Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  Just as he was wiping a bit of noodle from his cheek, Anemone lunged forward and pulled the parking brake as hard as she could. The taxi screeched to a halt, but before she could get out, the driver’s hand, sticky with blood and ramen, had fastened on her arm.

  “Where do you think you’re going? I thought we were making our getaway.”

  Anemone, terrified now, looked him straight in his bloodshot eyes and shouted:

  “Get your filthy hands off me!”

  “But we’re going to the beach together. I swear, one little dip in the ocean and all this stuff will wash right off.”

  “And in the meantime, my meat’s going bad,” she squawked, as the driver tightened his grip and tried to kiss her.

  “Oh, angel face! Please, please!”

  “Let me go, you asshole! I hate you!” Anemone shouted louder than she had ever shouted before. The voice was not the high, fluty one she’d inherited from her mother; this came from deep inside and seemed to bring her guts with it as it came bursting out. The driver held her with one hand while the other reached for the kitchen knife stuck in his belt. Blood was still dripping from the blade.

  “Ohhh, so that’s it—you hate me. Well, I guess that’s that. Nothing I can do about it. I only thought it might be nice to go away to the beach for a while with a pretty girl like you, but if you’re not interested I guess it won’t work out…”

  Anemone was not particularly frightened any more. The whole thing seemed like a dream anyhow; she would probably end up getting killed, but she had that dream almost every night. The only difference was that in the dreams she was always quiet when they were killing her, but this time she’d been able to shout. Another difference, too: she was mad as hell that Gulliver’s meat was going to spoil, probably already had. The mere thought of the meat made her want to spit; for the sake of that meat, she’d listened to this fool run on at the mouth for hours… And suddenly her anger boiled over, emerging in a scream that echoed across the stillness of Toxitown.

  “You freak! Just who the fuck do you think you are?! Take a look in the mirror, asshole. You’re gross! Just take a look! You’re filthy, you’ve got noodle shit all over your face. Besides that, you’re ugly, and you stink too. You’re the biggest freak I’ve ever seen!” As she went on yelling, she could feel the fever in her head beginning to cool. The driver, though, was taking it hard; he hung his head and tears welled up in his eyes.

  “Stink? I really stink?” he said in a small, quaking voice. Anemone felt the rage boil up from her toes again. I hope he stabs me quick, she was thinking, determined to go on insulting him as he churned the knife around inside her.

  “You’re the dirtiest, smelliest shithead I’ve ever seen,” she added.

  “But I’m not always like this,” he pleaded. “When I got to the guy’s office, he was eating his lunch—a bowl of noodles—and as soon as he saw the knife, he threw it at me. Guess he wasn’t anxious to bite the big one. What can I tell you?” The driver loosened his grip on her arm, let the knife fall from his other hand, and climbed out of the cab. He was wailing loudly as he staggered away, but just beyond the range of the headlights he let out a shriek, his knees buckled, and he sank to the ground. It was then that she first noticed the human shapes lurking in the darkness around the car. A moment later, when one of them stepped forward into the light, she covered her eyes in fright: the child, about nine or ten years old, had holes in its face.

  The surrounding skin was as horrible as the holes themselves, all crusty and suppurating, as if loose, gray elephant skin had been pasted to the face and left to rot. Directly under the headlights, the reddish black hollows seemed to bubble with pus, like chunks of meat simmering in a stewpot, and from one a cheekbone protruded at a startling angle. The chlorine had done its work. The boy—she could still tell it was a boy—came up to the car and peered in at the window, and Anemone, though unable to stop trembling, screwed up the courage to meet his gaze. Although she wanted to say something to him, she couldn’t, but when he stuck his hand in through the window, she fished a five thousand yen note from her purse and passed it to him. Hardly looking at the bill, the boy crumpled it in his fist, shoved it in his pocket, and had his hand back in the window almost instantly. This time Anemone realized that he was pointing at the pin on her chest, an airplane with tiny neon lights. When she had given it to him, the boy withdrew and Anemone, climbing into the front seat as fast as she could, started the engine. The taxi lurched forward, but before it had gone more than a few meters, the boy was waving at her frantically. Sticking her head out the window, Anemone asked:

  “What now?”

