by Ryu Murakami
Frank said yeah, he’d seen documentaries like that on TV.
“But Buddhism has a lot of very sweet, gentle things about it too,” I told him. “Like the New Year’s bells. If you keep dividing up all the different bonno into smaller and smaller categories, you end up with a hundred and eight worldly desires. So they ring the bells that many times to free the listeners from each one.”
Frank asked where the best place to listen to the bells was. And that’s when I remembered how I’d learned about all this stuff. When Jun had been so angry at me for breaking our Christmas date, I’d promised her that we’d spend New Year’s Eve together. In order to decide what to do that night we’d bought and looked through several city guides—Pia and Tokyo Walker and so on. I forget which magazine it was, but one of them had a section titled something like “Joya-no-kane: Know the Traditions to Enjoy Them More!” and I’d read it aloud to her.
“The Peruvian woman said it was incredibly crowded, I mean the place she went to listen to the bells, and she wished she could have heard them in a quieter place. Kenji, do you know a nice quiet temple we can go to? I’m not comfortable in big crowds.”
The thought of trudging through Meiji Shrine with Frank and hundreds of thousands of other people didn’t appeal much to me, either. I told him I knew a good place.
“It’s a bridge.”
Frank gave me a baffled look.
“A bridge?”
One of the magazines had mentioned it, and Jun and I had decided that was where we’d go to hear the ringing of the bells. It was a bridge over the Sumida River, but I couldn’t remember the name. I looked at my watch. Three A.M., December 31. I wondered if Jun was still up.
“Kenji, what do you mean, a bridge? I don’t understand.”
There weren’t many temples in this area, around Shinjuku, I told him. “The Shitamachi district—downtown?—has far more of them. But like the Peruvian woman said, thousands and thousands of people pack into those temples—they’re the least peaceful places on New Year’s Eve. But if you stand on this bridge, you can hear the sound of the bells echoing off the steel. They say it’s amazing.”
I saw something flicker in Frank’s sunken and normally expressionless eyes. Deep inside them a tiny light came on.
“That’s where I want to go, then,” he said, the underside of his chin quivering. “Take me there, Kenji. Please.”
I told him my girlfriend knew the name of the bridge, and got out my phone to call Jun. As I was dialing I realized for the first time how very cold it was in here. My fingers were so numb I accidentally pressed the wrong numbers several times before getting it right.
“Is that you, Kenji?” Jun answered on the first ring. I pictured her sitting up with her mobile, waiting for me to call. She must be worried.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said as calmly as possible. But whether from the cold or from the tension, my voice was shaking again. At least I was aware of it this time.
“Where are you? Back in your apartment?”
“I’m still with Frank.”
“Where?”
“At his hotel.”
“The Hilton?”
“Not the Hilton, no, it’s a smaller place. A little business hotel. I don’t know the name exactly, but it’s nice.”
I had an idea. I didn’t know if it was a good one. I was cold and sleepy and emotionally exhausted, and maybe it was a terrible idea, but it was the only one I had. The mouthpiece was frosting up with my breath. Frank was staring at me, and the fluorescent lamp on the floor made his face an unearthly blue and strangely warped. At least he won’t kill me, I thought. Not till I’ve taken him to that bridge, anyway.
“Jun, we’re going out to hear Joya-no-kane tonight, me and Frank. I have to guide him there.”
“Very funny.”
“No, really. It’s what we decided.”
“Oh?”
She sounded angry. I was breaking my promise again, and any concern about me had shifted to the back burner now. But I needed her to be at that bridge. My plan, such as it was, was to have Jun keep an eye on us. She could probably even have arranged for Frank to be arrested, but that would require a long explanation about what had happened in the omiai pub. And if I told her the whole story, I was sure she’d freak out—if she even believed me, that is. Besides, the killing scene was already fading from my memory. And I didn’t want to be grilled endlessly by the police and forced to quit working as a guide, I was sure of that now. Jun, he really is the killer, go to the police, have them come with you—I just couldn’t bring myself to say that. It would be asking for trouble.
