(2005) In the Miso Soup Read Free Page A

these fellows saying?”
    I took a moment to explain what a lingerie pub was, but the touts were talking much too fast for me to translate: “Absolutely no additional charges!Normally it would be ¥9000 but because it’s the end of the year and we’ve just opened we’re only charging ¥5000! Would I lie to you? When I say the girls are young, I’m talking barely legal! Naturally your foreign friend is welcome too! It’s just down those steps over there! Right this way! We have online karaoke and a full catalogue of English songs! Please, gentlemen! If you’re not satisfied with the quality of the girls or the atmosphere of the pub, you’re absolutely at liberty to turn around and walk out! You can’t pass up an opportunity like this! Once the new year arrives, the price goes right back up! What have you got to lose?”
    As we walked away from this fairly overbearing pack of touts, Frank said, “I heard that the Japanese were nice, but this is amazing.” He kept turning to look back at them, still milling about in front of the peep show. Most of them were wearing cheap suits like mine. This was Kabuki-cho, not Roppongi, and you didn’t see many designer clothes on these streets. The only way you could tell most of the customers from the touts was that the customers were walking and the touts looked like they were loitering. Even from a distance, touts have something lonesome about them. Most of the guys I know who’ve done the job a long time are sort of worn thin—not physically run down, but like something’s eroded away inside. Even when you’re talking to them face to face you have this feeling of not connecting, as if the words just pass right through them. Sometimes they remind me of the Invisible Man, but I’ve never quite understood why they end up that way.
    “These fellows are nothing like the seedy characters who work for American sex clubs,” said Frank. “They’re more like Eagle Scouts or something! How do they find the energy to be so friendly all night?”
    “For every customer they bring in they get a commission.”
    “Well, that’s only fair, I guess. But can you trust what they tell you?”
    “It’s best to be suspicious if the price seems too cheap.”
    The idea of a lingerie pub clearly appealed to Frank.
    “Shall we go see some Japanese girls in their underwear, then, for starters?” he said.
    “You can’t have sex there.”
    “I know. I want to build up to that slowly anyway, and right now girls in their underwear seems like the best way to start.”
    “One hour, at this time of night, will cost ¥7000 to ¥9000 per person, and since hardly any of the girls speak English you’ll have to pay for me too. There are pubs where you can touch the girls and pubs where you can’t, and there are ones that put on shows and ones where the girls will dance on your table, but the prices don’t vary that much.”
    “I prefer your normal kind of place, where the girls just sit next to you and talk,” Frank said. “After all, if the price doesn’t go up much even with all those options, then the pubs without the options must have the prettiest girls. Right, Kenji?”
    I found a tout I knew and had him guide us to his pub. Satoshi was the same age as me, twenty. At eighteen he’d come to Tokyo from Yamanashi—or Nagano, I forget which—to attend a college prep school, and almost immediately went mental. I didn’t know him then, but he once showed me a souvenir of those times. He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children’s building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train. Why would you do that, I asked him, and he shrugged. I don’t know, man, I found them at Kiddyland and I just wanted to buy them and play with them somewhere, you know, and then I thought the train would be good, and it
was
good, man, it’s fun trying to build a castle on a