Ryu Murakami - In the Miso Soup

Translated by Ralph McCarthy

First published in Great Britain 2005
This electronic edition published in 2010

Copyright 1997 by Ryu Murakami
English translation 2003 Ralph McCarthy
Published by arrangement with Kodansha International Limited
The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

ISBN 9781408806371

www.bloomsbury.com/ryumurakami

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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Audition

My name is Kenji.

As I pronounced these words in English I wondered why we have so many ways of saying the same thing in Japanese. Hard-boiled: Ore no na wa Kenji da. Polite: Watashi wa Kenji to moshimasu. Casual: Boku wa Kenji. Gay: Atashi Kenji te iu no yo!

Oh, so youre Kenji! The overweight American tourist made a big show of being delighted to see me. Nice to meet you, I said and shook his hand. This was near Seibu Shinjuku Station, at a hotel that might rate about two-and-a-half stars overseas. A moment I wont forgetthe first time I ever met Frank.

I had just turned twenty, and though my English is far from perfect I was working as a nightlife guide for foreign tourists. Basically I specialize in what you might call sex tours, so its not as if my English needs to be flawless. Since AIDS, the sex industry hasnt exactly welcomed foreigners with open armsin fact, most of the clubs are pretty blatant about refusing service to gaijinbut lots of visitors from overseas are still determined to play, and theyre the ones who pay me to guide them to relatively safe cabarets and massage parlors and S&M bars and soaplands and what have you. Im not employed by a company and dont even have an office, but by running a simple ad in an English-language tourist magazine I make enough to rent a nice studio apartment in Meguro, take my girl out for Korean barbecue once in a while, and listen to the music I like and read the things I want to read. I should mention, though, that my mother, who runs a little clothes shop in Shizuoka Prefecture, thinks Im enrolled in a college preparation course. Mom brought me up on her own after Dad died when I was fourteen. I had friends back in high school who thought nothing of slapping their own mothers around, but youd never catch me hurting mine. Much as I hate to disappoint Mom, though, I have no plans to go to college. I definitely dont have the background in science and math to go for a professional degree, and all a degree in the arts would get me is a cubicle in an office somewhere. My dream, not that Ive ever had much hope of realizing it, is to save up a fair amount of money and go to America.

Is this Kenji Tours? My names Frank, Im a tourist from the United States of America?

When the phone rang, late in the morning of December 29 last year, I was reading a newspaper article about this high-school girl whod been murdered. According to the article, her corpse had been dumped at a trash collection site in a relatively untraveled alley in the Kabuki-cho district of Shinjuku with her arms, legs, and head cut off. The victim had been one of a group of high-school girls who openly peddled sex in the area and was well known at nearby love hotels. No eyewitnesses had come forward, and investigators had no solid leads as yet. The article went on to editorialize that ones heart went out to the victim, of course, but perhaps this incident would help instill in todays teens a proper understanding of the potential horror behind those fashionable words compensated dating, and that all the girls in the victims group had now sworn off what they flippantly refer to as selling it.

Hi, Frank. I tossed the newspaper on the table and gave him my standard greeting. How you doing?

Im all right. I saw your ad in this magazine and wondered if I can hire you to show me around.

Tokyo Pink Guide?

Howd you guess?

Its the only magazine we advertise in.

Aha! So can I hire you for three nights, starting tonight?

Are you alone, Frank, or with a group?

Its just me. Is that a problem?

No, but for one person its kind of expensive10,000 from six to nine; 20,000 from nine to midnight; and 10,000 for each hour after midnight. I dont charge tax, but you pay all expenses, including any meals and drinks we have together.

Thats fine. Id like the nine to midnight course, starting tonightif I can book you for three nights.

Three nights took us through New Years Eve, and there was just one problem. I have this girlfriend named Juna high-school girl who, by the way, is dead set against selling itand Id broken my promise to spend Christmas with her. She didnt like that one bit, and just the other day Id given my solemn word, locking pinkies with her and everything, that we would absolutely be together for the countdown on New Years Eve. Jun can be kind of hard to deal with when she gets mad, but I wanted the job. After almost two years of doing this sort of work I hadnt saved nearly as much money as Id hoped to. I told Frank okay and told myself that on New Years Eve Id just invent some excuse and cut out early.

Ill be at your hotel at ten of nine, I said.

Frank was waiting for me in the cafeteria off the lobby, drinking a beer. Hed described himself as white and stocky and looking a bit like Ed Harris in profile, and said hed be wearing a necktie with a pattern of white swans, but he was the only foreigner in the place anyway. I introduced myself and shook his hand, studying his face and not finding the least resemblance to Ed Harris from any angle.

Shall we get started right away? he said.

Up to you, Frank. But if you have any questions, now might be a good time. The magazines dont tell you everything you need to know about nightlife in Tokyo.

Oh, I like the sound of that.

What?

Nightlife in Tokyojust the sound of those words is kind of exciting, isnt it?

Frank certainly didnt remind me of the soldiers or astronauts or whatever that Ed Harris portrayshe looked more like a stockbroker or something. Not that I have any idea what an actual stockbroker is supposed to look like. I just mean he struck me as sort of drab and nondescript.

How old are you, Kenji?

Twenty.

Oh? Well, they say the Japanese look young for their age, but thats exactly what I would have guessed.

I had bought two suits at a discount clothing outlet in the suburbs and always wore one or the other when I was working. In winter, like now, I needed an overcoat and muffler too. My hair is average length, and I dont bleach it or have any piercings or anything. Most sex clubs are wary of people whose appearance is eccentric in any way.

And you, Frank?

Im thirty-five.

He smiled as he said it, and thats when I first noticed this thing about his face. It was a very average sort of face, but you couldnt have judged his age from it. Depending on the angle of the light, one moment he looked like he could be in his twenties, and the next in his forties or even fifties. Id worked for nearly two hundred foreigners by now, most of them Americans, but Id never seen a face quite like this one. It took me a while to pinpoint exactly what was so odd about it. The skin. It looked almost artificial, as if hed been horribly burned and the doctors had resurfaced his face with this fairly realistic man-made material. For some reason these thoughts stirred up the unpleasant memory of that newspaper article, the murdered schoolgirl. I sipped my coffee.