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This Adama of ours was really down now, though. The decision about our punishment must have been weighing pretty heavily on him.

Fumi-chan’s shrill voice—“No, no, no! How many times do I have to tell you?”—grated on our ears. Blue and red veins stood out on her scrawny neck, and she was jiggling her ass in exasperation. What right did someone like that have to act so high and mighty? I didn’t need Adama to tell me how sickening it was—I already felt like
puking
. There were, admittedly, some grotesque specimens among them, but to see seventeen-year-old bodies being ordered around was disgusting. Seventeen-year-old bodies weren’t put on earth to be dressed in colorless gym clothes and forced to march around in some prearranged pattern. A few of them looked like hippos, it’s true, but most seventeen-year-old bodies, with their smooth, elastic flesh, were designed to go running along some seashore playing tag with the waves and shouting with glee.

So it wasn’t only the verdict, just one day away now, that was getting us down; watching the girls practice their routines was depressing, too. Just to see people being bullied into doing things was a bummer.

Neither of my parents mentioned the punishment question during dinner. When the meal was over, I went outside in my yukata to set off fireworks with my little sister. She told me she was going to invite a classmate she called Torigai-san over to our house soon. Torigai-san was half American and strangely sexy for a sixth-grader. I was always after my sister to introduce me to her. The reason she remembered and brought it up now was that she somehow must have sensed, in spite of my attempts to fool around and be cheerful, how low I was really feeling.

My father was standing on the veranda watching us. He stepped down into the garden in his bare feet and said, “Let me give it a try.” He took three sparklers in one hand, lit them, and waved them around in a circle. My sister clapped her hands, saying it was beautiful.

“Ken, about tomorrow,” he said. I was busy painting a mental picture of Torigai-san’s blue eyes and budding breasts and didn’t realize at first that he was referring to the announcement. “I’m not going with you. I’ll ask your mother to go along. If I went, you know, it could end up in a fight.”

This was no surprise. Whenever the school summoned my parents, it was always my mother who showed up. I preferred it that way, too. I didn’t want to see my father standing beside me apologizing for something I’d done.

“Look them in the eye,” he said. “When the principal’s dressing you down, don’t look away or bow your head. I don’t want you groveling to those people. There’s no reason to swagger, but you don’t need to be obsequious, either. It’s not as if you killed anybody or held someone up or raped them or something. You believed in what you were doing, and now you’ve got to take the consequences.”

I felt tears brimming up. Ever since the bust, we’d been under constant attack by adults. My father was the first to offer any sort of encouragement.

“If the revolution comes, you boys could end up being heroes, and the principal could be the one hanging from a rope. That’s the way these things go.”

He started waving the sparklers around again. Sparklers burn themselves out in no time at all...

But they’re beautiful.

This was the first time I’d ever passed through a school gate with my mother at my side. Even at elementary school, it had been my grandfather who accompanied me to the opening ceremony—my parents couldn’t go because they were both teaching.

On the way in, we met Adama’s mother. She was tall, with features a lot like Adama’s but more firmly molded. My mother bowed to her, saying, “I don’t know how to apologize for all the trouble my son has caused you.” I pulled her aside and whispered, “What the hell’re you doing? You don’t have to apologize to Adama’s mother.” Her reply was that even as a little boy, I was always the ringleader; “It’s become part of your character,” she said. Adama’s mother looked at me with eyes that said
So this is the boy who led my dear little Tadashi astray
, but I smiled and gave her a cheerful “Hello! I’m Ken Yazaki.” That was part of my character, too.

The principal’s ruling was
“Indefinite confinement at home.”

‘“Indefinite,’ of course, doesn’t mean forever,” he told us. “The period of time will be determined according to the extent to which you are judged to have shown regret for your behavior. Your graduation and admission to college depend on this, so we strongly advise you to avoid any further lapses and hope that both you and your parents will give some serious thought to the reasons for this situation.”

