curled, unrecognizable script ran down the side panel, spelling out instructions, perhaps, or warnings we couldn’t read. Not that it mattered: we came to sing, and that particular machine had the best selection of songs. In fact, it seemed to have different songs every time, and was known for oddball old favorites, like Ray Sakamoto’s “Dragon Curry” or Kari Kari’s “Love Me for the Forever.” Nozomi once claimed that it had any song you wanted, if you looked through the book enough times.
The karaoke system had a built-in game that scored your pitch and timing. After each song a cartoon island appeared in the distance. “Cram Island,” it was called. The idea was that you were lost at sea and swimming toward land—the better you sang, the closer you got. Sometimes the game would comment on your performance, little animated coconuts yelling “WAAA!” or “HEEE!” or, if you were doing badly, maybe caught up in conversation instead of singing, they’d shout, “BUUU!” There were a couple theories behind the name “Cram Island”: I joked that it was a horrible place full of kanji practice sheets and crabby, second-rate teachers so bad they were exiled from regular cram school. Miho was certain it was a misspelling of the English word “clam,” though we never did see any shellfish in the game.
Aside from that machine, though, number 17 was like any other room in the place: yellow walls, plastic couches, the stink of fresh cigarettes and stale potpourri in the air. A low table piled with songbooks, mics, and remotes, and a wicker basket that held tambourines and maracas, though we never used those—they were for the old ladies who came in with their masks and kerchiefs to sing enka .
We liked that Karaoke Live! was out of the way, that the bike path snaked between those rice paddies. It felt like we’d earned something simply by arriving. On warm nights you could hear the paddy frogs singing, and if you got a room facing east, you couldn’t even open the window for all the noise. I remember walking out some nights, my voice hoarse after three or four hours of singing and chatting, and those frogs would still be hummingalong like an engine. The three of us would get on our bikes and pedal away from the neon into the darkness.
MIHO WAS A CYNIC, which made me one too; she insisted Cram Island wasn’t even reachable, that the manufacturer had just added the feature to keep customers coming back. Nozomi, though, wasn’t so sure. One day her schoolbag fell off the couch, and I spotted the black and silver strap of her bathing suit. (I’d memorized that strap, of course, during our PE swimming unit earlier in the year.) To tease her, I asked if she was really planning to swim to Cram Island. She blushed and joked she didn’t need to worry about getting anywhere close when I was around.
Occasionally, amid all the clanging, merry filler music that played between songs, two voices emerged: one high and whispery, the other comically low, like a barbershop bass, which chanted a jumble of syllables we could never make out. It was like one of those ink blot tests: what you heard depended on your state of mind. “His sky crime fell over the land,” they sang to me once, and another time, “This crying will end in her hand.”
Nozomi went in on her own a lot toward the end, and even started outscoring me on “Bullet Train (to My Heart).” I didn’t think about it too much: Miho’s mom had started volunteering in the afternoons, leaving behind an empty house and Miho’s pink-ruffled bed. Nozomi didn’t mind singing alone, she said; she enjoyed it because she could repeat songs without being a bother. Later, kidswho were in choir with her at school would say her voice had gotten stronger, that they had noticed. But I think they only noticed afterward, you know?
THERE WAS ONE INCIDENT during those last couple weeks that’s never left me. I was walking out of school for lunch with a couple guys from
The karaoke system had a built-in game that scored your pitch and timing. After each song a cartoon island appeared in the distance. “Cram Island,” it was called. The idea was that you were lost at sea and swimming toward land—the better you sang, the closer you got. Sometimes the game would comment on your performance, little animated coconuts yelling “WAAA!” or “HEEE!” or, if you were doing badly, maybe caught up in conversation instead of singing, they’d shout, “BUUU!” There were a couple theories behind the name “Cram Island”: I joked that it was a horrible place full of kanji practice sheets and crabby, second-rate teachers so bad they were exiled from regular cram school. Miho was certain it was a misspelling of the English word “clam,” though we never did see any shellfish in the game.
Aside from that machine, though, number 17 was like any other room in the place: yellow walls, plastic couches, the stink of fresh cigarettes and stale potpourri in the air. A low table piled with songbooks, mics, and remotes, and a wicker basket that held tambourines and maracas, though we never used those—they were for the old ladies who came in with their masks and kerchiefs to sing enka .
We liked that Karaoke Live! was out of the way, that the bike path snaked between those rice paddies. It felt like we’d earned something simply by arriving. On warm nights you could hear the paddy frogs singing, and if you got a room facing east, you couldn’t even open the window for all the noise. I remember walking out some nights, my voice hoarse after three or four hours of singing and chatting, and those frogs would still be hummingalong like an engine. The three of us would get on our bikes and pedal away from the neon into the darkness.
MIHO WAS A CYNIC, which made me one too; she insisted Cram Island wasn’t even reachable, that the manufacturer had just added the feature to keep customers coming back. Nozomi, though, wasn’t so sure. One day her schoolbag fell off the couch, and I spotted the black and silver strap of her bathing suit. (I’d memorized that strap, of course, during our PE swimming unit earlier in the year.) To tease her, I asked if she was really planning to swim to Cram Island. She blushed and joked she didn’t need to worry about getting anywhere close when I was around.
Occasionally, amid all the clanging, merry filler music that played between songs, two voices emerged: one high and whispery, the other comically low, like a barbershop bass, which chanted a jumble of syllables we could never make out. It was like one of those ink blot tests: what you heard depended on your state of mind. “His sky crime fell over the land,” they sang to me once, and another time, “This crying will end in her hand.”
Nozomi went in on her own a lot toward the end, and even started outscoring me on “Bullet Train (to My Heart).” I didn’t think about it too much: Miho’s mom had started volunteering in the afternoons, leaving behind an empty house and Miho’s pink-ruffled bed. Nozomi didn’t mind singing alone, she said; she enjoyed it because she could repeat songs without being a bother. Later, kidswho were in choir with her at school would say her voice had gotten stronger, that they had noticed. But I think they only noticed afterward, you know?
THERE WAS ONE INCIDENT during those last couple weeks that’s never left me. I was walking out of school for lunch with a couple guys from
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