by Ryu Murakami
“Is she at your apartment?” Frank asked as we started walking again. No, she went home, I told him, and he went: Hmm. No intonation—he might have been signaling relief or disappointment. But with Frank you had to expect your worst premonitions to come true. I was now positive that he knew where my apartment was, and that he was the one who’d plastered that scrap of skin on my door. Jun’s house was in Takaido, though, and I doubted he could have found out the address. He can’t get to her, I thought.
“That Peruvian woman has been in Japan for three years,” Frank said as we ambled along. “She’s had sex with almost five hundred men in that time, about four hundred and fifty Japanese, and some Iranians and Chinese. She’s Catholic, you know, but she’s decided that Jesus loses his power in this country, and I can kind of understand what she means. I can’t explain it very well but I think I understand. And last year at this time she had an amazing experience that proved to be her salvation. Kenji—is it true that they’ll ring the salvation bells all over Japan tomorrow night?”
At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. The bells, he said—the gongs.
“She had a lot of bad experiences. I don’t mean she was beaten or assaulted or anything, but apparently for her the hardest part about living here was all the group pressure, and the fact that people don’t understand about personal space. The Japanese surround you in groups and talk about you behind your back in groups and don’t think anything of it. They don’t think about the pressure they’re putting on you, and it’s no use complaining to them because they don’t even know what you’re talking about. If they were openly hostile you could counterattack, but it’s not like that, and she doesn’t know how to deal with it. Like this one thing that happened when she’d been in Japan about six months and was finally picking up a little of the language. She was walking across a vacant lot surrounded by little factories and warehouses, and some kids were playing soccer there. Soccer’s big in Peru, of course, and when she was a little girl in the slums near Lima they used to play with tin cans and rolled-up newspapers and things because they couldn’t afford a ball. So watching these kids made her happy, it brought back good memories, and when the ball came rolling over toward her she tried to kick it back to them. But she was wearing sandals and the ball veered off to one side and landed in a ditch full of some kind of factory waste, and it got covered with this greasy gunk and smelled terrible, so she fished it out and apologized to the kids and was about to leave when they said: ‘Hold on a minute.’ They surrounded her, and told her she had to buy them a new ball, because this one was filthy and smelly and they couldn’t use it anymore, but she couldn’t even get her mind around that, because where she grew up everybody’s so poor the idea of compensation didn’t even exist, and she ended up breaking down in tears right there in front of the kids. She knows that women who come here to peddle sex aren’t exactly welcome, but she realizes that would probably be true in most countries, and she’s tough enough to put up with being sneered at or treated badly just for doing what she has to do, but she couldn’t understand these kids demanding she buy them a new ball. There are sixteen people in her family and she came to Japan to work so she can rent them a small apartment in Peru, and she can’t return until she’s saved a certain amount of money, but at this rate she thought she’d never get ahead at all, and she didn’t know who to turn to. This was her first time abroad, and she decided that since it’s a foreign country they must have a different god and that maybe the god the Catholics pray to loses his power here because the customs are different, not to mention the land itself.”
As Frank talked, we had slowly made our way past the west exit of Seibu Shinjuku Station through the canyon of skyscrapers and on toward Yoyogi. Now we turned down a narrow street with small wooden apartment buildings on either side. There wouldn’t be any hotels in this area. The street was dark, and the buildings were crammed so close together that you couldn’t see the skyline beyond them. The skyscrapers of West Shinjuku were still nearby but completely blocked from view, and above us the sky was flat, like a strip of dark blue paper. I walked at Frank’s side, but he was leading the way. Walking helped calm my mind a little, and I found the story of the Peruvian prostitute oddly gripping. It was a subject close to my own heart, and it was also the first time I’d heard Frank speak with so much composure, or say anything that felt real and true.
Was it really because of Jun that he didn’t kill me? Now that I thought about it, it couldn’t have that much to do with her. All Jun knew about him was that he called himself Frank and claimed to be an American. Frank surely wasn’t his real name, and anyway there must be hundreds of foreigners named Frank in Tokyo alone. Just as Jun had said, the police couldn’t really do anything even if she did go to them. They had no photos of him, and no one knew his passport number or even if he was really American. The only people who could testify that he was ever in the omiai pub were dead except for me and Noriko, and I was one hundred percent sure Noriko wouldn’t go to the cops. In other words, there was nothing to stop Frank from killing me tonight and taking a plane back home from Narita tomorrow. He could have killed me any time he wanted to, but he didn’t.
“She thinks the Japanese need to do some deep thinking about their own gods, and she’s right.”
Who would have guessed you’d find a neighborhood like this, full of old wooden apartment buildings, pretty much smack dab in the middle of Tokyo and only about a fifteen-minute walk from Kabuki-cho? Not me. Amid the tenements were a few ancient, one-story wooden houses, like the kind you see in samurai dramas, so small I almost wondered if they weren’t scale models. They had little sliding doors you couldn’t have used without stooping, and tiny pebble-covered gardens. Some of the gardens had pint-sized, zinc-lined ponds, their surfaces rippling not with goldfish or carp but schools of slimy little pink things. Over the roofs of these low-slung houses you could make out the highrise buildings of the new city center in Shinjuku. Frank marched along at a steady pace, as if he knew exactly where he was going, and turned down a street that might or might not have been wide enough for a single compact car to pass. He kept going on about the Peruvian street-walker.
