(2005) In the Miso Soup

by Ryu Murakami

  I walked out the door toward the elevator hall and flipped open my mobile. I knew Jun would be in my apartment, but I couldn’t bring myself to call her and just paced up and down awhile. Finally I walked back and peered inside the pub through a tinted glass panel in the door. I could vaguely make out shapes moving around inside. And then I saw an unmistakable form lumbering toward me. I dashed for the elevator, but it was too late.

  “All right, Kenji, come on back in,” Frank said.

  I didn’t want to go. But with Frank’s eyes drilling into me, I couldn’t have moved anyway. I had turned to stone, from the tip of each hair on my head all the way down to my toenails. Frank grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me inside. At the door I lost my balance and nearly fell, but he caught me and easily supported my entire weight with his right arm. He carried me inside as if I were a piece of luggage and dropped me carelessly on the floor. I heard him walk back to the door and pull down the steel security shutter outside it. When I opened my eyes I saw two pairs of legs, a man’s and a woman’s. I knew the woman was Maki by her red high heels and white lace stockings. A wet, shiny, scarlet line slithered down the shin of one stocking. Like a living creature, some sort of parasite maybe, it was crawling along the delicate threads at a slow but steady pace. At a table facing her, Lady #5 along with Mr. Children and Lady #3 sat goggling slack-jawed at Maki. The moment I looked up and saw what they were staring at, everything in my stomach began the journey back up my esophagus. It looked as though Maki had another mouth below her jaw. Oozing from this second, smiling mouth was a thick, dark liquid, like coal tar. Her throat had been slit literally from ear to ear and more than halfway through, so that it looked as if her head might fall right off. And yet, incredibly, Maki was still on her feet and still alive, her eyeballs swiveling wildly and her lips quivering as she wheezed foam-flecked blood from the wound in her throat. She seemed to be trying to say something. The man beside her was the manager. He and Maki were leaning against each other, as if they’d been positioned to hold each other up. His neck was twisted in an unnatural way, his head turned as though to look over his shoulder, but drooping limply, chin resting on his shoulder blade. Just beyond Maki’s high heels, Yuko and the waiter lay in a heap on the floor. A thin blade, like a sashimi knife, was buried deep in Yuko’s lower back, and the waiter’s neck was twisted like the manager’s.

  Lady #3, Mister Children, and Lady #5 sat as still as cardboard cutouts on their sofa, but I didn’t know if they were hypnotized or unconscious or just paralyzed with fear. I struggled to hold down the vomit rising inside me. An acid wave washed up through my chest and throat, and my temples were numb and tingling. I couldn’t think, let alone speak. This can’t really be happening, I told myself. It was like being in a nightmare you’re sure you can’t awaken from. Frank moved into my line of vision, walking toward Lady #3. He had the long, thin knife in his hand now, having extracted it from Yuko’s body. Apparently Lady #3 was neither unconscious nor hypnotized, because she reacted to Frank’s approach—but in the oddest way. Her right hand, still grasping the mike on the sofa cushion beside her, began to jerk frantically back and forth, as if she were pawing at the material. Like a kitten excited at play. The mike was still on, and the sound of it rubbing over the cloth reverberated through the room. She was trying to run away, I thought, but her will was disconnected from her body. Her shoulders shook from the tension in her face and neck, and though the muscles of her legs were straining so hard you could see them bulging, she couldn’t so much as wiggle her toes. The nerves connecting her brain to her muscles had short-circuited, and the movements of her body were random and uncontrolled. I was in a similar state—my vision and hearing were messed up. The backing track to the Amuro song Lady #3 had been singing was still on, but I wasn’t sure I was really hearing it with my own ears. When Frank stopped in front of her, #3 soiled herself explosively beneath the skirt of her cream-colored suit. As her fluids sprayed over the floor, all the strength drained from her body. Her feet fell out of her strapless shoes, her shoulders drooped, and her face relaxed into something like a smile just before Frank grabbed her by the hair and plunged the knife into her chest. And like a gnat flying out of a clump of grass, something went missing from that peculiar smiley face.

