(2005) In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

Author:Ryu Murakami [Murakami, Ryu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Japan
ISBN: 9781408806371
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2009-08-02T14:00:00+00:00

Frank raised the steel shutter to let us out, then pulled it down again behind us and said: “Did that scare you?” As if we’d just ridden the new roller coaster at Magic Mountain or something. My answer—and even I couldn’t believe I was saying it—was: “A little.” I think my body, and my nervous system, were trying to get back to normal. They wanted me to let it go, forget about it—what was done was done. Frank didn’t have the long, thin knife in his hand anymore. Had I seen him slip it into an ankle-sheath? I seemed to remember that, but the memory was as vague as something from a dream.

“Well, shall we?” said Frank, hooking his arm around my shoulder and stepping out onto the street. I might have shaken him off and run away shouting MURDERER!—but I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was as if my nerves were still curled up in a ball. My knees and hips throbbed with a dull pain, like you get when you lie in bed all day, my pulse felt weak, and my vision was still messed up. Everything was blurry, and the familiar blinking neon lights of the sex clubs seemed to stab at my retinas. I found myself keeping an eye out for Noriko. Would she snap out of her trance at some point? Even if she remembered all about meeting me and Frank, and discovered what had happened in the pub, I was fairly sure she’d vanish rather than cooperate with the police. Noriko was probably on probation and not allowed to work in the sex industry.

“Kenji.” Frank pointed at the police box near the corner. “Why don’t you run over there and tell the cops what happened?”

To have him more or less confirm in words what he’d just done put a tremendous amount of stress on me somehow, and I was suddenly trembling all over.

“Kenji, you know, I’ve told you nothing but lies so far. I hope you won’t hold it against me, because the truth is I can’t help it. My brain doesn’t work right and I can’t connect the memories in my head very well. And it’s not just memories, either, it’s me myself. There are several me’s inside this body, not just one, and I can’t get them to connect, or merge. But I’m pretty sure the me I am right now is the real me, and you may not believe this but the me I am now can’t understand the me who was inside that pub a while ago. You’re probably thinking, where does he get the gall to make excuses like this, but I honestly feel it wasn’t me doing those things, it was somebody else who looks exactly like me. It’s not the first time he’s done that, either. I’ve been trying to make sure it didn’t happen again, though the only strategy I could come up with was to not lose my temper. When they cut out part of my

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