69 by Ryu Murakami Read Free Book Online

emperor system in postwar Japan, and argued about whether Che Guevara’s activities in Bolivia exemplified the fundamental aims of anarchism. Which is all a lie, of course. Munching rice crackers, I picked out Simon and Garfunkel’s “April Come She Will” on the guitar and explained how unhealthy it was for high school girls to remain virgins and how all the teachers at Northern High had given up on Otaki and Narushima because of their low IQs. The two factory girls, however, gave every indication of being the Politicos’ squeezes; they went with the futon and pillows and tissue paper. I’d already heard that Otaki and Narushima went around dropping hints that joining their committee was a sure way of getting laid. So it was true. The slimeballs. Why didn’t they take the cause more seriously? It made me sick, and so envious I could have wept.
    *
    I was just explaining that it wasn’t an immutable fact that throwing water on mating dogs would make them separate, that there were exceptions, and had the two factory girls cackling with laughter, when Narushima and Otaki and a string of seven of their followers showed up. One of them was a college student wearing a helmet. The others were Fuse and Miyachi, two creeps from the debating team; a guy named Mizoguchi, who’d come within an inch of being expelled for swiping someone’s bicycle; Masutabe, the owner of the eight-millimeter camera; and two other second-year students.
    Narushima looked at me and smiled uncomfortably. They’d both been in my class in our second year. Neither of them did well in school. I was going around spouting about the evils of imperialism—without really knowing what I was saying, of course—before either of them knew Lenin from lemonade. They’d been your average lousy students in those days, just beginning to resign themselves to the fact that they weren’t very bright. The Joint Campus Action Committee changed their lives: it showed them that even under-achievers could become stars. When they began sneaking leaflets into school from the Students and Workers Liberation Front at Nagasaki University, I still couldn’t take them seriously, and even now I knew they felt inferior to me. But what with the futon and pillows and tissue paper and the fact that they had other backward types to push around, they seemed a bit more confident nowadays.
    “What’s this?” Narushima said. “What brings you here, Yazaki?”
    “You want to join up?” Otaki asked. When he’d first come up with the idea of forming a JCA Committee at Northern High, I’d told him to count me out. I’d done a lot of soul-searching and decided that the time just wasn’t ripe yet for that sort of thing. No, scratch that. I turned him down because I didn’t like the idea of being punished by the school for joining a radical group, and, besides, I thought making films would be a shorter path to futons and pillows and tissue paper. But that was all beside the point now. This was for Kazuko Matsui. Bambi, my little fawn, liked men who rallied to the cause.
    “Yeah, I want to join,” I said.
    Otaki and Narushima were surprised at first, then delighted. They shook my hand and introduced me to the guy in the helmet, saying I was a brilliant theorist who’d been reading Marx and Lenin since my junior year. Helmet said theory alone wasn’t much use and gave me a look. He seemed like a jerk. I was dealing with nine people, though. I needed to take control in one swift move.
    “All right, then. Otaki, let’s hear your strategy for the struggle from here on,” I said.
    Otaki and Narushima looked at each other uncertainly. Fat chance they’d have anything like a course of action in mind. They didn’t have the brains or the balls to actually do anything.
    “Well, I don’t know if you’d call it a strategy, but we’re going to form a study group with people from Nagasaki U. and work on leaflets with the Peace for Vietnam Committee and try to get more recruits