A Left Hook Like God's - Part I
LJ, I don't like you anymore. You're making me split up my >9000 word fanfic into two chunks, which I can only hope doesn't spoil the flow. You, dear reader, shall hopefully be the judge of this.
Title: A Left Hook like God's - Part I
Fandom: Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei
Genre: Gen
Characters: Jinroku, Nozomu (and Matoi of course).
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Nothing specific for this chapter but it gets progressively darker. Potentially slightly un-PC with regards to popular Japanese attitudes towards North Korea. Please be advised that the views expressed within the context of this work are not necessarily those of the author, her employers, the creators of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei or anyone of importance.
Summary: The lurid half-world of pachinko is decadent and depraved. Amid despair over international affairs (among other matters,) Nozomu, Jinroku and Matoi go on a savage journey to the heart of the Tokyoite dream.
A Left Hook Like God's
*
Jinroku, an aging gentleman of an otherwise sanguine temperament, had a habit of visiting a certain pachinko hall in Higashi-Ueno every time he felt himself caught up in any kind of problem that was larger than he was. Sometimes it was a personal matter, or business, but more often these days, it was some kind of event in the world at large. It wasn't a pattern he was entirely conscious of, but, if you were to draw up a chart of Jinroku's proximity to this certain pachinko hall and, say, the perceived closeness of nuclear war, you would find a stunning correlation. He had no personal or business connections to this particular hall whatsoever; it was case of simple conditioning. Hundreds of other professional-looking men also crowded here during the long dark o-yatsu of the soul. There must've been something relaxing about it, to watch the random motion of the tiny silver pinballs, with their eyes like seashells amid the smoke. There was also the incentive to make some quick cash, through the convoluted trade-in system designed to sidestep the anti-gambling laws. Even so, a vague anxiety sat at the back of Jinroku's mind when he parted the anachronistic blue noren curtains. But all the same, it was a Sunday night, and it wasn't like he had anywhere else to be.
"Welcome!" A young girl in a bright uniform happi greeted him. She looked a little familiar, but he paid it no mind. After buying a can of UCC coffee-milk, he sat down in front of his favorite machine, poured in a few hundred yen, and collected the clattering pinballs in a rectangular dish. He'd never won a big payout on it so far, and so by his reasoning this one was "due."
One thing which set this particular hall aside from most others was a small Sony TV8-301 transistor television, which was suspended on a ledge on the wall opposite Jinroku. It was almost like a foreign concession to any passing time-travellers from the Showa era, moulded in dark brown Bakelite and always fuzzily tuned to NHK General. He didn't feel like watching it, and even if he had, it would've been impossible to make out the words over the roar of klaxons, and the constant pa-chi, pa-chi, clack-clack-clack of the tiny pinballs raining down the faces of the machines. It was like a tree falling in the forest with no-one there to hear it, only the forest was at the epicenter of an H-bomb. Still, the dry, desu-masu litany of the announcers continued.
"--is reported to be in preparations for launching a Taepodong-2 missile within several days, according to US intelligence agencies. It is currently uncertain whether the missile is carrying, as Pyongyang insists, a satellite, or if it is, as many here in Japan suspect, a warhead. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comments that if the launch goes ahead, it will be in opposition to several United Nations Security Council resolutions, and the US will voice its strong opposition to such--"
//ipachipachipachipachipachipachipachipachipachi-ka-kiiiiiin//
"Meanwhile, here in Japan, fears are rife over the Taepodong-2's war potential. The government warns that it will pre-emptively destroy any missiles launched. However, North Korea has today indicated it will consider any Japanese incursions into North Korean airspace an act of war, and is prepared to retaliate without hesitation. The previous launch of a Taepodong missile was in 2006, which ended in failure and--."
//ER IS YOU-- A WINNER IS YOU! -- A WINNER IS YOU! -- A WINNER IS YOU! -- A WINN//
A bowlful of newly-won pachinko balls spilled out of the machine in time with the English jingle. Jinroku smiled, his initial vague anxiety replaced by an even vaguer sense of calm. After a while, he couldn't even make out his own reflection in the glass panel of the machine. He began to lose awareness of the boundaries of himself and the world at large. The ontological phenomenon of that which is known as "Jinroku" became dispersed throughout the room, throughout the universe. As long as the game continued, he was present and absent in all things. There was only room in his waking mind for how he could control the machine's randomness; its miniature meteor showers of lights and silver pellets.
Hour by hour, the night bore on without change. Once the houselights came on, signaling the close of the day's trade, Jinroku snapped back to consensus reality. Once he felt like himself again, he swapped in his collection of balls for a few cartons of Marlboro Reds. He wasn't sure whether he could be bothered to swap them in for cash at the trading post next door; anyway, if he did, the profits would go right on over to the Taito-Iijima syndicate... Seeking anonymity in an unfamiliar district had its drawbacks.
