(2005) In the Miso Soup (23 page)

The things he was talking about were fundamentally creepy and disgusting, and a lot of what he said made no sense to me, but it was all sinking in. It was like listening to music, rhythmical and with a sort of melody that seemed to get inside me directly, through my pores rather than my ears. I’d surrendered to his storytelling, I guess, and when he asked if I’d ever been in a mental hospital it didn’t even strike me as an outrageous question. I just said no, I hadn’t. Listening to him, I’d ceased to think of Frank as insane or not insane. I felt like someone listening to an ancient myth:
Long, long ago, when men used to kill and eat one another
. . . I wasn’t sure I knew any longer what was right and what was wrong. It was a very precarious feeling, but it hinted at a sense of liberation like I’d never experienced. Liberation from the countless little hassles of everyday life. It was as if the border between “me” and “not me” was dissolving, leaving me in a sort of slush.

I was going somewhere I’d never been before.

“Mental hospitals are interesting places,” Frank said. “I’ll never forget hearing about this experiment they did with cats. They put the cat in a cage that has a button in the floor, and when he steps on the button he gets food, so after a while he learns to do that, press the button when he wants food, and then they take him away and starve him for a while and then put him back in the same cage with the same button, only this time when he steps on it he gets a shock. Not a big shock, just a mild current, but the result’s the same. The cat becomes unbalanced, completely neurotic, and in the end he loses
the will to eat, even refuses food when it’s offered to him, and starves to death. The man who told me this was a specialist in psychological testing. You know anything about psychological tests, Kenji? I’ve taken hundreds of them. The most famous one is probably the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, but I took so many that eventually I memorized all the different types of questions, and by the time I was in my late teens I was more familiar with the tests than the people testing me were. Would you like to try one?”

The story of the experiment really spoke to me. First the cat learns something, and it’s fun for him because he’s rewarded with food, but then they starve him and reward the learned behavior with pain. Naturally the cat doesn’t understand what the hell’s going on. I experienced things like that nearly every day when I was a kid. I don’t mean big things like my father’s death, just ordinary everyday dilemmas and double binds. You can’t change the grownup world to suit your idea of how things should be, so you have to learn to press the right buttons, and kids growing up find themselves constantly in situations just like that cat’s. There’s no consistency to the way your parents and other adults respond to you when you’re a kid. It’s especially inconsistent in this country, because there aren’t any solid, standard criteria for judging what’s important. The grownups live only for money and things with established monetary value, like designer goods. The media—TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, whatever—are full of pronouncements by adults that make it clear that all they really want or care about is money and material goods. From politicians and bureaucrats to the lowliest office drudge drinking cheap saké at some outdoor stall, they all show by the way they live that money is the only thing they aspire to. They’ll puff themselves up and say “Money isn’t everything,” but all you have to do is watch their behavior to see where their real priorities lie. The weeklies that cater to middle-aged men criticize compensated dating among high-school girls, but in the same issue you’ll find recommendations for reasonably priced erotic massage parlors and early morning soaplands. They’ll denounce the corruption amongst politicians and bureaucrats but also feature “can’t-miss” stock tips and “bargain”
real-estate deals. And they’ll do entire photo spreads on “success stories,” showing us rich people’s houses or some asshole standing there in designer clothes and accessories. Pretty much all day long, day in and day out, three hundred sixty-five days a year, children in this country go through what that food-or-electric-shock cat went through. But try to point that out, and some old fucker will jump all over you.
You kids are spoiled rotten! How dare you complain, when you’ve never lacked for anything in your life? Why, my generation lived on potatoes and worked our fingers to the bone to make this the wealthy country it is!
It’s always precisely the sort of smug old wanker you would never
ever
want to end up like. We don’t live the way you tell us to because we’re afraid that if we do we’ll grow up to be like you, and the thought of that is unbearable. It’s all right for you because you’ll be dead soon anyway, but we’ve still got another fifty or sixty years to live in this stinking country.

“Kenji, what’s wrong?”

