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  Out of my mind with nerves, I answered, “Okay,” and took off alone toward the mob. I got the stuffing beat out of me and sustained injuries that took two weeks to recover from.

  “Who actually does that?” said Tawake in disbelief. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  With that, the nickname “Crazy” stuck throughout my junior high school years.

  Tawake was the star striker on the soccer team and something of a legend in our school. I was on the basketball team, but as soon as practice ended, I spent most days prowling the streets with Tawake. We’d go looking for someone to scrap with and fight them. No reason necessary. If we locked eyes and the other guy didn’t look away, game on. Tawake and I were always angry. We didn’t know why. All we knew was that basketball and soccer alone weren’t going to relieve our anger.

  Whenever a battle royal broke out against a mob of kids from another school, the police would arrive on the scene and try to chase us down. I always ran in the same direction Tawake did. But it wasn’t long before I’d lose sight of his bristly, unbending hair. I could never catch up to him. The police had never been able to catch Tawake.

  On the day of Tawake’s graduation, I handed him a bouquet of flowers. He smiled bashfully and gave my thighs a gentle kick. “Keep working those legs. We’re nothing if we can’t run fast.”

  The last time I saw Tawake was during spring recess of my second year in junior high, a little while before my father confronted me about choosing my country of citizenship. Tawake called me out of the blue, and the two of us went to an izakaya and drank. Tawake, who’d gone on to North Korean high school, had grown bigger since I’d seen him last and was now able to run the 100-meter dash in 10.9 seconds.

  We caught each other up on the latest news, and when I told him about my father’s recent Hawaiian awakening, Tawake laughed his head off. Once he stopped, he asked, “Have you thought about what you’re going to do in the future?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you thinking about going to Korean high school, graduating, and working at a Korean-owned pachinko parlor or yakiniku restaurant or as a money lender like me? Or are you going to be a doctor or lawyer?”

  We looked at each other and laughed. In Zainichi society, this was the fairy tale that parents told their children:

  Even North Koreans can take the Japanese national examination and become doctors and lawyers.

  But the reality was none of us ever dreamed of being a doctor or lawyer or anything that required a national examination. Lou Reed had our situation exactly right in “Dirty Blvd.” People like us don’t get to dream. Maybe Lou Reed was Zainichi.

  Anyway, none of the people around me wanted to become doctors or lawyers or believed they could ever become one. We weren’t raised in a system that made that sort of thing possible. That fairy tale every North Korean parent told their kid sounded like this to my ears: join a Serie A league soccer club and score a goal.

  Tawake. Now he might have been able to score a goal. Although there’s not much point in talking hypothetically, if Tawake had been Japanese, he would easily have become a great player in the J League, been scouted by a foreign club, and gotten rich and famous playing in Serie A or the Bundesliga. Tawake was born in Japan, was raised in Japan, and spoke Japanese. He also happened to be a foreigner with North Korean citizenship. It was virtually impossible for a foreigner to reach the J League, much less become rich and famous. Tawake had run into an obstacle that had finally stopped him in his tracks. This was the story Tawake told me around the time three empty beer bottles sat on the table:

  “I got fingerprinted awhile back.”

  Back then, the government still had a fingerprinting system for foreign residents. When you turned sixteen, you had to go to the Alien Registration Office and get your fingerprints taken, like a criminal. I’d already been fingerprinted on one of my “trips” down to the station, but for Tawake, who had never been caught, it was a first.

  “I was going to go down to the registration office and punch the daylights out of the bastards. You can get into trouble for refusing to get fingerprinted. I didn’t want the hassle, so I figured I’d get at least a little payback by decking the bastards at the office.”

  Tawake lifted his beer glass to his lips and drained it.

