(2005) In the Miso Soup (6 page)

On stage, the small, thin woman was opening the front of her negligee and gyrating her hips. She wasn’t a professional dancer, just another girl in the sex industry, so there was nothing very seductive about her moves. Comical and sad, is more like it, but nobody had come to this place expecting to see an artistic striptease. The woman pressed against the one-way mirror before each booth for about thirty seconds, giving the customers what they’d come for by pulling down her bra and squeezing her breasts, sticking her finger down her panties, and so on. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, and her skin was so pale you could see the veins in her face and arms and legs. There was something cruel about the way the cheap illumination highlighted those blue veins, I was thinking, when Madoka opened the door to my booth again and stuck her head inside.

“Well?” I said quietly. A wave of strong perfume washed over me. Madoka was wearing a sort of negligee with frills, looking for all the world as if she were off in search of the bluebird of happiness. She was also holding a vinyl bag full of condoms and moist towelettes.

“The . . . the gaijin in Booth 5, right?” she said.

“I don’t remember the booth number, but surely there’s only one gaijin here?” The booths are dark, and with the light behind her it was hard to see
Madoka’s face, but she sounded troubled, as if she didn’t know what to say.

“Didn’t he ask for the special service?”

Madoka shook her head and said: “No, he
did
, but . . .”

“Did something weird happen?”

“He stopped me after a while and said ‘No more.’”

“So he didn’t come?”

“That’s not what I mean. . . .”

“How big was he?”

“Size-wise, about average I think, but . . . Something wasn’t right. First of all, I’ve never seen anybody make a face like that when they’re getting jerked off. And his dingaling was, like . . . creepy.”

“Creepy.”

“Yeah. It was hard in some places and soft in others.”

“Silicone injections?”

“No. I could tell if it was silicone or pearls or whatever, but this was different. And that face! At first it was dark and I couldn’t see very well, but then a light shone on his face, and it was like, I mean, he was looking at me, but . . . Can I go now? I get yelled at for talking to customers.”

“Of course, sorry to ask such a weird favor,” I said, and Madoka said no problem and shut the door again. She didn’t seem to want to talk about Frank. The girl on stage, braless now, had her panties down around one ankle and was masturbating. She lay on her back with her legs spread and her eyes closed, moaning softly. No one but she herself could have said if it was just an act, or if she was actually a bit turned on, or if in fact she was the type who really gets off on having people watch. I certainly didn’t know which it was, but her voice and facial expressions were a pretty good facsimile of what happens when a woman is genuinely aroused. There’s not that much variation, which I’m sure is true for men too. Someone like Madoka has seen the faces of hundreds, if not thousands, of men in that state. What sort of face could Frank have made that she’d find so disturbing?

After we left the peep show Frank hardly spoke at all, and I didn’t much feel
like talking either. We just walked along, drifting away from the neon lights and the cries of the touts, and the next thing I knew we were in front of a batting center on the outskirts of the love hotel district. It was past 1:00
A.M
., but we could hear a syncopated clank of metal bats beyond the tall green net and rusty chain-link fence. Frank stopped to listen to the sound, and gazed curiously up at the fence. I’m told that in America they don’t fence in batting centers or driving ranges. I’d always assumed that enclosed driving ranges, at least, were something you could find anywhere in the world. I thought that vending machines for booze and cigarettes and magazines and whatnot were everywhere, too. Well, maybe not everywhere, but it never occurred to me that having vending machines for beer or whatever on every other corner was unusual. Clients with any curiosity always ask me about this, though. Kenji, why are there so many vending machines? Who needs them, with convenience stores everywhere you turn? And why do you need so many different types of canned coffee and juice and sports drinks? With so many brands, how can anyone possibly make a profit? I’ve never been able to come up with answers to questions like these, and at first I didn’t even understand what the big deal was. But from the point of view of foreigners, any number of things about this country seem abnormal, and I’m not able to explain most of them. I get questions like: If Japan is one of the richest countries in the world, why do you have this
karoshi
problem, people literally working themselves to death? Or: Girls from poor Asian countries I can understand, but why do high-school girls in a country as wealthy as Japan prostitute themselves? Or: Wherever you go in the world, people work in order to make their families happy, so why doesn’t anybody in Japan complain about the
tanshin-funin
system that sends businessmen off to live on their own in distant cities or countries? If I can’t answer these questions, it’s not because I’m particularly stupid. Nobody writes about these things in the newspapers or weeklies, or talks about them on TV. No one teaches us why
karoshi
has to exist in this country, or the
tanshin-funin
system that the rest of the world seems to think is so perverse.

