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So it was true...
I bet he sits outside at night howling at the moon rising over the slag heaps.

“Of all our children, Tadashi is the most like me. He was always such a good boy, so well-behaved. If anything, I sometimes worried if he wasn’t a bit too...
placid
for a child. He never got emotional about things.”

I thought about telling her she was wrong there, that I’d seen him almost in tears after watching the boxing cartoon “Joe Tomorrow,” and snorting and gulping as he flipped through girlie magazines, but I decided not to.

“And now he gets so worked up, so rude to his teachers... He’s become more and more distant, even with me.”

I considered telling her that it would be even stranger for a high school senior to be still clinging to his mother’s apron strings, but I didn’t. Her eyes were filling with tears.

“Before he was confined to the house, he used to talk about you often, about his friend Ken. I... That’s why I thought I’d like to talk with you a bit. What do you think about all this?”

“All what?”

“Well, college entrance exams, for example.”

“What do I think of college entrance exams? Not much. Education in Japan today is designed not just to turn out useful members of society, but to sort people out and classify them as tools of the capitalist nation-state...”

I went on and on, discussing everything from the Joint Campus Action movement, Marxism, the lessons of the 1960 Security Treaty fracas, Camus’s absurdist novels, suicide and free sex, Naziism, Stalin, the emperor system and religion, the mobilization of students, the Beatles, and nihilism... down to the degenerate apathy of the old man who ran the local barbershop.

“I’m afraid I don’t really understand most of that...”

I could hardly say “Of course you don’t; I don’t really understand it either,” so I told her that the generation gap was no one’s fault and nothing to be ashamed of. I hadn’t talked so much in a long time, and it made my throat dry. It was no fun talking to Matsunaga—all you got for your efforts was a wry smile—and it was too embarrassing trying to talk to my parents about things like this because we used the local dialect. Try discussing, for example, Camus’s
The Plague
in dialect and it would come out sounding something like:
“Da Plague
, see, it don’ be jus’ ’bout some disease. Be a metaphor, be a symbol for Fascism,
Communism
,
stuff like dat.” Anybody could tell immediately that you were just mouthing someone else’s ideas. Chatting with your friend’s mother, though, was a breeze. She’d never changed your diapers, or slapped you and made you cry after you’d fought with your little sister over a sweet roll, or worn herself out carrying you around strapped to her back. You could say the first thing that came into your head and convince yourself it sounded intelligent.

“But I do understand to some extent. During the war I did clerical work for an antiaircraft battalion, and I saw soldiers being killed in air raids. You and Tadashi, you’re trying to make a world where things like that don’t happen, aren’t you?”

I wasn’t about to tell her that, no, I was only trying to draw attention to myself and attract girls.

“Actually, I think Tadashi’s beginning to calm down a bit. Friends come to see him sometimes now, and... Oh, well, I know it’s not really allowed, but Mr. Matsunaga has been kind enough to overlook it once or twice. Just yesterday two very nice girls dropped by on their way home from the beach.”

“Eh?” 1 raised my head and gaped at her. “Girls? You mean from our school?”

“Yes. They’re in a different class, though, I believe. A very sweet girl named Matsui-san, and another called Sato-san, I think, tall and rather attractive...”

Blood rushed to my head, and I didn’t hear the rest. Lady Jane and Ann-Margret had been to Adama’s house. Why would two refined, intelligent, courageous, and beautiful women go visit a guy who spoke a dialect you needed an interpreter to understand? And how could any “Lady” be so fickle as to deceive and abandon the knight-in-shining-armor who’d presented her with a copy of
Cheap Thrills
? On their way home from the beach, did she say? Don’t tell me they were in their bathing suits? No, surely not, but still... Lady Jane, with white strap-lines decorating her shoulders, fragrant with suntan lotion, goes way way way way way out in the boondocks, where there’s nothing but slag heaps, to eat watermelon pulled fresh from some farmer’s patch and cooled in a nearby mountain stream. And me? I get to console Adama’s mother. Air raids? So what? You want to talk about real injustice? When Meursault shot the Arab, he blamed it all on the sun. I felt like Camus.

