(2005) In the Miso Soup (24 page)

“Yeah, I did. Tuxedos are great when there’s a celebration of some kind and you want to blend in.”

It was only 4:00
P.M
. when we left the building. I didn’t know how big a crowd would show up at Kachidoki Bridge, and I wanted to be sure of grabbing the spot I told Jun we’d be at.

As Frank led the way down the narrow alley, I asked him if he’d been staying in that building since he came to Japan. He’d stayed at a hotel for a while but didn’t feel comfortable there, he said. It had been so dark the night before that I hadn’t noticed, but signs were posted all along the cul-desac:
DANGER! TOXIC WASTE! KEEP OUT!
When I stopped to read the first one we came to, Frank said something about “polychlorinated biphenyl.”

“There used to be a factory here that made copy paper treated with PCB, and a wholesale distributor or two, and then when it was discovered that PCB is bad for you the authorities sealed off this whole area. Fact is, the toxic material, the dioxin, isn’t released into the atmosphere unless the PCB is burned, but the cops don’t know that and steer clear of the neighborhood. You couldn’t ask for a better hideout.”

He said he’d been told all this by a homeless man who spoke English with a British accent. The homeless man they found burned to a crisp? I didn’t ask.

Frank wore a red muffler over his tuxedo and was carrying a small duffel bag. It was true, though, that he didn’t stand out, even as we neared Yoyogi Station. I guess people just assumed we were on our way to a New Year’s Eve party.

I led Frank to a soba shop in front of the station, explaining that on New Year’s Eve it’s customary to eat buckwheat noodles. I was starving. I asked for herring-and-soba soup and Frank ordered
zaru soba
—plain cold noodles. Several groups of college students were clustered around tables, eating and talking quietly, but none of them paid any attention to us. I didn’t need to know much about clothes and fashion to see that Frank’s tuxedo was a cheap one
or that his muffler was a long way from cashmere. My own suit was wrinkled and dusty and didn’t look as if it hadn’t been slept in. Anyone observing a bit more closely might have thought us a suspicious pair, but the students completely ignored us, and I began to understand how Frank had managed such spectacular murders without getting caught. Right now in this country nobody gives a damn about strangers. I wondered if that was true in America too, and asked Frank about it while we waited for the food to come. He said it was true in the cities, at least.

The restaurant had no forks, and the chopsticks did nothing to speed up Frank’s eating technique. It took him nearly an hour to finish his soba, by which time the noodles were dry and swollen and night had fallen outside. The kitchen was bustling as the small staff prepared for the crush of customers who’d show up just before midnight to greet the new year slurping up soba for good luck. The owner was a tiny old man who, when I apologized for taking so long, laughed and said: “Gaijin will be gaijin.” It was an odd sensation to be sitting there with Frank and yet be treated like any other customer in a place as ordinary as a noodle shop outside a station. I was back in the everyday world, which only made the massacre of the night before all the more unreal to me. But part of me couldn’t forget the very real horror of ears lopped off and throats slashed open. It was as though a thin membrane were covering only Frank and me, or as if we’d fallen deep inside some weird sort of fissure in the reality around us.

While Frank ate his soba I pored over every inch of an evening paper someone had left behind. There was no mention of the omiai pub. I was relieved but not surprised. Anyone who found the shutter down would simply assume the place had closed for the holidays. And even if the manager, for example, had a family, they’d probably hesitate to contact the police just because he went missing for a night or two, given the nature of his work. The bodies might not be discovered for days. How long does it take for a corpse to begin decomposing? Would the cold December temperatures slow the process?

Frank stabbed a clump of soba with his chopsticks and asked why we ate this stuff on New Year’s Eve. I explained how the long buckwheat noodles symbolized hope for a long life. Gripping the chopsticks like a knife, he’d been sliding them under the strands and then trying to finesse them to his mouth. At first, when the noodles were still fresh and slippery, they’d tended to slip off as soon as he tried to lift them, but as they grew soft and swollen they clung to the sticks and made it easier, if less appetizing. Anyone who knew nothing about Frank would probably have been charmed or amused by his clumsy efforts to grapple with soba. I wasn’t charmed, of course, but I wasn’t amused either.

