A Japanese Schoolgirl Read online

  ‘Because this whole thing is weird you know.’

  Then Yukio smirked and said that I seemed not to have understood what he was talking about and that he felt relieved to have made sure of it by himself. This remarks hurt my feelings so hard that I turned my back without saying sayonara.

  ‘Sure, you can leave,’ he said impatiently, ‘anytime.’

  Covered by a blanket of snow, the street was still deserted and I heard Yukio drop coins in one of vending machines. It sounded shy and lonesome. I was about to finish crossing the street when Yukio uttered an exclamation of surprise. The next moment I saw him falling on his buttocks. He was repeating, in a shaky voice, that there was a strange creature inside the mouth of the vending machine.

  *

  The one he was pointing at was the one for soft drinks. I crouched down to peek into the mouth of the vending machine. Yukio warned me from behind to be careful not to be bitten by the creature. Carefully I pushed the clear plastic cover of the mouth to open it and then asked him in whisper to come and take a look at what was lying the inside.

  ‘No way,’ he whispered back.

  ‘At least you can try,’ I said.

  The strange creature was a dinosaur-like lizard, although it was a miniaturized version of its ancestor.

  It was an iguana. To put it more specifically, a green iguana.

  I could tell what it was by its shape alone because I had once intensively read about it for my younger sister Naomi who used to be eager to have it as a pet. On my bookshelf there still is the book entitled Iguana: Your Silent Friend, which I bought for her. Unfortunately, Naomi had no opportunity to finish reading the book. She died from an accident four days after I had given it to her.

  Looking down at the creature, I felt a curious turn of karma.

  In the snow Yukio and I crouched down side by side, facing the vending machine. We both stared down at the wrinkled lizard that was lying on its belly in a long gutter into which a can of soft drink would roll down.

  How did this creature happen to be inside this vending machine? I asked myself. Did it try to shelter itself from the cold? No, it seemed impossible. The gutter was located too high for this short-legged creature to crawl up into by itself.

  We speculated that the owner of this wrinkled lizard must have given up keeping it and left it here expecting someone to find it.

  There still appeared no shadow of a car, nor sign of passerby. The snowflakes were fluttering down softly as if they had been the artificial snow falling on the kabuki stage.

  You could see my breath that was illuminated with the fluorescent lights from vending machines.

  It might have looked something otherworldly, like ectoplasm.

  ‘Is it dead?’ asked Yukio, pushing up his silver-rimmed thick glasses with the middle finger.

  ‘Why don’t you check it yourself?’

  ‘I’d rather leave it to you, Luna.’

  The iguana appeared to have a total length of one and half feet. It seemed to be dead already because it didn’t move at all even when we poked at it by turns.

  I say, ‘This cold weather must be fatal to any cold-blooded lizard.’

  ‘Affirmative. It’s definitely dead.’

  As I tried to drag it out of the gutter, however, the dinosaur-like lizard abruptly began to wriggle away out of my hands. Yukio and I screamed at once as piercingly as a five-year-old girl who accidentally stepped on the fresh carcass of a puppy flattened by a truck.

  I asked Yukio to hold down the iguana until I came back with something to shelter the creature from the cold. Initially, he hesitated even to touch it, but, by the time I sneaked out of the house again with a carton box, Yukio seemed to become familiar with the creature already. He was even holding it on his lap.

  The flabby chin of the creature, especially its heavily wrinkled skin, reminds me of the scrotum of my grandfather I happened to steal a glance at during a summer vacation. I was eleven and beginning to feel a painful itch on my nipples whenever they rubbed hard against my T-shirt.

  Yukio said he had been wondering if he could keep the iguana. I had no reason to oppose his plan. It even gave me a sense of relief because my mother had ever showed no interest in animals. No pets allowed. This was her stance and has never been modified so far.

  I warned Yukio that it would grow large very fast, probably reaching a maximum length of three feet within a year.

  ‘I can manage that,’ said Yukio.

  After taking a glance around the snow-covered sidewalk, he slowly plugged up his ears with a pair of earphones and then smiled an embarrassed smile.

  Suicide

  Suicide Gene. It was the title of what Yukio the self-styled genius wrote for our school paper. The following is the content:

  Suicide gene is what we Japanese carry with us all the time. Thanatos prevails in our mind as despair falls on our shoulders. Ours is Suicide Nation.

  In Japan we high-school students tend to commit suicide in May after having failed the entrance examination for the college of first choice. High-ranking bureaucrats are liable to commit suicide in March when they are torn between conflicting demands from various sectors and powers while fiscal policy is under deliberation. Chief Executive Officers usually commit suicide either in April or in October when their company’s Nikkei stock price plunges disastrously because of the statement of accounts they had delivered the previous month. The owners of smaller businesses have a tendency to commit suicide in December after they are cut off by local banks.

  You need not to kill the Japanese by knives and guns; the Japanese kill themselves before you kill them. Ours is the country of Kamikaze spirit, the Kamikaze nation, so to speak.

  We have more than 35,000 suicides per year and the number is on the increase. We Japanese are now leading the world in regard to suicide rate.

