Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu Murakami & Ralph McCarthy (translator)

Author:Ryu Murakami & Ralph McCarthy (translator)
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction:Humor
ISBN: 9780393340372
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

They rode the tandem bicycles down a dirt road to the courts and rented rackets and balls at the little log-cabin-style office from a young man with no shortage of pimples. He directed them to Court B, where they split into two teams for a doubles match. None of them had ever played before, so their serves were rarely within the lines and nothing resembling an extended rally ever occurred, but the four Midoris enjoyed themselves immensely, cheering and shrieking every bit as energetically as the younger groups on either side of them. They had reserved the court for two hours, but after an hour of playing their particular style of tennis, in which all four players jump up and down and squeal with delight whenever one of them manages to hit the ball, they’d had their fill and sat down on the benches, drinking sports drinks and chattering excitedly. None of them had produced so much as a drop of perspiration, but they had achieved one of their dreams—tennis by the lake—and spirits were high. Tomiyama Midori peered up at Mount Fuji, looming right in front of them, and said, Come to think of it…

“I used to come here when I was little, not the tennis courts but Lake Yamanaka. I wonder why I’ve forgotten about that for so long. My father worked in a bank that had a lodge where the employees could stay on their holidays. Judging from the position of Fuji, I’d say it was on the far end of the lake, like if you walked halfway around the lake from here, that’s about where the lodge was. It seems like we went there every summer when I was little, but of course my father was just an average clerk in the bank, so he could never get a vacation of any length, more like three days at a time, and I even seem to remember trips where we stayed at the lodge just one night, but anyway we went there many, many times. I wonder how old I was when this thing happened—I remember my father carrying me on his shoulders, so I must’ve been really small, first or second grade, maybe. It wasn’t much of a lodge or anything, nothing special about it, just a dining hall and three or four rooms upstairs lined with bunk beds, but it was on this gently sloping hill, and out in the garden was a barbecue, just a simple one made out of bricks with a heavy iron screen kind of thing sitting on top, and I remember the last dish we’d cook would always be yaki-soba noodles, but we grilled all sorts of things, steaks and potatoes and hamburgers and frozen prawns, and the adults drank beer and we kids drank orange pop, and then, before going to bed, we always had fireworks. My father usually took his vacation after the Obon holidays, so it was just about the time of year it is now, but

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