Nao-Cola Yamazaki
TRANS. BY Polly Barton
Let People Buy You Lunch
In this band, I like to think of myself as a leek.
If you conceptualize the whole band as a simmering hotpot of goodness, then the singer, Kato, is the salmon, and the guitarist, Matsumoto, is the potato. The drummer, Iwamoto, is the aromatic green leafy stuff, and the tambourine player, Miyata, is the noodles. And then the bassist—that’s me—is the leek.
The leek never comes to the forefront, you see. And that’s not to downplay the role I have. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not underestimating the significance of the leek here.
The percentage of fan letters that are addressed to me is, I gotta admit, pretty high. It would be fair to say that I get even more than Kato, and she’s the singer. The reason for that is clear enough. A high proportion of our fans are female. And, if you’ll forgive me for saying this, I was quite a looker when I was younger.
But I don’t get carried away, you understand.
I respect the leek’s place in all this. When we do live performances, I leave the speaking up to Kato. I don’t say anything at all. When we do interviews for magazines, it’s Matsumoto who speaks about our music, and I just make accompanying noises, like “right” and “yeah” and stuff. There was this one time when an interviewer asked,
“Is Kunimura always this quiet?”
Iwamoto replied for me. He said,
“No, no. Backstage, he won’t shut up. He might not look it, but Kuni’s a bit of a buffoon. Just now, actually, he was making this huge fuss because someone had gone and eaten his macarons. Kuni’s always carrying sweet things around with him in his bag, y’see. Macarons are these cookie sandwich things that you make by mixing egg whites with sugar—they’re really good. So when Kuni went off somewhere, I ate them. The thing is, though, when Kuni doesn’t have enough sugar in his bloodstream, he can’t play bass at all. So he went crazy, and I started apologizing like mad, and then I ran down to the nearest convenience store and bought him a Kit-Kat. I stuffed it in his mouth and was like, ‘Eat that,’ and he was right as rain in a few seconds, and then he just started playing his bass.”
Of all the band members, Iwamoto’s the only one who calls me Kuni.
“Is that all true, Kuni?” the interviewer asked, so I just said,
“Yeah.”
When the band first started selling, all the people from the label started making a fuss over us. So suddenly we had all these people offering to pay for our meals, but Kato just turned them down flat, every time. She’d always hated having her meals bought for her. She didn’t even like it when I offered. She’d be like, just because you’re a man, or older than me, or whatever, that doesn’t mean you need to pay for me, and then she’d get out her wallet. She’d always be going, I’ll pay, I’ll pay, and start treating people to tangerine juice all over the place. It’s not a very good way to make yourself liked, I always thought to myself, and, what’s more, it’s just creating work for yourself and everybody else.
One time, a song of ours was nominated for the Best Song prize for this music event put on by a television station. So we all got dressed up and went along to the award ceremony, and waited for the results to be announced. Five songs had been nominated, but there was just one winner.
In the end, ours wasn’t chosen as the winning song. But I liked the song that won just fine, so I didn’t feel cut up about losing. I was pretty calm about it all, actually.
But I think Kato was in shock about the whole thing, and when we got back into the dressing room, she was sitting there all slumped over, being like, I can’t believe we didn’t win, what a bummer . . . and that kind of stuff.
I tried to cheer her up, saying things like, “But this is just a party, man, you should try and enjoy it!” And then Kato goes,
“Will you buy me dinner?”
So I was like, “Well, okay.” And Kato was like,
“You know, I’ve converted. I’ve decided that when I have the opportunity to be spoiled by people, I’m gonna let myself be spoiled. When I can rely on people, I should just rely on them, and be grateful. It’s that simple. If someone does something for you, you should be thankful. And if there are things you can’t manage to do by yourself—well, all you need to do is apologize. I can’t believe that I didn’t realize that until now. I was always like, I can do all this by myself, always in- sisting on paying for things myself and saying that I didn’t want people to buy me lunch or whatever when I’d done nothing for them. But because I was insisting on doing everything alone, I was always unbelievably busy and really struggling with everything, so I let my emotions get the better of me all the time, and in the end I ended up causing even more of a nuisance to everyone around me. If I’d known that it was going to end up like this I’d have just let people support me, little by little, from the very beginning. I’ve started to think that I should start relying on people a bit—label people, and men, and whoever—whenever I can.”
“Right,” I said.