"Much obliged, miss," Jinroku said to the girl behind the counter.
"Have a lucky day, sensei!" she responded in kind.
Now, how did she know my day job, I wonder? he though as he stepped into the night. Perhaps she was just being polite...
At any rate, she was right. It would be midnight soon, and a new morning was about to begin.
**
The following Monday, despite the overcast dawn, Jinroku was ready as anything for the working week. It was only a quarter past 7, but a fresh rush of caffeine started to kick in on his way in through the main gates. With only a few dozen students or so milling about the campus for early morning clubs, it didn't even quite feel like a school yet. He folded his dry umbrella in on itself and swapped his boots for inside-shoes at the vestibule, then drew in a lungful of the warm recycled air. He particularly liked how the biscuit-coloured wood of the hallways had a toasted, tobacco-like smell under the heating ducts when he passed them by.
Jinroku pushed the sliding door to the teachers' room ajar. To his surprise, at the opposite side of the room stood Nozomu Itoshiki, decked out in his usual off-white kimono attire, and looking to be very absorbed in whatever it was he was doing. Jinroku wasn't sure what exactly that was, but it apparently involved a neat pile of small cardboard boxes which Nozomu produced from his sleeve pockets and left on the counter by the communal fridge. Now, what the devil's he up to? Jinroku thought sneakily. It's not like him to be so early.
Jinroku fancied that he might have caught his colleague in the midst of something innocently untoward, along the lines of smoking indoors, or writing personal correspondence on the school letterheads. His curiosity aroused, Jinroku decided to observe how it played out, like you might watch a squirrel or an uncommon bird.
Nozomu looked a trifle thinner than usual, and Jinroku glimpsed an unfocused scowl on his profile when the young man crossed the floor to the water cooler. He filled a paper cup, and after opening the first of the piled boxes, popped out a couple of white tablets from an oblong silver sheet. He frowned at them, as if he was in two minds about what they were for, but after a little trepidation he licked them off his palm, gulping back the rest of the water in one for a chaser. He repeated this process in exactly the same manner several times over for the remaining boxes, refilling the paper cup and even hesitating a little each time. Finally he settled by the window with another full glass of water, and seemed to stare at the ink-wash skyline without moving again. I'll just wait until he goes back to his desk, Jinroku thought, maybe that way he'll be none the wiser. Still, Nozomu kept still as a painting of a statue in a photograph. The whole scene filled Jinroku with the intense desire to be somewhere else. Eventually there was no sense in evading the awkwardness any more.
"Um," Jinroku finally said to break the silence. "Good morning, Itoshiki! Are you well today?"
A visible shiver shot up Nozomu's spine and he inhaled a mouthful of water in surprise.
"FFFFfff--- morning, Jinroku!" he sputtered, accidentally knocking the pyramid of medicine boxes to the ground. "Didn't see you there," he continued with a pained expression, and began to cough violently. Mortified, Jinroku quickly stepped over to the younger man's side.
"Are you alright?" Jinroku asked. "Do you need for me to strike you on the back or anything?"
"Just-- something gone down the wrong way then, excuse me," Nozomu wheezed. "Another glass of," he coughed, "water would be," cough, "nice if it's not too much," he took a great sucking in-breath and clutched at his throat. "Oh, Christ, choking, going to die..."
"Breathe normally, you'll be just fine," Jinroku said reassuringly.
He pulled Nozomu along by both of his sweaty hands to a chair by the other window, which he opened wide before fetching another glass. There was an unseasonal chill to the morning air. The dark grey clouds were now more active than before, cracking open in places to patches of mockingly blue sky. Nozomu snatched the fresh glass of water and sipped at it nervously. Jinroku uncomfortably ran his hand through his thinning forelocks and looked at the ceiling. A long silence settled between the two teachers until Nozomu finally caught his breath.
"Uh, please excuse me," he said. “That was inexcusable of me, just now. I take it you... you saw all that, yes?"
"It's quite alright, as long as health issues aren't interfering with--"
"I should've taken care of it at home. And then to lose my composure, on top of that!" Nozomu folded one arm behind his head and grimaced. "But, uh, they're on prescription, I assure you."
"Oh, I'm sure of it!" Jinroku insisted. "I just feel bad to've startled you--"
"And I only took the recommended dose this time."
"Ah, is that so?"
An uncomfortable quiet spell elapsed between them while Nozomu finished the glass of water. Jinroku went to set his own briefcase down, but he saw that Nozomu quickly twisted around and kept speaking.
"And you know, it's only as a trial. And in fact, they're just for--"
"You don't need to justify yourself to me, lad!" Jinroku said with a laugh. "You and me, we're equals as far as I know. Besides, we've all got skeletons in our closets, as they say. Why, even--" Jinroku half-began, but quickly checked himself.