Frank stood riveted to one spot, gazing up at the batting center. I thought maybe he’d enjoy hitting a few. “Wanna try it?” I said, and he looked at me as if startled and bobbled his head ambiguously.

On the ground floor was a game center. We climbed a metal staircase to the second level, a surreal open space illuminated by fluorescent lights. A sign hanging about midway up the chain-link fence said:
FOR YOUR SAFETY, ONLY THOSE TAKING BATTING PRACTICE ARE ALLOWED IN THE CAGES
. There were seven batting cages, all set at different pitching speeds. The one farthest to the right was the fastest, 135 kph, and the one on the far left was the slowest at 80. Two of the cages were occupied—one by a young man in training wear and the other by the male half of a drunken couple. His woman was egging him on. “Go for a home run!” she shouted before every pitch. The man was staggering drunk and missed most of the balls completely, but the woman kept at him as if their lives depended on it: “Don’t let ’em beat you! Don’t let ’em beat you!” Don’t ask me who or what was trying to beat him. She stood behind the fence on a long concrete walkway like the platforms you see at little train stations in the country, with a roof but no walls to block the wind. In a shed about the size of a highway tollbooth the batting center attendant slumped in his chair, asleep, and next to him a kettle sat on a small kerosene stove that flickered with orange flames. The little shed must have been warm, because the dozing attendant inside had nothing on over his T-shirt, and a homeless man lay with his back against the outer wall. He was sprawled out on a couple of flattened cardboard boxes, drinking some colorless liquor from a Cup Noodle container and leafing through a magazine.

“There’s no place like this in America,” Frank said.

I didn’t think there were many places like it in Japan, either. The pitching machines were lined up in the shadows of a sort of bunker, and small green lights blinked at the tips of the two catapult arms that were currently operating. Hit or miss, the balls rolled down to a conveyor belt that carried them back to the machines. Intermittently, between the beats of a Yuki Uchida song crackling over the primitive loudspeakers, you could hear the rumbling
of the conveyor belt and the creaking of the machines as they wound the arm-springs tighter and tighter. The guy in training wear was dripping with sweat and hitting the ball pretty good. Of course, no matter how well he connected, the ball couldn’t go any farther than the netting, about twenty meters away. High up on the net was an oval cloth banner that said
HOME RUN
, except that the cloth was ripped and the “
M
” was missing.

“You wanna hit some?” I asked Frank again.

“I’m kind of tired,” he said. “I think I’ll just rest awhile. Why don’t you hit some, Kenji, and I’ll watch. Go ahead, take a few swings.”

Frank dragged a metal lawn chair over from in front of the attendant’s shed to sit on. As he did so, the homeless guy looked at him, and Frank asked him in English: “Is anyone using this chair?” The homeless guy didn’t answer but took another sip of his vodka or
shochu
or whatever it was. I could smell the booze from where I stood, not to mention the stink of the man himself.

“Is this where he lives?” Frank asked, looking over at the guy as he sat down.

“I’m sure he doesn’t live here, no.”

