(2005) In the Miso Soup (20 page)

“She wanted to find out about the gods of this country, but she couldn’t find any books on the subject in Spanish, and she doesn’t read English, so she asked a lot of her customers, but apparently none of the Japanese knew anything, which made her wonder if people here never came up against the kind of suffering where you can’t do anything but turn to your god for help. The person who told her about the salvation bells was a Lebanese journalist who’d been here for over thirty years. He told her there was no figure like Christ or Mohammed in Japan, or any god like the kind Westerners imagine, but that certain big rocks and trees and things were decorated with straw ropes and worshiped as gods, and that people also worshiped the spirits of their ancestors. And he said she was absolutely right, that the Japanese had never experienced having their land taken over by another ethnic group or being slaughtered or driven out as refugees—because even in World War II
the battlefields were mostly in China and Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific, and then Okinawa of course, but on the mainland there were only air raids and the big bombs—so the people at home never came face to face with an enemy who killed and raped their relatives and forced them all to speak a new language. A history of being invaded and assimilated is the one thing most countries in Europe and the New World have in common, so it’s like a basis for international understanding. But people in this country don’t know how to relate to outsiders because they haven’t had any real contact with them. That’s why they’re so insular. According to the Lebanese man, Japan’s just about the only country in the world that’s been untouched, except for the U.S. But he said of course there’s a bright side to that too and started telling her about the bells, saying that precisely because the Japanese have never experienced a real invasion, there’s a certain gentleness here you can’t find in other countries, and that they’ve come up with these incredible methods of healing. Like the bells. Ringing them at temples on New Year’s Eve is a custom that goes back more than a thousand years, right? How many times was it they ring the salvation bells? It was a funny number but I forget what it was, a hundred and something, I think. Kenji, do you know how many times they ring them?”

Frank was talking about
Joya-no-kane
, the New Year’s bells. A hundred and eight, I said.

“That’s it, yeah, a hundred and eight.”

We’d reached the end of a cul-de-sac, and I followed Frank into a narrow gap between two buildings. No light from the houses or streetlamps made it into this space, and it was so narrow we had to shuffle along sideways. The path ended at a ruined building that looked as if it had been in the process of being torn down by the land sharks when the real-estate bubble burst. Mortar had fallen from its outer walls, which were draped with canvas dropcloths and sheets of vinyl. Frank parted the sheets, and we crouched down almost to our knees to pass through into the building. The rain-splattered vinyl smelled of dried mud and animal shit.

“Last year she went to listen to them, and she said it was a transcendent experience, like being in another world, and that the hundred and eight bells washed away all her bad instincts.”

Once inside the building, Frank turned on the light—a bare fluorescent unit on the floor—and his face, lit from below, became a puppet show of creepy shadows. The building must have been a clinic: in one corner was a pile of discarded medical equipment and broken chairs. A bare mattress lay on the hard-wood floor, and Frank sat down on it and gestured for me to sit beside him.

“Kenji, those bells, they wipe out all your bad instincts, right? Will you take me to a good place to hear them?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking: There it is—that’s why he decided to let me live.

“Really? Thanks. So how do these bells purify you? She had a rough idea, but I want to hear it from a Japanese person.”

“Frank, can I stay here tonight?”

I was pretty sure he wouldn’t let me go home.

“There are beds on the second floor you can sleep on. I use this mattress here. I guess you must be tired—so much happened today. But I’d like to hear a little more about the bells, if it’s all right with you.”

“Sure,” I said, looking around the room. I didn’t see any stairs. “How do I get up there?”

“See that?” Frank pointed at the far corner, where a big steel cabinet lay on its side. Planted atop the fallen cabinet was a small refrigerator, and in the ceiling right above the refrigerator was a hole about half the size of a tatami mat. Probably where the stairs had been ripped out.

“You can climb up to the second floor from the refrigerator,” he said, smiling at me. “Lots of beds up there. It’s like a hotel.”

All he’d have to do was move the refrigerator after I climbed up, and there’d be no need to watch me all night. It would take guts to leap down from that hole in the ceiling. The floor was covered with shards of glass from the toppled cabinet, and jumping down would result in a lot of noise and possibly a broken leg or two.

“This must’ve been a hospital,” Frank said as I scanned the room. “I found it while I was taking a walk. Pretty good hideout, don’t you think? No running water, but there’s electricity, so instead of showering I just heat up some mineral water in my coffee maker and wash with that. All the comforts of home.”

Along with the water, the gas and electricity would surely be turned off in a ruin like this. I wondered where he was stealing electricity from but didn’t ask. Something like that would be child’s play for Frank.

“Why do they ring the bells a hundred and eight times? The Lebanese fellow had this really fascinating explanation but she couldn’t remember all of it. Anyway, after having that beautiful experience with the bells she started studying about Japan, and I’ll tell you, she knows more about this place than anybody I ever met. Like those girls in the pub? They didn’t know anything about their own country. Not only did they not know anything, they didn’t even seem to be interested. All they cared about was expensive bourbon and clothes and handbags and hotels and things. That amazed me—them knowing nothing at all about their own history.”

