Spark Read online

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  Title Page

  Spark

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  SPARK

  THE PIERCING TRILL of bamboo flutes soared over the beat of the drums, and as the heat of the midday sun dissipated into the evening air, the festive crowd, in cotton kimonos and geta, streamed along the road by the bay of Atami.

  Yamashita and I—two halves of a manzai stand-up comedy duo—were on a tiny makeshift stage, going through our routine. We were supposed to be entertaining the crowds on their way to the fireworks, but the microphone set-up got in the way of the quick-draw banter, forcing us to take turns and bring our faces so close to the mic we looked like we were about to cram it into our mouths. No one really cared—our so-called audience kept walking by, barely noticing us, their laughter for sure not having anything to do with us. It was depressing. And it didn’t help that the music was so loud we couldn’t be heard from more than a few metres away, which meant we had to say something hilarious every three seconds or end up looking like a couple of dopes just standing there. Not much we could do under those conditions, so reluctantly we were just sort of going through our paces, using up our time.

  I can’t remember the gags we tried that day, but Yamashita started off with something like: “What kind of thing would you hate to hear your parakeet say?” and I responded, “Be sure to make your pension contributions regularly, however small, it’s all about accumulation.” Then I came up with a list of things that your average parakeet would not be likely to say, like: “You still haven’t done anything about that wasted space in our apartment,” “We need to have a serious talk,” “What’s with all the strange looks—you’re not thinking of eating me, are you?” and “Can we discuss fully what’s troubling you?” Yamashita responded to each with a grunt or a quip, but for some reason he thought “Can we discuss fully what’s troubling you?” was hysterical and he couldn’t stop laughing. He laughed so hard he was gulping for air. His laughter saved me. Gave me a moment to picture myself coming home, feeling good about the day, and the parakeet saying, “Can we discuss fully what’s troubling you?” And I’d say, “Yes, but first, I’m going to take my lighter and singe your pretty little wings.” Oh, maybe that would be cruel. Better if I just singed the hair on my arm and scared the bejeezus out of the parakeet. Blow the parakeet’s tiny mind! This made me snigger. Truth is, if a parakeet, or anybody else for that matter, had asked me “Can we discuss fully what’s troubling you?”, right then and there onstage I would have broken down in tears. I felt alienated, it was that lonely, standing there trying to make funny in front of a crowd that didn’t care if you existed or not. Suddenly, there was a BOOM, and a burst of explosions behind us, coming from the direction of the sea and echoing off the mountains.

  The crowd stopped in their tracks and looked up, their faces reflecting red, blue and green. I spun around to see a carpet of lights roll out like a vision in the night sky, then slowly dissolve in a shower of glitter. Before the spontaneous cheering had died away, another firework unfolded in the shape of a gigantic weeping willow, dangling its glowing branches in the darkness. Smaller fireworks spiralled around feverishly, lighting up the night as they fell into the sea. The crowd roared. These fireworks were more beautiful and magnificent than anything else man-made in this city where the surrounding mountains and sea made nature feel close. It was a perfect setting. I wondered now why we’d even been invited here. We weren’t really needed.

  By now our voices were completely drowned out by the fireworks exploding and echoing off the mountains. I felt small and insignificant, but not despairing, for the very mundane reason that I have tremendous respect for nature and fireworks.

  Thinking back, it seems significant that this—a night that brought home my inadequacy in the face of something larger—was also the night when I found my sensei. Saizo Kamiya came along, boldly walked into my life and made himself at home. That was the night I decided to learn from him and no one else.

  But back to the manzai stage: driven to desperation by the crowd, which was totally transfixed by the fireworks, I screamed out, in the voice of the parakeet speaking to its owner, “You’re the parakeet!” And at last our fifteen minutes was up. I was soaked in sweat, feeling zero satisfaction. The plan had been for all entertainment to be finished before the fireworks started, but the guys on before us were a bunch of senior citizens who acted out street theatre and forgot about the schedule once the crowd paid them the least bit of attention, which cut into the time we had before the first fireworks went off. The organizers weren’t concerned about trifling programme adjustments at the tail end of the evening either, setting the scene for our tragedy. The fireworks upstaged us and nobody could hear us unless they strained.

  When we left the stage, there was still one manzai duo waiting to perform. They emerged less than energetically from the tent—hung with a yellowing banner that read atami junior chamber of commerce—where they’d been waiting, and where the senior citizens were now encamped, the beer flowing. As one of the performers brushed past, he turned to me and muttered angrily, “You will be avenged.” I didn’t understand what he said right away, but now I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I slipped into the crowd and watched their act from start to finish. The guy who’d spoken to me was taller than his partner, which forced him to bend over the mic as if he were a dog about to snap at it, all the while glaring angrily at those passing by.

