by Ryu Murakami
“Kenji, what’s wrong?”
Frank was staring at me. “Nothing,” I said. He took a sip of Evian and smiled: “You look angry.” That story about the cat was interesting, I told him, taking a sip of my Coke. I had left the can on the floor beside me, and it was still ice-cold. What a weird place this was, I thought. It felt completely isolated and, partly because of the cold, like being on another planet. I wondered if there were planets where it’s okay to murder people. I decided there must be, reminding myself that in war, after all, killers are heroes. And it suddenly occurred to me why I hadn’t run to that police box in Kabuki-cho. The victims in the omiai pub, when placed in the position of the cat with the button, hadn’t put up any resistance. I looked over at Frank and thought: Well, here’s a guy who resisted. Maybe he was one of the very few who’d kicked against this cat’s cage of a world, where first they feed you and then, although you’ve committed no crime, they give you a punishing jolt. Looking at Frank, lit from below by the lamp, I began to think of him as a man who’d been stepped on all his life but never caved in.
“Let’s try a little psychological test,” he said, and started asking me some of the questions he’d memorized. Well, not questions exactly, more like statements to which I had to answer “true” or “false.” He told me I had to answer at once, without thinking. The statements were of all sorts, from “I like poems about flowers” to “My genitals are oddly shaped” and “My greatest pleasure is to be hurt by someone I love.” Over the course of half an hour or so he must have rattled off over two hundred of them.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Frank smiled when we were done. “I put them together myself. Like I say, I’ve taken hundreds of these tests. In fact, I’d say I’m one of the world’s foremost authorities on psychological testing.”
“Is there anything wrong with me?” I asked. “I mean, according to the test?”
“Don’t worry, Kenji, you’re normal. You exhibit a certain amount of confusion, a few contradictory impulses, but that’s true of all mentally normal people. It’s the ones who’re rigid in their likes and dislikes who are in trouble. Everybody lives with a certain amount of confusion and indecision—never knowing which way the pendulum’s going to swing. That’s normal.”
What about him? I asked, and Frank said he was normal too. This didn’t even strike me as peculiar. I thought he probably was.
Starting with that piece of human skin plastered to my door, today had been just one unimaginable thing after another. But though I knew I was exhausted, I was too wired to be able to sleep. Besides, it was freezing cold, and I was sitting with a murderer in an abandoned building littered with medical junk. I think all of these things contributed to my mental state being slightly out of whack. It wasn’t that Frank was exerting an evil influence on me, winning me over to the Dark Side or whatever. But I can’t deny that my body and mind were being dragged into unfamiliar territory. I felt like I was listening to the tales of a guide in some unexplored country.
“You must be tired,” Frank said. “There are still plenty of things I haven’t told you, but I guess we’d better call it a day. Tonight we have to go hear the bells and everything.”
“I don’t think I can sleep.”
“Why not? You afraid I’ll kill you?”
“No. It’s just that my nerves are kind of on edge.”
“Maybe you should eat something.”
I wasn’t hungry, I told him, but Frank said I’d sleep better if I had something in my stomach. He took a coffee maker from one of the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, filled it with Evian, and plugged it in. Then he took two cups of King Ra instant ramen from the same box. I asked if he always ate instant foods. Sure, he said with a grin.
“I’m no gourmet.”
“Is there some reason for that?” I said, watching the steam begin to rise from the coffee maker. “I mean, everybody likes good food, right?”
“They shoved those tasteless liquids down my throat for so long in the mental hospital that the truth is I don’t even remember what ‘good’ means. But when I do eat something that everybody thinks is delicious, it’s funny—I feel like something’s draining out of me. Like something important is escaping from my body.”
And what would that be?
“The mission I’ve been entrusted with. My destiny. Killing people.”
When the noodles were ready, Frank handed me a plastic fork. I inhaled the fragrant steam, absorbing it like a sponge, then slurped up a mouthful before asking him if he was going to continue to kill people after hearing the hundred and eight bells. He shrugged.
“I never seemed to have much choice in the matter,” he said. “Killing people has always been absolutely essential for me to go on living. Slashing my wrists and slicing through that swan’s neck and drinking its blood and killing people were all basically expressions of the same thing, the thing that’s driving me. If you don’t keep your body and brain active, senility sets in, even if you’re a little kid. The circulation in your brain gradually decreases. Like the cat in that experiment—by the time he lost interest in eating, the blood in his brain was just barely moving. It’s the stress that does it. Human beings have thought up everything from hunting in groups to pop songs and car races so our brains wouldn’t atrophy, but there aren’t that many genuinely effective ways to guard against senility nowadays. Kids are especially vulnerable because their options are so limited. And now with all this social surveillance and manipulation going on, I think you’ll see an increase in people like me.”
