(2005) In the Miso Soup (11 page)

“Maybe I misunderstood you just now, Frank. Did you say why don’t I bring my girlfriend?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. I was thinking the three of us could hang out together. Is it a bad idea?”

Asking your nightlife guide to bring his girlfriend with him—it’s just plain unthinkable. Did he imagine I’d already told Jun too much? Maybe he wanted to murder her outside the batting center.

“It’s out of the question, Frank.”

“Well, suit yourself,” he said and hung up abruptly.

I took a sip of my cappuccino before giving Jun a recap of the conversation. I had to be careful to reconstruct it accurately. What Frank had said, particularly the part about changing hotels, was full of contradictions, so I knew I’d have to put everything in the right order or it wouldn’t make any sense at all. I wanted to explain it to her properly. She was the only one besides me who knew how freaky he was.

When I was done, she said: “How suspicious can you get! Why don’t you go to the police?”

“And tell them what?”

Jun sighed. The cappuccino was cold, and all the froth was gone, leaving it a light brown color like muddy water.

“That’s true. You can hardly say you know who murdered the schoolgirl and the homeless man but don’t have any proof. . . . And obviously you can’t just tell them you know this gaijin named Frank who’s a liar and a weirdo, but . . . How about telephoning them instead of going in person?”

“I don’t know where the bastard is, and I’m sure his name isn’t Frank, either—it’s all lies. The cops couldn’t find him if they wanted to. Now that I think about it he may not even have stayed in that hotel last night. I never actually escorted him to his room, or even saw him get his key at the front desk, and I never called him there.”

“I wonder why he wanted to meet me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Kenji, just don’t show up tonight.”

“I thought about that, but . . . He hasn’t paid me yet, and—”

“Who cares about the money?”

“Yeah. The truth is it’s not the money, it’s that I’m sure he knows where I live and there’s no telling what he’ll do. I’m afraid of him, Jun, that’s the honest truth, okay? I’m scared shitless of Frank. I think maybe he wanted me to bring you so he could, you know, find out how much I’d told you about him.”

I wasn’t about to say “kill you.”

A woman and her little boy and girl came into the shop. The woman was in her thirties, I’d say, the kids in elementary school. They were having a good time deciding which kind of cake they wanted. The kids were well behaved but gleeful, full of life. The mother was wearing a tasteful suit under a tasteful coat, and her interaction with the waitress was natural and courteous. When Jun turned to look their way, her eyes met the little girl’s, and the little girl beamed at her. There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have looked on this sort of scene with cynicism, if not loathing. I’m not so innocent. I know what malevolence is about, which is why I thought I was able to judge that Frank was a dangerous man. Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness
inside you that feels as if it’s been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you’re left with when something very important has been taken away from you. I can’t say I sensed a particularly cruel or sadistic tendency in Frank, or even that he fit my image of a murderer. But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that. I’m sure we’ve all experienced really malevolent feelings once or twice in our lives, the desire to kill somebody, say. But there’s always a braking mechanism somewhere along the line that stops us. The malevolence is turned back, and it sinks down to the bottom of the emptiness it emerged from and lies there, forgotten, only to leak out in other ways—a passion for work, for example. Frank wasn’t like that. I didn’t know if he was a murderer, but I knew he had a bottomless void inside him. And that void was what made him lie. I’ve been there. Compared to where Frank was at, it may have been like a Hello Kitty version, but I’ve been there.

“Call me every half-hour,” Jun said, and I nodded. “And whatever you do, don’t let him get you alone.”

Frank was standing in the shadow of a pillar in the lobby of the Shinjuku Prince. I was passing by on my way to the cafeteria when he popped out from behind the pillar.

“Hey, Kenji,” he said.

It literally took my breath away. “Frank,” I gasped. “I thought we were going to meet in the cafeteria.”

