In the Miso Soup

by Ryū Murakami

What’s good about Americans, if I can generalize a little, is that they have a kind of openhearted innocence. And what’s not so good is that they can’t imagine any world outside the States, or any value system different from their own. The Japanese have a similar defect, but Americans are even worse about trying to force others to do whatever they themselves believe to be right. American clients often forbid me to smoke and sometimes even make me accompany them on their daily jogs. In a word, they’re childish—but maybe that’s what makes their smile so appealing.

Japan is fundamentally uninterested in foreigners, which is why the knee-jerk response to any trouble is simply to shut them all out.

In the back of the book was a simple Japanese-English sex glossary, and he began reading words in alphabetical order. “Aho,” he said in a booming voice, and gave us the English translation (Shithead). “What did he just say?” Rie asked me, not quite understanding his accent. When I repeated the word, she began laughing and slapping her knee, saying: “Iya da! Kawaii!” (I can’t stand it! How cute!)

It’s endearing when foreigners try their best to communicate in broken Japanese. When they’re giving it all they’ve got, you find yourself wanting to reward them by comprehending.

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.

Americans don’t talk about just grinning and bearing it, which is the Japanese approach to so many things. After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there. I don’t think I could stand the sort of loneliness Americans feel.

Everybody lies at one time or another. But once someone makes a habit of lying, once it becomes a part of their everyday life, denial kicks in. Even the fact that they’re lying begins to fade into the background, and in extreme cases they actually forget. I know more than a few people like that, and I make sure to steer clear of them, because they’re the world’s biggest pains in the ass. Not to mention dangerous.

Why is there such agreement around the world about what is or isn’t a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow they’d get an urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby they’d get an urge to kill it? Something tells me there must be people like that somewhere, Kenji.”

He’s an American all right, I thought. Americans never forget the original agreement. No matter how drunk they get or how many naked ladies they get excited about, they always remember.

Sure enough, this summoned up the Face. Little blue and red capillaries appeared on his cheeks, the light went out of his pupils, and the corners of his eyes and nose and lips began to quiver. This was the first time I’d seen the Face head-on and close up, so close I could almost feel Frank’s breath on me. He looked like he was either very, very angry or very, very frightened.

Parents, teachers, government—they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

My friends have always told me I’m a pessimist, that I tend to see the dark side of everything, and I think that may have something to do with Dad dying when I was so young. It was definitely a shock when he died. The worst possible scenario is always taking shape behind the scenes, where no one can detect it or see it coming, and then one day, boom, it becomes your reality. And once it’s real, it’s too late to do anything about it. That’s what I learned from my father’s death.

Jun’s parents divorced when she was small, so she knows what it’s like to be anxious or scared and want to be with somebody but not have to talk. I think people like Jun and me are becoming the mainstream in this country. Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can’t really deal with on your own. We’re still in the minority, so the media lump us together as “The Oversensitive Young,” or whatever the latest catchphrase is, but eventually that will change.

I had a vision of Frank, his scrap of human flesh at the ready, calling Yokoyama-san from his hotel room before dawn and saying: Kenji was a wonderful fellow, please tell me his bank account number. That was exactly the sort of bizarre behavior he was made for. As opposed to, say, giving himself a Mohawk, painting his body, and running naked through the streets.

But I should have known there was no way to hide anything from a sixteen-year-old girl. Sixteen-year-old girls are probably the most sensitive and perceptive group of people in this entire country.

He seemed to be at a pay phone, and it sounded like the words were coming not out of his mouth but straight through his skull from his brain.

His voice had the power to transform an everyday little scene like this into something else entirely. I felt like I was being sucked through the gap between what Frank’s voice symbolized and what Jun and the waitress symbolized, down into the belly of some monster.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have looked on this sort of scene with cynicism, if not loathing. I’m not so innocent. I know what malevolence is about, which is why I thought I was able to judge that Frank was a dangerous man. Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it’s been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you’re left with when something very important has been taken away from you. I can’t say I sensed a particularly cruel or sadistic tendency in Frank, or even that he fit my image of a murderer. But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced really malevolent feelings once or twice in our lives, the desire to kill somebody, say. But there’s always a braking mechanism somewhere along the line that stops us. The malevolence is turned back, and it sinks down to the bottom of the emptiness it emerged from and lies there, forgotten, only to leak out in other ways—a passion for work, for example. Frank wasn’t like that. I didn’t know if he was a murderer, but I knew he had a bottomless void inside him. And that void was what made him lie. I’ve been there. Compared to where Frank was at, it may have been like a Hello Kitty version, but I’ve been there.

