Popular Hits of the Showa Era (17 page)

They
made the journey to an all-night bookstore and bought a map of Greater Tokyo. Back at the apartment, they rewarmed a couple of jars of One Cup Sake. Taking small sips so as not to get drunk too quickly, and snacking on smoked squid, they spread the map out on the floor and focused their attention on Chofu City.

“All right, Ishi-kun, I’ll read the names and addresses, and you take these pins and mark the spot where each one lives. Approximately is good enough.” Nobue opened the college notebook Kato had left behind and read the relevant information for each of the four Midoris. The first two lived near the center of town, the third on the northern edge, and the fourth on the western outskirts. Ishihara also put a pin at the location of the Flower Petal Women’s Junior College dormitory, the abode of the girl with the misaligned eyes and terrifying face. The head of each pin was a little plastic sunflower.

“Pretty wide area,” Ishihara muttered. “It’d be cool if I was a giant, and this map was the real Chofu, and I could just step on it, like this, and they’d all be dead. Squash ’em like marshmallows.”

Nobue stared at the map between Ishihara’s feet as the latter trod in a slow, city-leveling circle. What to do? The Tokarev was long gone—not that it would have done them much good against these four women. They were clearly not just your average Oba-sans. The newspaper had said they’d used a rocket launcher. Where in Japan could you get your hands on a rocket launcher? Nobue had once seen an ex–Green Beret on TV who was a resident of Japan—maybe these women were the wives of geezers like that.

Ishihara was taking a felt pen to the first spot on the map where he’d placed a pin. He drew the
omanko
mark, which consisted of two concentric circles bisected by a long vertical line, with wavy hairs radiating out from the doughnut, and was instantly recognizable to any Japanese middle school boy as a symbol for the female reproductive organ. “Omanko One, Suzuki Midori,” he intoned, writing the name. He proceeded to sketch a pair of fat, warped lips, protruding teeth, and a distended tongue upon which he placed a coiled, steaming turd; added a pair of large, deformed nostrils, into each of which he inserted a sharpened number 2 pencil; and finally completed the portrait with bulging eyes and a dialogue balloon inscribed with the words “Oh, yes, YES! Stick in a BIGGER ONE!”

“Ishi-kun,” Nobue groaned, “stop messing around and help me figure out what we should do.”

Ishihara responded by drawing one big omanko mark that covered the whole of Chofu on the map.

“
Dummkopf!
” he said. “We’ll just blow up the entire city.”

I

“The
entire city of Chofu—we’ll blow it away, blow it away, blow it away, blow it away…”

Ishihara continued chanting this even after he crawled under the covers, and eventually he got himself so worked up that his moist eyes began to glow with a light of their own, and he couldn’t sleep. He needed to do something but didn’t know what, and though he himself wondered if this wasn’t crossing a line better left uncrossed, he gripped Nobue’s hand tightly with one of his own and rubbed his own chest and stomach with the other, moaning,
Ah…ahh…ahhn!
as he did so. Nobue was understandably startled and disconcerted.

“Ishi-kun! What’re you doing? That’s not even funny, man. In the first place, to go to sleep holding hands, if you think about it—shit, even if you don’t think about it—is pretty fuckin’ weird. But, you know, when my cheek was hurting really bad, I used to get so pissed off and frustrated and lonely, and I felt like at that rate I was just going to keep spiraling down, so I went ahead and let you hold my hand when we slept, even though I knew it wasn’t normal, but, please, if you’re gonna hold my hand, don’t be rubbing your body and making those creepy noises, all right?”

“But it feels so
good
,” Ishihara murmured, bending his knees and gyrating his hips. “You try it too, Nobu-chin:
Blow it away, blow it away, blow it away
—you keep saying that in your head, and when you touch your body it feels like you’re going to come, like you’re just going to let go and start squirting—
floop, floop, floop, FLOOOOP
!”

“Ishi-kun, listen to me, that’s fucked up, what you’re doing.” Nobue gently freed his hand and wiped his sweaty palm on the sheets. He wasn’t sure if the sweat was his or Ishihara’s. “Here’s the deal, Ishi-kun. We just realized that we have an important mission to fulfill, right? You know we can’t allow the courageous deaths of Yano-rin and Kato-kichi and O-Sugi to be in vain. We can’t let them die for nothing!” Sugiyama and Yano and Kato had died prancing on a moonlit beach, dressed in bizarre costumes and singing “Love Me to the Bone,” but somehow none of that entered into Nobue’s recollection of events. His own words had moved him powerfully, and now tears welled up in his eyes. “We have a mission to fulfill, Ishi-kun, an appointed task. You’re the only friend I have left, it’s true, but I think it would be a big mistake for us to turn homo. We can’t let their deaths be in vain!” he said again, and the emotionally charged words caused him to furrow his brow and make a face like a gorilla sucker-punched with a baseball bat, but a moment later he was sitting bolt upright in bed, his hair standing on end as Ishihara let loose with an earsplitting howl: “HOMO-O-O-O-O-O-O!” Twice more he howled—HOMO-O-O-O-O-O-O! HOMO-OO-O-O-O-O-O!—then smiled and said, “Awesome!” Nobue was pretty sure that not even God knew what that “awesome” was supposed to mean.