"I wonder whether I shouldn't just call in sick for the rest of the day, perhaps..." Nozomu sighed and lowered his head. "I was feeling confident before, but after that, I'm not sure I'm up to teaching."
"It's your call, Itoshiki. But since we're public sector teachers, we're only allowed a set number of sick days off per year, you know," Jinroku responded, taking a stern tone. "And I don't want to sound critical, but you already did take two straight weeks off just last month."
"But I wasn't feeling well!" Nozomu said defensively. "I'll have you know I had the very same thing as Akutagawa."
"Is that right? Well, one of the lads in my homeroom told me he saw you milling about Kitashikahama with a couple of your students the very same weekend. Said he didn't recognize one of them at a distance, but that Tsunetsuki girl was definitely there, as usual. Now, I won't mention it to Chie or anyone this time, but you'd do well to avoid taking time off for things like that."
"You don't understand! She's always--"
"If I don't understand, then the Board certainly won't," Jinroku countered. "Please believe me when I say I've got only your best interests at heart, Itoshiki."
"Very well... If you insist, I'll stay on for now," Nozomu surrendered. "But don't say I didn't warn you I was feeling overtired. When I die of karoushi, it'll be on your conscience."
Jinroku switched the transistor radio on his desk to NHK FM, which was a minute or so into Bellini's "Casta Diva" on a bland morning classical program. Nozomu, a karoushi? Death from overwork? The very idea! If anyone was going to die of overwork, it would be 2-H's substitute teachers. Still, he sometimes couldn't tell whether (relatively) young people like Nozomu were being ironic with him or not. It made him feel intensely out of touch, but at the same time, he also felt an twinge of guilt for badgering Nozomu even a bit. Sunken into the armchair, and apparently paying close attention to the radio, he looked exactly like a petulant youth in a coffeeshop. As a matter of fact, everything he was doing that morning, Jinroku noticed, he did with a pathos that, from a distance, resembled childishness. On one hand Jinroku was fed up with it, but at the same time he found it stirring a kind of protectiveness.
The woman on the radio was up to the bit in the aria about the "il bel sembiante senza nube e senza vel" when Jinroku walked over and quite sharply brought his hand down on Nozomu's shoulder.
"There, there, lad. Cheer up! The whole stars-and-violets temperament isn't becoming for a young man of your status. Which isn't to you're by any means advanced in life yet, but you've got a lot of potential in this job that I couldn't bear to see you waste on insubstantial things."
"Insubstantial things?" Nozomu shot back, sounding very offended. "I don't think about anything insubstantial, you can be sure of that."
"Well, perhaps I misspoke. I'm sure whatever it is, is substantial to you," Jinroku conceded, "but perhaps another perspective would be useful."
"I don't have anyone to speak to," Nozomu said poutingly. "This is what it means to be an outsider."
"Well, if you think I could help in any sense--"
"How could you possibly? I hardly even know you outside of this building. I don't even know what you do in your casual time."
"Well, sometimes it's even easier to relax people you don't know well," argued Jinroku. "Like a doctor, for instance. Or a therapist, or the people at the public baths..."
"Aah! Yes, but you see!" Nozomu flailed a bit, looking a bit like an angry panelist on a TV debate. "I already intimately know a doctor, and a therapist, and a youth who works at the public baths, all of whom are already deeply enmeshed in my personal problems! So, clearly there isn't anyone left I can even trust as a stranger!"
"I'm afraid I don't see your point at all," Jinroku said flatly.
"Actually, come to think of it, neither do I." Nozomu stood up to face the window again.
"Very well!" he said. "I'll start over. Where was I before I got sidetracked?"
"You were just about to tell me what was bothering you."
"Was I? Really? How queer!" Nozomu cried, then quickly sat down again. "That doesn't sound like something I'd do..."
"Which would be why you got confused just now. But you definitely were."
"Promise?"
"Oh, unreservedly."
"Well, in that case...."
When Nozomu began in a tone on voice that seemed to channel darkness itself, Jinroku began to regret ever becoming involved in other people's affairs.
"Lately I've been worried about the things they say on the news," said Nozomu quietly. "And the things they don't."
"The things they don't?"
"Well, the things that are kept hidden by the media; often dangerous things."
Nozomu wouldn't let his gaze meet Jinroku's, but kept either looking in the distance or off to one side, as if he was addressing some unseen third person standing off in the middle-distance. It was an intensely unsettling affectation.
"Now, as a caveat, I know I tend to talk about death a lot. Often my own, in fact, so you might very well say that I'm a morbid person. But even so, I know I don't want to die in a crowd. It's so anonymous; I wouldn't enjoy it all. There wouldn't even be anything to bury, can you imagine it? War, that is to say..."
