In the Miso Soup (8 page)

“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.”

The word “America” brought me back to Frank. When we’d reached his hotel, he turned to me to say one last thing.

“I’ve been told I’m a very unusual case,” he said. “Normally you stop making new brain cells after a certain age, whereas the liver for example—or was it the stomach?—one of them makes millions of new cells every day, same with the skin, but the brain, after you’ve reached adulthood, all it does is lose cells. My doctor, however, says that in my case the brain may be creating new cells to replace the part that was cut out, which would mean that inside my head I have old cells and new ones mixing together. I think that’s why my memory gets so hazy sometimes, and my motor functions get all fouled up. I mean, that could explain it, don’t you think, Kenji?”

On TV they took a break from the schoolgirl murder and moved on to some news flashes. The first headline nearly made me spit out my last mouthful of noodles:
HOMELESS MAN FOUND TORCHED TO DEATH
.

“In other news, an unidentified body, burned beyond recognition, was found in a pay toilet in Shinjuku Central Park this morning. Discovered by city sanitation workers, the victim appeared to have been doused with a flammable substance and set on fire. The intensity of the fire was such that the concrete inner walls of the restroom were scorched and blackened, according to police. They are investigating the incident as a possible homicide. From the victim’s presumed belongings, which were piled in old shopping bags outside the restroom, he is believed to have been one of the homeless men who inhabit the park. Next, reporting from just outside the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, where the hostage crisis continues . . .”

The noodles in my mouth had turned to yarn. It was as if Frank’s face had suddenly loomed up before my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Jun leaned forward and peered at me.

I swallowed with effort, then stood up, got a bottle of mineral water from the fridge, and took a drink. I felt sick to my stomach.

“You’re all pale.”

Jun came over next to me and rubbed my back. I could feel her soft, girlish hand through my sweater. Imagine, I thought. Imagine not even being able to feel something like this.

“That gaijin again?”

“His name’s Frank.”

“Right. Frank. It’s so common it’s hard to remember.”

“Yeah, well, it may not even be his real name.”

“You think it’s a whatchamacallit? An alias?”

I told her all the things Frank had said about homeless people the night before.

“But, wait a minute,” Jun said when I was done. “If the gaijin—sorry—if Frank says there might be people who would see a smelly homeless man and want to cuddle up to him but look at a baby and want to kill it . . .”

“When it comes to this guy, it’s not about making sense. I get the feeling you can’t believe anything he says anyway—except for the hateful stuff.”

“So you think he killed the homeless man?”

It was hard to explain why, exactly. I had no proof, and Jun had never met Frank. You couldn’t understand what was so disturbing about him without meeting him.

“Kenji, why not cancel the job?”

Cancel on Frank? The thought literally gave me goosebumps.

“I can’t do that,” I said.

“Why? You think he might kill you?”

Jun was really beginning to worry. She could sense how scared I was. She probably pictured Frank as the sort of psychopath Mafia killer you see in movies. But Frank was no hit man. Hit men murder people for a fee. If Frank was a murderer, I was pretty sure he wasn’t just in it for the money.

“I doubt if I can explain this very well. I can’t prove he’s done anything, and normally it wouldn’t even occur to me that he might have. The homeless guy who got killed—I don’t know that he’s the same guy we saw at the batting center. And I don’t see any point in going back there to check, because I have a feeling that to somebody like Frank, one bum would be as good as another.”

“I’m not really following you.”

“I know,” I sighed. “I think I’m starting to lose it.”

“Did the homeless man at the batting center do something to Frank?”

“Nothing, no.”

“So what exactly makes you think Frank had something to do with killing him?”

“It’s crazy, I know. I’m sure it’s just paranoia. But if you were to meet him . . . You said you wanted to see a photo of him, but I don’t think a photo would tell you that much. How can I put this? Listen, when I was in high school, we had a lot of badasses around—you probably do too, right? In your school? Kids who seem to go out of their way to cause trouble and make people hate them?”

“I don’t know. Nobody that bad, I don’t think.”

Probably not, now that she mentioned it. Jun goes to a fairly respectable private high for girls, where there probably aren’t many really hard cases. Or, then again, maybe the type who gets off on being a big pain in the ass for everyone else is slowly dying out.

“Well, anyway, that’s the sort of negative energy I sense about Frank, only taken to the ultimate extreme. The ultimate in malevolence.”

“Malevolence.”

“Yeah. Everybody has a little of that in them. I know I do, and to some extent even . . . Well, maybe not you, Jun. You’re too sweet.”

“Never mind about me. Try to explain this better. You’re the one who’s so good at explaining things.”

“Okay. Look. I had a friend who was like that—hated by everybody. The teachers had long since given up on him, and he ended up stabbing the headmaster with an X-Acto knife and getting expelled. But, see, he had a very troubled home life, this guy, not that he talked about it much, but once I went to his house. His mother gave me this super-polite welcome, bowing and everything, and the house, the house was huge and the guy had his own room, way bigger than anything I ever had, and all the latest computer stuff, everything you could think of, and I remember being really envious, except that something was weird about the atmosphere of the place. I couldn’t say exactly what, but something was weird about it. So his mother brings us tea and cookies and says something like ‘Our son’s told us so much about you’ or whatever, and my friend goes, ‘Never mind that, get the hell out of here,’ and she’s like ‘Well, please do make yourself at home’ and leaves the room bowing again. I’m like, ‘Thanks,’ you know, watching her close the door, and my friend looks at me and goes, ‘Bitch used to whip me with a hose.’ No particular expression on his face or anything, just ‘You know those extension pipes on vacuum cleaners? She used to hit me with one’ and ‘Burned me with a lighter too.’ He showed me the burn scars on his arms, and he goes, ‘I’ve got a little brother, but she never laid a finger on him.’ So, anyway, later on we started playing this computer game that’d just come out, and after a while I had to go to the bathroom, so we pause the game and I go out into the hallway, and his mother is standing there in the shadows. She’s staring at me with this spaced-out look on her face and then suddenly she goes, ‘Oh, the lavatory? It’s down at the end,’ or whatever, and titters in this high-pitched voice, a voice like, I don’t know how to describe it, like a needle hitting a nerve. . . . This friend, say we’d go to a game center or something? And if there’d be some friction with dudes from another school, if one of them said something—I mean anything at all, any little thing, like, Come on, you’ve been on that machine for two hours, let somebody else have a turn—my friend’s face would undergo this transformation. He’d get this look like, you know, there’s no telling what the son of a bitch might do. Like he was no longer in control of himself. Well, Frank has that same face times ten. Like he’s just completely gone.”