I was freezing and wanted to hit some balls to warm up but felt awkward about asking Frank to pay for it. I enjoy swinging a bat, and it was only ¥300 a turn, so I could have paid for myself easily enough, but it wasn’t for my sake that I’d led Frank up those metal stairs. I’ll admit I was tired of walking, but really we were only here because Frank had said all that stuff about playing baseball as a kid. This was part of my job—trying to see that he enjoyed himself. Besides, I still hadn’t recouped my ¥300 for the Print Club photos. Not a lot, I know, but it was the principle of the thing. I’d told him at the outset that the client has to bear all expenses, and it wasn’t in my interest to have him start thinking of me as a buddy—that wouldn’t do at all. Maybe it was the strange exhaustion I felt that made me incapable of asking him to get change. I was strangely exhausted.

“He’s homeless, right?” Frank said.

“That’s right, yeah.”

I felt like I was coming down with a cold, and I didn’t want to stand there in the wind chatting. Behind us was a parking lot, and through the links in the fence you could see the neon signs of all the love hotels. Frank, his nose red from the cold he didn’t seem to feel, sank deeply into the lawn chair and just sat there watching the bum sip his liquor.

“Why doesn’t somebody chase him out of here?”

“Too much trouble.”

“I saw a lot of homeless in the park too, and in the station. I didn’t realize there were so many in Japan. Are there kids here who rough them up?”

“Yeah, there are,” I said, thinking: Doesn’t this clown realize how cold it is?

“I bet there are. So what do you think of kids who’d do such a thing, Kenji?”

“Stuff like that is going to happen, I guess. They smell bad, for one thing. It’s hard to imagine wanting to get close and be nice to them.”

“The smell, huh? That’s true, smell is definitely a factor in deciding who we like and don’t like. New York has street gangs that specialize in molesting vagrants. No money in it of course, they just take pleasure in the violence, pulling a homeless fellow’s teeth out one by one with pliers, for example, or even assaulting them sexually.”

Why was Frank carrying on about things like this, in a place like this, at a time like this? The don’t-let-’em-beat-you woman was now helping her defeated warrior stumble off toward the stairs. The guy in the training wear was still batting. It was so cold on that windblown platform I felt as if I were naked below the waist and standing on a block of ice. Most of the windows in the love hotels had lights on. Looking up at those dim, sleazy lights I remembered what Madoka had told me in the peep show booth.
I’ve never seen anybody make a face like that when they’re getting jerked off
. Come to think of it, she never actually told me whether Frank had come or not, let alone the quantity. Not that it seemed to matter at this point. What sort of face could he have made, though?

“You don’t like this kind of talk, do you,” Frank said, his eyes still on the homeless guy.

I shook my head, thinking: If you can tell that, how about putting a lid on it?

“I wonder why. I guess because to talk about it makes you picture it, and nobody wants a picture in their mind of kids beating the crap out of a bum who stinks to high heaven. But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can’t help smiling? Why is there such agreement around the world about what is or isn’t a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow they’d get an urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby they’d get an urge to kill it? Something tells me there must be people like that somewhere, Kenji.”

Listening to Frank talk like this made me feel queasy. “I’m gonna hit a few,” I said, and put the fence between us.

I stepped into the batting cage marked “100 kph.” The floor was concrete and slightly sloping so the balls would collect at the bottom, near the machines, and the concrete was painted white but took on a bluish tinge in the fluorescent lights. Beyond the net all you could see were the neon signs of the love hotels and their sad, dimly lit windows. I stretched briefly, thinking: Could the view possibly be any bleaker? I selected the lightest of the three available bats and put three coins in the slot. The pitching machine’s green light came on, I heard the low rumble of the motor, and before I knew it a white ball came zipping out of the long, narrow darkness. Even a hundred kilometers an hour is pretty fast, and I wasn’t really ready, so I missed the first ball completely.

My next few swings weren’t much better. I couldn’t get a solid hit, kept fouling the ball off, and Frank sat back there staring at me. Finally he got up from the chair and walked this way. He clung to the fence and said: “Kenji, what’s the matter, you haven’t hit one past home plate!”