In the Miso Soup (18 page)

“Frank, did you just hypnotize me?”

“No,” he said, looking puzzled.

I was honestly afraid I was losing my mind. Blathering away without showing any other evidence of brain activity. I had no will or intention to speak, but the words kept popping out of my mouth. The trembling in my jaw was getting more severe, and trying to stop it just made it worse. My teeth began to chatter like castanets.

“You all right, Kenji?” Frank said and peered at my face. “Your eyes look funny, and you’re shivering. Are you sick? Kenji, it’s me, Frank! Do you know who I am?”

I laughed and said in a strangely high-pitched voice: “Frank, that sounds funny coming from you!” The words echoed in my skull, and I couldn’t stop laughing for a while. Now I know I’m going mad, I thought. My brain was in utter chaos, with different parts of it seeming to operate independently. One part was searching furiously for words. It didn’t seem to matter what the words were as long as they kept turning up, and any random memory or thought that happened along was automatically verbalized. It was as if my speech function was the only thing that still worked, and it had seized the opportunity to take control. If a dog passed by right now I’d probably say:
Oh, look, a dog
. Then I’d probably remember my boyhood pooch and tell Frank:
I had a dog when I was small
.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked him. Exactly like a little kid, blurting out the first thing that occurred to me. But to my amazement I got some feeling back in my jaw when I said this.

“I was going to,” he told me, “but I decided against it.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. I bowed my head, not wanting Frank to see. As my teardrops fell to the dry pavement, I thought: It was only fear. It was fear that had befuddled my mind. At the sudden reappearance of Frank, I’d just lost it. All this turmoil was caused by fear. A fear so powerful I didn’t even recognize it for what it was. It had filled my entire body and brain, and instead of screaming I’d begun nattering away, randomly and involuntarily. Just because Frank said he’d decided against killing me didn’t mean he wouldn’t, of course, but even if it was a lie it relieved the fear for a moment. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my overcoat. I wanted to say:
Really? You really won’t kill me or anything?
But I didn’t. I reminded myself he could always change his mind. The police box was behind Frank. If I ran for it now, I knew he could grab me and snuff me out before I took two steps. Mr. Children had had his neck broken in a heartbeat. Besides, my kneecaps were still bouncing around. I couldn’t have run if I tried.

Frank threw an arm around my shoulders and off we went, with him all but carrying me. He looked back once at the Latin American prostitute, and she waved again.

“What a swell lady she was,” Frank sighed, as if remembering an old friend.

The next thing I knew we were strolling past the glass-walled police box, bathed in the pharmacy’s gaudy lights. At the entrance were traditional New Year’s decorations of pine sprigs and bamboo and woven straw and cloth, which looked to me like symbols of everything imbecilic in this world. Inside, three policemen drank steaming cups of tea and talked and laughed. Meanwhile, I thought, a mass murderer fresh from the kill is walking right past you. The cops didn’t know anything. Not that they should or could have. The security shutter was closed at the omiai pub, and no one who happened by would think twice about that. Even if Noriko’s hypnosis wore off and she went back to the place, she’d probably just assume they’d decided to close early for one reason or another. It’s not as if anyone would suspect that the place was littered with corpses. It might be days before anybody discovered or reported anything. Frank turned his poker face toward the police box as we passed and asked me again why I didn’t go to the cops. I told him I was just going to when he appeared. Aha, said Frank, popping the lozenge back in his mouth. Everything was very strange. It was as if the universe had cracked open and time had got scrambled. As if the Great Omiai Pub Massacre had happened a decade ago and everyone but me had long since forgotten about it.

“Is it because you think of me as a friend?” Frank asked solemnly after looking back a couple of times at the police box receding behind us. “Is that why you didn’t report me?”

“No,” I said truthfully. “I don’t really know why I didn’t go.”

“It’s a citizen’s duty to report any crime he witnesses. Did you think I’d kill you if you did?”