  “But when I got there, this old man with a gimpy leg came out. He acted so sorry and kept saying, ‘Thank you for coming down,’ to me, a kid. He must’ve said it about fifteen times. And then a girl with this big birthmark on her face brought the fingerprint form and didn’t look at me once but shielded my hands with her notebook the whole time so the others couldn’t see I was getting fingerprinted. I forgot about punching anybody after that. I must’ve said sorry about ten times. More times than I’ve ever said it in all my life.”

  Tawake looked at me with a serious expression and continued.

  “They finally got me. The government’s power is a terrifying thing. You have to be pretty fast to outrun it.”

  Walking back from the izakaya, Tawake drunkenly smacked my head and kept muttering, “Hawaii . . . Crazy . . . Hawaii . . .” He gave me a wobbly kick in the thighs and said, “I’ll see ya.”

  I bowed and began walking away. From behind me, I heard the first word Tawake had ever said to me: “Go.”

  When I turned around, Tawake had turned around and was already walking in the opposite direction. His hair stood tall and unbending against the wind. That was the last time I saw him.

  The story I heard later was that Tawake had switched from North Korean to South Korean citizenship and quit high school before that last night I saw him. Then he was gone. No one knew where he went. According to rumors, he had gone to France and joined a foreign mercenary unit or to England and became a hooligan leader or to Amsterdam, where he became king of the hippies. Wherever he was, I was sure he was running, running so fast that no one could catch him.

  As soon as I started my third year in junior high, I announced to my teachers that I was going to take the Japanese high school entrance exams. I expected them to laugh me out of the room—the school’s biggest dumb ass shooting his mouth off again—but the school had fallen on hard times. The number of students going to North Korean schools was declining every year, and if this continued, the survival of the school was at risk, so they hated to lose even a single student. But that wasn’t what the vice principal called me in to tell me.

  “We don’t mind if you go to a Japanese school. But what we can’t have is the other students hearing about it and getting ideas of their own. So taking the Japanese entrance exams has to remain secret.”

  And that was how I was given my discharge notice.

  The vice principal also said this: “What makes you think you can get into a Japanese high school in the first place? When you come crying back to us, we won’t admit you to the high school. Keep that in mind as you study for the exams.”

  I wasn’t particularly hurt by this. Back then, I couldn’t even read the English word “certainly,” pronounced “George” as “Gerogay,” and thought the past tense of “leave” was “leaved.” So no, I wasn’t particularly hurt by what the vice principal said, but it did piss me off.

  I began to study like crazy. I quit the basketball team, saying that my joints were screwed up; quit looking for trouble after school, citing a moral awakening; secretly went to a cram school; and studied like never before. A certain friend spotted me going into the cram school one afternoon, and the next morning it was all over school. Then the bullying by the teachers began.

  One day about a month before my high school entrance exams, I was so tired from studying the night before that I fell asleep in the History of Kim Il Sung’s Revolution class. I was slapped awake by the teacher’s hard palm. The class was stopped midlecture, and after I was made to sit on my heels before the teacher’s desk, the teacher ordered me to criticize my behavior. I kept quiet since I couldn’t think of anything to criticize, and the teacher struck me again. A metallic ringing
filled my ear. It was a familiar sound. My eardrum had burst.

  I took three toe kicks in the thigh. It hurt so bad that tears welled up in my eyes. I took five finger-flicks to the bridge of my nose. It hurt so bad that five happy memories flew out of my brain. I was grabbed by the ear and pulled down to the ground. I bit down on my humiliation so hard that blood seeped from my gums.

  I was called an “ethnic traitor” and kicked in the pit of the stomach, then called a “sellout” and struck across the face again. I couldn’t really understand what that last one meant. I knew the literal meaning of the word, of course, but I just couldn’t bring myself to think that I was a sellout. I could sense the incongruity of the label but didn’t have the words to express it. Then someone who was able to say exactly what I was feeling appeared, like a superhero.

  A voice rose up from the back of the classroom.

  “We’ve never belonged to a country we could sell out.”

  Sunday.