“She wanted to find out about the gods of this country, but she couldn’t find any books on the subject in Spanish, and she doesn’t read English, so she asked a lot of her customers, but apparently none of the Japanese knew anything, which made her wonder if people here never came up against the kind of suffering where you can’t do anything but turn to your god for help. The person who told her about the salvation bells was a Lebanese journalist who’d been here for over thirty years. He told her there was no figure like Christ or Mohammed in Japan, or any god like the kind Westerners imagine, but that certain big rocks and trees and things were decorated with straw ropes and worshiped as gods, and that people also worshiped the spirits of their ancestors. And he said she was absolutely right, that the Japanese had never experienced having their land taken over by another ethnic group or being slaughtered or driven out as refugees—because even in World War II the battlefields were mostly in China and Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific, and then Okinawa of course, but on the mainland there were only air raids and the big bombs—so the people at home never came face to face with an enemy who killed and raped their relatives and forced them all to speak a new language. A history of being invaded and assimilated is the one thing most countries in Europe and the New World have in common, so it’s like a basis for international understanding. But people in this country don’t know how to relate to outsiders because they haven’t had any real contact with them. That’s why they’re so insular. According to the Lebanese man, Japan’s just about the only country in the world that’s been untouched, except for the U.S. But he said of course there’s a bright side to that too and started telling her about the bells, saying that precisely because the Japanese have never experienced a real invasion, there’s a certain gentleness here you can’t find in other countries, and that they�
�ve come up with these incredible methods of healing. Like the bells. Ringing them at temples on New Year’s Eve is a custom that goes back more than a thousand years, right? How many times was it they ring the salvation bells? It was a funny number but I forget what it was, a hundred and something, I think. Kenji, do you know how many times they ring them?”
Frank was talking about Joya-no-kane, the New Year’s bells. A hundred and eight, I said.
“That’s it, yeah, a hundred and eight.”
We’d reached the end of a cul-de-sac, and I followed Frank into a narrow gap between two buildings. No light from the houses or streetlamps made it into this space, and it was so narrow we had to shuffle along sideways. The path ended at a ruined building that looked as if it had been in the process of being torn down by the land sharks when the real-estate bubble burst. Mortar had fallen from its outer walls, which were draped with canvas dropcloths and sheets of vinyl. Frank parted the sheets, and we crouched down almost to our knees to pass through into the building. The rain-splattered vinyl smelled of dried mud and animal shit.
“Last year she went to listen to them, and she said it was a transcendent experience, like being in another world, and that the hundred and eight bells washed away all her bad instincts.”
Once inside the building, Frank turned on the light—a bare fluorescent unit on the floor—and his face, lit from below, became a puppet show of creepy shadows. The building must have been a clinic: in one corner was a pile of discarded medical equipment and broken chairs. A bare mattress lay on the hard-wood floor, and Frank sat down on it and gestured for me to sit beside him.
“Kenji, those bells, they wipe out all your bad instincts, right? Will you take me to a good place to hear them?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking: There it is—that’s why he decided to let me live.
“Really? Thanks. So how do these bells purify you? She had a rough idea, but I want to hear it from a Japanese person.”
“Frank, can I stay here tonight?”
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t let me go home.
“There are beds on the second floor you can sleep on. I use this mattress here. I guess you must be tired—so much happened today. But I’d like to hear a little more about the bells, if it’s all right with you.”
“Sure,” I said, looking around the room. I didn’t see any stairs. “How do I get up there?”
“See that?” Frank pointed at the far corner, where a big steel cabinet lay on its side. Planted atop the fallen cabinet was a small refrigerator, and in the ceiling right above the refrigerator was a hole about half the size of a tatami mat. Probably where the stairs had been ripped out.
“You can climb up to the second floor from the refrigerator,” he said, smiling at me. “Lots of beds up there. It’s like a hotel.”
All he’d have to do was move the refrigerator after I climbed up, and there’d be no need to watch me all night. It would take guts to leap down from that hole in the ceiling. The floor was covered with shards of glass from the toppled cabinet, and jumping down would result in a lot of noise and possibly a broken leg or two.
“This must’ve been a hospital,” Frank said as I scanned the room. “I found it while I was taking a walk. Pretty good hideout, don’t you think? No running water, but there’s electricity, so instead of showering I just heat up some mineral water in my coffee maker and wash with that. All the comforts of home.”
Along with the water, the gas and electricity would surely be turned off in a ruin like this. I wondered where he was stealing electricity from but didn’t ask. Something like that would be child’s play for Frank.
