Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu Murakami Read Free Book Online Page A

pinpointed the carotid artery like Tomii taught me. I needed all my concentration.”
    “Concentration…” Tomiyama Midori breathed the word like a sigh, her crow’s-feet twisting until they resembled the contour lines on a topographical map. “You don’t know what that word means to me. I’ve always had this image that one day someone—one of my friends—would speak that word while I sat there beside her with a dreamy look in my eyes. Now I feel like it’s finally happened…. This is a great victory.”
    Iwata Midori closed her eyes and nodded deeply any number of times.
    “You’re so right,” she said. “Concentration isn’t something women our age are familiar with, unless they follow some religion or whatever. I’m not even sure most women understand the meaning of the word…. But you should have seen the way I was dressed!”
    Takeuchi Midori crunched a slice of grilled stingray fin between her teeth and said, “Did my Janis run well for you?”
    Iwata Midori reached for a slice of her own.
    “‘Janis’?” she said.
    “My scooter.”
    “So I gathered, but why ‘Janis’?”
    “I used to really like Janis Ian.”
    WAH! Me too! Me too! Really? You too? Yes! I forget the titles, but she had a lot of sad songs, right? I’m ugly and maybe no one will ever love me but I know the true value of love , or I tried to make a boy notice me by pretending to call another boy, but I wasn’t fooling anybody —songs like that. She was so good at expressing the psychology of the average girl who doesn’t stand out….
    The Janis Ian symposium continued for some time. They were all getting seriously drunk when Iwata Midori muttered, “I thought I looked like the Moonlight Rider.”
    None of the others knew who this early TV hero was, but they all laughed.
    “I was wearing the sunglasses and everything.”
     
     
    When everyone had assembled at Nobue’s apartment and Kato reported the murder, saying that according to the evening news Sugioka had “died of a stab wound to the throat,” no one knew how to react. They resorted as usual to mindless laughter, but for once it felt and sounded strained. Everyone noticed this, but Ishihara and Nobue were the most sensitive to it. Nobue forced himself to stop laughing with a sudden, mournful, Ohhh, and made an extraordinary face—one that might have caused an impartial but morbidly depressed observer to finally end it all. Ishihara managed to stop laughing only by opening his already large eyes as wide as he could, stretching to the limit the skin and muscles around them and exposing a bloodshot-red Pollock-like pattern on the bulging sclera, making a face that might have given an impartial but acutely manic observer a terminal case of the giggles. But when the other three saw these faces, they gasped, swallowed, and fell silent.
    “Fools!” shouted Nobue, following the remark with a line he’d never uttered before in his life: “This is no time for laughing!”
    No one thought to ask any constructive questions, such as who might have killed Sugioka, or why; nor did any of them realize that it was simply their own sorrow and rage that had stifled the laughter. It was the first time any of them had experienced these emotions. Some part of Nobue’s unconscious was making an effort to find the proper facial expression for sorrow and rage, but owing to inexperience all it came up with was a sort of vermiculation of the facial muscles. Ishihara happened to see this and, to keep from bursting into laughter again, burst instead into song. He sang “Chanchiki Okesa,” which Kato had suggested as the theme song for tonight’s gathering.
    The others joined in, all thinking the same thought:
    We’re one voice short.
    II
     
    They sang “Chanchiki Okesa” for a long time, joined from the street at one point by a passing migrant worker, and before it was over they were all shedding tears. Sugioka had been merely an agreeable, lightweight, shifty, incomprehensibly