As soon as I do, I’m sorry. I see that I’m narrow-minded, and fall into self-loathing. I really am alone and insecure, as helpless and easily hurt as a crab that’s just changed into a soft new shell.
When the bell rings again, I have to go back to the classroom. This time it’s the mathematics test. The mere thought of it makes me tremble with fear. My math answers are even worse than my disgraceful performance in Japanese. I listen to the bell signaling the end of the period in a daze. I feel like I want to cry. But when I think about what’s coming this afternoon, I realize that bad as it was, this morning was actually the easy part.
§ § §
The test of general physical ability is held in the afternoon. Physical education is my worst subject. When I think about my body, it stops me in my tracks. The thought of having an erection while I’m wearing nothing but my gym shorts makes me tremble with shame. Practically paralyzed with fear, I have to run the eight hundred meters. And I have to do it on the big sports field, in full view of the female students and everybody on the street!
The big field is behind the school building. It faces a shopping street across a strip of pavement. Adults and kids with time to kill lean on the low fence and watch the field. They aren’t there to appreciate the beauty and power of sports. They gather only to enjoy themselves by laughing at and ridiculing the pratfalls of the students. They can laugh at the agony we endure when the coach makes us run. For that one moment they can smile and forget the contemptuous and demanding ways in which they are treated by their company bosses and customers.
We boys are gathered in the middle of the track on the big sports field. As we do our warm-ups, we wait for the physical education director to come out of his office with his stopwatch and his little black book. We’re like a noisy herd of cattle, some of us scared, some of us brimming with courage, some like cats enjoying the late spring sunshine, lazing, without a thought in our heads. The honor students are debilitated from studying for their entrance exams. They’re blinded and confused by the light. You can see that they’re terrified by the long distance they have to run. They look pale. But I think it’ll be easier for them to get through this grueling, humiliating race than for me, since the clique they belong to knows they’re a bunch of worn-out book-worms.
Then we have the track stars, who’re so full of energy they take it on themselves to call time for the warm-ups. One in particular holds a whole handful of the year’s best city records. His attitude is even worse than what the honor students showed in class. He stops his jumping for a second, shakes his head over his ankle, and then goes back to jumping twice as high as anybody else. It’s all a big act, but it’s enough to make me pretty jealous. It pricks my feeling of inferiority.
Some guys are just lazing in the sunshine, not putting any effort into their warm-ups. In class they were the same. They look down on their own abilities, so it doesn’t bother them to be looked at. They have the shamelessness of dilettantes.
I’m not like anybody else in my class. I am alone, and probably more frightened than anyone. I only hope it’s over soon. I try not to think about it too much.
The small field bulges like a tumor from the larger field, in the space between the school buildings. The girls are playing volleyball there. They’re wearing headbands and ungainly bloomers that make them look like ducks. Several girls are standing at the side of the court, still dressed in their skirts, watching the game with the fixed, dull-witted look of sick animals. They’re menstruating, I think with contempt. That’s a public secret, and everybody knows.
Every week, Shintoho enthusiastically notes the names of the girls who watch from the sidelines. He keeps a chart of the menstrual cycles of every girl in school. He knows who’s safe according to the Ogino rhythm method, and he makes a point of telling them what days they can do it. “I’m available any time,” he adds to everybody, “so if you’ve made up your mind to get rid of that treasure, just give me a call.” He’s built himself quite a reputation that way. The girls don’t hate him for it, and it makes him popular with the boys.
If I did anything with a girl, I’d be an outcast from the very next day. I wouldn’t have the courage to show my face at school. Why is it that only he can get away with anything he wants to do? And he’s the only guy in our class with experience. He’s like the devil in a play I saw when I was a child, thanks to the church Sunday Club. God and man have to suffer, work, and repent, while the devil alone lounges around shouting obscenities, profanities, and lies as he enjoys the banquet.
How I’d like to play the devil’s part!
But what on earth would be the devil’s part in times like these? What kind of job would he get after graduation? I think about this, panting for breath from doing my warm-ups. Would that be the devil’s job in this present society that is so incomprehensible to me . . . for example, the job of poisoner-devil?
