First Person Singular Page 12

  On the field, there is a story line about to be played out, amid the full array of cheers and signs and cries of anger ready and waiting: the players warming up, their uniforms still sparkling clean, the happy reverberation of the pure-white ball striking the sweet spot of the bat as the players field fungoes, the determined shouts of the hawkers selling beer, the fresh new scoreboard before the game begins. Yes, that’s how—without any room for doubt whatsoever—that’s how baseball, and going to the stadium, has become an integral part of me.

  So at eighteen when I left the Kansai-Kobe area to go to college in Tokyo I decided, like it was the most natural thing, to go to Jingu Stadium and root for the Sankei Atoms. This was the closest stadium to where I was living, so I could root for the home team—which to me was the very best way of enjoying watching baseball. Though strictly speaking, Korakuen Stadium, the home of the Tokyo Giants back then, was a bit closer to my apartment…but there was no way I was going there. I mean, there are certain ethical standards you have to maintain.

  This was in 1968. The Folk Crusaders had a big hit then with “I Only Live Twice,” it was the year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and there were student demonstrations on Anti-War Day that occupied Shinjuku station. Lining up all these events makes it sound like ancient history, but, at any rate, that was the year I decided, “Okay, I’m going to be a Sankei Atoms fan from now on.” Prompted by something—fate, my astrological sign, blood type, prophecy, or a spell. If you have a chart of historical chronology I’d like you to write the following, in small letters in one corner: 1968. This was the year that Haruki Murakami became a Sankei Atoms fan.

  I’m ready to swear this before every god in the world, but at the time, the Sankei Atoms had totally hit rock bottom. They didn’t have a single star player, the entire team was obviously barely scraping along, and there were hardly any fans at the stadium, except for when they played the Giants. To use an antiquated Japanese term, “the black cuckoo was calling”—meaning the place was deserted. The thought often struck me back then that the team mascot shouldn’t be the anime character Astro Boy (Iron-arm Atom, in the original) but instead should be a black cuckoo. Though what exactly that kind of cuckoo looked like, I couldn’t tell you.

  This was the age when the Tokyo Giants—under their manager, Tetsuharu Kawakami—ruled. Their home ground, Korakuen Stadium, was always sold out. Their corporate owner, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper group, used game tickets as a major sales strategy, and worked hard to increase newspaper sales. The Giants sluggers Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima were national heroes. I passed by kids on the street who proudly wore their Giants baseball caps. But a kid wearing a Sankei Atoms cap was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps those brave few who did were seen stealthily slinking down back alleyways, furtively weaving their way under the eaves. My gosh—where is there any justice left in the world?

  But whenever I had free time (and back then I was free most of the time), I’d walk over to Jingu Stadium and silently root for the Sankei Atoms by myself. They lost much more often than they won (probably losing about two-thirds of their games), but I was still young. As long as I could stretch out on the grass past the outfield, have some beers, and watch the game, occasionally gazing aimlessly up at the sky, I was pretty happy. I’d enjoy it when the team won the odd game, and when they lost, I’d console myself with the thought that it’s important in life to get used to losing. They didn’t have bleachers in the outfield then, just a slope with trampled-down grass. I’d spread out a newspaper (the Sankei Sports paper, of course) and sit there, sometimes lying back. As you can imagine, when it rained the ground got pretty muddy.

  * * *

  —

  In 1978, when the team won its first championship, I was living in Sendagaya, a ten-minute walk from the stadium, so I went to see games whenever I was free. That year the Yakult Swallows (they’d changed their name to the Yakult Swallows by then) won their first league championship in the twenty-nine-year history of the franchise, and rode that wave all the way to victory in the Japan Series. A miraculous year, for sure. That was the same year (when I was twenty-nine, too) that I wrote my first novel, entitled Hear the Wind Sing, which won the Gunzo Newcomer’s Prize. I suppose that’s when you could call me a novelist, starting then. I know it’s just a coincidence, but I can’t help feeling there’s some connection, some karma, at work in all this.

  But this was all much later. In the ten years that led up to that moment, from 1968 to 1977, I witnessed a huge number, an almost astronomical number (at least that’s the way it feels), of losing games. To put it another way, I steadily became accustomed to regular loss: “Here we go again—another defeat.” Like a diver carefully takes his time to acclimate to the different water pressure. It’s true that life brings us far more defeats than victories. And real-life wisdom arises not so much from knowing how we might beat someone as from learning how to accept defeat with grace.

  “You’ll never understand this advantage we’ve been given!” I often used to shout at the Giants’ cheering section. (Of course I never actually shouted it aloud.)

  * * *

  —

  During those long dark years, like passing through an endless tunnel, I sat in the outfield seats. To kill time while I watched the game, I scribbled down some poem-like jottings in a notebook. Poems on the topic of baseball. Unlike soccer, with baseball there can be a lot of down time between plays, so I could look away from the field, jot down my ideas on paper without missing any runs. Let’s face it—baseball is a sport done at a leisurely pace. Most of these poems were written during tiresome, losing games when one pitcher after another was brought in to try to salvage the game. (Oh, man, how many times did I watch that kind of game?)

