Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  It wasn’t long after this that she went to work designing costumes for Hashi’s concert tour. Two dreams, it seems, had come true at once: she had an angel to love, and she was making that angel snow-white satin clothes to wear.

  16

  There was still time before he was to meet Neva for dinner and he had forgotten to buy flowers—Neva liked orchids—so Hashi decided to pay off the cab and walk the rest of the way. A huge Christmas tree stood in front of the flower shop, but inside the air was warm and smelled of damp leaves. As Hashi entered, he was greeted by the shopkeeper, a dark man whose chest hair, threading through an ivory necklace, peeped out of his open-necked shirt. He was cutting roses. Hashi ordered five orchids: white with just a touch of red at the edges. While the flowers were being wrapped in silver foil, a man in a fur jacket—obviously queer—walked in the door.

  “You know what I’m just dying for?” he announced. “Bougainvillea, and masses of it, stems and all.” The owner of the place put down the orchids for a moment and went to a refrigerator at the back of the shop. When he came back, his arms were filled with bougainvillea.

  “What do you need them for?” he asked the fur jacket.

  “We’re having a Christmas pageant, and I’m going to put some in my hair and play Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Now be gentle with the little things, the petals drop off if you so much as sneeze at them.”

  It was the first time that Hashi had seen the brilliant color of the flower; the ones he’d kept as a souvenir of his mother had long since turned brown. “I wonder what bougainvillea means botanically,” he mumbled. The shopkeeper smiled and shook his head, but the man in the fur said “Must have something to do with buggers, don’t you think?” and winked at Hashi. Hashi laughed. I didn’t realize they were so fragile, he was thinking. Why would my mother have put some in the locker with me? That woman writer said it was because they were the fanciest thing in the flower shops at the time… As he stood lost in thought, the fairy breezed by him and out of the shop, crimson petals scattering on the shoulders of his silver fox jacket.

  Back in the street, a dog sat next to a blind old man playing a violin. Every time the wind blew, the tune seemed to go astray, perhaps because the man’s fingers were numb from the cold. The dog’s breath came in white clouds. A group of drunks came by, and one called to the others to stop as he sat down in front of the dog and began to open a small box of sushi. The dog, a hairless breed of some sort, sniffed at the food, then looked up at its master. Without stopping his playing, the man croaked:

  “What is it?”

  “Just thought I’d give your dog some of this here tuna,” said the drunk.

  “Sorry,” said the old man, “but he can’t eat anything raw.” The drunk had grabbed its collar and was trying to force the fish into its mouth.

  “Hey, you stupid mutt, this is fuckin’ toro!” he said. The dog curled its tail, let out a howl, and tried to wriggle free while the blind man apologized and went on playing. “All right, then,” the drunk conceded, and, stuffing the remaining sushi into the man’s money can, he left. As Hashi walked away, the old musician was squatting by the can clawing out bits of rice and throwing them on the ground.

  In Roppongi, young drifters had lined the street with makeshift stalls consisting of nothing but flattened cardboard boxes on which jewelry, original paintings, or perhaps a private collection of poetry were spread. One group had a Christmas cake they’d probably found in the garbage behind some bakery, which was being devoured in great handfuls. A young girl, back hunched against the cold, had a safety pin through the flesh of her cheek from which a large tag dangled with the words “Punk Forever!” written on it. The pin looked slightly rusty, and though it was hard to tell in the dim light, the skin around the hole in her cheek seemed to be infected. From time to time she took a tube of ointment from her pocket and dabbed at it. At the moment her cheek was stuffed with cake, which didn’t prevent her, however, from taking her turn inhaling from a plastic bag filled with paint thinner.

  A young man nearby, seated in Zen meditation, had painted his face in the red, white, and blue of the French flag. Though it was December, he wore nothing over his T-shirt, nor any socks with his rubber sandals. Another man was tending a display of blowguns which he demonstrated for any willing passerby, and the show seemed to be working, as a small knot of people had collected around his stand. The guns, consisting of nothing more than lengths of lead pipe and cone-shaped rivets wrapped in paper, packed a surprising punch, and the man was able to stick the darts in a board ten meters away with apparent ease. The sign next to his display read: “Lethal.” As Hashi was watching the demonstration, someone tapped him on the shoulder. Turning, he found himself looking at a scraggly face whose smile revealed missing teeth in front.