As usual, that Shintoho is entertaining everybody in sight. “Damn, but I’m in a mess. The nuclear test in Nevada last week must’ve caused a disruption. I’m going to have to revise my charts. Or maybe Miss Emiko Sugi is suffering diarrhea.”
I listen hard and give a quick look at the small sports field, like almost all the other boys. A large, white face that’s just like Sugi is looking our way. Of all the gloomy, skirt-wearing girls, only Sugi is looking at us, with her head held high. My chest feels warm. I release my hot breath in time to the sighing of all the other boys.
Each class has its queen. She’s not only beautiful, but also possesses an overwhelming dignity and a coquettish charm. She’s the envy of all the other girls, and drives the boys crazy. Sugi is the queen of our class. I’m one of the poor devils who writes love letters to her, and then tears them up before he gets up the courage to give them to her. With Sugi staring at me, I feel all over again the pain of the sad figure I cut. If she were a girl in bloomers and I could find the audacity to stare back at her fat white thighs, I might get the best of my shame. But a girl firmly wrapped in a skirt doesn’t have a weak point anywhere. There’s nothing I can take advantage of to make her wince, and let me transform myself from the watched into the watcher. Still, it’s that Sugi. . .
“Why do you think Miss Emiko Sugi is so interested in us?” Shintoho asks. His feeling of triumph makes his repulsive, pimple-swollen face shine like the sun. To give me the final blow, he cries out, “I tossed a mystery note into that girl’s desk. Guys who jerk off fall flat as soon as they start, so she’ll know right away. At this very minute, Miss Sugi is about to discover a Kinsey Report fact of human life. Abstainers! Don’t give up!”
The physical education teacher comes galloping over to put a stop to the commotion. Then the test starts, the eight-hundred-meter run. We’re supposed to do two laps around the four-hundred-meter track in groups of ten. The starting line is on the side away from the small field, which lets us start and finish as far as possible from the girls, but it puts us right under the noses of the bunch who’re watching from the street. As soon as the test begins and the first group starts running, the eager audience swarms to the starting line. They sit themselves on the fence and get ready to watch our down-home horse race.
I stand at the starting line. Lanes are drawn in lime on the sun-baked ground. They look like they go on forever. The starting gun sounds. When I start running, jostling against the bare arms of the boys beside me, I trip, and before long my chest aches and I’m panting. From the start, the runners sprint with incredible, cold-blooded speed. Life is hell, I think, and I’m a slave, gasping for air with the devil forcing me on. He’s dressed in spotless training pants and a baseball cap, and he clutches a starter’s pistol in his hand. I run without a clue, trying to escape this hellish world, but there’s no way out.
Before long the other runners have left me behind. Far in back, I run alone. My legs are heavy, like in bad dreams when I’m chased by a monster. My brain feels like it’s on fire. I realize that I’m groaning out loud as I run. When I pass the girls I force myself t
o run by the book, chest thrown out, head held high, knees up, but the effort back-fires as soon as I try it. I can’t thrust out my chin or swing my arms. My wrists dangle below my waist, and I can barely drag my feet along the ground. I stagger along, groaning one long, unbroken groan. Still, I finish the first four hundred meters. When I make it back to the starting line, I try to show a smiling face to the other boys who’re waiting their turn, pretending everything’s fine, but the skin of my face is thick and stiff and refuses to move. All I can manage is a sad pout, with only my eyes moving in an aimless stare.
“You!” the coach roars. “Act like a man. And stop that pigeon-toed dog-trot!”
From the street a child’s voice follows me.
“Look how white he is! He must be sick!”
That’s how slow I’m running. Everybody is watching my sad, farcical stumbling. All the others in the world stare at the filthy Seventeen as he runs his pigeon-toed dog-trot with his jaundiced lips and tears of agony pouring down his pallid cheeks. They smile with derision.