  * * *

  —

  The first poem in my collection was the following one. There are two versions of the poem—a short version and a long one—and this is the long version. I added a few things later on.

  Right Fielder

  On that May afternoon

  You’re holding down right field at Jingu Stadium.

  The right fielder for the Sankei Atoms.

  That’s your profession.

  I’m seated in the back of the right field’s seats,

  Drinking slightly lukewarm beer.

  Like always.

  The opposing team’s batter lofts a fly to right field.

  A simple pop fly.

  It arcs high up, a lazy fly ball.

  The wind has stopped.

  And the sun isn’t an issue.

  It’s a piece of cake.

  You raise both hands a bit,

  And step forward about three yards.

  You got this.

  I take a sip of beer,

  Waiting for the ball to drop.

  As straight as a ruler the ball falls

  Precisely three yards behind you.

  Like a mallet lightly tapping the edge of the universe,

  There’s a slight plunk.

  It makes me wonder—

  Why in the world do I cheer on a team like this?

  This itself is a kind of—

  Riddle as huge as the universe.

  I have no idea if this could be called a poem. If you did, it might make actual poets upset, make them want to string me up from the nearest light pole. I’ll pass on that, thank you very much. Okay, but then what should I call these? If there’s a better name for them, then I’d like to know it. So, for the time being, at least, I labeled them “poems.” And I gathered my poems into a book called The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection and published it. If poets want to get all bent out of shape over it, then be my guest. This was in 1982. A little before I finished writing my novel A Wild Sheep Chase, three years after I’d debuted as a novelist (if you could call it that).

 
Major publishers were wise enough, of course, not to show even a smidge of interest in putting out my book of poems, so I ended up basically self-publishing it. Fortunately a friend of mine ran a printing company, so I could print it up on the cheap. Simple binding, five hundred numbered copies, each and every one signed by yours truly. Haruki Murakami, Haruki Murakami, Haruki Murakami…Predictably, though, hardly anyone paid it any attention. You’d have to have pretty odd taste to lay down good money for something like that. I think I sold about three hundred copies, all told. The rest I gave away as souvenirs to various friends and acquaintances. Nowadays they’ve become valuable collector’s items, and fetch unbelievable prices. You never know what’s going to happen. I only have two copies myself. If only I’d kept more, I’d be rolling in dough by now.

  * * *

  .

  After my father’s funeral, three of my cousins and I drank a ton of beer. Two of my cousins were on my father’s side (around the same age as me), and the third was a cousin on my mother’s side (about fifteen years younger). We sat around till late at night, throwing back the beers. Beer was all we drank. And no snacks, either. Just an endless parade of beer. I’d never drunk that much beer in my life. By the end, about twenty of those large, twenty-one-ounce Kirin bottles stood empty on the table. How my bladder held out, I have no idea. On top of that, while we were downing all this beer, I stepped out to a jazz bar near the funeral home and had several Four Roses whiskeys on the rocks.

  I don’t know why I drank so much that night. It wasn’t like I felt any deep emotions or anything—I wasn’t feeling particularly sad or empty. No matter how much I drank, though, I didn’t get drunk, and the next day, I didn’t even have a speck of a hangover. In fact, when I woke up the next morning, my mind was sharper than usual.

  My father was a dyed-in-the-wool Hanshin Tigers fan. When I was a kid, my father was in a foul mood whenever the Tigers lost. Even his facial expression would change. And if he had anything to drink, this tendency would get even worse. So on nights after the Hanshin Tigers lost, I’d be extra careful not to do anything to upset him. Possibly that’s why I never got to be—or never could be—a Hanshin Tigers fan.

  My relationship with my father wasn’t what you’d call friendly. There were lots of reasons for this, but in the twenty years before severe diabetes and the cancer that had spread throughout his body put an end to his life at age ninety, my father and I hardly exchanged a word with each other. You could never label that a “friendly relationship.” At the very end of his life, we had a reconciliation of sorts, though perhaps it came too late to really matter.

  But of course I do have some wonderful memories.

  When I was nine, in the fall, the St. Louis Cardinals played a goodwill game against an All-Star Japanese team. The great Stan Musial was at his peak then, and he faced two top Japanese pitchers, Kazuhisa Inao and Tadashi Sugiura, in an amazing showdown. My father and I went to Koshien Stadium to see the game. We were in the infield seats along first base, near the front. Before the game began, the Cardinals’ players made a circuit of the whole stadium, tossing signed soft rubber tennis balls to the crowd. People leapt to their feet, shouting, vying to grab the balls. But I just sat in my seat, vacantly watching all of this happen. I figured that a little kid like me had no chance of getting one of those signed balls. The next instant, however, I suddenly found one of them in my lap. By total chance, it just happened to land there. Plop—like some divine revelation.

  “Good for you,” my father told me. He sounded half shocked, half admiring. Come to think of it, when I became a novelist at age thirty, he said almost the same thing to me. Half shock, half admiration.