“He wasn’t expelled,” my mother told my father over the phone, tears running down her face. The word “confinement” made me think of solitary confinement, which was pretty depressing, but the realization that our punishment actually meant I could ditch school without even being sneaky about it cheered me up a lot.

As we were walking back to the front gate, Yuji Shirokushi, the head Greaser, stuck his head out the window of a classroom in the middle of a supplementary lecture and shouted, “Ken-yan! Adama! What happened?” My mother got all flustered and flapped about in front of me, telling me to behave myself, but I ignored her and shouted back in a voice that echoed all around the courtyard: “We didn’t get expelled! We’re confined to our homes!” The members of my band, and the kids in our class, and Masutabe’s supporters in the second year, and Shirokushi’s Greaser underlings, and, and, and, and, and, and Kazuko Matsui, all looked out the windows of their various rooms and waved. I waved back—to Lady Jane.

Confinement at home technically meant that you weren’t supposed to step outside your house at all, but since that was likely to drive anyone nuts and undermine the rehabilitation process, we were allowed a minimum of freedom referred to as “neighborhood outings.”

I didn’t miss anything much. I couldn’t go to any movies or jazz cafés, of course, but my house wasn’t far from the center of town, so I managed to keep myself amused, sucking popsicles and playing with our dog in the park and the area near the base, visiting bookstores and record shops, spying on the house where the groupies tangled with their sailor boys, and meeting my sister’s friend Torigai-san.

Adama’s situation was hell compared to mine. He’d had to leave his boardinghouse and move back home. The coal mines were on the verge of closing down because of an economic slump, and the place was practically a ghost town. They had a shoe store, a dry goods store, a stationery store, and a clothing store, and that was about it. Just about the only things in the clothing store were white cotton socks, the stationery store had nothing but rag paper, there was no instant curry in the dry goods store, and all the shoe store had in stock were split-toed canvas workshoes. Rumors that the mines were to be closed had been circulating for a couple of years now, and people were leaving in droves. All you saw on the streets were shuffling bands of old geezers who couldn’t have moved away even if they’d wanted to.

You could hardly expect a seventeen-year-old kid who’d learned about Led Zeppelin and Jean Genet and doggy style to be happy about being stuck in a town like that.

I, however, was so bubbly and so eager to put on my goody-goody act for the teachers who came to check up on me that more than once my father shook his head and asked me where I’d learned to be such a cunning little bastard. I’d serve them a glass of cold barley tea and smile and chatter away—things that Adama, apparently, found it hard to do.

“They make me sick.”
I don’t know how many times he told me this over the phone. All he did was get into arguments with his supervisors.

“They make me sick.”

“Come on, man. Don’t get so uptight.”

“Ken, they all tell me you’re really sorry about what we did. That true?”

“It’s just a pose, man.”

“A pose?”

“Yeah.”

“What sort of pose is that? Huh? Where’s your sense of shame? What would Che have said?”

“Look, man, take it easy, will you?”

“Ken, what about the festival?”

“We’ll do it.”

“You finish the script?”

“Almost.”

“Hurry up and send it to me. I’ll start getting the stuff we need together—whatever I can find up here, at least.”

“What’s that likely to be? Workshoes? I don’t think we’re gonna need any slag heaps, either.”

Adama in confinement didn’t appreciate jokes like this. He slammed the phone down. I called him right back and apologized.

“Hey, I’m sorry. Don’t be so touchy, man. I’ll finish the script soon and mail it to you, I promise. And listen, I was thinking about the opening—for the festival, I mean. Remember that girl we met at Boulevard? Mie Nagayama, the one from Junwa? We’ll have her wearing a negligee and holding a candle in one hand, and the music’ll be Bach, the Brandenburg Concerto no. 3, see, and she’ll have an axe in her other hand, and up on the stage there’ll be big plywood boards with pictures of Northern High teachers and the prime minister and Lyndon Johnson, and she’ll start hacking away at them with her axe. Pretty cool, eh?”

This restored Adama’s spirits a little. The festival was the only thing that was keeping him going. I knew how he felt. With the barricade now behind us, we were all looking forward to the next celebration.

