Even someone like me was, without a doubt, happy in middle school. I skipped school like it was the most natural thing in the world. I’d spend the night with the other kids from the same poor housing complex, standing around reading manga at a junk shop until morning. Or we’d play mahjong at a friend’s place that had a proper table. It was really, genuinely happy.
In Okinawa, the line between “yankii”(Japanese delinquent) kids and “normal students” is blurry. Unless someone is especially serious, everyone has a bit of delinquent in them. I had a habit of running away from home, and I was always looking for people to hang out with until dawn, so I ended up with a lot of particularly un-serious friends. They stole Yu-Gi-Oh cards and bicycles like it was routine, then sold them cheap to scrape together money to play with. Sometimes they’d get caught stealing a senior’s bike and get beaten up for it. That was the youth of Okinawan yankii middle schoolers.
They didn’t really get anime or manga talk, but at the arcade it was different. Fighting games, mahjong, Gundam’s VS series. Back then it was Rengou vs. ZAFT, and for a while the game center became this weird space where otaku and yankii fought side by side. I even saw this strangely moving scene once: an otaku beat up another school’s yankii too hard in KOF, the guy stood up and tried to turn it into a real fight, and then the yankii from our school jumped in to back up the otaku and get him out. Friendship, Okinawa-style.
There was also this classmate who was an otaku but tried too hard to imitate delinquents. He handed me a Zippo lighter printed with a Touhou fanart reposted without permission. You know the kind they have as arcade prizes. Then he goes, “Wanna smoke?”
My mom had basically given up on raising me, but she’d still told me again and again: “Run away, drink if you want. I don’t care. But your lungs are weak, so don’t you ever smoke.” So I stayed stubbornly smoke-free. Those were my days.
One night, I got bored of mahjong at a friend’s place and went out for a walk. Then I remembered the yankii kids used to hang around the elementary school late at night. They never go to school during the day, but they love school at night.
I passed by the courtyard and saw seven or eight students from my own school standing in a circle. One of them laughed, giggling: “Thought you were a security guard for a second.”
The background music was Orange Range blasting from a flip phone, the kind of sound quality that makes your ears hurt. They loved Okinawan artists too. Local pride ran deep.
I joined the circle for now. I asked, “Do you guys always gather for no reason?” and someone said, lately they’d been into something called a “shoulder-punch deathmatch.”
I didn’t even need the details. I understood instantly it was going to be a stupid, violent way to kill time.
Two guys face each other and take turns punching the other’s shoulder. First one to drop to a knee loses. Simple. Crystal clear. Primal. Practicing fighting-game combos is a thousand times better.
Naturally, they decided I should do it too, since I’d wandered in like some kind of special guest. I said it wouldn’t be interesting because I was obviously a skinny weakling, and that turned into a plan to match me with the skinniest guy in their group. Even yankii kids can do game-balance adjustments.
Once it got that far, backing out felt awkward. More than that, trying something this idiotic at least once didn’t seem so bad. I stared down the skinniest one, Ryo.
“Skinny” only compared to them, though. He was still definitely stronger than the class average, because even these guys were, one way or another, spending their days in sports clubs, betting their youth on basketball or baseball or whatever. Ryo was in the soccer club. There was no way I could win. But even an otaku boy has his pride.
Rock-paper-scissors. Ryo went first.
There we were, in the middle of the night at an elementary school, facing each other in fighting stances. The BGM was distorted, clipping Orange Range. The audience was a circle of yankii kids, completely hyped. In a situation this unnatural, brain-chemicals start flooding through you.
Ryo didn’t hold back. He buried a straight punch into my right shoulder.
A dull thunk rang out across the schoolyard. One hit wasn’t a big deal.
My turn. For no reason at all, I swung my arm around like Donkey Kong. Then I threw everything into a punch at his shoulder.
Another dull thunk. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the act of hitting a person.
“It’s getting good!”
“Keep the tempo up!”
The audience egged us on. Two hits, three hits. Up to seven or eight, I was fine. Around the ninth, I could tell real damage was piling up.
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
And because you’re swinging an arm that’s already full of pain, the one doing the punching starts hurting too. Even an otaku’s fist starts screaming after ten hits. Ryo’s shoulder hurt too.
The rule “first one to drop to a knee loses” is weirdly perfect. No matter how much it hurts, that pain is in your upper body. Dropping to a knee isn’t about your body giving out. It means your spirit broke first.
Thirteen. Fourteen.
We both wanted to collapse onto the ground right now. But pride wouldn’t let us. In our heads, it was Raoh versus Toki.
Since punching also hurts, our blows started to weaken. That made it even worse, because it meant the number of punches just kept climbing. After we passed twenty, my awareness got fuzzy. Before we hit thirty, my spirit snapped.
For the first time in my life, I crumpled to my knees.
And then I fell backward onto my back.
The yankii kids praised us for an unexpectedly legendary match. They tried to hand me cigarettes as a reward, but I refused. No smoking. Not that. Nights like this aren’t so bad.
Ryo silently offered his hand. We shook.
I didn’t know there were ways to deepen friendship besides mahjong.
After a few minutes of resting, it sounded like a patrol car was making its rounds. One guy panicked, and we all hurried out toward the road. But of course, I was the only one who lagged behind, because I was injured. And they didn’t want to get taken in by the police, so they didn’t have the luxury of helping someone else.
I didn’t know what to do. I chose hiding instead of running, and slipped under a parked truck. If it started moving now, I’d definitely die. I held my breath and stayed there for a long time.
After things finally seemed safe, I literally crawled out from under the dim truck.
Then I staggered home, taking my time. It was past 4 a.m., so even if the cops stopped me, I figured I wouldn’t get “taken in” anymore. A trip that would normally take thirty minutes took me two hours.
Early morning. When I got home for the first time in a while, battered and wrecked, my mom welcomed me gently.
“You lost?”
It was frustrating, but all I could do was answer, “Yeah.”
She didn’t press any further. She just said, “I see,” put me to bed, and quietly treated my injuries. Even if she’d basically abandoned my education, she had to have had thoughts about her son coming home at dawn in that condition.
But she chose to say nothing.
Because she knew anything more would damage a boy’s pride.
For the first time, I felt like I understood why my late father had fallen in love with her.
That was one page of my youth.
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