Popular Hits of the Showa Era (3 page)

The look on her face as she spun around.

Perspiration was melting her makeup, outrage dilated her nostrils, her badly penciled-on eyebrows twitched indignantly, and she appeared to be on the verge of spewing green foam. Sugioka didn’t realize he was grinning; all he knew was that he had a hard-on like a tree. He thrust his hips forward a few more times, and the Oba-san began wailing like a fire-engine. “Aaaooooooooooh! Pervert! Aaooooooooooooh! What do you think you’re doing? I’ll call for help!” Sugioka, disrespected by what seemed to him the lowest form of life on earth, now caught a powerful whiff of ripening clams wafting up from the Oba-san’s lower regions. Seized with a nameless fear, he pulled out his commando knife, pressed the blade against the still-wailing siren of her throat, and sliced horizontally. Her neck opened as if it were a second mouth, and there was a whooshing sound followed immediately by a gusher of blood. Sugioka snickered to himself as he ran away. He glanced back just in time to see the Oba-san crumple to the pavement.

There was no one else on the street.

I

The
murdered woman’s name was Yanagimoto Midori, and the first one to discover the body—or, rather, the first to do anything about it—was a friend of hers named Henmi Midori. After Sugioka’s hurried departure from the scene, a total of eleven people had passed the spot where Yanagimoto Midori lay with bubbles of blood burbling from her throat, but they all pretended not to see her—although it would have been impossible to miss her on a street like this, barely wide enough for two cars to scrape past. Her frilly white dress was saturated with red; the curry-filled buns she’d bought lay squashed beside her, the yellow curry smeared over the concrete like vomit; and in the torrid sunlight breaking through the rainy-season clouds, the clams that had spilled and scattered from her shopping bag promptly began to broadcast the fragrance of decaying shellfish. Each of the eleven passersby caught at least a glimpse of Yanagimoto Midori before looking away and pretending they hadn’t. A young housewife, walking by with a toddler who pointed and said, “Look, Mama! That lady’s lying on the ground!” went so far as to scold her child: “Don’t look! The lady’s just playing!” When a passing prep school student saw the victim, his first instinct was to try and help her, or at least summon the police, but he was wearing a white shirt and on his way to a date. “Sorry, Oba-san,” he muttered as he walked on. “I can’t mess up this shirt. Besides,” he reasoned to himself, “there’s a big pile of shit or something right next to her.”

Yanagimoto Midori’s heart had stopped beating a mere fifty seconds after Sugioka slit her throat, so it wasn’t as if trying to help her sit up or notifying the police might have saved her, but any undue delay in acknowledging the discovery of one’s remains is of course a serious blow to one’s pride. By the time Henmi Midori came upon her dead friend and screamed her nickname—“
Nagiiiii!
”—the latter was scarcely recognizable. In her agony, Yanagimoto Midori had clawed at her wound and her face. Part of her esophagus now protruded from the gash in her throat, along with various blood vessels; a good ten centimeters of tongue sagged from one side of her mouth; her right eyeball had been gouged from the parent socket; and her right fist gripped a clump of hair she’d torn from her own head. Bending down for a closer look, Henmi Midori accidentally added to the mess by vomiting explosively upon her friend’s ravaged face, and it was just after doing so that she spotted a vital piece of evidence. It was a little silvery badge that had fallen from Sugioka’s raincoat as he’d turned to flee the scene. Before the police arrived, Henmi Midori instinctively plucked the badge from the ground and dropped it into her handbag.

Yanagimoto
Midori had been divorced and living alone, her ex having assumed custody of their only son, so her group of friends, known collectively as the Midori Society, took it upon themselves to host the wake. Shortly after ten p.m. the last of the relatives and acquaintances left, followed by the ex-husband and child, but the Midoris remained. All of them—Henmi Midori, Iwata Midori, Takeuchi Midori, Suzuki Midori, and Tomiyama Midori—shared with the late Yanagimoto the same given name. They had met one another in hobby circles and culture centers and what have you, and though their backgrounds differed considerably, they had in common the fact that each was alone and inept at making friends. They had now been associating for several years, however, all on the basis of, “My! Your name is Midori too?” Tonight, with the remains of Yanagimoto Midori before them, they all wept profusely. From time to time one of them stifled her sobs to say, “And she was such a good person!” or “To think we’ll never hear Nagii sing ‘Stardust Trails’ again!” or “Was it just me, or did her ex-husband look sort of relieved?”—but as usual none of them seemed to hear anything the others had to say. These women were all unmistakably of the fearsome tribe known as Oba-san. Born in the middle of the Showa Era, they were all in their late thirties, all originally from somewhere outside Tokyo, all graduates of high school or junior college, all sturdy of frame and far from beautiful, all karaoke enthusiasts, and all strangers to Orgasmus. The late Yanagimoto Midori was not the only one in the group who hadn’t managed to sustain a successful marriage. They were all divorcees, some with children and some without. Tomiyama Midori had been through three husbands and shared a son with ex number two, and Takeuchi Midori had given birth at seventeen to a daughter who’d grown up to marry a foreigner and now lived in Canada.

