(2005) In the Miso Soup (8 page)

“It’s all right, Kenji,” he said when he’d settled into the chair again. “I’m okay now.”

“You want to go get a cup of coffee or something?” I asked.

Frank shook his head, trying to smile, and said: “Let me sit here for a while.”

The homeless man was watching us.

December 30, 1996.

I got up around noon and read the newspaper first thing. It was full of details about the schoolgirl murder.

In the early morning hours of December 28, a restaurant employee in the Kabuki-cho section of Shinjuku, Tokyo, reported to police that on leaving work he had discovered two plastic trash bags containing the dismembered body of a young woman. Police have identified the woman as Akiko Takahashi (17), a second-year student at Taito No. 2 High School and the daughter of Nobuyuki Takahashi (48) of Taito Ward. Evidence suggests that Akiko had been sexually assaulted, and the Metropolitan Police have formed a task force to investigate the case as an apparent rape/homicide
.

Investigators report that Akiko’s torso was found in one bag and her head, arms, and legs in the other. Her face bore several bruises, and cuts and puncture wounds covered her body. It was determined that she had been dead for approximately twelve hours. Her clothing, appointment book, and other personal effects were also found inside the plastic bags, which were discovered at a trash collection site in an out-of-the-way alley. Because of the small amount of blood at the scene, the task force has concluded that Akiko’s remains were transported there after she had been assaulted, murdered, and dismembered at a separate location
.

It is known that Akiko was associated with a group of juvenile delinquents who frequented Kabuki-cho and nearby Ikebukuro. The Nishi-Shinjuku police have interviewed members of the group and learned that Akiko was last seen
in the early evening hours of December 27, at an Ikebukuro game center
. . . .

I had finished reading and turned on the TV when the doorbell rang. I opened up to find Jun standing there, dangling a bag from a convenience store. “It’s just instant,” she said, “but would you like some hot-pot noodles?”

“You really think he . . .? What was this gaijin’s name again?”

“Frank.”

“Right. You really think he’s the murderer?”

“I’m not saying that, but . . . I don’t know.”

On TV a psychologist, a criminologist, and a social commentator guy who was supposed to be an expert on high-school girls were holding forth, acting as if nothing in the whole world was beyond their comprehension.

“I mean, I don’t have any actual evidence that he did it. The real mystery to me is why I can’t shake the feeling that maybe he did.”

The thick noodles were delicious. Jun had mixed in some minced meat she’d bought separately. She’s thoughtful like that. Jun has bleached highlights in her hair and piercings in both ears. Today she’d shown up in a black leather miniskirt with a mohair-blend sweater and boots. On TV, the social commentator guy was saying: “As for the baggy leggings and the bleached hair and the piercings, these are all expressions of high-school girls’ rejection of the parameters of adult society.” Jun picked up a tiny clump of minced meat with her chopsticks and said the guy was a fool. I agreed with her. I’m not a girl, and it’s been two years since I was in high school, so I’d never claim to understand even Jun very well. But some of the younger “experts” on TV act as if they’ve got high-school girls completely figured out. You can’t trust people like that.

“Chopping her up, though,” Jun said, “—that’s pretty extreme. It’s like
Silence of the Lambs
, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I do. I think whoever did it must have been influenced by stuff like
that. Like you said last night, it’s not a very Japanese way to kill somebody.”

“So did you bring me a picture?”

“A picture?”

“Kenji, you said you’d bring a Print Club photo of the guy.”

“I didn’t get back here till almost three in the morning, after dropping him off at his hotel. He said something you wouldn’t believe last night, at this batting center we went to. Believe me, photos were the last thing on my mind. We went to this batting center and he got all whacked out.”

“What do you mean, whacked out?”

“He suddenly froze up, his whole body. The balls were flying at him and he was facing the wrong way, just squatting there like a statue. It wasn’t just, you know, like he’d never played baseball before or something. It was way beyond that. And when I asked him about it afterward, he told me he’s missing part of his brain.”

“You mean, like a retard or something?”

“No. They cut it out. Part of his brain.”

The noodles Jun was lifting to her mouth stopped and swayed in midair.

“Don’t you die if somebody cuts out part of your brain?”

“This was the part called the . . . what was it again? I asked Frank to spell it for me and looked it up, and it was a word you hear once in a while. What the hell was it? Can you name any parts of the brain?”

“The skull?”

“That’s the bone, dummy. Anyway, it’s a more difficult word.”

“Medulla oblongata!”

“Not
that
difficult. It was up here in front.”

An older guy, a sociologist, was now talking on the tube: “In other words, as a result of this incident, we’re likely to see harsher enforcement of the anti-prostitution laws, but this, while it may have some temporary effect, would represent a total capitulation of mature judgment.”

“The frontal lobe?” said Jun.

I patted her on the head. Jun’s just an average student, but I think she’s
smarter than most. Right now her mother was on a trip to Saipan that she’d won in some kind of lottery, which meant that Jun could have slept over last night without getting busted, but she has a brother in middle school, for one thing, so she’d gone home around midnight, as usual. It’s not that she’s the serious, responsible type—Jun’s goal is to avoid extremes like that and be as normal as possible. It isn’t easy to live a normal life, though. Parents, teachers, government—they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

“That’s it, the frontal lobe, and there was something else but it was more difficult and not in the dictionary. Anyway, they cut it out. His frontal lobe.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why did they cut it out? Isn’t it something you need?”

“He says he was in a car accident, and his skull got cracked open and little bits of glass got in there, so they had to remove it. Sounds ridiculous, right? But if you had seen him last night . . .”