  “Thank you, we’re the Doofuses,” he announced with a scowl, then started in on the crowd as if picking a fight. It’s hard to put down everything he said because most of it was unintelligible, but the spit flew as he snarled: “Listen up, my lovelies, I’ve got the gift. I can tell by looking at you if you’re going to hell!” He pointed at people passing by and screamed “hell” at them, in a voice sounding for some reason like a woman’s. “Hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell—you’re all sinners, every one of you. Repent!” And he kept this rant up while his partner—without using the mic—yelled like a demon at anybody who came up to the stage and dared to complain: “I’ll kill you, you don’t believe me, you come here and see.” This chanting and taunting went on until, all of a sudden, the tall guy stopped and went quiet, his eyes fixed on one thing. I looked in the direction his finger was pointing and saw a little girl holding her mother’s hand. For a moment my heart missed a beat, and I prayed for him to say nothing. If this was his revenge for us today, I wanted him to stop. But when I turned back to look at him, a big smile was spread across his face. “A fun hell,” he whispered in a gentle voice. “Sorry, little girl.” I knew then, from that alone, that this guy was the truth.

  In the end this duo’s performance went down even worse than ours had. The organizer was red-faced with anger as he gave them a dressing-down, but even then the partner never lost the kick-ass look. That was when the tall guy saw me and gave me the sweetest, most innocent smile. It was wide-open purity. I was in awe.

  While I was changing in a corner of the tent, the tall guy made his escape from the organizer’s tirade and came over to me. “I got paid in cash,” he said with a suppressed twitch of the lips. “Wanna go for a drink?”

  Fireworks illuminated the hotel-lined streets of Atami as we walked along in silence. He wore a Hawaiian shirt—a tiger against a black background—and faded Levi’s 501 jeans on his lean body. His eyes were piercing, and he did not seem very approachable.

  We entered a small pub with a weather-worn sign and found a rickety table in the corner. The other customers looked like tired tourists and were mostly older than we were. Everybody seemed to be in a daze after the fireworks show. On the wall was a large square card, autographed by somebody who had to have been famous. The way it was discoloured by tobacc
o smoke and grease made me think the autographer must be dead.

  The tall guy looked at me, his eyes penetrating. “Order anything you like,” he said.

  There was such kindness in these words that I felt hot with relief. I hadn’t realized how intimidated I’d felt until then.

  “I should’ve introduced myself before,” I said. “My name’s Tokunaga of the Sparks comedy duo.”

  “I’m Kamiya,” he said, “of the Doofuses.”

  That was how Kamiya and I met. I was twenty at the time so he would have been twenty-four. It was the first time I’d ever been out drinking with a sempai, someone senior to me, from the manzai world, and I had no idea what the protocol was, but apparently Kamiya had never gone out drinking with a kohai—someone younger, that is, like me—or a sempai either, for that matter, so we were both new at the game.

  “The Doofuses—great name,” I said.

  “Naming’s not my strong point. The old man always used to call me a doofus, so I stuck with it.”

  The waitress brought a bottle of beer, and for the first time in my life, I performed the ritual of pouring a drink for someone.

  “Your duo’s got a cool name. And in English, eh? What does your father call you?”

  “Father.”

  Kamiya fixed me in the eye as he raised his glass and emptied it in one gulp, then continued staring straight at me.

  “Really,” I said a few seconds later, “he calls me Father.”

  Kamiya’s black eyes contracted. “Hey, don’t spring the dumbass funny-man act on me,” he said. “Took me a while to get that. I couldn’t tell if you were joking, or had some complicated family situation, or your old man is an idiot.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. Always say what comes into your head.”

  “OK.”

  “In return, make me laugh. But when I ask a serious question, I want a straight answer.”

  “OK.”

  “So I’ll ask again. What does your father call you?”

  “All you need is love.”

  “What do you call your father?”

  “Ready for the old folks’ home?”

  “What does your mother call you?”

  “I don’t know who you take after.”

  “What do you call your mum?”

  “Who do I take after?”

  “Whoa, those are weird names. But we’re getting it together now.”

  Kamiya leant back in his seat and smiled.

  “Not so bad, hey. Since when was it this hard to be funny?”

  “I was feeling the pain, too.”

  “We’ve still got a way to go. Anyway, let’s drink,” Kamiya said, pouring for himself since I hadn’t mastered the timing for giving him a refill.

  I was thrilled at being invited to drink with him and had a string of questions I was dying to ask. “Why,” I started off, “did you try to sound like a woman in your routine?”

  “Because it’s fresh, right,” Kamiya said, “and you don’t want to be predictable or anything. Any reason I shouldn’t sound like a woman?” He looked at me with intensity.

  Feeling anxious, as I get when I’m under pressure for a quick answer, I replied earnestly, “Because if people start to wonder why this guy is trying to sound like a woman, maybe it’s harder for them to get their heads around the important stuff.”

  “Did you go to college or something?” Kamiya said uneasily, bringing his face up close to mine.

  “High school.”

  “Idiot, don’t make like you’re clever when you didn’t even go to college,” he said, pretending to knock me on the head with his fist. “You have to do something different from other people.”

  I don’t know where the conversation went from there, but around the time Kamiya was on his fifth glass of shochu, his face red and eyes heavy, I found myself bowing and saying, “Please take me on as your apprentice.” I wasn’t joking—the words had bubbled up from somewhere deep inside me.

