Popular Hits of the Showa Era (11 page)

The Midoris were compelled to ask a question or risk being reduced to convulsive giggles.

“You really never flew in a plane before?”

“Dozens of times during parachute training, but that was on military transport planes. But the thing that still bothers me the most is…is she…she used to tell me I was a good singer too. Naturally I started to wonder if that wasn’t just another lie, and, well, I haven’t been able to sing ever since. So…would you mind if I sang a song right now?”

Oh, please! Please do! Please sing for us! We love listening to men sing!

The song was the late Ishihara Yujiro’s “Rusty Knife,” and Sakaguchi’s singing was so bad that it gave the lyric a strange new pathos and poignancy. Listening to his version, Suzuki Midori was reminded that no one ever said it would be easy to go on living in this world; Takeuchi Midori pondered the noble truth that nobody’s life consists exclusively of happy times; Henmi Midori vowed to remember that it’s best to keep an open heart and forgive even those who’ve trespassed against us; and Tomiyama Midori had to keep telling herself that hitting rock bottom is in fact the first step to a hopeful new future. Sakaguchi was gripping the mike in both hands, his eyes were closed, and sweat dripped from his forehead as he sang all three verses and choruses to the bitter end. The freakish mother-and-child duo behind the counter stood at attention, watching Sakaguchi’s performance through eyes that shone with a mixture of unnatural fervor and bottomless despair, like members of the Housewives’ Civilian Defense Corps seeing off a squadron of young kamikaze pilots.

By the time Sakaguchi had finished, the Midoris were all perspiring profusely beneath their clothing.

“Here
she is,” Sakaguchi said, taking a large tennis bag from the trunk of his car and casually extracting something that looked like a telescope and was only a little longer than a tennis racket.

“It’s called your M72 LAW, which stands for Light Anti-tank Weapon. Comes loaded with a sixty-six-millimeter HEAT rocket. Exceptional killpower, and it’s lightweight, so even a lady can use it. Disposable type, good for a single use only. The American forces accidentally left a pile of these behind after the joint maneuvers a couple of years ago. It’s been properly maintained, and I think it’s your best bet.”

I

The
Midori Society didn’t leap into action the moment they’d got their hands on the rocket launcher but began holding a new series of study groups to research guerrilla and terrorist tactics. All four of them had regular jobs, so the meetings had to be held at night. Meanwhile, they continued to track the movements of the enemy camp, conducting regular surveillance on Ishihara, Nobue, and the others.

Saturday night, another study group. Suzuki Midori’s apartment. Only three of them were present, as Henmi Midori was busy staking out Nobue’s building.

“All right, then. Does anyone have any questions or opinions about the things we went over last night?”

Chairwoman Suzuki sipped her green tea and looked at Takeuchi and Tomiyama in turn. They had all decided to refrain from drinking alcohol at these meetings. Especially on Saturdays, when the meetings often lasted into the wee hours, alcohol would only invite drowsiness and impede concentration.

Takeuchi Midori raised a hand. “I’m reading the greatest book!” she said. She was drinking a cup of thick espresso, which she’d brought in her own thermos. “It’s by this famous general from the Republic of Korea named Paik Sun-yup, and it’s called
Anti-Guerrilla Warfare
. Three nights ago we talked about
Guerrilla Warfare
by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, right? Well, Che’s book is a sort of manual written from the guerrilla’s point of view, of course, but Paik Sun-yup writes from the other side. He was a specialist in suppressing communist guerrillas from North Korea. And he—”

Suzuki Midori interrupted her.
Hang on a second
, she said.

“Takee, are you using less makeup than usual? You’re not even wearing any lipstick.”

Takeuchi Midori blanched and gave a little gasp. Her hand darted into the purse beside her, and in less time than it takes to say so, she was checking her face in the little round mirror of her compact.

“I’m sorry,” she said with honest contrition. “I didn’t realize…”

“I’m not saying it just to get on your case, believe me.”

