Meanwhile, Imai remembered Sakurai Atsushi, a boy who’d been in his class first year who always sat by himself. He’d heard that Sakurai’s friends who he’d known since elementary school had all decided to get jobs instead of going to high school. So all through first year, none of Imai’s friends had ever talked to Sakurai, and they’d never ended up in common situations.
Since childhood, Sakurai had never found it easy to make friends—he was shy and introverted and he didn’t want to stand out. Even when he entered high school he never did anything to draw attention to himself. The only people he’d ever hung out with were his few friends from elementary school, so every day, from the moment he arrived at school in the morning to the moment he left at night, he often went without ever saying a word to anyone. Everyone knew him as “that scary guy who hangs out with the delinquent kids from other schools.” Sakurai knew most people probably thought he didn’t care at all about school, either, but he decided he’d just let them think that, without denying or affirming anything.
Cigarettes, motorcycles, fights, and “regent” hairdos—those things were Sakurai’s only love in those days, and he had a lot of fun hanging out with his bad-boy friends. He wanted to escape the dullness of life, even for a moment. Of course he couldn’t escape reality, but he wanted to, and he was even mad at himself that he couldn’t.
Even now, Sakurai and Imai still remember their first impressions of each other. Imai thought Sakurai was “a guy with a sharp gaze,” and Sakurai thought Imai was “a little strange.” When they first interacted with each other, all they thought was “this guy is totally different from me.” But for more than a year, no circumstances allowed them to get to know each other more fully, and their only connection remained the fact that they were classmates.
Then, in their third year, a horrible incident brought them close together at once. Sakurai’s gang of friends got into trouble with the law, and in the aftermath, Sakurai was given no choice but to part ways with them. Separated from his former friends, Sakurai’s connections outside the school had been severed in an instant.
Sakurai’s dull, boring days had just gotten even more boring and dull. He decided that a small attempt to make friends at school might be a little better than just spending every minute alone. And then one day, one of his new friends said, “Let’s go to Imai’s house!”
Sakurai knew Imai’s house was a place where lots of different students like to hang out. It was in the opposite direction from his own house, but he was interested to go, so he let his friend take him there.
In the cramped, 4-and-a-half-tatami room, cigarette smoke hung in the air as music played in the background. Imai, the owner of the room, was unperturbed by seeing a new face, and immediately welcomed Sakurai in. The people who hung out at Imai’s room had no specific affiliation with each other. Imai’s friends brought their friends, and there was a tacit understanding that it was okay if people came even if Imai didn’t know them—it was as if he were sponsoring a space for them all to hang out in. Sakurai probably thought he could easily slip into the situation unnoticed, even though this was a place where people were friendly and accepted him. He felt a little sad that a place like this had been here all along and he hadn’t known about it.
“Peace is nice, isn’t it?” he thought. Before, he’d always been making trouble and getting high on thrills, but the atmosphere in this room was very relaxed, and that wasn’t a bad thing, he found. Maybe it was that he felt comfortable there. From then on, he came to dearly love that room with its ever-present music and crowd of friends.
★★★★★
Even after Imai had decided to start a band with Araki, he was still unsure about where to actually begin. He was only a high school student, and he had no money. Only the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to start a band—it became the only thing he wanted to do, and his desire to do it kept growing until he had his heart completely set on it and he just had to do it.
Meanwhile, Araki was busy talking to people and searching for members. He thought that when he graduated from high school he would move to Tokyo and search for members, because he was sure he could find people in such a big place. He tried adapting ads for band members of the kind that commonly appeared in music magazines to suit his and Imai's intents and purposes. Higuchi, who was a year younger than Imai, spent a lot of time talking to his brother, who was five years older. Of course, that brother later became Yagami Toll. SPOTS, Yagami’s band at the time, were entering a contest, the prize of which was a record deal. They also played gigs at local live houses. Yagami stressed that if they wanted to do a band, the first thing they had to do was play live shows.
