In the Miso Soup (9 page)

“A scary face, in other words,” Jun said.

“Yeah, but not like a yakuza scowling at you or something, not scary in that way,” I told her, thinking: Sure enough, it’s hard to explain. I imagine other people could meet Frank and not get this feeling from him at all. If he happened to stop you on the street and hold out a camera and ask you to take a photo for him, say, you might come away thinking he seemed nice—kind of down on his luck, maybe, but a well-meaning, open and friendly gaijin.

“Forget it. I can’t explain. Anyway he’s a really weird guy, but ‘anyway he’s a really weird guy’ doesn’t tell you much, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t. Besides, if you think about it, Kenji, I’ve never spent any time with foreigners, like you have. That must make a difference. I mean, how could you know what’s weird about one unless you know lots of them?”

What Jun said made sense. The Japanese aren’t exactly in tune with people from other countries. My last client, or rather the one before last, a man from Texas, had told me how astonished he was when he went to Shibuya. He said: “I thought I was in Harlem or someplace, all those kids walking around looking like black hip-hop artists, wearing their Walkmans, some had skateboards, too, but what was amazing was, here they are completely copying the fashions of African-American kids—even down to the dark suntans and cornrows—and they can’t speak a word of English! But I guess they just like black people, huh?” I don’t know what to do with questions like that. There’s no way to answer them. I told the Texan something like, Well, they think imitating black people is cool—but even I knew it wasn’t much of an answer. There are things people in this country do automatically that foreigners can’t understand no matter how hard you try to explain.

“Why don’t we go for a walk?” Jun said.

It seemed like a good idea.

As we were leaving my apartment, Jun found something stuck to the outside of my door and said: “What’s this?” It was a small, dark thing, about half the size of a postage stamp, like a torn scrap of paper. My first thought was that it was a piece of human skin. “Kenji, what is it?” she asked again.

“I don’t know,” I said, picking at it with my thumb and forefinger. “The wind must have blown it against the door.”

Touching it gave me the creeps, and it was fastened to the metal door as if with glue. I had to scrape it off with my fingernail, leaving a dark stain on the door. I tossed it away, into the bushes beyond the stairs. My heart was pounding like crazy. I felt ill but tried not to let on.

“I wonder if it was there when I came,” Jun said as we walked down the stairs. “I didn’t notice it.”

I was convinced it was human skin. And that Frank had put it there. Whose skin, I couldn’t say. The schoolgirl’s? The homeless guy’s? Or maybe he’d sliced it off some corpse that hadn’t been discovered yet. My head was reeling, and I felt sick to my stomach.

Jun stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “You’ve gone all pale again, Kenji.”

I knew I should say something, but no words came.

“Let’s go back to the room,” she said. “The wind’s too cold out here anyway.”

If it was human skin, and Frank had put it there, why did I throw it away? Because I couldn’t bear the feel of it for even a split second.

“Kenji, come on, let’s go back in.” Jun was patting my arm.

“No,” I said. “No, let’s walk.”

I kept imagining Frank lurking somewhere, watching us walking along arm in arm. Jun peered up at my face from time to time but didn’t talk. The thing had had what felt like fingerprint grooves pressed into it. It wasn’t a scrap of paper, I was sure of that. And I couldn’t imagine that this damp little thing, about the size of a fingernail, had just happened to come wafting along on the wind to plaster itself to my door. Someone had deliberately pasted it there, pushing down hard with the tip of his finger.

It must be a warning, I thought. And the only person I knew who might feel any need to warn me would be Frank. Don’t get any ideas or try anything funny, or you could end up like this, was probably what it meant. An image flashed through my mind of Frank planting that moist scrap of skin on my door and muttering: “Kenji, you’ll understand what this means, won’t you.” It was behavior that suited him perfectly.

My friends have always told me I’m a pessimist, that I tend to see the dark side of everything, and I think that may have something to do with Dad dying when I was so young. It was definitely a shock when he died. The worst possible scenario is always taking shape behind the scenes, where no one can detect it or see it coming, and then one day,
boom
, it becomes your reality. And once it’s real, it’s too late to do anything about it. That’s what I learned from my father’s death.

