Popular Hits of the Showa Era Read Online Free PDF Page A

essentially unrelated experience of her own: “I know, I know, that sort of thing happens all the time, doesn’t it? Once I didn’t have an umbrella, and this man named Sakakibara in my office who’s forty and still single but not necessarily a homo but if you ask me it’s hard to know what he’s up to, he was standing in front of me and it was pouring and I was thinking he was going to let me in under his umbrella but instead he goes to practice his golf swing with it and almost hits me in the face! But I mean it’s typical. Things like that happen all the time nowadays. There’s so many weirdos out there!”
    Nonetheless, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to anyone, the Midori Society had remained intact for a little over four years now. No one—not even the Midoris themselves—could have said what the determining factor was in creating their particular type of personality, but they all had an instinctive distaste for any action that smacked of “healing one’s wounds.” In fact, the responsibility for this lay with their fathers, but none of the ladies were aware of this or cared about such things, and in any case their male parents have nothing to do with our story. To open up to another person and talk about the sources of one’s current anxieties, to have that person accept it all as “normal,” and thereby to heal, was the sort of thing all the Midoris found despicable. For whatever reason, they couldn’t afford to be conscious of their wounds. The strange, unfamiliar feeling they experienced as they sat weeping before the corpse of Yanagimoto Midori, therefore, was nothing less than an implacable rage brought on by the realization that the “wound” had come from the outside world to open them up by the throat.
    They continued to weep for more than three hours after everyone else had left. Tomiyama Midori, the first to stop sobbing, began in a tiny voice to sing “Stardust Trails,” a perfect match for the rhythm of the rain against the reinforced concrete wall of their late friend’s one-bedroom apartment; and one by one, as they stopped weeping, the others joined in. It was the first time in the four years of their association that all of them had sung the same song together. They sang it again and again, reprising “Stardust Trails” for more than an hour, and it was only when they were done singing that Henmi Midori produced the silver badge and held it up for all to see.
    “I found this at the scene of the crime,” she said. “Does anyone know what it is?” The badge was passed around from hand to hand. “I believe it belonged to the murderer.”
    Suzuki Midori said, “I saw where that stupid-looking detective was saying it seemed to be a random killing, which meant they might never find the murderer,” and Iwata Midori said, “I read in the local news section that the police are looking for eyewitnesses,” and Tomiyama Midori said, “I know this badge!
    “I see my son once a week, right? So I always want to feed him something delicious, because his father’s a man with no ambition whatsoever and I’m afraid he’s robbed the poor boy of even the will to eat delicious things, which it would be better if he lived with me but I have to work and I know my son understands that, but anyway he always wants to eat at MOS Burger, teriyaki burgers with double mayonnaise, three of them, and then we go to this store called Kiddy Kastle, and out in front of the store is a video game he likes to play, and if you score over three hundred thousand points you get one of these badges, and there’s a poster with a list of all the people who’ve won a badge.”
    For the very first time, only one person was talking, and everyone else in the group was listening.
    II
     
    “So if we investigate all the names on the list, I bet we’ll find the killer.”
    Tomiyama Midori stopped there, and an eerie silence filled the room. It was a silence pregnant with heart-tingling anticipation, the