(2005) In the Miso Soup (4 page)

Frank pulled out his wallet and said: “Kenji, what’s this Niketown business? Why is it so popular with the Japanese?”

He wasn’t sweating at all. I wondered what had made him come out with this question now, so long after the conversation, but I didn’t ask. The Japanese like anything that’s popular in America, I said.

“I never heard of Niketown,” said Frank. “Never knew there was such a place.”

“I believe you. It’s only here, in this country, that everybody goes crazy over the same things at once.”

When the check came, Frank extracted two ¥10,000 notes from his wallet. On one of them was a dark stain, about the size of a large coin, that bothered me a little. It looked like dried blood.

“Frank, I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.”

“Really? The girls got a kick out of it too, didn’t they?”

“Do you always do things like that?”

“Like what?”

“Make people laugh. I mean, by telling jokes and so on.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny. I was just having a Japanese lesson, and then before I knew it it turned into this thing. I still don’t really understand what was so hilarious.”

We had left the lingerie pub and were walking along the street behind the Koma Theater. It was a little past ten-thirty, and we hadn’t yet discussed our next move. I was exhausted from laughing like that, and it had been so hot inside the pub that my only thought was to walk awhile to cool off and settle down. I kept thinking about that ¥10,000 note with what looked like a bloodstain on it. And wondering why it bothered me so much.

“It was a brilliant performance, Frank. Did you study acting or anything?”

“No, but when I was small I had two older sisters who liked that sort of thing. Whenever we had company we used to fool around imitating comedians we’d seen on TV and so forth. But that’s about it.”

We came to a narrow side street with an atmosphere I’ve always found kind of eerie. It’s like stumbling onto a movie set from the Fifties, a street lined with tiny bars and mahjong parlors, and tea rooms with ivy-grown entrances and classical music playing, all with retro-looking signs out front. One of the bars even had a terra-cotta flowerpot hanging beside the door. The little white flowers shivered in the December wind of Kabuki-cho—a wind ripe with alcohol and sweat and garbage—and reflected the yellow and pink lights of the Koma Theater. Frank seemed to respond to the old-fashioned
atmosphere. He stopped at the corner, beneath the simple neon sign of a bar called Auge, and peered into the narrow lane.

“Kenji, there aren’t any touts around here.”

That, I explained, was because anyone walking this way would already have decided exactly where he was going. On this street you didn’t get the drunken sorts roving arm in arm with their buddies, checking out all the clubs and looking for the cheapest and easiest place to get their rocks off.

“This is the way Kabuki-cho used to look,” I said.

“Is that so? I guess it’s the same in every town.” Frank started walking again. “Times Square in New York was like this, way back when—used to be lots of nice bars before the sex shops moved in.”

He said this in such a nostalgic way that I decided he really was a New Yorker after all. It was silly to expect everyone from New York to know about Niketown.

“Speaking of which, Kenji, I saw a building in front of Shinjuku Station with a big sign saying ‘Times Square,’ but—what is that, some kind of joke?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the name of a department store.”

“But Times Square is Times Square because the old Times Tower was there. The
New York Times
doesn’t have a building in Shinjuku, does it?”

“Japanese think using names like that is cool.”

“Well, it’s not cool, it’s embarrassing. Japan may have lost the war, but that was a long time ago now. Why keep imitating America?”

I didn’t have an answer for that, so I just asked Frank where he wanted to go next. He said he wanted to try a peep show, to see girls who were completely nude.