“Doing stuff like paying for things myself and giving people tangerine juice didn’t come from any particularly admirable consideration for others, you know. It totally came from this determination to escape my own anxiety. A kind of narcissism, in other words. If people I knew professionally bought me dinner, I felt like they were investing in my future, and that thought scared the hell out of me. Even when people were nice to me, I felt like they had no confidence in my ability to pay them back, to contribute in any way in the future, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Even if I have all kinds of people doing all kinds of things for me, and I’m there working my butt off, there are still gonna be times when things don’t work out, you know? And there’s just nothing that can be done to change that fact. And when that happens, all you have to do is say, I’m really sorry. All you need to do is to apologize, and that’s it.”
“Right.”
“Music isn’t something I’m making by myself, after all. I’ve got you and all the other guys from the band making it with me. I’ve got the other artists who are living and working in the same period of history as me. There’s all the crew. And then, above all, there are all the fans, the people who listen to our stuff. It’s them that’s really making the music.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Just then Matsumoto came up to us and was like, “Kunimuraaaaaaa! What are you doing, playing the nice guy again?” He seemed pretty mad.
“Huh?” I said.
“How come you always manage to be in the right place at the right time?”
Matsumoto sat down on a chair and folded his arms.
“That’s totally not true, man,” I said. “I’m just the leek.”
“Leek my ass. You’re the stock. You’re what gives the soup its flavor, man.”
“I’m not the stock. I’m the leek.”
“Everyone’s starting to think that it’s thanks to you that the damn hotpot exists at all.”
“Who’s everyone? And what are you trying to say, anyway?”
“Everyone is everyone! I want to have the lead role man!” With that, Matsumoto put his head face down on the table and began to cry. So I was like,
“Alright, how about Matsumoto buys us all dinner tonight?”
And Kato was like, “Hooray! Dinner’s on Matsumoto. Korean! Barbeque! Korean! Barbeque!”
“Korean barbeque . . .” Matsumoto said. “I’ll have a look . . .”
He used his cellphone to search for Korean barbeque restaurants.
“There’s one in Daikanyama. Is that okay?”
“Ooh! Daikanyama!” Iwamoto clapped his hands.
“Great! Let’s ask the crew along too,” Kato said, running out the dressing room, and invited all the crew to dinner.
“How many in total?” Matsumoto asked.
“Fifteen,” said Kato. Matsumoto made a reservation at the restaurant, and everyone left the TV station, hailed a bunch of taxis, and got in.
Inside the restaurant, after everyone had got their drinks, Matsumoto stood up and said,
“I’m really sorry that I wasn’t able to lead us to success this time. But thanks to everyone’s efforts, we managed to get this far, and personally, I’m really happy with the place we’re at. I think we’ve increased our fan base just by getting nominated for this award, and I really want to keep going and keep getting better and better. Thank you to everyone who’s helped us here. We owe you one. Cheers.”
And everyone raised their glasses.
After the toast, I went out of the restaurant and called Miyata.
“We’re in a Korean barbeque place.”
“You guys all just left me behind,” said Miyata.
“Well, just get here as quick as you can. I’ll send you a map right now.”
“Okay.”
Miyata showed up about thirty minutes later, so I sat with him at the end of the table, and drank with him.
“What’s all this!?” Matsumoto butted in after a while. “You’re playing the goddamn nice guy again!” He was mad.
“Huh?” I said.
Then Matsumoto was like, “You’re making out like it’s me that’s treating Miyata like a doormat.”
“No one thinks that,” I said, totally astonished.
“Y’know, the thing is, I want to look out for everyone in the band, just like you do. If I had the choice, I’d have been born handsome. I wanna get loads of fan letters too!”
Matsumoto put his head face down on the table and began to cry.
“But we love you just the way you are, Matsumoto!” Miyata shouted.
Then he stood up and began shaking his tambourine.
Nao-Cola Yamazaki debuted in 2004 with the Bungei Award-winning novella Don’t Laugh At Other People’s Sex. They have published over ten novels, essay collections, and a children’s book, and has been nominated for the Akutagawa Prize five times. Their latest release is Utsukushii Kyori (A Beautiful Distance), published in July 2016.
Polly Barton was raised in London and lives in Osaka. Aside from Nao-Cola Yamazaki, she has translated a variety of Japanese literary fiction and non-fiction including work by Aoko Matsuda and Misumi Kubo. She is a 2017 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant recipient. Her translation of Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden was published by Pushkin Press in 2017.