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Toshiki Okada

THE END OF THE MOMENT WE HAD

^{Translated by Sam Malissa}

THE END OF THE MOMENT WE HAD

THE SIX OF THEM were in a clump, talking loudly, relentlessly, sometimes shouting, from the moment they stepped into the last car of the Hibiya Line metro. They carried on, leaning against the glass of the conductor’s booth, sliding their backs along the lateral bar. You’d think they were trying to drown out the rumble and screech of the train. But no one on the train there with them was thinking that. They were stuck with these guys. They couldn’t escape the shouting. Robbed of their solitude, they stared at the screens of their phones, or at the ads, or at the floor. No one said a word. Some maybe were thinking, these guys will get off at Roppongi, so it won’t be much longer. Which was what happened.

The six guys were drunk, but it wasn’t until they got to Roppongi that they realized how drunk they were. The doors opened, they were sucked out, and they were still shouting. It wasn’t one conversation, each was talking with whoever happened to be nearest them, so Minobe with Suzuki, Azuma with Yukio, Yasui with Ishihara. But more or less they were a group. All drunk. They were louder than anyone else around, but they didn’t notice nor care, or maybe it was their intention to be loud. As they climbed the stairs to the exit, they never once lowered their voices. At the wicket they lined up behind one another, as if it were a ritual, to pass through the same gate, shouting the whole time. Ishihara was the last in line, and when he fumbled through his pockets and couldn’t find his ticket, he yelled out to Yasui, who was in front of him and at that instant about to pass through the barrier. Yasui stopped in his tracks, and Ishihara pressed up behind him, crotch to ass, and the two tried to pass through the barrier as one. The sensor went off, beeping its high pitch, and the flaps of the electronic barrier slammed shut on them.

No problem. Yasui and Ishihara busted through with the full force of their drunkenness and fell forwards onto the ground. The others were right there watching, howling with laughter, loud as ever.

Moving in a mass, they made their way above ground, where, afraid they wouldn’t be able to hear each other, they raised their voices even more. At one point they must have figured they could turn it down a notch and still be heard. Even so, definitely, they were loud. As they headed towards their destination—the SuperDeluxe club-slash-event space—their voices made it to the other side of the street and bounced back, even through the clamour of Roppongi Drive. The endless flow of cars and exhausts, and on top of that a jumble of noise. Clamour: it gets caught up in an invisible whorl, gets warmed by night air and starts to rise, rise until it’s looking down over the whole scene, the dots of light blurring as they grow more distant, bleeding into each other until they look like thick haze hanging heavily over the ground.

When Yasui was little, he had gone up to the observation deck of Tokyo Tower and been startled by how all the cars below seemed like toys. It had been during the day, but the night laid itself over this memory and he now saw the buzz of Roppongi from a bird’s-eye view. He was at the back of the group, rubbing his thigh where the flaps of the ticket barrier had slammed into him. A bruise was forming, but he didn’t know that yet. He and Ishihara—trashed, semi-conscious, words tumbling out of their mouths—were going on about girls. Ishihara’s eyes were glazed over. When Yasui asked Ishihara where are we going again?, Ishihara didn’t answer, maybe because the question didn’t register. So Yasui just followed along. It wasn’t really clear that anybody knew where they were going, though it appeared they were going somewhere.