(2005) In the Miso Soup (25 page)

“I can tell, Kenji.” My heart froze. “Sometimes I know what people are thinking. Not all the time, mind you. If it happened all the time I’d go insane. But when you’re killing, your senses have to be wide open and honed to razor sharpness. You have to be totally
there
. When I kill, I get so focused that I can pick up certain signals people send out, unconscious signals that emanate from the blood circulating in their brains. Sluggish brain circulation is one of the hallmarks of devolution, and it causes a signal that says:
PLEASE KILL ME
.
Kenji, you’re the only friend I’ve made in Japan—in fact you may be the only real friend I’ve ever had. Go on now, go to your girlfriend. Thank you for bringing me here. I won’t impose on you any longer. I’ll go off someplace where I can listen to the bells on my own.”

Frank jerked his chin toward Jun, dismissing me. But when I turned in a daze to walk away, he clamped his hand on my shoulder. “I almost forgot to give you this,” he said, and held out an envelope. “It’s a present. Something very valuable to me, much more valuable than any amount of money, and I want you to have it.”

As I took the envelope, he added: “There’s just one thing I was hoping we could do that we never got around to. I wanted to have some miso soup with you, but it’s too late now. We won’t be meeting again.”

“Miso soup?”

“Yeah. I’m really interested in miso soup. I ordered it at a little sushi bar in Colorado once long ago, and I thought it was a darned peculiar kind of soup, the smell it had and everything, so I didn’t eat it, but it intrigued me. It had that funny brown color and smelled kind of like human sweat, but it also looked delicate and refined somehow. I came to this country hoping to find out what the people who eat that soup on a daily basis might be like. So I’m a little disappointed we didn’t get to have some together.”

I asked him if he was going back to America right away. No, not right away, he said, so I suggested we could still have miso soup together sometime. Even the smallest Japanese restaurant has it, I explained, and you can even buy it in convenience stores. That’s all right, Frank said with a smile—that peculiar smile of his which looked as if his features weren’t relaxing but collapsing.

“I don’t need to eat the stuff now because now I’m here—right in the middle of it! The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I’m in the miso soup myself, just like those bits of vegetable. I’m floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that’s good enough for me.”

Frank and I shook hands, and I turned and walked toward Jun’s park bench. My entire body was rigid with tension. Jun looked puzzled as she glanced from me to Frank and back again. The New Year’s bells still hadn’t begun to sound. I was deviating from the script, and she didn’t know what to do. She pointed at the bridge. I looked back and Frank was gone. Jun shook her head to tell me she didn’t know where.

I opened the envelope beneath a streetlamp. It was sealed with seven of the little Print Club photo stickers of Frank and me. Me before I knew anything, standing there looking disgruntled, and Frank beside me with his poker face. Inside the envelope was a gray, soiled feather.

“What’s that?” Jun asked, pressing against me.

“The feather of a swan,” I said.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami has played drums for a rock group, made movies and hosted a TV talk show. His first novel
Almost Transparent Blue
, written while he was still a student, was awarded Japan’s most coveted literary prize and went on to sell over a million copies.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATOR

Ralph McCarthy is the translator of
69
by Ryu Murakami
and two collections of stories by Osamu Dazzai.

ALSO AVAILABLE BY RYU MURAKAMI

PIERCING

Every night, Kawashima Masayuki creeps from his bed and watches over his baby girl’s crib while his wife sleeps. But this is no ordinary domestic scene. He has an ice pick in his hand, and a barely controllable desire to use it. Deciding to confront his demons, Kawashima sets into motion a chain of events seeming to lead inexorably to murder. . .

‘A smart and snappy psychosexual pulp thriller. . .
Piercing
keeps
the tension running high until its climactic resolution’
Times Literary Supplement

‘A haunting Japanese version of a David Lynch nightmare . . .
Piercing
reads like a compendium of Hollywood
psychological horror’
Guardian

‘A deliciously black farce. . .worthy of Bret Easton Ellis’
Metro

‘Like any good thriller,
Piercing
makes you queasy in the
stomach yet want to read more, and relieved that you are
on the other side of the page’
London Paper

‘There are echoes here of Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoevsky . . .
Creepy and gripping’
The Times

OUT NOW IN ALL GOOD BOOKSHOPS

To order your copy online visit
www.bloomsbury.com