Frank was staring at me. “Nothing,” I said. He took a sip of Evian and smiled: “You look angry.” That story about the cat was interesting, I told him, taking a sip of my Coke. I had left the can on the floor beside me, and it was still ice-cold. What a weird place this was, I thought. It felt completely isolated and, partly because of the cold, like being on another planet. I wondered if there were planets where it’s okay to murder people. I decided there must be, reminding myself that in war, after all, killers are heroes. And it suddenly occurred to me why I hadn’t run to that police box in Kabuki-cho. The victims in the omiai pub, when placed in the position of the cat with the button, hadn’t put up any resistance. I looked over at Frank and thought: Well, here’s a guy who resisted. Maybe he was one of the very few who’d kicked against this cat’s cage of a world, where first they feed you and then, although you’ve committed no crime, they give you a punishing jolt. Looking at Frank, lit from below by the lamp, I began to think of him as a man who’d been stepped on all his life but never caved in.

“Let’s try a little psychological test,” he said, and started asking me some of the questions he’d memorized. Well, not questions exactly, more like
statements to which I had to answer “true” or “false.” He told me I had to answer at once, without thinking. The statements were of all sorts, from “I like poems about flowers” to “My genitals are oddly shaped” and “My greatest pleasure is to be hurt by someone I love.” Over the course of half an hour or so he must have rattled off over two hundred of them.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Frank smiled when we were done. “I put them together myself. Like I say, I’ve taken hundreds of these tests. In fact, I’d say I’m one of the world’s foremost authorities on psychological testing.”

“Is there anything wrong with me?” I asked. “I mean, according to the test?”

“Don’t worry, Kenji, you’re normal. You exhibit a certain amount of confusion, a few contradictory impulses, but that’s true of all mentally normal people. It’s the ones who’re rigid in their likes and dislikes who are in trouble. Everybody lives with a certain amount of confusion and indecision—never knowing which way the pendulum’s going to swing. That’s normal.”

What about him? I asked, and Frank said he was normal too. This didn’t even strike me as peculiar. I thought he probably was.

Starting with that piece of human skin plastered to my door, today had been just one unimaginable thing after another. But though I knew I was exhausted, I was too wired to be able to sleep. Besides, it was freezing cold, and I was sitting with a murderer in an abandoned building littered with medical junk. I think all of these things contributed to my mental state being slightly out of whack. It wasn’t that Frank was exerting an evil influence on me, winning me over to the Dark Side or whatever. But I can’t deny that my body and mind were being dragged into unfamiliar territory. I felt like I was listening to the tales of a guide in some unexplored country.

“You must be tired,” Frank said. “There are still plenty of things I haven’t told you, but I guess we’d better call it a day. Tonight we have to go hear the bells and everything.”

“I don’t think I can sleep.”

“Why not? You afraid I’ll kill you?”

“No. It’s just that my nerves are kind of on edge.”

“Maybe you should eat something.”

I wasn’t hungry, I told him, but Frank said I’d sleep better if I had something in my stomach. He took a coffee maker from one of the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, filled it with Evian, and plugged it in. Then he took two cups of King Ra instant ramen from the same box. I asked if he always ate instant foods. Sure, he said with a grin.

“I’m no gourmet.”

“Is there some reason for that?” I said, watching the steam begin to rise from the coffee maker. “I mean, everybody likes good food, right?”

“They shoved those tasteless liquids down my throat for so long in the mental hospital that the truth is I don’t even remember what ‘good’ means. But when I do eat something that everybody thinks is delicious, it’s funny—I feel like something’s draining out of me. Like something important is escaping from my body.”

And what would that be?

“The mission I’ve been entrusted with. My destiny. Killing people.”

When the noodles were ready, Frank handed me a plastic fork. I inhaled the fragrant steam, absorbing it like a sponge, then slurped up a mouthful before asking him if he was going to continue to kill people after hearing the hundred and eight bells. He shrugged.