CHEAP THRILLS

Matsunaga, the teacher in charge of our class, was one of the skinniest people I’ve ever known, having had TB for years when he was young. He was a mild-mannered guy, the type who’d probably never raised his voice in his life.

Throughout summer vacation he came to my house at least every other day. Being a quiet sort of person, though, he never said much other than “How’s it going?” or “You’re not letting this get to you, I hope.” He also looked in on Adama just as often. Adama, apparently, would snarl at him, accusing all teachers of being stooges or capitalist lackeys, but Matsunaga would just nod and smile wryly and comment on the sunflowers in the garden or whatever, and then, after a while, he’d leave.

His visits came on top of a full day of giving supplementary lessons at school, and involved taking a bus to my place, then going on later to Adama’s mining town. I could see the bus stop from my bedroom window. After getting off the bus, you had to walk up a narrow lane and a long flight of stone steps. I used to watch Matsunaga huff and puff his way up the slope, stopping any number of times to rest—a teacher with a history of lung problems trudging uphill to arrive at my house dripping with sweat, not to lecture me or anything but just to ask how it was going... I soon found it hard to hate him.

“You may not understand this yet, Yazaki, but I’ll tell you anyway. When I was in teachers’ college I had six major operations—my chest is a mass of ugly scars. I even had fainting spells and so on. It was frightening, but, you know, people can get used to anything. I actually got used to the operations and the anesthesia and the blackouts, and I started to think, oh well, nothing really matters that much. In summer, for example, there are sunflowers and cannas and other things in bloom, and all I have to do is look at them to feel that way—that nothing really matters much.”

Matsunaga used to say things like this from time to time. I’d stopped putting him down and had even begun to respect him, to think he was a hell of a teacher, in fact, but Adama and I were both a long way from “nothing really matters.”

Adama was growing surlier each day, and by the time the second semester started, I too was getting pretty restless. The streets of a provincial city are empty of kids and grownup men on weekday mornings; there’s no one around but housewives and pensioners and infants and dogs. I remembered how unfamiliar the town had seemed whenever I came home early from elementary school. The smell of cut flowers would drift from under the half-raised shutter of the florist’s; the owner of the shoe store would be just opening up for the day, dusting his shelves and yawning; the sounds of TV shows I’d never seen would murmur out of open windows; nursery school children would be dancing in a circle behind a wire fence, and old men would be crouched in the shade of trees, laughing together. The town was like a stranger to me then.

This was the town I was confined to now that summer vacation had ended. I began to worry about my attendance figures, because I’d ditched a lot of classes even before my suspension. Just to think about being
held back a year
was enough to make me shudder. There was no way I could take another year at that school.

One day when it was too rainy to take the dog for a walk and I was sitting at home playing the drums, the doorbell rang. Standing on the front step was Adama’s mother.

“Do you remember me, Ken? I wonder if I could have a word with you.”

She sounded pretty miserable.

“Please don’t tell Tadashi about this, though. He’d be angry.”

I was surprised to find that there wasn’t a trace of Adama’s accent in her voice.

“I know coming here won’t solve anything, but I don’t have anyone else to discuss it with. I suppose you know that the mines in our town are on the verge of closing? Well, these are difficult times for my husband, and he’s just too busy right now to concern himself with Tadashi’s problems.”

She stiffened slightly and pressed a white handkerchief to her neck and forehead.
Oh, no
, I thought.
What if she starts crying on me?

“I haven’t talked to him for two or three days,” I said. “Is he doing all right?”

Adama’s mother gave a heavy sigh and shook her head. She didn’t say anything for a while.
Don't tell me he's gone insane
, I thought, and the thought terrified me. It was always the cool, calm, and collected types like Adama who tended to suddenly crack under pressure.
Don't tell me he's tying ribbons in his hair, wearing a flower-print yukata, and sitting at the organ, drooling and playing “My Little Butterfly”...

“To be honest, I’ve never seen Tadashi like this before.”