We had to retrace our steps a bit. There are no peep shows around Kuyakusho Avenue, just Chinese clubs and girlie bars and pub-restaurants and love hotels. We turned the corner at a love hotel to head back toward Seibu Shinjuku Station and found ourselves walking past a rent-a-car lot. What it was doing in a place like that I couldn’t tell you. Who in the world would come here to rent a car? There isn’t even room on the streets to park. The
Toyota Rent-a-Car banner and the strings of vinyl pennants flapped in the wind, and the prefab office was all but hidden among the dozen or so dust-covered station wagons and sedans squeezed fender to fender inside the tiny lot. I’d rather walk any day than drive something like that, I thought. Frank was shuffling along with his collar turned up and his hands stuffed in his pockets. The tip of his nose was red. He had no coat or muffler and the warmth from the lingerie pub had faded quickly enough, but he didn’t look cold so much as dejected. I looked over at him as we walked past the Toyota lot, and a chill trickled down my spine. It was something about his posture in silhouette. He gave off this overpowering, almost tangible loneliness.

All Americans have something lonely about them. I don’t know what the reason for that might be, except maybe that they’re all descended from immigrants. But Frank had taken it to a whole new level. His cheap clothing and slovenly appearance had something to do with it: shorter even than my 172 centimeters, he was fat, his hair was combed forward and thinning, and right now he looked very old for his age. But it wasn’t just that. There was a falseness about him, as if his whole existence was somehow made up. That’s what I was thinking, anyway, when I noticed something that made my scalp crawl. Just ahead was a trash collection site cordoned off with yellow tape, and a cop was standing guard. This was where the schoolgirl’s corpse had been found.

Things that had been tugging at my brain merged with the trickling chill. Something in that newspaper article about all the cash having been removed from the murdered girl’s wallet. The bloodstained ¥10,000 note Frank had whipped out at the lingerie pub. And the fact that Frank had said he imported Toyota parts and yet hadn’t shown the least interest in the rows of Toyotas we’d just passed.

I told myself these were just random, unconnected blips, but I couldn’t shake my suspicion, and before I knew it I was getting all worked up. I had to keep telling myself to calm down and be reasonable. It’s crazy to suspect a guy of murder just because he lied about his job and has a bill stained with something that looks like blood. And maybe he wasn’t lying about his job
but only cares about the parts he imports, not the whole car. That’s what I kept telling myself, but I wished I could hear it from someone else. If someone would tell me, even over the phone, that I was letting my imagination run away with me, maybe that would be enough to pull me out of it. The only person I could think of was Jun.

“Um, it’s almost eleven o’clock,” I told Frank, showing him my watch. “We agreed on three hours, right? Till midnight?”

“Oh, that’s right. But we’re having so much fun, and I’m just getting warmed up. What do you say, Kenji? Would you mind going a couple of hours extra?”

“Well, actually,” I said, “I kind of promised my girlfriend . . .”

Frank furrowed his brow, and I could see the light going out of his eyes. Shit, I thought, here comes the Face.

“But, then again,” I said, “work comes first! I’ll just give her a call.”

I marched toward a phone booth across from the Koma Theater. I didn’t want to use my mobile. I was pretty sure Frank didn’t understand any Japanese to speak of, but I still didn’t like the idea of him standing beside me listening. It was a relief to get the glass walls of the booth between us. Jun was generally in my room around this time of night. Not that she was waiting for me to get back—she likes to spend time there by herself, reading or listening to music, because she doesn’t have any private space at home. Jun’s parents divorced when she was small, and she lives with her mother and little brother. She tells her mother she’s been studying at a friend’s house, and as long as she gets home by midnight no questions are asked.

“Hello? Oh, hi, Kenji.” I felt another wave of relief just hearing her voice, which is pretty low and husky for a sixteen-year-old girl.

“Hi. What’re you doing?”

“Just listening to the radio.”

Jun’s mother works in the sales department of an insurance company, and I know Jun loves her a lot and appreciates everything she’s done for her. The apartment the three of them share in Takaido has only two rooms and a
kitchen, but with her mother working late every night just to make ends meet, Jun can hardly suggest they move to a bigger place. I met Jun in Kabuki-cho. She wasn’t selling it, but she was doing some compensated dating in those days. Going with middle-aged guys to dinner or karaoke, for which she’d get from five to twenty thousand yen. We don’t talk about that very much.

