69 Read online

  RYU MURAKAMI

  69

  SIXTY-NINE

  Translated by Ralph F. McCarthy

  For my friends back then

  CONTENTS

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Iron Butterfly

  Lady Jane

  Daniel Cohn-Bendit

  Claudia Cardinale

  Power to the Imagination

  Just Like a Woman

  Alain Delon

  Lyndon Johnson

  Cheap Thrills

  Amore Romantico

  Wes Montgomery

  Led Zeppelin

  April Come She Will

  Velvet Underground

  It’s a Beautiful Day

  Epilogue

  ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  Nineteen sixty-nine was the year student uprisings shut down Tokyo University. The Beatles put out The White Album, Yellow Submarine, and Abbey Road, the Rolling Stones released their greatest single, ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ and people known as hippies wore their hair long and called for love and peace. In Paris, De Gaulle resigned. The war in Vietnam continued. High school girls used sanitary napkins, not tampons.

  That’s the sort of year 1969 was, when I began my third and final year of high school. I went to a college-prep high in a small city with an American military base on the western edge of Kyushu. Because I was in the science track, there were only seven girls in our class. Seven was better than none, as had been the case in my first two years, but most girls who take science are dogs, and I’m sorry to say that five of our seven were exactly that. One of the remaining pair, a girl with a face like a kewpie doll, was interested in nothing but math formulas and English vocabulary lists. Kewpie’s father ran a lumberyard, and we figured you’d probably need a chisel to get inside her.

  The other one happened to have the same name as the leader of the Japanese Red Army who was to shock the world three years later. Unlike her namesake, though, our Hiroko Nagata didn’t suffer from an exophthalmic goiter.

  There was a guy in our class who’d been lucky enough to take electric organ lessons with Hiroko when they were both in kindergarten. He was an honor student who hoped to go on to medical school at a national university, and so handsome that even girls from other high schools in the area knew about him. Unfortunately, however, he wasn’t “wickedly” handsome but handsome in a fuzzy, unpolished sort of way, which I attributed to his having grown up in the country. If the rest of us spoke a dialect, Tadashi Yamada used an even rougher form of speech, a kind of ultra-dialect heard only in the coal-mining areas of Kyushu. Too bad. If Yamada had attended a junior high in the city he might have played the guitar, ridden a motorbike, known a lot about rock, been hip enough to order iced coffee instead of a plate of curry in coffee shops, and used marijuana, which was secretly all the rage at the time, as bait to hit up “bad” girls for a piece of ass.

  But, though he lacked these refinements, he was still good-looking. We called him “Adama” in those days, because he reminded us a bit of the French singer Adamo.

  My name is Kensuke Yazaki. People called me Kensuke, or Ken-san, or Ken-chan, or Ken-yan, or Ken-bo, or Ken-ken, but I asked my friends just to call me Ken. This was because I was a fan of the comic-book serial “Ken the Wolfboy.”

  It was spring of 1969.

  The first exams of the year had finished that day. I’d done miserably on all of them.

  My grades had been dropping at a steady and alarming rate ever since I’d entered high school. There were various things one could blame for this—my parents’ divorce, my younger brother’s sudden suicide, the effect that reading Nietzsche had had on me, and the shock of learning that my grandmother had come down with an incurable disease—but none of them were true. The simple fact was that I hated studying.

  It’s also a fact, however, that in 1969 there was a convenient tendency to describe people who studied for college entrance exams as capitalist lackeys. Zenkyoto, the Joint Campus Action movement, had already begun to run out of steam, but it had at least managed to keep Tokyo University from functioning for a while.

  Naively, we all hoped that something might actually change. And, according to the mood of the times, going to university wouldn’t help you cope with that change, but smoking marijuana would.

  Adama sat in the seat behind me. Each time we were told to pass our answer sheets to the front, I’d glance at his paper. He’d always answered about three times as many questions as I had.

  When all the exams were over, I decided to skip out on homeroom and clean-up. I was hoping Adama would come with me.

  “Hey, Adama. You know Cream?”

  “Cream? Like ice cream?”

  “No, you idiot. It’s the name of a British rock group.”

  “Never heard of ’em.”

  “Boy, are you out of it. You’re a lost cause, man.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Okay, then, you know who Rimbaud is?”

  “What, another group?”

  “He’s a poet, dummy. Look. Read this, right here.”

  I showed him a book of Rimbaud’s poetry. Too bad he didn’t say “No thanks” and turn away. He went ahead and read it. Out loud. Looking back on that moment now, I can see that it was a major turning point in Adama’s life.

  I have found it

  What?

  Eternity

  The fusion of sun and sea

  Thirty minutes later we were standing in front of the gibbons’ cage at the Nature Park, a long way from school and the whole routine that followed the exams, including lunch, and we were hungry. The mining town Adama grew up in was too far to commute from, so he stayed in a boardinghouse in the city, and the people who ran the place packed a lunch for him every day. But I didn’t bring a lunch; my mother always gave me a hundred and fifty yen to buy something with. If that figure surprises you, blame it on the inflation of the past fifteen years. In 1969 a hundred and fifty yen was big money. Kids from families poorer than mine managed to hold off starvation with just fifty yen a day—twenty for milk, ten for a sweet roll, and twenty for a curried bun.

