In the Miso Soup

Set in Tokyo during the final days of December 1996, the story follows Kenji, a twenty-year-old unlicensed nightlife guide who steers foreign tourists through the city's sex industry. Kenji advertises in an English-language magazine called Tokyo Pink Guide and leads clients to cabarets, massage parlors, and clubs in Kabuki-cho, the red-light district of Shinjuku, where most establishments refuse foreign customers. His mother, who raised him alone after his father died when Kenji was fourteen, believes he is enrolled in a college prep course. His private dream is to save enough money to move to America.

On December 29, while reading about a high-school girl found dismembered at a trash site in Kabuki-cho, Kenji receives a call from an American tourist named Frank, who books three consecutive nights of guided tours. Kenji agrees, though the commitment means breaking a promise to his girlfriend Jun, a sixteen-year-old high-school student, to spend New Year's Eve together.

That evening, Kenji meets Frank at a modest hotel near Seibu Shinjuku Station. Frank is short, overweight, and wearing a cheap suit. His face is oddly ageless, his skin almost artificial-looking. He claims to be thirty-five, from New York, and in Japan to finalize a Toyota radiator licensing deal, but his low-end hotel and shabby clothes contradict this story. As they walk through Kabuki-cho, Kenji witnesses a brief transformation in Frank's face when a tout ignores him: his skin twitches, and his eyes become like dark glass beads. The moment passes instantly.

At a basement lingerie pub, Frank entertains the staff by reading from a sex glossary with deadpan seriousness. When paying, he produces a ¥10,000 note stained with what looks like dried blood. Later, they pass a rent-a-car lot full of Toyotas that Frank ignores despite claiming to import Toyota parts, then walk past the actual trash site where the dismembered girl was found. Kenji's suspicions begin to coalesce. He calls Jun, who suggests he take a photo with Frank. At a Print Club photo sticker booth, Kenji finds Frank's cheek cold and rubbery, like silicone.

At a peep show, Frank mentions playing baseball with brothers, contradicting his earlier claim of having two older sisters. He also fails to recognize Hideo Nomo, the famous Japanese pitcher then playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers. An acquaintance Kenji asks to observe Frank during a private service returns disturbed, saying his expression was unlike anything she had seen and something about his body felt wrong.

At a batting center, Frank goads Kenji into an unfavorable bet and wins. When challenged to bat, Frank freezes motionless on home plate as pitches strike him, appearing catatonic. Afterward, he reveals that part of his frontal lobe was surgically removed after a car accident at age eleven, causing episodes of paralysis and confusion.

On December 30, Kenji reads more about the murdered schoolgirl, then sees a TV report about a homeless man burned to death in a Shinjuku park restroom. He feels sick, recalling unsettling remarks Frank made about homeless people at the batting center the night before. When he and Jun leave his apartment, they find a small, dark object stuck to his door with what feel like fingerprint grooves. Kenji is convinced it is a piece of human skin left by Frank.

A call to Yokoyama, the publisher of Tokyo Pink Guide, deepens his alarm: someone phoned in the middle of the night asking for Kenji's bank account number, praised him effusively, and mentioned "magic." Frank later calls, says he has changed hotels but refuses to give a room number, and asks Kenji to bring Jun along. Kenji refuses. Jun urges him to cancel or go to the police, but Kenji fears Frank knows where he lives and feels unable to do either.

That evening, Frank's appearance has changed: new clothes, new hairstyle, more aggressive energy. At a bar, Kenji introduces Noriko, a young female tout he knows, hoping for a witness. Kenji notices that Frank's left wrist, beneath flesh-colored makeup, is packed with dozens of suicide scars crammed into a tiny space. Frank hypnotizes Noriko with a trick using his index fingers, tells her she will forget everything when she steps outside, and sends her away.

They move to an omiai pub, a matchmaking bar. Two women join their table: Maki, a delusional hostess, and Yuko, a quiet vocational school student. Other patrons include a woman singing karaoke, a man negotiating with another woman nearby, and various staff. When Jun calls Kenji's mobile, Frank snatches the phone with shocking strength and shouts into it, demanding Jun's name.

Then everything changes. Frank uses his American Express card to hypnotize the manager, the waiter, Maki, and Yuko. He tells Kenji to step outside, then intercepts him, drags him back inside, and pulls down the steel security shutter. In a prolonged massacre, Frank slits Maki's throat, breaks the manager's and waiter's necks, buries a knife in Yuko's back, stabs the karaoke singer in the chest, slices the other woman's throat while amplifying her scream through the microphone, and burns the man's face with a lighter. Kenji lies paralyzed on the floor throughout. Frank attempts to force Kenji into necrophilic acts with one of the dying women. By spitting, Kenji reconnects to his will enough to shout "NO!" Frank turns the knife toward Kenji, but Jun's phone call interrupts. Kenji tells her, in English, to call back in an hour and contact the police if he does not answer. Frank withdraws the blade.

Outside, Frank gives Kenji cash and says he is free to go to the police, then walks off with a Peruvian streetwalker. Kenji stands thirty meters from a police box but cannot bring himself to enter. He is in deep shock and recognizes with horror that he feels no sympathy for the victims, whom he perceives as people who were never truly living. Frank reappears directly behind him, revealing he watched the entire time and would have killed Kenji had he approached the police.

Frank leads Kenji to an abandoned clinic in a sealed-off toxic waste zone near Yoyogi, where he has been hiding. Through the night, Frank recounts his life: getting lost constantly as a toddler, biting his mother and drinking her blood at age three, slashing his own wrists between ages four and six, killing a swan and drinking its blood at seven, and murdering two people before age seven. He was committed to a military mental hospital and at fifteen underwent a lobotomy, a procedure that severs nerve fibers in the brain. In institutions, he learned to hypnotize people and kill efficiently. He tells Kenji that killing is the only thing that makes him feel fully alive, though he senses there is something else he ought to be doing.

On the afternoon of December 31, they eat soba noodles near Yoyogi Station, then travel to the Sumida River. Kenji has arranged for Jun to wait at the foot of Kachidoki Bridge, watching from a distance, ready to summon police if Frank prevents Kenji from leaving. As they lean against the railing, Frank spots Jun on a nearby bench, confirming he has been surveilling them. Kenji is flooded with remorse for involving her and feels his connection to Frank snap. He recognizes that no one has the right to judge who deserves to live.

Frank tells Kenji he can detect "unconscious signals" from certain people, signals that say "PLEASE KILL ME" (215). He calls Kenji his only real friend and tells him to go to Jun. He hands Kenji an envelope, expressing one regret: that they never shared miso soup. He came to Japan hoping to understand the people who eat that soup daily and now feels he is floating inside it himself, like one of its ingredients.

They shake hands. Kenji walks toward Jun and looks back. Frank has vanished. Inside the envelope, sealed with seven of their Print Club photo stickers, is a single gray, soiled feather: the feather of a swan.