“What was the name of that bridge?” I said.
“What bridge?”
She was pissed off all right. When I’d canceled our plan for Christmas dinner at a fancy hotel because I had to work, she was furious and said something to the effect that the only reason she even bothered to have a boyfriend was so she could spend Christmas with him. Christmas has a special importance for high-school girls. Jun and her friends don’t really need guys—boyfriends, I mean. I’ve often heard them say that boyfriends are more trouble than they’re worth, that most boys don’t have anything interesting to say, or any money either. And in fact Jun had spent more time with her friends during the past summer, going to the beach and whatnot, than with me. But Christmas is a special ritual for them, the one precious night of the year to spend some real quality time with a guy. I had denied her that, and now I was saying I’d be with Frank on New Year’s Eve. I couldn’t blame her for being angry.
“You know. The bridge in the magazine, where the sound of the bells is supposed to echo off the girders? Over the Sumida River. What was the name of it again?”
“I forget,” she said. “Sorry.” Translation: Figure it out for yourself, jerk.
“Jun, this is important. Look, I don’t want to worry you, but—how can I put this? My life may depend on it.”
I heard a gasp, then a frantic jumble of words. Hang on, I told her, cutting in. Frank was gazing at me with his cow face.
“Keep calm, okay? Please just listen carefully to what I’m about to say. It’s not a joke, and I’m not just making it up. And when I’m done, no questions, okay? I don’t have time to explain everything. That’s just the way it is right now. Are you with me?”
“Yes,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
“Good. First of all, can you try to remember the name of that bridge?”
“Kachidoki,” she said. I knew she hadn’t forgotten it. “It’s out by the fish market, near Tsukiji.” I could hear the tension in her voice. “The next one downriver from Tsukuda Bridge.”
“Go there tonight,” I told her. “But don’t come up to us. I just want you to keep an eye on Frank and me.”
“Keep an eye on you? What do you mean?”
There was no way to make it all perfectly clear. I had to stick just to the essentials.
“Tonight, by ten o’clock at the very latest, Frank and I will be at the foot of Kachidoki Bridge, on the fish market side. I’ll make sure that’s where we are—the foot of Kachidoki Bridge, ten o’clock. Got it?”
“Wait a minute, Kenji.”
“What.”
“Sorry. What do you mean ‘the foot’?”
“Where the bridge, you know, begins.”
“Got it.”
“Look for me and Frank, but don’t show yourself. When you see us, just pretend you don’t know who we are. Whatever you do, don’t come up to us or talk to us. Understood?”
“So I’m just supposed to watch you from a distance, right?”
“Exactly. When the last bell has been struck, Frank and I will split up, and I’ll go back home with you. If Frank tries to stop me, or if I seem to be struggling with him—if that happens, and only if that happens, find a policeman and get him to step in and help me. Okay? There are bound to be a lot of cops around to control the crowds. I intend to walk away from Frank after the last bell, no matter what. If I don’t, it means F
rank is pulling something, so do whatever you have to do, start screaming or whatever, to get a cop to help me get away from him. Don’t try to do anything on your own, that’s very important, get a policeman or two. You understand me?”
“I understand.”
“All right. I have to go now. See you tonight.”
“Kenji, wait. Can I ask just one more question?”
“What?”
“So Frank is a bad guy after all?”
“Pretty bad, yeah,” I said and switched off the phone.
I told Frank I’d found out the name of the bridge, but that when the bells were done ringing I wanted him to let me go. I was amazed at how calmly I was able to say this. I guess I felt I’d done all I could do. To have Jun watch the two of us—that was all my creative resources were up to. No matter how long I sweated over the problem, it wasn’t likely I’d come up with anything better.
“I don’t like cops very much in the first place, and if I went to them they’d make me stop working as a guide. Besides, I don’t even know your family name. I’m not going to tell the police anything, Frank. So when the bells stop ringing, I want you to let me go. Okay?”
