(2005) In the Miso Soup

by Ryu Murakami

  “I want sex, Kenji, sex. I want to drink some beer here to get in a good mood and then go to a club where I can get sexually aroused.”

  I had no way of knowing if my crack about the batting center had made any impression or not. In my jacket pocket was a little spray-can of mace. I’d stopped in Shibuya to buy it after parting company with Jun. Jun had suggested a stun gun, but I was afraid that if worse came to worst, I could be wiped out before getting the damn thing switched on, and keeping it switched on would drain the battery. Stun guns might be useful for attacking people, but they’re not that well suited for self-defense. The safest thing would be just to get away from Frank, of course. Find him a Latin American streetwalker or a hostess from a Chinese club and send them off to a love hotel for a few hours.

  “You want to buy a woman?” I asked.

  “Bingo,” he said. “But it’s too early yet.”

  “There may not be many hookers out tonight, though, just two days before New Year’s. Most Japanese companies are already on holiday and the businessmen have gone home. The hookers may have decided to take some time off too.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ve done my research.”

  “Your what?”

  “Research. After dinner I took a walk, and I questioned some fellows who were handing out fliers. You remember last night, those black fellows handing out fliers? They gave me a lot of ideas, and then I asked this woman who was standing around on the street who didn’t speak much English, and she said most of the girls were working tonight. She said they came to Japan to make money, not celebrate New Year’s.”

  “You did that all on your own, Frank? Maybe you don’t need me.”

  How wonderful it would be, I thought, if he decided he didn’t need my services and went off on his own to find a woman.

  “Don’t be silly, Kenji. You’re more than just a guide to me now, you’re my friend. You’re not offended that I checked things out on my own, are you? I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings or anything. Are you upset with me?”

  No, no, not at all, I told him, forcing a smile. Frank was definitely different tonight. His voice was louder and more confident, and he came across as outgoing and energetic. Raring to go.

  “You seem in good spirits this evening,” I said. ”Did you sleep well last night?”

  Frank shook his head. “Just an hour or so.”

  “You only slept one hour?”

  “But that doesn’t bother me. When my brain cells are regenerating big-time like this I don’t need much sleep. Sleep is mainly for undoing the knots of stress, did you know that? It’s for resting the brain, not the body. When your body’s tired, all you really have to do to recuperate is lie down. But if someone’s stressed out and doesn’t sleep for a long time they can turn savage, do things you’d never imagine people could do.”

  A girl I knew came into the bar. She was alone, and I waved her over.

  Noriko was a tout for what they call an “omiai pub.” “Omiai” means “match-making,” and an omiai pub is a place where women are approached on the street and invited to come drink and sing karaoke for free. Male customers pay to come in and try to hook up with them.

  “Well, if it isn’t Kenji,” Noriko said, walking unsteadily toward us. I introduced her to Frank.

  “Noriko’s an expert on the clubs around here. She’ll tell us a good place to go.”

  In Japanese I told her Frank was a client of mine. Noriko had no English. She was about twenty, a dyed-in-the-wool j.d. who’d probably spent more time in reform schools than any other kind. I hadn’t heard this from her, mind you—it was the sort of common knowledge you tend to pick up in a place like Kabuki-cho. Like all genuine j.d. girls, Noriko never talked about her own past, no matter how drunk she got. But just talking to her made you realize the term “juvenile delinquent” still meant something.

  With the arrival of Noriko between us, Frank got one of those incomprehensible looks on his face. His eyes seemed to flicker with something that might have been anger or discomfort or hopelessness. Noriko glanced at him but immediately looked away. Women like her have an unfailing instinct for where not to look.

  “Come to think of it, I still don’t know your last name, Frank,” I said as I paid for Noriko’s drink. She’d ordered a Wild Turkey and soda.

  Frank was looking more and more sullen by the moment. “Last name?” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “Kenji,” Noriko said, edging away, “are you sure I’m not in the way here?”

  I gave her a pleading look and urged her just to stay for a while.

  “Masorueda,” said Frank.

