(2005) In the Miso Soup

by Ryu Murakami

  “Exactly. Isn’t that what we did as kids? We always took turns batting.”

  “All right,” Frank said. He took the bat and stepped into the cage. “Double or nothing, then?”

  The guy in the training wear was packing up to leave. Except for the dozing attendant and the bum, we were the only ones on this bizarre concrete plateau in a canyon of love hotels.

  “That’s right,” I said. “If you hit the home run target, my fee for tomorrow night also is zero. If you don’t hit it, you pay me the regular fee for both nights.”

  Frank nodded, but before putting the coins in the slot, he hesitated and said: “Kenji, I don’t really understand how this happened. All I know is I’m stepping up to swing this bat because you’re in a bad mood. But I just want us to get along. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not like I tried to get you mad so you’d take the bet and I wouldn’t have to pay you. I’m not that kind of person, Kenji. I was just playing around, feeling like a kid again. It’s not about money—I’ve got plenty of money. I guess I don’t look like a rich fellow, but that doesn’t mean I’m not one. You wanna look in my wallet?”

  Before I could refuse, Frank pulled a wallet from his breast pocket. A different wallet from the one he’d taken out in the lingerie pub, which had been made of imitation snakeskin. This one was of well-worn black leather, and inside was a thick wad of ¥10,000 notes and another of $100 bills. “See?” he said and smiled. What this was supposed to prove, I couldn’t tell you. Genuine rich guys never carry a lot of cash around, and I didn’t see any credit cards in there.

  “That’s about 4000 bucks and 280,000 yen. Oh, I’ve got money, all right. You see that now?”

  “Yeah, I see,” I said, and Frank strained to make the happiest face he was capable of. His cheeks twisted grotesquely, and he kept them like that until I grinned back at him. I felt goosebumps rise on the nape of my neck.

  “All right, then. Here goes.”

  Frank took ¥300 out of his coin purse and fed the machine. Then, instead of standing on the artificial turf of the batter’s box, he stepped onto the concrete and stood directly on top of the painted lines of home plate. I had no idea why he was doing that. If he didn’t move before the pitch came, he was going to get hit by the ball. The green light came on, and the machine began to stir. Still standing on home plate, Frank crouched down facing the machine and held the bat out in front of his chest. His grip was wrong too—his right hand below his left. I thought he was trying to be funny. I heard the spring’s final stretch and then the thump as it snapped back. Frank still wasn’t moving, and the ball grazed his ear at 100 kph. Well after the ball had hit the mat behind him, he swung for all he was worth—if you can call it a swing. He pounded the bat against the concrete, as if he were chopping wood, and let out an incomprehensible yowl. The metal bat slipped out of his grasp and bounced up in the air, ringing like a high-pitched gong. When the next pitch came whizzing at him Frank was standing sideways to the ball but still right on top of home plate. I was dumbfounded. I was watching an adult American male stand in the path of a speeding baseball with nothing in his hands. That familiar, everyday concept—the batter’s box—had been transformed into something alien. Frank’s pose had nothing to do with baseball, or any other sport. He squatted there with his head bowed and his fists still locked in the position they were in when the bat flew off—one on top of the other, both pointing toward left field. It was as if he’d been instantaneously freeze-dried. The second ball grazed his back, and I called out to him: “Hey, Frank.” He didn’t even flinch. He was staring at the bluish white concrete floor. A scrap of paper rode a gust of wind through the chain-link fence and danced lazily in the air to the ancient pop song crackling over the loudspeakers. Frank wasn’t even blinking. It was as if rigor mortis had set in. I felt like I’d wandered into a nightmare. One ball after another brushed past Frank and slammed against the mat suspended behind him. The regular, muffled sound it made was like the ticking of time in some alternate world—strangely comical but also painfully real. The sixth ball hit Frank in the ass, but he still didn’t move except to bring his hands in front of his face and peer at them. It was a pose of sorrow and resignation, like someone who’d just confessed to a crime and was awaiting punishment. I began to feel I’d been bullying him and went into the cage to try and put a stop to it all. “This is dangerous, Frank,” I said and put my hand on his shoulder, which was as cold and hard to the touch as the metal bat had been. “It’s dangerous here,” I said again, shaking him. Frank finally looked up from his hands and nodded. His face was turned toward me, but his dead eyes were focused somewhere else, and as I led him from the cage he slipped on a stray ball and fell down. I apologized to him again and again. I felt like I’d crossed a line, done something unforgivable.

