Popular Hits of the Showa Era (10 page)

“It’s because your heart is open right now,” Suzuki Midori murmured, and Tomiyama Midori nodded. The other two Midoris understood as well. And why were their hearts open now? Because they were doing what they really wanted to do. Until now, they’d never known what that was. Until now, there hadn’t
been
anything they really wanted to do.

“Back when I was married, I was always somewhere else in my mind, thinking about all sort of things, and now I feel like I understand why.”

They were pedaling their swan boat over the surface of the lake, plowing slowly through the shimmering golden fan painted there by the sinking sun, their hair waving in the wind.

“Whenever I was with my husband, whether we were eating dinner or taking a walk, or even just talking about things, I was always thinking about something else. At the time, though, it never even occurred to me that there was anything abnormal about that.”

Suzuki Midori squinted into the setting sun as she spoke.

“When you’re married to someone, you talk about all sorts of things, right? Since we didn’t have any children to talk about, my husband would tell me about things at the office, that a colleague of his who’d once visited us at our home had cancer, or that a man who’d entered the company the same year as him got tricked by the mama-san of some bar into cosigning on a loan and now his life was a living hell, things like that. And we had a pet cat named Fu Ming, kind of a Chinese-sounding name, who was part Siamese, and I was still in my early twenties and didn’t want to be some boring housewife who can only talk about things she saw on TV that afternoon, so mostly I talked about Fu Ming, but even when we were talking and laughing about the cat I’d be thinking about something completely different. ‘Today Fu Ming was chasing a fly and jumped up on the coffee table but landed on a cassette tape and slipped and nearly fell off’—I’d be telling my husband some story like that, but all the time my brain would be somewhere else, some really stupid place. Like I might be thinking about that morning, when I walked with him to the station to see him off and a tall woman in a suit passed by and he stared at her for about three seconds. I’d be thinking,
That’s probably the type of woman he really likes
, and it would turn into a kind of obsession that kept ballooning, getting bigger and bigger, and I’d start to feel like I hated having a person like him for a husband. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could even talk to anyone about, though, so I’d just feel sorry for myself, and it would go on like that. I’d be rehashing these things in my mind, over and over, even while I was sitting there laughing with him, telling him funny stories about Fu Ming. It was like that the entire time we were together, and finally I started to wonder if there wasn’t something wrong with me, but I didn’t have anyone to discuss it with, and then, after about half a year or a year of that, Fu Ming got this sickness called hydro-peri-something, where her tummy filled up with water, and she died, and after she died I didn’t have much to say to my husband anymore. It wasn’t because I was thinking about Fu Ming or grieving or anything, it just felt like my head was completely empty. I mean, it wasn’t about the cat. It was about the fact that I’d never told my husband any of the things I was actually thinking. So, well, I’m the one who was messed up, I guess, but it was always that way for me. I’ve never known what it feels like to do something and have it be the only thing in my head. Even during, excuse me, sexual intercourse, I’d be thinking about something else completely. It’s terrible, I know, and I got to hate the whole situation so much that I ended up getting a divorce, but even getting divorced didn’t fix the problem. But now…the amazing thing is that now, everything’s changed.”

The western slope of Mount Fuji was turning pink and lavender in the setting sun.

“Everything’s changed….”

The wind had died, and the shadow cast by the swan boat stretched out across the glassy surface of the lake, heralding the rapid approach of night.

“There’s a place somewhere in this world,” Suzuki Midori said, remembering some tidbit she’d read in a book, “where they talk about the night as if it were a living creature. Not just that day loses its light, but that the creature called night comes and swallows everything up….”

The
little bar they were looking for was down a narrow lane that separated the bike rental shed from a souvenir shop. The bar, sandwiched between a noodle kitchen and a coffeehouse, had an old-timey sign hanging over its windowless entrance.

The man was already there, drinking a glass of Suntory Old with water and ice. When the four Midoris opened the door and looked in, he waved and said, “Hi! Over here! Over here!” From the top of his haircut to the soles of his black patent-leather shoes he exuded, along with a faint odor of sweat, the air of a man who had never had any luck with the ladies, just never had any luck with them at all.

