(2005) In the Miso Soup

by Ryu Murakami

  “I was watching Noriko. I’ve never seen that kind of thing before.”

  My voice was quaking. I figured I’d just have to make it seem as if I was shaken up not because Frank was scaring the shit out of me but because I was so surprised to see someone be . . . I didn’t know the word in English.

  “Hypnotized,” Frank said, pronouncing it with a strange British accent I’d never heard him use before.

  “Frank, I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Get what?”

  “If you can do that sort of thing, why pay a woman for sex? You could have any woman you wanted.”

  It’s not that easy, Frank explained. “At this time of year, when it’s cold outside, forget about it. It doesn’t work if they can’t concentrate. Get one to concentrate, and, yes, she can become very . . . suggestible, let’s say. But it’s no fun having sex with a woman who’s like a zombie anyway. No, I prefer prostitutes.”

  The waiter with the pierced nose and lip brought the replies from Ladies #1 and #2 back to our table. Each of them had put a check mark next to Let’s have a drink here and see if we hit it off! If we’d like to join them, the waiter told me, we would each have to pay an extra table charge and buy the ladies’ drinks. I asked Frank, who muttered: “Not much choice, I guess.” We all moved to a table for four.

  Lady #1 was named Maki and #2 Yuko. Maki said she’d dropped in here just on a whim, because she had the night off from her job at a “super-exclusive members’ club” in Roppongi. Just to sit down it costs you sixty or seventy thousand yen, she said, clearly expecting us all to be impressed. I knew right away she was lying. Her face and figure and fashion and manner of speaking and carrying herself didn’t fit the picture she was painting. I figured her for a hostess at a girlie bar who only dreamed of working in a super-exclusive club.

  Yuko said she was a college student and was on her way home from a party with a group from her school. It was the first get-together for the members of this activity circle she’d joined, she said, but it was boring so she left early but felt kinda lonely and didn’t have anywhere to go, and since she’d never been to an omiai pub before . . . Yuko looked old for a college student. I wondered why all the people you meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it. She couldn’t speak a word of English. Wasn’t there an English test among her entrance exams, I wondered but didn’t ask. I was in no frame of mind for wasting my breath on stupid questions. “So—no English, huh?” Frank said, not making much of it, but Yuko reacted by looking down at her hands and very meekly saying that actually it was just a vocational school. This was probably the truth. The waiter came, and Yuko ordered an oolong tea and Maki a whiskey-and-water.

  “Places like this never have decent whiskey,” Maki said after sipping her drink. What that meant, of course, was that she herself normally drank super-exclusive whiskey in super-exclusive clubs. She was chattering away in Japanese as if it were the only language in the world.

  “What do you usually drink?” Yuko asked me to ask Frank. Bourbon, he said. That was news to me.

  At least I was able to get my mind off my worries to some extent by concentrating on translating back and forth. But I couldn’t wipe out the images of Frank’s scarred wrist and Noriko’s hypnotized eyes. Frank had pushed his sleeves back down, and his wrists were hidden beneath his black sweater now. As for Noriko, some part of her had gone missing. The girl who walked out of here wasn’t the same one who’d walked in.

  “Oh, baa-bon?” Maki said. “What kind do Americans drink? Turkey and Jack and Blanton’s, I suppose, right? Isn’t that what they drink?”

  It wasn’t so much a question as an attempt to let us know how knowledgeable she was. Frank hadn’t even registered that she’d said “bourbon,” however. It’s a difficult word to pronounce, and the Japanese version doesn’t come close. When I first started doing this work, Americans never understood my pronunciation of it. One guy even thought I was trying to say “Marlboro.”

  “The ones you just named are the ones they ship out. Down south, where bourbon comes from, they keep the really good stuff for themselves and don’t export it. J. Dickens Kentucky Whiskey is probably the best example. An eighteen-year-old Dickens tastes like the finest cognac. You know, people often have a bad impression of the South, but there are a lot of good things about that part of the country.”