  “It’s all right, Kenji,” he said when he’d settled into the chair again. “I’m okay now.”

  “You want to go get a cup of coffee or something?” I asked.

  Frank shook his head, trying to smile, and said: “Let me sit here for a while.”

  The homeless man was watching us.

  December 30, 1996.

  I got up around noon and read the newspaper first thing. It was full of details about the schoolgirl murder.

  In the early morning hours of December 28, a restaurant employee in the Kabuki-cho section of Shinjuku, Tokyo, reported to police that on leaving work he had discovered two plastic trash bags containing the dismembered body of a young woman. Police have identified the woman as Akiko Takahashi (17), a second-year student at Taito No. 2 High School and the daughter of Nobuyuki Takahashi (48) of Taito Ward. Evidence suggests that Akiko had been sexually assaulted, and the Metropolitan Police have formed a task force to investigate the case as an apparent rape/homicide.

  Investigators report that Akiko’s torso was found in one bag and her head, arms, and legs in the other. Her face bore several bruises, and cuts and puncture wounds covered her body. It was determined that she had been dead for approximately twelve hours. Her clothing, appointment book, and other personal effects were also found inside the plastic bags, which were discovered at a trash collection site in an out-of-the-way alley. Because of the small amount of blood at the scene, the task force has concluded that Akiko’s remains were transported there after she had been assaulted, murdered, and dismembered at a separate location.

  It is known that Akiko was associated with a group of juvenile delinquents who frequented Kabuki-cho and nearby Ikebukuro. The Nishi-Shinjuku police have interviewed members of the group and learned that Akiko was last seen in the early evening hours of December 27, at an Ikebukuro game center. . . .

  I had finished reading and turned on the TV when the doorbell rang. I opened up to find Jun standing there, dangling a bag from a convenience store. “It’s just instant,” she said, “but would you like some hot-pot noodles?”

  “You really think he . . .? What was this gaijin’s name again?”

  “Frank.”

  “Right. You really think he’s the murderer?”

  “I’m not saying that, but . . . I don’t know.”

  On TV a psychologist, a criminologist, and a social commentator guy who was supposed to be an expert on high-school girls were holding forth, acting as if nothing in the whole world was beyond their comprehension.

  “I mean, I don’t have any actual evidence that he did it. The real mystery to me is why I can’t shake the feeling that maybe he did.”

  The thick noodles were delicious. Jun had mixed in some minced meat she’d bought separately. She’s thoughtful like that. Jun has bleached highlights in her hair and piercings in both ears. Today she’d shown up in a black leather miniskirt with a mohair-blend sweater and boots. On TV, the social commentator guy was saying: “As for the baggy leggings and the bleached hair and the piercings, these are all expressions of high-school girls’ rejection of the parameters of adult society.” Jun picked up a tiny clump of min
ced meat with her chopsticks and said the guy was a fool. I agreed with her. I’m not a girl, and it’s been two years since I was in high school, so I’d never claim to understand even Jun very well. But some of the younger “experts” on TV act as if they’ve got high-school girls completely figured out. You can’t trust people like that.

  “Chopping her up, though,” Jun said, “—that’s pretty extreme. It’s like Silence of the Lambs, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I do. I think whoever did it must have been influenced by stuff like that. Like you said last night, it’s not a very Japanese way to kill somebody.”

