“That kind of Japan ought to be wiped off the face of the earth, and that kind of Japanese can all go to hell.”
My sister hesitates. Then, with cold eyes, like a cat playing with a mouse it’s knocked flat, she looks at my face. My tears probably make me look terrible. She looks down, pretending to read the newspaper.
“If that’s what you think,” she says, “at least you’re consistent. But if you ask me, the left-wingers seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouths at the same time. They talk like they’re the protectors of democracy, but they don’t respect parliamentary government. They blame everything on the tyranny of the majority. They’re against rearmament. They call it a violation of the Constitution, but they don’t lift a finger to find jobs for members of the SDF. They aren’t honest, they only want to be ‘anti.’ They drink the sweet juice the mixer of Conservative government makes, but then they blame the government for the bitter. It’d be a good thing to let the progressives take power for once in the next election. Let them chase the Americans off the bases, let them destroy the SDF, and then let’s see if taxes go down and we get rid of unemployment. Let’s see if the economic growth rate soars. It’s not like I enjoy being despised as an SDF nurse, you know. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t mind being a progressive worker with a clean conscience . . .”
My tears ought to be proof enough that a dirty sense of shame is stuffed inside me like lead from my head to my asshole. My old man and brother, who’re ignoring our argument with utter indifference, also give me the feeling of being pushed into a gulf of explosive rage and misery. His son is in tears, and the old man just sits there bathing in complacency, with the newspaper spread in front of him. He thinks that’s how you show American-style liberalism.
Even at the private high school where he works, my old man’s proud of the fact that he doesn’t make the students do anything and never gets involved in their problems, all in the name of American-style liberal education. But I heard from one guy who transferred from my father’s school that the old man is hated and despised by his students. You can’t count on him to act like a teacher, they think. One time the papers made a stink about it, when about twenty students at his school were supposed to get guidance for some kind of sex trouble, but the old man was unflappable. He said it was his personal belief as a liberal that it isn’t permissible to restrict students’ behavior after school hours. That’s an irresponsible philosophy. Students my age are unstable and rebellious, but what we want most is a teacher who thinks about our problems and gives us a firm shoulder to lean on.
As for me, I sometimes wish he would get involved in my problems, even if he overdid it. At times like this, I don’t know whether he’s supposed to be American or liberal, but he is more like a stranger than a father.
My father doesn’t have any real schooling. He educated himself, struggling along in a lot of different jobs. After he got his license he made it to his present position. So now he does his dead-level best not to get involved with other people, trying to hold on to the position he’s got. He’s afraid of trouble from other people, of getting embroiled with others and falling back into the pits of society. Even in front of his own son he never takes off the armor of that instinct for self-protection. He doesn’t show any emotion, like he doesn’t want to show himself naked and lose his dignity. All he ever does is give out cold-blooded, irresponsible criticism. Even now, my old man is probably trying to take the most typical attitude of American-style liberalism . . .
§ § §
My sister is puffed up with victory and goes on muttering comments. I want to go and crawl into the shed that’s my little hideout so I won’t have to hear them. That’s absolutely the only thing I’m thinking about when I stand up. My heart is a swirl of angry humiliation and shame, and there’s no room in me to think about anything else.
I stand and take one step forward, and kick the tea table. There is a crash and the cups go flying and cold tea runs out, yellow like piss. For one instant, I hold my breath and look at my father. He doesn’t scream at me. Instead, he puts a cool, derisive smile on his lips. He never takes his eyes off the paper.
“Another rampage by the Student Coalition,” my sister says mockingly.
I explode. With a scream I give my sister a terrific kick to the forehead. She falls over on her back with her hands still reaching for the table. I see blood where her eyelid was cut by the shattered lens of her glasses. Her grotesque face turns gruesomely pale. Blood trickles from her eyelid, which swells tight over her eye, down to the remarkable elevation of her cheekbone. My mother comes charging out of the kitchen to take care of her.
I’m shocked by what I’ve done. I stand rooted to the floor, shaking. When I see that my toes are covered with my sister’s blood, burning pain and a crawling itch come climbing up my leg. My father slowly lowers his paper to his knees and looks up at me. I wait to be hit. I make up my mind not to resist, even if he beats me half to death.