“No. I thought you’d gone into the hotel. I didn’t realize you were watching me.”

“Oh,” Frank said, then muttered: “It’s a good thing we didn’t miss each other.”

Miss each other? I thought. How can I miss you when you won’t go away?

“I wanted to test you,” he said. “Whether you really considered me a friend or not. That’s why I left you alone by the police box and watched from nearby. I thought if I saw you going toward it all I had to do was kill you. You see, in my book nobody reports their own friends to the cops, and anybody who does deserves to die. But what do you think, Kenji? You think it’s okay to rat on your friends?”

I don’t really know, I was going to say, when my mobile rang. A truck was approaching, and it was noisy on the street, so I huddled against a wall, cradling the phone in both hands, and turned it on. It was Jun.

“Kenji?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I meant to call earlier, but I was on my way home. Sorry.”

“That’s all right, don’t worry about it.”

“Are you with Frank?”

“That’s right, still in Kabuki-cho. It’s good you decided to go back home.”

“I was a little worried. I mean, when I called earlier. You said something in English about the police and then hung up before I could say anything. And before that, when you called me, Frank got on the line and . . . What was going on, was he drunk?”

“Drunk, yeah.”

“You said something about going to the police if you didn’t answer, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to tell them. ‘There’s this gaijin named Frank, and my boyfriend’s with him, and he seems like a dangerous guy’—I mean, it’s hard to imagine they’d take me seriously.”

“You’re right, they wouldn’t have.”

“Kenji?”

“What?”

“Are you really okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then: “Kenji, your voice is shaking.”

Frank was watching me with his usual blank, cowlike expression. “I’ll call again later,” Jun said. “Or you call me. I have my mobile, and I’ll be waiting up to hear from you.”

“Okay,” I said and turned off the phone, wondering if my voice had really been shaking just now. I thought I had it under control. Apparently I wasn’t even in touch with what was going on with myself, I needed someone else to tell me. I wished I had someone who was absolutely rock-steady to compare myself with—someone I liked and trusted, if possible. To have them tell me that I was acting a little weird or that I seemed perfectly fine or whatever. It was strange talking even briefly to Jun because it gave me a glimpse of who I used to be in the old days, before the Great Omiai Pub Massacre. When I turned off the phone and looked at Frank, though, I felt as if I were being dragged right back into the hole I’d just crawled out of. I’d experienced the sunlit world for a minute, and now I was back in my prison cell.

“Is she at your apartment?” Frank asked as we started walking again. No, she went home, I told him, and he went:
Hmm
. No intonation—he might have been signaling relief or disappointment. But with Frank you had to expect your worst premonitions to come true. I was now positive that he knew where my apartment was, and that he was the one who’d plastered that scrap of skin on my door. Jun’s house was in Takaido, though, and I doubted he could have found out the address. He can’t get to her, I thought.

“That Peruvian woman has been in Japan for three years,” Frank said as we ambled along. “She’s had sex with almost five hundred men in that time, about four hundred and fifty Japanese, and some Iranians and Chinese. She’s Catholic, you know, but she’s decided that Jesus loses his power in this country, and I can kind of understand what she means. I can’t explain it very well but I think I understand. And last year at this time she had an amazing experience that proved to be her salvation. Kenji—is it true that they’ll ring the salvation bells all over Japan tomorrow night?”

At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. The bells, he said—the gongs.

