by Ryu Murakami
The audience of housewives burst into applause. “They don’t have compensated dating in America,” Jun said. “I wonder what these geniuses would say if an American newspaper asked them to explain why Japanese high-school girls sell it.”
The word “America” brought me back to Frank. When we’d reached his hotel, he turned to me to say one last thing.
“I’ve been told I’m a very unusual case,” he said. “Normally you stop making new brain cells after a certain age, whereas the liver for example—or was it the stomach?—one of them makes millions of new cells every day, same with the skin, but the brain, after you’ve reached adulthood, all it does is lose cells. My doctor, however, says that in my case the brain may be creating new cells to replace the part that was cut out, which would mean that inside my head I have old cells and new ones mixing together. I think that’s why my memory gets so hazy sometimes, and my motor functions get all fouled up. I mean, that could explain it, don’t you think, Kenji?”
On TV they took a break from the schoolgirl murder and moved on to some news flashes. The first headline nearly made me spit out my last mouthful of noodles: HOMELESS MAN FOUND TORCHED TO DEATH.
“In other news, an unidentified body, burned beyond recognition, was found in a pay toilet in Shinjuku Central Park this morning. Discovered by city sanitation workers, the victim appeared to have been doused with a flammable substance and set on fire. The intensity of the fire was such that the concrete inner walls of the restroom were scorched and blackened, according to police. They are investigating the incident as a possible homicide. From the victim’s presumed belongings, which were piled in old shopping bags outside the restroom, he is believed to have been one of the homeless men who inhabit the park. Next, reporting from just outside the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, where the hostage crisis continues . . .”
The noodles in my mouth had turned to yarn. It was as if Frank’s face had suddenly loomed up before my eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Jun leaned forward and peered at me.
I swallowed with effort, then stood up, got a bottle of mineral water from the fridge, and took a drink. I felt sick to my stomach.
“You’re all pale.”
Jun came over next to me and rubbed my back. I could feel her soft, girlish hand through my sweater. Imagine, I thought. Imagine not even being able to feel something like this.
“That gaijin again?”
“His name’s Frank.”
“Right. Frank. It’s so common it’s hard to remember.”
“Yeah, well, it may not even be his real name.”
“You think it’s a whatchamacallit? An alias?”
I told her all the things Frank had said about homeless people the night before.
“But, wait a minute,” Jun said when I was done. “If the gaijin—sorry—if Frank says there might be people who would see a smelly homeless man and want to cuddle up to him but look at a baby and want to kill it . . .”
“When it comes to this guy, it’s not about making sense. I get the feeling you can’t believe anything he says anyway—except for the hateful stuff.”
“So you think he killed the homeless man?”
It was hard to explain why, exactly. I had no proof, and Jun had never met Frank. You couldn’t understand what was so disturbing about him without meeting him.
“Kenji, why not cancel the job?”
Cancel on Frank? The thought literally gave me goosebumps.
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“Why? You think he might kill you?”
Jun was really beginning to worry. She could sense how scared I was. She probably pictured Frank as the sort of psychopath Mafia killer you see in movies. But Frank was no hit man. Hit men murder people for a fee. If Frank was a murderer, I was pretty sure he wasn’t just in it for the money.
“I doubt if I can explain this very well. I can’t prove he’s done anything, and normally it wouldn’t even occur to me that he might have. The homeless guy who got killed—I don’t know that he’s the same guy we saw at the batting center. And I don’t see any point in going back there to check, because I have a feeling that to somebody like Frank, one bum would be as good as another.”
“I’m not really following you.”
“I know,” I sighed. “I think I’m starting to lose it.”
“Did the homeless man at the batting center do something to Frank?”
“Nothing, no.”
“So what exactly makes you think Frank had something to do with killing him?”
“It’s crazy, I know. I’m sure it’s just paranoia. But if you were to meet him . . . You said you wanted to see a photo of him, but I don’t think a photo would tell you that much. How can I put this? Listen, when I was in high school, we had a lot of badasses around—you probably do too, right? In your school? Kids who seem to go out of their way to cause trouble and make people hate them?”