So they all went together to see BOØWY perform live at the local live house “Make-Up,” which has since closed. When Imai and co. heard rumors that BOØWY and Rogue, bands from Gunma Prefecture, had both moved their base of operations to Tokyo and had been making a splash in the live house circuit, they decided to go see it with their own eyes, to confirm that indeed, if they wanted to do a band, they had to play live shows, too.
The upshot of this outing was that Imai decided yes, they definitely had to do the band thing. In the summer of his third year of high school, Imai coaxed his parents into buying him a 29000-yen Stratocaster-type guitar through a mail-order service from a maker called Pressure. Even though Imai was right-handed, he chose a left-handed guitar. He had no reason for the choice other than that he thought that the left-handed one was easier to hold, but since there was no chord book on the market with left-handed guitar chords, he started out learning all the right-handed chords completely backwards.
“Since I started out learning them that way, it’s like I see guitar tablature in code—I just play it backwards right away. Since that was the way I learned how to do it, now I can just play the chords as soon as I see them written down.” He always talks about it like it’s easy, but really, he must be doing a very clever mirroring act in his head.
Somehow, everyone noticed that Imai wanted to start a band. He was always in his room, holding his wood-pattered guitar, learning chords. Araki declared that if he were going to be in a band, he wanted to be the vocalist. Now he thought that the idea of waiting until they graduated high school and could move to Tokyo to search for members was waiting too long, and anyway, the group that hung out in Imai’s room was beginning to develop interest in the band, too.
Higuchi, who had talked so much about bands with his older brother, asked the bassist of his brother’s band to teach him the instrument. He said he wanted to play bass so he’d be able to feel its heavy thud vibrating throughout his body. Hoshino, who had been dragged into the band plot by Higuchi, paid no attention to Higuchi’s desire for “Hide on vocal” and instead chose to play guitar.
“I know Imai already plays guitar but it’ll be fine if there are two guitarists,” he decided. Hoshino had never picked up a guitar before, but he felt okay about it because they were all beginners, and he didn’t change his mind about joining the band as a guitarist. “Having two guitarists is kind of a different setup,” he thought. Maybe he thought each guitarist would be able to show off his own individuality.
Sakurai Atsushi also began to show interest in the band. He’d heard about SPOTS from Higuchi, and he’d been going to live shows. Maybe he’d be able to play the music he was hearing himself. The possibility was now before his eyes. Bands were music—music that you weren’t just listening to. The reason why he’d been getting into trouble was that he wanted some way to make himself noticed. Hidden behind his indifferent, introverted personality was a part that wanted to stick out and be noticed, and it was this part that couldn’t help getting excited on hearing the word “band.” He couldn’t help it, he wanted to join.
“If I do it, I guess I’ll be the drummer,” he thought.
From the time he was a child, he’d never hated listening to music. Sakurai loved beautiful melodies that he felt got stuck in his heart, and he felt the same way about rhythms. When he listened to music, before he knew it he always ended up pounding the rhythm with his hands or tapping it with his feet. Of all the instruments he’d heard, the drum rhythms always penetrated furthest into his ears and his body, much more so than guitar phrases.
It was the winter of Imai, Sakurai, and Araki’s third year of high school, and their graduation was looming before them. Everyone was clear that they wanted to start the band, but they hadn’t actually done anything for real yet. Imai and Hoshino both had guitars now and with chord books and finger picking practice, they began to master playing them. Sakurai bought an old, beat-up drum set off a friend for 30000 yen. However, when he went to practice the drums in his four-and-a-half-tatami room, his father yelled at him to shut up, in that instant reducing his drum set to nothing more than furniture. So instead, Sakurai got Yagami Toll to let him practice drums at his house. He watched Yagami practice drums and learned from him, and he paid special attention to observing drum form when he went to live shows.
There hadn’t yet been a moment for the five of them to decide “Okay, we’re officially starting the band today.” They were just trying to alleviate their everyday boredom. But then when such a moment came, it turned out to be very simple. They all felt the same way, so there was nothing to worry about. All it took was one word from Sakurai Atsushi to confirm the