  That’s when Lady #5 at last began to scream. It wasn’t like a reaction to #3’s murder specifically, but rather as if someone had finally hit a switch to turn on the volume. Frank pulled the knife from #3’s chest and then tried to take the mike from her, but her fist was so tightly clenched that even he had trouble prying it loose. Her fingers had turned white and puffy, as if they’d been pickled. Frank grabbed her by the hair again and rammed his index finger into her eye. I heard the sound it made from where I lay, and simultaneously I saw her hand release the mike. Something the like of which I’d never seen came out of her eye socket. A thick, gooey, semitransparent liquid speckled with red dots. Frank took the mike and held it up to Lady #5’s screaming mouth. This amplified the scream many times over, of course, but also made it sound, strangely, like a song. He pointed at #5’s throat and looked at me. You could see her vocal cords vibrating as she screamed. Signaling me with his eyes as if to say “Ready? Watch this,” Frank sliced deeply into the vibrating flesh, and the scream dissolved in a loud shoosh, like escaping steam.

  Frank seemed to be moving in slow motion one moment and fast-forward the next. At times it was as if he was barely moving, and at others, like when he pulled the knife from Yuko’s back, things happened with bewildering speed. It’s amazing how easily your senses and reflexes can become deranged when you’re in shock. The woman sitting beside Mr. Children had just had her throat slit, and he’d watched it all as if it were a Cup Noodle commercial. He wore an expression that was beyond hopelessness. I once read how in extreme situations your body releases these hormones—adrenaline and whatnot —that speed up your pulse and make you tense and excited at the same time, ready to fight or flee. But a body and brain accustomed to normal, mild reactions just get confused and disjointed when this flood of hormones is released. I think that’s what was happening to me and everyone else in the room. When I remembered the can of mace in my breast pocket, I agonized for a moment, wondering if I shouldn’t take some sort of action to stop Frank, but the very idea was unbearable. Instead, I had the weirdest thought: of just running into the restroom and throwing the little can away. Whatever it may have symbolized, that mace in my pocket was utterly powerless in the face of the reality Frank was causing to unfold. The instant I’d realized I was going to be murdered, the possibility of action had gone right down the drain, and watching the knife plunge into #3’s chest and seeing #5’s throat yawn open like the hood of a car, my body had completely seized up. It was as if every nerve in my system had frozen solid. I couldn’t even imagine screaming for help, let alone trying to run, and you can’t do something you can’t visualize yourself doing. Normally we don’t notice it, but we always have to picture ourselves doing something before we can match the image with an action. And that was what Frank had made impossible—he’d destroyed our ability to visualize a course of action. Not many people in this country have ever seen a human being’s throat sliced open. There just isn’t the where-withal to think how cruel it is, or to feel sorry for the person, or to be horrified, or even to tell yourself, you know, That’s gotta hurt. The slashing of Lady #5’s throat produced very little blood, oddly enough, but you could see this dark red slimy stuff inside the wound. Probably the severed vocal cords. You might spend your whole life without ever seeing such things in the raw, but when you do see them you instinctively recognize them as something you have inside yourself. And take it from me, once that happens you lose the power to visualize your next action.

  When blood finally began oozing out of the crevice in #5’s throat, it looked black, not red—exactly like the soy sauce you use with sashimi, I thought. I was still unable to move, paralyzed, and my neck and shoulders and the back of my head felt numb and cold. I p
robably wouldn’t have been capable even of turning away if Frank had poked his knife in my face. There were no windows in the pub, but on one wall was an enormous video screen, and on it I could somehow visualize the street outside—a world where people still lived and talked and walked around, now hopelessly out of reach. I felt I was already knee-deep in the world of the dead. Outside, people were buying and selling sex. Women were standing on corners in miniskirts, legs covered with goose-bumps from the cold, trying to rent out their bodies, and men were laughing and singing drunkenly as they shopped for a woman to relieve their loneliness. Under the twinkling neon lights touts and barkers were calling out to the drunks walking by: We promise you a good time! I saw this vision as if through an unfocused lens, and I tried to face the fact that all of that was gone forever now.

