In the Miso Soup (17 page)

Whose voice is that? I muttered, and lifted the can of tea to my lips again, though it was empty. Not a drop was left, but I did this two or three more times before noticing. Maybe I should telephone someone. But who?
Who?
said the voice. I took out my mobile, and a picture of Jun’s face formed in my mind. Not Jun, not now. Yokoyama-san? What would I say to him?
Yokoyama-san, the guy turned out to be a murderer after all, and now I’m thinking about going to the police. Do you think I should? I should, right?
I looked up and down the street. Frank was nowhere to be seen. The cityscape around me didn’t seem real. It couldn’t have been a more familiar place—one of the streets off Kuyakusho Avenue in good old Kabuki-cho—but I felt as if I was adrift in a strange town in some foreign country. It was like losing my way in a dream. I reminded myself I was still in shock, still not completely in control of myself. A uniformed cop came out of the police box, climbed on a bicycle, and pedaled this way.

I was sure he was staring at me as he approached. He was the only thing alive and moving in the universe. My legs had seized up again. It felt as if the circulation was cut off down there and the blood wasn’t getting to them. As if they weren’t even my legs. I was freezing from the waist down, but the cold wasn’t the problem. I lifted the can of tea to my lips again but tasted only metal. I remembered the intense smell of blood in the omiai pub, and suddenly felt dizzy. The policeman reached the intersection, and without thinking about it I raised the mobile to my ear. Pretending I was on the phone. Instead of turning right, toward me, the cop hung a left and pedaled off down Love Hotel Lane. I watched him go, still mashing my ear with the mobile. The bicycle seemed to take forever to make the left turn but then sailed past another girlie bar at the corner and vanished. And once he’d disappeared from sight, I found I wasn’t quite certain I’d actually seen the cop ride by in the first place. In a while my ear began to hurt and I realized I was crushing it with the phone. I had the phone in my right hand, the Java Tea can in my left. The can was moist and clammy. My palms were sweating, and the mobile too was wet when I finally pried it away from my ear. I hadn’t realized I was sweating, and wondered if the tea had seeped straight out through my pores. That’s when it dawned on me that I wasn’t going to the police box.
I don’t have to report to the stinking cops—
it was incredible what a relief this thought was.

Explaining the situation to the cops would have been a pain in the ass of epic proportions. A pain in the ass, I muttered to myself, and heard myself chuckle. How many hours—no, days—would the police grill me? It wouldn’t escape their notice that I was a tourist guide without a license. That would probably spell trouble for Yokoyama-san, too. And when the whole story came out it would destroy my mother. Not only would the police forbid me to work, they’d now be keeping an eye me. I know how they operate. I’d be treated from the start as a probable accomplice. It would destroy Mom, I thought again . . . and then I thought of Lady #3. Naturally she and Mr. Children and the others had families too. I remembered their corpses, and their final moments. The images flickered through my mind like drug flashbacks, but unaccompanied by any real sense of revulsion or outrage. I remembered the sound of the guy’s neck bones cracking, but all I could think was: So that’s what it’s like when you break somebody in two. Maybe my nerves still hadn’t thawed out. I tried to feel sorry for the people who’d been killed but found, to my horror, that I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel any sympathy for them at all.

