69 by Ryu Murakami Read Free Book Online Page A

and—”
    “Look,” I interrupted, “let’s barricade the school.”
    None of the high schools in Kyushu had ever been barricaded; it hadn’t even been done at Nagasaki U. For people in a small city in the wilds of western Kyushu, tear gas and barricades were like Godard and Led Zeppelin—the stuff of dreams. Everybody was blown away by the idea.
    “I’ve already decided the day. July 19, the last day of school. We’ll barricade the roof.”
    “That’s crazy,” Helmet said. “Totally off the wall.”
    “Listen, pal, you keep out of this. This involves Northern High, not college boys who’ve never got around to taking any action themselves.”
    Masutabe and the other second-year kids looked at me, their eyes aglow with new respect.
    “The problem is, we’re talking about an organization with, what, less than ten members. We let them know who’s behind it and we’ll be expelled, just when we’re getting started.”
    The more I talked, the more confident I felt.
    “Until we get more people on our side, we’ve got to keep it all secret. Go underground. We’ll barricade the place, but won’t hang around. Hit them, and withdraw. Guerrilla tactics.”
    I was really rolling now.
    “One of our tactics will be graffiti. We’ll cover the walls with slogans. And we’ll hang a giant banner from the roof. We’ll block off the stairs and the entrance to the roof so they won’t be able to take the banner down. We’ll do it all late at night, in true guerrilla style. And, by the way, we’re going to need a different name for the committee, otherwise Otaki and Narushima’ll be kicked out in no time. As long as there’s only a handful of us, we can’t let anything like that happen. Che wrote something to that effect in Guerrilla Warfare , I think.
    Nobody said anything. Adama alone was smiling and nodding. He was the only one who knew this was all for Lady Jane’s sake.
    “With a group this small, it won’t cost much to set it up. The reason we do it on the last day of school is that it’ll make it harder for them to investigate, and it’ll also have more impact on the students. They’ll be coming to school feeling great because summer vacation’s about to start. They’ll see the banner, and they’ll freak out. Then, during the vacation, since they won’t have much contact with the teachers—less chance of having their minds warped by reactionaries—they might even read some Marx or think about the war in Vietnam. ‘Smash the National Athletic Meet’—that’ll be one of our slogans. The Athletic Meet is a counterrevolutionary ritual devised by the government to keep us all in line. There’s a lot of bad feeling about it, too—girls are upset, for example, because all the practice for the opening ceremony interferes with studying for entrance exams. We use that. It’s easier to expand the scale of the struggle if there’s a concrete problem to focus on—one that people care about enough in private to fight against in public. Naturally we won’t advertise the fact that any of this was planned by people at Northern High, but we won’t say it was the work of outsiders, either. We’ll hint that it might have been an inside job—that’s about as far as we’ll go.”
    Otaki raised his hand and asked me to hold on a second.
    “What are we going to call ourselves, if not the JCA Committee?”
    I told him not to worry. “I’ve already thought of a name: Vajra . It’s Sanskrit for the gods of lust and anger. Pretty cool, eh?”
    “Far out!” shouted Masutabe, and everyone applauded. And that’s how I became the leader of Vajra, the new dissident movement at Northern High.

CLAUDIA CARDINALE
    A few days after the midterm exams, which I’d screwed up badly on, I was climbing the hill to the hideout with Adama and Iwase.
    “Ken-san,” Iwase said, “you remember last year when we went to Hakata?”
    “Sure. The time we spent the night in the movie theater, right?”
    He was talking about