  Neither of the ladies had any idea what “the South” meant. Nor, incredibly enough, had they ever heard of the American Civil War. Frank was astonished that anyone could be familiar with several different brands of bourbon and not know about the Civil War, but Maki didn’t display any embarrassment. “Who cares about that?” she said.

  I glanced at my watch and realized I’d been with Frank for nearly fifty minutes and hadn’t called Jun yet. I asked Yuko if it was all right to use my mobile phone in this place. “How should I know?” she said in a tone that meant I’m not a hostess here, Mister. Maki said: “It’s all right, everyone does it, I talk on my mobile here all the time.” Which of course told me she was a regular and probably at least a semipro. Frank and I were sitting side by side on a sofa, and the ladies were across the table from us. I don’t know much about furniture, but I could tell the table and sofas and chairs were pieces of crap. There was a dismal aura of cheapness about them, which was only magnified by the tacky attempt to make everything look high-class. The sofas were too small, for starters, and the upholstery was unpleasant to the touch. You felt as if the dirt and grease and dead skin of all the previous horny, lonely customers were rubbing off on you. The table had that unmistakable sheen of particle board, but the surface was imprinted with a wood-grain pattern, as if that could fool anybody. I haven’t seen much really good furniture in my life, but I know crappy stuff when I come in contact with it because it brings me down. Yet the sofas and tables matched the two ladies across from us so perfectly that I found myself coming up with a new proverb: The ghosts of sad, cheap souls live on in sad, cheap furniture. Maki carried a Louis Vuitton purse. It didn’t suit her, but I couldn’t blame her for trying. When you’re using the genuine article—not just designer goods, but anything that’s made really well—it never brings you down. It’s not easy to know what’s genuine and what isn’t, though, so unless you’re willing to go to all the trouble of refining your taste, you need to rely on brand names. I think that’s why girls in this country are so obsessed with Vuitton and Chanel and Prada and the rest.

  The sofa had these oddly shaped armrests that made it impossible to sit sideways or even cross your legs comfortably. I pressed my knees together, but my thigh was still plastered against Frank’s. And I couldn’t extract the mobile from my jacket pocket without my elbow and forearm coming in contact with his body. “You calling your girlfriend?” he asked. Yuko pushed a napkin and ballpoint pen across to Frank, saying: “Name, name, you, name.” He absently wrote FRANK, then lifted the pen off the napkin and said: “Kenji, what was my last name again?” He smiled as he asked me this—a smile that would have given anyone the willies. Just then Jun answered the phone.

  “Kenji! Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” I was about to expand on that when Frank said, “Let me talk to her,” and reached over and took the mobile from me. Instinctively I clutched at it, but he easily ripped it from my fingers. Like a hungry gorilla stripping a banana from a tree. What the fuck are you doing, I nearly shouted, but the survival instinct kicked in, and I shrank back down in my seat. If I were a dog I would have tucked my tail between my legs and rolled on my back. I was on Frank’s right and had been holding the phone in my right hand when I saw his left arm stretch out in front of my eyes, all but covering my face. He grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled my hand away from my ear, then used his other hand to wrench the phone from my grasp. I thought he was going to tear off a few fingers along with it. It had been a very violent act, but it happened so quickly that the ladies must have thought we were just horsing around. “Oh, stop it!” they squealed with pseu
do-girlish glee. Frank’s strength was off the chart, and his hand felt the same way his arm and shoulder had the night before, when I was leading him out of the batting cage. Metallic. I was afraid he was going to crush the phone in his fist. Mind you, he’d done all this without any visible effort. It wasn’t as if he was straining.

  “Hi! My name’s Frank!” he shouted into the phone, loudly enough to drown out the background music playing over the speakers—a song by the Ulfuls—but his tone was cheerful and friendly. Like the super-salesman type you often see working the phones in American movies. “You’re Kenji’s girlfriend, aren’t you? What was your name again?”

  I prayed for Jun to act as if she didn’t understand English.

  “What’s that? I’m sorry, I can’t hear very well—the music . . .”