  “Hashi, it’s me,” hissed the man. It was Tatsuo. He was selling a book of poetry at a stand next to the girl with the safety pin; The Bee’s Remains, it was called. “It’s not my book,” he was quick to tell him. “This weird old guy writes this stuff, has them printed up, and then gives them away free… But Hashi, you’re getting to be a star, right?” Though Hashi tried to refuse, Tatsuo pushed a copy of the book into his pocket as he went on: “I’ve heard your record. Most folks around here don’t like it much, but when anybody says anything bad about it I punch them out for you.” Tatsuo was staring at Hashi’s bouquet. “Those sure are pretty. Must be from the south. Flowers, fish, everything’s prettier down there, you know.”

  “Tatsuo, I’m afraid I’m in a hurry,” Hashi interrupted.

  “Oh… Well, OK, if that’s the way it is.”

  “How’s Emiko?” Hashi thought to ask, and suddenly Tatsuo seemed to come to himself and covered his toothless mouth with his hand.

  “Lost more of my teeth,” he muttered. “They pulled them out without even giving me any novocain. That jock brother of yours hid my shotguns somewhere, and I couldn’t tell them where even when they tried to get it out of me by pulling my teeth. Shit, that hurt—even worse than getting my ears shredded. Guy wasn’t even a dentist, not that it would have made much difference…”

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to go,” said Hashi.

  “You know, those were good times we had together. Seems like years ago now, but it was just yesterday… So, you rich now? Have you been to Cebu? Seems all the rich people go there sometime. You been yet?”

  “Let’s talk some other time—soon—OK?” said Hashi, beginning to walk on, but Tatsuo caught him by the sleeve.

  “Look, I know you’re in a hurry, but there’s just one thing I’d like you to do for me. Uh … I don’t mean to be a nuisance, but if you should get to Cebu and run into Emiko, could you say hello for me? Tell her I may have lost my teeth but I’m doing fine. Tell her I’ll never hit her again. You’re sure to be going, aren’t you? You’re rich now; you’ve got to go. You should bring back a guitar—they’ve got handmade ones dirt cheap. You can’t make any money selling that mother-of-pearl shit everybody brings back—guitars are the only way to go. Singapore Air is the cheapest way to get there. Air India’s cheap too, but you get nothing but curry to eat. You transfer to a domestic flight in Manila; takes another fifty-eight minutes from there. From Japan, with transfers and all, it’s six hours, twenty-nine minutes. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Six hours and twenty-nine minutes—no time at all—and you’re there. I’ve already been sitting here more than four hours…”

  Hashi said nothing, and Tatsuo hadn’t let go of his sleeve, so Hashi transferred the orchids to his other hand. Tatsuo extracted a small circle of glass from his pocket; it was a ring.

  “I read in a magazine that you’re engaged,” he said. “This isn’t much, but it’s my present to you. And if you’re my friend, you’ve got to like it. That’s what friends do—give each other stuff…” When Hashi put the ring in his pocket, Tatsuo smiled his toothless smile and released his grip on the sleeve.

  “Well, be seeing you,” said Hashi, and he walked on down t
he street. He turned now and then to look back over his shoulder, and each time Tatsuo could be seen hopping up above the heads of the crowd and waving.

  “My throat hurts from smoking too much,” Neva was saying as they sat across from each other at the restaurant. Between them were the orchids, which Hashi had asked the waiter to put in a vase.

  “Do you think bougainvillea are pretty?” he said suddenly.

  “Why do you ask?” said Neva.

  “They had some at the florist. I kind of liked them.”

  “They don’t have any smell,” said Neva.

  “The woman who abandoned me put some of them in the coin locker before she left.”

  “Really? She must have been fond of flowers.”