  At first I thought he’d said something in Japanese, like Maa, sore da. Eh? I said, and he pronounced it slowly—MA-SO-RU-E-DA. I’ve had close to two hundred foreign clients, but I’ve never heard a last name like that. Masoruedasan, I told Noriko.

  “I thought his name was Frank,” she said, pulling a pack of Marlboro reds from the pocket of her hooded duffel coat. She took a big slug of Wild Turkey and lit a cigarette.

  “Frank is his first name, like Kenji or Noriko.”

  “I know that much. Like Whitney’s the first name and Houston the family name, right?”

  “How’s business?”

  “No good, too cold out there. You coming to our pub?”

  “If this one wants to we will.”

  Frank was watching this discussion with his usual expressionless eyes.

  “He’s a gaijin, Kenji, don’t ask his opinion, just drag him there. Don’t you ever do that?”

  “Not usually.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Why are you drinking so early? Finish work already?”

  “Just started, stupid, but I got pissed off.” Noriko held up her empty glass. “Can I have another one?”

  Sure, I said. The bar was crowded, but over the noise you could hear a jazz guitar recording. Noriko knew a lot about jazz for someone of our generation. She was bobbing her head to the rhythm of the bass echoing off the walls and floor, with the smoke from her cigarette drifting up through her long, bleached, rust-colored hair. Noriko had striking, chiseled features, but she looked tired. Frank asked me if she was a hostess. I blanked on the English word “tout” and explained that she did the same sort of work as those black guys. She’s pretty, he whispered to me. I passed this on to Noriko, who glanced at him and said: “Domo.”

  “That’s Kenny Burrell on the guitar,” Frank told her. “A piano player named Danamo Masorueda used to do a lot of sessions with Kenny Burrell. He’s not a famous pianist, and not all that good, either, but he’s from Bulgaria, and his grandfather was a sorcerer for a heretical sect called the Bogomils.”

  What’s the gaijin-san saying, Noriko wanted to know, and I gave her a rough translation. So this piano player had the same family name? she asked, pulling out a second cigarette. Frank lit it for her. “Domo,” she said, then: “Ah, thank you!” She chuckled at her little adventure in English, and Frank blew out the match and countered with a “Domo” of his own.

  Noriko then wanted to know what he meant by “sorcerer.” “You mean like Siegfried and Roy?” she asked me.

  “A magician?” I asked Frank. No, he said, and made a big deal of it by leaning back and waving his arms.

  “You may know that sorcery was big in medieval Europe. Well, Bulgaria was the center of all that. I’m not talking about sleight of hand or juggling, I’m talking about black magic, Satanism, where you get power from the devil, not from God—you ally yourself with Satan. Tell her what I’m saying, Kenji. I’d think a girl like her would find this interesting.”

  Frank’s eyes glistened as he talked about this stuff. They grew moist and red, and his eyelids fluttered slightly. I was reminded of the eyes of a dead cat I once saw when I was a little kid. Walking across a vacant lot, I didn’t notice the cat and stepped on it. Its carcass was already starting to rot, and I felt its gas-filled stomach burst, and one of the eyeballs popped out and stuck to my shoe.


  “It was all about sex, that’s what they were really into, all types of abnormal sex—sodomy, coprophilia, necrophilia. The whole thing started in the fourteenth century, when the Knights Templar defending the roads to Jerusalem met up with a heathen Arab cult. Did you know that when new recruits wanted to join the Templars, the initiation rites required them to kiss their sponsor on the anus? I bet it would excite the young lady to hear stories like this. The Rolling Stones were into Satanism at one point. She looks like she’d like the Rolling Stones.”

  I struggled to translate this. What a crock of shit, Noriko said.

  “I’m not interested in devils or whatever, but I know that’s not Kenny Burrell on the guitar. I’ve never heard such crap. This guy’s a baka, Kenji—listen to that guitar, anybody can tell it’s Wes. This baka doesn’t even know Wes Montgomery when he hears him.” Noriko poked Frank on the arm and said: “Baka da yo, Os-san.”