“Of course,” said Frank. “That’s what I planned to do from the beginning, you don’t need to ask your girlfriend to do anything. Haven’t I been saying all along that I consider you my friend?”
I looked at Frank, thinking: It’s only been about thirty hours since I first met this guy. It seemed like his voice and manner of speaking had reverted to the way they were then, in the cafeteria of that hotel. Of course, that was no reason to trust anything he said. With somebody like Frank, even if he did regard me as a friend, it didn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t murder me.
“Sleepy, Kenji?”
I shook my head. A few minutes ago I would have been happy to stretch out even on the broken glass on the floor, but, maybe because of that intense conversation with Jun, my drowsiness had vanished. Frank looked like he was about to say something but hesitated. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped himself again. Finally he got up and fetched a bottle of Evian water from the refrigerator. He took a sip and asked if I wanted anything, and I said I’d have a cola. The refrigerator was one of those small, squat, old-fashioned jobs, probably salvaged from someone’s trash, but I could see it was well stocked with soft drinks and even beer.
“I want to tell you something, Kenji. It’s a long story, and pretty strange, too, but I’d like for you to hear it, if you don’t mind.”
Frank was speaking in what was, for him, a meek-sounding voice. I’m listening, I said.
“I grew up in a plain little town on the East Coast, you wouldn’t know the name, in a plain little house like you see in old American movies, with a small lawn and a front porch just made for an old lady in a rocking chair.”
Frank’s voice and even the expression on his face had grown more relaxed and tranquil since we’d entered this ruined building. What kind of neighborhood was this, anyway? It was packed with small apartment buildings, and yet not a sound was to be heard from anywhere outside. The bare fluorescent unit on the floor emitted a faint electric buzz, and the refrigerator made a vague, high-pitched whine, like tinnitus. That was all I could hear, though. The broken windows and collapsed walls were covered with those vinyl sheets and canvas dropcloths, but we had no heat and it was freezing. My breath made little white clouds. Frank’s didn’t.
“We moved there when I was seven years old, because in the town before that I had already killed two people.”
My ears pricked up at the word “killed,” and I found myself asking: “How old?”
“I was . . . seven,” Frank said slowly and took a sip of Evian. Unbelievable, I mumbled—and it felt like an unbelievably stupid thing to say. I’d been expecting just another of Frank’s lies, but somehow the words “seven years old” sucked me right in.
“The town I was born in had a population of maybe eight thousand. An old historical port town with what they claimed was the fourth oldest golf course in America, not a championship course or anything but famous enough that people would fly in from New York and Washington just to play it. We weren’t far from Portland, where they had an airport, and just a short drive from Canada, too. People in that part of Canada spoke French, so it really seemed like a foreign country, and that thrilled me as a kid. The town had once had streetcars, which was unusual for a town of that size, and even though they’d stopped running before I was born, the tracks were still there. I used to love those tracks, the steel rails buried in the road. I liked to play a game where I would walk along them as far as I could go. I thought they must go on forever, because no matter how far I went the rails never seemed to end. I honestly believed that if you kept following them you’d eventually see the entire world. But what I remember most about those times was getting lost. Did you ever get lost when you were a kid, Kenji?”
I shook my head.
“That’s funny,” said Frank. “All kids get lost.”
I did remember my father lecturing me about that when I was very small. He told me many times that whenever children play by themselves they end up getting lost. So always play with others, Kenji, never play outside alone, or a bad man might come and snatch you away!
As this memory of my father was unreeling, I was startled to hear Frank use the word “Daddy.”
“Daddy used to say that it was as if I’d learned to walk just in order to get lost, because that’s what I started doing almost as soon as I could toddle around.”
I guess when he said he’d killed people by the time he was seven I somehow pictured Little Frank as an orphan. I once read a novel like that, about a kid who lost his parents and grew up in an old-folks home his grandmother ran and turned into a serial killer. “Is your father still alive?” I blurted out. “Daddy?” Frank muttered with a rueful smile. “He’s still around somewhere, I guess,” he said, staring down at the floor.