  He came up to the window. His tongue rattled around in his head, flicking out now and then to rake across his lips, and it was everything Anemone could do to make out what he was saying:

  “Burrrnnn. Stay’n the car and you burrrnnn.” But it was enough to remind her of the guards with flamethrowers, and she immediately crawled out from behind the wheel. Opening the trunk, she hauled out the cardboard box filled with meat, but the load—five twenty-kilo bundles—was too much for her and the whole lot fell to the ground, splitting the box and leaving bloody trails as the meat rolled off in every direction. In the blink of an eye, the lurking shadows swooped in, and the meat vanished almost before it came to rest.

  The boy with the ruined face had started to walk away, but from time to time he turned to beckon to Anemone, who quickly realized she had no choice but to follow him. As they walked along the narrow street, Anemone noticed red Xs on several houses and, below each X, a small sign noting that some animal had died there. Under the eaves hung strings of light bulbs, as on a Christmas tree, and piles of broken concrete torn from the street and wrapped in shiny aluminum foil glittered like bulky decorations. The street itself, stripped of its pavement, had become a swamp in the rain, and she found it slow going. Finally, the row of houses came to an end and they entered a park bisected by a broad avenue. Beyond a cluster of dead trees, the thirteen office towers were visible. The boy stopped and pointed to a staircase at the top of which a hole, just the size a person might slip through, had been cut in the barbed wire.

  “Thanks,” said Anemone, and headed for the stairs, when the boy stopped her again.

  “Wait till dark or’ll find you,” he gurgled.

  Again, she had to admit the advice made sense, so she sat down to wait on the single unbroken swing in the park and gazed at the skyscrapers, which seemed to lean over her, about to fall. It occurred to her that if King Kong came to Tokyo and climbed up to play around on those buildings, they wouldn’t have to call out the helicopters and machine guns and fighter planes; all they’d need do was lure him in here and let him muck around until he was covered with this stuff, and then blow him away with a little napalm.

  Although there was no visible source of light, the park was not pitch dark. The boy said to wait till it’s dark, she thought, but it never gets really dark anywhere in the city. In the valley of the thirteen towers of light, there was always a dim phosphorescence drizzling down from on high. From outer space, Tokyo must look like a big, bright blob with no place to hide from the light. It seemed to penetrate every barrier, the smokiest glass, the thickest membrane, to find its way into every corner of every room, every nook and cranny, every bird’s nest and beehive. There was nowhere to run, nowhere they couldn’t find by your shadow.

  In the middle of the park was a murky pond, from which the breeze brought the smell of decay. As she sat there watching, a fat man appeared at the edge of the park and made his way toward the pond. He was barefoot and he jumped around—more a twitch actually—as he walked, as if someone were shooting at his feet with a machine gun. Probably St. Vitus’s Dance, thought Anemone. He stared in her direction, face bathed in sweat, and appeared to be trying to tell her something, but only a strangled cry punctuated his dance at intervals. The sound was something between “gu” and “gi,” like a large bird calling to its flock; he held it until the breath died i
n his throat and then, just as the sound was fading away, he clawed his way up another octave.