  Banzai.

  I, Yukio Misawa, have also learned that most Japanese prefer a safety-razor blade to a butcher’s knife when they want to commit suicide in the bathtub. No one seems to try the all-purpose knife made in Switzerland, for the knife is clearly made for the purpose of survival, not for that of suicide.

  Some slashes the wrist and the ankle with the safety-razor blade in the bathroom. Imagine a pale body in pink water.

  You will learn that the word ‘safety’ doesn’t always stand for safety.

  There are still some Japanese who wish to be samurais when they attempt suicide. They dream of death with dignity, only the data tells us that there has been no one who is eager to perform hara-kiri in the 21st century. It is quite understandable since a Japanese sword is as expensive as a brand-new small car and it is not so difficult to imagine how painful and ugly it may become once you start making a horizontal cut across your belly from left to right. If the pain grows unbearable, you might start calling anyone or everyone on the list in your Mobile. But you can’t possibly call ambulance while performing hara-kiri. It would be utterly disgraceful.

  Some individual has a taste for hanging oneself, but it is very unlikely for anyone to be able to find a proper tree for that purpose in Tokyo today. Parks are few, and, even if there are some parks to be found in the neighborhood, parks at night belong mostly to voyeurs who hide behind trees with newest night vision equipment and highly directional microphone to hunt for couples in estrus. Allegedly there are more voyeurs than their preys in well-known parks in Tokyo.

  How about committing suicide by inhaling the gas? No, it is also impossible, for the emission of the gas in each house is being efficiently controlled by its built-in integrated circuit.

  The IC knows exactly what you are doing. No gas leak is permitted. It detects your wicked behavior and shuts off the gas automatically and becomes disturbingly noisy.

  Remember that we Japanese adore advanced technology. It is therefore natural that most kitchen appliances should behave smarter than us.

  In the end, throwing yourself under a train is the easiest, surest, showiest method to commit suicide in Tokyo.
You can disrupt the overcrowded railroad schedule of a morning rush hour and strand at least two hundred thousand commuters for about an hour or two. It would be quite an achievement.

  You could be Anna Karenina then.

  Vengeance is mine, you say to yourself, as you put your neck on a railroad track and then sneer away whatever you would like to curse. In an instant your head will be removed from the trunk. You may shout banzai one time or give three cheers for Ms. Karenina.

  Self-destruction could be the last resort once you would realize that you are incapable of destroying the world surrounding yourself.

  What you can do is to simply get off the express train called This Fleeting World.

  Stopover permitted.

  Say sayonara with a sneer.

  *

  Probably because of this article, most classmates tried to dismiss his death as suicide. I have no doubt that there is a problem of bullying in our gakko, but most of us know that Yukio was not being bullied by anyone. He was regarded as a walking encyclopedia; he could give us his mind-bending opinion on anything we could think of anytime, anywhere. It is true that he was attending one of highly competitive high schools in which suicide is not uncommon. As a matter of fact, on average, one and a half students commit suicide every year in our school, but even so I must say that his death has nothing to do with ‘suicide gene.’

  I remember watching his back as he walked away into the flickering snow with that carton box in which a green iguana lay. He was holding it with great care as if it had been his brand-new Notebook. I wonder that he could commit suicide, leaving that green iguana alone and uncared-for.

  Platform

  On a crowded platform at Shinjuku railroad station Yukio was standing in the forefront of a line. He was waiting for a rapid-service train to arrive when someone gave him a push from behind. No, it didn’t necessarily have to be Yukio himself to be pushed. It could have been anyone who happened to stand behind Yukio to be pushed. One push with the forefinger would have been enough. The domino effect would have done the rest. People in the waiting line would have simply fallen down forward one after another. And no one in the swarms of crowd could have possibly found out who gave the initial push. In Tokyo, during the morning rush hours, it would be quite possible for anyone to execute a perfect crime before breakfast, especially at Shinjuku railroad station.

  According to Maya, Yukio appeared to have fallen over the platform as if he had thrown himself into the railroad track. It happened a second before an incoming rapid-service train came into sight. A strange thing was, as most eyewitnesses agreed, that, after the fall, he looked as though he were frantically trying to clamber up onto the platform five feet above. But the train was already approaching the platform blasting its horn like a furious elephant with screeching metallic sound. The next moment his body was caught in the gap between the edge of the train and that of the platform where there were more than five inches of space lying between the two. His soft flesh was an easy prey to the heavy metal. In a flash, his body was, like a cake of tofu, cut in half. Maya also told me that Yukio kept struggling to crawl on his hands for a short while even after he had lost the lower half.

  Did he change his mind the second he saw the train approaching?

  There were some eyewitnesses who claimed that Yukio appeared to fall off the platform as if he were pushed by someone. Unfortunately, those eyewitnesses had already dashed toward an extra train before the railroad police came running.

  Did you commit suicide, Yukio? Was that an accident?

  Was there anyone who pushed you to the edge of the platform? I’m waiting for your e-mail to arrive from the land of the departed, if any.

  Besides him, Maya and Reiko and Takeshi were also standing there that morning, in the same row of which Yukio was in the front.

