In the Miso Soup (6 page)

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!”

For some reason this really pissed me off. I didn’t want to hear shit like that from someone like him.

“Watch
that
fellow.” Frank rolled his eyes toward the guy in training wear, two cages up. “He’s banging the heck out of ’em.”

This was true. The guy was nailing almost every pitch—at 120 kph—and lining them all toward center. His bat speed wasn’t something you see every day. I figured him for a pro of sorts, maybe employed as a ringer for a team in the early morning leagues. I’d heard you could find such specimens in Kabuki-cho: guys who, after starring on high-school or corporate teams, get into trouble with women or gambling or drugs and, not having any other way to make money, become paid secret weapons in the amateur leagues. They’re on a piecework basis—¥2000 for a home run, ¥500 for a hit, or what-ever—so they need to stay in practice.

“I’ve been watching you this whole time, Kenji. You haven’t hit the ball cleanly even once yet, and these pitches are a lot slower than his are.”

“I know that,” I said, a little more loudly than necessary. I took a huge swing at the next ball and missed. Frank groaned and shook his head.

“Oh my God, what was that? And such an easy pitch!”

That did it. I stepped away and took a few practice swings, trying to focus. Frank was back there muttering that it must be a curse, that even God had abandoned me, or something along those lines.

“Will you be quiet, please!” I shouted. “How am I supposed to concentrate with you talking like that?”

Frank sighed and shook his head again.

“Kenji, do you know the story about Jack Nicklaus? Very famous story. Jack had a long putt to decide some major tournament, you see, and he was standing over the ball concentrating so hard that he didn’t even notice it when the wind blew his hat off. Now
that’s
concentration.”

“Jack who?” I said. “Never heard of him. Just be quiet, all right? If you’ll just be quiet, I’ll hit that home run sign for you.”

“Hmph,” Frank snorted. Then, nodding slowly, his face a blank mask, he said: “Wanna bet?”

The way he said it really got to me. Maybe Frank pulled this kind of stunt all the time, I thought. Maybe all the needling had been calculated to lead up to that final line:
Hmph. Wanna bet?
Looking at that poker face of his I found myself thinking he just might be the sort of scumbag who would stoop to something like that. But it was already too late.

“Fine with me.”

I was saying these words before I even realized it. That cool, clear judgment I pride myself on, so rare in a guy my age, got clouded by the rage Frank’s droopy, no-expression face triggered in me.

“Here’s what we’ll do, Kenji,” he said. “You get twenty balls, and if you hit even one home run out of the twenty, you win and I’ll pay you double your fee for tonight. But if you don’t hit a home run, I win and I don’t owe you anything.”

You’re on, I almost said, but stopped myself.

“Frank, that’s not fair.”

“Why not?”

“If you win, all my work this evening adds up to nothing. Zero. You don’t have a zero option, which means I’m risking more than you.”

“So how do you want it?”

“If you win you only have to pay half the fee, and if I win you pay double the fee. That’s logical, right?”

“Then if you win I pay you the ¥20,000 basic rate plus the ¥20,000 for two hours extra, that’s ¥40,000 times two, total of ¥80,000?”

That’s right, I said, a little taken aback that he’d remembered the payment system so accurately. He’s an American all right, I thought. Americans never forget the original agreement. No matter how drunk they get or how many naked ladies they get excited about, they always remember.

“Talk about not fair—that means if you win you’re ahead ¥40,000 but if I win I’m only ahead ¥20,000.” He stared into my eyes for a beat, then said: “You’re a cheapskate.”

I don’t know if this was meant as a challenge to sucker me in or what, but it worked.

“All right, the original conditions you stated,” I said, and Frank twisted his lips into a smile.

“I’ll pay for this one, Kenji,” he said. He took a coin purse from the inner breast pocket of his jacket and picked out three ¥100 coins. His fingernails were longish and jagged and not overly clean. I took the coins, thinking: If he had change, why didn’t he pull it out at the photo booth?

“How many balls do you get for ¥300?”

“Thirty,” I said.

“All right, then, the first ten will be just for practice, and the bet starts with ball number eleven.”

I was convinced that Frank had planned all this. It was becoming obvious what a crafty bastard he was. Maybe he’d been watching the probably semipro guy two cages down smashing them consistenty toward center and still never hitting the home run banner. When I first came up to Tokyo from Shizuoka I went to a prep school for about four months and had a part-time job delivering packages. Often, though, when the weather was nice and I had some time off, I’d go to a batting center alongside the Tama River, just a couple of train stops from my apartment. They had a home run sign, too, and if you hit it you’d win a prize—your choice of a teddy bear or vouchers for beer, as I recall. One day I hit more than a hundred balls, but I never did hit that sign, and only once did I ever see anyone else hit it. The sign, about the size of a small surfboard, was hung maybe fifteen meters up the netting and twenty meters from the batting box, and there was no way you could hit it with a line drive. The one ball I saw graze the sign at Tama River for a teddy bear was a blooping pop fly hit by some housewife.

The pitching machine growled to life. I went through the first ten practice balls in what seemed like no time. I was trying to keep my shoulders and arms relaxed and to concentrate on hitting the ball cleanly. That’s what Dad used to tell me when he first taught me how to play baseball, when I was seven or eight. My father helped design machinery for public works projects and was sent overseas a lot, mostly to Southeast Asia. His health wasn’t that great, but he enjoyed both watching and playing sports. Keep your eye on the ball—that’s what he kept telling me when he’d bought me my first mitt and took me outside to play catch.