The Anthem of Youth

It was her. And it wasn’t her.

The girl leaning against the column was a little shorter than she had looked through the windows. She wore her hair parted over to one side of her shoulder instead of letting it hang straight back like she did in class. Her face was wider and fuller than I had imagined. She wasn’t wearing the old-timey olive-green and black-striped sailor suit that she always wore. It was an old white blouse with the sleeves cut all the way to the shoulders. Maybe it was cream colored; it was hard to tell in a room that was lit up like the bridge of a battleship at action stations. The miniskirt she was wearing looked like it had been salvaged out of old yukata fabric- not the flashy kind that girls (who were not Miho) wore on dates in the summertime, but the kind that your grandparents might have lounged around in when the air conditioning was out.

Yet, it was still, without a doubt, the same girl I had been watching every day instead of listening to unimportant details about things that had happened before my parents had even been born. It was something I couldn’t put my finger on- was it her posture? Her mannerisms? Was it that look on her face? Earnest, and maybe a little sad?

None of this ensemble would have been trendy in the South. Looking at the other ravers in the room, though, it looked almost too normal. Perhaps that’s why she was standing back and not getting involved on the dance floor.

“Um…”

I don’t know what compelled me to speak up. I was just supposed to be taking a peek in this room while Kanamaru tried his best to get un-screwed by his unreliable business partner “Toshi,” if that was really his name. I wasn’t supposed to have walked through those doors. I wasn’t supposed to be talking to anyone, as a matter of fact; Kanamaru had given those implicit instructions.

“Hmm?”

In the South, she might have been reading something on her phone right about now and completely tuning me out. This was the North, though, and neither of us had a screen to sink into at the moment. She was looking right at me.

Crap. I had actually caught her attention, and now I had no idea what to say. What even was there to say? I knew nothing about this girl aside from the fact that she lived in the North and had class at nearly the same time as me in the afternoon. What do you even talk to a Northerner about? Marxism? With Miho it had been easy enough to keep a conversation going- we had just enough overlap in the songs we listened to and the TV shows we watched to make small talk. A Northerner wouldn’t even have that much in common, or else we wouldn’t be here trying to sell old TV junk at absurd markups.

“Hello.”

REALLY, TOUMA? Is that the best you can do? A “Hello”!? That’s your best effort at a once-in-a-lifetime meeting?

“Hi there.”

It was polite and noncommittal. She was still staring at me, waiting for me to pluck the thinnest straw of connection from my brain. 10 seconds in and this was already a god-damned disaster. The song blasting through the speakers dropped out, and the DJ changed places with another that had been waiting in the wings. Save me, DJ.

“Gooooood night to all my vesigen kids!”

What did he say? I asked you to give me something to talk about, not something to look up in a dictionary. What language was that, even? Russian?

The girl was still looking at me expectantly. I figured I had about 5 seconds to salvage this before she wrote me off as some kind of weird creeper-stalker type. Fortunately, the DJ came to the rescue, just in time.

“This next little one I’ve got for you is a hit straight out of Kyoto! It’s the anthem of youth! HATSUKOI ROOOOOOOAD!”

The crowd cheered. Hatsukoi Road had been the theme song of an extremely popular romance movie that had premiered when I was in middle school. I had almost seen it with Miho on a tepid date that had ended in disaster when the tickets were sold out and we chose to see a pretentious art-house flick instead. I enjoyed it- a little bit- but Miho fell asleep a few minutes in. We had nothing to talk about afterward, so we just ate our meal in silence and went home. I wouldn’t exactly call it the “anthem of youth,” but it was still a pretty popular song- especially if you were the kind of girl who uploaded all the photos of your date to the internet as a musical slideshow.

That was it. If even Northerners knew about the song, then we had something to start talking about, even if it was the narrowest connection possible.

“Do you like this song?”

“Never heard of it.”

Well, there goes the 5 seconds I had left.

No, it’s still too early to give up. I had kept the conversation going. This was the spider’s thread out of hell.

“Did you see the movie this was from?”

“Didn’t know this was from a movie.”

“It’s a romantic comedy. It’s pretty popular.”

Ok, that was just a basic fact. There was one little problem with heading this way- as previously stated, I hadn’t actually seen the movie. Whatever I knew about it was gleaned from secondhand accounts by people who hadn’t gone on as many bad dates.

“What’s it about?”

What was it about? It was something like a girl with cancer meets a guy who wants to draw- no, wait, that was a bad romantic tragedy I had watched on TV recently. Crap. She had just asked the one question I couldn’t answer.

“About two hours.”

“You’re funny.”

The tone of her voice told me that she had heard this joke before.

“Actually, I never saw it either. But it’s really popular in the-”

I had almost given everything away. I was just about to finish with “in the South,” but I remembered just in time. I really, really wasn’t supposed to be here.

