by Ryu Murakami
“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.<
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“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.
I managed to really tag it on my first official swing, smashing a line drive up the middle, and heard Frank behind me go: “Whoa.” But the ball hit the netting about two meters below the home run sign. I connected well with the next one too, but it was even lower and banged against the steel mesh protecting the pitching machines. Every time I told myself to keep my eye on the ball, it conjured up a picture of Dad. I don’t remember him playing with me that much—he was out of town more often than not, and ended up spending most of his time in Malaysia, where he was helping build a big bridge. But even now I often dream that I’m playing catch with him.
On the third pitch I lined one that would have been good for extra bases, right down the third-base line and nowhere near the home run banner. On the fourth and fifth I hit grounders. After about ten of my twenty pitches, I was so focused on the ball that I’d forgotten all about Frank, but my head was full of my father. My mother seems to have considered him something of a playboy, but that sort of thing doesn’t matter to you when you’re a kid. “I have two regrets,” Dad said when he was dying of lung disease: “Not seeing that bridge completed, and not teaching Kenji how to swim.” Apparently when I was born he told himself that though he’d probably be too busy to play with his son much, at the very least he’d teach me the fundamentals of baseball and swimming. I sometimes think my desire to go to America may have a lot to do with him. He always looked so happy, after having come home for a brief stay, to be heading back to Malaysia. My mother says it was because he had a “local floozy” there, but I don’t think that could have been the only reason. Maybe he did have a woman, and I know he loved his work, but I also think there was something about Malaysia itself that excited him. It was sad when he left, of course, but my father was never more appealing to me than when he was saying “See ya!” and walking off with a suitcase in his hand. I’ve always thought that one of these days I’d like to fly off somewhere like that, with just a casual “See ya!”
I swung up from my heels on the fourteenth pitch, got under the ball, and sent it up at a good angle. Frank shouted “No!” and I shouted “Go!” but the ball ended up in the netting a good meter below the target. From there on it was all downhill. My anxiety over the prospect of losing my entire evening’s wages destroyed my form, making me swing for the sky, and the best I could do on the remaining pitches was some useless grounders. When, on the seventeenth pitch, I whiffed again, I heard Frank stifle a laugh, and that made me lose my cool entirely. None of the last three balls even made it into fair territory.
“Boy, that was close! I thought I was done for, several times.”
Frank was feigning sympathy for me. I felt I needed to do something. There was no way I could accept having to work for this clown for free, even for one night. I came out of the cage, and before putting my jacket back on I held the bat out to him and said: “Your turn, Frank.”
Frank didn’t take the bat. He played dumb and said: “Whaddaya mean?”
“Your turn to try. Same bet.”
“Wait a minute, nobody said anything about that.”
“You used to play baseball, right? I already hit. Now you’re up.”
“Like I said before, I’m tired. Much too tired to swing a bat.”
I braced myself.
“You’re a liar,” I said.
Sure enough
, this summoned up the Face. Little blue and red capillaries appeared on his cheeks, the light went out of his pupils, and the corners of his eyes and nose and lips began to quiver. This was the first time I’d seen the Face head-on and close up, so close I could almost feel Frank’s breath on me. He looked like he was either very, very angry or very, very frightened.
“What are you talking about?” he said, peering at me with those lightless eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re calling me a liar? Why? When have I ever lied to you?”
I looked down at my shoes. I didn’t want to look at the Face. Frank seemed to be trying to arrange it into a sad, hurt expression, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight. I felt pathetic just being associated with a face like that.
“You said you used to play baseball when you were little. You told me that, in the waiting room at the peep show. You said you and your brothers didn’t have anything else to do so you played baseball all the time.”
“So how does that make me a liar?”
“For anybody who’s played it as a child, baseball is a sacred thing. Right?”
“I don’t get you.”
“It’s sacred, more important than anything.”
“Okay, Kenji, hold on a minute. I think I’m beginning to see. I guess you’re saying that if what I said in the waiting room is true, then I should take a turn at the plate?”