by Ryu Murakami
“We’re going to make a star out of you,” he managed to say. “The boy’s a genius; you may not know it, kid, but you’re a goddamn genius!”
And D had been as good as his word: Hashi was making his debut as a singer soon, apparently. Kiku heard this last part of the story with the person in question standing behind them. It was hard to say, even from this close, whether he was young or old; his hairline had receded, exposing a broad forehead, but the skin was smooth and unlined. His eyes were narrow, his lips full. He wore tortoiseshell sunglasses and a sweaty silk shirt, and the red bow tie seemed to be spotted with the tall woman’s saliva. Stubby fingers with close-cut nails and a cat’s-eye ring completed the picture. There was a slight smell of peppermint about him.
D bent over Hashi, cupped his chin, and brought their lips together in a long kiss. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, like parent and child, or two people greeting each other at a party. Kiku was sure D would stop soon to ask who he was, to scold Hashi for not introducing his friend—the thought made him shudder. But he couldn’t help feeling left out, a little jealous of both of them. Hashi had found an older man, a father, and D had found someone who needed him; whereas Kiku hadn’t found but lost something—his temper, if nothing else.
At last D broke off the kiss to say: “Let’s go get something to eat. They tell me they’ve got a new duck dish, with raisins and cucumber. Sounds good to me.” Hashi looked over at Kiku.
“This is my friend, the one I told you about: Kiku,” he said.
“Ahhh. I remember. The kid who comes from the same, shall we say, ‘background’ as you, the one you wanted me to help. Well, he can come too—looks like he could use some of that duck.”
“Thank you,” Hashi said, smiling at Kiku, but Kiku was glaring at D as if he were about to hit him in the face. He stood up as D rattled on:
“You like duck, kid? If you don’t, we can get you sushi or something instead.”
“I don’t want duck shit or anything else if you’re buying.” Hashi had never heard him use this tone before; he sounded on the verge of tears. Bracing both hands on the table and struggling to catch his breath, Kiku calmed himself. “I’m going home, Hashi. You can do whatever you want, just don’t tell this creep anything more about me.” But as he turned to leave, D grabbed his shoulder.
“Hold on a second. Who’re you calling a creep?”
“Let go.”
“Listen, kid, Hashi was only trying to do you a favor. Seems to me, if you’re going to refuse, you could at least be a bit nicer about it.”
Kiku brushed aside his hand: “Don’t touch me. Just because you go around feeling up every jerk on your payroll, don’t get the idea you can do it to me.”
“Tetchy, aren’t we?” said D, backing off momentarily. “But don’t you think you’re embarrassing Hashi acting like that? And where do you get the idea I get a kick out of touching you? But for that matter, why shouldn’t I give you a squeeze if I feel like it? Do you know where you are? This is a meat shop, dear boy, a temple of the flesh. See these boys and girls?—they’ve come here to sell, and I’ve come to buy. Nothing out of line about that. You’re the one out of line. If you want to act all proud and uppity, if you’re so keen on exercising your inalienable rights, go do it in a hotel lobby or your own marble palace. Here people have business to transact: they’ve got something to sell—nobody’s forcing them to do it—and I’ve got money to spend. Beggars aren’t supposed to be choosy—shows a lack of enterprise or something. What I’m saying, my little friend, is that you should stop pretending to be what you aren’t; there’s a right way and a wrong way for everybody to act, and this is the first time I ever saw a hustler act like the Queen Mother. You punks are supposed to shut up and stick out your asses, not go mouthing off all the time. Got it?”
As D finished speaking, Kiku grabbed the neck of the wine bottle on the table and held it over his head; but in one motion, D fell back and his driver stepped in, twisting Kiku’s arm behind his back. The driver grinned as his white gloves tightened their grip.
“Break his arm!” D urged. “See if you can make him cry.”
Make me cry? thought Kiku to himself—that’s all they’ve done since the day we were born. Don’t listen to them, Hashi, they’re the ones who put us in the locker, and now they’re just looking for other ways to hurt us.
But Hashi was apologizing. “Don’t pay any attention to him, sir—please; he says things but he doesn’t really mean them.”
