(2005) In the Miso Soup

by Ryu Murakami

  The night wore on, but barely a breeze blew over the river, and it was much warmer than the past two nights had been. Frank was observing the interaction between the policemen and the circle of half-drunk laborers. The cops had made them douse the fire but weren’t throwing their weight around. Once the fire was extinguished, they both sat down with the men and started chatting: Which part of the country are you from? Aren’t you going home for New Year’s? And so on. Apparently the men were all from the same region up north. They said they’d been unable to book train tickets for today so planned to spend the night here and head home tomorrow.

  A crowd was gradually gathering in the park and on the bridge. Mostly young people in couples and groups. Some of the couples were drinking thermos cups of coffee and sharing sandwiches, others stood shoulder to shoulder listening to music on the same Walkman. One group was waving to each boat that passed. I figured they’d all read about this place in the same magazine Jun and I had seen. There was no sign of her yet.

  The policemen walked toward me and Frank. No one else knew about the bodies in the omiai pub, so I was sure we weren’t in danger of being arrested, but it didn’t do my nerves any good to see two uniformed officers approaching, each with a long hardwood riot stick. There was no change whatsoever in Frank’s expression.

  “Komban wa,” the older of the two said to us.

  I returned the greeting—“Good evening”—and Frank, seated beside me, bobbed his head in an attempt at a bow. It was an endearingly clumsy gesture that said: Though an outsider here, I respect your culture and traditions. “Gaijin-san desu ne. Joya-no-kane desu ka?” asked the policeman, and I said: “So desu.” Yes, he’s a foreigner and we’re here for the New Year’s bells.

  The policeman said he didn’t think there’d be a very big crowd tonight, but we should nonetheless be on guard against pickpockets and bag-snatchers and what have you. I translated this for Frank, who bobbed his head again and said: “Arigato gozaimasu.” The two policemen walked away smiling. “What friendly cops,” Frank muttered as he watched them go.

  More people were arriving, so we decided to walk over and claim our spot. A homeless man was sitting on sheets of cardboard at the foot of the bridge, his belongings in a baby carriage. A foul smell radiated out from him. We gave him a wide berth and went up to lean against the railing, looking out over the river and the little park, to wait for the bells.

  “I wonder which of us is more of a bane on society, that homeless fellow or me?” said Frank.

  I asked him if he really thought single individuals could be “a bane on society.”

  “Of course they can,” Frank said, his eyes still on the bum, “and I’m clearly more of one than he is. I see myself as being like a virus. Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject—when you don’t need much sleep you have a lot of time to read—and I can tell you that if it weren’t for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won’t one day prove to have been rewriting our genetic code in a way that’s essential to our survival as a race. I’m a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I’m definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world. But people like him?”

  Frank looked over at the homeless guy, who hadn’t budged from his cardboard mat. On the bridge, the crowd continued to grow, but he alone had plenty of room.

  “It’s not that people like him have given up on life,” Frank went on. “They’ve given up trying to relate to others. In poor countries you may have refugees but you don’t have bums. The homeless in our societies have the easiest lives of anybody, in a way. If you reject society, then you should live outside it, not off it—you have to take some risks. I’ve done at least that much in my life. But people like him, they’re not even capable of a life of crime. They’re examples of retrogression—devolution, I call it—and I’ve spent my life exterminating them.”

  Frank was speaking very slowly and clearly to make sure I followed him. He could be strangely persuasive when he talked like this, but part of me wasn’t buying it. I wanted to ask him if the dismembered high-school girl was an example of devolution too, but I didn’t have the energy.

  Frank turned toward Sumida River Terrace and sent a jolt through me by saying: “There she is.” Jun had materialized on a bench in the park. She glanced up at us, then quickly averted her eyes, bowing her head and staring at her feet, probably wondering what the hell to do now. I felt a sudden tidal wave of remorse for having summoned her to watch out for me. Not because Frank knew who she was, though I should have foreseen as much. After all, he’d found his way to my apartment and stuck a piece of charred human flesh to my door—how hard could it have been for him to get a good look at Jun’s face? But I never should have asked an innocent creature like her to come anywhere near this monster. Looking at Jun I saw the world Before Frank, and the huge gulf between her and the post-Frank me. I should have dealt with this on my own, whatever the cost. I shouldn’t have got her involved, I thought, and looked around for a policeman. I have to protect Jun: the moment this thought crystallized in my mind, my feelings disengaged completely from Frank. It was like being released from a spell. I even realized what it was about Frank’s argument that I couldn’t swallow. Who was he to set himself up as judge and jury? No one could possibly tell who is or isn’t an example of devolution, even if there was such a thing.