  Frank grabbed Mr. Children by the hair and turned his head so that he was facing Lady #5. Her head was tilted back, not only widening her wound but stretching the skin of her throat so that it was taut and smooth, like the tanned hide of some animal. Held by his hair and forced to absorb this sight, Mr. Children, astonishingly, screwed his face into a smile and laughed: Heh, heh, heh. It was like when you see victims of earthquakes or typhoons on TV, and they’re smiling. “You think this is funny?” Frank asked him. The man couldn’t have understood, but he nodded sheepishly several times and laughed again: Heh, heh. Then, with Frank still holding him by the hair, he decided to have a cigarette. He picked his pack of Seven Stars off the table and extracted one. Frank watched closely as the man put the cigarette in his mouth and searched his trouser pockets for a lighter, as though he were just having a little smoke to calm his nerves. Frank reached for the lighter on the sofa next to Lady #5, fired it up, and raised his eyebrows as if to say This? Mr. Children nodded, smiling again, and Frank turned up the flame and held it to his eyes and forehead and hair. A smell of scorched tissue wafted over to me. The man struggled to get away from the flame, but Frank only gripped his hair more tightly. When he took the flame away for a moment, the man’s lips trembled and he smiled again, nodding repeatedly as if in gratitude. Frank then held the flame to his nose and lips, and this time he struggled a little more violently. He flapped his arms about and tried to avert his face, and like an infant throwing a tantrum he pounded Frank’s stomach and chests with his small fists. “Keep it up, go wild,” Frank muttered as he roasted the man’s face. Then, to my utter disbelief, he yawned. It was one of the biggest yawns I’ve ever seen, splitting his face open like an egg. At last Mr. Children began screaming. His scream faded in and out, like a poorly tuned radio. Frank moved slightly to one side to allow me a clear view, perhaps guessing that I’d never seen a burning human face before. The orange flame was licking the insides of the man’s nostrils. The Amuro song had ended at some point, and now a tune by Takako Okamura was playing. Mr. Children looked like he was trying to dance, waving his arms and legs to the music. Frank glanced at me as if to say, Hey Kenji, check it out. The flesh around the man’s nose was melting like wax and dripping in a thick, brownish goop with occasional little flaming gobs of fat, while the sweat poured from his temples and forehead. His face was turning purple, the tip of his nose was beginning to char, and I could clearly make out a crackling sound, like a scratchy old LP. The entire area around his nostrils became so black you couldn’t distinguish the holes from the charred flesh, and then his screams died out and his arms dropped to his sides. I could hear the Takako Okamura song and the crackling flesh and a third sound which I only gradually recognized as Mr. Children weeping. His jaw shuddered and shook with his gurgling sobs. Frank looked at him curiously, before giving another yawn—long and leisurely and so cavernous that it looked like he was going to swallow the man’s head.

  Mr. Children still hadn’t lost consciousness when Frank left off burning his face and reached over to hike up the skirt of Lady #5, whose throat was still leaking blood. The moment Frank lifted her skirt she slumped against the backrest of the sofa. Her head flopped back over it until all I could see of her face was her nostrils, and then, carried by its own weight and with a sound like a rusty lock giving way, it flopped even farther. I never would have thought the head could bend all the way back like that. Now the wound looked like the mouth of a vase filled with dark-red fluid. I could see veins and bone and a gooey white stuff, but strangely enough the blood still wasn’t spurting but only slowly seeping out. Mr. Children was holding his molten nose with his right hand as he sobbed. Tears and sweat dripped from his face, and some fluid matter oozed through his fingers. Frank spread Lady #5’s legs apart, then ripped her panties and stockings open and waved me over, saying: “C’mere, Kenji.” I didn’t go. I was still sprawled on the floor and literally couldn’t have moved to save my life. Frank let go of Mr. Children’s hair, strode over to me and, grabbing the collar of my jacket, dragged me across the floor to #5’s feet. Her body was twitching in various places. Maybe she was still alive. The flesh quivered where her inner thighs met her groin, and her pubic hair bristled as her vagina opened and closed, for all the world as if it were breathing. “Kenji, tell this man to have sex with her,” Frank whispered in my ear. I shook my head. I’m not sure I could have spoken anyway.

  “Tell him!” Frank shouted.

