(2005) In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami Read Free Book Online

that eager to get into his booth. Not that he seemed nervous, just uncomfortable and bored. What a weird guy, I muttered under my breath as I entered my own little cubicle.It was furnished with a round stool and a box of tissues and was so narrow I was glad I wasn’t claustrophobic.
    The show started right away. As in most of these places, the stage was a half circle no more than two meters across, separated from the booths by one-way mirrors. The dancer can’t see inside the booths, but she can tell which ones are occupied, thanks to a little light in the wall above each mirror. The music started, and the cheesiest illumination imaginable began to glitter as a door opened in the right rear of the stage and a small, skinny girl walked out. The music was something by Michael Jackson. The girl was wearing a negligee.
    There was a knock, and someone opened the door to my booth and poked her head inside.
    “Excuse me. Would you like the special service?” She peered at my face, then said: “What the hell, if it isn’t Kenji.”
    About six months ago she’d been working at a show pub in Roppongi, and her name, if I remembered right, was Asami.
    “Asami?” I said, and she laughed and told me they called her Madoka here. “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got a favor to ask you. Three booths down from here is a gaijin who’s going to want the special service.”
    As soon as Asami/Madoka heard the word “gaijin,” she creased her brow in a frown. Like I said, the popularity of foreigners in the sex industry has completely bottomed out.
    “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to ask you to give him something extra or anything. I just want to know if he, um, ejaculates a lot? Quantity-wise, I mean.”
    “What? What is it, a contest or something?”
    “No, I just want to know. Humor me. I’ll treat you to dinner sometime.”
    “All right,” Madoka said and shut the door. I had requested her as a hostess at the Roppongi show pub a few times, and girls in the sex trade remember that sort of thing. What I was asking of her now sounded crazy, I know. But the newspaper had said that the dismembered high-school girl showed signs of having been sexually assaulted. She’d been killed less than two days before,and I figured if Frank was the one who raped her, he probably wouldn’t have much semen stored up yet. Of course, it was crazy for me to suspect Frank of having anything to do with the murdered girl in the first place. I was thinking too much, is what Jun, for example, would probably tell me. But after two years of working Tokyo’s sex scene I’d developed a sort of sixth sense for danger, and even if Frank wasn’t a murderer my intuition was definitely telling me not to trust him. Everybody lies at one time or another. But once someone makes a habit of lying, once it becomes a part of their everyday life, denial kicks in. Even the fact that they’re lying begins to fade into the background, and in extreme cases they actually forget. I know more than a few people like that, and I make sure to steer clear of them, because they’re the world’s biggest pains in the ass. Not to mention dangerous.
    On stage, the small, thin woman was opening the front of her negligee and gyrating her hips. She wasn’t a professional dancer, just another girl in the sex industry, so there was nothing very seductive about her moves. Comical and sad, is more like it, but nobody had come to this place expecting to see an artistic striptease. The woman pressed against the one-way mirror before each booth for about thirty seconds, giving the customers what they’d come for by pulling down her bra and squeezing her breasts, sticking her finger down her panties, and so on. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, and her skin was so pale you could see the veins in her face and arms and legs. There was something cruel about the way the cheap illumination highlighted those blue veins, I was thinking, when Madoka opened the door to my booth again and