Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  Two months later, in March of 1988, an underwater photographer working for a Tokyo documentary film company came to the island with four assistants to make a movie about this strange incident. Naturally, they got in touch with Aritsuki. It was then that the third “accident” occurred.

  “I told them they should forget about it. The Diving Center in Tokyo had sent a directive banning diving in the cave, and you can see why I wasn’t crazy about the idea of going back there, but this photographer—Ozaki was his name—said it didn’t matter whether I went with them or not, they were still going to the cave. I figured I didn’t have a choice, and at least if I went along I could see to it that nothing happened, or if anything did happen, make sure we’d have a way of keeping in touch. I had them rig everybody up with waterproof transceivers, and I tied ten reserve air tanks to the anchor chain to go down with us. 1 also made Ozaki leave one of the assistants at the mouth of the cave holding the end of a rope that was tied around the rest of us; he had instructions to pull us out if anything went wrong.

  “The camera lights for the filming were much brighter than anything I’d ever had with me, so I got a good view of the inside of the cave for the first time. We even discovered the young of a really rare kind of shrimp and a nest of blind moray eels. We’d made it all the way to the ledge without any trouble and we were poking around at the entrances to the three tunnels when it happened. Ozaki threw his camera down and started thrashing his arms and legs about like he was in terrible pain. After that he clawed at his chest for a few seconds and then stopped moving altogether. When I think back on it, it started just after Ozaki had taken his regulator out of his mouth for a few seconds to focus his camera. Anyway, as soon as I saw him go spinning around, I realized something was wrong and pulled on the rope according to plan. I tried to stop them, but three other guys swam over to Ozaki; they must have thought his hose was broken, because they all tried to give him their regulators, but almost as soon as they had them out of their mouths, things started to go crazy. The guy closest to Ozaki let out a bloodcurdling scream—people think you can’t hear underwater but you can, you know; you may not be able to make out words and stuff, but you can hear, and this was one loud scream… Anyway, he let out this scream and then shot his spear gun into the chest of another guy who was holding the lamp. The light fell out of his hands and went spinning over the edge, down somewhere deep, but for one second I got a glimpse way back in one of those cracks. I suppose my eyes could have been playing tricks on me, but, you know, I swear I saw these weird-looking flat gray things—rocks, maybe, but too regular for any rocks I’ve ever seen—stacked up inside that crack. Looked exactly like concrete, but why would there be concrete down there at the bottom of the ocean?…

  “Anyway, I didn’t have much time to worry about it. The next thing I knew, the guy who had fired the spear gun was drawing his knife and coming after me and the other assistant there. At least that’s what I thought was happening as near as I could tell—it got real dark after the light went over the edge, and the water was full of sand and blood by this time. I figured it wasn’t worth waiting around to see what was going to happen, so I started pulling on the guide rope for dear life. As I was heading out the tunnel, I heard a terrible scream—as bad as with the German ladies and the dolphin. I suppose that’s when the assistant who was following me out of the tunnel got it. I’ve never been so scared in all my life. I didn’t really know what was going on, except that a crazy man was coming after me in the dark. Well, I finally got out of the tunnel and started trying to make the guy waiting at the entrance understand what had happened, but he didn’t seem to be getting it at all, and besides that he was tied to those lines, most of which now had dead bodies at the other end. It seemed to me about the only thing I could do was cut him loose, but just as I was drawing my knife, the crazy guy appeared with his big sheath knife. I couldn’t see his whole face because of his mask, but it looked like he was real mad about something—all worked up into a rage like nothing I’d ever seen—but as I said, I’m not exactly sure of any of this. Of course, the guy who’d been waiting outside didn’t know what was up, so he moved toward the other man thinking he must be in trouble, but as soon as he got in range, the crazy guy planted his knife in his neck, up to the hilt. It all happened in a second. Then he started stabbing him again and again, and blood was spurting out into the water. By this time I was sure I should be getting out of there—not only because of the crazy guy, but now there would be sharks to deal with as well, and I made a quick calculation and decided that I was more afraid of the man and the sharks than I was of the bends. I thought I would swim for the surface at an angle to avoid getting really bad bends, but the man was swimming after me, and before I got very far I felt a hand grab my arm. But this was no ordinary hand doing the grabbing; I’ve never felt a grip that strong, like a gorilla. Fortunately for me, everything gets slowed down underwater, so when he swung the knife I was able to twist out of the way and slice through his hose. Even then, he went on flailing around with that knife for more than thirty seconds. Now, that may not sound so amazing—most people can hold their breath for that long—but when somebody’s moving about like that, at that depth, you’d expect him to last no more than five seconds, tops. Finally, though, this spurt of air came out of his mouth and he stopped moving, but I was still in a fix since he hadn’t let go of my arm and his hand stayed rock-hard even after he passed out.

