Free Audition by Ryu Murakami Page A

presumably, what was wrong, but he merely shook his head. Averting his gaze and hunching his shoulders as if cowering, he wheeled himself on towards the far end of the room. There was no change whatsoever in Yamasaki Asami’s expression as she watched this peculiar little scene play out.
        ‘Someone you know?’ Aoyama ventured.
        She shook her head and shrugged, apparently just as mystified as he was. The kid must have mistaken her for someone else, Aoyama thought, or maybe he was just having some sort of attack.
        He still knew nothing about Yamasaki Asami. But he wasn’t going to allow an odd little incident like this – or Yoshikawa’s paranoid ravings, for that matter – to burst his bubble.
     
    ‘I never knew beef could be so delicious!’
        At the restaurant, Aoyama had ordered a starter of pigeon pâté, Kobe chateaubriand steak and a half-bottle of red Burgundy. Yamasaki Asami sipped quietly at her wine and responded to his questions in a refreshingly open and natural way. She also ate every last morsel of food she was served. Aoyama, who’d loosened up a little with the wine, liked everything about her. The way she talked, the things she talked about, the way she sipped her wine and handled her fork and knife. He didn’t think he’d ever met a woman of whom that was true before.
        ‘This is such a treat!’ she said. ‘And you really just wanted to chat?’
        ‘Sure.’
        ‘Lucky me!’
        ‘I’m just happy if you’re enjoying yourself.’
        ‘How could I not be?’ she said. ‘Do you come here often?’
        ‘I wouldn’t say often. Once in a while. Compared to other places I find it . . . I guess the word would be “genuine”.’
        ‘Genuine?’
        ‘Most restaurants of this sort are known for the view, or for their interior design, or their location, and the quality of the food is secondary. But this place isn’t like that. Here the atmosphere is designed to enhance the food. They pride themselves on serving the finest meat dishes, and they want you to be as comfortable as possible while enjoying them.’
        ‘It is a nice atmosphere,’ she said. ‘I suppose only people of the best quality come here.’
        ‘Best quality?’
        ‘People with, well, status.’
        ‘Rich people, you mean?’
        ‘Yes, people with money, and power.’
        ‘Hmm. Well, I don’t think of myself as being anything special because I eat in this restaurant. And not all wealthy people are what I would call “quality”, believe me.’
        ‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘But then again, I wouldn’t really know. My father was just a salaryman, and we were just an average middle-class family. We’d spend the day together at one of the big department stores on weekends, and sometimes we’d take trips, but when we ate out it was always at a soba shop or a family restaurant. I guess I grew up believing that places like this – the sorts of restaurants I’d see in magazines – were only for the elite.’
        ‘I don’t think that’s true any more, if it ever was. Japan has, in an unlikely way, become a wealthy country, and in Tokyo almost anyone can enjoy the best cuisine from all over the world, but . . . It may sound funny for me to say after stuffing myself with a meal like this, but the truth is that we Japanese are more suited to places like soba shops. The food here is fantastic, there’s no denying that, but I always feel slightly out of place in this kind of environment.’
        She looked down at her plate and smiled.
        ‘I hope this won’t sound rude,’ she said.
        ‘What?’
        ‘I’ve never met anyone who says the sorts of things you do.’
        ‘No?’
        ‘I’ve had, well, only a little experience in the entertainment industry, but the people I’ve met . . . I can’t describe what I mean very well, but everyone seems so . . . arrogant?’
        ‘I don’t know. Maybe