  Four of them were all waiting for the same train to arrive.

  *

  Three months ago, the day Yukio was killed, I was absent from school. I had been sick with the stomach flu. The moment his trunk was severed in half, I was taking my body temperature. It was precisely seven-thirty in the morning. I remember the moment quite well because I took a glance at my Mobile to check up the time. It was the time for all of us to transfer from one train to another at Shinjuku railroad station every weekday.

  Who was stalking Yukio anyway? What if his worries were true? The stalker might be someone whom I have known already.

  Maya

  A train jolts hypnotically. I look up at a grey winter sky from a window of this rapid-service train bound for Shinjuku. The windows are all misted over from the heating system and the body heat of passengers.

  It has been passed a week since Yukio’s funeral. I still feel his death to be unreal.

  “Are you all right?” asks Maya from my left. “You seem to be worried about something.”

  “Well…nothing in particular.”

  “It sounds just like you.”

  She gives me a thin plastic smile.

  When we step off the train at Shinjuku railroad station, the public-address system is warning a crowd of people not to step over the yellow line while waiting for the train.

  I glance back at the very spot Yukio tried to clamber up.

  There is a rectangular mirror fixed on a pole few feet away from there. I wonder if his last moment was captured by the mirror.

  Maya whispers in my ear, “I still can’t even cast a glance down at meat dishes. I’ve become a fruitivorous after the incident. How is your stomach flu by the way?”

  “I’m in recovery mode now.”

  “How about your asthma?”

  “Not too bad so far. Thank you, Maya.”

  “I hate this place. It’s cold and windy,” she says flatly and, after having a muffler around her neck, she plugs a pair of earphones in her ears.

  I am uncertain what kind of music she has in her Mobile these days. Last year she told me that her favorite genre of music was Tango with a flavor of Electronica. That is what I have started collecting recently.

  She looks like a teen fashion model for offbeat category in some girl’s magazine. Rumor says that Maya usually goes to Harajuku to have a haircut in a beauty salon that is favored particularly by Japanese celebrities in the music trade.

  “It’s funny,” Maya says, having tapped her Mobile probably to pause a stream of music, “I didn’t cry during the funeral ceremony for Yukio. I couldn’t.”

  “I felt like I wasn’t there,” I say.

  Maya leans her head to one side as if to recall something forgotten.

  “His photograph was funny you know,” she says.

  I shrug my shoulders and say, “I think the photograph of a deceased person is usually funny. Like that of my granduncle, for example. He looked like he was totally unaware of what had happened to him.”

  “My grandma’s photo looked just like that. She wore a foolish-looking smile. I felt a pity for her.”

  Maya often speaks with a lisp.

  She continues, “Anyhow, Yukio is photogenic. No, I mean, he was good-looking in a strange way. He was weird you know.”

  “Yes, he was different.”

  “How about you, Luna? Look at me.”

  And Maya takes a snapshot of my blank look with her Mobile and then of the crowd and posters on the walls in quick succession.

  “Have you ever seen him in your dream, Maya?”

  “You mean, Yukio? No, he is not my type. I mean, he was not. He was really something, though. The strange thing was that he always looked neither boyish nor girlish you know.”

  I nod and say, “Maybe he was the genus Martian, I guess.”

  Maya smiles and stops to withdraw several thousand yen in notes from a cash dispenser.

  She is like a summer rain. She can cool off emotions before I notice it and she is no longer there when I noticed it.

  We go out into the station square. You can see Maya breathing softly in a cold air. The city looks as inviting as a show window on Christmas Eve.
We head for the center of Neon Forest. The evening breeze smells of foods, car exhaust fumes, perfume, and urine. A huge crowd starts to carry us toward a main intersection. We look up at a gigantic electric bulletin board on which evening news is streaming hypnotically.

  Maya and I are second-year students in a private high school in Tokyo that has produced quite notable alumni such as the president of a megabank, the CEO of an electronic power company, and that of a car manufacturer.

  Banzai.

  We are simply different from students in other schools.

  They bully physically: we bully psychologically.

  They nod and shrug: we use language.

  They wear sex hormones: we wear glasses or contact lenses.

  They wear streetwise clothes: we wear the scent of elitism.

  They have a lot of pretty girls and muscular boys: we have a lot of anorexic girls and bulimic boys.

  They are animals that roam the street: we are statues that sit side by side in school library.

  They care nothing about conforming to any kind of regulations: I still carry the pocketbook for school regulations that is as thick as my father’s vintage smart phone.

  In our school no skateboarding is permitted. No stopping on the way to and from gakko. No colored hair, nor unusual hairdo. No make-up. No piercing. No tattooing. No break-dancing. No music and/or movie by the Mobile in the classroom, et cetera, et cetera.

  “Where are we going?” asks Maya, looking at me in the face.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Would you like to follow me then?”

  I nod firmly, casting an affirmative glance at her.

  We start crossing a wide intersection where a large crowd overflows into the roadway like migrating penguins. We then go down the stairs leading to the entrance of a subterranean shopping complex. It is, if anything, another megalopolis lying underneath Shinjuku.