The Others are neat, dry, and gallantly composed. I am a disgrace. I’m dizzy and mawkish, awkwardly frightened, puffy fat, and reeking of sweat like I’m rotting away even as I run this miserable race. The others slobber on themselves like dogs, they puff out their bellies as they watch me, but I know that what they really see is the naked me, the me that’s red-faced and trembling with fear, me addicted to obscene fantasies, me masturbating, me anxious, the me who’s a coward and liar. As the Others look at me and laugh, they scream out, “We know all about you. You’re done in by the poison of self-consciousness, done in by your budding sexual desires. You’re rotting away from the inside. We can see all the way through to your indecent fetid crotch! You’re nothing but a lonely gorilla, masturbating in front of our very eyes!”
I’ve made it to the six-hundred-meter mark, and now the girls are watching me again. I pray that I’ll have a heart attack and die, but that kind of miracle doesn’t happen. Instead, I finally have to accept the fact that my wide-awake self-consciousness roars like a bear in a heat of shame.
I stagger across the finish line a good hundred meters behind the other runners. Just as my pathetic relief at finishing the race dampens my breast with a liquid warmth, the coach smiles a wry smile and points behind me. I think I’m not going to smile, but I look back, wearing a vague little grin, and discover the long black trail I’ve made by pissing in my pants.
Like a storm in a forest, the sneering laughter of a whole world of Others howls around me! I’ve finished this ugly eight-hundred-meter race in utter desperation, giving it every atom of sincerity I possess, and this is the cruel welcome I receive. I may be a poor, ugly Seventeen, but the world of Others has treated me with cruelty, with more cruelty than even I deserve.
The coldness of my wet pants makes me sneeze. In total exhaustion, I sink into the pit of shame. I make up my mind to stop hanging on and trying to find some good in this world of Others. Why? Probably because if I don’t kindle an enemy spirit, if I don’t rake up hatred for them, I’m afraid I’m going to break down and cry.
3
I’m alone, waiting for the train. There was a student council meeting after the physical education trials, but I didn’t have the courage to go.
A voice calls out from behind me. “Hey, you want to come along and be a Sakura for the right-wingers? They need an audience to make them look good, you know.”
I turn around to see Shintoho approaching me. His face is serious. He must think I’m going to punch him or something, the way he shrinks back for a moment, but then he spills out a flood of words that loosens me up.
“Don’t get mad, man. I didn’t feel like going to that stupid meeting either, you know. I happened to see you at the ticket gate, so I came after you. You really have guts, you know. I changed my mind about you. What you did I could never have done. Coaches are bastards anyway, but that one’s the worst. We aren’t horses, are we? Why would we want to run eight hundred meters? But he makes us, that tyrant. People are saying he’s pissed off because that good-looking music teacher dumped him. I got pretty sick of it too, running like that. Everybody was happy when you pissed. We should’ve all pissed. That would’ve put that dictator in his place.”
Shintoho realizes that his talk is getting on my nerves.
“There’s this rightist group,” he says. “I sometimes go to see what they’re up to. They give speeches from a platform in the square in front of Shinbashi Station. That’s why they need Sakura. Those in school uniforms are especially good. You get ¥500 a day for it. What do you say? You want to be a Sakura? I’m not kidding, you know.”
Shintoho must be intimidated by me. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him make such a serious face, or heard him make such an earnest plea. When I don’t answer, half out of doubt about whether to believe him, he starts giving me his personal history.
“Me, I’m not exactly what you’d call a right-winger. I’m more of an anarchist, a new kind of anarchist like the beatniks. Still, it makes me mad to hear the progressive parties and the Communists bad-mouthing the SDF You once defended the SDF yourself, didn’t you? You said your sister was a SDF nurse. I liked that. I’m a coward, so I didn’t say anything about it, but actually my old man is in the SDF too. He’s a colonel in the infantry. That’s why I’d like to smash the progressives and the Commies. If the Right wants to do that for me, then the Right gets my support. So, sometimes I do drop in on them. You’ve probably heard of the Imperial Way Party. The boss is Kunihiko Sakakibara. During the war he was in a special brigade in Mukden. Nobody in Japan tells him what to do. Since the war in Manchuria, he’s been a personal friend of Prime Minister Oka.”