  When the fat man reached the edge of the pond, where he seemed to be thinking of wading in, the short, slight figure of a young woman appeared from the shadows of the healthier trees lining the west side of the park and ran up to him. Nimbly dodging the man’s legs, which jerked about from time to time, she managed to whisper something in his ear. Soon, between the man’s squawking sounds, Anemone realized that she was actually singing in a thin, shaky voice, and as she sang the fat man’s cries faded. The song grew louder and began to seem strangely familiar to Anemone, who closed her eyes trying to remember where she’d heard it. She was sure she knew it, as if the memory of the thing were just under the skin of her head—the title, the singer, everything about the piece. The song was about the evening, at the moment the sun was about to sink below the horizon—she was sure of that much. There was only the faintest light left; the sea coast… no, a silhouette, of a building or some mountains, just when they’d been reduced to a dark line and the light was going… Anemone gave up trying to recall its name, but as it washed through her head the tune stirred up memories and images of memories, which quickly took on a life of their own beyond her control. She hadn’t fallen asleep, but somehow on the back of her eyelids a scene appeared: a harbor at dusk, ringed with mountains. It was a large harbor, and in the middle of it they were raising a huge sunken ship. Cranes and winches and anchoring blocks had been gathered from all over the area, and divers, carrying a wire cable as thick as a man’s arm, were just disappearing below the surface. When they came up again, the cable was fastened to a tugboat which pulled it to shore, where it was then wrapped twice around the biggest, sturdiest building in town. Meanwhile, the local people had all gone to a restaurant at the top of one of the mountains overlooking the harbor and were scarfing down mounds of steamed shrimp, as bets were taken on whether the ship would be raised or the building would collapse. And from loudspeakers in the restaurant, the tune was playing.

  The harbor had just turned blood red in the dying light when the surface of the water was breached by the bow of the ship, which itself was already larger than any other boat in the harbor. The silver hull, all crusty with barnacles, caught the last rays of the sun with a blinding flash. The cable, stretched to breaking point, was sawing through the building amid clouds of dust, and each successive pull exposed a few more inches of the ship, sending a great swell toward shore. On the hilltop, dinner was forgotten for the moment; every breath was held, waiting for the outcome, while the speakers continued to blare the tune. The building seemed to bend slightly as the melody swept out over the harbor and off into the distance—as far as Anemone could see. Still sitting in the swing, she felt the tension; laughing, gasping, then almost crying from the excitement, until at last the music stopped. As the sound died away, she opened her eyes to see a pair of dirty tennis shoes moving across the dark earth directly in front of her. For a moment she was disoriented, and then she realized she’d been dreaming.

  “Makes you sad, doesn’t it?” said the slim singer Anemone had thought was a woman but who now turned out to be a young man. “He’ll go on jumping around like that till he keels over and falls asleep. Miserable, isn’t it?” He was standing right beside Anemone, dressed in a woman’s blouse and slacks and lightly made up. The broad face was turned toward her, but the eyes seemed to wander off in all directions. At first she thought he had something physically wrong with him, but then some headlights in the distance caught his eyes, and she could see from the empty gaze that she might as well have been invisible to him.

  6

  Gazelle was dead. Two summers back, in 1987, he had crashed his motorcycle off a cliff. Gradually, since his death, Kiku had stopped picturing Gazelle’s face when he was sprinting along the beach. As his muscles matured and grew stronger, he no longer confused Gazelle with the bearded man on the chapel wall.

  In their third year of junior high school, Kiku’s times in the sprint at the National Athletic Meet attracted attention: 10.9 in the hundred meters; 22.2 in the two hundred. Invitations came from private high schools all over the country, but he refused them. He didn’t quite know why himself. It would have been nice to have a crack at pole vaulting at a big school with all the right equipment. Hashi had very little to say while Kiku was deciding, but he did point out that none of the high schools in question was near the sea. It occurred to Kiku that he refused all of them in the end because he didn’t want to leave Hashi, who, surprisingly, was proving to be the popular one at school. Unlike Kiku, Hashi found it easy to make friends, to be nice to people. Kiku, on the other hand, was naturally rather quiet—and then there was the constant, lonely running practice; sometimes he was sorry he’d ever taken up track. It suited him to be alone, he realized, but still, he wished at times that he had more friends. He was incapable of playing a team sport—in fact, of cooperating on almost anything at all. At one point he had played basketball in gym class, but once the ball was passed to him, he could never bring himself to pass it on and ended up shooting on every play. Naturally, he wasn’t very popular with his teammates and soon lost interest in the game. Somehow, his increasingly impressive muscles could never be put to use for anything that involved other people, and each time the strength began to flow through his body, everyone else seemed to fade away. In the end, he decided, maybe he was better off sticking to track.

