I answer: “Has to be the line where we dump our trash.”
“Huh?”
“Think about it. Yotsuya… Mitsuke…”
Nothing but blank faces.
I take a deep swig of canned coffee (BOSS, to be specific). What a pain to explain. All right—here goes.
The five of us were in college. We spent freshman year drinking and singing and chasing girls. But not sophomore year. We were sick of cheap booze, karaoke was repulsively mainstream and—thanks to semi-permanent girlfriends—our chase was on hold, for the time being.
Shigeru Kaji: High time we found another way to have fun…
Me: High time?
Takeru Igarashi: We’re sophomores now. We’re in the big time…
Hisashi Iwata: But our girlfriends eat up all our cash.
Me: The price of courtship…
Hashiguchi, Kaji, Igarashi and Iwata all nod.
Shopping was never our bag anyway. So—what else could we do for kicks?
Work. That was the answer to our prayers. Nothing beats short-term employment. You can choose what you want to do, and every workplace comes with its own discoveries (varies from person to person). Best of all, you get paid. Talk about the ideal hobby.
Sophomore year. The five of us landed jobs.
Different jobs doing different things in different places.
But our work hours weren’t all that different.
We always met up on the way to work. Mid-commute, in a subway station. At first, our rendezvous was Akasaka Mitsuke Station. It’s well connected—it has the Ginza and Marunouchi Lines. I had to get to Honancho on the Marunouchi Line (switching or not switching trains at Nakano Sakaue). Akasaka Mitsuke was on the way. Pretty much every morning from August to September, we met up in Mitsuke. To share an underground breakfast before heading to work. Proof of our friendship. Whenever a girlfriend prepared something for one of us, we split the spoils five ways.
We were working for fun. It was just a hobby—so we didn’t stay in one place for long. We switched jobs at breakneck speed. And when we changed jobs, we changed stations, too. The location changed—but our morning ritual was constant.
When we were done eating, the trash had to go somewhere. But some lines had better trash cans than others. If you ask me, the Marunouchi Line had the best bins in the business.
Masuo Hashiguchi: That’s how you think of the Marunouchi Line? The one with the trash cans?
Me: Pretty much.
Hisashi Iwata: Oh.
Shigeru Kaji: I think I get that.
Me: The day before yesterday was the solstice…
We crush our empty coffee cans.
Me (continuing): And I was on the Marunouchi Line—heading to Yotsuya. You know how it’s always dark, because you’re underground, then right before you get to the station you surface and the sun hits you? The other day, at that moment, I felt like the sun was right over me. Then I got off at Yotsuya and met up with you mugs.
Hisashi Iwata: Oh.
Shigeru Kaji: I get that.
Masuo Hashiguchi: Works for me. Real poetic. I guess I was thinking kind of literally. Like, some tropical location somewhere.
Me: What made you ask anyway?
Masuo Hashiguchi: I dunno. Guess I was daydreaming. About a little getaway, just us and our girlfriends.
Me: In the middle of winter?
Masuo Hashiguchi: Haha, yeah… Like those celebrities who fly to Honolulu for New Year’s or something.
Takeru Igarashi: Sign me up, man.
Masuo Hashiguchi: You serious?
Kaji and Iwata and I all nod. Unanimous.
Masuo Hashiguchi: Is it just me… or is it getting hot down here?
The end of the line?
We didn’t know our underground breakfasts wouldn’t last forever.
We didn’t know about the 1995 underground gas attack. Or the citywide removal of subway station trash receptacles that would follow.
A future with nowhere for trash to go.
Nobody saw that coming. Because we were still living in 1994.
BOAT SIX
YOU? IN BUSINESS?
About my third girlfriend.
Fast-forward six years—to 2000 A.D. Except, well, I wasn’t some boy in a bubble. Things happened in between. So let me fill you in real quick.
A detour before we get around to my third escape attempt and its inevitable failure.
Remember my rival in love? Yakisoba Man? Well, I thought he was my rival, but I guess that was all in my head. Yakisoba Man never made it to Haneda, either. That’s right. My second girlfriend caught that plane to Okinawa, plus none. She was totally devastated when I didn’t show. It makes me want to cry out at a hundred decibels: YOU’RE WRONG!
But how could she know? She had no idea I was blacked out on a train on the Yamanote Line. Typically, I’m the great misreader. I like to think I hold the patent on getting things wrong. Shit, I probably could have sued her for patent infringement.
This is what I get for going behind his back…
I bet she was crushed. Clueless and crushed.
She got on that flight (the seat beside her empty), connected in Naha, and landed in Miyakojima.
Did she find Shangri-La there?
Beats me.
I learnt everything I know—her side of the story or whatever—from a letter. One letter from Okinawa. That’s all she wrote. My second girlfriend quit school (by the time she sent that letter, the necessary paperwork had already been filed with the admissions office) and vacated Casa Komagome (an aunt from Saitama acted as her proxy), never to return from her areolar paradise.
OK, my turn.
I read that letter in my hospital bed. My mom brought it when she came to visit. Yeah, my heart was broken. But that wasn’t the only thing. I was hospitalized for broken bones sustained in the Yamanote brawl. Or, as the episode is known in the annals of my history, TRAGEDY OUTSIDE MEJIRO STATION. All of this bold.
My injuries were pretty serious. Three months to recover—that was the diagnosis. After I passed out on the train, men and women of all ages walked all over me, leaving me with six broken ribs. How many were left? On the bright side, my spinal cord was apparently intact.
Things were that bad.
That was how I learnt that when someone blacks out, they really black out.
They beat the shit out of me. No, they beat a lesson into me. There’s no way I’m ever getting out of Tokyo. Everything went black. Next thing I remember: the white fluorescence of my hospital room. I was looking up at the ceiling above my narrow cot. That was two days after my first procedure.
I was famous. Or—you know—infamous. The other passengers were seeking “damages”. Guess they were told to go after JR, too. The charges were, I went off like a machine gun—assaulting innocent after innocent. That was how the newspapers spun it the morning after: SIGN OF THE TIMES—REBEL WITHOUT A COMPASS LASHES OUT DURING GUERRILLA ATTACKS.