Jun and I neared Meguro Station, walking among the crowds. She could see I wasn’t quite myself and didn’t press me to talk. Jun’s parents divorced when she was small, so she knows what it’s like to be anxious or scared and want to be with somebody but not have to talk. I think people like Jun and me are becoming the mainstream in this country. Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can’t really deal with on your own. We’re still in the minority, so the media lump us together as “The Oversensitive Young,” or whatever the latest catchphrase is, but eventually that will change.

I tried calling the office of the magazine where I advertise my services. Maybe Frank had asked for my address.

“Yokoyama-san?”

“Kenji! You still working?”

Yokoyama-san published the magazine more or less on his own, and though it was the day before New Year’s Eve, he was hard at it now. In fact he often sleeps in his office and works most Sundays and national holidays. He always says he’s happiest when he’s listening to old-time jazz and laying out the magazine on his Mac.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “Gaijin don’t think of New Year’s the way we do, as you know.”

“And that’s all to their credit if you ask me. Hey—did the police contact you?”

My heart stopped for a second. It turned out not to be about Frank, though.

“Did something happen?”

“You knew I had a homepage, right? On the internet?”

“Of course. You’re always bragging about having designed it yourself.”

“I am? Well, anyway, the police sent me a warning.”

“A warning? What for?”

“I had a few pictures on there. Nothing hardcore, but nudes, of course. After all, it’s a magazine for foreigners about the Japanese sex industry. But the police advised me to ‘practice self-restraint.’ In other words, clean it up or expect some heat. Hey, you could see some pubic hair, it’s true, but every magazine you pick up these days shows at least that much, so it’s obvious they just want to make an example of me. I was afraid since your ad’s in there they might have contacted you too.”

“They haven’t.”

“Good. If they do call you, just say you don’t know anything.”

“I will. By the way,” I said, “you didn’t get any calls from a client of mine, did you?”

Even if Frank had called, I was pretty sure Yokoyama-san wouldn’t have given him my address.

“Oh yeah, I did,” he said.

My heart started thumping. I was using my mobile, standing beneath the sign of a cake shop near Meguro Station with my back to the wind. Jun was holding my hand and watching a live demonstration in the shop window of how to decorate a cake Japanese New Year–style. Every now and then she shot me a worried look.

“You did? Who was it?”

“What did he say his name was again? John, James, one of those names you hear all the time. He wanted your bank account number. I didn’t give it to him, of course, but . . . It was a pretty strange call, now that you mention it.”

“Strange? In what way? Was he calling from here in Tokyo?”

“That’s the thing, he said he was calling from . . . where was it, Missouri? Kansas, maybe. Anyway, somewhere in America. He calls me last night in the middle of the night. Closer to dawn, really. Pretty inconsiderate of the guy, I thought, or just plain ignorant. I’m sure he said one of those Midwestern states, so do the math—over there it’s December 29, Sunday afternoon. Who’s going to call from America on Sunday afternoon to ask me for your account number? Strange, right? Over there they all go to church on Sunday, don’t they? Or to the movies or whatever, but who’d make an international call to say I forgot to pay my guide, give me his bank account number? If it was the other way around I’d understand, if he was saying you owed
him
money, I could see that—but to tell me he wants to pay
you
? Besides, you’re the one he should be calling, right? So I asked him, I said, ‘Did you call Kenji?’”

“And?”

“He said you didn’t answer. Any idea who it was?”

“Well, for starters, I always insist on cash or traveler’s checks. I’m not about to trust people to wire me my fee from overseas.”

“Of course not. Ask any hustler her golden rule—it’s got to be cash on the—Wait, that didn’t sound right. I’m not saying you’re—”

“What was he like? His voice and everything.”

“His voice. Well, the first thing that seemed odd to me was that he sounded so close. I know the international lines are pretty good these days, but still, there was no static or delay or anything. . . . His voice? I don’t really remember. It was the type you don’t remember, a voice you might hear anywhere, not husky or deep or high-pitched or anything. Pretty average way of speaking too. Not the most beautiful English but polite enough. That’s about all I can tell you. Is there a problem?”