  After I’d given Frank a simplified translation of what she’d said, Noriko started shouting at me: “What about the baka part? Even I know the word ‘fool,’ and you didn’t say it just now.”

  I told her there was more than one way to call someone baka in English, but she wasn’t buying it.

  Yakuza hoods are the classic example, but people like Noriko get this way sometimes. Drunk or sober, she always had a hair trigger, and you could never tell how she was going to react to anything you said. With no warning whatsoever, even when you’ve meant no offense, people like her will suddenly decide you’re disrespecting them. If you just try to laugh it off they really snap, and once they’ve snapped there’s no way to salvage the situation. I looked at Frank, and he was morphing into the Face again. There it is, I thought. There’s the Face that first aroused my suspicions. Noriko glanced at him too, and I could see her thinking: What the hell is up with this gaijin? She stopped shouting.

  “Kenji,” Frank said in a low, thick voice. “Is this broad a prostitute?”

  He’s asking me if you sell it, I told Noriko. She peered at Frank as if trying to decipher him and said:

  “Not anymore, but you’ll find a lot of girls like that in our pub.”

  Frank turned the Face toward me as I translated.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go to her pub.”

  On top of the table in front of each woman was a placard with a number on it. There were five of them, and they were drinking juice or whiskey-and-water and taking turns singing karaoke. Noriko poured Frank and me some beer, handed us each a postcard-size piece of paper, and explained the system. We were to write the number of the lady we liked on this paper, each sheet of which cost ¥2000. We could also write down what it was we hoped to do with the girl.

  “Like, ‘I’d like to take you out somewhere,’ or ‘Let’s have a drink together here and get to know each other.’ Just keep it clean,” Noriko said. “These girls aren’t pros.”

  “What’s she saying?” Frank asked me. I murmured in his ear that the women were amateurs.

  In terms of looks and fashion and attitude, they represented a variety of types. The woman behind placard #1 wore a white minidress and a lot of makeup and didn’t look like an amateur to me. A non-professional, dressed like that, on her own in Kabuki-cho on December 30? It would have been inconceivable just three or four years ago. Lady #2 wore a leather jacket and velvet pants, and #3 a cream-colored suit. Ladies #4 and 5 were together and wore similar, brightly colored sweaters. Lady #1 had just finished singing, and now #3 was performing a Seiko Matsuda song from about ten years ago.

  “Kenji, what kind of place is this?” Frank asked me. “She said we’d find hookers if we went to her pub.”

  I told him that in Japan right now there were more and more women who were somewhere in between pro and amateur, but I didn’t really expect him to understand. Ladies #1 and #3 were smiling at me and Frank. Not even I could say with any certainty where on the pro/am scale they fell. The room had six or seven tables and muddy orange wallpaper with an incomprehensible design. A design that said: We wanted the place to look classy and tried to imitate the effect of tapestries in some European castle, but—sorry!—on our budget, this was the best we could do. A few pictures hung on the walls, reproductions of the kind of still-life paintings you might find in some small-town exhibition. The menu on the table had little illustrations of flowers in each corner and was handwritten and said things like: Yaki-soba—wait till you taste our sauce! and Ramen—and we don’t mean instant! Next to the “kitchen area” (basically just a sink and a microwave) stood a middle-aged man in a suit who had to be the manager, and a young waiter with piercings in his nose and lip. There was one other male customer, in his forties or so, who looked like he might be some sort of civil servant.

  “Which of them are hookers?” Frank asked me, ballpoint pen in hand. “I told you I want to have sex. Noriko said we’d find prostitutes here.”

  I was trying to decide which of these five would be most likely to leave the pub with Frank on a “date.” All five of them were borderline—each looked as if she might be selling it or might be just a plain old office girl. Of course, no perfectly respectable woman would come to a place like this, but I’m beginning to wonder if there’s still such a thing as a perfectly respectable woman in this country.

  On the sheets of paper Noriko gave us was a box where you wrote the number of the lady you liked, then four larger boxes where you introduced yourself: Name, Age, Occupation, Where you usually go to party. Then: What you would like to do on your date. Underneath that were four possible replies the lady could choose from.