Suzuki Midori took a leisurely sip of her green tea. She’d recently acquired a keen appreciation for how economical tea and coffee were compared to things like brandy and wine and whiskey. In the past, she had often mindlessly gulped down wine that cost five or six thousand yen a bottle at Seijo Ishii, whereas a hundred-gram bag of even the finest green tea from Yame or Uji was under three thousand yen and would easily last ten days. Besides, the caffeine kept you sharp. Leaders of all the world’s guerrilla and terrorist groups have said to drink tea rather than wine, and now she understood why.

“I’ve made the same sort of mistake myself any number of times and had to hurry into the nearest powder room to fix it, so I’m just speaking from experience. Didn’t Guevara and Marighella both emphasize this very point: that if something’s important, it’s worth rehearsing and reiterating again and again? That’s why I keep harping on these things. Going light on the makeup is a habit you can fall into without even realizing it, but people around you are quicker to notice such things than you might imagine. The last thing we want is for people to think there’s anything suspicious about our behavior, right? That’s why, even though we’ve all got so much else to do with our time these days, we keep meeting once a week at the karaoke club in front of the station, and that’s why when we buy these reference works, each of us goes to the trouble of traveling to bookstores in distant towns, putting on aprons or dressing in college-girl fashions, or wearing other things we’d never really wear, like those purple jeans of mine. These are the kinds of details we have to keep working on, never letting down our guard. After all, a group of women our age buying manuals on guerrilla warfare and terrorism at their local bookstore would be pretty conspicuous, right? Didn’t Marighella and Action Directe’s Nathalie Ménigon both warn against exactly that sort of thing? We’ve lost two of our comrades, Nagii and Wataa, so we have to make sure there’s no trail of evidence leading back to us when we exact revenge on the dirtbags responsible.”

Takeuchi Midori was nodding in agreement as she peered into her compact and carefully applied her red Chanel lipstick. “How’s this?” she said when finished. Given the thumbs-up, she smiled and said, “I’ve got to be more careful!” Perhaps it was partly because of the lipstick, but that smile was unlike any she’d ever exhibited before, and the other two Midoris were mildly stunned.

“Takee!” Chairwoman Suzuki gasped. “What is with the sexy smile? Even
my
heart just skipped a beat!”

“Seriously, Takee,” said Tomiyama Midori. “Do people at work tell you you’re looking especially hot these days?”

Takeuchi Midori bowed her head, blushing, and said that in fact they did.

“My section chief asked me if I’d found a new lover or something. It was strange. I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.”

“You
have
found a new lover,” Suzuki Midori said, and tilted her head toward the far corner of the room. The M72 was there, closed up inside its outer tube. “But back to what you were saying, Takee. What’s so good about this Korean general’s book? Did you find anything we can use?”

“Well, nothing in particular, I guess, but…” Takeuchi Midori leafed through her underlined copy of
Anti-Guerrilla Warfare
. “Oh, wait. For example: ‘Japan has no history of guerrilla warfare.’ I thought that was worth noting. And this one: ‘A fascinating thing about human beings is that the more they begin to disintegrate psychologically, the more they tend to fall back on custom and habit.’ Well, just things like that…I guess it’s not much help, is it? No really practical tips or anything….”

She closed the book and shrugged, still wearing that sexy half-smile. Suzuki Midori and Tomiyama Midori were wondering what it was that had effected this transformation in her—and, indeed, in themselves as well. They had both had similar experiences at their respective offices.
Tomiyama-san, Suzuki-san, you’re looking awfully pretty lately
….