  Along with the fear I felt an overwhelming revulsion. Frank had the long, thin knife in his right hand and held it up before my eyes. The numbness in my temples intensified, and the nausea that had caught in my throat surged up to my back teeth. And when my eyes fell again on #5’s vagina wriggling like a shellfish, I spewed a cappuccino-colored stream onto the floor. As I puked, I felt my anger rising. I don’t think the anger was directed at Frank precisely. It was more of an abstract, absolute sort of anger. NO, I tried to say, but only managed to spill dribbles of vomit from my mouth. I spat out some of the sour, sticky stuff adhering to my tongue and gums and inner cheeks. To do this, though, I had to arch my back and splutter for all I was worth. Frank was looking down at me with obvious amusement. “Better yet, Kenji, why don’t you have sex with her?” he said. “Go ahead, fuck her.” He pointed at #5’s vagina with his knife as he said this. I spat once more. It required the concentration of my entire being to get the nerves and muscles to connect and cooperate. But when I saw my spit hit the floor, I felt the welcome return of what seemed like long-lost circuitry. I don’t know exactly what it was I’d recovered: my will, maybe, or maybe just the ability to release tension. But whatever it was, I knew it was something you couldn’t do without if you wanted to be in control of your own body. Without it you were at the mercy of your environment, like some sort of plant. I could feel my voice gathering.

  “NO!”

  I tasted flecks of vomit on my tongue as I pronounced the word. I’d managed to clearly visualize the letter N and the letter O and to picture myself sounding them out, and, lo and behold, out came my voice. I said it again: “NO!” I felt I had to make my will known to this gaijin. Just expressing something to someone wasn’t necessarily the same as communicating. I’d never really realized that before. A while ago, Lady #3 had scraped the microphone over the sofa like an infant having a tantrum, and Lady #5 had begun “singing” just moments before getting her throat cut. You might say these were signals the women were using to try and express something, but naturally they failed to get their meaning across to Frank. You can’t communicate anything with random signals like that. Before Frank had turned up, this pub was like a symbol of Japan, self-contained, unwilling to interact with the world outside, just communing with itself in every breath—mmm, ahhh. People who’ve spent their lives living in that kind of bubble tend to panic in emergencies, to lose the ability to communicate, and to end up getting killed.

  “No?”

  Frank made a big production of acting as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He looked up at the ceiling, spread his arms wide, and shook his head. I don’t know why this particular thought occurred to me at a time like this, but I thought, yeah, he’s an American all right. The Americans, like t
he Spanish, massacred millions of Indians, but I don’t think it was out of malevolence so much as plain old ignorance. And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.

  “What did you say, Kenji? ‘No’? That’s what it sounded like to me. Is that what you just said? ‘No’?”

  Frank was slowly waggling the knife in front of my face. I was at his feet on my hands and knees. When you’re in a groveling posture, groveling words are the only sort that come to mind. I wanted to change positions but couldn’t very well move with that knife in my face. “NO!” I said yet again, still on all fours. The smile on Frank’s face sagged into a sorrowful frown.

  “Kenji, you don’t understand.”

  He swung the knife back toward Lady #5’s vagina. It looked to me as if he was winding up before sticking it into me. I thought: I’m done for.

  “You don’t know how good it feels to have sex with a woman who’s dying, or who’s just died. It’s the ultimate experience, Kenji! The brain’s dead so they can’t resist, but the pussy’s still alive.”

  There was something very mechanical and singsongy about the way he was speaking, like a bad actor reciting lines he’d learned years ago, to see if he can still remember them. A white thread was entangled in Lady #5’s pubic hair, and I suddenly realized it was the string to a tampon. I’d never actually seen that before. Well, she wouldn’t be needing tampons anymore. That frayed white string seemed to symbolize a life cut short. Lady #5 was fair-skinned, but the flesh around her vagina was turning pinkish gray.

  “Kenji, you disappoint me.”

  Frank turned and placed the long blade of his knife behind Mr. Children’s right ear, then sliced downward, lopping it off. The man had been sitting with his face in his hands, and his right thumb fell away with the ear. His cries didn’t get any louder as a result. To be frightened, to weep, to feel pain—those things require energy, and Mr. Children didn’t have any left. Frank sighed as though bored and cut off his other ear as well. It fell to the floor soundlessly, like a slice of fishcake or something, and lay there among the loose strands of hair and cigarette ashes.