  Once he was in high school, Kiku got serious about pole vaulting, as he’d been planning all along. His motive was simple: he wanted to fly. He had nursed this dream ever since the day Gazelle had shown them a film of the record-breaking jumps at the Tokyo Olympics where Hansen and Rheinhardt had dueled for the gold medal. As he’d watched the film, Kiku imagined himself being snapped into space on the end of a fiberglass pole. For Hashi bliss came in the form of a sound, but when Kiku closed his eyes it was a long pole that appeared before him, and a bar, horribly high, that had to be cleared, every nerve and tissue, every muscle and tendon uniting in the effort to fly over it. It made him feel ecstatic.

  Kiku learned to jump without a coach, devouring every book he could find on training and technique. At first, he didn’t even have a real pole, so he used a piece of bamboo and concentrated on basic physical conditioning and building a proper runway and pit. Though he had turned down invitations from high schools where he could have been well trained, he never once complained about the primitive conditions, not even when he had to save Kazuyo’s old sponges and rags to stuff a bag for the pit. He did find one thing hard to take—his lack of a fiberglass pole—but he diverted the ache of this frustration into making his body strong. And he spent more and more time alone, often finding that Hashi would be waiting for him at the end of a long training session.

  It was hard to miss the fact that Hashi was proud of Kiku. When he was practicing outside a classroom window, he would often point him out to his friends.

  “That’s my big brother,” he would say, forcing them to watch him make attempt after attempt. Whenever Kiku cleared the bar, Hashi would applaud from the window.

  One day during the summer, Hashi met him at the school gate after practice and they headed home together. When they got off the bus at the bottom of the hill among the clumps of canna lilies, Hashi told him that a girl in his class had said that Kiku was cute. Kiku blushed.

  “You’re the one they like,” Kiku said. Hashi picked one of the flowers and peeled back its petals, sending a puff of pollen into the air.

  “No,” he said. “It’s just that I talk to them. I know what they want to hear. Sometimes I get sick of it, you know. It’s always been that way; remember at the orphanage how I got to be friends with the milkman? You were always picking fights, even got yourself beat up a few times. Remember?” Kiku nodded. Wiping the pollen on his pants, Hashi went on: “But in the end I think you were the one who really got to be their friend… And the whole time I was wishing I could be like you and beat the shit out of anyone I wante
d to.” Kiku laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Hashi asked.

  “I always wanted to be able to talk like you so they’d like me,” said Kiku. “But no matter what I did, it didn’t come out right and I ended up hitting somebody.” A cicada landed in a tree halfway up the hill and tucked its wings together. The late afternoon sun dyed the road orange.

  “Who woulda thought it,” said Hashi, kicking an empty can. The can rolled down the slope and bounced with a clatter off the tin roof of a chicken coop.

  Kiku stared straight ahead, holding a fiberglass pole that only flexed a little in his tight grip. It was the autumn All-Prep track meet for Nagasaki City, and he had reached the finals of the pole vault. There were nine competitors, all of them, except for Kiku, seniors. But he wasn’t thinking about the competition or about jumping higher than the rest of them; the only thing in his mind was an image of himself sailing over a black and white bar hung in the sky, and all his energy was focused on making his body overlap with that image. That’s why he was vaulting. Inside his head he sketched a picture of himself defying gravity and floating into space; and once the picture was complete, at the instant of the actual jump, the image would paste itself onto his body, momentarily liberated, and the two would become a weightless, soaring one. That was Kiku’s method.

  Almost before he realized the competition had started, the bar was at 4.70 meters, a height he had never cleared, and only three other vaulters were left. The favorite was a kid in glasses, but there was also a tall boy who had good times in the four hundred meters, and another guy who attended a high school for gifted students run by a university known for its track and field program.

  Kiku was to be the first to vault. The vaulting area was to one side of the track, but since the other events had all finished, people had drifted over to watch. Kazuyo was there too. Kiku had insisted she didn’t need to come, but she’d closed the beauty parlor, packed a lunch, and made the trip from the island.