“I remember very clearly what it was like getting lost,” he went on. “The circumstances varied, but the moment I realized I was lost was always the same. No kid ever got lost gradually. Suddenly you find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings, and that’s it, you’re lost. You’ve been walking along past familiar houses and parks and streets, and then you turn a corner and the scenery changes completely. I remember being very scared when that happened but also really liking it. A lot of times I’d get lost following somebody. It started as soon as I was able to walk around outside, so how old could I have been? Three or so, I guess. The ones I followed most were the men in the fire brigade’s brass band. The local firehouse was right near my home, and the brass band was famous in those parts for winning contests, and they practiced a lot, marching around as they played. I used to follow their little parades, but you can’t walk that fast at three, so I’d fall behind. The sousaphones and tubas always brought up the rear of the parade, and I remember how it felt watching those big, shiny horns march away into the distance. It was like the world was leaving me behind, and then I’d look around and realize I was lost. One day when that happened, Mama was driving home from the grocery store and saw me walking along the street.”
The word “Mama” seemed to come as naturally to Frank as “Daddy” had. But I didn’t ask if she was still alive. Something told me I shouldn’t.
“I remember exactly how I felt right then, but how to describe it? It was the same atmosphere as always when I got lost. I only knew the geography around my house, the immediate neighborhood. That was the whole world to me, and it was T-shaped, if you see what I mean, because it consisted of the street that ran in front of our house and the little road that started right across the street and narrowed down to nothing in the distance. I even remember the edges of my world, where the borders were marked. To the left was a neighbor’s blue mailbox, to the right, at the corner of the street, was a flowering dogwood tree, and straight ahead, down that sloping little road, was a steel bench in a park with a brook running through it. Those were the e
dges of the world—a mailbox, a dogwood tree, and a park bench—and the moment I stepped beyond any of them I was outside my world and lost. Even though I did it over and over again and must have seen the scenery plenty of times before, I could never familiarize myself with the landscape out there beyond the borders, in the Unknown, which is what it was for me, like the dark forests were for people in the Middle Ages. The day I ran into Mama was a cloudy day in late spring, early summer. That part of the East Coast is cloudy a lot, with so much humidity it’s almost like a mist in the air, blocking out the sun. Muggy, but when the wind blows it feels chilly on your skin. A lot of people there develop asthma or bronchial problems, and I seem to remember the adults coughing all the time. On this particular day I’d ventured into the Unknown beyond the blue mailbox. When you’re a kid, getting lost isn’t just an event or a situation, it’s like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you’ve done something that can never be undone. My sense of myself, of my body, would become very shaky, and I’d feel like I was going to melt into the gray fog all around me. A lot of times I’d start screaming. But adults never pay any attention to a little kid alone on the street just screaming—crying, maybe, but not screaming. On this day I was mostly just afraid but still really excited. And then Mama appeared. All of a sudden she pulled up beside me in the car and said: ‘Goodness, it’s my little boy!’ I started bawling, not because I was happy or relieved to see her but because I was scared. I felt like Mama had merged with the Unknown and must therefore be a completely different person. I thought I somehow had to find a way back to the world I knew, and when Mama went to take me in her arms I shook her off and tried to run away. I wasn’t supposed to meet up with Mama here, I was only supposed to see her back in the real world, and so this woman couldn’t be my real Mama even though she looked just like her. So when she grabbed me again I bit her on the wrist, so hard that my jaw went numb. I didn’t think I had any choice, I didn’t know what else to do. Mama was yelling her head off. I guess I bit right through the skin where there was an artery or something, because blood started gushing out into my mouth, lots of it, and I was biting so hard I couldn’t breathe, so I gulped it all down, like a baby nursing at its mother’s breast, just sucking up the blood. I felt like I had to, like if I didn’t drink it all up I’d suffocate. Have you ever swallowed somebody else’s blood, Kenji?”