  “Why do you suppose she did that, though?” Hashi asked, but Neva just looked down at her drink and drained it in one gulp. Hashi watched her for a minute, then laughed and changed the subject.

  Neva was, in fact, feeling uncomfortable, but not for the reason Hashi imagined. She was thinking that it was only a week until the Christmas Eve broadcast during which Hashi would meet that very woman. The woman’s name and address had already been discovered; Hashi alone knew nothing about it. D had told her to say nothing unless she was sure she could convince him to go through with it. It seemed he had thought of telling Hashi himself several times but hadn’t been able to. “Tell him if you can,” D had said. Neva couldn’t.

  On the other side of the table, Hashi was wondering why seeing Tatsuo had left such a bad taste in his mouth. No doubt it had something to do with the damage that old friends did to the carefully reworked memories he’d made to match his TV image. These fresh, cheerful memories, free of any sense of shame, just crumbled to pieces when confronted with a living, breathing part of his past. The thought made Hashi shudder. It made him wish them all dead, these people who knew him as he once had been. Tatsuo’s toothless smile came floating into his head. With an effort he managed to push Tatsuo out of the way, only to have Kiku take his place. There was no getting rid of Kiku.

  “Hashi?” said Neva, calling him back to the present. She was wearing a velvet dress with a low neckline, and he reached across the table to slide his hand under the material. “Not here!” she scolded as he squeezed the spongy bra and stiff wire. Dinner was just a prelude, like foreplay, Hashi thought, filling his mind with images of Neva’s body. A man’s chest above, a cunt below. He wondered what the huge sort of breasts one saw in magazines would feel like; the only thing like that he’d ever touched was on a cow. Probably pretty sexy… So how about someone with a woman’s breasts and a cock? That would be perfect; probably sprout wings on the back if they ever came up with that.

  The waiter brought the hors d’oeuvres and then soup served in turtle shells. Hashi took a spoonful of the soup and found it so delicious that he soon forgot all about Kiku and Tatsuo.

  17

  His nickname was Handy. An acquaintance of D’s from the mahjong tables, his job, ostensibly, was dealing in antiques, but he was really just a handy man to have around. It was to Handy that D went with his request: find the woman who abandoned the child Hashio Kuwayama, alias Hashi; do it in such a way that neither Hashi nor the woman knows what’s going on; and, finally, find out for certain where she’ll be on Christmas Eve and what she’ll be doing. To accomplish this, Handy was given exactly three months and two days.

  Time being short, Handy figured he had no choice but to start with what seemed like a good hunch, one that, if correct, just might enable him to find the woman in time. If it proved wrong—well, he’d never find her in three decades, let alone three months. The hunch was this: the woman who left Hashi in the coin locker had had other children whom she’d also got rid of or killed. Working on this assumption, Handy did the only thing he could in the absence of other clues: he combed the police records of every woman who had ever been arrested for infanticide or abandonment.

  Hashi, Handy learned, had been left in a paper bag in locker number 309 at Sekikawa Station on the Negishi Line of the National Railway. According to the report made by the officer who discovered him, his body had been covered with talcum powder and he was vomiting a yellowish liquid that had a medicinal odor. The police hospital determined later that the stuff was a prescription cough syrup. Also, the baby appeared to be no more than thirty hours old when found. So, for a start, Handy knew that the woman he was looking for had been in Sekikawa Station on July 19, 1972, and that she had, in all likelihood, been in a hospital somewhere about thirty hours earlier. So far so good.

  The next clue: the bag in which baby Hashi had been left came from a shop selling imported goods in downtown Yokohama by the name of Gingham. It was a largish bag, the sort that might have been used for a coat or suit, and it was brand-new. Then there was the spray of bougainvillea which was still fresh when the baby was discovered. Handy did a little digging and found that there were no more than eleven flower shops in the greater metropolitan area that would have had bougainvillea in those days. OK, he reasoned, everything taken together—fancy shop with a name like Gingham, fancy flowers and all—it looked like the woman hadn’t come to town from the country to have this baby, and he felt safe in concentrating on women who were living in the vicinity of Yokohama in July 1972. When he had correlated all the variables, he found there were, fortunately, only three women with records for infanticide or abandonment who fitted the bill.