  That was probably the greatest, most memorable thing that happened to me when I was a boy. Maybe the most blessed event I ever experienced. Could it be that my love for baseball stadiums sprang from this incident? I took that treasured white ball back home, of course, but that’s all I remember about it. What ever happened to that ball? Where could it have possibly gone?

  * * *

  .

  I also included the following poem in The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. I believe I wrote it back when Osamu Mihara had taken charge of the team as their manager. This was the period I have the most vivid and fond memories of, for whatever reason. I was always fired up to go to the stadium back then, sure that something fun and unexpected was going to happen.

  A Bird’s Shadow

  An afternoon day game in early summer.

  Top of the eighth

  The Swallows losing 9–1 (or something like that).

  Their sixth pitcher (or something like that), someone I’d never heard of,

  Was warming up.

  Right at the instant

  The clear-cut shadow of a bird

  Raced quickly from first base

  Over the green grass to where the center fielder stood.

  I looked up at the sky

  But couldn’t spot the bird.

  The sun was too bright.

  All I saw was a shadow, like a black cutout, falling on the grass.

  A bird-shaped shadow.

  Was this some lucky omen?

  Or an unlucky one?

  I gave it some serious thought,

  But soon shook my head.

  Come on, knock it off.

  How could there ever be a lucky omen at a place like this?

  * * *

  .

  When my mother’s memory started to get shaky, and she couldn’t live on her own anymore, I went back to her house in Kansai to get her ready to move out. I couldn’t believe all of the junk—at least, that’s how it seemed to me—that she had stored away in boxes. She’d bought an unimaginable amount of stuff for reasons I couldn’t fathom.

  For instance, one empty candy box was stuffed full of cards. Mostly telephone cards, the kind people once used for pay phones, with a few prepaid railway cards for the Hanshin or Hankyu Railways mixed in. All the cards had Tigers players’ photos on them—Kanemoto, Imaoka, Yano, Akahoshi, Fujikawa…Telephone cards? Good grief. Where the heck are you supposed to use telephone cards these days?

  I didn’t count them all, but there must have been over a hundred. I just couldn’t get it. As far as I knew, my mother had no interest in baseball whatsoever. Yet it was clear that she was the one who’d bought all those cards. There was solid proof. Had she become a rabid Hanshin Tigers fan before I realized it? For all that, she flatly denied ever buying so many Hanshin Tigers telephone cards. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I’d never buy those kinds of things. Ask your father—he’ll know.”

  So what was I supposed to do? My father had died three years before this.

  The upshot is that, although I have a cell phone, I’ve been walking all over, looking hard for the rare public phone, trying to use up these Hanshin Tigers telephone cards. Thanks to this, I’ve gotten to know their players’ names pretty well, though most of the ones on the cards have either retired by now or have moved on to other teams.

  The Hanshin Tigers.

  The Tigers used to have a player named Mike Reinbach, an outfielder, a high-spirited, all-around nice guy. I wrote one poem in which he was featured in a supporting role. Reinbach was the same age as me. He was killed in a car accident in the U.S. in 1989. In 1989 I was living in Rome, writing a long novel. So I didn’t learn of his death, at age thirty-nine, for quite some time. Italian newspapers, as you can imagine, weren’t going to report on the death of a former Hanshin Tigers outfielder.

  This is the poem I wrote.

  Outfielders’ Butts

  I enjoy gazing at the butts of outfielders.

  What I mean is, when I’m watching a slow-going, losing game

  From the outfield seats by myself,

  How else can I enjoy myself besides staring at the outfield
ers’ butts?

  If there’s some other way, I’d sure like to know.

  I could talk the night away

  About outfielders’ glutes.

  The Swallows’ center fielder John Scott’s*1 butt

  Is beautiful beyond measure.

  His legs are ridiculously long

  And look as if they’re suspended in the air.

  Like a bold metaphor that makes your heart sing.

  Compared to this, the legs of the left fielder, Wakamatsu,

  Are incredibly short.

  When the two players stand together

  Scott’s butt is about at the level of Wakamatsu’s chin.

  The Tigers’ Reinbach*2 has a butt

  So symmetrical you can’t help but love it.

  Just one look and it all makes sense.

  The butt of the Hiroshima Carp’s player Shane*3

  Is deeply thoughtful, cerebral.

  Reflective, you might say.

  People really should have called him by his full name,

  Scheinblum.

  If for nothing else, then to show respect for that one-of-a-kind butt.

  I was about to list

  The names of outfielders whose butts

  Are not what you’d call attractive—

  But decided I’d better not.

  After all, you have to consider their mothers and siblings, and wives

  And kids, if they have any.

  * * *

  .

  As a Yakult fan I did once watch a Hanshin Tigers vs. Swallows game at Koshien Stadium, the Tigers’ home stadium. I happened to have an errand that brought me to Kobe and I had the afternoon free. I saw a poster at the Hanshin Sannomiya station advertising a day game at Koshien Stadium and decided it’d been far too long since my last visit to Koshien. It had been over thirty years, in fact.