The performance started. The mood in the room shifted with almost no warning, like an ambush. Or maybe it just felt that way to the guys because we were all drunk and had no concept of time. There was a change in the quality of quiet, like when snow suddenly stops falling. The murmurs of the crowd died down, and the house lights dimmed a little—not that they had been very bright to begin with. So maybe it was just the impression of the lights dimming. The six of us were all still drinking beer, to the point where none of us knew how many we’d had. Everyone finished the little bit that remained in our paper cups—it seemed like the thing to do with the lights going down and the feeling that the show was about to start, and after a bit the performers came out. There was nothing flashy about it, neither their entrance nor the performance that followed, it had a totally relaxed feel. First, a white girl took the mic. She wound the cord a few times, which there didn’t seem to be any reason for doing other than to mark time. She started talking in English. Next to her stood a Japanese girl who was interpreting, and she had a mic in her hand too. The white girl spoke in a rich voice, sometimes suddenly getting louder, and the first couple of times she raised her voice it triggered a screech of feedback, but the feedback stopped quickly enough. She was explaining what the performance was going to be about. Although the explanation was already part of the performance. We’ll be talking about things, but we don’t know what we’ll be talking about, and the reason why not is that we haven’t prepared anything. But we’ll talk anyway. That must have been what she said, because that’s what the interpreter interpreted after her. There aren’t just mics on the stage, she said, there’s also a mic on a stand in the audience, and it’s open to anyone who wants to speak. The audience mic stood right behind where the six of us were sitting, kind of blocking the aisle. If anyone has anything they want to say, feel free to get on the mic at any time. The interpreter said all that in Japanese. Of course nobody got up and went to the mic. The room fell silent. This is, after all, Japan. The girl, and I’m just guessing here, she let the silence go on, thinking maybe that would get past the Japan-ness. But before the silence could get too heavy it was broken. One of the performers, the young black guy who might have been in the movie I saw, walked over to the audience mic and started telling his story. He had dreads, but they didn’t make his head look that much bigger and they weren’t flashy or intimidating, if anything they made him look sophisticated. His story didn’t last long. When I was sixteen I got my first ever job. A janitor in a Dunkin’ Donuts. At the end of my first day, the manager called me into the office and asked, how do you like the job? But I didn’t answer. That was the end of the story. He stepped away from the mic, opened one of the folding chairs onstage and sat down. Silence returned to the room. It lasted a lot longer than the first time. At first everyone thought it would end right away, that someone else would stand up and go to the mic and pick up where the first performer left off. But no one did, and the silence stretched on much longer than anyone thought it would. It must have been part of the performance, an intentional silence. It went on and on, to the point where the least secure people in the audience must have been squirming under the weight of the silence, when finally the girl sitting next to the black guy on the stage made a move like she was going to stand up, and then she actually did stand up, took the mic and started talking. It was just when people were starting to think that the silence had gone on for too long, just as they were facing the need to decide what they were prepared to do about it. Thanks to the girl standing up, everything taking shape in their minds settled back, only half-formed. All their discomfort was neutralized along with everything else they were feeling, then it vanished, as if it had never been there at all.
This is what the girl said: She was staying at a hotel in Shibuya. That morning she went out for a walk and she happened upon a protest march. It was a few days before the US began their invasion of Iraq. The protest was against the war. She joined in and marched with them. She was surprised at how narrow the column of the marchers was in Japan compared to the protests she had seen elsewhere, and how orderly the police were, escorting the marchers. She heard music that was probably from a portable CD player somewhere in the march, and then somebody handed her a tambourine. That was the end of her story, and the girl sat down. This time there was only a short pause. Then the girl who spoke first stepped up and said something very brief. The immediate Japanese translation told us that the mic was open to all of us. Then another silence. Another long one.
I wondered what I would say if I went to the mic, tried to picture myself doing it. After a little while a man stood up, but at first I didn’t notice him. It wasn’t until he got right up to the mic that I did. He was middle-aged, with greying hair and rimless glasses, and he had a mellow vibe. We watched to see what he would do. I asked myself if I would get up too, all six of us did, I mean only vaguely, but we did. He said that he found out about this event online. He got on a plane from Kyushu to Tokyo to come see it. I have grave apprehensions about the war that’s about to begin, he said. When I was young it was the war in Vietnam. Back then, there were bands like Peter, Paul and Mary, and we all sang their songs together. But now there are no songs like that. That was when he lost my interest. Is this old guy going to keep talking? I wondered, but that was all he had to say. While he shared his thoughts, the interpreter spoke in a low voice to the performers, telling them in English what the guy said. One of them nodded repeatedly. The man at the mic stood there for another minute even though he had stopped talking, like it took him some time to realize that he was done. When he finally came back to himself, he stepped out of the light into the shadows and went back to his seat. Then he raised his glass from the table to his lips and steadied himself. None of us paid any more attention to him. No one else made any moves towards the mic and the room got silent again. The air was still; you could hear the bubbles in the beer. This went on for a while, the echoes or maybe more like the reverberations of what we’d just heard hanging over the room like smoke. But it wasn’t exactly a vibe relating to what the man had said, if anything it was resistance, annoyance even, except that’s probably not quite right, it was both, a feel in the room that was kind of obviously a combination of resistance and agreement, and I was glad, because that was how I felt too. I wanted to try to put a name to the feel at that moment, like if it existed independently from all the bodies in the room—I mean if someone was observing, from a distance, what would they call that feeling. I considered really thinking about it, but I didn’t do it. I wanted another beer, but I couldn’t get up in the middle of this and go to the bar. I turned to look at the bar anyway, see how far away it was. My eyes swept over the audience, and that was when I spotted a girl, who looked back at me. She wasn’t the girl from the movie theatre. After the performance ended, she and I stood by the bar talking. Then we took a taxi to Shibuya and got a room at a love hotel. It wasn’t a Friday or Saturday so even though we got there pretty late, we had no problem getting a room.
One of the other audience members who got up in front of the mic during the performance—after a while lots of people got up to say something—was a girl who started off by saying she was an interpreter. By the time she was on the mic, the performance was winding down, and the whole room was full of everyone’s desire for the thing to finish. But she just talked on, nonchalant-like. Or maybe she really couldn’t read the room.