“She had a lot of bad experiences. I don’t mean she was beaten or assaulted or anything, but apparently for her the hardest part about living here was all the group pressure, and the fact that people don’t understand about personal space. The Japanese surround you in groups and talk about you behind your back in groups and don’t think anything of it. They don’t think about the pressure they’re putting on you, and it’s no use complaining to them because they don’t even know what you’re talking about. If they were openly hostile you could counterattack, but it’s not like that, and she doesn’t know how to deal with it. Like this one thing that happened when she’d been in Japan about six months and was finally picking up a little of the language. She was walking across a vacant lot surrounded by little factories and warehouses, and some kids were playing soccer there. Soccer’s big in Peru, of course, and when she was a little girl in the slums near Lima they used to play with tin cans and rolled-up newspapers and things because they couldn’t afford a ball. So watching these kids made her happy, it brought back good memories, and when the ball came rolling over toward her she tried to kick it back to them. But she was wearing sandals and the ball veered off to one side and landed in a ditch full of some kind of factory waste, and it got covered with this greasy gunk and smelled terrible, so she fished it out and apologized to the kids and was about to leave when they said: ‘Hold on a minute.’ They surrounded her, and told her she had to buy them a new ball, because this one was filthy and smelly and they couldn’t use it anymore, but she couldn’t even get her mind around that, because where she grew up everybody’s so poor the idea of compensation didn’t even exist, and she ended up breaking down in tears right there in front of the kids. She knows that women who come here to peddle sex aren’t exactly welcome, but she realizes that would probably be true in most countries, and she’s tough enough to put up with being sneered at or treated badly just for doing what she has to do, but she couldn’t understand these kids demanding she buy them a new ball. There are sixteen people in her family and she came to Japan to work so she can rent them a small apartment in Peru, and she can’t return until she’s saved a certain amount of money, but at this rate she thought she’d never get ahead at all, and she didn’t know who to turn to. This was her first time abroad, and she decided that since it’s a foreign country they must have a different god and that maybe the god the Catholics pray to loses his power here because the customs are different, not to mention the land itself.”

As Frank talked, we had slowly made our way past the west exit of Seibu Shinjuku Station through the canyon of skyscrapers and on toward Yoyogi. Now we turned down a narrow street with small wooden apartment buildings on either side. There wouldn’t be any hotels in this area. The street was dark, and the buildings were crammed so close together that you couldn’t see the skyline beyond them. The skyscrapers of West Shinjuku were still nearby but completely blocked from view, and above us the sky was flat, like a strip of dark blue paper. I walked at Frank’s side, but he was leading the way. Walking helped calm my mind a little, and I found the story of the Peruvian prostitute oddly gripping. It was a subject close to my own heart, and it was also the first time I’d heard Frank speak with so much composure, or say anything that felt real and true.

Was it really because of Jun that he didn’t kill me? Now that I thought about it, it couldn’t have that much to do with her. All Jun knew about him was that he called himself Frank and claimed to be an American. Frank surely wasn’t his real name, and anyway there must be hundreds of foreigners named Frank in Tokyo alone. Just as Jun had said, the police couldn’t really do anything even if she did go to them. They had no photos of him, and no one knew his passport number or even if he was really American. The only people who could testify that he was ever in the omiai pub were dead except for me and Noriko, and I was one hundred percent sure Noriko wouldn’t go to the cops. In other words, there was nothing to stop Frank from killing me tonight and taking a plane back home from Narita tomorrow. He could have killed me any time he wanted to, but he didn’t.

“She thinks the Japanese need to do some deep thinking about their own gods, and she’s right.”

Who would have guessed you’d find a neighborhood like this, full of old wooden apartment buildings, pretty much smack dab in the middle of Tokyo and only about a fifteen-minute walk from Kabuki-cho? Not me. Amid the tenements were a few ancient, one-story wooden houses, like the kind you see in samurai dramas, so small I almost wondered if they weren’t scale models. They had little sliding doors you couldn’t have used without stooping, and tiny pebble-covered gardens. Some of the gardens had pint-sized, zinc-lined ponds, their surfaces rippling not with goldfish or carp but schools of slimy little pink things. Over the roofs of these low-slung houses you could make out the highrise buildings of the new city center in Shinjuku. Frank marched along at a steady pace, as if he knew exactly where he was going, and turned down a street that might or might not have been wide enough for a single compact car to pass. He kept going on about the Peruvian street-walker.

“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?”