He was dressed differently tonight—black sweater and corduroy jacket with jeans and sneakers. Even his hairstyle was different. The short, slicked-down bangs he’d had the night before were now standing straight up. And instead of the old leather shoulder bag, he was carrying a cloth rucksack. It was like he’d had a makeover or something.

This is how people start the slide down into madness, I thought. Suspicious minds breed demons, they say, and now I knew what they meant. Frank kept peering at me, and I searched for something to say. I was trying to decide how much I should let him suspect I suspected.

he laughed out loud in a very American way, raising his beer mug with one hand and slapping my shoulder with the other. An American holding a beer aloft and roaring with laughter looks as natural as a Japanese does dangling a camera and bowing.

Japanese always have a favorable impression of people from overseas who seem to be having a good time. The foreigner’s enjoying himself, so maybe old Nippon isn’t so bad after all, in fact maybe this is a world-class bar, and we drink in places like this all the time, so maybe we’re happier than we realized, is how the reasoning goes.

“You may know that sorcery was big in medieval Europe. Well, Bulgaria was the center of all that. I’m not talking about sleight of hand or juggling, I’m talking about black magic, Satanism, where you get power from the devil, not from God—you ally yourself with Satan. Tell her what I’m saying, Kenji. I’d think a girl like her would find this interesting.”

“It was all about sex, that’s what they were really into, all types of abnormal sex—sodomy, coprophilia, necrophilia. The whole thing started in the fourteenth century, when the Knights Templar defending the roads to Jerusalem met up with a heathen Arab cult. Did you know that when new recruits wanted to join the Templars, the initiation rites required them to kiss their sponsor on the anus? I bet it would excite the young lady to hear stories like this. The Rolling Stones were into Satanism at one point. She looks like she’d like the Rolling Stones.”

On the sheets of paper Noriko gave us was a box where you wrote the number of the lady you liked, then four larger boxes where you introduced yourself: Name, Age, Occupation, Where you usually go to party. Then: What you would like to do on your date. Underneath that were four possible replies the lady could choose from. 1. I’d be happy to accompany you anywhere! 2. Let’s go out for a drink! 3. Let’s have a drink here and see if we hit it off! 4. Sorry! The sheet of paper was delivered to the lady you chose, and returned to you once she’d indicated her answer.

Beneath the makeup I could see these raised lines that at first I thought were a particular sort of tattoo—like Hell’s Angels often give themselves, scraping the skin to make a swollen wound and then injecting ink. When I realized what they really were, every hair on my body stood on end. Suicide scars. I know a girl who has three scars like that on her left wrist. But Frank’s scars were beyond belief. There were dozens of them, more than you could count, within a space of about two centimeters, and they went halfway around his wrist. How many times had that wrist been slashed, then allowed to heal, only to be slashed again? Just thinking about it made me feel like throwing up.

It’s not easy to know what’s genuine and what isn’t, though, so unless you’re willing to go to all the trouble of refining your taste, you need to rely on brand names. I think that’s why girls in this country are so obsessed with Vuitton and Chanel and Prada and the rest.

I wanted to tell him Jun didn’t speak much English, but he gave me an icy look and growled: “Shut up, I’m talking here!” The Face made a brief appearance, and it was scarier than ever. Maki wasn’t looking, but Yuko happened to glance up and see it, and the smile froze on her lips. Even a dim-witted vocational school student with zero English could sense something abnormal in the Face. She looked like she was going to burst into tears. I, for my part, was learning this much about Frank: the angrier he got, the cooler he became. As his rage grew, his features seemed to sink and contract and his eyes would glint with a colder and colder light. Expressions like “boiling mad” didn’t suit Frank at all.

People in this country have no consideration for others, no glimmer of comprehension that they might be annoying those around them. There was something very ugly about this man contorting his face as he struggled with the high notes.

I was getting genuinely pissed off and beginning to wonder if we really needed people like this in the world. For a moment I thought: He should be put to death, this guy. And at that very moment, Frank looked at me and nodded and smiled as if to say: Exactly. An electric shiver ran through me.

Unattractive, riddled with complexes, and dumb as a post, but because of the worst sort of upbringing ignorant even of her own ignorance. Convinced she ought to be working in a classier place and living a better life, and equally convinced that it’s other people’s fault she can’t pull it off. Envious of everybody else and therefore eager to blame them for everything. Treated so badly all her life that she thinks nothing of doing the same to others by deliberately saying things that hurt them.

Because Frank’s thigh was pressed right up against mine, part of me had already abandoned all hope of escape. When the body’s constrained, so is the spirit.

when you’re in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who’s decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.