Life is absurd.

I telephoned Adama, still burning with rage.

“Hey, Ken,” he said. “My mother went to your house today, right?” What the hell. He knew all about it. “Sorry. She still there?”

“Just left.”

“Your parents there?”

“They’re both teaching.”

“Oh, that’s right. So you were alone together?”

“I was the perfect host. Gave her a baumkuchen and a glass of barley tea.”

“Listen, you didn’t, ah... you didn’t...”

“What?”

“You didn’t try to kiss her, did you?”

“Don’t be a jerk.”

“Hey, just kidding. No, see, when she asked me for your address today, I figured she was going to your place. So she really went, eh? What’d she have to say?”

I didn’t answer. I was pissed off, and I had my pride to maintain. How was I supposed to bring up the Lady Jane problem? A man who’s been deceived by the one he loves is at a big disadvantage.

“What did you talk about? Don’t tell me you sat there bad-mouthing me together.”

“No, the truth is... Listen, Adama, don’t let this get you down.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t go into shock on me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nah, never mind. I can’t bring myself to tell you anyway.”

“What? Let’s hear it.”

“I’d cut out my tongue before I’d tell you.”

“It’s about me?”

“Of course it’s about you.”

“C’mon, man, tell me. Please?”

“Promise you won’t freak?”

“Spit it out.”

“Well, it seems your mother talked it over with your father, and they’re thinking about pulling you out of school and putting you to work. You’ve got relatives in Okayama, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Apparently they want you to work in an orchard up there. By next week you’ll be up to your neck in peaches.”

“What’s the matter, man? You’re losing your touch.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Being a brilliant liar was about the only thing you had going for you, too.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“
Just kidding
. Oh, by the way...” Adama chortled. Cool-headed people don’t do much chortling, and when they do it’s not a pretty sound. “Matsui and Sato came to see me yesterday.”

“What!” I said, feigning surprise.

“They said they were on their way home from swimming at Utanoura.”

Utanoura was a beach just down the road from Adama’s house.

“Is that right?” I sounded aloof, indifferent.

“I tell you, though, man, I’m not used to getting things like this from chicks. I don’t really like it, you know?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“This letter I got. It’s just not my kind of thing.”

“Letter? A
love letter
?”

“Well...”

“A love letter?”

“Well, I guess you’d call it that. It’s in this kind of old-fashioned language. You know, ‘To express my admiration and respect,’ and all that. It’s not for me, man. Give me Rimbaud any day.”

The world went dark before my eyes.

“Oh, yeah, and Matsui asked me to give her your address, so I did. You don’t mind, right?”

“I couldn’t care less about Matsui. Chicks like that, I tell you, man, they got no brains, no culture, no sense of gratitude...”

“You serious?”

“Sure, man, I mean, what kind of a broad is that? I give her a copy of
Cheap Thrills
and she doesn’t even send me a thank-you note. Look at my father—he writes to thank people every single time he gets a present.”

“Present? That was Ezaki’s record.”

“To hell with her, anyway.”

“I like Matsui, man, she’s got class. I bet you wouldn’t catch her writing this old-fashioned crap, like Sato.”

“What?”

“Sato’s got big knockers, but Matsui’s a lot smarter.”

“Adama. The love letter was from Sato?”

“Yeah.”

A light came on in my brain. Ten thousand watts.

“Matsui’s not human, man, she’s an angel, she’s in human form but she’s an angel sent to me by God.”

After expressing an inability to figure out how my brain worked, Adama told me to hurry up and finish the script, then hung up.

That evening, a
bouquet of roses
was delivered to my house.

“Aren’t they pretty!” my sister said, clapping her hands. “They’re for
you,
Ken? It’s like in the movies!” I held her hand and we skipped around the room together singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

There was a note attached to the bouquet: “Hoping these seven red roses will take your mind off your troubles, if only for a while... Jane.”