“Not really.” I knew better than to think I could explain.

“The last thing he said was really strange, something about magic.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard this right.

“Sorry?”

“I think he realized I was getting suspicious. This was the middle of the night, after all. I mean, look, I’m a man who likes foreigners. Normally I’d bend over backward to help, but to have this guy wake me up before dawn and mutter this crazy stuff in my ear, I mean, come on. I may have been a little gruff when I said did you call Kenji, but then he starts telling me what a great guy you were and what a wonderful job you did, and how well he and you got along and how you hung out together like friends, and I just thought, this is getting weirder and weirder. I mean, would an American telephone somebody he’s never met from his living room or whatever in Kansas or Missouri on Sunday afternoon to say that the tour guide who introduced him to women at sex clubs in Tokyo was a great guy? Normally, I mean.”

I had a vision of Frank, his scrap of human flesh at the ready, calling Yokoyama-san from his hotel room before dawn and saying: Kenji was a wonderful fellow, please tell me his bank account number. That was exactly the sort of bizarre behavior he was made for. As opposed to, say, giving himself a Mohawk, painting his body, and running naked through the streets.

“How do you know it was Frank?” Jun asked me. We were sitting at a table in the little “Café Corner” of the cake shop. After talking to Yokoyama-san I’d been standing there on the sidewalk stunned till she grabbed my arm and dragged me inside, saying I was pale as a ghost, let’s get some hot coffee. We both had cappuccinos, which were supposed to be special in this place, but I couldn’t taste mine. It was as if I had some sort of film covering my tongue and gums and throat. My heart was pounding and my mind was confused. I told her what Yokoyama-san had said.

“Of course, there’s no proof it was Frank,” I added unconvincingly.

“You think he stuck that thing on your door, too, don’t you?”

Sort of, I said. I hadn’t told her what I thought the “thing” was. Jun was too important to me. I didn’t want to share with her something as insane and intense and evil as what I was imagining. I wanted to handle it on my own, if possible. Spilling my guts to her about this would do nothing to brighten her life, that was for sure. But I should have known there was no way to hide anything from a sixteen-year-old girl. Sixteen-year-old girls are probably the most sensitive and perceptive group of people in this entire country.

“That thing was funny,” Jun said in an oddly childlike tone of voice. Like a nursery school kid seeing a corpse on the steps and telling her teacher: There’s a man sleeping outside!

“It looked like papyrus, didn’t it?” she said.

“Ah. ‘The fruit that tastes like first love,’ as they say in the ads?”

“Kenji.”

“What?”

“Normally I like your little puns, but now’s not the time.”

I hadn’t meant it as a joke. I’d honestly mistaken “papyrus” for “papaya.” I’m not proud to admit it, but that’s how out of it I was.

“Did it have blood on it or something, that thing? It was all dark and nasty-looking. Was that blood?”

“I think so,” I confessed, throwing in the sponge. I didn’t have the energy left to lie. “I think it was a piece of someone’s skin.”

“What? Why would he do that?”

“As a warning. Warning me not to talk to the police or whatever.”

My mobile rang in my jacket pocket. Dark forebodings always come true. It was Frank.

“Hi, Kenji!” in this super-cheerful voice. “How you feeling?”

He seemed to be at a pay phone, and it sounded like the words were coming not out of his mouth but straight through his skull from his brain. On our table was a little clipboard with a sign:
Please refrain from using your mobile phone in the Café Corner
. Jun pointed at it and gestured that I should go outside, but a cute young waitress who’d been rearranging cakes in the window said it was all right, since there weren’t any other customers right now. Jun thanked her. This little cake shop was a favorite of Jun’s, and apparently she and the waitress had struck up an acquaintance. It was unnerving to hear Frank talk as I watched Jun and the waitress interacting. His voice had the power to transform an everyday little scene like this into something else entirely. I felt like I was being sucked through the gap between what Frank’s voice symbolized and what Jun and the waitress symbolized, down into the belly of some monster.

“I’m fine,” I told him, struggling to keep my voice calm. Don’t let on, I told myself. Act like you know nothing. Let him think you’re just some dimwitted nightlife guide.