands over his mouth and was shuddering and wheezing. I’d never realized how hard it could be to control the giggles. I drew a picture of Kazuko Matsui in my mind: her slender, milky calves, her Bambi eyes, her white arms, the awesome curve of the nape of her neck—and the spasms finally stopped. Such is the power of beautiful women: they can even stifle laughter, make a man sober and serious. After a while Adama, too, stood up, drenched with sweat. He told me later he’d pictured the charred corpses he’d once seen after a mine explosion. Being forced to remember a scene like that must have made him angry: he rapped Nakamura on the head with his fist.
“Asshole. I thought I was going to lose my mind,” I said and quietly opened the door to the principal’s office. “Hey, Nakamura.”
“Yes?”
“Is it diarrhea?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you do it right away?”
“It’s already poking its head out.”
“Do it up there.”
“Eh?” he said, and his jaw dropped. I was pointing at
the principal’s desk
. “I can’t do that.”
“What do you mean, you can’t do it? It’s your punishment for making us laugh and nearly getting us busted. If we were real guerrillas, we’d have killed you right then and there.”