  Subject number one, Chiyoko Kunisaki, had been twenty-three at the time in question and was living in Yokosuka with her boyfriend who worked for a used-car dealership. The two had split up six months later, and in February of the next year Chiyoko had taken a job as a waitress at a restaurant in the suburbs. That same year she married a man who earned his living as a broker for golf club memberships. It was a second marriage for him, and he brought along a baby from his first marriage. Chiyoko, Handy learned, had just one hobby, playing the stock market, which she had refrained from doing for a time after her marriage; but eventually, without her husband’s knowledge, she invested heavily in the stock of a household-appliance manufacturer and the stock had suddenly taken a tumble. A terrible fight broke out when her husband discovered her losses—nearly two hundred thousand yen—and by the end of it Chiyoko had strangled the child who had been sleeping in the next room. She served six years of her eight-year sentence before being paroled from Tochigi Prison in 1980; currently, she was living alone in an apartment in Hodogaya Ward, Yokohama City. Age: forty. Occupation: cleaning lady.

  Handy secured the services of a young man who styled himself an “enforcer” and went to pay a visit to a certain car wax salesman living in public housing in Yokohama—the man who had once lived with Chiyoko Kunisaki in Yokosuka. Pretending to be Chiyoko’s elder brother, Handy showed up at the old boyfriend’s door at noon on Sunday just as he was sitting down to a lunch of instant noodles with his wife and two kids. When Handy mentioned Chiyoko’s name, the man nearly choked. With a slight nod from Handy to the young “enforcer,” he was led trembling to a nearby park where he willingly told them everything he knew about Chiyoko Kunisaki, even the fact that she liked it from behind, but as far as he knew she’d never got rid of a child. She had, he admitted, had a couple of abortions, but she’d never abandoned one she’d given birth to. Handy gave the man five thousand yen and suggested he forget the whole thing.

  Fumiko Itoya had been twenty at the time, a student living in central Yokohama who was involved with a man old enough to be her father—a veterinarian. In July 1970 she had been arrested for abandoning a child and sentenced to two years and eight months, though the sentence had then been suspended and she was given five years’ parole. The child had apparently been dumped in a ditch at the side of a road.

  “He refused to own up that the kid was his,” she explained to Handy, referring to the vet. “You see, I worked as a sculptor’s model while I was going to night school trying to get into college. I was a dumb kid from the country and I had it bad for that sculptor. I guess I was w
owed by all those beautiful things he made. He promised me that I could keep my clothes on, but then he started saying he needed to see my ‘womb,’ as he called it; something about how the statue was supposed to show a woman’s strength, and for that he had to see where the strength came from. He insisted it wasn’t my privates he wanted to see, it was my womb—nothing dirty about it, just the opposite. He was very persuasive. Anyway, in the end I showed him. Afterward I realized what a disgusting man he was. I guess I cried a lot at the time, but by then it was too late.

  “I started college and tried to forget all about him, and not long after that I met the Doctor”—her name for the vet—“and then I guess I really did forget him. When I got pregnant, though, the Doctor didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I thought a lot about abortion, but I was afraid if I had somebody go poking around in my ‘womb,’ I’d start thinking about the sculptor again. Well, while I was trying to decide, my stomach was getting bigger and bigger, and before I knew it, out popped the baby. I went to show it to the Doctor, but he got mad; I guess I’d lied somewhere along the line and told him I’d got rid of it. Anyway, he said some terrible things, called me a slut, said I was trying to blackmail him. Then he kicked me out. And that’s when I went a bit crazy. On the way home I started thinking that the baby looked just like the sculptor, that it wasn’t really the Doctor’s kid at all, that I’d got it from the sculptor that time, from all the gross stuff he’d done to me that day, all those strange things he stuck in me. Anyway, I guess that’s when I just dropped the baby in the ditch and ran off. Somebody saw me and started yelling, but I just kept running.”