It was kind of crowded, he said and winked. The world’s weirdest wink: his eye rolled back in his head as he closed it, so that for a second all you could see was white. And the cafeteria, clearly visible from where we stood, was almost empty. Frank saw me looking that way and said it was really crowded a few minutes ago. He was dressed differently tonight—black sweater and corduroy jacket with jeans and sneakers. Even his hairstyle was different. The short, slicked-down bangs he’d had the night before were now standing
straight up. And instead of the old leather shoulder bag, he was carrying a cloth rucksack. It was like he’d had a makeover or something.

“I found a good bar,” he said, “a shot bar. You don’t see many of those in this country. Let’s go there first.”

The bar, on Kuyakusho Avenue, is a pretty well known place. Not because it serves delicious cocktails or the interior is anything special or the food is particularly good, but simply because it’s one of the few no-frills drinking places in Kabuki-cho. It’s popular with foreigners, and I’ve taken clients there several times. It has no chairs, just a long bar and a few elbow-high tables along the big plate-glass window. To get there from the hotel we’d walked along a street lined with clubs and crowded with touts, but Frank wasn’t interested in their lingerie pubs or peep shows.

“I just wanted to start off by wetting the old whistle,” he said when our beers came and we clinked glasses. We could have drunk beer in the hotel cafeteria. Did Frank have some reason for not wanting to go in there? I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face.

I looked around for someone I knew. Jun had told me not to be alone with Frank, and I thought it might be a good idea to let someone who knew me see us together. Frank peered steadily at my face while he drank his beer, as if trying to read my mind. I didn’t see anyone I knew. A wide range of types stood shoulder to shoulder at the bar. Affluent college kids, white-collar workers bold enough to wear suits that weren’t gray or navy blue, office girls who were old hands at partying, and trendy dudes who looked like they belonged in Roppongi but had decided to drink in Kabuki-cho for a change. Later on, hostesses and girls from the sex clubs would stop in for a drink.

“You seem a bit funny somehow tonight,” Frank said. He was gulping his beer at a much faster pace than he had the night before.

“I’m kind of tired,” I told him. “And like I said on the phone, I think I’m catching a cold.”

I guess anyone who knew me could have seen I was a bit funny somehow.
Even I thought I was. This is how people start the slide down into madness, I thought. Suspicious minds breed demons, they say, and now I knew what they meant. Frank kept peering at me, and I searched for something to say. I was trying to decide how much I should let him suspect I suspected. It seemed best to hint that I thought he was a dubious character, but not to the extent that I’d ever imagine he might be a murderer. If he knew I imagined any such thing, I was pretty sure he’d kill me. And if, on the other hand, he decided I was completely naïve and oblivious, he might be tempted to whack me just for the hell of it.

“So, what do you want to do tonight?” I asked him.

“Don’t you have any good ideas, Kenji?”

In as lighthearted a tone as I could muster, I tested him with one of the cracks I’d been considering.

“Let’s see. . . . Why don’t we go to the batting center and hit balls till about five o’clock in the morning?”

“Five? In the morning?” he said with a smile, and when I nodded yes, yes, he laughed out loud in a very American way, raising his beer mug with one hand and slapping my shoulder with the other. An American holding a beer aloft and roaring with laughter looks as natural as a Japanese does dangling a camera and bowing. Some of the customers around us smiled. Japanese always have a favorable impression of people from overseas who seem to be having a good time. The foreigner’s enjoying himself, so maybe old Nippon isn’t so bad after all, in fact maybe this is a world-class bar, and we drink in places like this all the time, so maybe we’re happier than we realized, is how the reasoning goes. This spot had some excellent jazz on the sound system—a rarity for Kabuki-cho—and the lighting was fashionably dim, so that not even the people standing right next to us could see Frank’s face very clearly. Even as he slapped my shoulder and laughed, Frank’s eyes were as cold as dark marbles. I had to force myself to return the gaze of those chilling eyes and try to look perky and cheerful. It was agony of a sort I’d never experienced before. I didn’t know how long my nerves would hold up.

“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.