  “Hey, Frank,” I said. I wanted to tell him Jun didn’t speak much English, but he gave me an icy look and growled: “Shut up, I’m talking here!” The Face made a brief appearance, and it was scarier than ever. Maki wasn’t looking, but Yuko happened to glance up and see it, and the smile froze on her lips. Even a dim-witted vocational school student with zero English could sense something abnormal in the Face. She looked like she was going to burst into tears. I, for my part, was learning this much about Frank: the angrier he got, the cooler he became. As his rage grew, his features seemed to sink and contract and his eyes would glint with a colder and colder light. Expressions like “boiling mad” didn’t suit Frank at all.

  “What’s that? I’m asking what your name is! Your name!”

  Frank was all but bellowing into the phone now. Apparently Jun was doing a good job of pretending not to understand.

  “Kenji,” Frank turned to me, “what’s your girlfriend’s name?”

  I didn’t want to tell him. “She’s not used to talking to foreigners,” I said. “She’s probably . . . confused.”

  I wanted to say she was probably intimidated, but couldn’t think of the word.

  “What’s to be confused about? I just want to say hello. After all, you and I aren’t just a guide and his customer now, we’re—”

  The intro to a karaoke tune blasted over the sound system, several times louder than the background music had been. The civil servant guy started singing, and there was no possible way to carry on a telephone conversation. Frank spread his hands palms up in a disgusted shrug, then handed the mobile back to me.

  “I’ll call again, don’t worry!” I shouted to Jun and shut the thing off.

  “Why don’t they turn down the music?” Frank said. “The noise is brutal.”

  To hear him use that word was somehow both funny and depressing. Like listening to a prostitute denounce promiscuity. But it was true, the karaoke had been turned up to a nearly intolerable level. The civil servant, a man in his mid-forties or so, was butchering the latest song by Mr. Children, and the girls were clapping along apathetically. He’d clearly chosen this song to appeal to them. Anyone could have told him that just singing a Mr. Children song wasn’t going to make him popular with young women, but he was giving it all he had, belting out the lyrics so passionately that veins bulged in his throat. Frank gestured to me that it was too loud even to talk and sat there looking disgruntled. I was none too gruntled myself. I was concerned about Jun, and I was worried about Noriko out on the street and probably still in a trance, but more than anything I was consumed with my own distrust and fear of Frank. The last thing I needed right now was to have someone belt out, at earsplitting volume, a song I didn’t even like. People in this country have no consideration for others, no glimmer of comprehension that they might be annoying those around them. There was something very ugly about this man contorting his face as he struggled with the high notes. It wasn’t a good key for him, and in any case it wasn’t a song he’d chosen out of an actual desire to sing it. He’d chosen it to ingratiate himself with the girls, and he didn’t seem to notice that the girls were all but yawning and rolling their eyes. In other words, he was the only one who failed to realize that what he was doing was completely useless. And infuriating. I was getting genuinely pissed off and beginning to wonder if we really needed people like this in the world. For a moment I thought: He should be put to death, this guy. And at that very moment, Frank looked at me and nodded and smiled as if to say: Exactly. An electric shiver ran through me. Frank had been devising a new name for himself on Yuko’s napkin. Having already written FRANK, he’d started to scrawl the O of DE NIRO when he gave me this conspiratorial glance. The timing was just like when you say to someone “I could kill that guy” and they shoot back, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” What was going on with this guy? Had he really just read my mind?

  Now Frank was shouting in my ear to ask me to interpret something for him. Yuko was apparently a big fan of Robert de Niro’s, and had nearly wet herself when informed that Frank had the same last name.

  “Kenji, listen, these girls don’t speak any English. I want to tell them that Robert de Niro means ‘Robert of the House of Niro.’ ” He spoke rapidly between choruses of the song. My pulse was galloping again. It was all I could do to say I’d tell them when the song was finished. The apprehensions that had been building inside me suddenly coalesced into one big ball of anxiety. I had a horrible feeling that something very bad was about to happen. Frank had changed—his appearance, his personality, even his voice. He’d given Noriko and me some phony name and tried to hypnotize us both. He’d sent her off in a trance, he’d hijacked my phone call to Jun, and now he was reacting to my thoughts as if by telepathy. What the hell was going on here?