“I don’t know. Nobody that bad, I don’t think.”
Probably not, now that she mentioned it. Jun goes to a fairly respectable private high for girls, where there probably aren’t many really hard cases. Or, then again, maybe the type who gets off on being a big pain in the ass for everyone else is slowly dying out.
“Well, anyway, that’s the sort of negative energy I sense about Frank, only taken to the ultimate extreme. The ultimate in malevolence.”
“Malevolence.”
“Yeah. Everybody has a little of that in them. I know I do, and to some extent even . . . Well, maybe not you, Jun. You’re too sweet.”
“Never mind about me. Try to explain this better. You’re the one who’s so good at explaining things.”
“Okay. Look. I had a friend who was like that—hated by everybody. The teachers had long since given up on him, and he ended up stabbing the headmaster with an X-Acto knife and getting expelled. But, see, he had a very troubled home life, this guy, not that he talked about it much, but once I went to his house. His mother gave me this super-polite welcome, bowing and everything, and the house, the house was huge and the guy had his own room, way bigger than anything I ever had, and all the latest computer stuff, everything you could think of, and I remember being really envious, except that something was weird about the atmosphere of the place. I couldn’t say exactly what, but something was weird about it. So his mother brings us tea and cookies and says something like ‘Our son’s told us so much about you’ or whatever, and my friend goes, ‘Never mind that, get the hell out of here,’ and she’s like ‘Well, please do make yourself at home’ and leaves the room bowing again. I’m like, ‘Thanks,’ you know, watching her close the door, and my friend looks at me and goes, ‘Bitch used to whip me with a hose.’ No particular expression on his face or anything, just ‘You know those extension pipes on vacuum cleaners? She used to hit me with one’ and ‘Burned me with a lighter too.’ He showed me the burn scars on his arms, and he goes, ‘I’ve got a little brother, but she never laid a finger on him.’ So, anyway, later on we started playing this computer game that’d just come out, and after a while I had to go to the bathroom, so we pause the game and I go out into the hallway, and his mother is standing there in the shadows. She’s staring at me with this spaced-out look on her face and then suddenly she goes, ‘Oh, the lavatory? It’s down at the end,’ or whatever, and titters in this high-pitched voice, a voice like, I don’t know how to describe it, like a needle hitting a nerve. . . . This friend, say we’d go to a game center or something? And if there’d be some friction with dudes from another school, if one of them said something—I mean anything at all, any little thing, like, Come on, you’ve been on that machine for two hours, let somebody else have a turn—my friend’s face would undergo this transformation. He’d get this look like, you know, there’s no telling what the son of a bitch might do. Like he was no longer in control of himself. Well, Frank has that same face times ten. Like he’s just completely gone.”
“A scary face, in other words,” Jun said.
&nb
sp; “Yeah, but not like a yakuza scowling at you or something, not scary in that way,” I told her, thinking: Sure enough, it’s hard to explain. I imagine other people could meet Frank and not get this feeling from him at all. If he happened to stop you on the street and hold out a camera and ask you to take a photo for him, say, you might come away thinking he seemed nice—kind of down on his luck, maybe, but a well-meaning, open and friendly gaijin.
“Forget it. I can’t explain. Anyway he’s a really weird guy, but ‘anyway he’s a really weird guy’ doesn’t tell you much, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t. Besides, if you think about it, Kenji, I’ve never spent any time with foreigners, like you have. That must make a difference. I mean, how could you know what’s weird about one unless you know lots of them?”