“I understand,” said D, stroking Hashi’s face again, “I understand. You know, in a way he’s just like you, Hashi: spoiled. You kids don’t know what it’s like to go hungry. You think you’ve had it hard just because somebody left you in a coin locker, but there must be thousands of kids like you. You’re both spoiled rotten; don’t know how good you had it at that orphanage—even ended up getting adopted—fuckin’ spoiled, that’s all.”
At this point, Kiku jabbed his heel into the driver’s shin and lunged at D, trying to punch him, but Hashi slipped nimbly between the two of them.
“Stop it, Kiku,” he ordered. “Mr. D is an important person.”
Kiku wished he was good at talking—wished he could find the right words to tell Hashi that he was being taken advantage of. He stared into Hashi’s eyes and tried to make him understand, but the eyes looking back were ones he didn’t recognize. Hashi had changed. He stood with his hand on Kiku’s shoulder.
“Go home, Kiku, go back to your pole vaulting.” His words seemed to suck all the strength out of Kiku, and he could feel tears welling up. Still, he swung his fist in one last punch, no longer sure who he wanted to hit but needing to do something to keep from crying. But his movements had gone sluggish, fuzzy, and the driver caught him with a kick to the stomach before his slow-motion punch could land. Kiku rolled out into the road and lay face down.
“Are you OK?” asked Hashi, running over to him. Kiku raised his head slightly to nod…
10
“Pretty shitty floodlights,” Anemone muttered as she studied the dark Polaroid frames. Since the night she had taken them, Kiku had appeared in her dreams several times, but when she woke she could never remember exactly what he looked like. She could picture his hair and forehead, but down around the nose and eyes things got a little fuzzy and her mind would substitute parts from friends or some celebrity. She was sure that somewhere deep in her head she had a memory of Kiku’s face, it was just that she couldn’t develop it into a clear picture. This kind of thing happened to Anemone all the time, however, and she managed to be satisfied with a mental place-marker where the memory of Kiku should have been.
But why was she so stuck on him, anyway, she wondered. When she saw him in her dreams, he was always flying, leaping buildings in a single bound—not stretched flat with his arms out like Superman but using his supple pole to snap into the air. Then, somewhere in her subconscious, Anemone would realize that Kiku’s place-marker seemed to be whispering something to her in that same whisper she’d heard as they hid in the bushes to escape the guards. The whisper sounded stiff and forced: “When I soar aloft and look back on all of you, I feel like a butterfly flying o’er the Amazon delta,” or something. After dreaming about him, she always woke up feeling wonderful.
In the afternoon, she set out for the hospital to visit Sachiko, a friend from her modeling crowd. Sachiko was older than Anemone and had always played the part, taking Anemone out to dinner or on trips to the beach. Still, Sachiko insisted that it was Anemone who had more poise and self-control.
“Girls with big eyes are always that way,” she would say. “I’d swear you actually see more than the rest of us.” Sachiko, with her long, straight hair, had been popular with foreigners, and in the end she married one, an Italian diplomat. That was two years ago. A couple of letters had come from Italy complaining about the formal functions she had to attend, then nothing. But just recently Anemone had heard that she had divorced the diplomat, come home to Japan, and was
in the hospital with some sort of lung problem. Anemone stopped in at a bakery on the way and bought some candied chestnuts.
The hospital room was an antiseptic white, Sachiko a little heavier than Anemone had remembered.
“… I’m not boasting,” Sachiko was saying, “but I really wasn’t bad-looking back then, was I?”
“I don’t know what you mean, ‘back then,’” said Anemone.
“You know exactly when I mean. When we used to go for sushi at dawn, play billiards in the nude, and jump in the pool in our best little frocks. Don’t say you don’t remember.”
“I think you’re still pretty,” said Anemone.
“But I was prettier back then. I was crazy about makeup, anything that would make me look better. It’s only now I can see how dumb I was. I thought if I were beautiful enough, all my dreams would come true. But you don’t stay beautiful forever; one day you wake up and it’s gone, and then where are you? You know what I learned?… Dreams are made with blood and sweat and tears. Do you see what I mean?”