“What made the old-time Japanese think they wouldn’t die if they ate soba?” Frank was taking this very seriously.

They didn’t think they wouldn’t die, I said, they thought they’d live longer. Frank shrugged and shook his head, and I realized he had a point. Living longer was the same as not dying, at least anytime soon. Maybe in this country “long life” meant something different from “postponed death.” In any case, few Japanese would ever have considered the possibility of an outsider like Frank suddenly coming along and rubbing them out.

He was now sawing with his chopsticks at the dry, gray clump of buckwheat dough.

We rode the Yamanote Line to Yotsuya, descended to the subway, and transferred again at Ginza. Ginza Station was insanely crowded, and Frank didn’t look happy as we waddled along with the herd. When I asked him if he disliked crowds, he said he was afraid of them.

“A lot of people jammed into one place really scares me, it always has. Which is not to say I like being all alone either. I just don’t seem to have a stable comfort zone when it comes to personal space.”

It was still early in the evening when we emerged onto a street in Tsukiji, near the fish market. From the top of a pedestrian overpass we caught a glimpse
of Hongan-ji Temple. Frank said it looked like an Islamic mosque. He had left his duffel bag in a station coin locker after removing a gray raincoat, which he was now wearing. It was a plain one like the British often wear, and made him even less conspicuous. The road leading to Kachidoki Bridge was wide but dimly lit, with few shops or restaurants and only the occasional passing car. I’d never been here before. This was a very different Tokyo from places like Shibuya or Shinjuku. Wooden bait-and-tackle shops with disinte-grating roofs and broken signs stood next to shiny new convenience stores, and futuristic highrise apartment complexes rose skyward on either side of narrow, retro streets lined with wholesalers of dried fish.

A gently arching old structure of steel and stone came into view. What a pretty bridge, Frank said softly. To the left of it, along the riverbank, stretched a narrow public park called Sumida River Terrace. Near the entrance to the park was a big rectangular stone basin with a fountain, but whether because of the season or because of the hour the water had been turned off. The New Year’s bells wouldn’t begin for quite some time yet, so we walked down through the park to the riverside and sat on a bench, where we had a good view of the bridge railing. This would be the perfect place for Jun to sit, I thought. Spaced every few meters along the bridge were metal lanterns, and reflections from the yellow lights wavered on the dark surface of the river. After the white fluorescent lights of the ruined clinic, the soba shop, and the trains, those lanterns felt like long-lost friends to me. A group of men who looked like migrant laborers from distant provinces sat drinking in a circle at the water’s edge, not far from us. At first they’d been roasting something over a small fire, but then two policemen strolled over and asked them to put it out. The men did so without protest. Though night had long since fallen, flocks of pigeons whirled overhead from time to time. The white things I could see bobbing on the river were probably seagulls. I told Frank we still had a long wait before the bells began to sound. He adjusted his bow tie and said he was used to waiting.

The night wore on, but barely a breeze blew over the river, and it was
much warmer than the past two nights had been. Frank was observing the interaction between the policemen and the circle of half-drunk laborers. The cops had made them douse the fire but weren’t throwing their weight around. Once the fire was extinguished, they both sat down with the men and started chatting: Which part of the country are you from? Aren’t you going home for New Year’s? And so on. Apparently the men were all from the same region up north. They said they’d been unable to book train tickets for today so planned to spend the night here and head home tomorrow.

A crowd was gradually gathering in the park and on the bridge. Mostly young people in couples and groups. Some of the couples were drinking thermos cups of coffee and sharing sandwiches, others stood shoulder to shoulder listening to music on the same Walkman. One group was waving to each boat that passed. I figured they’d all read about this place in the same magazine Jun and I had seen. There was no sign of her yet.