What Jun said made sense. The Japanese aren’t exactly in tune with people from other countries. My last client, or rather the one before last, a man from Texas, had told me how astonished he was when he went to Shibuya. He said: “I thought I was in Harlem or someplace, all those kids walking around looking like black hip-hop artists, wearing their Walkmans, some had skateboards, too, but what was amazing was, here they are completely copying the fashions of African-American kids—even down to the dark suntans and cornrows—and they can’t speak a word of English! But I guess they just like black people, huh?” I don’t know what to do with questions like that. There’s no way to answer them. I told the Texan something like, Well, they think imitating black people is cool—but even I knew it wasn’t much of an answer. There are things people in this country do automatically that foreigners can’t understand no matter how hard you try to explain.
“Why don’t we go for a walk?” Jun said.
It seemed like a good idea.
As we were leaving my apartment, Jun found something stuck to the outside of my door and said: “What’s this?” It was a small, dark thing, about half the size of a postage stamp, like a torn scrap of paper. My first thought was that it was a piece of human skin. “Kenji, what is it?” she asked again.
“I don’t know,” I said, picking at it with my thumb and forefinger. “The wind must have blown it against the door.”
Touching it gave me the creeps, and it was fastened to the metal door as if with glue. I had to scrape it off with my fingernail, leaving a dark stain on the door. I tossed it away, into the bushes beyond the stairs. My heart was pounding like crazy. I felt ill but tried not to let on.
“I wonder if it was there when I came,” Jun said as we walked down the stairs. “I didn’t notice it.”
I was convinced it was human skin. And that Frank had put it there. Whose skin, I couldn’t say. The schoolgirl’s? The homeless guy’s? Or maybe he’d sliced it off some corpse that hadn’t been discovered yet. My head was reeling, and I felt sick to my stomach.
Jun stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “You’ve gone all pale again, Kenji.”
I knew I should say something, but no words came.
“Let’s go back to the room,” she said. “The wind’s too cold out here anyway.”
If it was human skin, and Frank had put it there, why did I throw it away? Because I couldn’t bear the feel of it for even a split second.
“Kenji, come on, let’s go back in.” Jun was patting my arm.
“No,” I said. “No, let’s walk.”
I kept imagining Frank lurking somewhere, watching us walking along arm in arm. Jun peered up at my face from time to time but didn’t talk. The thing had had what felt like fingerprint grooves pressed into it. It wasn’t a scrap of paper, I was sure of that. And I couldn’t imagine that this damp little thing, about the size of a fingernail, had just happened to come wafting along on the wind to plaster itself to my door. Someone had deliberately pasted it there, pushing down hard with the tip of his finger.
It must be a warning, I thought. And the only person I knew who might feel any need to warn me would be Frank. Don’t get any ideas or try anything funny, or you could end up like this, was probably what it meant. An image flashed through my mind of Frank planting that moist scrap of skin on my door and muttering: “Kenji, you’ll understand what this means, won’t you.” It was behavior that suited him perfectly.
My friends have always told me I’m a pessimist, that I tend to see the dark side of everything, and I think that may have something to do with Dad dying when I was so young. It was definitely a shock when he died. The worst possible scenario is always taking shape behind the scenes, where no one can detect it or see it coming, and then one day, boom, it becomes your reality. And once it’s real, it’s too late to do anything about it. That’s what I learned from my father’s death.
Jun and I neared Meguro Station, walking among the crowds. She could see I wasn’t quite myself and didn’t press me to talk. Jun’s parents divorced when she was small, so she knows what it’s like to be anxious or scared and want to be with somebody but not have to talk. I think people like Jun and me are becoming the mainstream in this country. Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can’t really deal with on your own. We’re still in the minority, so the media lump us together as “The Oversensitive Young,” or whatever the latest catchphrase is, but eventually that will change.
I tried calling the office of the magazine where I advertise my services. Maybe Frank had asked for my address.
“Yokoyama-san?”
“Kenji! You still working?”
Yokoyama-san published the magazine more or less on his own, and though it was the day before New Year’s Eve, he was hard at it now. In fact he often sleeps in his office and works most Sundays and national holidays. He always says he’s happiest when he’s listening to old-time jazz and laying out the magazine on his Mac.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “Gaijin don’t think of New Year’s the way we do, as you know.”