“Not exactly…”
“I suppose not. Maybe you’re still too young.”
“But I do have dreams… at night, that is,” said Anemone.
“That’s normal enough at your age. But you know what bothers me about young people these days? They don’t seem to care about anything. I’ve done my share of stupid things, and now I’m paying for it—that’s why I’m here. But at least I did things, went places, had more men than you could count. I wanted excitement, wanted to do something. I may have worn myself out along the way, but it was a helluva ride. But when I look at you, Anemone, I can’t even tell if you’re feeling anything at all. You keep everything bottled up inside so nobody knows what you’re thinking, and you drift along going nowhere. If you get a few kicks a day, if life is easy enough, reasonably pleasant, you’re satisfied. If you ask me, though, that’s not really living.”
“It doesn’t even have to be pleasant,” said Anemone quietly. Then: “Sachiko, have you ever been pregnant?”
“Sure, and I’ve got one kid.”
“What’s it like when you first find out you’re pregnant? They say you feel sick a lot.”
“Not only that. It’s a big, natural feeling, like you’re a real live mammal.”
“Sometimes I have a feeling almost like that, like all the blood in my body’s being collected in a sack somewhere down in my stomach. It feels just like a baby must feel when it starts to grow, and sometimes I think when it gets big enough, the sack is going to break and then I’ll understand all kinds of things that don’t make sense now…”
“Sure, honey, I know what you’re talking about, but you’ve got to ignore stuff like that; they’re illusions, self-deceptions, what you feel when you want everything but you’re not willing to do anything to get it. You’re fooling yourself and you don’t even know it.”
“Illusions? But that’s fine with me.” Yes, thought Anemone, illusions are just fine.
Outside the sealed hospital windows, the late August sun was slowly roasting the city; Anemone’s eighteenth summer was drawing to an end. Sachiko was obviously incapable of understanding her thoughts about the future as she chattered away, listing parties and jewels and lovers, and a certain silver fox coat in a glass box, and how she had suffered for it, dieting to get the best modeling jobs, doing midnight shoots, hustling any way she could. But Anemone, she supposed, had been born with a silver fox coat, and couldn’t begin to imagine its real worth…
The windows were double-glazed, perhaps because the room had once housed tuberculosis patients, and through the thick glass the late-summer shadows appeared long and spidery. Large buildings around the hospital left the room itself in deep shadow. Poor Sachiko, thought Anemone, you’re trapped, and not just in this hospital room either; you’ve been trapped since birth. Suddenly, in mid-thought, a sharp image of Kiku’s face appeared to her, clear down to the last detail. In the distance, the sun was setting amid the cluster of skyscrapers—the ones Kiku said he liked. We both like them, Anemone decided, because we both picture them as the only surviving buildings after the rest of the city has sunk into a boiling swamp. And her thoughts wandered on.
About once a month, Gulliver would stop eating and begin to move nervously around the apartment, finally exploding in a fit of madness, whipping his tail against the walls until it was all bloody and the whole building was shaken to its foundations. The fit would last twenty-four hours, during which Gulliver would groan and foam a bit at the mouth, and then it would be over, leaving him looking miserable. During one of these spells, Anemone had realized that Gulliver’s tropical blood was just registering a protest against the fake tropics of Uranus.
Sachiko too, she remembered, used to say that she got jittery if she had nothing to do. She also used to say that every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset, and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down. And then she would tell her about the silver scales of the huge fish at the mouth of the Amazon, or listening for hours to gypsy songs in the hills of Portugal. But Anemone had finally seen through all this talk; all Sachiko’s trips and lovers and “experiences” amounted to the same thing: boredom. They were exactly the same as Gulliver’s fits—her way of lashing out at the concrete walls that had her boxed in. And no matter how hard she struggled, or if she managed, for a while anyway, to exhaust herself, to forget that she was a prisoner, she was still a million miles away from the tropics…
“Anemone,” Sachiko was saying, “you don’t know what really wanting something means, do you? You were born in a supermarket world; you could have anything, eat anything, do anything, and the result is you don’t need anything. You think people who have to say out loud ‘I want this or that’ are a little tacky.”
