Free In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami Page A

not that she’s the serious, responsible type—Jun’s goal is to avoid extremes like that and be as normal as possible. It isn’t easy to live a normal life, though. Parents, teachers, government—they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.
    “That’s it, the frontal lobe, and there was something else but it was more difficult and not in the dictionary. Anyway, they cut it out. His frontal lobe.”
    “Why?”
    “What?”
    “Why did they cut it out? Isn’t it something you need?”
    “He says he was in a car accident, and his skull got cracked open and little bits of glass got in there, so they had to remove it. Sounds ridiculous, right? But if you had seen him last night . . .”
    Frank had said: “Kenji, can I tell you a secret?” And before I could even reply, he was off. “It may have crossed your mind that there’s something unusual about me. Well, when I was eleven I was in a terrible automobile accident, and it damaged my brain, so sometimes, like just now, I suddenly can’t move my body, or my speech comes out all mangled and nobody can understand what I’m saying, or I’ll blurt out things that seem completely unconnected.”
    Frank took my hand and placed it on the back of his wrist and said: See how cold this is? He wasn’t kidding. It was freezing out there, with a strong wind whipping through the open concrete platform. I had the sniffles, and my own hands were half-numb. But the cold of Frank’s wrist was a different sort of cold, a cold you couldn’t have fixed by rubbing it or something. His wrist and forearm felt just like his shoulder had when I was dragging him out of the batting cage, like something metallic. Once when I was small I went with my father to a warehouse where they kept the machines he designed. I forget exactly why he took me with him, but it was in the hills outside Nagoya, in the middle of winter. Rows and rows of giant machines whose functions were a complete mystery to me, all lined up in this vast space charged with the smell of chilled steel. Touching Frank’s wrist triggered that memory.
    “Yet I myself can’t even feel how cold my body is,” he told me. “I’ve lost some of my sensory functions, and a lot of times I get so I can’t even tell if this body is really mine or not. Or I can be talking away like this and suddenly my memory will get very uncertain, and I won’t know if what I’m saying really happened or if it’s all just something I dreamed.”
    Frank went on about this all the way back to his hotel. It seemed like something from a science fiction movie, but I decided to take it at face value. Not so much because it explained the things he said and did, but because of the way his arm and shoulder felt to the touch.
    “I don’t get it,” Jun said. She had finished her noodles. I still had more than half of mine left. I have a sensitive tongue, and steaming-hot boiled udon takes me some time. “You’re not saying he’s a robot, are you?”
    “Well, I mean, look, all we know about robots is what we see in comics or movies or whatever, but . . . It’s like, there’s a certain sensation you get from touching someone’s skin, right?”
    I put my hand on the back of Jun’s. We hadn’t had sex for a while—almost three weeks, now that I thought about it. When we first met we were going at it like a couple of I-don’t-know-what in heat, but gradually, as we spent more time hanging out with each other, eating noodles or Jun’s special salads, the sex became less frequent.
    “It’s a particular kind of soft, warm feeling that you recognize immediately. Well, when you touch Frank it’s not like that at all.”
    Jun’s eyes were on the TV, but she squeezed my hand gently and told me to hurry up and finish eating.
    “Before the stuff they’re saying ruins your appetite.”
    They were still going on about the schoolgirl murder. The experts had all had their say, and