I’d spent two evenings with Frank but had only just met the people who died in that pub. I wondered if the reason I couldn’t sympathize with the victims was that I’d come to empathize with Frank, but that didn’t seem true. I had no affection for Frank. I don’t think it would have bothered me if he were arrested, or even killed. But those people in the omiai pub had been like androids or something. Lady #2, Yuko, had said she was there because she felt “kinda lonely.” She would actually have preferred to be doing something else but had no idea what that might be so decided to check out a match-making pub and at least talk to somebody. Lady #3 was the same. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, so she ended up singing an Amuro song all by herself in that lonely place. Mr. Children was intent only on hooking up with Lady #5, whose only reaction to insults like “I can tell you’re the type of broad who works those telephone clubs” was a simpering grin. The manager had been the classic Kabuki-cho lifer. Utterly resigned, the type of guy who’d numbed out his feelings of jealousy and futility to such a degree that even if his woman or the woman of a friend were to do whatever with another man, he’d be able to let it go. The waiter, on the other hand, was one of those young-dude-in-a-band types. He wouldn’t have known anything much about music or ever tried to learn, having joined a band simply because he wanted friends. They were like automatons programmed to portray certain stereotypes, those people. The truth is it had bugged the hell out of me just to be around them, and I’d begun to wonder if they weren’t all filled with sawdust and scraps of vinyl, like stuffed animals, rather than flesh and blood. Even when I saw their throats slit and the gore oozing out, it hadn’t seemed real to me. I remembered thinking, as I watched the blood drip down from Lady #5’s throat, that it looked like soy sauce. Imitation human beings, that’s what they were. Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she’d become a super-exclusive person.

What did I have in common with the victims? Just that we were all human trash. I couldn’t kid myself—I wasn’t so different from them. That’s why I understood them, and that’s why they bugged me so much. At the entrance to the girlie bar diagonally across from the police box stood a young barker in a silver lamé suit and red bow tie. He was rubbing his hands together for warmth and calling out to everyone who passed. Above him was an arch of sequentially lit neon that made his face glow orange one moment and purple the next. When no one was on the street, he’d step back and yawn, and a minute ago I’d seen him tickle a passing cat behind the ears. My job was guiding foreigners to bars and strip joints and date clubs and helping them hook up with women. Nothing to be proud of and nothing that distinguished me in any way from the guy in the silver suit. But after nearly two years of working with foreigners, I’d discovered one thing: what makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up. The communication in that omiai pub was all lies. It was a bar in Kabuki-cho, of course, which more or less precluded anyone telling the full truth or discussing serious issues. But that’s not what I mean. Women in Chinese or Korean clubs, for example, will think nothing of lying to you if it means a better tip, but most of what they make they send back home, investing their capital in prolonging the lives of family members. It’s the same for Latin American prostitutes in Japan—they sell their bodies to buy things for the folks back home. These women are serious and focused, because they know exactly what they want. They don’t dither or feel lost, and they don’t feel “kinda lonely.” You wouldn’t show your child a place like that omiai pub. Not because it was depraved or whatever, but simply because the people in there weren’t living life in earnest. It wasn’t as if the place had something any of them couldn’t live without. They were just killing time there because they were “kinda lonely”—even the manager and waiter, really. All of them had been like that, not really living even when they were still alive.

I had no interest whatsoever in going to the cops and putting myself through a big pain-in-the-ass ordeal for people like them, but at some point I found myself walking toward the police box again. Part of me had surrendered to the inevitable. I couldn’t very well go searching for Frank in the love hotel. I couldn’t go back to my apartment and tell Jun:
Guess what, I saw some people murdered tonight
. Going to the police was the only possible course of action. But I hadn’t taken more than a few steps when a horrible feeling came over me. My body was sending me a signal. A danger signal.

It seemed to be coming from my feet, or maybe one of my internal organs. Something wasn’t right about this. I began to see that I was falling for something I never would have if shock hadn’t scrambled my senses. That I was fooling myself, in other words. I had reached the cinderblock wall again, and as I leaned against it I decided to run through all that had happened, to try and get it straight in my mind. I didn’t see much point in trying to understand what had triggered Frank to suddenly start slaughtering people. There was no way I’d ever understand that, no matter how long I puzzled over it. But why hadn’t he murdered me? Call me in an hour, I’d told Jun—in English so Frank would understand—and if I don’t answer, go to the police. I had no idea how much time had passed since then, pathetic as that may sound. I looked at my watch. It was just past midnight. Tiny specks of blood clung to the crystal, some of them not quite dry. Had Frank spared me because of Jun? Was he afraid she’d call the police?

