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

her, thinking: Sure enough, it’s hard to explain. I imagine other people could meet Frank and not get this feeling from him at all. If he happened to stop you on the street and hold out a camera and ask you to take a photo for him, say, you might come away thinking he seemed nice—kind of down on his luck, maybe, but a well-meaning, open and friendly gaijin.
    “Forget it. I can’t explain. Anyway he’s a really weird guy, but ‘anyway he’s a really weird guy’ doesn’t tell you much, does it?”
    “No, it doesn’t. Besides, if you think about it, Kenji, I’ve never spent any time with foreigners, like you have. That must make a difference. I mean, how could you know what’s weird about one unless you know lots of them?”
    What Jun said made sense. The Japanese aren’t exactly in tune with people from other countries. My last client, or rather the one before last, a man from Texas, had told me how astonished he was when he went to Shibuya. Hesaid: “I thought I was in Harlem or someplace, all those kids walking around looking like black hip-hop artists, wearing their Walkmans, some had skateboards, too, but what was amazing was, here they are completely copying the fashions of African-American kids—even down to the dark suntans and cornrows—and they can’t speak a word of English! But I guess they just like black people, huh?” I don’t know what to do with questions like that. There’s no way to answer them. I told the Texan something like, Well, they think imitating black people is cool—but even I knew it wasn’t much of an answer. There are things people in this country do automatically that foreigners can’t understand no matter how hard you try to explain.
    “Why don’t we go for a walk?” Jun said.
    It seemed like a good idea.
    As we were leaving my apartment, Jun found something stuck to the outside of my door and said: “What’s this?” It was a small, dark thing, about half the size of a postage stamp, like a torn scrap of paper. My first thought was that it was a piece of human skin. “Kenji, what is it?” she asked again.
    “I don’t know,” I said, picking at it with my thumb and forefinger. “The wind must have blown it against the door.”
    Touching it gave me the creeps, and it was fastened to the metal door as if with glue. I had to scrape it off with my fingernail, leaving a dark stain on the door. I tossed it away, into the bushes beyond the stairs. My heart was pounding like crazy. I felt ill but tried not to let on.
    “I wonder if it was there when I came,” Jun said as we walked down the stairs. “I didn’t notice it.”
    I was convinced it was human skin. And that Frank had put it there. Whose skin, I couldn’t say. The schoolgirl’s? The homeless guy’s? Or maybe he’d sliced it off some corpse that hadn’t been discovered yet. My head was reeling, and I felt sick to my stomach.
    Jun stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “You’ve gone all pale again, Kenji.”
    I knew I should say something, but no words came.
    “Let’s go back to the room,” she said. “The wind’s too cold out here anyway.”
    If it was human skin, and Frank had put it there, why did I throw it away? Because I couldn’t bear the feel of it for even a split second.
    “Kenji, come on, let’s go back in.” Jun was patting my arm.
    “No,” I said. “No, let’s walk.”
    I kept imagining Frank lurking somewhere, watching us walking along arm in arm. Jun peered up at my face from time to time but didn’t talk. The thing had had what felt like fingerprint grooves pressed into it. It wasn’t a scrap of paper, I was sure of that. And I couldn’t imagine that this damp little thing, about the size of a fingernail, had just happened to come wafting along on the wind to plaster itself to my door. Someone had deliberately pasted it there, pushing down hard with the tip of his finger.
    It must be a warning, I thought. And the only person I knew who might feel any need to warn me