  “And then the sharks started to show up. A whole swarm of them were chewing on the body of the guy who’d been stabbed in the neck while I was trying to pry those fingers off my arm. But they were like steel—rigor mortis, I guess—so I decided I’d just have to take him to the surface with me. When the sharks finished with the other bleeding guy, they came after us, and it took them all of one second to take off the leg of the guy I was dragging. Somebody pulled me up on deck just as the sharks were going for me; I was sure I was a goner.”

  The police coroner examined the body of the man who was pulled aboard with Mr. Aritsuki, and the findings proved as surprising as everything else about this case. The muscles were, as Aritsuki’s account suggested, unusually rigid and the person seemed to be in a state of extreme excitement, but in every other way the blood, tissues, and organs were perfectly normal, and, according to all the evidence, the cause of death was simple drowning.

  Aritsuki himself saw to sealing up the entrance to the cave with wire mesh, after which it was briefly rumored that frogmen from the Coast Guard were planning to investigate the area; but for reasons unexplained—perhaps simply the inherent danger—these plans never materialized, and soon afterward the whole north coast of Garagi Island was closed to swimming and diving. That was in May of last year, and the mystery remains unsolved. Various explanations have been offered, all ultimately unsatisfactory, and at least one novel has already appeared based on the incident. Theories range from the bite of some unknown sea snake, or the curse of a local sea god, to simple madness brought on by panic, but the truth is sealed in a cave off the north shore of Garagi. And there it may remain, a cousin of the Bermuda Triangle, as a lesson that the sea is an inscrutable mistress and that we humans are, by comparison, pitifully small and vulnerable. It’s a lesson that all of us who challenge the sea as divers would do well to remember.

  Kiku closed the scuba diving magazine and put it down. He’d found it on Anemone’s bookshelf, and this was his tenth time through that article, so the pages were worn and grubby. He mumbled a line he’d memorized from the pamphlet on DATURA that the drug dealer in The Market had given him: “A large part of the existing stockpile… sunk somewhere in the ocean.” He and Anemone then went to a store that specialized in navigational charts and bought two: the quadrant for the Ogasawara archipelago and a detailed map of Garagi.

  In the evening, Kiku went along to watch Anemone work. The downtown studio was basically an empty warehouse—dim, damp, and cool—that had been rigged with a metal framework on the ceiling, from which hung hundre
ds of lights. The floor and walls were concrete, painted snow-white, and when the lights were focused, a person standing in that vast, colorless space cast absolutely no shadow.

  Shortly after they arrived, workers started wheeling in props and decorations. For this particular set, the white room was to become a meadow in Bulgaria; an enormous background photo was brought in, then yards of rolling artificial turf, a fence, a cottage complete with chimney, and a flock of live sheep. Finally, someone led in a long-haired dog, while the finishing touches—real dandelions—were scattered on the “grass.” When everything was ready, a smiling Anemone, clad in a frilly white frock and checked apron and carrying a basket of yogurt, was supposed to stroll across the phony countryside. After the shooting started, Kiku quickly lost interest and decided to look around at the other sets while he was waiting.

  There were lots of things to see: a tropical island, an iceberg, a desert battlefield, an amusement park, the grand hall of a palace, a circus tent, and the surface of Mars. In order to get a view of everything at once, Kiku climbed up to the lighting scaffold and sat down; from there he could watch all the shooting.

  “Finished,” said a laughing Anemone some time later as she appeared at his elbow, still in costume. They were beginning to dismantle the sets in the various studios and the lights were dimming. Below, shadowy figures were scurrying about with plants and furniture, weapons, toys, musical instruments, fountains, stone walls, and whatever else came to hand, and in a few minutes the two of them were sitting above what was once more just an empty room, as if white paint had rained from the sky, obliterating every last hint of scenery.

  “It’s so white,” murmured Kiku.

  “And what’s strange about that?” asked Anemone as she peeled off her golden lashes.

  “Over there,” said Kiku, pointing at a darkened studio, “until a few minutes ago they were holding a ball in a beautiful palace. Now it’s just a big white room.”

  On the way home from the studio, they made a detour to west Shinjuku and drove about among the skyscrapers. The sparsely lit towers looked like damascene cliffs rising above them, and at the top, red signal lights blinked on and off with sinister regularity.

  “Let’s go to Garagi to find the DATURA,” said Kiku.

  “Datura?” said Anemone, stopping the car in the valley of towers. The reflection of a red light was blinking where Kiku’s pupil should have been.

  “The medicine to make Tokyo snow-white,” he said.

  15

  D’s offices occupied an older nine-story building nestled among the skyscrapers in west Shinjuku. After the success of his first rock singer, D had taken over the seventh floor of the building and set up an independent record company. Then, when the second discovery had become something of an international sensation, he bought the building outright. The basement was used for storage and parking space; the first four floors housed business, accounting, promotion, and production offices; and the fifth and six floors were recording studios. The next floor had screening and editing facilities for dubbing in soundtracks produced for commercials and movies, and on the eighth floor were the offices of various music magazines ostensibly independent of D’s little empire. Right at the top were a couple of conference rooms and the president’s suite.