There were no other customers in the place, which was furnished with only a short counter and three small tables. A woman wearing no lipstick or any other makeup except for thickly painted layers of blue, green, and brown around her eyes—a dubious cosmetic strategy—and a chubby girl who looked to be about middle school age and well below average intelligence, chanted “
Irasshaimase!
” in unison as the Midoris stepped inside.

Suzuki Midori, intuiting that no one wanted to sit next to the man, made that sacrifice herself. The man, having presumably picked out the best articles of clothing he owned without giving any thought as to whether or not they went together, wore a yellow shirt, pink-and-gray-checkered trousers, purple nylon socks, a brown blazer with black stripes, and a red silk neckerchief.

“I’m Sakaguchi,” he said. He was a member of the Self-Defense Forces.

III

“You
must be the four ladies who are all named Midori.”

Sakaguchi was gulping his whiskey and water even as he said this, so that it came out more like,
You must be
gulp,
the four ladies who
gulp,
are all named
gulp,
Midori
. His cheeks and the flesh around his eyes were flushed, but Suzuki Midori knew it wasn’t merely the result of alcohol. He was plainly nervous and self-conscious in their presence. They might be Oba-sans in their late thirties, but this man had probably never in his life been surrounded by four women before, and certainly not by four women who had any sort of interest in him. All of them could sense that much.

“Would you like something to drink?” He arranged his mouth in a smile as he said this. “When I say ‘something,’ I mean whiskey, is what I mean. That’s all there is in this joint.”

It was an appalling and alarming smile.

“This whiskey, in the old days they called it ‘Dharma.’ Isn’t that funny? Dharma. They used to sell it in a wooden case, six bottles to a case. From the time I was in high school I used to think that was something really special, and I decided that someday I’d become a man of such importance that people would bring me gifts like that, whole cases of Dharma. But then at some point—and just overnight, really—along come your Early Times and your Jim Beam and your I. W. Harper, and before you’re even used to the idea that there’s so many different types of liquor in the world, everybody stops drinking domestic whiskey. Okay if I mix it with water? This bar, the one thing about it, the water’s delicious. There’s a well out back, and I’m told that the mama-san and her daughter draw fresh water from it every day. Not with a motorized pump either, but with a pulley and a bucket on a rope, just like in the old days.”

A lot of effort was clearly going into maintaining the smile, and yet you sensed that if you were to praise it as lovely or charming, the owner would continue to bear it for an hour or two or, if necessary, all night long. “Whiskey and water would be wonderful,” said Suzuki Midori, and Tomiyama Midori smiled and nodded, saying, “We’re not so young that we don’t have fond memories of Suntory Old!” Reassured, perhaps, Sakaguchi finally let go of the smile. Even the mama-san and her hostess offspring breathed a sigh of relief from behind the counter as the smile was disassembled, and the Midoris were aware of tension going almost audibly out of the room, like air escaping a balloon. None of them had ever before met a man who could create a general atmosphere of panic simply by smiling.

“I heard all about you ladies,” Sakaguchi said, his face back in neutral now. The Midoris drained their whiskeys and water.

“Is that so?” Henmi Midori smiled politely. “Well, a certain person told us about you too, and this bar, and what time we could find you here.”

The “certain person” she referred to was a small man of indeterminate age who looked like an adult version of a premature baby and whom one of Henmi Midori’s coworkers had met in a nightclub. The man, according to his own account, had started a children’s clothing company some twenty years before, but after it had gone belly-up some three years ago, he’d begun working in his present capacity as an agent and go-between. Henmi Midori and Suzuki Midori had gone together to meet him in the lobby lounge of one of the high-rise hotels in West Shinjuku. The small man showed up wearing a unobtrusive suit, and as he sipped at a cup of tea with milk, he slid a memo pad across the table and said, “Write down what it is you want.” Henmi Midori did as instructed and slid the pad back to him, along with an envelope containing his fee. The fee was 250,000 yen, not including the price of the tea.

