Ryu Murakami - Popular Hits of the Showa Era

Audition

Translated by Ralph McCarthy

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 1994 by Ryu Murakami

Translation copyright 2011 by Ralph McCarthy

Originally published in Japanese as Shwa kay daizensh

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murakami, Ryu, 1952
[Showa kayo daizenshu. English]
Popular hits of the Showa era / Ryu Murakami;
translated by Ralph McCarthy.

p. cm.

Originally published in Japanese as Shwa kay daizensh

ISBN: 978-0-393-34037-2

I. Title.

PL856.U696S4913 2011

895.6'35dc22

2010031109

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

I

Ishihara had had a feeling, ever since the party the night before, that something like this was going to happen. That he alone had had this feeling was decidedly not because he was more intelligent than the others, or more skillful at analyzing situations, or psychic or anything. Ishihara had a tendency to burst into mindless and uncontrollable laughter at random moments, and it was a tendency he shared with all the other members of the group. The only difference was that in the interval between one bout of laughter and the next, into his head alone some sort of imageif not an actual ideawould occasionally pop.

The party had begun as usual at seven in the evening, and more or less everyone had been thereIshihara, Nobue, Yano, Sugiyama, Kato, and Sugioka. More or less because no one was keeping track, but in fact the six of them constituted everyone. They assembled as always at Nobues apartment in Chofu City, on the western edge of Greater Tokyo. Each of them brought food or drinks in a plastic bag or paper sack or, in one case, an old-school furoshiki wrapping cloth. Yano was the one with the furoshiki. He also wore his prized Leica M6 on a strap around his neck.

Check it out, I saw Karinaka Riethe adult video actress?at this street fair in Shinjuku the other day, and I took a bunch of pictures of her, but would you believe it? None of em turned out. I dont know why. I mean, I dont get it. Why would that happen? Ive thought about it and thought about it, but

Stroking the Leica with his right index finger, Yano expanded upon this mystery at some length, but, typically enough, none of the others responded or reacted in any way. These gatherings didnt have the atmosphere one normally associates with the word party. Nobues apartment, just north of Chofu Station, was in an old two-story wood-frame-and-stucco building with a sizable parking lot in the rear. The six members of the group generally assembled here of a Saturday evening, but the gatherings had no clear purpose, and one hesitates even to call the participants friends, since they lacked any common goals or interests. Nobue and Ishihara had been classmates in high school; Yano had met Ishihara in the computer section of a bookstore, where theyd exchanged remarks about the new Macintosh being this or that and then, having nothing better to do, meandered off to a coffee shop and sat facing each other for a couple of hours, neither of them talking much but each coming to the general conclusion that the other was a person rather like himself, the upshot of which was that theyd swapped phone numbers and become comrades of sorts; Sugiyama, the only one over thirty, had met Yano while temping at a construction site out near Chiba; Kato was a sort of underling or sidekick of Sugiyamas; and Sugioka knew Nobue somehow or other.

Nobue was the one whod originally suggested a party. It had now been about a year since the first time theyd assembled at his apartment. No preparations of any sort had been made for that first gathering, and no one brought anything to eat or drink. Theyd all been to parties before, of course, but it had never occurred to any of them to think about how to host one or prepare for one, much less be the life of one. There were only five of them at the first partyNobue, Ishihara, Yano, Sugiyama, and Kato. Kato, having lost a brief rock-paper-scissors showdown, was sent out to the vending machine down the street to purchase a sackful of One Cup Sake drinks, and when he returned they all sat around quietly sipping from the little glass containers. Every now and then one of them would burst into mindless laughter or relate in a fragmented way some personal anecdote, fully cognizant of the fact that no one else was listening, and after some five hours of this the party just sort of evaporated.

Not until the fourth time they gathered had the parties begun to take shape. There was a full moon that night. Sugiyama had brought an armful of karaoke laser discs, and though no one in the group could sing, a few of them hummed along tentatively. They were humming to one of the tracks when a light went on in the window of an apartment across the parking lot, and there, clearly visible from where they sat, a young woman with very long legs and an unbelievable body was in the act of disrobing. Sipping at their sake in awed silence, all six of them watched, along with the full moon, as this modest striptease unfolded. The young woman with the unbelievable body was immediately elevated to the status of everyones special idol, and the karaoke set (which had apparently conjured her up) to that of a miracle machine more worthy of reverence than even their precious computers. Karaoke became an essential element of each party from that night on, and they all began memorizing lyrics and timidly attempting to sing. Months went by, however, without the young woman with the unbelievable body making a return appearance. It was at the sixth party, when shed failed to materialize for the second consecutive time, that Nobue proposed the post-party ritual that was to become such an important part of their lives. For someone in this group to come up with and propose an idea, and for the others to actually listen to it, consider it, voice their opinions, come to a consensus, and act upon it, was an unprecedented eventan event of historical significance to rival the moment seven or eight million years ago when some ancestor of human beings first stood upright and blundered forward on two feet.

The evolution of the parties had been slow but inexorable. At the third party, Ishihara had arrived bearing eihire (dried stingray fin), kusamochi (mugwort rice cakes), and piisen (peanuts mixed with tiny rice crackers), and from then on everyone began bringing things to eat or drink. At the ninth party a small wave of panic had swept the room when Sugioka showed up not with the usual dry snacks like stingray fin or peanuts or chocolate but a packaged macaroni salad of the sort sold in delicatessens and supermarkets. Nobue took one look at the macaroni salad and, after the inevitable bout of spasmodic laughter, set out plates and forks for all. One could have searched each individual brain cell in Nobues headand everyone elses, for that matterwithout finding so much as a hint that the concept of providing others with eating utensils would ever occur, but it had, and it was a deeply moving moment. Sugioka, whod bought the macaroni salad at a butchers shop just down the road, near his own apartment, actually misted up on seeing his purchase cause such excitement and wield such unexpected influence. At the tenth party, it was Yanos turn to stir the others to their depths by bringing six portions of Nagasaki Chanmen, an instant noodle dish that required only the addition of boiling water. Such astonishing mutations in the nature of the parties were, Nobue and Ishihara and the others all believed, directly attributable to karaoke; and the scale of the all-important post-party ritual continued to expand.