(2005) In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami Page A

to lose it.”
    “Did the homeless man at the batting center do something to Frank?”
    “Nothing, no.”
    “So what exactly makes you think Frank had something to do with killing him?”
    “It’s crazy, I know. I’m sure it’s just paranoia. But if you were to meet him . . . You said you wanted to see a photo of him, but I don’t think a photo would tell you that much. How can I put this? Listen, when I was in high school,we had a lot of badasses around—you probably do too, right? In your school? Kids who seem to go out of their way to cause trouble and make people hate them?”
    “I don’t know. Nobody that bad, I don’t think.”
    Probably not, now that she mentioned it. Jun goes to a fairly respectable private high for girls, where there probably aren’t many really hard cases. Or, then again, maybe the type who gets off on being a big pain in the ass for everyone else is slowly dying out.
    “Well, anyway, that’s the sort of negative energy I sense about Frank, only taken to the ultimate extreme. The ultimate in malevolence.”
    “Malevolence.”
    “Yeah. Everybody has a little of that in them. I know I do, and to some extent even . . . Well, maybe not you, Jun. You’re too sweet.”
    “Never mind about me. Try to explain this better. You’re the one who’s so good at explaining things.”
    “Okay. Look. I had a friend who was like that—hated by everybody. The teachers had long since given up on him, and he ended up stabbing the headmaster with an X-Acto knife and getting expelled. But, see, he had a very troubled home life, this guy, not that he talked about it much, but once I went to his house. His mother gave me this super-polite welcome, bowing and everything, and the house, the house was huge and the guy had his own room, way bigger than anything I ever had, and all the latest computer stuff, everything you could think of, and I remember being really envious, except that something was weird about the atmosphere of the place. I couldn’t say exactly what, but something was weird about it. So his mother brings us tea and cookies and says something like ‘Our son’s told us so much about you’ or whatever, and my friend goes, ‘Never mind that, get the hell out of here,’ and she’s like ‘Well, please do make yourself at home’ and leaves the room bowing again. I’m like, ‘Thanks,’ you know, watching her close the door, and my friend looks at me and goes, ‘Bitch used to whip me with a hose.’ No particular expression on his face or anything, just ‘You know those extension pipes on vacuumcleaners? She used to hit me with one’ and ‘Burned me with a lighter too.’ He showed me the burn scars on his arms, and he goes, ‘I’ve got a little brother, but she never laid a finger on him.’ So, anyway, later on we started playing this computer game that’d just come out, and after a while I had to go to the bathroom, so we pause the game and I go out into the hallway, and his mother is standing there in the shadows. She’s staring at me with this spaced-out look on her face and then suddenly she goes, ‘Oh, the lavatory? It’s down at the end,’ or whatever, and titters in this high-pitched voice, a voice like, I don’t know how to describe it, like a needle hitting a nerve. . . . This friend, say we’d go to a game center or something? And if there’d be some friction with dudes from another school, if one of them said something—I mean anything at all, any little thing, like, Come on, you’ve been on that machine for two hours, let somebody else have a turn—my friend’s face would undergo this transformation. He’d get this look like, you know, there’s no telling what the son of a bitch might do. Like he was no longer in control of himself. Well, Frank has that same face times ten. Like he’s just completely gone.”
    “A scary face, in other words,” Jun said.
    “Yeah, but not like a yakuza scowling at you or something, not scary in that way,” I told