  1. I’d be happy to accompany you anywhere!

  2. Let’s go out for a drink!

  3. Let’s have a drink here and see if we hit it off!

  4. Sorry!

  The sheet of paper was delivered to the lady you chose, and returned to you once she’d indicated her answer. Frank chose Lady #1, and I filled in the rest for him. Name: Frank Masorueda. Age: 35. Occupation: President of an importing firm. Where you usually go to party: Nightclubs in Manhattan. What you would like to do on your date: Spend a romantic and sexy evening together. I didn’t want to choose anybody for myself, but according to the pub rules I had to, so I reluctantly wrote down #2. You had to pay the ¥2000 per sheet up front. Frank plucked a ¥10,000 bill from his imitation snakeskin wallet, and Noriko took it and delivered the papers to the respective girls. Ladies #1 and 2 studied Frank and me closely, then clenched their pens and pored over the paper as if it were a final exam.

  Noriko was getting up to leave, saying she had to get back on the street, when Frank stopped her.

  “No, please, wait just a minute.”

  “Now what?” she sighed, and plopped back down. As I translated, a sense of foreboding came over me.

  “I’m grateful to you,” Frank said.

  “Don’t mention it. It’s my job, you know.”

  “As a token of my appreciation, I want to show you something really interesting. It has to do with mental energy. Okay? It won’t take a minute. Watch my two index fingers.”

  Frank pressed his palms together, like you do before a Buddhist altar.

  “See that? My left and right index fingers are the same length. Only natural, you say? But in thirty seconds, the right finger will be much longer. Watch carefully, now.”

  Frank shaped his hands into a gun—his two index fingers were the barrel—and pointed it midway between Noriko and me.

  “Watch closely. My right index finger will slowly start to grow, longer and longer, like in the story of Jack and the beanstalk. It’s actually growing now, but if you don’t watch carefully you won’t be able to see it. . . .”

  I was on Frank’s right, and Noriko was across from us. Frank had pushed up the sleeves of his sweater and jacket, and from where I sat I had a clear view of his left wrist and the back of his right hand. There wasn’t much hair on the inside of his left wrist, and I could see that he’d applied makeup there, like a flesh-colored foundation. What w
as he covering up, I wondered. Frank was recounting the story of Jack and the beanstalk, and as I translated for Noriko I peered at his wrist. Beneath the makeup I could see these raised lines that at first I thought were a particular sort of tattoo—like Hell’s Angels often give themselves, scraping the skin to make a swollen wound and then injecting ink. When I realized what they really were, every hair on my body stood on end. Suicide scars. I know a girl who has three scars like that on her left wrist. But Frank’s scars were beyond belief. There were dozens of them, more than you could count, within a space of about two centimeters, and they went halfway around his wrist. How many times had that wrist been slashed, then allowed to heal, only to be slashed again? Just thinking about it made me feel like throwing up.

  “Kenji, where are you looking?” At the sound of Frank’s voice a shudder ran through me, and I looked up at him. “Never mind,” he said, “just translate what I’m saying for your friend here.”

  Something was wrong with Noriko. Her eyes weren’t focused, and a thick vein stood out on her forehead, throbbing gently.

  “You will forget everything,” Frank told her. “Do you understand? The moment you step out on the street, you will forget everything that happened here.”

  I didn’t translate this faithfully. In fact I told Noriko the opposite of what Frank had said: that she’d remember everything.

  “Kenji, you weren’t watching my fingers,” Frank said.

  He gave Noriko’s shoulder a squeeze and said “I love you,” raising his voice a little, and Noriko’s eyes came back into focus. She excused herself politely and walked out.

  Frank grinned at me. “What were you looking at?”

  Noriko had disappeared out the door long before I found my voice. Nothing, I told him, trying to sound calm, but it sounded more like a frightened yelp. I’ve always hated the occult and the supernatural, and as far as I’m concerned, putting people into a trance ranks right up there with the worst of that stuff. It disturbs me even to think about someone losing control of their own will. This was the first time I’d ever actually seen it happen.