Read In the Miso Soup for Free Online Page B

of what it’s like. We just think, Hmm, how about that, and turn the page. But I’d worked as a nightlife guide for nearly two hundred Americans so far, and when it came time to say goodbye after hanging out with them for a couple of nights, more than a few would start drunkenly telling me about their childhoods. This is especially true of guys who hadn’t managed to find the kind of sex they wanted with the kind of woman they liked—which is almost everyone, since there’s not much chance of going to a foreign country for two or three days and finding a woman you like and having sex with her. I think that’s part of the reason so many of my clients, after wandering through the long Tokyo night, end up drunk and tired and determined to confess their loneliness to me. Because of my father dying when I was a kid, I do feel like I understand to some extent when they talk about their sense of loss or whatever, but still. This is the sort of story I’d hear, for example: Pop stopped coming home, and then the next year at Christmas there was a man I didn’t know, and my mother said from now on this is your father. I was only six so I didn’t have much choice in the matter, but it took me a long time to accept it, two or three years about, and then at some point the man started hitting me. This was back in North Carolina, and we had a custom where we didn’t mow or walk on the grass until May, to let it grow, and the man was a salesman from the West Coast and didn’t know about that, so he used to walk all over the lawn in front of the house in early spring, and Pop had planted that lawn, so it really upset me, and I warned the man, I told him again and again, but he kept walking on the grass, and finally I called him this really bad name, which I must have just learned because I didn’t even know what it meant. That was the first time he hit me, and then I had to start all over again, trying to get to a point where I could, you know . . . accept it .
    I remember the American making this particular confession, and the way his voice caught when he said “accept it.” Americans don’t talk about just grinning and bearing it, which is the Japanese approach to so many things. After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there. I don’t think I could stand the sort of loneliness Americans feel.
    I was sure Frank had a similar sad story. Who knows—maybe he was a foster child who got bounced around from home to home. At one time he might have been in a household with only older sisters, and later in one with only older brothers.
    “I played in middle school, second base,” I said. “The shortstop and I were best friends. I had a pretty good arm for a second baseman, and he had a good arm too, and we used to practice double plays a lot. In fact, double plays were everything to us. Like, even if we lost a game, if we managed to turn a double play we’d give each other the thumbs up when no one was looking.”
    After spilling out this little reverie, I asked Frank what position he had played, but just then the previous show finished and an announcement came over the speakers: We’re sorry to have kept you waiting, please enter the booths, please enter the booths. “It must be our turn, Kenji, let’s go,” Frank said abruptly and stood up. I stood up too and moved toward the door to the booths, but I was fuming. The bastard gets all pumped up talking about baseball, and then when I try to join in he suddenly loses interest and seems anxious to drop the subject altogether.
    We were led to separate booths some distance apart. For a guy who claimed to have such a strong sex drive, Frank didn’t