  With a hundred and fifty yen I could have had a bowl of noodles, milk, a curried bun, a melon roll, and a jelly doughnut. But I always made do with one bun—no milk—and saved the rest of my money to spend on books by Sartre, Genet, Celine, Camus, Bataille, Anatole France, and Kenzaburo Oe. In a pig’s ass. What I really needed the cash for was to go to coffee shops and discos where I could hit up on loose chicks from Junwa Girls’ High, a school with a fox ratio of over twenty percent.

  Our city had two prefectural college-prep high schools, Northern High and Southern High; a prefectural industrial arts high school; a municipal commercial high school; three private girls’ high schools; and a private coed high school. In small cities like ours, only the real duds went to private coed highs.

  My own school, Northern High, was known for getting the best college entrance results; Southern High came second; the industrial arts school had a good baseball team; the commercial school was crawling with porkers; and Junwa, a private Catholic school where uniforms were optional, had, for some reason, a high ratio of foxes. Everyone knew that it had once been popular among the girls of Yamate, another private girls’ high, to masturbate with radio tubes, and that many of the tubes had exploded, leaving them scarred for life; the girls of Koka High were so grim and gloomy that they rarely even rated as a topic of conversation; and it was said that when the kids at the private coed high, Asahi, shook their heads, you could hear a dry, rustling sound.

  Status for a male student at Northern High consisted in having a member of the English Drama Club for a lady friend, having a Junwa girl of the uniformed sort for a lover and one of the streetclothes set for a mistress, having persuaded a student at Yamate to show you her scars, and having girls from Koka a
nd Asahi supply you with spending money. Needless to say, however, life is never that accommodating, and, status aside, the more urgent problem was to find, as soon as possible, someone who would let you get into her pants. Which was why, in spite of having the princely sum of a hundred and fifty yen in my pocket, I had to make do with a single curried bun.

  “Hey, man, I think I’ll go get something to eat.” We were still standing in front of the gibbons’ cage, and my eyes were glued to Adama’s box lunch as I said this.

  “I’ll split my lunch with you. Let’s eat together.”

  Adama opened the little box, put half of its meager contents on the lid, and handed it to me. Adama had paid the bus fare from school to the Nature Park for both of us, and if it weren’t for me he’d have been in homeroom at that very moment washing windows, serious lad that he was. It would have troubled my conscience if, on top of this, he were to give up half his lunch for my sake, so I politely declined. Like hell. I took my share and scarfed it down in three minutes flat, wondering all the while why he’d only given me one of his three fish-paste rolls, feeling disgust at his stinginess, and angrily reflecting that he had a better future in moneylending than in medicine.

  Like a couple out on a picnic on their first date, once we’d eaten we had nothing to do. Gibbons can get on your nerves when you’re bored. If our stomachs had been full, we could at least have taken a nap, but on half a lousy boardinghouse box lunch, forget it.

  Not really having any choice, we started shooting the breeze.

  “Ken-yan, what college you gonna go to?”

  “Don’t call me ‘Ken-yan,’ all right? Just Ken. I don’t like it when people call me ‘Ken-yan.’”

  “Okay. You’re going into medicine, right? You’ve been saying that ever since we were sophomores, haven’t you?”

  I was famous in my school for four things. The first was that in the fall of my sophomore year, I’d placed 321st out of some twenty thousand participants in a nationwide exam for people hoping to go on to medical school. The second was that I was a drummer in a band whose repertoire included songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Walker Brothers, Procol Harum, the Monkees, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. The third was that I was in the newspaper club, and three times I’d put out editions without submitting them to the faculty advisor in advance, which resulted in their being banned and confiscated The fourth was that in the third term of my sophomore year, I’d tried to put on a play for the “Goodbye, Seniors” party about a radical student group’s campaign against a visit by an American aircraft carrier loaded with atomic missiles, and the play had been suppressed by the teachers. People thought I was peculiar.

  “No, I’m not going into medicine. I’d never be accepted, anyway.”

  “What, then? Literature, I guess, huh?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “No? So why do you read poetry and stuff?”

  I couldn’t tell him it was to help me seduce women. Adama was a Hardboy at heart. Hardboys didn’t approve of sucking up to women.

  “I don’t really like poetry. But Rimbaud’s different. Everybody knows Rimbaud, man.”

  “They do?”

  “Rimbaud was a big influence on Godard. You didn’t know that?”

  “Ah, Godard. I know who he is. I learned about him in World History.”

  “World History?”

  “He was a poet from India, right?”

  “That’s Tagore, dummy. Godard’s a film director.”

  I gave him a good ten-minute lecture on Godard. About how, being in the vanguard of the nouvelle vague, he was making one breakthrough film after another, about how spectacular the last scene in Breathless was, about the meaningless deaths in Masculine—Feminine, and about the subversive editing techniques in Weekend. Needless to say, I’d never seen a single film by the man. Godard didn’t make it to small cities on the western edge of Kyushu.