Frank had speared some noodles with his fork and raised them to just below his chin but then seemed to forget about them as he rambled on. Condensation from his cup dripped onto the dusty floor. Eventually the steam ceased to rise from it, but he continued talking. He’d forgotten he was eating. Concentration wasn’t the word for this—it was something much more intense, as if he were possessed. As if his life would end if he stopped talking. He hadn’t taken a single bite of his ramen, and the stuff on the end of his fork had begun to change color. Listening to him talk on and on with one eye on the darkening noodles, I’d watched them transform into some unidentifiable, pendulous, stringy substance. When he paused in his monologue for a moment I raised my eyebrows at his fork and lifted my chin to suggest he eat. Glancing with some surprise at the noodles, he shoveled them in his mouth and chewed with a melancholy air that seemed to say: Why do we have to go through the dreary process of ingesting food?
“When I was twelve I killed three in a row—all old people sleeping on porches in their rocking chairs or gliders—and I made a tape taking credit for the murders and sent it to the local radio station. They had a DJ I liked and I wanted him to know I was the serial killer everyone was talking about. I did a lot of things to disguise my voice—packed cotton balls in my mouth, held a pencil between my teeth, scotch-taped my lips together, and so forth—and I used an old tape recorder of my father’s. It took me over twenty hours to do it, but I can’t tell you how much fun it was. In the end the FBI managed to analyze the voice print, which proved my guilt beyond any reasonable doubt, so for a long time I regretted making and sending that tape. But then years later I remembered what fun it had been, how it made me feel like I was getting in touch with things outside myself, like I finally fit properly into my own body. That’s why I want to listen to those bells, Kenji: to see if my bad instincts—my bonno—will be washed away, so I can fit into my own body again.”
Moments after I finished my ramen, sleep began to steal over me. I rubbed my eyes, and Frank jerked his thumb at the mattress we were sitting on and told me I could sleep there. “It’s not so easy to climb up to the second floor,” he said. I lay down on the mattress in my suit and overcoat. Frank was still eating, and I put a hand over my eyes to block out the light from the lamp. He must have seen me do this, because he turned it off. The mattress was cold and damp. Sleep kept pulling me down, but the cold kept waking me back up. The warmth of the ramen I’d eaten was so
on just a memory, and the cold seemed to seep up through the mattress from the floor. At some point I started shivering. I heard Frank rummaging around and then felt a crinkly sort of blanket being placed over me. When I moved, the blanket made a rustling sound, as if it was made of paper. Frank ate the rest of his ramen in total darkness. Just before I fell asleep I had a moment of panic, thinking he was going to kill me after all, but I reminded myself that he wouldn’t do that before hearing the bells. As I drifted off, a bird was screeching somewhere outside.
I woke up covered with old newspapers. I heard Frank’s voice say, “We won’t be coming back here, so don’t forget anything.” I looked up to see him dressing. Improbably enough, he was climbing into a tuxedo. He said he’d been waiting for me to wake up.
“There are no mirrors here, so I need you to tell me if my tie is straight.”
He wore trousers with a stripe running down the outside of each leg and was squirming into a shirt of some shiny material with lacy frills down the front. A bow tie and jacket were draped over the stack of cardboard boxes. “Pretty snazzy,” I said, and he smiled as he buttoned the shirt. Watching Frank don a tuxedo in the dim light of this ruined building, with shards of broken glass scattered across the floor, I had to wonder if I wasn’t still dreaming. I asked him if he’d brought the tux with him.
“Yeah, I did. Tuxedos are great when there’s a celebration of some kind and you want to blend in.”
It was only 4:00 P.M. when we left the building. I didn’t know how big a crowd would show up at Kachidoki Bridge, and I wanted to be sure of grabbing the spot I told Jun we’d be at.
As Frank led the way down the narrow alley, I asked him if he’d been staying in that building since he came to Japan. He’d stayed at a hotel for a while but didn’t feel comfortable there, he said. It had been so dark the night before that I hadn’t noticed, but signs were posted all along the cul-desac: DANGER! TOXIC WASTE! KEEP OUT! When I stopped to read the first one we came to, Frank said something about “polychlorinated biphenyl.”
“There used to be a factory here that made copy paper treated with PCB, and a wholesale distributor or two, and then when it was discovered that PCB is bad for you the authorities sealed off this whole area. Fact is, the toxic material, the dioxin, isn’t released into the atmosphere unless the PCB is burned, but the cops don’t know that and steer clear of the neighborhood. You couldn’t ask for a better hideout.”
He said he’d been told all this by a homeless man who spoke English with a British accent. The homeless man they found burned to a crisp? I didn’t ask.
Frank wore a red muffler over his tuxedo and was carrying a small duffel bag. It was true, though, that he didn’t stand out, even as we neared Yoyogi Station. I guess people just assumed we were on our way to a New Year’s Eve party.
I led Frank to a soba shop in front of the station, explaining that on New Year’s Eve it’s customary to eat buckwheat noodles. I was starving. I asked for herring-and-soba soup and Frank ordered zaru soba—plain cold noodles. Several groups of college students were clustered around tables, eating and talking quietly, but none of them paid any attention to us. I didn’t need to know much about clothes and fashion to see that Frank’s tuxedo was a cheap one or that his muffler was a long way from cashmere. My own suit was wrinkled and dusty and didn’t look as if it hadn’t been slept in. Anyone observing a bit more closely might have thought us a suspicious pair, but the students completely ignored us, and I began to understand how Frank had managed such spectacular murders without getting caught. Right now in this country nobody gives a damn about strangers. I wondered if that was true in America too, and asked Frank about it while we waited for the food to come. He said it was true in the cities, at least.