“You could be right. I wouldn’t say I ‘want’ much of anything, but I am waiting for something.”
“Waiting for what? And why? You could wait forever—nothing’d ever come of it. It’s just more self-indulgence, more illusions. You’re lost in the desert, and you think you’ve found water when anyone can see you’re gulping down sand.” The illusions again! thought Anemone. It’s all a mirage, is it?… Well, fine! I’m sick of water anyway, sick to death of water. I’d rather suck on this mirage, I’d rather eat sand till I’m spitting blood than drink another drop of smelly water. The whole city stinks of age and stagnation and boredom, and it makes Sachiko as sick as it does me; but she goes on listening to the same old songs, trying to keep from dying of boredom, while I’d rather puke it all out, puke up a great cloud of boredom and let it rain down all over Tokyo, rain till your lungs rot in your chest, till the streets crack and wash away and rivers of puke run between the buildings… puke going higher and higher, the air so thick it chokes you, and mangroves sprouting from the cracks in the sidewalks… the old trees washed up by the roots, rotting in little pools to become nests for poisonous bugs, horny bugs that hatch out in swarms to creep all over you, Sachiko, like things in the worst nightmares you ever thought up in your orgies of booze and cum, to crawl over you and lay their eggs right on your skin, hatching their squirmy little babies from your rotting body. Sachiko, dear, this room is already a nursery for the creeping and crawling, and you’re a rotting pusbag for them to feed on… But what I’m waiting for comes when you’re gone, when the rain stops and a huge swollen sun rises over the city; then I’ll get mine—you see, Sachiko, there is something I want—and Gulliver and I will live on the roof of one of those skyscrapers, surrounded by a swamp full of jungle flowers, great tropical forests, and the last few feverish people, slowly wasting away.
“You’ve changed, Anemone,” mumbled Sachiko through a mouthful of marron glacé. A bit of chestnut dropped from her lip down the front of her hospital gown. “You may not see it yourself, but you’ve changed.”
Within minutes of leaving the air-conditioned hospital, Anemone’s blouse was soaked in sweat. But when she arrived back at her apar
tment, she let out a little cry of delight: Kiku, looking slightly ill, was leaning against the door.
“I came to see the crocodile,” he said.
Mr. D had mobilized his record company for Hashi’s singing debut, building the publicity around his unusual background. Work had begun in secret on a documentary feature scheduled to be broadcast at Christmas. Tentatively titled “Born in a Coin Locker,” the show would follow Hashi from the orphanage, through life on the island, to his experiences as a hustler in The Market. But the climax was to be a live, on-camera reunion between Hashi and his mother, and D had already hired a private investigator to find the woman. Hashi, however, was told nothing about this.
Final preparations had also been made on a new condo D had bought for him, and Hashi went back to the factory in Toxitown to get the few things he’d left behind there. A bit surprised that Kiku and Tatsuo were both gone, he sat down on the floor and began lining up the junk he’d been storing in a cardboard box: a coffee cup, an ashtray, wads of paper, a broken lighter, an empty soda can, a rusty spoon, nail clippers, a used-up lipstick, hairpins, apple seeds, shoelaces, a rubber band. Suddenly he remembered that he used to play this game all the time—on the floor, next to his bed at the orphanage. He had been making some kind of miniature garden—no, a whole city, out of odds and ends… He remembered now. He remembered how feverish he had felt as he worked at the model, but there was something else, scraps of memories about… what had stood for what. All he could recall for sure were the tower of spools and the awl: the spools were the fire house, and the awl a cannon. He picked up the empty can and weighed it in his hand. It was just a can, nothing more; it didn’t dissolve before his eyes and become a symbol for something else, something larger, more sinister. That pulp in his head must have finally dried out, he told himself, he had finally outgrown this old habit. But then a whole string of old memories came back to him: the can… just a can… had been a water tank; the spoon, the spoon had been a runway; hairpins, machine gun-toting soldiers; rubber bands were trucks, a round plate a baseball field, and assorted seeds and pits had been ships at sea.