Popular Hits of the Showa Era Read Free Page B

location by staking out a spot on the beach for a full twenty minutes, as stipulated by the guidelines. He had to make sure the place really was deserted. Once, a vacant lot Yano had found on a warehouse-lined street along Tokyo Bay turned out to be the occasional site of some sort of illicit transactions, and they’d been attacked by a pair of youths on motorcycles who smashed the windows of their van. Nobue and Ishihara and the others all hated that sort of thing. It wasn’t violence that they disliked, mind you. Sugiyama had been studying karate and kick-boxing since middle school and had a habit of going off on opponents who were clearly capable of pounding him into the ground, as a result of which he’d had his skull fractured on four separate occasions; Yano had inadvertently joined a fascist youth organization when he was eighteen and as part of his training had hunted field mice with a crossbow in the remote mountains of Nagano; Nobue and Ishihara had both scored a number of knockouts in drunken brawls—although, admittedly, only when given the chance to attack unsuspecting opponents from behind; Sugioka, who owned a collection of more than a hundred edged weapons ranging from box cutters to Japanese swords, always carried one or two blades and was forever stabbing walls and tree trunks and leather sacks stuffed with sawdust, and when especially piqued had even been known to slash to ribbons the shiny skin of used blow-up dolls; and Kato suffered a chronic, obsessive delusion that sooner or later he would murder—slowly and methodically—an infant or toddler or some other weak and defenseless being, and had come recently to believe that the only way to rid himself of this obsession was to go ahead and act it out. No, it wasn’t violence they disliked: it was contact with strangers. What these young men feared and hated more than anything else was being spoken to by people they hadn’t met, or having to explain themselves to people they didn’t know.
    “It’s just like Kato said, not a soul around. A stray dog wandered by with a fish head in his mouth, but I threw a rock at him. Aimed right at his balls, but I missed, but he ran away anyway.”
    The other five greeted Nobue’s announcement with a cheer that sounded more like a collective moan, then grabbed their things and piled out of the van. Nobue and Yano, peons for the night, had to carry all the heavy equipment: spools of thick extension cord, the 3CCD Hi8 video camera and tripod, the five-hundred-watt pinspots and their stands, a gargantuan boom-box, Bose speakers, and a set of Sennheiser microphones. They huffed and wheezed as they lugged everything down the narrow concrete steps to the beach, while Ishihara and the others changed into their costumes: flared velvet pantaloons, patent-leather shoes, frilled silk shirts, cummerbunds, bow ties, and tuxedo jackets with velvet lapels, followed by the top hats, false mustaches, black canes, and white gloves—for the others, that is. Ishihara alone applied bright red lipstick, false eyelashes, and a Cleopatra-style wig, tittering maniacally as he did so: Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee! Finally, decked out exactly as Pinky & the Killers had been back in the day, the performers strode down to the beach and stood there facing the sea and the tiny lights of fishing boats far offshore. Ishihara stepped forward and raised his little finger as he took the mike and cooed, “Ready, baby.” Yano, off to one side, turned on the pinspots, and the intro to “Season of Love” came blasting out of the Bose 501 speaker system and echoing across the dark sea and sky. When the first line of the lyric— I just can’t seem to forget —reverberated toward the waves in Ishihara’s nausea-inducing voice, all the crabs on the beach scuttled simultaneously into their holes. As for Ishihara himself, he actually was able to forget—at least during the time he was singing—the anxiety growing inside him.
     
     
    The day