My sister arranged the flowers in a glass vase for me. I put them on my desk and gazed at them all night long. Camus was wrong.

Life wasn’t absurd.

It was rose-colored.

I finished the film script in two days. The title was
Etude for a Baby Doll and a High School Boy.
Long titles were popular back then. I stayed up till dawn writing it.

My father once told me about something that happened when I was three, at a swimming pool he took me to. I’d nearly drowned in the sea once before, so I was afraid of water and wouldn’t go in. He tried yelling at me, coaxing me, prodding me with a stick, and bribing me with ice cream, but I just kept screaming and crying. Then a cute little girl about my age appeared. She called to me from the pool. I hesitated but finally jumped in—for her sake.

When I finished the script I took a short nap, then started right in on the text for the play. It took me three days to write it. The title was
Beyond the Blood-Red Sea of Negativity and Rebellion.
There were only two characters—a young divorcee and her younger brother, who’d failed to get into university.

“A play?” Adama said. “Who’s going to act in it?”

“Me. Me and Lady Jane.”

“Her I can understand. But you? Can you act?”

“Hey, I was the second of the Three Little Pigs in elementary school, man. I’ll direct it, too, of course.”

“You’re not going to have nude scenes and stuff, like
Hair
, are you?”

“What do you think, you idiot?”

“But
I
bet you try to throw in a
kissing scene
or something. Better not, man. Matsui won’t like it.”

I crossed out the kissing scene as soon as we hung up.

One day shortly after the roses died and were carefully laid to rest in a drawer of my desk, Matsunaga showed up, smiling and saying “Good news!”

Our punishment was over.

After one hundred and nineteen days.

AMORE ROMANTICO

I sat at my desk in class for the first time in a hundred and nineteen days. The old school gate, the old courtyard, the old classroom—I wasn’t the least bit happy to see any of them again. They had the same old air of cold indifference they’d had before my suspension.

Except for Matsunaga, all the teachers treated Adama and me as if we were bastard children they’d been stuck with after just one little slipup. We were neither heroes nor villains, merely inconvenient and unwelcome.

The class was English Grammar. The little gnome giving it was baring his gums as he read out sample sentences. His pronunciation was awful. It didn’t sound like English at all; it was a language spoken and understood only in the teachers’ rooms of high schools in provincial Japanese cities. I could imagine this guy in London—they’d think he was mumbling some inscrutable Oriental curse.

I noticed Adama looking in my direction. He looked bored. When he glanced away toward the window, I did the same. A group of elementary school kids was marching in pairs along the road outside. A field trip, probably. Beyond the steep hill in front of the school was a thickly wooded little mountain where there was a children’s recreation area. They’d probably have a picnic and play Drop-the-Hanky or Who’s-Got-the-Pickle. I envied them.

I remembered how, in elementary school, if I stayed at home with a cold for even three days, I used to miss my friends and the atmosphere of the classroom and everything. The reason I didn’t feel the same way about this place after an absence of a hundred and nineteen days was that this was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us—except, maybe, the baby pigs that got roasted whole in Chinese restaurants—were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a
domestic animal
.

Between classes, Adama came over and sat on my desk.

“Narushima and Otaki were saying we should all get together.”

“Get together and do what?”

He shrugged. “You going to pull out, Ken?”

“Pull out of what?”

“You know. Political action.”

“You really think we can call it that?”

Adama laughed through his nose.

To me, there’d been more fun than function in what we’d done. You could say the same, in fact, about the fight against the
Enterprise.
Sure, some blood had been spilled, but blood was spilled at parties sometimes, too. Had they actually hoped to accomplish anything with their campaign? The roar of one Phantom jet was enough to drown out all the speeches and chanting. If they’d really wanted to break through at Sasebo Bridge, they should have thrown down their banners and placards and picked up rifles and bombs.