Women like her have a nearly impenetrable barrier of stupidity. I could put it to her straight—You’re a moron—but that wasn’t likely to produce much more than an angry What’s that supposed to mean?

Men today are such a lonely breed that any woman who wants to sell it, as long as she isn’t absolutely hideous to look at, will find a buyer. Which is partly why women like Maki get so full of themselves.

once heard a psychiatrist type say on TV that people need to feel they’re of some value to go on living, and I think there’s something to that. It wouldn’t be easy to keep going if you thought you were of no use to anyone.

Men like him, managers of soaplands and Chinese clubs and S&M clubs, not to mention gigolos and pimps—men who eke out a living exploiting women’s bodies—all have one characteristic in common: they look as if something has eroded away inside them.

A familiar, creepy vibe told me that Frank was up to something again. The air seemed so dry it pricked my skin, yet so dense it was hard to breathe. I, for one, wasn’t going to look at Frank’s card. I kept my eyes on the manager and waiter, and sure enough in a matter of seconds I saw a change come over them. Something in their eyes. I once read that when you’re hypnotized you temporarily enter the world of the dead, and whether it’s true or not, I do know that something spooky happens. I saw the manager’s pupils dilate as he stared at the Amex card. Then, a moment later, the muscles of his jaw and cheeks tensed up so tight you could hear his teeth grinding, and veins stood out on his neck. It was the expression of someone absolutely petrified with fear, but it lasted only a few seconds. Then the veins deflated and the light went out of his face.

Frank looked strangely radiant, like someone who’d finally finished a long and difficult job and was now about to celebrate with a cold beer. The manager, the waiter, and Maki and Yuko were all in a trance of some sort. The waiter’s lip-piercing jiggled as if in a small breeze, but he looked like a mime frozen in position. Everyone’s eyes were unfocused, and I couldn’t tell if their muscles were relaxed or tense.

I couldn’t even imagine screaming for help, let alone trying to run, and you can’t do something you can’t visualize yourself doing. Normally we don’t notice it, but we always have to picture ourselves doing something before we can match the image with an action.

Just expressing something to someone wasn’t necessarily the same as communicating. I’d never really realized that before.

People who’ve spent their lives living in that kind of bubble tend to panic in emergencies, to lose the ability to communicate, and to end up getting killed.

Frank made a big production of acting as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He looked up at the ceiling, spread his arms wide, and shook his head. I don’t know why this particular thought occurred to me at a time like this, but I thought, yeah, he’s an American all right. The Americans, like the Spanish, massacred millions of Indians, but I don’t think it was out of malevolence so much as plain old ignorance. And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.

Now that I thought about it, it seemed he’d taken special care not to muss himself, handling the ear, for example, as if it were something breakable as he tried to insert it in the woman’s vagina. I saw no blood on his clothes or face, either. Obviously Frank had mastered a technique for cutting throats without spraying blood.

“Kenji, you know, I’ve told you nothing but lies so far. I hope you won’t hold it against me, because the truth is I can’t help it. My brain doesn’t work right and I can’t connect the memories in my head very well. And it’s not just memories, either, it’s me myself. There are several me’s inside this body, not just one, and I can’t get them to connect, or merge. But I’m pretty sure the me I am right now is the real me, and you may not believe this but the me I am now can’t understand the me who was inside that pub a while ago. You’re probably thinking, where does he get the gall to make excuses like this, but I honestly feel it wasn’t me doing those things, it was somebody else who looks exactly like me. It’s not the first time he’s done that, either. I’ve been trying to make sure it didn’t happen again, though the only strategy I could come up with was to not lose my temper. When they cut out part of my brain, like I told you yesterday, that’s what started it all, according to the doctor the police sent me to. The police, yes. I’ve been caught before, and sometimes that’s part of the punishment, being put in a psych ward. But believe me, I’ve been punished in plenty of ways, by both God and society.”

Most Japanese girls sell it, not because they need money, but as a way of escaping loneliness.

I’d once read an article about a little girl in England who’d grown so attached to her kidnapper that after she’d been rescued she claimed to like him more than her mummy and daddy, and a bank teller in Sweden who fell in love with the man who robbed the bank and took her hostage. The article said that in extreme situations like this, when a criminal literally controls whether you live or die, you can develop a feeling of intimacy with him that’s very much like love.

The images flickered through my mind like drug flashbacks, but unaccompanied by any real sense of revulsion or outrage. I remembered the sound of the guy’s neck bones cracking, but all I could think was: So that’s what it’s like when you break somebody in two. Maybe my nerves still hadn’t thawed out. I tried to feel sorry for the people who’d been killed but found, to my horror, that I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel any sympathy for them at all.