Free In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

opened up to find Jun standing there, dangling a bag from a convenience store. “It’s just instant,” she said, “but would you like some hot-pot noodles?”
    “You really think he . . .? What was this gaijin’s name again?”
    “Frank.”
    “Right. You really think he’s the murderer?”
    “I’m not saying that, but . . . I don’t know.”
    On TV a psychologist, a criminologist, and a social commentator guy who was supposed to be an expert on high-school girls were holding forth, acting as if nothing in the whole world was beyond their comprehension.
    “I mean, I don’t have any actual evidence that he did it. The real mystery to me is why I can’t shake the feeling that maybe he did.”
    The thick noodles were delicious. Jun had mixed in some minced meat she’d bought separately. She’s thoughtful like that. Jun has bleached highlights in her hair and piercings in both ears. Today she’d shown up in a black leather miniskirt with a mohair-blend sweater and boots. On TV, the social commentator guy was saying: “As for the baggy leggings and the bleached hair and the piercings, these are all expressions of high-school girls’ rejection of the parameters of adult society.” Jun picked up a tiny clump of minced meat with her chopsticks and said the guy was a fool. I agreed with her. I’m not a girl, and it’s been two years since I was in high school, so I’d never claim to understand even Jun very well. But some of the younger “experts” on TV act as if they’ve got high-school girls completely figured out. You can’t trust people like that.
    “Chopping her up, though,” Jun said, “—that’s pretty extreme. It’s like Silence of the Lambs , don’t you think?”
    “Yeah, I do. I think whoever did it must have been influenced by stuff like that. Like you said last night, it’s not a very Japanese way to kill somebody.”
    “So did you bring me a picture?”
    “A picture?”
    “Kenji, you said you’d bring a Print Club photo of the guy.”
    “I didn’t get back here till almost three in the morning, after dropping him off at his hotel. He said something you wouldn’t believe last night, at this batting center we went to. Believe me, photos were the last thing on my mind. We went to this batting center and he got all whacked out.”
    “What do you mean, whacked out?”
    “He suddenly froze up, his whole body. The balls were flying at him and he was facing the wrong way, just squatting there like a statue. It wasn’t just, you know, like he’d never played baseball before or something. It was way beyond that. And when I asked him about it afterward, he told me he’s missing part of his brain.”
    “You mean, like a retard or something?”
    “No. They cut it out. Part of his brain.”
    The noodles Jun was lifting to her mouth stopped and swayed in midair.
    “Don’t you die if somebody cuts out part of your brain?”
    “This was the part called the . . . what was it again? I asked Frank to spell it for me and looked it up, and it was a word you hear once in a while. What the hell was it? Can you name any parts of the brain?”
    “The skull?”
    “That’s the bone, dummy. Anyway, it’s a more difficult word.”
    “Medulla oblongata!”
    “Not that difficult. It was up here in front.”
    An older guy, a sociologist, was now talking on the tube: “In other words, as a result of this incident, we’re likely to see harsher enforcement of the anti-prostitution laws, but this, while it may have some temporary effect, would represent a total capitulation of mature judgment.”
    “The frontal lobe?” said Jun.
    I patted her on the head. Jun’s just an average student, but I think she’s smarter than most. Right now her mother was on a trip to Saipan that she’d won in some kind of lottery, which meant that Jun could have slept over last night without getting busted, but she has a brother in middle school, for one thing, so she’d gone home around midnight, as usual. It’s