Murakami Ryu: 'now I’m in the miso soup myself'

 

‘An American holding a beer aloft and roaring with laughter looks as natural as a Japanese does dangling a camera and bowing. Some of the customers around us smiled. 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.’

‘I haven’t seen much really good furniture in my life, but I know crappy stuff when I come in contact with it because it brings me down. Yet the sofas and tables matched the two ladies across from us so perfectly that I found myself coming up with a new proverb: The ghosts of sad, cheap souls live on in sad, cheap furniture. Maki carried a Louis Vuitton purse. It didn’t suit her, but I couldn’t blame her for trying.’

‘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. I knew this was no time for getting worked up about the karaoke singer or Maki, but 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.’

‘I once read how in extreme situations your body releases these hormones—adrenaline and whatnot —that speed up your pulse and make you tense and excited at the same time, ready to fight or flee. But a body and brain accustomed to normal, mild reactions just get confused and disjointed when this flood of hormones is released.’

‘Normally we don’t notice it, but we always have to picture ourselves doing something before we can match the image with an action. And that was what Frank had made impossible—he’d destroyed our ability to visualize a course of action’

‘Before Frank had turned up, this pub was like a symbol of Japan, self-contained, unwilling to interact with the world outside, just communing with itself in every breath—mmm, ahhh. 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.’

‘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.

“What did you say, Kenji? ‘No’? That’s what it sounded like to me. Is that what you just said? ‘No’?”

‘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. Frank hadn’t hurt me. He’d grabbed me by the hair and collar and thrown me to the floor, but he didn’t break my neck or cut off my ears. Still, that was no reason not to go to the police. Murder isn’t something you can just turn a blind eye to. I took three more steps, and my feet stopped again. I hadn’t decided to stop, my feet just took it upon themselves to do so. They didn’t seem to want to go to the cops.’

‘They were like automatons programmed to portray certain stereotypes, those people. The truth is it had bugged the hell out of me just to be around them, and I’d begun to wonder if they weren’t all filled with sawdust and scraps of vinyl, like stuffed animals, rather than flesh and blood. What did I have in common with the victims? Just that we were all human trash. I couldn’t kid myself—I wasn’t so different from them. That’s why I understood them, and that’s why they bugged me so much.’

‘In the operation, they open a small hole in your skull and insert an instrument like an ice pick into the white matter and sever the nerve fibers, which usually makes you very quiet and docile. Americans love to mess about with the brain—that’s why they’re at the forefront of neurosurgery…From politicians and bureaucrats to the lowliest office drudge drinking cheap saké at some outdoor stall, they all show by the way they live that money is the only thing they aspire to. They’ll puff themselves up and say “Money isn’t everything,” but all you have to do is watch their behavior to see where their real priorities lie. hey’ll denounce the corruption amongst politicians and bureaucrats but also feature “can’t-miss” stock tips and “bargain” real-estate deals. And they’ll do entire photo spreads on “success stories,” showing us rich people’s houses or some asshole standing there in designer clothes and accessories. Pretty much all day long, day in and day out, three hundred sixty-fivedays a year, children in this country go through what that food-or-electric-shock cat went through. But try to point that out, and some old fucker will jump all over you. 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 endup 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.’

‘“I don’t need to eat the stuff now because now I’m here—right in the middle of it! The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I’m in the miso soup myself, just like those bits of vegetable. I’m floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that’s good enough for me.”