“-in the South?”

She wasn’t supposed to be here, either. Not the girl in my head. I had once given her the name Sayu Midorikawa out of some compulsive desire to name her, to bind the idea of what she was to something more tangible than just “a girl across the wall.” Sayu wasn’t the kind of girl to go to underground raves. But Sayu wasn’t real. This girl was.

“Yeah.”

That was all I could answer. I was trapped.

“Are you Wezigen?”

What? It was that weird word again. Vesigen or Wezziejen or something like that. I didn’t even know what language it was from. For the most part the Northern dialect was easy to understand and wasn’t that far off from the Southern Tokyo dialect, but occasionally they threw in a curveball indecipherable slang word like Droog or whatever this was. Was it some kind of gang?

I looked down at myself. A denim jacket from the 90s. A crappy old t-shirt, and some still-soaked-with-algae-and-motor-oil track pants from a famous European sports brand. If I had been planning to meet her, I would have probably picked just about any other outfit over this one. If Vezzigin was some sort of Northern gang, I probably looked like one.

“No, I’m a student.”

To my surprise, the girl started laughing. What was so funny?

“You look like you’re halfway there, is all. First time here?”

Yes, yes it was. I’m not sure where I was halfway to, but the girl was smiling now. I think I must have been doing something right.

“Yeah, I’ve never been to one of these before.”

My answer presumed this wasn’t a one-off event. Kanamaru had done business with his contact here before, so maybe they held these kind of raves regularly.

“U-disco’s pretty fun. Better than listening by yourself. Do you use a radio, or…?”

I used my phone, like anyone in the south except for that annoying subset of people who liked to brag about their expensive old hi-fi systems or record players. I had the feeling that that was giving a little too much info that would peg me as a Southerner, though.

“No, I listen on CDs.”

Her eyes widened a bit. They had CDs here, right? The North wasn’t that backwards.

“Wow. You have a guy that can get you those?”

Ok, maybe my assumption had been a bit too generous.

“Toshi sells them. In the back.”

I pointed at the door I had peeked through.

“Who’s Toshi?”

Who was Toshi, indeed?

“Kanamaru’s business partner.”

I neglected to add who was currently doing his best to screw me out of a paycheck to the end of that. It didn’t seem wise to immediately start talking about money.

“Who’s Kanamaru?”

“Kind of a scumbag. I guess he’s my boss right now?”

Ok, I couldn’t hesitate to get that shot in.

“Who are you?”

I wasn’t ready for that. I hadn’t even introduced myself. We had been talking for several minutes without even learning each other’s names. Wait, was it a good idea to give this girl my name? The North wasn’t really a safe place, after all. If someone knew my name, they might tell someone who could really make my life miserable, even if I could get home safely tonight. I decided to make up something.

“Ichiro Shelly.”

Oops. That was a baseball player who played for a team in Chicago. I had been thinking of Percy Shelley in the back of my head and had come up with something reasonable sounding. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been the first one to come up with that combination. I hoped for a second that she was just as familiar with American major league players as she was with hit romantic comedies.

Wait, that wasn’t the issue with this. There was a much bigger mistake here. Shelly wasn’t a Japanese name, or even Japanese-sounding. The North probably wouldn’t have many people with an English last name. I had just given the important part away.

“Nice to meet you, Ichiro.”

We had just met, and already we were on a first name basis? People weren’t lying when they said Northerners were blunt. It made me a little happy, even if it was just a fake name that I hadn’t given enough consideration to.

Ok, first things first, what was her name? We couldn’t be “Ichiro” and “You” for much longer without things getting awkward.

“Nice to meet you, uh…”

Hatsukoi Road had spun down through its last bitter beats. A new song was fading in- S.T.i.L.E., another hit song by a punk-rock idol group that was associated with a TV drama that had ended last summer.

“Oh, I love this one!”

Was she distracted, or did she dodge the question deliberately? She started towards the dance floor. When she had gone a few steps, she turned back to me.

“Do you dance, Ichiro?”

No, I didn’t. The idea of dancing in public was mortifying to me. I’m sure it didn’t have anything to do with getting jeered at by half for tripping when it was Miho’s turn to dance with me at the middle-school culture festival’s closing bonfire. Nothing at all.

“No, I don’t.”

“Come on, it’s easy! I’ll show you. Here.”

With that little warning, she grabbed my hand and started dragging me closer to the dance floor. She was surprisingly strong. Definitely not a “Sayu Midorikawa.”

We were just about to the edge of the crowd when I felt something else- a hand on my shoulder. The voice that spoke into my ear was Kanamaru’s. It wasn’t his charismatic boasting dripping with sleaze. It wasn’t his cool-headed drill instructions.

It was unmitigated terror.

“Freshman. We need to go. NOW.”