As they wept, all five were overwhelmed with a feeling they’d never experienced before. Having come face-to-face with the sobering fact that we all must die eventually, had nothing to do with it. And it wasn’t that they shared the sorrow Yanagimoto Midori must have felt as she lay dying so outrageously and unexpectedly, her body and clothing fouled with her own blood and gore. Nor was it the sadness of losing a friend with whom they had all shared, if not an actual intimacy, at least the custom of getting together occasionally and chattering away without the inconvenience of having to listen to one another. No, the unfamiliar feeling the five remaining Midoris were experiencing was the sense that someone had made fools of them.

It wasn’t as if the Midoris had lacked men in their lives. Though none of them had managed to achieve lasting relationships, neither had they ever experienced anything they recognized as loneliness. Each was the type of woman who refuses to depend on anyone else. Having made their way through life without ever providing or receiving comfort and affection, none of them had acquired many friends, and they had advanced well into their thirties before finding each other and forming this group of like-minded individuals. They would get together to chat, or to eat brunch at a hotel buffet, or to sing karaoke, or to swim and sunbathe at a public pool, but they never delved into one another’s personal lives. When one of them said something—if, for example, Henmi Midori were to say, “Listen to this, yesterday this guy at my office who has a reputation for being quite the sex fiend? As we were leaving work it was raining and he’d forgotten his umbrella and was getting all wet so I let him in under mine, and as we’re walking along he suddenly looks at me and goes, ‘Henmi-san, would you like to FUCK?’ Can you imagine? I just glared at him like,
How dare you!
And then he tells me that six of the eight women he’s said something like that to have gone for it, that the direct approach makes them wet. I’m like,
Women aren’t wet all the time, buster!
But he doesn’t get it. I mean, he’s incapable of recognizing anyone else’s point of view, you know what I mean?”—none of the others would pay any attention to what she was actually saying, but one of them might happen to hear and latch on to some particular detail, such as the word “umbrella,” and begin relating an essentially unrelated experience of her own: “I know, I know, that sort of thing happens all the time, doesn’t it? Once I didn’t have an umbrella, and this man named Sakakibara in my office who’s forty and still single but not necessarily a homo but if you ask me it’s hard to know what he’s up to, he was standing in front of me and it was pouring and I was thinking he was going to let me in under his umbrella but instead he goes to practice his golf swing with it and almost hits me in the face! But I mean it’s typical. Things like that happen all the time nowadays. There’s so many weirdos out there!”

Nonetheless, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to anyone, the Midori Society had remained intact for a little over four years now. No one—not even the Midoris themselves—could have said what the determining factor was in creating their particular type of personality, but they all had an instinctive distaste for any action that smacked of “healing one’s wounds.” In fact, the responsibility for this lay with their fathers, but none of the ladies were aware of this or cared about such things, and in any case their male parents have nothing to do with our story. To open up to another person and talk about the sources of one’s current anxieties, to have that person accept it all as “normal,” and thereby to heal, was the sort of thing all the Midoris found despicable. For whatever reason, they couldn’t afford to be conscious of their wounds. The strange, unfamiliar feeling they experienced as they sat weeping before the corpse of Yanagimoto Midori, therefore, was nothing less than an implacable rage brought on by the realization that the “wound” had come from the outside world to open them up by the throat.

They continued to weep for more than three hours after everyone else had left. Tomiyama Midori, the first to stop sobbing, began in a tiny voice to sing “Stardust Trails,” a perfect match for the rhythm of the rain against the reinforced concrete wall of their late friend’s one-bedroom apartment; and one by one, as they stopped weeping, the others joined in. It was the first time in the four years of their association that all of them had sung the same song together. They sang it again and again, reprising “Stardust Trails” for more than an hour, and it was only when they were done singing that Henmi Midori produced the silver badge and held it up for all to see.

“I found this at the scene of the crime,” she said. “Does anyone know what it is?” The badge was passed around from hand to hand. “I believe it belonged to the murderer.”