  I arrived at the east exit of Shinjuku Station five minutes before the appointed time and found Jeong-il leaning against the pillar by the ticket barrier, reading a paperback. I snuck up on him and without making a sound, peered over at the book. It was I Am a Cat by Soseki Natsume.

  “Any good?”

  Jeong-il closed the book. “‘Is the Spirit of Japan triangular? Is it, do you think, a square? As the words themselves explicitly declare, it’s an airy, fairy, spiritual thing,’” he said, reciting a passage from the novel.

  “Sounds interesting.”

  He continued his recitation. “‘There’s not one man in the whole of Japan who has not used the phrase, but I have not met one user yet who knows what it conveys. The Spirit of Japan, the Japanese spirit, could it conceivably be nothing but another of those long-nosed goblins only the mad can see?’”

  Jeong-il smiled at me good-naturedly. I adored Jeong-il’s smile.

  Jeong-il was born to a Zainichi father and a Japanese mother. His father left when Jeong-il was three and had been MIA ever since.

  When it came time for Jeong-il to start elementary school, his mother put him straight into North Korean school. Since North Korean schools were classified as miscellaneous schools, and thus didn’t qualify for subsidies, tuition was expensive, but she worked tirelessly to pay it.

  Thus, a strange half-Korean, half-Japanese student with South Korean citizenship was born. By the start of fifth grade, Jeong-il was called “the brightest student since the school’s founding.” And because, in part, we were never in the same class until we entered junior high school, I (“the biggest dumb ass since the school’s founding”) hardly ever talked to him.

  “We’ve never belonged to a country we could sell out.”

  By the time Jeong-il made that declaration, he had achieved perfect grades and attendance for eight years running, could correctly pronounce “certainly” in English, explain the present perfect tense, and read and write cursive letters. Not to mention he’d never shoplifted, shaken anyone down for money, or gotten in a fistfight. He avoided groups altogether. Jeong-il was always alone. Even the teachers didn’t know how to relate to him. None of my other friends tried to get to know him either.

  Jeong-il’s rebellious declaration on my behalf got him hit by the teacher for the first time. After racking my brain, I bought a PlayStation with what little money I had and gave it to Jeong-il as a thank-you gift. At first, he looked at the console as if he didn’t know what to do with it but smiled good-naturedly and said thanks. A teacher found the PlayStation and ended up confiscating it. We both got smacked for that. It was a mistake to give it to Jeong-il at school. Jeong-il and I became friends anyway.

  After I was miraculously admitted to a Japanese high school and started going there, I grew farther apart from the friends I used to hang out with. The environments that we lived in had completely changed, of course, and in the end, I had become an outsider to my friends.

  Jeong-il had continued into North Korean high school, but we kept in touch. In fact, our friendship grew deeper. We met at least once a month and talked about a whole lot of things. Well, actually we talked a whole lot about the usual topics.

  Jeong-il and I went into a café and killed time until dinner.

  As soon as we settled into our seats, I pulled out a copy of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man from my backpack and handed it to him.

  “My number-one pick this month.”

  “What is it about?” Jeong-il asked.

  “Don’t believe scientists pushing the theory of genetic determinism.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Let’s say, for example, you and I both have small skulls. Some diabolical scientist lumps us all together and comes out and says all Koreans have small skulls and therefore are stupid. That data could be used to oppress us, which is what happened to blacks and Indians in America.”

  Jeong-il said, “I’ll give it a try.” He slipped the book into his bag and then took out another paperback and gave it to me. It was In Exile by Takeshi Kaiko.

  “It’s really cool,” said Jeong-il.

  Riffling through the pages of the book, I said, “You’re always reading novels.” I didn’t believe in the power of the novel. A novel could entertain but couldn’t change anything. You open the book, you close it, and it’s over. Nothing more than a tool to relieve stress. Every time I said as much, Jeong-il would say something cryptic like, “A lone person devoted to reading novels has the power equal to a hundred people gathered at a meeting.” Then he’d continue, saying, “The world would be a better place with more people like that,” and smile good-naturedly.

