Free In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami Page B

now a reporter was chattering excitedly in front of a big, badly drawn sketch of a generic high-school girl: “Akiko had been viciously beaten, but if you’ll look at this picture I’d like to explain some of the more puzzling facts in regard to the nature of her injuries. . . .”
    “Don’t these people ever think about how her parents would feel if they saw this?” Jun said. “They act like the girls who sell it aren’t even human.”
    Makes me sick, she muttered, looking away from the TV. It’s true the drawing was in incredibly bad taste. There were different-colored marks for where the girl’s body was bruised, slashed, or punctured, and the head and arms and legs were separated from the torso with dotted lines. “So, as you can see, Akiko’s entire body had wounds of one sort or another, and on her upper torso, right here, on her left breast, the flesh was said to have been sliced and peeled away, but to the profiling experts the most significant point is here, the eyes, the fact that her eyes had been punctured with what would appear to be an ice pick, which, according to criminal psychologists, means that the murderer couldn’t bear to have the act witnessed, that he didn’t want the victim watching him and found it necessary to blind her before proceeding with the attack, and what’s important about this is that it tells us the murderer is an extremely repressed and timid person.”
    “Maybe not, though,” said Jun. “Maybe he just likes to puncture people’s eyeballs.”
    I thought so too. On the screen, we were getting closeups of the housewives in the audience and the regular “personalities” on the panel. Their reactions ranged from disgust and disbelief to defiant outrage. The reporter continued: “Akiko, it has become clear, was part of a group involved in underage prostitution, and police are doing their best to determine the identities of her most recent clients. However, if a girl is plying this dubious trade independently, as opposed to being affiliated with one of the notorious ‘date clubs,’ tracing previous clients can prove almost impossible.”
    “They could check her pager,” Jun said. “I’m sure she had one, and if it was still on her, they could trace her last ten messages—or is it twenty?—through the phone company.”
    “I don’t think the paper said anything about a pager, either, now that you mention it.”
    “They probably aren’t telling us everything, because the murderer would be reading the paper and watching TV, and if he realized they had any leads he’d leave the country or something. I would if I were him.”
    The reporter finished his bit, and now it was back to the experts and the minor showbiz personalities on the panel. One of these was saying something that was definitely slanted against the victim: “With all due respect to the young lady who was murdered, we’re only going to see more cases of a similar nature as long as this so-called compensated dating is allowed to continue among high-school girls, because although generally speaking these girls are just spoiled, selfish children, physically they’re adults, and I warn you that there’s no telling how bad things could get if we don’t clamp down and punish them accordingly, and of course I’m referring to the men who patronize these girls as well, they too are responsible for this state of affairs, and we need to let them know that they can and will be arrested, because if we let something like this go, if we turn a blind eye and don’t take action now, the next thing you know we truly will be like America—a society in chaos!”
    The audience of housewives burst into applause. “They don’t have compensated dating in America,” Jun said. “I wonder what these geniuses would say if an American newspaper asked them to explain why Japanese high-school girls sell it.”
    The word “America” brought me back to Frank. When we’d reached his hotel, he turned to me to say one last