But all my father can do is say in a composed voice, “You aren’t going to get your tuition money from your sister now, young man. You’ll just have to study hard and get into Tokyo University. The national universities are cheap and you have a good chance of getting a scholarship. But it’s not going to be enough to study hard, you’re going to have to study yourself into a breakdown. But then don’t we all reap what we sow? Either you get into Tokyo, or you’ll have to get a job. Unless you want to go to the Military Academy, but that’s a different story.”
I feel myself freeze, right to the guts. I turn my back to my father and the rest of them and go out into the garden. It’s a spring night. Underneath the dark sky, there’s another rose-colored sky. They form a double stratum. Sultry steam and dust rise from the earth up to the skies and form a screen against the light, giving back a chaotic reflection of the lights from the homes all across Tokyo.
I’ve made myself a personal hideout where I sleep, in a shed at the far side of our little garden. It’s like a bunk on a ship. There’s no light, so when I close the door, I have to grope my way to bed. I made this bunk in the shed so I can get away from my family and be by myself. My bunk takes up only a third of the six-square-meter shed. The rest is piled high with junk.
I head for my bunk, groping my way through the junk. I touch one pile that’s jumbled together between a desk and a chair. When I think of my bunk in the shed as a ship, this is the cabin. Useless as it is, I keep my eyes open in the dark. I open the desk drawer and take out a short-sword.
This is my weapon. I found it in the junk when I was building my bunk. It’s only thirty centimeters long, but it has a Raikokuga inscription. I looked it up once in the library, and it seems Raikokuga was a swordsman in the late Muromachi period. That was four hundred years ago.
I unsheathe the sword and grasp it with both hands. With all my might I thrust it into the darkness between the piles of junk, again and again. It must be blood lust, a feeling that fills the shed and thrills my heart. Giving myself to my muffled cries, I pierce the darkness with my Raikokuga sword. The day will come when I’ll stab the enemy to death with this Japanese sword. The enemy who I, like a man, will skewer.
That sudden realization comes to me with a premonition that’s brimming with fierce confidence. But where is this enemy of mine? My enemy, is he my father? Is my enemy my sister? Or the American soldiers from the base? The men in the SDF? The Conservative politicians? Wherever my enemies are, I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them, I say with the same low cries.
As I slaughter my enemies, who cling as fast to me in the dark as the lice in the seams of my shirt, I gradually regain my composure. I even regret hurting my sister. If she goes blind because of what I did to her, I’ll sacrifice my own eye to give her a corneal transplant. I have to pay for what I’ve done. Anybody who doesn’t pay for his crimes with his own flesh and blood is a mean, despicable bastard. I’m not some trash who doesn’t pay for what he does.
I shove the short-sword into the white wood sheath a
nd put it back in the drawer. Groping my way, I get undressed and lie down on my bunk. Lying on my back in the dark, eyes open and ears strained, I have the feeling that the voices and shapes of all kinds of evil wilderness spirits are closing in on me. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a bowl, and my tiny nakedness is exposed to their ferocious attacks.
I hear the sounds of a record playing in the main house. Something by the Miles Davis Sextet. My brother is crazy about modern jazz. I remember how, during the whole episode of me kicking my sister and my old man making his contemptuous remarks, my brother was kneeling in the middle of all those pieces of plastic and tubes of glue he’d spread out on the tatami, and went right on putting together that model airplane, ignoring all of us. Like when a camera registers some detail the photographer hasn’t noticed, I wasn’t aware of it until now, but I discover that my brother’s total lack of interest in us is neatly captured on the film of my memory. He’s probably completely forgotten about the little storm that took place only ten minutes ago. He’ll be there now, sitting in front of the record player, in raptures over his jazz, looking like a drug addict with his head wobbling on the end of his neck. Every few minutes he’ll peel off another thin layer of the hardened glue that’s stuck to the insides of his fingers, wondering whether he should’ve smacked me one, or maybe should’ve warned my sister not to get so carried away. The record player makes the bass and treble unnaturally loud, but to escape from his thoughts he turns the volume up another notch.