  The song finally ended. There was a pathetic smattering of applause, and the civil servant guy made the peace sign and went: “Yay!” I decided not to look at him. To pretend he wasn’t even there.

  When I explained the meaning of de Niro, Yuko gazed admiringly at the napkin and said that names were fascinating, weren’t they? But Maki let out a nasty snorting laugh, like a sneer.

  “They may share the name,” she said, “but that’s all they’ve got in common.”

  Of all the women you see in Kabuki-cho, Maki’s type is the lowest of the low, if you ask me. Unattractive, riddled with complexes, and dumb as a post, but because of the worst sort of upbringing ignorant even of her own ignorance. Convinced she ought to be working in a classier place and living a better life, and equally convinced that it’s other people’s fault she can’t pull it off. Envious of everybody else and therefore eager to blame them for everything. Treated so badly all her life that she thinks nothing of doing the same to others by deliberately saying things that hurt them.

  “What did she say?” Frank asked me.

  I told him.

  “Oh?” he said. “And what’s so different about me and Robert de Niro?”

  “Everything,” Maki said and snorted again.

  I was at a loss. Should I make this idiot woman across from us shut up? Should I get Frank out of this pub? Or should I pretend I needed to use the restroom and run like hell? So many things had happened in so little time that I couldn’t marshal my thoughts. The narrowness of the sofa had something to do with it. Because Frank’s thigh was pressed right up against mine, part of me had already abandoned all hope of escape. When the body’s constrained, so is the spirit. I knew this was no time for getting worked up about the karaoke singer or Maki, but when you’re in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who’s decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home. All the same, I kept trying to devise a way of taking Maki down a notch or two. And I couldn’t come up with anything. Women like her have a nearly impenetrable barrier of stupidity. I could put it to her straight—You’re a moron—but that wasn’t likely to produce much more than an angry What’s that supposed to mean?

  “Everything. Everything!” she said again, looking at Yuko for confirmation. “Right?”

  “Um, I don’t know,�
� Yuko said, opting to keep it vague.

  “But they’re totally different. The face, the style, the body, everything.” Snort.

  “Have you ever met the real de Niro?” Frank asked her. “He’s got a restaurant in New York, and I’ve seen him there two or three times. Bob’s not that tall, and he’s very unassuming, just a regular fellow. Jack Nicholson lives on the West Coast, which may be why he has that movie star air about him, but de Niro really seems like just a normal person. That’s how you know he’s a great actor. That mood, that intensity you see on screen, is something he has to work very hard to create.”

  I didn’t see what good it would do, but I translated this too. Meanwhile the waiter with the piercings brought two orders of yaki-soba and potato chips to our table. I told him we hadn’t ordered them. “I did,” Maki said, snatching one of the plates of grilled noodles and veggies. “You have some too,” she told Yuko.

  “Kenji, did you translate what I just said?” Frank asked, watching the girls dig in. I told him of course I did. What were we doing here anyway, he wanted to know.

  “Did we come here to watch two broads eat noodles? I want to have sex. Noriko said there were hookers in this place. Are these two hookers?”

  I translated the question. “What a jerk,” Maki said through a mouthful of noodles. “Right?” she said to Yuko. “That’s what’s wrong with places like this, you get all the losers, know what I mean?” Yuko gave me a troubled look before saying: “But I can see how he might misunderstand.” “Don’t be silly,” said Maki, “we’re not the ones who asked them to join us.” She waved her hand dismissively as she spoke, and part of a sauce-covered noodle fell on her dress. “Shit!” she shrieked, wetting a handkerchief and dabbing frantically at the spot. “Bring me a hand towel!” she shouted at the waiter standing by the counter, loud enough to drown out the Ulfuls, whose album was back on the sound system. She scowled at the dark stain on her white dress and wiped at it with the moist cloth the waiter had fetched, but the stain wouldn’t come out. Maki was short, with a round face and rough, swarthy skin. To think there were men who’d pay good money even for a woman like this. Men today are such a lonely breed that any woman who wants to sell it, as long as she isn’t absolutely hideous to look at, will find a buyer. Which is partly why women like Maki get so full of themselves.