It was a funny thing. Until not so long ago, the Midori Society had often taken up issues like How to Find a Good Man—a “good man” meaning one who was as wealthy as possible (if only to keep things from getting messy later on), and presentable, and who’d take you to fashionable restaurants and clubs and hotels and make you the envy of all your friends. The original six members had always shared their romantic close encounters and near misses.
Guess what happened to me! I was walking down the street today and a gentleman in a Bentley pulled up to the curb and spoke to me
, or
The other day this younger man in my office who’s the idol of all the younger women suddenly came up to me and started talking about something that had nothing to do with work, and I’m afraid I got a little flustered, but
…There had always been plenty of stories, but in the end none of them had ever gotten anywhere in these little adventures. In those days, Suzuki Midori was thinking, it must have been as if they had the words
STARVED FOR A MAN
stamped on their foreheads. The funny thing was that as soon as you stop needing men, they suddenly started finding you desirable.

Some hours later, Tomiyama Midori looked up at the wall clock and said, “Shouldn’t Hemii be back by now?” It was three-thirty a.m., and the windows of Suzuki Midori’s living room were white with condensation. The muggy rainy season, the brutal sun of midsummer, and the hot days of early autumn were all far behind them now. It was mid-November, the time of year when a girl’s fancy turns to warm sweaters and hot soups and bonfires. “She must be awfully cold, out there all night like that.” The three of them sat back to drink their tea and espresso while they waited. As it turned out, the news Henmi Midori would bring would be well worth the wait.

It was a little after four when they heard a taxi stop outside. Takeuchi Midori jumped up and went to the window. “It’s Hemii,” she said, and the three of them went to the the front door to greet her. She looked cold and exhausted, but her first words were a breathless, “We’ve got ’em!” The other three insisted she come in and drink something hot before delivering her report. Green tea? Coffee? Tea with milk?

“The thing is, we can’t attack them at the apartment they gather at, right?” Henmi Midori said after pouring some whiskey into her coffee, stirring, taking a swallow, and pronouncing it good. “You can only use the rocket launcher if you have twenty meters of clear space behind you—otherwise you’ll blow yourself up with the backblast. So I watched the apartment tonight, just like I did last Saturday, but last Saturday, like I told you, they all got into a big Toyota van type of thing and drove off somewhere and I couldn’t follow them because I didn’t have a car. So tonight I parked my Accord nearby, and at about midnight these guys—‘guys’ doesn’t seem like the right word, but this creepy group that makes you wonder how five such weird-looking characters ever found each other—they got into the van and drove off again. Well, where do you think they went? They headed straight for Izu and stopped at a place on the shore above Atami. And what do you think they did there? Get this. They put on a big karaoke show, just for themselves, in the middle of the night, in a lonely cove with a big concrete breakwater….”

II

“A
CONCRETE BREAKWATER!”

Suzuki Midori inadvertently launched three tiny flecks of spittle as she echoed Henmi Midori’s words at many times the volume. She snatched the bottle of whiskey from the table, fumbled with it, splashed some whiskey into her cup, and drank it down straight. Takeuchi Midori and Tomiyama Midori followed suit, making it like a scene from an old western movie. Takeuchi Midori was the first to speak. Her breath was hot and whiskey-scented.

“That means we can kill them all at once….”

