In the Miso Soup (19 page)

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.”

I saw something flicker in Frank’s sunken and normally expressionless eyes. Deep inside them a tiny light came on.

“That’s where I want to go, then,” he said, the underside of his chin quivering. “Take me there, Kenji. Please.”

I told him my girlfriend knew the name of the bridge, and got out my phone to call Jun. As I was dialing I realized for the first time how very cold it was in here. My fingers were so numb I accidentally pressed the wrong numbers several times before getting it right.

“Is that you, Kenji?” Jun answered on the first ring. I pictured her sitting up with her mobile, waiting for me to call. She must be worried.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said as calmly as possible. But whether from the cold or from the tension, my voice was shaking again. At least I was aware of it this time.

“Where are you? Back in your apartment?”

“I’m still with Frank.”

“Where?”

“At his hotel.”

“The Hilton?”

“Not the Hilton, no, it’s a smaller place. A little business hotel. I don’t know the name exactly, but it’s nice.”

I had an idea. I didn’t know if it was a good one. I was cold and sleepy and emotionally exhausted, and maybe it was a terrible idea, but it was the only one I had. The mouthpiece was frosting up with my breath. Frank was staring at me, and the fluorescent lamp on the floor made his face an unearthly blue and strangely warped. At least he won’t kill me, I thought. Not till I’ve taken him to that bridge, anyway.

“Jun, we’re going out to hear Joya-no-kane tonight, me and Frank. I have to guide him there.”

“Very funny.”

“No, really. It’s what we decided.”

“Oh?”

She sounded angry. I was breaking my promise again, and any concern about me had shifted to the back burner now. But I needed her to be at that bridge. My plan, such as it was, was to have Jun keep an eye on us. She could probably even have arranged for Frank to be arrested, but that would require a long explanation about what had happened in the omiai pub. And if I told her the whole story, I was sure she’d freak out—if she even believed me, that is. Besides, the killing scene was already fading from my memory. And I didn’t want to be grilled endlessly by the police and forced to quit working as a guide, I was sure of that now.
Jun, he really is the killer, go to the police, have them come with you
—I just couldn’t bring myself to say that. It would be asking for trouble.