My brother was a genius, the hope of the family. Last year he graduated from the Liberal Arts Department of Tokyo University and got a job in a broadcasting company. At the university, my brother was a leader in his class. He worked like a maniac in the student festival. For the first few months after he joined the company he poured all his enthusiasm into his work as a producer on the special features team of a news program. He was doing a good job.
In those days I believed in my brother. I respected him. Things I couldn’t get from my old man, I got from my brother. But last summer he started complaining all the time about how tired he was. In autumn he took a week off. He went back to work after the holiday, but he was a changed man. He turned silent and polite, and developed a morbid fascination with modern jazz and a mania for building model airplanes. Since last fall, I haven’t heard him say one word about his work, and I haven’t heard him say anything about politics. Worse still, my brother, who used to be a passionate, confident, even eloquent speaker, hasn’t talked to me about anything for as much as five minutes since the start of the year. Last winter, he broke a promise he made to climb the tough face of Mt. Tanigawa with me. That left a bitter taste.
I see him now listening to his modern jazz, with his washed-out body like a drunkard’s, and much as I hate to admit it, I wouldn’t want to take on the smallest slope with him as my partner. I have to ask, brother, how have you come to this?
Since my brother changed, I’m completely alone at home. A lonesome Seventeen. At this age, I should be growing and changing with the understanding of the people around me, but nobody makes the slightest effort to understand me, in spite of the fact that I’m in a real pinch . . .
Faintly, but unmistakably, something is signaling to me from outside the shed. I’d forgotten. I sit up in bed and open the round window I cut in the wall like a porthole in a ship’s cabin. With an air of perfect composure the creature descends onto my cabin bed. Purring, it curls up on the blankets that cover my legs. This is Gangster, an alley cat that’s always raising hell in the neighborhood. My father and mother are both stingy. They’re the kind of people who tremble in fear at the thought that some pet animal might take the food out of their mouths. That means I can only keep pets that don’t cause food problems. Last year I kept a colony of fifty ants in a jar, but they didn’t make it through the winter. All I had left in my hands was the jar full of dirt, dug out in an amazing three-dimensional labyrinth. I was so sad I cried.
After that, I tamed Gangster. Gangster is a monster tomcat with tiger stripes. Since he’s an alley cat, I don’t have to worry about feeding him. He only comes home in the middle of the night to sleep, but it warms my heart that he came back this time when I was sunk in my own thoughts. I cluck my lips for him to come. Gangster pulls his heavy body up from the blankets on my legs and comes to drink my spittle. He’s the only one who’s celebrating my seventeenth birthday. The thought makes me sentimental. I push out a gob of spit with my tongue and let Gangster drink.
But Gangster is a real bastard, worse than Al Capone. He’s not about to get sentimental or anything of the kind. Even while he’s drinking my spit, he has his claws out far enough to dig into my chest, all the way through the blanket. He’s getting a sure footing, so he’s ready to make a get-away anytime he wants. I’ve never hugged Gangster. I can only leave it to him to come, and welcome him with my chest and knees. Even when he’s purring, with his eyes closed and his wet nostrils quivering like a beautiful woman, he’ll dash off in a mad rage if I pass my fingers over his body. Gangster doesn’t want to be tied down. I understand that, but still I can’t stand the way he goes back to the other end of the bed as soon as I run out of spit and my throat starts to get scratchy. It’s like I’m falling into a pit of loneliness.
I want to hold Gangster’s big tiger-striped body to stop his calm, composed departure from my chest. For one instant, Gangster and my hand meet with an intensity that sends off sparks. It’s like the sparks from an electric-powered train. I lick the back of my hand where Gangster’s claws have sliced open the flesh. I taste blood.
Gangster uses his head to send the porthole cover flying. He turns into a tiger-striped shark, dives into the stormy ocean, and disappears. The scratches hurt, but instead of getting mad at Gangster, I’m captured by admiration for him. He’s a perfect villain: a barbarian, the incarnation of evil, ungrateful and shameless, explosive, a lone wolf. He trusts nobody, and steals whatever he wants. And still he’s so dignified that he arouses a feeling of respect in me. As he walks in the dark, stalking his prey, he’s as beautiful as an unwavering monument, but at the same time he’s supple as rubber. When he glares at me I feel uneasy and apologetic. I even blush. Why hasn’t he got even one weak spot? Once I watched in horror as he killed and ate a white cat in his secret hideaway, but even then he was splendid in his composure and dignity.