They couldn’t learn about it now even if they wanted to, I thought to myself. A picture of Frank cutting Lady #5’s throat threatened to form in my mind, and the fear came back, just like before, when he’d suddenly appeared behind me on the street. My spine felt funny, all the strength drained from my legs, and a mold-like odor filled my nostrils and then spread from the nasal passages throughout my body, the smell sticking like a coat of paint to the underside of my skin. But the image of Lady #5’s slit throat didn’t materialize. I’d received warning that a nauseating image was going to appear on my mental screen, and then the screen had gone blank. It was hard to believe, but I was beginning to forget the actual scene of the massacre. I tried to visualize Mr. Children’s ear being lopped off but couldn’t. I remembered it as a factual event, but the image of it had faded. Sometimes you can remember everything about an old friend, down to minor details about his behavior, but for the life of you you can’t picture his face. Or you’ll wake up knowing you’ve just had a terrifying dream but can’t remember what it was about. It
was like that. Why that sort of thing happens I couldn’t tell you, but there it was.

“Meanwhile, here’s this Peruvian hooker who knows all kinds of fascinating things about Japanese history. For example, from way back—thousands of years ago—the Japanese just focused on growing rice, and even when things started coming in from overseas, like the
taiko
drum and metals from Persia, the rice-farming traditions didn’t change. But as soon as the Portuguese brought rifles, everything changed, and the Japanese started having wars all the time. Previously they’d only fought with swords—I’ve seen that in movies, it looks like ballet, almost. But warfare with guns increased year by year, and the Japanese started invading other countries, and because they hadn’t had much experience with foreigners they were incompetent at occupying a country or relating to its citizens, so people in the neighboring countries grew to hate them. This misguided sort of warfare continued right up until the A-bombs fell. And then, after that, Japan changed its way of thinking and gave up war and started making electric appliances and became an economic superpower, so obviously that was the path the country should have followed all along. They lost the war, but it was a war over vested interests in China and Southeast Asia, so now after all these years you might say Japan won it after all. But why do they ring the bells a hundred and eight times, Kenji? Can you tell me? She only had a rough idea.”

I thought maybe Frank was testing me. To see if I was knowledgeable enough to serve as his guide to the New Year’s bells. What would happen if I failed the test?

I said: “In Buddhism . . .”
Or was it Shinto?
I thought—but Frank wouldn’t know the difference. “In Buddhism, what you’re calling ‘bad instincts’ are known as
bonno
. Bon-no, with two ens, like ‘bone’ and ‘no.’ But the meaning is a lot deeper than ‘bad instincts.’ ”

Frank was fascinated by the sound of the word and practiced pronouncing it: Bon-no, bon-no. . . .

“Gosh,” he sighed. “What an amazing word. Just saying it makes me feel
like something is melting away inside, or like I’m being wrapped in a soft, warm blanket. Bon-no . . . What exactly does it mean, Kenji?”

“I think it’s usually translated as ‘worldly desires.’ It’s more complicated than that, but the first thing you need to know is that it’s something everybody suffers from.”

I was surprised to hear myself saying these things, because I didn’t know I knew them. I couldn’t remember being taught this or reading it somewhere. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d heard the word “bonno” pronounced. But I knew what it meant and even the usual English translation. When I told Frank that everybody suffered from it he looked, believe it or not, as if he was going to cry.

“Kenji,” he said with a little quaver in his voice, “please, tell me more.”

I did, wondering all the while where and when I’d picked up this information. It was like having data sleeping away on your hard disk and then stumbling across software that unlocks it.

“There’s another word,
madou
, which means, like, to lose your way.” I told him to think of “Ma” as in mother, and “dough” as in bread, and he began practicing the pronunciation. Old Japanese words like this sound even more solemn and mysterious when spoken by foreigners.

“Madou is the simplest verb for expressing what bonno are, or what they do to you. Bonno make you lose your way. ‘Bad instincts’ makes them sound like something you’re born with, something you need to be punished for, which isn’t quite right. There are six categories of bonno, or sometimes ten—or sometimes just two big categories. They’re kind of like the Seven Deadly Sins in Christianity, but the difference is that
everybody
suffers from them. They’re as much a part of being human as, like, our vital organs are. But the six categories, or ten or whatever, are all things I can’t translate into English, so it’s hard to explain.”

Frank nodded and said he understood. “It must be hard to translate such deep words into a simple language like English.”

“The two basic categories of bonno are the ones that come from thoughts
and the ones that come from feelings. The ones you get from thoughts might disappear if someone just points out the truth to you. But the ones you get from feelings are more difficult. To wash those away you have to train very hard. Have you ever heard how Buddhists go without eating, or swim naked in icy water, or stand under waterfalls in winter, or sit crosslegged in this unnatural position and get smacked from behind with sticks?”

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.”