(2005) In the Miso Soup
Ryu Murakami
Translated by Ralph McCarthy
First published in Great Britain 2005
This electronic edition published in 2010
Copyright © 1997 by Ryu Murakami
English translation © 2003 Ralph McCarthy
Published by arrangement with Kodansha International Limited
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
ISBN 9781408806371
www.bloomsbury.com/ryumurakami
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Almost Transparent Blue
69
Coin Locker Babies
Piercing
Audition
My name is Kenji.
As I pronounced these words in English I wondered why we have so many ways of saying the same thing in Japanese. Hard-boiled:
Ore no na wa Kenji da
. Polite:
Watashi wa Kenji to moshimasu
. Casual:
Boku wa Kenji
. Gay:
Atashi Kenji ’te iu no yo!
“Oh, so you’re Kenji!” The overweight American tourist made a big show of being delighted to see me. “Nice to meet you,” I said and shook his hand. This was near Seibu Shinjuku Station, at a hotel that might rate about two-and-a-half stars overseas. A moment I won’t forget—the first time I ever met Frank.
I had just turned twenty, and though my English is far from perfect I was working as a “nightlife guide” for foreign tourists. Basically I specialize in what you might call sex tours, so it’s not as if my English needs to be flawless. Since AIDS, the sex industry hasn’t exactly welcomed foreigners with open arms—in fact, most of the clubs are pretty blatant about refusing service to
gaijin
—but lots of visitors from overseas are still determined to play, and they’re the ones who pay me to guide them to relatively safe cabarets and massage parlors and S&M bars and “soaplands” and what have you. I’m not employed by a company and don’t even have an office, but by running a simple ad in an English-language tourist magazine I make enough to rent a nice studio apartment in Meguro, take my girl out for Korean barbecue once in a while, and listen to the music I like and read the things I want to read. I should mention, though, that my mother, who runs a little clothes shop in
Shizuoka Prefecture, thinks I’m enrolled in a college preparation course. Mom brought me up on her own after Dad died when I was fourteen. I had friends back in high school who thought nothing of slapping their own mothers around, but you’d never catch me hurting mine. Much as I hate to disappoint Mom, though, I have no plans to go to college. I definitely don’t have the background in science and math to go for a professional degree, and all a degree in “the arts” would get me is a cubicle in an office somewhere. My dream, not that I’ve ever had much hope of realizing it, is to save up a fair amount of money and go to America.
“Is this Kenji Tours? My name’s Frank, I’m a tourist from the United States of America?”
When the phone rang, late in the morning of December 29 last year, I was reading a newspaper article about this high-school girl who’d been murdered. According to the article, her corpse had been dumped at a trash collection site in a relatively untraveled alley in the Kabuki-cho district of Shinjuku with her arms, legs, and head cut off. The victim had been one of a group of high-school girls who openly peddled sex in the area and was well known at nearby “love hotels.” No eyewitnesses had come forward, and investigators had no solid leads as yet. The article went on to editorialize that one’s heart went out to the victim, of course, but perhaps this incident would help instill in today’s teens a proper understanding of the potential horror behind those fashionable words “compensated dating,” and that all the girls in the victim’s group had now sworn off what they flippantly refer to as “selling it.”
“Hi, Frank.” I tossed the newspaper on the table and gave him my standard greeting. “How you doing?”
“I’m all right. I saw your ad in this magazine and wondered if I can hire you to show me around.”
“
Tokyo Pink Guide
?”
“How’d you guess?”
“It’s the only magazine we advertise in.”
“Aha! So can I hire you for three nights, starting tonight?”
“Are you alone, Frank, or with a group?”
“It’s just me. Is that a problem?”
“No, but for one person it’s kind of expensive—¥10,000 from six to nine; ¥20,000 from nine to midnight; and ¥10,000 for each hour after midnight. I don’t charge tax, but you pay all expenses, including any meals and drinks we have together.”
“That’s fine. I’d like the nine to midnight course, starting tonight—if I can book you for three nights.”
Three nights took us through New Year’s Eve, and there was just one problem. I have this girlfriend named Jun—a high-school girl who, by the way, is dead set against “selling it”—and I’d broken my promise to spend Christmas with her. She didn’t like that one bit, and just the other day I’d given my solemn word, locking pinkies with her and everything, that we would absolutely be together for the countdown on New Year’s Eve. Jun can be kind of hard to deal with when she gets mad, but I wanted the job. After almost two years of doing this sort of work I hadn’t saved nearly as much money as I’d hoped to. I told Frank okay and told myself that on New Year’s Eve I’d just invent some excuse and cut out early.
“I’ll be at your hotel at ten of nine,” I said.
Frank was waiting for me in the cafeteria off the lobby, drinking a beer. He’d described himself as white and stocky and looking a bit like Ed Harris in profile, and said he’d be wearing a necktie with a pattern of white swans, but he was the only foreigner in the place anyway. I introduced myself and shook his hand, studying his face and not finding the least resemblance to Ed Harris from any angle.