Shintoho is obviously a lot more naive than I thought The naive Shintoho is after all a complete nobody. I lighten up. A feeling of superiority flits past me like a bird. I catch it and don’t let go.
Just then the train rolls in. I give Shintoho a nod, and we get on the train together, I couldn’t stand to go home and be alone. Being with somebody for whom I feel nothing but contempt seems safer for my wounded pride than being by myself. I can relax now. It’s like escaping from your insecurity by getting drunk on cheap booze.
After we’re on the train, Shintoho’s attitude changes completely. He sinks into a dead silence. Apparently he’s going to treat the fact that we’re going to be Sakura at a right-wing speech with secrecy worthy of a nuclear spy. Maybe he’s even convinced that this is just as important. The bullshit artist Shintoho probably hasn’t ever told anybody that he’s mixed up in some right-wing group. If he did, half the student body would know about it by tomorrow.
The movement of the train bounces us around to the point where I actually feel my chest touching Shintoho’s pimply chest. His filthy hair, where the dirt seems to be kneaded together with pomade, touches my chin. It makes me realize that I’m a lot taller than Shintoho. I’d never noticed before. Odd as it may seem, the realization cheers me from the depths of my heart. We stay like this, silently rubbing chests, all the way to Shinbashi Station.
The platform is strangely deserted for a station in the city at three in the afternoon. As I walk along, my shoulders and arms touching Shintoho’s, I suddenly feel like I’m an accomplice in some sexual adventure. Later I will often recall this occasion. An event of the utmost importance for the future direction of my life is crystallizing before my very eyes. At least, that’s the profound feeling I have, here in Shinbashi Station on this late spring afternoon. An old railway employee is sweeping the platform with an old-fashioned bamboo broom. With his rational outsider’s eyes, that must be how he sees us: a couple of high school students, pale-faced and pimply, on our way to some sexual prank.
The speech by Kunihiko Sakakibara of the Imperial Way Party is a disaster. That much is clear, as soon as I enter the square where he’s speaking. Not a soul is paying any real attention to the raging old lunatic on the platform. He simply goes on raving, incoherent and alone, like he doesn’t
expect anybody to listen. Maybe Sakakibara wants to be the first man in history to stand up, single-handedly, to the noise of the incoming trains at Shinbashi. As he screams away he’s not even looking at the audience. He’s gazing at the trains on the elevated tracks. Sakura like me and Shintoho are supposed to clap and cheer, but the imperturbable Sakakibara doesn’t give us a chance, so we just hang around. The roaring human lion with the dangerous look on his face seems to have completely forgotten about the Sakura he hired. From behind the backs of some irresponsible bystanders, me and Shintoho, more out of curiosity than anything else, are observing the lunatic. That a man can be as dignified and aggressive as a trooper, while he’s roaring like this against the ridicule and indifference of so many others, is a startling concept. The platform where he’s speaking doesn’t give him as much as one decoration to protect his flanks. There’s only a single Japanese flag, dangling lifelessly from its bamboo pole. On the two sides of the platform stand young men in black shirts and armbands, and some older men in suits. But even they seem to be more interested in the horse race bulletin board on the opposite side of the square than in Kunihiko Sakakibara. Probably they’ve got money riding on a horse named Imperial Way, in hopes of winning the big one.
Then one of the other Sakura develops a new enthusiasm for his work. He’s a remarkably skinny, dreary man with a stoop. Clasping his knees, he’s sitting in the middle of the concrete benches that face the platform. Sakakibara has to stop for a minute to push a little spittle into his overworked throat. As he does, he stares into space as if the forced interruption in his ravings fills his heart with regret. During that brief moment, the Sakura breaks into wild applause and shouts of encouragement. This single person’s frenzy attracts the attention of some others who’re loafing around like they’ve sworn on their old man’s dying bed to never get involved in anything and never abandon the position of onlooker. They circle around, looking for some kind of scandal. Me and Shintoho hurry toward the center of the square before the circle closes, and grab a seat on the last bench. After all, we’re Sakura.