  “I can tell, Kenji.” My heart froze. “Sometimes I know what people are thinking. Not all the time, mind you. If it happened all the time I’d go insane. But when you’re killing, your senses have to be wide open and honed to razor sharpness. You have to be totally there. When I kill, I get so focused that I can pick up certain signals people send out, unconscious signals that emanate from the blood circulating in their brains. Sluggish brain circulation is one of the hallmarks of devolution, and it causes a signal that says: PLEASE KILL ME. Kenji, you’re the only friend I’ve made in Japan—in fact you may be the only real friend I’ve ever had. Go on now, go to your girlfriend. Thank you for bringing me here. I won’t impose on you any longer. I’ll go off someplace where I can listen to the bells on my own.”

  Frank jerked his chin toward Jun, dismissing me. But when I turned in a daze to walk away, he clamped his hand on my shoulder. “I almost forgot to give you this,” he said, and held out an envelope. “It’s a present. Something very valuable to me, much more valuable than any amount of money, and I want you to have it.”

  As I took the envelope, he added: “There’s just one thing I was hoping we could do that we never got around to. I wanted to have some miso soup with you, but it’s too late now. We won’t be meeting again.”

  “Miso soup?”

  “Yeah. I’m really interested in miso soup. I ordered it at a little sushi bar in Colorado once long ago, and I thought it was a darned peculiar kind of soup, the smell it had and everything, so I didn’t eat it, but it intrigued me. It had that funny brown color and smelled kind of like human sweat, but it also looked delicate and refined somehow. I came to this country hoping to find out what the people who eat that soup on a daily basis might be like. So I’m a little disappointed we didn’t get to have some together.”

  I asked him if he was going back to America right away. No, not right away, he said, so I suggested we could still have miso soup together sometime. Even the smallest Japanese restaurant has it, I explained, and you can even buy it in convenience stores. That’s all right, Frank said with a smile—that peculiar smile of his which looked as if his features weren’t relaxing but collapsing.

  “I don’t need to eat the stuff now because now I’m here—right in
the middle of it! The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I’m in the miso soup myself, just like those bits of vegetable. I’m floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that’s good enough for me.”

  Frank and I shook hands, and I turned and walked toward Jun’s park bench. My entire body was rigid with tension. Jun looked puzzled as she glanced from me to Frank and back again. The New Year’s bells still hadn’t begun to sound. I was deviating from the script, and she didn’t know what to do. She pointed at the bridge. I looked back and Frank was gone. Jun shook her head to tell me she didn’t know where.

  I opened the envelope beneath a streetlamp. It was sealed with seven of the little Print Club photo stickers of Frank and me. Me before I knew anything, standing there looking disgruntled, and Frank beside me with his poker face. Inside the envelope was a gray, soiled feather.

  “What’s that?” Jun asked, pressing against me.

  “The feather of a swan,” I said.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami has played drums for a rock group, made movies and hosted a TV talk show. His first novel Almost Transparent Blue, written while he was still a student, was awarded Japan’s most coveted literary prize and went on to sell over a million copies.

  A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATOR

  Ralph McCarthy is the translator of 69 by Ryu Murakami

  and two collections of stories by Osamu Dazzai.

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY RYU MURAKAMI

  PIERCING

  Every night, Kawashima Masayuki creeps from his bed and watches over his baby girl’s crib while his wife sleeps. But this is no ordinary domestic scene. He has an ice pick in his hand, and a barely controllable desire to use it. Deciding to confront his demons, Kawashima sets into motion a chain of events seeming to lead inexorably to murder. . .

  ‘A smart and snappy psychosexual pulp thriller. . .Piercing keeps

  the tension running high until its climactic resolution’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘A haunting Japanese version of a David Lynch nightmare . . .

  Piercing reads like a compendium of Hollywood

  psychological horror’ Guardian

  ‘A deliciously black farce. . .worthy of Bret Easton Ellis’ Metro

  ‘Like any good thriller, Piercing makes you queasy in the

  stomach yet want to read more, and relieved that you are

  on the other side of the page’ London Paper

  ‘There are echoes here of Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoevsky . . .

  Creepy and gripping’ The Times

  OUT NOW IN ALL GOOD BOOKSHOPS

  To order your copy online visit www.bloomsbury.com