“Shall we get started right away?” he said.
“Up to you, Frank. But if you have any questions, now might be a good time. The magazines don’t tell you everything you need to know about nightlife in Tokyo.”
“Oh, I like the sound of that.”
“What?”
“‘Nightlife in Tokyo’—just the sound of those words is kind of exciting, isn’t it?”
Frank certainly didn’t remind me of the soldiers or astronauts or whatever that Ed Harris portrays—he looked more like a stockbroker or something. Not that I have any idea what an actual stockbroker is supposed to look like. I just mean he struck me as sort of drab and nondescript.
“How old are you, Kenji?”
“Twenty.”
“Oh? Well, they say the Japanese look young for their age, but that’s exactly what I would have guessed.”
I had bought two suits at a discount clothing outlet in the suburbs and always wore one or the other when I was working. In winter, like now, I needed an overcoat and muffler too. My hair is average length, and I don’t bleach it or have any piercings or anything. Most sex clubs are wary of people whose appearance is eccentric in any way.
“And you, Frank?”
“I’m thirty-five.”
He smiled as he said it, and that’s when I first noticed this thing about his face. It was a very average sort of face, but you couldn’t have judged his age from it. Depending on the angle of the light, one moment he looked like he could be in his twenties, and the next in his forties or even fifties. I’d worked for nearly two hundred foreigners by now, most of them Americans, but I’d never seen a face quite like this one. It took me a while to pinpoint exactly what was so odd about it. The skin. It looked almost artificial, as if he’d been horribly burned and the doctors had resurfaced his face with this fairly realistic man-made material. For some reason these thoughts stirred up the unpleasant memory of that newspaper article, the murdered schoolgirl. I sipped my coffee.
“When did you arrive in Japan?”
The day before yesterday, Frank said. He was drinking his beer at a ridiculously
slow pace. He’d raise the glass to his lips and sort of peer at the foam awhile, like someone contemplating a cup of hot tea, then take a tiny sip and swallow as if forcing down some foul-tasting medicine. This guy could turn out to be a tremendous tightwad, I thought, remembering the passage in a Tokyo guidebook a lot of my American clients used.
Never eat meals at hotel restaurants. Fast-food joints are everywhere, and you can always just grab a burger nearby. If you have to meet someone in the hotel restaurant or bar, feel free to linger for an hour or two over a single beer. Coffee is shockingly expensive and therefore to be avoided, but those who want first-hand experience of the nose-bleed prices at Tokyo’s top hotels are advised to order a fresh orange juice. Extracted from the grandiose glass cooler where it’s kept, this overgrown thimbleful of the juice and pulp of a mere orange will set you back at least eight and often as much as fifteen dollars. Enjoy the taste of the Japanese government’s tariff system!
“You’re here on business?”
“That’s right.”
“Everything going well?”
“I’ll say it is! I import Toyota radiators from Southeast Asia, and I came here to finalize the licensing agreement? But since we’ve already been sending drafts back and forth by e-mail we managed to wrap it all up in one day, so what can I say? It went perfectly!”
This didn’t sound right to me. Here in Japan, most businesses were having their last workday today, the twenty-ninth, but Americans would have been on holiday since before Christmas. And nothing about this hotel or Frank’s clothes matched all that stuff about Toyota and licensing agreements and e-mail. From my experience so far, the legitimate businessmen who visit Shinjuku tend to stay in the top four hotels—the Park Hyatt, the Century Hyatt, the Hilton, and the Keio Plaza, in that order—and to take extra care with their wardrobe, especially if they’re working on an important contract. Frank’s suit looked even cheaper than my own Smart Young Businessman’s Three-Piece at the Special Konaka Discount Price of ¥29,800 (Second Pair of Slacks Included). It was a tacky cream color and too small, to the extent that the crotch of his
trousers seemed on the verge of splitting.
“That’s great,” I said. “Now, what is it you want tonight, basically?”
“Sex.”
Frank said this with a bashful grin, but it wasn’t like any bashful grin I’d ever seen on an American before.
Nobody, I don’t care what country they’re from, has a perfect personality. Everyone has a good side and a side that’s not so good. That’s something I learned working at this job. What’s good about Americans, if I can generalize a little, is that they have a kind of openhearted innocence. And what’s not so good is that they can’t imagine any world outside the States, or any value system different from their own. The Japanese have a similar defect, but Americans are even worse about trying to force others to do whatever they themselves believe to be right. American clients often forbid me to smoke and sometimes even make me accompany them on their daily jogs. In a word, they’re childish—but maybe that’s what makes their smile so appealing. Robert de Niro, Kevin Costner, Brad Pitt—the winning, bashful grin of the American actor is like part of the national character. There was nothing appealing about Frank’s grin, though. Unnerving, is more like it. The artificial-looking skin of his face twisted into a whorl of wrinkles, making him look almost disfigured.