(2005) In the Miso Soup Read Online Free PDF Page A

Theater. It was a little past ten-thirty, and we hadn’t yet discussed our next move. I was exhausted from laughing like that, and it had been so hot inside the pub that my only thought was to walk awhile to cool off and settle down. I kept thinking about that ¥10,000 note with what looked like a bloodstain on it. And wondering why it bothered me so much.
    “It was a brilliant performance, Frank. Did you study acting or anything?”
    “No, but when I was small I had two older sisters who liked that sort of thing. Whenever we had company we used to fool around imitating comedians we’d seen on TV and so forth. But that’s about it.”
    We came to a narrow side street with an atmosphere I’ve always found kind of eerie. It’s like stumbling onto a movie set from the Fifties, a street lined with tiny bars and mahjong parlors, and tea rooms with ivy-grown entrances and classical music playing, all with retro-looking signs out front. One of the bars even had a terra-cotta flowerpot hanging beside the door. The little white flowers shivered in the December wind of Kabuki-cho—a wind ripe with alcohol and sweat and garbage—and reflected the yellow and pink lights of the Koma Theater. Frank seemed to respond to the old-fashionedatmosphere. He stopped at the corner, beneath the simple neon sign of a bar called Auge, and peered into the narrow lane.
    “Kenji, there aren’t any touts around here.”
    That, I explained, was because anyone walking this way would already have decided exactly where he was going. On this street you didn’t get the drunken sorts roving arm in arm with their buddies, checking out all the clubs and looking for the cheapest and easiest place to get their rocks off.
    “This is the way Kabuki-cho used to look,” I said.
    “Is that so? I guess it’s the same in every town.” Frank started walking again. “Times Square in New York was like this, way back when—used to be lots of nice bars before the sex shops moved in.”
    He said this in such a nostalgic way that I decided he really was a New Yorker after all. It was silly to expect everyone from New York to know about Niketown.
    “Speaking of which, Kenji, I saw a building in front of Shinjuku Station with a big sign saying ‘Times Square,’ but—what is that, some kind of joke?”
    “No,” I said. “It’s the name of a department store.”
    “But Times Square is Times Square because the old Times Tower was there. The
New York Times
doesn’t have a building in Shinjuku, does it?”
    “Japanese think using names like that is cool.”
    “Well, it’s not cool, it’s embarrassing. Japan may have lost the war, but that was a long time ago now. Why keep imitating America?”
    I didn’t have an answer for that, so I just asked Frank where he wanted to go next. He said he wanted to try a peep show, to see girls who were completely nude.
    We had to retrace our steps a bit. There are no peep shows around Kuyakusho Avenue, just Chinese clubs and girlie bars and pub-restaurants and love hotels. We turned the corner at a love hotel to head back toward Seibu Shinjuku Station and found ourselves walking past a rent-a-car lot. What it was doing in a place like that I couldn’t tell you. Who in the world would come here to rent a car? There isn’t even room on the streets to park. TheToyota Rent-a-Car banner and the strings of vinyl pennants flapped in the wind, and the prefab office was all but hidden among the dozen or so dust-covered station wagons and sedans squeezed fender to fender inside the tiny lot. I’d rather walk any day than drive something like that, I thought. Frank was shuffling along with his collar turned up and his hands stuffed in his pockets. The tip of his nose was red. He had no coat or muffler and the warmth from the lingerie pub had faded quickly enough, but he didn’t look cold so much as dejected. I looked over at him as we walked past the Toyota lot, and a chill trickled down my spine. It was something about his