Free 69 by Ryu Murakami Page B

a local festival; a penalty shootout in the prefectural junior high soccer finals, which our team lost. None of them worked. Adama had both hands over his mouth and was shuddering and wheezing. I’d never realized how hard it could be to control the giggles. I drew a picture of Kazuko Matsui in my mind: her slender, milky calves, her Bambi eyes, her white arms, the awesome curve of the nape of her neck—and the spasms finally stopped. Such is the power of beautiful women: they can even stifle laughter, make a man sober and serious. After a while Adama, too, stood up, drenched with sweat. He told me later he’d pictured the charred corpses he’d once seen after a mine explosion. Being forced to remember a scene like that must have made him angry: he rapped Nakamura on the head with his fist.
    “Asshole. I thought I was going to lose my mind,” I said and quietly opened the door to the principal’s office. “Hey, Nakamura.”
    “Yes?”
    “Is it diarrhea?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Can you do it right away?”
    “It’s already poking its head out.”
    “Do it up there.”
    “Eh?” he said, and his jaw dropped. I was pointing at the principal’s desk . “I can’t do that.”
    “What do you mean, you can’t do it? It’s your punishment for making us laugh and nearly getting us busted. If we were real guerrillas, we’d have killed you right then and there.”
    Nakamura was close to tears, but we wouldn’t let him off the hook. Bathed in moonlight, he climbed up onto the desk.
    “Don’t look, okay?” he said in a pitiful voice as he pulled down his pants.
    “If you think it’s going to get noisy, stop,” Adama whispered, holding his nose.
    “Stop? Once it starts coming out, I can’t stop.”
    “You wanna get thrown out of school?”
    “Can’t I do it in the toilet?”
    “Nope.”
    Nakamura’s white ass shone in the moonlight.
    “I’m too nervous. It won’t come out.”
    “Push,” Adama said, and that’s when it happened.
    Along with a little whimpering cry, Nakamura let out a tremendous fart. It sounded like a broken bagpipe. Adama ran up to him and whispered, “Keep it down! Plug up your ass with something!”
    “It’s too late,” Nakamura said.
    The noise was incredibly loud and seemed to go on forever. I got goosebumps all over and turned to look toward the watchmen’s room. If we got expelled for a fart, we’d be the laughingstock of the school, but they still seemed to be asleep. Nakamura wiped his ass with the monthly newsletter of the
    Nagasaki Prefectural High School Principals Association, and smiled sheepishly.
     
    The other team had nearly finished barricading the door to the roof with wire and desks and chairs. Otaki told us wistfully that it would have been even better if he’d had welding equipment.
    Narushima and Masutabe were the only ones left on the roof. After securing the door from the outside with wire, they had to slide down a rope to a window on the third floor. We all watched them from the courtyard in front of the school. Narushima had been in the mountain-climbing club, so we weren’t worried about him.
    “What’ll we do if Masutabe falls?” Otaki said. “Might as well decide that now.”
    “We’ll call the cops and run.” It was, of course, Adama who made this decision. “Hell, if we try to help him, we’ll all be busted.”
    Masutabe, unlike Narushima, was swaying back and forth on the rope. Fuse said he wouldn’t be surprised if the kid was pissing his pants. I told them about Nakamura’s revolutionary bowel movement, and everyone doubled up laughing.
    Masutabe somehow managed to make it down safely. The banner was hanging from the roof.
    “Power to the Imagination.”
    We all stood silently gazing up at it.

JUST LIKE A WOMAN
    At six o’clock in the morning, Adama and I made seven telephone calls: to the local branches of the Asahi , Mainichi , and Tomiuri newspapers, the main offices of both the Western Japan News and the Nagasaki Post