“I never seemed to have much choice in the matter,” he said. “Killing people has always been absolutely essential for me to go on living. Slashing my wrists and slicing through that swan’s neck and drinking its blood and killing people were all basically expressions of the same thing, the thing that’s driving me. If you don’t keep your body and brain active, senility sets in, even if you’re a little kid. The circulation in your brain gradually decreases. Like the cat in that experiment—by the time he lost interest in eating, the blood in his brain was just barely moving. It’s the stress that does it. Human beings have thought up everything from hunting in groups to pop songs and car races so our brains wouldn’t atrophy, but there aren’t that many genuinely effective ways to guard against senility nowadays. Kids are especially
vulnerable because their options are so limited. And now with all this social surveillance and manipulation going on, I think you’ll see an increase in people like me.”

Frank had speared some noodles with his fork and raised them to just below his chin but then seemed to forget about them as he rambled on. Condensation from his cup dripped onto the dusty floor. Eventually the steam ceased to rise from it, but he continued talking. He’d forgotten he was eating. Concentration wasn’t the word for this—it was something much more intense, as if he were possessed. As if his life would end if he stopped talking. He hadn’t taken a single bite of his ramen, and the stuff on the end of his fork had begun to change color. Listening to him talk on and on with one eye on the darkening noodles, I’d watched them transform into some unidentifiable, pendulous, stringy substance. When he paused in his monologue for a moment I raised my eyebrows at his fork and lifted my chin to suggest he eat. Glancing with some surprise at the noodles, he shoveled them in his mouth and chewed with a melancholy air that seemed to say: Why do we have to go through the dreary process of ingesting food?

“When I was twelve I killed three in a row—all old people sleeping on porches in their rocking chairs or gliders—and I made a tape taking credit for the murders and sent it to the local radio station. They had a DJ I liked and I wanted him to know I was the serial killer everyone was talking about. I did a lot of things to disguise my voice—packed cotton balls in my mouth, held a pencil between my teeth, scotch-taped my lips together, and so forth—and I used an old tape recorder of my father’s. It took me over twenty hours to do it, but I can’t tell you how much fun it was. In the end the FBI managed to analyze the voice print, which proved my guilt beyond any reasonable doubt, so for a long time I regretted making and sending that tape. But then years later I remembered what fun it had been, how it made me feel like I was getting in touch with things outside myself, like I finally fit properly into my own body. That’s why I want to listen to those bells, Kenji: to see if my bad instincts—my
bonno—will be washed away, so I can fit into my own body again.”

Moments after I finished my ramen, sleep began to steal over me. I rubbed my eyes, and Frank jerked his thumb at the mattress we were sitting on and told me I could sleep there. “It’s not so easy to climb up to the second floor,” he said. I lay down on the mattress in my suit and overcoat. Frank was still eating, and I put a hand over my eyes to block out the light from the lamp. He must have seen me do this, because he turned it off. The mattress was cold and damp. Sleep kept pulling me down, but the cold kept waking me back up. The warmth of the ramen I’d eaten was soon just a memory, and the cold seemed to seep up through the mattress from the floor. At some point I started shivering. I heard Frank rummaging around and then felt a crinkly sort of blanket being placed over me. When I moved, the blanket made a rustling sound, as if it was made of paper. Frank ate the rest of his ramen in total darkness. Just before I fell asleep I had a moment of panic, thinking he was going to kill me after all, but I reminded myself that he wouldn’t do that before hearing the bells. As I drifted off, a bird was screeching somewhere outside.

I woke up covered with old newspapers. I heard Frank’s voice say, “We won’t be coming back here, so don’t forget anything.” I looked up to see him dressing. Improbably enough, he was climbing into a tuxedo. He said he’d been waiting for me to wake up.

“There are no mirrors here, so I need you to tell me if my tie is straight.”

He wore trousers with a stripe running down the outside of each leg and was squirming into a shirt of some shiny material with lacy frills down the front. A bow tie and jacket were draped over the stack of cardboard boxes. “Pretty snazzy,” I said, and he smiled as he buttoned the shirt. Watching Frank don a tuxedo in the dim light of this ruined building, with shards of broken glass scattered across the floor, I had to wonder if I wasn’t still dreaming. I asked him if he’d brought the tux with him.