  “Sure,” Kamiya said without hesitation, as the waitress arrived with our next round of drinks. “Hey, can you be our witness?” he said to her. “I just agreed to take on an apprentice.”

  “Yeah, why not,” she answered. Still, the importance of the moment and my great confidence in Kamiya, who acted as though he knew what he was doing even if this was new for him, were not diminished. And that was how our relationship—with him as sensei and me as apprentice—began.

  “On one condition, though,” Kamiya said with a meaningful air.

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to remember me. Don’t forget about me.”

  “Are you going to die soon?”

  Kamiya kept his eyes on me in a steady gaze, not blinking, and made no reply. I wasn’t even sure he had heard me.

  “You didn’t go to college so your memory might not be any good,” he said, coming back to our earlier conversation. “You might forget about me. I want you to watch me up close, write down what I do and say, then write my biography.”

  “Your biography?”

  “Yeah, you write my biography and I give you an initiation into manzai.”

  I wasn’t clear what he meant about me writing his biography. Was this the kind of thing you had to do for a sempai?

  The company I worked for was a small entertainment agency. In high school I’d entered an amateur manzai competition and afterwards was approached by a kind-looking man, who turned out to be the president of this company. It had one famous actor on its books, someone who’d been on television ever since I was a kid, and a few others, mainly stage actors, but Yamashita and I were the only comic team in the agency. I had hoped that would be to our advantage, but we didn’t get many gigs, and what we did get was almost always a long way out of the city or stints like today.

  Ever since I started on this path, I wished I could be around some seasoned manzai comedians to learn the ropes, maybe have someone to look up to. Backstage, at the events where manzai duos from different agencies performed, I was always jealous of the conversations between the younger comics and their sempai. Yamashita and I, who had no real place in the dressing room, kept quiet and tried to make ourselves invisible in the corridors.

  “Miss, can we have two more glasses of shochu, please?” Kamiya said to the waitress who had come over to announce that this was our last chance to order.

  “Sure. You guys here sightseeing?”

  Kamiya sat up straight and answered proudly, “I’m a local god.” It was such a weird response that the waitress couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Do you read books?” he said, now turning back to me.

  “No, not much.”

  Kamiya opened his eyes wide and seemed to be studying the graphic design on my T-shirt. Then he shifted his gaze to my face. “You should read,” he declared. “You should read because you have to be able to write—to write, you know, my biography.”

  Was Kamiya actually serious about me writing his life story? If so, I was ready to start reading that instant—even though I wasn’t what you’d call a reader. Already, I was feeling his influence. There was something about him that made me want to earn his praise. I wanted him to think well of me.

  “I like books,” Kamiya said happily, poking at a croquette with his chopsticks.

  Apparently while his primary school classmates were fighting over Barefoot Gen manga and illustrated animal guides, Kamiya had devoured the life stories of the great men and women.

  “They had pictures on the covers and there were a few inside, but mostly it was all writing. You know who Inazo Nitobe is?”

  “The guy on the five-thousand-yen note, right?”

  “Yeah, he did a lot of things. It’s all written down.”

  “Yeah, I guess so… What’d he do?”

  “I forget. But I remember it made a deep impression.”

  Biographies can be interesting, Kamiya was saying. Big accomplishments look good on paper, but on a personal level many great people were
fools. When he was small he’d wanted his own biography to surprise people.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re not much good at talking but I see from your eyes you’re taking everything in, so I think you have what it takes to write my biography.”

  “My dream is to make a living from manzai,” I piped up, even though I took what he said as a compliment.

  Kamiya laughed at this, then said with a wave of his hand, “Don’t be so obvious.”

  “What do you mean, obvious?”

  “If you’re a comedian, of course your mission is to be funny, and every act in your life is done with manzai in mind. So everything you do is already part of your manzai routine, right? Manzai’s not for people who can think up funny stuff, it’s an exposure of people who are honest and pure, who aren’t faking it. You can’t do manzai just by being clever. Only fools who honestly believe they’re genuine fools can make it happen.”

  Kamiya flicked away the hair that fell into his eyes.

  “So, you have to live by going at your ambitions full on. Anyone who says a manzai comic should be this or that won’t ever be one. You don’t even get better at becoming one by doing it for a long time. That’s like dreaming it’s going to happen. A real manzai comic, to take an extreme example, is doing manzai even if he’s selling vegetables.”

  Kamiya was speaking as if checking each sentence with himself first. It was like he wasn’t used to saying this stuff out loud, and maybe it was the first time he’d ever said it to anyone.

  “So if I talk about becoming a manzai comedian, I won’t become one?” I cautiously asked the question that had been on my mind for a while.

  “If you’re saying that to try and trip me up, as your sensei I’ll kick your ass.”

  “No, no, I’m just asking, honest,” I said quickly. “I really want to know.”

  Kamiya folded his arms and nodded once. “There’s a big difference between saying what a manzai comedian is supposed to be, and talking about manzai comedians. What I’m doing is talking about manzai comedians.”