  “Literature, novels—if you ask me, stuff like that is finished, dead.”

  “So now it’s movies, huh?”

  “No, movies are finished, too.”

  “Well, what, then?”

  “Festivals. Where you have theater and music and film all at the same time. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  Yes, that’s what I wanted to do—to set up a festival. Fesutibaru. The very word was exciting. There’d be every type of entertainment imaginable. We’d have plays and movies and live rock music, and all sorts of people would come. Girls from Junwa would come in droves. I’d play the drums, show a film I’d directed, and have the leading role in a play I’d written. Junwa would be there, the Northern High English Drama Club would be there, the radio tubes would be there, the rustle-heads would be there, and the gloomy girls from Koka would be there, crowding around to shower me with flowers and money.

  “I’ve decided to organize a festival in this town,” I said. “Adama, I’d like you to help me.”

  The rebel element at Northern High was divided into three main factions: the Greasers, the Rockers, and the Politicos. The Greasers were basically into drinking and smoking and chasing pussy, but occasionally indulged in fighting and gambling, and they had connections with the local yakuza. The central figure in this group was a guy named Yuji Shirokushi. The Rockers—also known as the Artistes—carried copies of New Music magazine, Jimi Hendrix’s Smash Hits, and Art Today, grew their hair as long as possible, and walked around flashing the V-sign and mumbling “Peace.” The Politicos were aligned with the Students and Workers Liberation Front at Nagasaki University, and had pooled their money to rent a room in town to use as a hideout. They plastered the walls of the room with posters of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara and surreptitiously circulated leaflets at school. At the core of this faction were two guys named Goro Narushima and Ryo Otaki. There were other groups, too—the Rightists, who were fans of some rabid old prewar imperialist; the Folkies, who were into folk music; the Literati, who put out their own little magazine; the Bikers, and so on—but none of them had many members or were capable of mobilizing large numbers of people.

  Although I didn’t belong to any of these factions, I was on good terms with members of all the three main ones. Being a drummer, I often sat in on jam sessions with the Rockers, and I sometimes drank beer with Shirokushi and his gang and showed up for debates at Narushima and Otaki’s hideout.

  I also had a friend in the newspaper club named Iwase whose family ran a sewing goods shop and who was exactly what you’d expect someone whose family ran a sewing goods shop to be like. We’d been in the same class in our first year in high school. He was a puny little guy, and a bit dim-witted, but he was hooked on anything to do with Art. Maybe it was connected with the fact that his father had died and he’d grown up with four older sisters, but he’d been keen to make friends with me because my father was an artist. Anyway, Iwase shared my dream of setting up a festival. We were both avid readers of Art Today and New Music, and had been blown away by the rock fests and happenings described in these magazines. What rock fests and happenings had in common, and what appealed to us about them, were naked women. Neither of us said as much in so many words, but we were obviously of one mind on that score.

  “Ken-san,” Iwase had said to me one day, “let’s make friends with Yamada. He’s a good-looking guy, and he gets good grades. With you and him working together, we can do anything.”

  I asked him if he was trying to say I wasn’t good-looking and didn’t get good grades, and he said no three times:

  “No, no, no. It’s like, Ken-san, you’re, how should I put this, it’s like, don’t get me wrong, your ideas or whatever, the things you think up, are great, but, well, you never really do anything, right? I mean, I don’t mean you never do anything, but it’s like, girls, food, whatever’s right in front of you, right?”

  In our second year, Iwase and I had decided we wanted to make films and started saving money to buy an eight-millimeter camera. We pooled our allowances and lunch money, but when we’d saved
up six hundred yen, I’d gone and treated a Junwa girl to a lunch of chicken and rice, with cream puffs for dessert. That’s the sort of thing he meant.

  He was right, though. Adama was good-looking and did well in school, and as a result had quite a following. He’d also been on the basketball team until his junior year and earned a reputation for helping solve a lot of his teammates’ personal, woman, and money problems. In order to make our festival a reality, we had to get him to join forces with us.

  Adama and I left the gibbons’ cage and climbed the observation tower. The sun had begun to dip toward the sea.

  “I guess everybody’s cleaning the classroom right now, eh?” he said, gazing out at the bay and smiling. I smiled, too. Adama was learning the joy of ditching class. He asked me to show him the book of poems again.

  I have found it

  What?

  Eternity

  The fusion of sun and sea

  Adama read it aloud. Peering at the ribbon of sunlight sparkling on the water, he asked me if he could borrow the book. I lent it to him, as well as an album by Cream and another by Vanilla Fudge.

  That’s how 1969, the third most interesting of my thirty-two years, began.

  We were seventeen.

  IRON BUTTERFLY

  In 1969 we were seventeen. And we still had our cherries. To be a virgin at that age is nothing to be particularly proud of and nothing to be particularly ashamed of, but it’s something that weighs on your mind.