As I was asking myself these questions the fear came creeping back. I felt I was on the verge of uncovering something my conscious mind didn’t want uncovered. My mind was refusing to remember the really scary stuff. The fear had crept up through the soles of my feet and shivered through all my sinews, and now it was surging against my temples. Sheer, unbridled terror makes it hard to think clearly, and my brain was refusing to do its job.
Think
, I commanded myself. But just remembering Frank’s face and voice turned my stomach, and suddenly I was vomiting. The Java Tea numbed my throat as it came back up and gushed from my mouth. I recalled that when Frank was in the midst of his killing and I was paralyzed with fright, unable to move or respond, I’d managed to get a small part of myself back by spitting forcefully. I hacked up a mixture of tea and saliva, and spat. It must be because of Jun that Frank didn’t kill me, no other reason made sense. I didn’t believe he felt any differently toward me than the others. Or even if he did, it wasn’t to the extent that he’d hesitate to kill me. The point of that long, thin knife had been closing in on my throat when Jun called. And yet, what did Frank say to me just a while ago? “Go to the police, Kenji, I’m putting my fate in your hands.”
He’s lying again
. No sooner did this thought crystallize than the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I turned around to see Frank. And only Frank.

He was standing right behind me, between me and the police box, blocking my vision entirely and so close that it was like he was preparing to absorb me. By some miracle I managed to remain both conscious and on my feet. Frank seemed much bigger than before. He was looming over me, and looked as if his weight alone could crush me like a bug, should he decide against swallowing me whole. I felt like a miniature version of myself.

“What the hell are you doing, Kenji?”

His voice wasn’t very loud, but it nearly lifted me out of my shoes. Hadn’t he gone into the love hotel with that Latin American woman? A car came down the street. Its headlights illuminated Frank’s face as he spoke again, and this time I saw something in his mouth.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” he said.

He was rolling something around on his tongue.

“Is that gum you’re chewing?”

Don’t ask me why I asked him that. I was neither responding to his question nor ignoring it. I mean, it wasn’t what you could call conversation. I don’t think I was mentally capable of conversing just then. It was more like pulling your hand away from a hot fying pan—an automatic response. No chain of reasoning. I’d simply reacted out loud to the first thing that caught my attention—that stuff in his mouth.

“Oh, this?”

Looking pleased that I’d reminded him, Frank spat the thing out into his hand and showed it to me. It was like a ring made of ivory or something, in the shape of a snake swallowing the sun.

“That woman gave it to me. She’s from Peru, but she speaks a little English. She said they find this substance in the sea, near the Incan ruins. What did she call it again? Lime sponge? Made of the bones of sponges with a high lime content, which they harvest and process and mold into these lozenges. Excellent source of calcium. Apparently the Mayans, the Toltecs, and the Aztecs all practiced cannibalism because their diet lacked calcium, but the Incans didn’t, not so much because they had llamas and guinea pigs but because they had this lime sponge. Did you know calcium relaxes you, makes you more emotionally stable? She really understood me, that woman. Wasn’t it nice of her to give me this? When I suck on it I feel totally at peace.”

Frank was beaming. He wiped the lozenge off on his sweater and held it up before my eyes.

“Frank, are you sure she gave it to you? You didn’t kill her and take it?”

I was shocked that I’d said this. It was as if a separate person were asking these questions. Both my own voice and Frank’s seemed to reverberate, as though we were inside a cave. My heart was palpitating so bad I couldn’t even feel the separate beats, and I thought my jaw was going to shake itself right off its hinges.

“I didn’t kill her.”

Frank looked off down the street. The woman with the vinyl bag was standing there, in pretty much the same spot as before. He gave her a little wave, and she waved back.

“Where’d you go?” I asked him. My voice was still saying things all by itself. “I lost sight of you both.”

Frank said they’d stood in the entrance to the hotel talking awhile, then circled around behind the building and watched me from just over there.

“Oh, is that where you went!” I said. And to my own astonishment I smiled at him. “I thought you’d gone inside the hotel with her.”

It wasn’t like deciding to say something, choosing the words, putting them together into sentences in my mind, and then speaking. It was like I’d loaned my body to someone else, and they were doing the talking for me. I wondered again if I wasn’t in some sort of trance.