  D’s office was famous for the impossibly bad taste of its decor, which took its cue from his obsession with American movies of the forties, particularly those starring Bob Hope. The room was an exact replica of the boss’s office in a Bob Hope film about a mill company executive whose ambition was to be a big game hunter. One wall was covered with enormous photographs of the jungle and savannah, and the floor was strewn with zebra and lion skins. In the corner stood a stuffed gorilla and a stuffed ostrich, and in the center of the room was a jet of water rising from a heart-shaped pool. It was in this setting, on Monday mornings, that D could be found with his masseuse, a black woman in a gaudy bathing suit, lying prone before a wall of windows that looked out on the thirteen skyscrapers. D was convinced that the drones at work in the offices across the way could see what he was up to, and were jealous as hell. On Monday mornings, as he lay beneath the masseuse’s hands, he was in the habit of saying:

  “Take a good look, kiddos. It won’t be long before I buy one of your big tall buildings, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  D’s company had run off thirty thousand copies of Hashi’s debut single, ninety percent of which had already sold, making Hashi something of a hit. Anything over ten thousand would have been a good showing, D had thought, but he hadn’t taken into account the full impact of the story of Hashi’s origins. News that the young singer had been found in a coin locker resulted in no fewer than eleven magazine features and seven television appearances. To make sure the interviews went according to plan, D hired three scriptwriters to work up answers to possible questions, and then chose the best of their suggestions for Hashi to memorize.

  Q. Is it true that as a baby you were abandoned in a coin locker?

  A. Yes, that’s correct. (Pause before answering; keep answer short, almost curt, as if you find the question impertinent. Stare for a few seconds into the interviewer’s eyes; don’t scowl)

  Q. Then you must have suffered a lot?

  A. Do I look like I’ve suffered? (Answer immediately, perhaps with slight, though friendly, smile; tone should be innocent, open, as if to say “Yes, I suppose it must show on my face.” After this question, no matter what the interviewer does, look down and keep quiet for a while)

  Q. I’m told that you liked music even as a child, but what sort of music, and which singers in particular?

  A. My favorite stars are Shimakura Chiyoko and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. (Object here is to give names of two singers who are completely unrelated, preferably a different pair at each interview. Answer promptly; selections should combine a known celebrity—Mick Jagger, for example—and someone the interviewer has probably never heard of, perhaps an obscure folk singer. If the interviewer asks about the little-known singer, be prepared to give a detailed biography, continuing until interviewer interrupts)

  Q. What do you see as the main factor that enabled you to become a singer?

  A. Being lonely. (Avoid appearance of seeking sympathy; answer cheerfully, positively, as if to say that now you aren’t at all lonely. A slight smile permissible here, but don’t give the impression of smiling in order to cover embarrassment. After this answer, remain silent for a time)

  Q. Would you like to be able to meet your real mother?

  A. I see her all the time… in my dreams, though they’re usually nightmares. (Line should be delivered with a serious expression, but avoid looking pained; breathe out slowly as you speak, but don’t let it turn into a sigh. Pause after “time,” then spit out the rest; absolutely no smile; shift line of sight during answer)

  Q. If you did meet her, what would you say to her?

  A. Long time no see. (The interviewer’s response to this answer is important: if he/she is smiling even the least bit, look hurt and angry; if the interviewer maintains a serious expression, smile slightly. Then, if the smiling interviewer stops smiling and looks embarrassed, you smile, but if he/she continues to smile, simply get up and leave; in the case of the serious interviewer, if he/she eventually smiles back, immediately frown slightly, but if the serious expression continues, slowly allow the smile to fade from your face)

  Q. Do you feel any hatred for this mother who abandoned you?

  A. Just a bit. (Questions of this kind are most likely to come from tough reporters or sentimental female emcees; in either case, answer bluntly, as if the question bored you)

  Hashi’s performance during the interviews was superb. He didn’t really mind all the questions; to him they were just a sign that he was finally attracting attention. Following D’s instructions, he carefully cultivated the image of “a young man who was unusual but not unlikable,” taking a certain pleasure in giving unexpected answers. As he found that he was able, just by talking, to make som
eone angry or sad, or cause surprise or admiration, something developed inside Hashi that had never been there before: confidence. Television became his mirror, and the reflection he saw there was not the sniveling person he had always been but someone else.

  Quickly, Hashi grew to like the new self D had invented for him, and he set about trying to turn the real Hashi into the image he saw reflected in the cathode tubes and newsprint. It was neither difficult nor painful, a matter of a slight readjustment of outlook. He had, he reasoned, always been different from other people, always willing to play the weakling, but now he saw this willingness in a new light. If in the past he had been terrified of grown men to the point of tears, that was simply—on the new scale of values—something he had done because it made men happy to see him cry. And though he’d often pretended to be sick to escape gym class and had hated himself for it, self-hatred, he now realized, was his own, idiosyncratic way of changing his character.