“The merchandise is in the car,” Sakaguchi was telling them now. “I’ll hand it over to you later on, but first I need to explain some things.”

After saying this much, he suddenly lowered his eyes and bit his lip. It was as if he wanted to say something but was too embarrassed. Henmi Midori hurriedly said, “Oh, don’t worry—we have the cash right here,” but Sakaguchi looked up, shaking his head.
It ain’t that
, he said, slipping into some sort of regional accent.

“I was contacted about this a week ago. I only had a few M16s in stock, so I had to do some real scrambling to find what you wanted, and that kept me so busy that I didn’t give it any thought at the time, but then as I was waiting for you ladies tonight it hit me, and it was kind of a shock.”

He looked to be on the verge of tears, and Suzuki Midori asked, “What is it?” in a tender voice, as if she and this SDF man, who looked roughly her age, were old and intimate friends. It wouldn’t do to have him getting all shocked and unstable on them now—they hadn’t received the merchandise yet, and they needed him to teach them how to use it. At the same time, she couldn’t help but wonder what exactly it was that emanated so powerfully from men who have no appeal for women. It was almost like an odor, and it was the same no matter where they lived or how old they were or what they did for a living. Maybe you could find out exactly what it was if you did a chemical analysis of their hair or urine—discover some kind of marker that was either caused by or responsible for their never having received a woman’s affection.

“The fact is, about ten years ago, I met a lady named Midori on the shore of that lake out there, and your names are Midori, and I don’t know if it’s karma or what it is, but this Midori, she was a terrible liar.”

“My!” said Takeuchi Midori, letting this most common and versatile of interjections escape her parted Chanel-red lips, along with a little sigh. Sakaguchi seemed to gain courage from that “My!” and as he mixed and guzzled an even stronger drink he muttered, as if to himself:
That’s right, that’s what she was, a liar.

“We were only together for half a year or so, but one lie I’ll never forgive her for was, I was born in the mountains and never ate much fish, so I had no idea that the head of the
buri
, the mature yellowtail, is one of the most delicious parts, and a member of my squadron who was from Kyushu, he wanted out of the Forces because he was getting married—why that’s a reason to quit the Forces is a mystery to me, but a lot of the younger fellows are like that these days—and I helped him out by putting in a good word here and there, so when he got back to his home town he shipped me a whole buri, packed in ice, you see, and me and some of the other fellows were talking about how to go about cooking and eating it, and I was going out with that woman then, and really enjoying every day, you know, living life to the fullest, and she came by and saw the fish and said, ‘Well, first of all, you don’t need the head, right?’ And she cut off the head and wrapped it up and took it away. Then later I found out that the head is the tastiest part, and you use it to make a dish called buri-daikon, and after that the other fellows started calling her the Buri Burglar. That wasn’t all, though. She told me a lot of other lies too.”

Takeuchi Midori breathed another “My!” and gave him a melting, sympathetic look. “That’s terrible!”

Sakaguchi mixed himself a fresh one, going easy on the water, and tossed it down.

“But the worst lie of all,” he gargled, leaning forward with outspread hands, as if begging for mercy, tears forming in the corners of his eyes. “She told me she was a stewardess, and she was really just a
tour bus guide
!”

Each of the four Midoris made use of the interjection “My!” to convert their spasms of laughter into scandalized gasps, and they all nodded in frantic agreement when Takeuchi Midori cried, “It’s just plain wrong to deceive people that way!”

“This Midori woman, I know now that she had other men, and she only came to see me when she felt like it, on nights when she couldn’t meet any of the others, but what made me really angry—well, there were lots of things that made me mad, but after I realized that she probably boiled that head with daikon radishes and ate it with another man, well, I not only couldn’t eat buri anymore, I couldn’t eat radishes either! Also, she was a really good singer, and just because she knew I’d never been on an airplane, she told me that stewardesses have to sing for the passengers!”