“Ishi-kun, listen to me. A long time ago—or, actually, I guess it was fairly recently—I read this story in a girls’ manga called, um, ‘Erika’s Flower Garden,’ about a dancer named Erika who can’t find any work, and she gets this boyfriend who’s younger than her whose name is Yoshi-bo, and Yoshi-bo’s an unemployed dancer too, and they start living together, and a year goes by, two years go by, and then one day they both realize:
This is no good.
They love each other, of course, and they take good care of each other, but if they stay together it’s like they’re complete, everything’s resolved, and they won’t keep pursuing their dreams. That’s what they realize, and Erika, looking back later on, she tells us in like a voice-over, ‘It was a horrifying epiphany.’ And so, even though they’re in love, they decide to split up. You understand, Ishi-kun? Even though they’re in love. And it’s the same for you and me. If we became homos, something would come full circle, and the deaths of Yano-rin and the others would end up being for nothing. I mean…how to put this? I feel like if we don’t do something soon, if we don’t take some positive action, we’ll lose our fighting spirit, our eye of the tiger, and never get it back.”

Ishihara repeated the words “horrifying epiphany” and muttered,
That’s some stupid shit.

“All right, then, Nobu-chin, you tell me: how’re we gonna wipe out the rest of those Oba-sans?”

Nobue furrowed his brow again. This time he looked like a hippopotamus who’d accidentally sat in a puddle of hot mustard.

“That’s what we have to figure out, Ishi-kun, that’s what I’m trying to say. Thinking is our only option now. We’ve got to think and think and think, until we think it all the way through.”

Ishihara said, “How about if we take that junior college girl to their house and make her sing and dance?” and Nobue shook his head and told him to be serious. “Well, then, Nobu-chin, why don’t you stop talking all this big talk about Erika and homos and I don’t know what and come up with a concrete plan?” He sat up, reached for the map, and spread it out between them on the futon.

“They all live so far apart,” Nobue said, his brow still wrinkled. The wrinkles disappeared with Ishihara’s next words.

“What about an atomic bomb?”

Two
days later, Ishihara and Nobue were in Setagaya—a tony section of Tokyo they’d never set foot in before. At a fruit stand in front of the station they bought a package of gourmet strawberries. “I wonder if he’ll really meet with us,” Nobue muttered, and Ishihara, skipping in circles around him, chanted, “He will, he will, I know he will!”

The day before, they’d gone to a bookstore and asked the lady at the register if she had any books on how to build an atomic bomb. Her reply had been curt and in the negative, so they’d gone on to a video rental shop. “Are there any films or documentaries that teach you how to build an atomic bomb?” they asked, and the long-haired dude at the register said, “Hell, yes.” The movie they rented was entitled
The Man Who Invented Fire
, and it was produced and directed by someone named Haseyama Genjiro. Haseyama Genjiro’s house was in Setagaya. Nobue had found the address in the
Japan Association of Film Directors Directory
. A photo of Haseyama Genjiro accompanied his entry, and Nobue and Ishihara both thought he was handsome.

The house was on the outskirts of a section of town noted for being where the richest people lived. Nobue pressed the chime on the intercom at the front gate, and a woman’s voice said, “Who’s there?”

“We’ve come to see Haseyama-sensei,” Nobue carefully enunciated into the speaker. “We’re fans of his work.”

“You didn’t see him out there?” the voice said. “He just stepped out to buy some cigarettes. He’ll be coming back soon.”

The two of them had waited in front of the house for twelve or thirteen minutes when Haseyama Genjiro, looking just like his photo, came sprinting around the corner at top speed and skidded to a stop in front of the gate. He had a carton of short Hopes tucked under his arm.

“Shit,” he said bitterly, looking down at his watch. “Just can’t shave off those last ten seconds!” He bent over for a moment, gasping for breath, then straightened up when he noticed the two visitors. “Who are you?” he said. “What do you want?”

“We’re fans,” they answered more or less in unison. Nobue held out the package of strawberries and added, “Will you teach us how to make an atomic bomb?”

“Ha,” Haseyama Genjiro said. “I get that all the time.” He then took a step back and studied them closely. “But you two have interesting faces. Follow me. We can talk in the park.”

He
led them to a city park about five hundred meters away. It was a big park with tennis courts, athletic fields, and a small botanical garden. The three of them sat on an embankment overlooking the tennis courts. Haseyama Genjiro was wearing a Nike warm-up suit, Air Jordan II basketball shoes, a cap with the Chicago Bulls logo, and Ray-Ban sunglasses. Nobue and Ishihara gazed at his profile and thought,
How cool can you get?
He was, as far as they could see, the very essence of that quality. A group of four deeply tanned, late-fortyish women were playing an energetic and shrilly vocal game of doubles on one of the courts. Nobue wondered if the members of the terrifying Midori Society were tennis players too.

