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

cheerful, knife-loving wanker who was remarkable only for having a new Mac and barely knowing how to use it. None of them had ever thought of him as anything other than a deviant of some sort, but now they all agreed that at least he’d had an ear for a really good song. As they sang, they did what Japanese men have done since time immemorial when enraptured with a tune, but rather than tapping ceramic rice bowls with chopsticks, they rapped out a beat with plastic forks and knives and spoons on styrofoam plates and containers. The resulting sound wasn’t a nostalgic ting ting , therefore, but a dry, emotion-free pash pash , like synthesized drums. And when they’d finally finished singing, they all sat there talking about what a great song “Chanchiki Okesa” was.
    “It’s a sorrowful song, yet cheerful.”
    “It makes you feel that, even if there’s no hope whatsoever, you still want to go on living.”
    “You get the image of someone who has to crawl to survive, but also of a beautiful bird spreading its wings to fly.”
    “I wonder if perhaps the most striking aspect of this song isn’t its refusal to fit into any particular category. It’s not classical or jazz or hip-hop or house. If anything, it’s closest to salsa.”
    “There’s something in the chorus and refrain that makes you feel that even in these difficult times, true inspiration must still exist. And yet it seems to transcend the times and to issue a challenge to us when we decline to act in any given situation.”
    Such was the general meaning behind various remarks the five exchanged over the course of an hour or so. To transcribe some of these remarks directly:
    “I dunno, I’m like, I feel kinda sad about everything, kinda like after yanking myself off to the lady on that children’s show Open! Ponkikki .”
    “If you were drinking at some oden stand you’ve never been to before, and some homeless guy comes by and sneaks a skewer of oden, and a thug with no pinky finger beats him half to death, this is the kind of song you’d want to be listening to.”
    “At this convenience store I always go to, in the place where they keep the tofu and potato salad and stuff, there’s always three or four cockroaches running around, and if there’s three of ’em I say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, YMO!’ and if there’s four of ’em I go, ‘And now…the Beatles!’ and for some reason every time I say that they wriggle away like sperm cells or somethin’.”
    “Assholes call this ‘traditional music,’ or even, like, ‘Japanese folk music,’ but really it’s more like reggae or salsa, innit?”
    “It’d be great to listen to this song with, like, a much older woman—you know, a ‘mature lady,’ like they used to call themselves in the telephone clubs—while you’re boning her standing up.”
    The last comment on the subject was Kato’s.
    “Sugioka said that when he first heard this song, his father was beating the shit out of him.”
    This brought on a sudden silence, and they all communed with their thoughts for a while. And then Sugiyama finally came out with the question someone had to ask.
    “Who do ya think killed him?”
     
     
    Three days later, Nobue and Ishihara visited the scene of Sugioka’s murder, where they decided, for lack of any better ideas, to relieve themselves as Sugioka had so often done. They had just pulled down their zippers when a female voice said, “Stop that!” Replying with a simultaneous, reflexive, Hai! , they looked back over their shoulders. Standing there was a junior college girl who might have been constructed exclusively from the more toxic components of some gastrointestinal disease. Nobue and Ishihara were both the type of men who tend to regard all females, from toddlers to great-grandmothers, as being in some sense sexual objects, but this junior college girl was a unique exception. She wasn’t deathly pale or exceptionally thin or fat, she didn’t have secretions of various