Frank had said: “Kenji, can I tell you a secret?” And before I could even reply, he was off. “It may have crossed your mind that there’s something unusual about me. Well, when I was eleven I was in a terrible automobile accident, and it damaged my brain, so sometimes, like just now, I suddenly can’t move my body, or my speech comes out all mangled and nobody can understand what I’m saying, or I’ll blurt out things that seem completely unconnected.”

Frank took my hand and placed it on the back of his wrist and said: See how cold this is? He wasn’t kidding. It was freezing out there, with a strong wind whipping through the open concrete platform. I had the sniffles, and my own hands were half-numb. But the cold of Frank’s wrist was a different sort of cold, a cold you couldn’t have fixed by rubbing it or something. His wrist and forearm felt just like his shoulder had when I was dragging him out of the batting cage, like something metallic. Once when I was small I went with my father to a warehouse where they kept the machines he designed. I forget
exactly why he took me with him, but it was in the hills outside Nagoya, in the middle of winter. Rows and rows of giant machines whose functions were a complete mystery to me, all lined up in this vast space charged with the smell of chilled steel. Touching Frank’s wrist triggered that memory.

“Yet I myself can’t even feel how cold my body is,” he told me. “I’ve lost some of my sensory functions, and a lot of times I get so I can’t even tell if this body is really mine or not. Or I can be talking away like this and suddenly my memory will get very uncertain, and I won’t know if what I’m saying really happened or if it’s all just something I dreamed.”

Frank went on about this all the way back to his hotel. It seemed like something from a science fiction movie, but I decided to take it at face value. Not so much because it explained the things he said and did, but because of the way his arm and shoulder felt to the touch.

“I don’t get it,” Jun said. She had finished her noodles. I still had more than half of mine left. I have a sensitive tongue, and steaming-hot boiled
udon
takes me some time. “You’re not saying he’s a robot, are you?”

“Well, I mean, look, all we know about robots is what we see in comics or movies or whatever, but . . . It’s like, there’s a certain sensation you get from touching someone’s skin, right?”

I put my hand on the back of Jun’s. We hadn’t had sex for a while—almost three weeks, now that I thought about it. When we first met we were going at it like a couple of I-don’t-know-what in heat, but gradually, as we spent more time hanging out with each other, eating noodles or Jun’s special salads, the sex became less frequent.

“It’s a particular kind of soft, warm feeling that you recognize immediately. Well, when you touch Frank it’s not like that at all.”

Jun’s eyes were on the TV, but she squeezed my hand gently and told me to hurry up and finish eating.

“Before the stuff they’re saying ruins your appetite.”

They were still going on about the schoolgirl murder. The experts had all had their say, and now a reporter was chattering excitedly in front of a big,
badly drawn sketch of a generic high-school girl: “Akiko had been viciously beaten, but if you’ll look at this picture I’d like to explain some of the more puzzling facts in regard to the nature of her injuries. . . .”

“Don’t these people ever think about how her parents would feel if they saw this?” Jun said. “They act like the girls who sell it aren’t even human.”

Makes me sick, she muttered, looking away from the TV. It’s true the drawing was in incredibly bad taste. There were different-colored marks for where the girl’s body was bruised, slashed, or punctured, and the head and arms and legs were separated from the torso with dotted lines. “So, as you can see, Akiko’s entire body had wounds of one sort or another, and on her upper torso, right here, on her left breast, the flesh was said to have been sliced and peeled away, but to the profiling experts the most significant point is here, the eyes, the fact that her eyes had been punctured with what would appear to be an ice pick, which, according to criminal psychologists, means that the murderer couldn’t bear to have the act witnessed, that he didn’t want the victim watching him and found it necessary to blind her before proceeding with the attack, and what’s important about this is that it tells us the murderer is an extremely repressed and timid person.”

“Maybe not, though,” said Jun. “Maybe he just likes to puncture people’s eyeballs.”

I thought so too. On the screen, we were getting closeups of the housewives in the audience and the regular “personalities” on the panel. Their reactions ranged from disgust and disbelief to defiant outrage. The reporter continued: “Akiko, it has become clear, was part of a group involved in underage prostitution, and police are doing their best to determine the identities of her most recent clients. However, if a girl is plying this dubious trade independently, as opposed to being affiliated with one of the notorious ‘date clubs,’ tracing previous clients can prove almost impossible.”

“They could check her pager,” Jun said. “I’m sure she had one, and if it was still on her, they could trace her last ten messages—or is it twenty?—through the phone company.”

“I don’t think the paper said anything about a pager, either, now that you mention it.”

“They probably aren’t telling us everything, because the murderer would be reading the paper and watching TV, and if he realized they had any leads he’d leave the country or something. I would if I were him.”

The reporter finished his bit, and now it was back to the experts and the minor showbiz personalities on the panel. One of these was saying something that was definitely slanted against the victim: “With all due respect to the young lady who was murdered, we’re only going to see more cases of a similar nature as long as this so-called compensated dating is allowed to continue among high-school girls, because although generally speaking these girls are just spoiled, selfish children, physically they’re adults, and I warn you that there’s no telling how bad things could get if we don’t clamp down and punish them accordingly, and of course I’m referring to the men who patronize these girls as well, they too are responsible for this state of affairs, and we need to let them know that they can and will be arrested, because if we let something like this go, if we turn a blind eye and don’t take action now, the next thing you know we truly will be like America—a society in chaos!”

The audience of housewives burst into applause. “They don’t have compensated dating in America,” Jun said. “I wonder what these geniuses would say if an American newspaper asked them to explain
why
Japanese high-school girls sell it.”