“And that’s all to their credit if you ask me. Hey—did the police contact you?”
My heart stopped for a second. It turned out not to be about Frank, though.
“Did something happen?”
“You knew I had a homepage, right? On the internet?”
“Of course. You’re always bragging about having designed it yourself.”
“I am? Well, anyway, the police sent me a warning.”
“A warning? What for?”
“I had a few pictures on there. Nothing hardcore, but nudes, of course. After all, it’s a magazine for foreigners about the Japanese sex industry. But the police advised me to ‘practice self-restraint.’ In other words, clean it up or expect some heat. Hey, you could see some pubic hair, it’s true, but every magazine you pick up these days shows at least that much, so it’s obvious they just want to make an example of me. I was afraid since your ad’s in there they might have contacted you too.”
“They haven’t.”
“Good. If they do call you, just say you don’t know anything.”
“I will. By the way,” I said, “you didn’t get any calls from a client of mine, did you?”
Even if Frank had called, I was pretty sure Yokoyama-san wouldn’t have given him my address.
“Oh yeah, I did,” he said.
My heart started thumping. I was using my mobile, standing beneath the sign of a cake shop near Meguro Station with my back to the wind. Jun was holding my hand and watching a live demonstration in the shop window of how to decorate a cake Japanese New Year–style. Every now and then she shot me a worried look.
“You did? Who was it?”
“What did he say his name was again? John, James, one of those names you hear all the time. He wanted your bank account number. I didn’t give it to him, of course, but . . . It was a pretty strange call, now that you mention it.”
“Strange? In what way? Was he calling from here in Tokyo?”
“That’s the thing, he said he was calling from . . . where was it, Missouri? Kansas, maybe. Anyway, somewhere in America. He calls me las
t night in the middle of the night. Closer to dawn, really. Pretty inconsiderate of the guy, I thought, or just plain ignorant. I’m sure he said one of those Midwestern states, so do the math—over there it’s December 29, Sunday afternoon. Who’s going to call from America on Sunday afternoon to ask me for your account number? Strange, right? Over there they all go to church on Sunday, don’t they? Or to the movies or whatever, but who’d make an international call to say I forgot to pay my guide, give me his bank account number? If it was the other way around I’d understand, if he was saying you owed him money, I could see that—but to tell me he wants to pay you? Besides, you’re the one he should be calling, right? So I asked him, I said, ‘Did you call Kenji?’”
“And?”
“He said you didn’t answer. Any idea who it was?”
“Well, for starters, I always insist on cash or traveler’s checks. I’m not about to trust people to wire me my fee from overseas.”
“Of course not. Ask any hustler her golden rule—it’s got to be cash on the—Wait, that didn’t sound right. I’m not saying you’re—”
“What was he like? His voice and everything.”
“His voice. Well, the first thing that seemed odd to me was that he sounded so close. I know the international lines are pretty good these days, but still, there was no static or delay or anything. . . . His voice? I don’t really remember. It was the type you don’t remember, a voice you might hear anywhere, not husky or deep or high-pitched or anything. Pretty average way of speaking too. Not the most beautiful English but polite enough. That’s about all I can tell you. Is there a problem?”
“Not really.” I knew better than to think I could explain.
“The last thing he said was really strange, something about magic.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard this right.
“Sorry?”
“I think he realized I was getting suspicious. This was the middle of the night, after all. I mean, look, I’m a man who likes foreigners. Normally I’d bend over backward to help, but to have this guy wake me up before dawn and mutter this crazy stuff in my ear, I mean, come on. I may have been a little gruff when I said did you call Kenji, but then he starts telling me what a great guy you were and what a wonderful job you did, and how well he and you got along and how you hung out together like friends, and I just thought, this is getting weirder and weirder. I mean, would an American telephone somebody he’s never met from his living room or whatever in Kansas or Missouri on Sunday afternoon to say that the tour guide who introduced him to women at sex clubs in Tokyo was a great guy? Normally, I mean.”
