In the Miso Soup

by Ryū Murakami

Now I know I’m going mad, I thought. My brain was in utter chaos, with different parts of it seeming to operate independently. One part was searching furiously for words. It didn’t seem to matter what the words were as long as they kept turning up, and any random memory or thought that happened along was automatically verbalized. It was as if my speech function was the only thing that still worked, and it had seized the opportunity to take control. If a dog passed by right now I’d probably say: Oh, look, a dog. Then I’d probably remember my boyhood pooch and tell Frank: I had a dog when I was small.

And he said she was absolutely right, that the Japanese had never experienced having their land taken over by another ethnic group or being slaughtered or driven out as refugees—because even in World War II the battlefields were mostly in China and Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific, and then Okinawa of course, but on the mainland there were only air raids and the big bombs—so the people at home never came face to face with an enemy who killed and raped their relatives and forced them all to speak a new language. A history of being invaded and assimilated is the one thing most countries in Europe and the New World have in common, so it’s like a basis for international understanding. But people in this country don’t know how to relate to outsiders because they haven’t had any real contact with them.

But he said of course there’s a bright side to that too and started telling her about the bells, saying that precisely because the Japanese have never experienced a real invasion, there’s a certain gentleness here you can’t find in other countries, and that they’ve come up with these incredible methods of healing.

Sometimes you can remember everything about an old friend, down to minor details about his behavior, but for the life of you you can’t picture his face. Or you’ll wake up knowing you’ve just had a terrifying dream but can’t remember what it was about. It was like that. Why that sort of thing happens I couldn’t tell you, but there it was.

Old Japanese words like this sound even more solemn and mysterious when spoken by foreigners.

No kid ever got lost gradually. Suddenly you find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings, and that’s it, you’re lost. You’ve been walking along past familiar houses and parks and streets, and then you turn a corner and the scenery changes completely. I remember being very scared when that happened but also really liking it. A lot of times I’d get lost following somebody.

But there’s no reason a child commits murder, just as there’s no reason a child gets lost. What would it be—because his parents weren’t watching him? That’s not a reason, it’s just a step in the process.”

because it’s extreme and abnormal but imaginable. Human beings are the only creatures who have the power of imagination, and that’s why we survived. Physically we were no match for other large animals, so certain things were needed to keep out of danger, like the ability to conceptualize and predict and communicate and confirm, all of which are possible only because of the power of imagination. Our ancestors were capable of imagining all kinds of horrors, which they had to try to prevent from becoming realities. And modern people still have the same ability. When it’s used in positive ways you get artists and scientists and so on, but when it’s used in negative ways it always turns into fear and anxiety and hatred, and it can cause a lot of damage.

People often point out how cruel children can be, because they’ll torture or kill little animals and insects or smash their own toys. But kids don’t do things like that for fun, they do it to release the anxieties of the imagination out into the real world. If they can’t bear the thought of torturing or killing bugs, they feel an unconscious urge to actually do it and reassure themselves that the world won’t come tumbling down.

Basically people who love horror movies are people with boring lives. They want to be stimulated, and they need to reassure themselves, because when a really scary movie is over, you’re reassured to see that you’re still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That’s the real reason we have horror films—they act as shock absorbers—and if they disappeared altogether it would mean losing one of the few ways we have to ease the anxiety of the imagination. And I bet you’d see a big leap in the number of serial killers and mass murderers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news, right?

But they fed me way too much, and that, along with the side effects of the medicine, made me fatter and fatter, until my face got all pale and bloated, and it began to feel like this body wasn’t even me, like I was stuffed with feathers, or just liquid, a liquefied human being.

A year later I was released from the hospital fat as a pig, a physical wreck.

You kids are spoiled rotten! How dare you complain, when you’ve never lacked for anything in your life? Why, my generation lived on potatoes and worked our fingers to the bone to make this the wealthy country it is! It’s always precisely the sort of smug old wanker you would never ever want to end up like. We don’t live the way you tell us to because we’re afraid that if we do we’ll grow up to be like you, and the thought of that is unbearable. It’s all right for you because you’ll be dead soon anyway, but we’ve still got another fifty or sixty years to live in this stinking country.

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.”