Three
more weeks went by. In the Nobue-Ishihara group, spirits were on the decline. Enthusiasm had reached its apex the night Yano reported his execution by Tokarev of Iwata Midori, and the energy of the group had been on a slow slide down ever since. The gradual advent of cold weather had played a part as well, but their last Karaoke Blast on the beach had been a listless and dismal affair, and though tonight they were gathering for the first time in three weeks, each was in his own world, eating or drinking vacantly from his own private stash. No one had brought much. Nobue had taken his last few cans of beer from the fridge and set them at his end of the table; Ishihara laid out the two jars of One Cup Sake he’d bought at a vending machine somewhere; Kato plopped down a bottle of domestic wine, a sticker reading
¥800
still attached; and Yano pulled out a miniature bottle of Early Times. Each of them was now consuming his own contribution, but that left Sugiyama, who’d brought nothing, in a state of lonesome despair that expressed itself plainly enough on his drooping face, the skin of which wouldn’t have looked out of place on a dried fish. Nobue, sitting right across from Sugiyama with five cans of beer before him, didn’t even notice that the latter was sending him and everyone else anguished
what-about-me?
looks as they drank their One Cup Sake and domestic wine and mini-bourbon, and of course it never occurred to Nobue to ask Sugiyama if he’d like a beer. The skin of Sugiyama’s face flushed salmon-pink with anger, and he glared fiercely at Nobue for a good three minutes but was unable to detect any glint of comprehension in the other’s eyes. He thought about kicking the table over and storming out but quickly remembered that there was nothing to do back at his one-room, six-mat apartment, where provisions amounted to a sake bottle with about a millimeter of liquid remaining, two eggs he’d bought the previous month, a jar of barley tea he’d brewed during the summer that now supported a floating colony of white mold, and a torn package of instant yaki-soba. He stood up, still wearing the same woebegone expression and nodding and grumbling inscrutably, “What a nightmare—America out of Somalia!” as he made his way around to where Nobue sat. “Right, Nobu-chin?” he said. Nobue looked up at him blankly and said, “What?” And Sugiyama, with all the speed of a cockroach disappearing behind a cupboard, snatched one of the cans of beer. Before Nobue’s startled “Hey!” even escaped his lips, Sugiyama had ripped open the pop-top and was noisily gulping the contents. “Mm-hm, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right,” he muttered, ambling back to his seat as if nothing had happened.

No one was putting any thought into the question of why the general energy level was so low, but it didn’t help that snacks were also in short supply. Nobue had extracted from the fridge a long, vacuum-sealed, fish-meat sausage with the legend
MARUHA
written vertically down the length of the wrapper, an item that hangs in convenience stores like a relic of the nineteenth century, but it never occurred to him to slice it up into little pucks and hand them around. Instead, he squeezed a tip-of-the-pinky-sized dollop of mayonnaise onto one end and laughed for no apparent reason—
Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!
—before biting off about two centimeters, peering at the toothmarks in the new end of the sausage and laughing again, then carefully adding another dollop of mayonnaise and repeating the sequence. Ishihara had apparently arrived hungry: along with his One Cup Sake, he’d brought three croquettes in convenience-store packaging—a styrofoam tray sealed with industrial-strength plastic wrap. Nobue hadn’t set out any chopsticks or sauce, however, and the obvious fact that one couldn’t eat croquettes without chopsticks or sauce somehow failed to penetrate Ishihara’s enervated brain. He just sat there playing with the unopened package, making little dents in the taut bubble of plastic wrap with his index finger. Normally even this level of mindless diversion would have triggered audible risibility, but tonight, what with his empty stomach and overall lack of vitality, he hadn’t so much as chuckled. It was extremely unusual for someone of Ishihara’s psychological makeup to go any length of time without laughing. Not even being beaten half to death could keep him from erupting with meaningless laughter—and this is no mere conjecture. Late one night some three years before, he’d been walking through Shinjuku’s Central Park, drunk, and had jumped up on a park bench and begun singing Japanese pop songs at the top of his lungs. When he ignored the repeated cries of “Quiet!” and “Shaddup!” issuing from the darkness on all sides, three middle-aged homeless men approached, dragged him down, pounded him to a pulp, and then, with tears of rage streaming down their cheeks, made a sincere attempt to strangle the life out of him. Homicides of just this sort are not uncommon in places like Shinjuku and Shibuya, but Ishihara survived. Symptoms of cyanosis had already begun to appear on his face, in all their blue and purple glory, when he’d suddenly started laughing so uncontrollably that his startled attackers backed off. Nobue, on first hearing this story, had expressed amazement that anyone could manage to laugh at a time like that. “I don’t know why, but it was really funny,” Ishihara had said, and laughed again at the recollection. “There was this flood of light and sound that was like from a different world, and it cracked me up, and I figured it would be a waste not to laugh, because if you laugh you feel better even if you don’t have any reason to. But mainly I just didn’t want to miss a good opportunity.”