Suzuki Midori said, “I saw where that stupid-looking detective was saying it seemed to be a random killing, which meant they might never find the murderer,” and Iwata Midori said, “I read in the local news section that the police are looking for eyewitnesses,” and Tomiyama Midori said, “I know this badge!

“I see my son once a week, right? So I always want to feed him something delicious, because his father’s a man with no ambition whatsoever and I’m afraid he’s robbed the poor boy of even the will to eat delicious things, which it would be better if he lived with me but I have to work and I know my son understands that, but anyway he always wants to eat at MOS Burger, teriyaki burgers with double mayonnaise, three of them, and then we go to this store called Kiddy Kastle, and out in front of the store is a video game he likes to play, and if you score over three hundred thousand points you get one of these badges, and there’s a poster with a list of all the people who’ve won a badge.”

For the very first time, only one person was talking, and everyone else in the group was listening.

II

“So
if we investigate all the names on the list, I bet we’ll find the killer.”

Tomiyama Midori stopped there, and an eerie silence filled the room. It was a silence pregnant with heart-tingling anticipation, the sort of thing the Midori Society experienced only rarely—most recently when the six of them had decided to take their first trip abroad together (and ended up on a five-day, four-night excursion to Singapore and Hong Kong). None of the Midoris had ever been big on travel, and though they were always trying to think of things to do together, somehow the idea of going overseas had never before occurred to them. Every one of them had always thought of travel abroad as an extravagance she had no need for. They believed it was wrong to want things you didn’t need, and that the people who flaunted Celine scarves, for example, or Louis Vuitton bags or Chanel belts or Hermès perfumes, were essentially people who had no self-esteem. Somewhere deep in their internal organs the Midoris carried the conviction that buying such things was just an attempt, albeit on an extremely primitive level, to “heal one’s wounds,” but it goes without saying that they too aspired to Celine and Louis Vuitton and Chanel and Hermès, not to mention world travel. Which was why, on that day when they’d gathered at Suzuki Midori’s apartment for a dubious culinary experience billed as “Box Lunches of Seven Major Train Stations” and Iwata Midori said, “How about taking a trip overseas, somewhere nearby maybe?” this same sort of tingly silence had descended. Everyone was thrilled but hesitated to be the first to admit it.

“So we find out who the killer is…and then what?” Henmi Midori, who tended to overdo the facial packs and whose forehead and cheeks shone so brightly as a result that they reflected the individual bulbs in the ceiling lamp, spoke these words, and there followed another, even deeper silence. All five lowered their eyes shyly, like young ladies meeting a proposed marriage partner for the first time and finding him just to their liking. Iwata Midori plucked at the loose threads of the carpet next to her cushion; Henmi Midori unclenched an incipient fist and gazed at her fingernails; Takeuchi Midori hummed tunelessly; Suzuki Midori raised her empty beer glass to her lips; and Tomiyama Midori fluttered her long false eyelashes—the kind you don’t often see anymore.

No one spoke, so Henmi Midori, discoverer of Yanagimoto Midori’s corpse, took her question a step further.

“Are we going to kill him ourselves?”

What followed was the deepest silence yet.

On
Saturday of that week, Tomiyama Midori met her son, Osamu, at a station on the Keio Line. “How’s your father?” she asked, stroking his hair and reflecting that she couldn’t care less how his father was, and as always Osamu just tilted his head to one side and didn’t reply. Tomiyama Midori loved this unaffable child of hers, however, as only a mother could. In fact, it was only by thinking about her son that she was able even to grasp the concept of love. Love wasn’t about feeling at ease with someone, or bubbling with happiness as a result of just being with them. Love was when you felt compelled to expend every effort to see that they enjoyed their time in your company. In a sense, the time she spent with Osamu was fairly agonizing for her. He would stay one night and leave the following evening, and if he smiled once during that time, she would feel that she’d accomplished something of vital importance. Osamu’s was a strictly conservative temperament. He would meet his mother at the ticket gate in the station, walk with her through the arcade to MOS Burger, play the video game at Kiddy Kastle, have her buy him a new computer game and three volumes of various manga, ride the bus to her housing complex, hopscotch with rigorous precision over the flagstones, play the new computer game in her third-floor condo, read his manga after dinner, get in the bathtub at exactly eighteen minutes past the hour, and go to sleep holding his mother’s hand. The two of them didn’t do a lot of actual talking, but Osamu would always smile at least once. Tomiyama Midori would be on edge until he did, however, and sometimes it wasn’t until he was on the train platform to head back home.