“I’m still working.”

“Poor thing, it’s cold out there! I made some risotto. It’s in the pot.”

“Thanks, Jun. You know, this client of mine is kind of weird.”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know, he . . . He’s a liar.”

“You mean he won’t pay what he promised?”

“No, it’s not that. He just seems suspicious.”

I gave her the basic facts about the bloodstained bill and the Toyota thing.

“So you think he’s a killer?” she said. “Just because of that?”

“I’m crazy, right?”

“Well, I haven’t seen him, but . . .”

“What?”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“About what?”

“Well, the way that girl was murdered—it was pretty over the top, right? I was thinking it didn’t seem like the way a Japanese would kill somebody. What’s he doing right now?”

My eyes had been on Frank the whole time. He’d watched me for a while, then got bored and wandered over to the game center across the street and stood loitering in front of it.

“He’s checking out a Print Club booth.”

“A what?”

“You know, that machine that takes photos of you and then prints them out on cute little stickers. I don’t think he knows how it works. He’s watching a group of girls posing for a picture.”

“I think you’re probably all right, then, Kenji. I can’t imagine a murderer
making Print Club photos of himself.”

I’m not sure why, but that seemed to make sense.

“Kenji,” she said, “take some photos with the guy. I want to see what he looks like.”

I said I would and hung up.

“What is this thing, Kenji? Those girls sure seemed to be enjoying themselves. I think it took their picture. Is it one of those passport photo machines?”

I started to explain, but a drunken office worker was standing behind us with his girlfriend, whose face could have stopped a train, urging us to hurry up. Normally I would have made some snappy reply, but I was preoccupied with Frank and it was cold and all I said was: “All right, just give us a minute here.” I decided to skip the explanation and just take a picture. Frank said he didn’t have any change, so I paid. I stood him in front of the machine and was selecting the background he’d chosen—the Japanesy one, a
yakitori
stand—when he insisted we pose for it together.

“Those girls all took pictures together, I want one with you and me.”

To take a Print Club two-shot, you need to put your faces right next to each other. I’m not saying Frank revolted me, but I wasn’t about to press my cheek against his. Just the fact that he was a man made it bad enough, but Frank also had that weird skin. No wrinkles, though he was supposedly in his mid-thirties, but his face wasn’t what you’d call smooth, either—it was shiny and flabby and artificial-looking. At any rate, it wasn’t a face I wanted touching mine, but Frank put his arm around my shoulder, pulled me close, spun toward the screen and said: “Okay, Kenji, shoot!”

Frank’s cheek was cold and felt like the silicone they use in diving masks.

“Hey, man, I heard this gaijin of yours is a real scream.”

Passing the lingerie pub, I ran into Satoshi again. “At this time of night it’s only ¥7000 apiece, absolutely no extra charges!” he was bellowing to the drunks stumbling by. Watching him, I felt I understood what he meant about
Kabuki-cho being “easy.” There’s an anything-goes feeling to the place, no “normal” standard of behavior to live up to and no illusions of glory or shame. You either get your money or you get fired and move on. Frank had stopped walking a few paces back and was studying the photo strips.

“Did the waiter say anything about him?” I asked Satoshi. “Like, about the money he paid with?”

“No, why?”

Apparently I was the only one getting stressed over the stain on that bill. I decided to forget about it. I didn’t need Jun to tell me I was being paranoid. The coincidence of seeing the very spot where the schoolgirl’s corpse had been dumped, immediately after passing that ghostly rent-a-car place, must have made my nerves short out in some way. At least that’s how I decided to look at it.

“He wants to go to a peep show,” I told Satoshi. “Heard about any good ones lately?”

“Hey, man, they’re all the same,” Satoshi laughed, then added, after glancing back at Frank: “Times are tough all around.” Translation: That’s one sorry-looking excuse for a customer you’re dragging around, man.