Tokyo Decadence by Ryu Murakami

Author:Ryu Murakami
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9784902075793
Publisher: BookBaby

The Last Picture Show

I was eighteen.

I’d just come up to Tokyo from a port town in Kyushu that had a US naval base, and was living with some friends in a crummy little apartment in a wooden building in Kichijoji, just north of Inokashira Park. These friends had formed a blues band back home and dreamed of making it big in the big city. I played drums but wasn’t really passionate about carrying on with a band from the boondocks. My main priority had been to get away from my parents, who’d agreed to stake my move to Tokyo and send me an allowance if I enrolled in a college prep school there. The other guys worked as busboys or waiters while looking to launch their career as professional musicians, but I wasn’t working. At this point I was living with them only because staying was easier than trying to find a room on my own.

The plan was to work nights, practice during the day, attend big concerts to meet the right people, and audition for record companies and production agencies. On the overnight train from our hometown, we’d set ourselves the goal of making it onto the stage at the Hibiya Park concert series within six months. There were, including me, five members, from a variety of backgrounds. Nakano, the bass player and leader, had a salaryman father who’d just retired; the guitarist Yamaguchi’s father ran a small import-export firm, and his mother was a piano teacher; Shimada on organ was the only child of a filling station owner; and Kato the vocalist had been raised by a single mother. Our financial circumstances differed too, of course—Nakano and Kato had virtually run away from home, and neither had so much as a futon or a rice bowl to his name, whereas Shimada’s folks sent him a package of food and clothing and a registered envelope full of cash every week, and Yamaguchi had a stereo system with an open-reel tape deck.

All four of them got jobs as busboys and waiters: Kato and Shimada at discos in Roppongi, Yamaguchi at a live-music club in Shinjuku, and Nakano at a cabaret in Ginza. But the plan to work nights and practice in the daytime proved undoable from the outset. The places they worked at were all open from about six in the evening to eleven at night, but busboys and waiters had to get there two or three hours early and stay till well after closing time to clean up or wash dishes. Nakano would leave the apartment at two in the afternoon and stagger home at about two in the morning, having caught the last train. There were cabarets nearby—right there in Kichijoji, even—but Nakano believed that only in Ginza could you make connections in the blues music field. God knows where he got an idea like that, which in retrospect just sounds like a bad joke.

Shimada had brought a mike and amp from Kyushu, and everyone except me had brought their instruments.

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