  And then it felt like maybe he was right.

  After putting the book in my backpack, I said, “The book you lent me last time—Akutagawa’s Aphorisms by a Pygmy? It was cool.”

  A joyful smile spread across Jeong-il’s face.

  When we finished catching each other up on the latest news, the conversation shifted to university. Although I intended to take the entrance exams, I felt conflicted about it. University was essentially a breeding ground for salarymen, and I had no use for such a place. The reason was simple. Even if I did become a salaryman, my nationality prevented me from becoming company president. Deprived of my greatest ambition from the start, I had no intention of slaving away in the system.

  “If you’re not going to university what’re you going to do?” Jeong-il asked.

  “Haven’t thought about it. Definitely not work nine to five.”

  “Then maybe you can take the four years at university to decide.”

  “Sounds like four random years.”

  Jeong-il took a sip from his lukewarm coffee and said in a serious tone, “But you should live a random life. I mean, your life has already veered off the rails. I wish you’d keep on veering and see where it takes you. You’re someone who could pull that off. But you know, that’s just me.” Jeong-il smiled good-naturedly.

  I fidgeted in embarrassment. I’d almost never had the experience of being praised by a teacher. Now I knew the feeling.

  After getting into a Japanese university, Jeong-il planned to get his teaching license and become a teacher. For a North Korean school.

  “Then why don’t you live a random life with me?” I asked.

  Jeong-il shook his head. “I’m not the type.”

  “How could you know that now?”

  “Because I do. Those things are already decided from the start.”

  “You sound like a diabolical scientist.”

  “No, this is different. What I’m talking about is something like a person’s role in life.”

  “Forget about roles.”

  “If I did that, I’d stop being me.”

  I let out a short sigh. “Please don’t tell me you’re going back to that small circle.”

  Jeong-il drank the cold coffee and said gently, “Do you remember when you said North Korean school was like an organized religion?”

  I nodded.

 
Jeong-il continued. “I don’t know all that much about religion, but if it serves the role of taking in vulnerable people of all kinds, then we definitely need Korean schools.”

  “Except that I was already in it before I had a choice. Vulnerable had nothing to do with it.”

  “Me, too. But if I’d gone to a Japanese school, I might have been bullied and killed myself.”

  “No way.”

  “It’s true. I used to get bullied all the time by the boys in my neighborhood. They said all sorts of horrible things, too. If they tried to televise it, all you’d hear is one long bleep.”

  There was a pause, and then Jeong-il and I laughed. Jeong-il stopped giggling and said, “But when I started going to the North Korean school, I saw tough guys like you jumping around, and then I was just tougher. I didn’t care what the bullies in the neighborhood said to me.”

  Another silence passed between us. Then I said, “It’s too bad we weren’t friends back then. I would’ve beat down every one of them.”

  Jeong-il narrowed his eyes at me as if he were looking at something bright and said, “You know what? You did.”

  We looked at each other and let out a sheepish laugh.

  “It’s for kids like me that we need organized religion,” Jeong-il continued matter-of-factly. “I’m going to study hard at a Japanese university and come back with the proper knowledge the kids coming up after us will need to break out into the wider world. I want to give them the courage that you guys gave me. I’m going to tell them about you, too. About the ridiculously tough-as-nails senpai that went to their school. You better not disappoint them.”

  The usual good-natured smile was spread across Jeong-il’s face. I fidgeted in my seat again.

  “You’re going to make a great leader.”

  Jeong-il chuckled bashfully and said, “The ‘organization’ is beginning to change since Kim Il Sung died. They’re slowly turning an eye toward the outside world. Maybe North Korean schools will have evolved into something better by the time I come back.”

  When Kim Il Sung died a short while back, I felt nothing. In my mind I had completely closed the book on Kim. Never to be opened again.