“How’d you get that scar on your cheek?” Haseyama Genjiro asked Nobue, whose heartbeat quickened as he replied:

“Got knifed.”

“In a fight? You don’t look the type.”

“The thing is,” said Ishihara, “we’re in a battle to the death with a group of Oba-sans.”

“You’re WHAT?” Haseyama Genjiro said, raising his voice a bit. “A battle with Oba-sans? And you want to use a nuclear weapon on them?”

“Yes, sir. They live in different parts of Chofu, so there’s no way to kill them all without one.” Ishihara looked at his own distorted face reflected in the Ray-Bans. Even he had to admit it was some face.

“Oba-sans are a problem for everybody,” Haseyama Genjiro said in an anguished tone. “Oba-sans, to put it in somewhat difficult terms, are life-forms that have stopped evolving. And anyone can turn into an Oba-san. Young women, of course, but even young men, even middle-aged men—even children. You turn into an Oba-san the instant you lose the will to evolve. It’s a bloodcurdling truth that no one seems to recognize. Bloodcurdling!”

“Is it easy to make an atomic bomb?” Nobue asked, and Haseyama Genjiro shook his head sadly.

“It’s impossible unless you have plutonium,” he said, then clapped them both on the shoulders and said, “But don’t give up hope. There’s an even better weapon, and it’s easy to make. I’ll tell you how right now, if you’ve got ten minutes. You’d better take notes.”

II

Nobue
and Ishihara withdrew their entire savings from their accounts at the bank and post office. Unfortunately, their entire savings amounted to only 12,930 yen, so they had no choice but to turn to their parents. Nobue wired his, saying that an emergency had arisen and he needed money immediately. Ishihara called home and explained that he’d caught a bad cold that had turned into a life-threatening illness, send cash. His parents promptly dispatched a crate of tangerines and a package of vacuum-packed eels, along with a note saying,
We’re having a hard time ourselves—hope this helps you pull through!
Eels and tangerines wouldn’t be of any use at all in building the weapon as outlined by Haseyama Genjiro. Nobue’s parents eventually sent emergency aid to the tune of 300,000 yen, but that wasn’t nearly enough.

“It’ll cost that much just to rent the helicopter,” Ishihara complained, and then got personal, saying, “What is your family, a bunch of paupers?”

“Look who’s talking!” Nobue replied with some heat. “All
your
people sent were some fucking eels!”

Having at last discovered a practical and feasible method for blowing up Chofu City, however, they weren’t about to get into a serious fight. They spent a few basically enjoyable minutes slapping each other’s cheeks and foreheads: Pauper! Eel-boy! Pauper! Eel-boy! But the fact remained that they still didn’t have sufficient funds to build the weapon. Their own parents having proved so unreliable, they now realized they had no choice but to contact the parents of Sugioka and Yano and Kato and Sugiyama. It took several drafts to get the letter right.

“Once, there was a Group of Six Good Friends. They helped and encouraged one another, drank together sometimes, and sang together, celebrating their youth, standing shoulder to shoulder as they struggled to survive in the concrete desert of the big city. However!! The unthinkable happened. Fate decreed that four of these innocent young men were to be taken from us, snatched from this world—nay, snatched from the Group of Six!—before their rightful time. It is our hope to commemorate these precious lives with a collection of pure, heartfelt, and poignant recollections gathered from those who knew and remember our departed pals best. Long live the Group of Six Good Friends! We are hoping that you who share our sorrow will support the publication of this effort by contributing five hundred thousand yen….”

A total of one-point-seven million yen came in. That they came up three hundred thousand short of their goal was because Sugiyama’s parents sent only two hundred thousand, his mother appending an apologetic note to the effect that at the moment her husband was out of work and they were barely able to make ends meet. But Nobue and Ishihara pressed their hands together and bowed with gratitude in the direction of Fukushima Prefecture, where Sugiyama’s parents lived. In the midst of their own struggles they had sent what they could and would now probably have to live on millet and barnyard grass for a month or two. Ishihara and Nobue were determined not to let that sacrifice be in vain. Failure, they both thought, was simply not an option.

The preparations began.

They leased a small warehouse near Harumi on a two-week renewable contract. Building the weapon in Nobue’s apartment was out of the question because of the danger of premature explosion. This was clearly stated in the notes Haseyama Genjiro had dictated to them, which he’d entitled “For a Better Tomorrow.”

“For a Better Tomorrow #1: The site of construction should be as spacious and as far from human habitations as possible….”

On the floor of the warehouse, they reassembled a salvaged prefab shed, sealing the interior walls with four layers of reinforced plastic, then took a vow to abstain from any activities that might interfere with their concentration, including drinking, smoking, playing computer games, and masturbating. They then began gathering the materials listed in their notes.

“For a Better Tomorrow #2: Assemble the following items: porcelain plates, alcohol burners, hydroextractor, flasks, drip funnel, reflux condenser, separating funnel, glass test tubes (various sizes), thiophosphoric acid syrup, calcium chloride, activated alumina, ethyl alcohol, isopropyl alcohol…”