  “So did you bring me a picture?”

  “A picture?”

  “Kenji, you said you’d bring a Print Club photo of the guy.”

  “I didn’t get back here till almost three in the morning, after dropping him off at his hotel. He said something you wouldn’t believe last night, at this batting center we went to. Believe me, photos were the last thing on my mind. We went to this batting center and he got all whacked out.”

  “What do you mean, whacked out?”

  “He suddenly froze up, his whole body. The balls were flying at him and he was facing the wrong way, just squatting there like a statue. It wasn’t just, you know, like he’d never played baseball before or something. It was way beyond that. And when I asked him about it afterward, he told me he’s missing part of his brain.”

  “You mean, like a retard or something?”

  “No. They cut it out. Part of his brain.”

  The noodles Jun was lifting to her mouth stopped and swayed in midair.

  “Don’t you die if somebody cuts out part of your brain?”

  “This was the part called the . . . what was it again? I asked Frank to spell it for me and looked it up, and it was a word you hear once in a while. What the hell was it? Can you name any parts of the brain?”

  “The skull?”

  “That’s the bone, dummy. Anyway, it’s a more difficult word.”

  “Medulla oblongata!”

  “Not that difficult. It was up here in front.”

  An older guy, a sociologist, was now talking on the tube: “In other words, as a result of this incident, we’re likely to see harsher enforcement of the anti-prostitution laws, but this, while it may have some temporary effect, would represent a total capitulation of mature judgment.”

  “The frontal lobe?” said Jun.

  I patted her on the head. Jun’s just an average student, but I think she’s smarter than most. Right now her mother was on a trip to Saipan that she’d won in some kind of lottery, which meant that Jun could have slept over last night without getting busted, but she has a brother in middle school, for one thing, so she’d gone home around midnight, as usual. It’s not that she’s the serious, responsible type—Jun’s goal is to avoid extremes like that and be as normal as possible. It isn’t easy to live a normal life, though. Parents, teachers, government—they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

  “That’s it, the frontal lobe, and there was something else but it was more difficult and not in the dictionary. Anyway, they cut it out. His frontal lobe.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why did they cut it out? Isn’t it something you need?”

  “He says he was in a car accident, and his skull got cracked open and little bits of glass got in there, so they had to remove it. Sounds ridiculous, right? But if you had seen him last night . . .”

  Frank had said: “Kenji, can I tell you a secret?” And before I could even reply, he was off. “It may have crossed your mind that there’s something unusual about me. Well, when I was eleven I was in a terrible automobile accident, and it damaged my brain, so sometimes, like just now, I suddenly can’t move my body, or my speech comes out all mangled and nobody can understand what I’m saying, or I’ll blurt out things that seem completely unconnected.”

  Frank took my hand and placed it on the back of his wrist and said: See how cold this is? He wasn’t kidding. It was freezing out there, with a strong wind whipping through the open concrete platform. I had the sniffles, and my own hands were half-numb. But the cold of Frank’s wrist was a different sort of cold, a cold you couldn’t have fixed by rubbing it or something. His wrist and forearm felt just like his shoulder had when I was dragging him out of the batting cage, like something metallic. Once when I was small I went with my father to a warehouse where they kept the machines he designed. I forget exactly why he took me with him, but it was in the hills outside Nagoya, in the middle of winter. Rows and rows of giant machines whose functions were a complete mystery to me, all lined up in this vast space charged with the smell of chilled steel. Touching Frank’s wrist triggered that memory.

  “Yet I myself can’t even feel how cold my body is,” he told me. “I’ve lost some of my sensory functions, and a lot of times I get so I can’t even tell if this body is really mine or not. Or I can be talking away like this and suddenly my memory will get very uncertain, and I won’t know if what I’m saying really happened or if it’s all just something I dreamed.”

  Frank went on about this all the way back to his hotel. It seemed like something from a science fiction movie, but I decided to take it at face value. Not so much because it explained the things he said and did, but because of the way his arm and shoulder felt to the touch.