The policemen walked toward me and Frank. No one else knew about the bodies in the omiai pub, so I was sure we weren’t in danger of being arrested, but it didn’t do my nerves any good to see two uniformed officers approaching, each with a long hardwood riot stick. There was no change whatsoever in Frank’s expression.

“
Komban wa
,” the older of the two said to us.

I returned the greeting—“Good evening”—and Frank, seated beside me, bobbed his head in an attempt at a bow. It was an endearingly clumsy gesture that said: Though an outsider here, I respect your culture and traditions. “
Gaijin-san desu ne. Joya-no-kane desu ka?”
asked the policeman, and I said: “
So desu
.” Yes, he’s a foreigner and we’re here for the New Year’s bells.

The policeman said he didn’t think there’d be a very big crowd tonight, but we should nonetheless be on guard against pickpockets and bag-snatchers and what have you. I translated this for Frank, who bobbed his head again and said: “
Arigato gozaimasu
.” The two policemen walked away smiling. “What friendly cops,” Frank muttered as he watched them go.

More people were arriving, so we decided to walk over and claim our spot.
A homeless man was sitting on sheets of cardboard at the foot of the bridge, his belongings in a baby carriage. A foul smell radiated out from him. We gave him a wide berth and went up to lean against the railing, looking out over the river and the little park, to wait for the bells.

“I wonder which of us is more of a bane on society, that homeless fellow or me?” said Frank.

I asked him if he really thought single individuals could be “a bane on society.”

“Of course they can,” Frank said, his eyes still on the bum, “and I’m clearly more of one than he is. I see myself as being like a virus. Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject—when you don’t need much sleep you have a lot of time to read—and I can tell you that if it weren’t for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won’t one day prove to have been rewriting our genetic code in a way that’s essential to our survival as a race. I’m a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I’m definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world. But people like him?”

Frank looked over at the homeless guy, who hadn’t budged from his cardboard mat. On the bridge, the crowd continued to grow, but he alone had plenty of room.

“It’s not that people like him have given up on life,” Frank went on. “They’ve given up trying to relate to others. In poor countries you may have refugees but you don’t have bums. The homeless in our societies have the easiest lives of anybody, in a way. If you reject society, then you should live outside it, not off it—you have to take some risks. I’ve done at least that much in my life. But people like him, they’re not even capable of a life of crime.
They’re examples of retrogression—devolution, I call it—and I’ve spent my life exterminating them.”

Frank was speaking very slowly and clearly to make sure I followed him. He could be strangely persuasive when he talked like this, but part of me wasn’t buying it. I wanted to ask him if the dismembered high-school girl was an example of devolution too, but I didn’t have the energy.

Frank turned toward Sumida River Terrace and sent a jolt through me by saying: “There she is.” Jun had materialized on a bench in the park. She glanced up at us, then quickly averted her eyes, bowing her head and staring at her feet, probably wondering what the hell to do now. I felt a sudden tidal wave of remorse for having summoned her to watch out for me. Not because Frank knew who she was, though I should have foreseen as much. After all, he’d found his way to my apartment and stuck a piece of charred human flesh to my door—how hard could it have been for him to get a good look at Jun’s face? But I never should have asked an innocent creature like her to come anywhere near this monster. Looking at Jun I saw the world Before Frank, and the huge gulf between her and the post-Frank me. I should have dealt with this on my own, whatever the cost. I shouldn’t have got her involved, I thought, and looked around for a policeman.
I have to protect Jun
: the moment this thought crystallized in my mind, my feelings disengaged completely from Frank. It was like being released from a spell. I even realized what it was about Frank’s argument that I couldn’t swallow. Who was he to set himself up as judge and jury? No one could possibly tell who is or isn’t an example of devolution, even if there was such a thing.