I want to be a creature like Gangster, I think, but for that very reason I know it’s a wish that can’t come true without a miracle. The reason is that I have the weak brain of an albino pig in my head, and I’m self-conscious. As soon as I become conscious of myself, I feel the evil eyes of everybody in the world relentlessly staring at me. I move like a scarecrow. Every part of me revolts and starts to do exactly as it likes. I’m so ashamed I could die. The very fact that the sum of flesh and spirit which is me exists in this world makes me so ashamed that I want to die. It makes me wish I could live alone in a cave, like a Cro-Magnon man gone mad. It makes me want to put out the eyes of those others, or snuff myself out the same way.
Gangster wouldn’t be conscious of himself. He probably thinks his body is nothing more than dirty skin, flesh, bone, and excrement, so he’d never blush in awkwardness if some other looked at him. I envy the dreams of that small brain in Gangster’s big, solid head, spotted as it is with bald scars. A cat’s nightmares would be at most an ash-gray haze, but the eeriness of my bad dreams is worse than juice laced with potassium cyanide.
My eyes are used to the dark, so I close them. I’m afraid of seeing ghosts in the shapes and shadows of the junk in my ship’s cabin. With my eyes shut tight, I anxiously wait for the fear that sleep brings. It so happens that before I fall asleep, I’m captured by fear. It’s the fear of death. I’m so afraid of death that I feel the need to vomit. Honestly, every time I feel this crushing fear of death, I get a sick feeling in my chest and have to throw up. The death I fear is like this: After this short life, I’ll have to endure billions of years in unconsciousness, as a zero. This worl
d, this universe, and all the other universes, will go on being for billions of years, and all that time I’ll be a zero. For all eternity!
Every time I think about the endless progress of time after I die, I faint with fear. In my first physics class, the teacher talked about how there’s an infinitely distant non-world, in other words, a place where nothing exists. A rocket flying straight out of this universe would go there, but eventually it’d find its way back. All the time it’s disappearing straight into the distance, it’s actually on its way back. While the physics teacher was explaining this, I fainted. Fear made me faint. I screamed, and I dirtied myself with piss and shit.
When I woke up there was shame, and hatred for my stinking self, and there was the unbearable look of the female students, but worst of all, I couldn’t admit that what made me faint was the thought of nothingness and the infinity of physical space, which made me afraid of the eternity of time and the nothingness of my own mortal self. I desperately tried to make the teacher and my classmates think I’m epileptic.
Since then, I haven’t had any real friends to whom I could open my heart. On top of that, my nightmares make me taste the fear of leaving all alone on a journey into that endless distance. The dead don’t feel fear, because the dead aren’t conscious. But in my dreams I wake up alone on a distant star, so I’m always conscious of fear. It’s a sly invention of the dream distributor, full of evil intent.
Fear of death is closing in, bringing with it those nightmares. I struggle desperately to think about something else: WHEN I READ A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE ABOUT MICHIKO SHODA BEING CHOSEN CROWN PRINCESS, I THOUGHT MICHIKO WOULD GO TO A DISTANT STAR. I FELT OPPRESSED IN MY CHEST AND WEPT. I TREMBLED WITH FEAR. WHY WAS THAT? I WAS AFRAID MICHIKO WOULD DIE. I TAPED MICHIKO’S PICTURE TO THE WALL AND PRAYED THE MARRIAGE WOULD FAIL. IT WASN’T JEALOUSY. WHEN I SAW A YOUNGSTER THROW A STONE ON TV, AGAIN I FELT OPPRESSED AND WEPT. APPARENTLY THAT YOUNGSTER TOO HAD A PICTURE OF MICHIKO IN HIS CLOSET. THAT NIGHT I HAD A DREAM IN WHICH I WAS BOTH MICHIKO AND THE STONE-THROWING YOUNGSTER. WHY WAS THAT?