  “I don’t get it,” Jun said. She had finished her noodles. I still had more than half of mine left. I have a sensitive tongue, and steaming-hot boiled udon takes me some time. “You’re not saying he’s a robot, are you?”

  “Well, I mean, look, all we know about robots is what we see in comics or movies or whatever, but . . . It’s like, there’s a certain sensation you get from touching someone’s skin, right?”

  I put my hand on the back of Jun’s. We hadn’t had sex for a while—almost three weeks, now that I thought about it. When we first met we were going at it like a couple of I-don’t-know-what in heat, but gradually, as we spent more time hanging out with each other, eating noodles or Jun’s special salads, the sex became less frequent.

  “It’s a particular kind of soft, warm feeling that you recognize immediately. Well, when you touch Frank it’s not like that at all.”

  Jun’s eyes were on the TV, but she squeezed my hand gently and told me to hurry up and finish eating.

  “Before the stuff they’re saying ruins your appetite.”

  They were still going on about the schoolgirl murder. The experts had all had their say, and now a reporter was chattering excitedly in front of a big, badly drawn sketch of a generic high-school girl: “Akiko had been viciously beaten, but if you’ll look at this picture I’d like to explain some of the more puzzling facts in regard to the nature of her injuries. . . .”

  “Don’t these people ever think about how her parents would feel if they saw this?” Jun said. “They act like the girls who sell it aren’t even human.”

  Makes me sick, she muttered, looking away from the TV. It’s true the drawing was in incredibly bad taste. There were different-colored marks for where the girl’s body was bruised, slashed, or punctured, and the head and arms and legs were separated from the torso with dotted lines. “So, as you can see, Akiko’s entire body had wounds of one sort or another, and on her upper torso, right here, on her left breast, the flesh was said to have been sliced and peeled away, but to the profiling experts the most significant point is here, the eyes, the fact that her eyes had been punctured with what would appear to be an ice pick, which, according to criminal psychologists, means that the murderer couldn’t bear to have the act witnessed, that he didn’t want the victim watching him and found it necessary to blind her before proceeding with the attack, and what’s important about this is that it tells us the murderer is an extremely repressed and timid person.”

  “Maybe not, though,” said Jun. “Maybe he just likes to puncture people’s eyeballs.”

  I th
ought so too. On the screen, we were getting closeups of the housewives in the audience and the regular “personalities” on the panel. Their reactions ranged from disgust and disbelief to defiant outrage. The reporter continued: “Akiko, it has become clear, was part of a group involved in underage prostitution, and police are doing their best to determine the identities of her most recent clients. However, if a girl is plying this dubious trade independently, as opposed to being affiliated with one of the notorious ‘date clubs,’ tracing previous clients can prove almost impossible.”

  “They could check her pager,” Jun said. “I’m sure she had one, and if it was still on her, they could trace her last ten messages—or is it twenty?—through the phone company.”

  “I don’t think the paper said anything about a pager, either, now that you mention it.”

  “They probably aren’t telling us everything, because the murderer would be reading the paper and watching TV, and if he realized they had any leads he’d leave the country or something. I would if I were him.”

  The reporter finished his bit, and now it was back to the experts and the minor showbiz personalities on the panel. One of these was saying something that was definitely slanted against the victim: “With all due respect to the young lady who was murdered, we’re only going to see more cases of a similar nature as long as this so-called compensated dating is allowed to continue among high-school girls, because although generally speaking these girls are just spoiled, selfish children, physically they’re adults, and I warn you that there’s no telling how bad things could get if we don’t clamp down and punish them accordingly, and of course I’m referring to the men who patronize these girls as well, they too are responsible for this state of affairs, and we need to let them know that they can and will be arrested, because if we let something like this go, if we turn a blind eye and don’t take action now, the next thing you know we truly will be like America—a society in chaos!”