"The war!?" Jinroku interrupted incredulously. "But you weren't even alive then, Itoshiki! Don't try giving me the 1000-yard stare; you're heisei-danshi material to the bone."
"Not 'The War', just war in general," Nozomu clarified.
"It's already happening everywhere else in the world. I look at what is done to people in Iraq, or Palestine and so on, and feel such intense disgust for human beings I can hardly stomach it to count myself among the species. In my mind's eye, I already see the bombs fall, one after another. When they fall, they flatten the cities and kill the soldiers. Before they even run out of soldiers to kill, they kill the civilians. They fall on schools, kill the students and blow their arms off. Then the soldiers move in shoot their fathers and their mothers and all their friends," Nozomu listed. His glasses caught in the line of light just so as to eclipse his eyes. "These are the sorts of things I've been thinking about lately."
Jinroku was becoming conscious of a deepening rift of anxiety in the other man, to which he had no idea how to respond. All he could tell was that it didn't wholly correspond with what he was actually saying. Nozomu spoke as if he were reciting poetry; there had to be some hidden meaning behind it. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was suddenly reminded of when, as a child, he'd dropped a handful of coins to a deep wishing well. Even after a full minute, they still didn't strike the ground. It must have opened up right to the very center of the earth, he thought. He prayed for some proof that the falling had stopped, but nothing came. There was just the fall -- the ongoing anticipation, that terrifying emptiness of the darkness, just before they found their way to whatever lay at the bottom of that selfsame darkness.
"On top of that, I also have a recurring nightmare that upsets me greatly. In it, I'd walked outside, and they-- I couldn't tell, I got the impression it was North Korea-- they'd dropped dropped bombs all over the city. There wasn't anything left, just burnt out skeletons of all the old familiar buildings. The sky was red and hazy, like pictures of Mars. The streets all ripped up, with the subways and sewers spilling out and the bridges collapsed into the sea. Charred power-lines and telephone poles stretched out for miles along the river.
“Almost everything solid had melted into air. I thought I was the only survivor until I saw them - hundreds people were crawling through Akiba with their skin still dripping off them. I could even recognize them-- my old friends and brothers, students, and so on. That's when I woke up, trembling. I can't stop thinking of it. I'm 100% that sure it's going to happen soon. So soon, in fact, I think I should just end it all now, so I won't have to be around to see everyone care for die in such a way."
"I couldn't sleep past 5 this morning, so I decided to come in early. But over and over again, my mind returns to it," Nozomu sighed, his glasses thoroughly misted over. "Such things; they truly terrify me, Jinroku."
Jinroku broke into a cold sweat and was, again, filled with the desire to be somewhere, anywhere, else.
"I'm in despair," Nozomu concluded ineluctably. "The ever-present threat of nuclear war has left me in despair."
After this, a long time passed with neither man having anything else to say.
"Uh, it looks like you're having a tough semester," the older man finally offered weakly. "But you know, Japan won't ever go to war again, so you probably don't need worry about that. It says so, right there in the Constitution. Unless they reform Article 9, but then again, you see the protests that always strike up when they propose that. And as for North Korea, there's no real reason to be so alarmist..."
All of a sudden the idea struck him, like a ball bearing dropped from the sky.
"Ahah!" Jinroku exclaimed victoriously.
"'Ahah' what?" Nozomu asked.
"Ahah, in the sense that, while I hope you won't find it presumptuous, if you've been feeling particularly under the weather lately..."
"Yes?"
"Then perhaps you'd like to join me for a night on the town of sorts. Tonight, I propose! There's nothing but the swimming carnival on tomorrow, so I know for a fact you aren't busy with anything work-related."
"Well! That's a bit..." Nozomu jumped back a little. All of a sudden, he looked clear and energetic, as if he'd been talking about the weather rather than nuclear war a minute ago. "Thank you for the invitation and I'm flattered that you asked, but I--"
"Please," Jinroku pressed. "I insist that you do. You'll feel all the better for it, I promise you."
Nozomu looked at the floor again.
"It's not..." he started hesitantly, "it's not in Shinjuku 2-chome, though, is it?"
"Oh, God, no!" Jinroku gave a loud, silly laugh once he realised Nozomu's implication. "No, no, no; if I were that sort of person, I'd have said I loved you right off the bat, you silly sod."
Even so he could tell he hadn't succeeded in making Nozomu feel any less uncomfortable.
*** e n d o f p a r t o n e ***
(o n w a r d s t o p a r t II)
Disclaimer - Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is the intellectual property of Kumeta Kohji. Additionally, certain concepts have been intentionally derived from imagery in Murakami Haruki's The Windup Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase/All God's Children Can Dance. That's because this whole fic is basically intended as a kind of gentle parody of Murakami's style for those In On The Joke, as permitted under the terms of fair use. So please don't sue me.