The restaurant had no forks, and the chopsticks did nothing to speed up Frank’s eating technique. It took him nearly an hour to finish his soba, by which time the noodles were dry and swollen and night had fallen outside. The kitchen was bustling as the small staff prepared for the crush of customers who’d show up just before midnight to greet the new year slurping up soba for good luck. The owner was a tiny old man who, when I apologized for taking so long, laughed and said: “Gaijin will be gaijin.” It was an odd sensation to be sitting there with Frank and yet be treated like any other customer in a place as ordinary as a noodle shop outside a station. I was back in the everyday world, which only made the massacre of the night before all the more unreal to me. But part of me couldn’t forget the very real horror of ears lopped off and throats slashed open. It was as though a thin membrane were covering only Frank and me, or as if we’d fallen deep inside some weird sort of fissure in the reality around us.
While Frank ate his soba I pored over every inch of an evening paper someone had left behind. There was no mention of the omiai pub. I was relieved but not surprised. Anyone who found the shutter down would simply assume the place had closed for the holidays. And even if the manager, for example, had a family, they’d probably hesitate to contact the police just because he went missing for a night or two, given the nature of his work. The bodies might not be discovered for days. How long does it take for a corpse to begin decomposing? Would the cold December temperatures slow the process?
Frank stabbed a clump of soba with his chopsticks and asked why we ate this stuff on New Year’s Eve. I explained how the long buckwheat noodles symbolized hope for a long life. Gripping the chopsticks like a knife, he’d been sliding them under the strands and then trying to finesse them to his mouth. At first, when the noodles were still fresh and slippery, they’d tended to slip off as soon as he tried to lift them, but as they grew soft and swollen they clung to the sticks and made it easier, if less appetizing. Anyone who knew nothing about Frank would probably have been charmed or amused by his clumsy efforts to grapple with soba. I wasn’t charmed, of course, but I wasn’t amused either.
“What made the old-time Japanese think they wouldn’t die if they ate soba?” Frank was taking this very seriously.
They didn’t think they wouldn’t die, I said, they thought they’d live longer. Frank shrugged and shook his head, and I realized he had a point. Living longer was the same as not dying, at least anytime soon. Maybe in this country “long life” meant something different from “postponed death.” In any case, few Japanese would ever have considered the possibility of an outsider like Frank suddenly coming along and rubbing them out.
He was now sawing with his chopsticks at the dry, gray clump of buckwheat dough.
We rode the Yamanote Line to Yotsuya, descended to the subway, and transferred again at Ginza. Ginza Station was insanely crowded, and Frank didn’t look happy as we waddled along with the herd. When I asked him if he disliked crowds, he said he was afraid of them.
“A lot of people jammed into one place really scares me, it always has. Which is not to say I like being all alone either. I just don’t seem to have a stable comfort zone when it comes to personal space.”
It was still early in the evening when we emerged onto a street in Tsukiji, near the fish market. From the top of a pedestrian overpass we caught a glimpse of Hongan-ji Temple. Frank said it looked like an Islamic mosque. He had left his duffel bag in a station coin locker after removing a gray raincoat, which he was now wearing. It was a plain one like the British often wear, and made him even less conspicuous. The road leading to Kachidoki Bridge was wide but dimly lit, with few shops or restaurants and only the occasional passing car. I’d never been here before. This was a very different Tokyo from places like Shibuya or Shinjuku. Wooden bait-and-tackle shops with disinte-grating roofs and broken signs stood next to shiny new convenience stores, and futuristic highrise apartment complexes rose skyward on either side of narrow, retro streets lined with wholesalers of dried fish.
A gently arching old structure of steel and stone came into view. What a pretty bridge, Frank said softly. To the left of it, along the riverbank, stretched a narrow public park called Sumida River Terrace. Near the entrance to the park wa
s a big rectangular stone basin with a fountain, but whether because of the season or because of the hour the water had been turned off. The New Year’s bells wouldn’t begin for quite some time yet, so we walked down through the park to the riverside and sat on a bench, where we had a good view of the bridge railing. This would be the perfect place for Jun to sit, I thought. Spaced every few meters along the bridge were metal lanterns, and reflections from the yellow lights wavered on the dark surface of the river. After the white fluorescent lights of the ruined clinic, the soba shop, and the trains, those lanterns felt like long-lost friends to me. A group of men who looked like migrant laborers from distant provinces sat drinking in a circle at the water’s edge, not far from us. At first they’d been roasting something over a small fire, but then two policemen strolled over and asked them to put it out. The men did so without protest. Though night had long since fallen, flocks of pigeons whirled overhead from time to time. The white things I could see bobbing on the river were probably seagulls. I told Frank we still had a long wait before the bells began to sound. He adjusted his bow tie and said he was used to waiting.