“Why do they ring the bells a hundred and eight times? The Lebanese fellow had this really fascinating explanation but she couldn’t remember all of it. Anyway, after having that beautiful experience with the bells she started studying about Japan, and I’ll tell you, she knows more about this place than anybody I ever met. Like those girls in the pub? They didn’t know anything about their own country. Not only did they not know anything, they didn’t even seem to be interested. All they cared about was expensive bourbon and clothes and handbags and hotels and things. That amazed me—them knowing nothing at all about their own history.”
They couldn’t learn about it now even if they wanted to, I thought to myself. A picture of Frank cutting Lady #5’s throat threatened to form in my mind, and the fear came back, just like before, when he’d suddenly appeared behind me on the street. My spine felt funny, all the strength drained from my legs, and a mold-like odor filled my nostrils and then spread from the nasal passages throughout my body, the smell sticking like a coat of paint to the underside of my skin. But the image of Lady #5’s slit throat didn’t materialize. I’d received warning that a nauseating image was going to appear on my mental screen, and then the screen had gone blank. It was hard to believe, but I was beginning to forget the actual scene of the massacre. I tried to visualize Mr. Children’s ear being lopped off but couldn’t. I remembered it as a factual event, but the image of it had faded. Sometimes you can remember everything about an old friend, down to minor details about his behavior, but for the life of you you can’t picture his face. Or you’ll wake up knowing you’ve just had a terrifying dream but can’t remember what it was about. It was like that. Why that sort of thing happens I couldn’t tell you, but there it was.
“Meanwhile, here’s this Peruvian hooker who knows all kinds of fascinating things about Japanese history. For example, from way back—thousands of years ago—the Japanese just focused on growing rice, and even when things started coming in from overseas, like the taiko drum and metals from Persia, the rice-farming traditions didn’t change. But as soon as the Portuguese brought rifles, everything changed, and the Japanese started having wars all the time. Previously they’d only fought with swords—I’ve seen that in movies, it looks like ballet, almost. But warfare with guns increased year by year, and the Japanese started invading other countries, and because they hadn’t had much experience with foreigners they were incompetent at occupying a country or relating to its citizens, so people in the neighboring countries grew to hate them. This misguided sort of warfare continued right up until the A-bombs fell. And then, after that, Japan changed its way of thinking and gave up war and started making electric appliances and became an economic superpower, so obviously that was the path the country should have followed all along. They lost the war, but it was a war over vested interests in China and Southeast Asia, so now after all these years you might say Japan won it after all. But why do they ring the bells a hundred and eight times, Kenji? Can you tell me? She only had a rough idea.”
I thought maybe Frank was testing me. To see if I was knowledgeable enough to serve as his guide to the New Year’s bells. What would happen if I failed the test?
I said: “In Buddhism . . .” Or was it Shinto? I thought—but Frank wouldn’t know the difference. “In Buddhism, what you’re calling ‘bad instincts’ are known as bonno. Bon-no, with two ens, like ‘bone’ and ‘no.’ But the meaning is a lot deeper than ‘bad instincts.’ ”
Frank was fascinated by the sound of the word and practiced pronouncing it: Bon-no, bon-no. . . .
“Gosh,” he sighed. “What an amazing word. Just saying it makes me feel like something is melting away inside, or like I’m being wrapped in a soft, warm blanket. Bon-no . . . What exactly does it mean, Kenji?”
“I think it’s usually translated as ‘worldly desires.’ It’s more complicated than that, but the first thing you need to know is that it’s something everybody suffers from.”
I was surprised to hear myself saying these things, because I didn’t know I knew them. I couldn’t remember being taught this or reading it somewhere. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d heard the word “bonno” pronounced. But I knew what it meant and even the usual English translation. When I told Frank that everybody suffered from it he looked, believe it or not, as if he was going to cry.
“Kenji,” he said with
a little quaver in his voice, “please, tell me more.”
I did, wondering all the while where and when I’d picked up this information. It was like having data sleeping away on your hard disk and then stumbling across software that unlocks it.
“There’s another word, madou, which means, like, to lose your way.” I told him to think of “Ma” as in mother, and “dough” as in bread, and he began practicing the pronunciation. Old Japanese words like this sound even more solemn and mysterious when spoken by foreigners.
“Madou is the simplest verb for expressing what bonno are, or what they do to you. Bonno make you lose your way. ‘Bad instincts’ makes them sound like something you’re born with, something you need to be punished for, which isn’t quite right. There are six categories of bonno, or sometimes ten—or sometimes just two big categories. They’re kind of like the Seven Deadly Sins in Christianity, but the difference is that everybody suffers from them. They’re as much a part of being human as, like, our vital organs are. But the six categories, or ten or whatever, are all things I can’t translate into English, so it’s hard to explain.”
Frank nodded and said he understood. “It must be hard to translate such deep words into a simple language like English.”
“The two basic categories of bonno are the ones that come from thoughts and the ones that come from feelings. The ones you get from thoughts might disappear if someone just points out the truth to you. But the ones you get from feelings are more difficult. To wash those away you have to train very hard. Have you ever heard how Buddhists go without eating, or swim naked in icy water, or stand under waterfalls in winter, or sit crosslegged in this unnatural position and get smacked from behind with sticks?”