Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  Custody of the child was eventually assumed by Fumiko’s parents, and, perhaps surprisingly, Fumiko continued to see the vet for nearly three years. But in January of 1973 she went through a nasty breakup with him, sued him successfully for a share of his considerable fortune, and went to live with her parents. At present, she was thirty-nine, single, and still living there.

  As he was returning home one evening, the Doctor found himself suddenly pulled into a passing car and driven away.

  “Did Fumiko Itoya abandon your child in a coin locker in July 1972?” asked Handy straight out.

  “Who the hell are you?” the Doctor wanted to know. “Yakuza? You can’t frighten me. I’m sure you’ve already checked, but I haven’t got any family—except a sick old father, and you’d only be doing me a favor if you bumped him off.”

  “We’re not interested in hurting you or anybody else. We just want you to tell us the truth,” said Handy.

  “What gang are you from? I’ll have you know that I’m a staff doctor for the Kennel Club, and I know everybody, all the big guys, so I’m telling you, don’t fool around with me… OK, how about this? I promise I won’t say anything to anybody and you let me out now. But I should warn you, I’ve already memorized your license number.” As the Doctor rattled on, Handy followed his assistant’s directions all the way to a large factory, the main processing center for a restaurant chain. The guard at the gate took one look at the hired thug and let them pass. Handy’s helper also seemed to be in possession of a key and, once inside, led the Doctor to a huge, funnel-shaped machine whose function he proceeded to explain.

  “This here’s the machine they use to turn meat into mush. You put the whole thing in here—don’t matter if it’s a cow or an elephant—and it comes out the other end like a pile of shit. Then they freeze it and two or three years down the line it’s somebody’s hamburger.” When the explanation was over, the Doctor had a good deal to say.

  “When I first met her, she seemed perfect—at least, in bed. You know about boxers, the way they say they’ve got to be both fighter and technician? Well, she was both in spades. Quite a woman. The only trouble was, I didn’t really want to get married. I was happy single and, besides, she wasn’t exactly the smartest person I’d ever met.

  “Anyway, when I found out she’d had that baby, I wasn’t exactly overjoyed. It felt weird to think there’d be a kid of mine running around somewhere. So I got hold of this stuff we use on sheep and horses to keep them from getting in the family way; it’s highly acidic and makes the eggs disintegrate. Makes the cunt hot and tight too—I could get you boys some if you’re interested. Anyway, it works as well with people as it does with animals, and after that first time, I can guarantee you Fumiko never got pregnant again. No way she could have even if she wanted to.”

  Miki Yoshikawa, twenty-one years of age in 1972, had been a housewife living in the Kohoku district of Yokohama. Her husband had worked for the city, but after Miki’s first “incident,” he quit to drive a recycling truck. Miki herself was still serving time in Tochigi Prison.

  The first case had occurred in 1974. Miki was arrested for abandoning a dead infant; the child had apparently been suffocated under a mattress, and Miki had put it in a plastic bag and left it in a dumpster. The court found mitigating circumstances—the fact that it was a first offense, the shock of having caused the death of her child—and the sentence was eventually suspended. Nevertheless, the publicity from the trial had made it impossible for her husband to go on working for the city government.

  In 1976, Miki gave birth to a stillborn child. Immediately after the delivery, she had apparently become obsessed with the idea that the death of the second child was caused by a curse from the first one and, fearing that a proper burial for the second baby would arouse further jealousy, she dropped the tiny body down the shaft leading to the hospital incinerator. This time there was no indictment, on the grounds of temporary insanity from the loss of the child. In 1980, she had become pregnant for a third time; afterward, her husband made the following statement in court:

  “In the early stages of this pregnancy, my wife became pretty unstable. I suppose she was worried because I was out of work and we didn’t really know how we were going to get by. She kept saying she was sure that the baby was already dead, that it had to be dead because the first two babies had left a curse on her. I thought this was all probably connected with her morning sickness, and she’d stop worrying as the pregnancy went along, so I didn’t do anything special. And, sure enough, about the fifth month she seemed to calm down.

  “Things were still pretty tough, but I’d started working down on the docks around that time. Then, as she got closer to her due date, she started acting strange again; she’d say the baby wasn’t moving, that it felt like a rock and that meant it had to be dead, dead and rotting away inside her. That’s when I decided I’d better ask a psychiatrist about it. I guess you could say she was talking crazy by then; she’d say things like ‘You know, dear, even if this baby isn’t dead, I’m going to have to kill it once it’s born. It just wouldn’t be fair to the other two to play favorites.’ The psychiatrist advised me to have her committed for a while after the birth, and that’s exactly what I did. She had a healthy baby girl and then went straight into a clinic for treatment.

  “Well, things seemed to start to go a little better after that. I finally managed to find a proper job, and my wife seemed to be getting better. After about four months, she came home from the clinic all smiles and, soon as she was through the door, she went to pick up the baby. Unfortunately, the baby was a bit fussy and that seemed to set Miki off; before I could stop her she threw the kid down on its head.”

  This time the court found criminal intent. Miki said in public that she hated the baby, resented it for crying at the sight of her after she’d spent so much time getting cured of her illness. She admitted to wanting to kill it. Furthermore, this time around the court psychiatrist found her sane, so there was no escaping the sentence. At present, she was forty-two years old and an inmate in Tochigi Prison.

  Handy learned that the husband had not divorced Miki and was actually still waiting for her release. He was working as the driver for a tropical fish shop, which was where Handy decided to pay him a call. When he asked him about Miki, the man smiled fondly.

  “She’s a good woman. You know what I mean? You can just feel it about her; she’s a real good woman.” He pointed at a fish swimming languidly in a large tank. “See that? It’s an Arowhana, worth more than two hundred thousand yen. Whenever I see it, I think of her. She wanted one of those fish more than anything in the world. I once went through some stuff she left at her parents’ house, and I found a notebook she kept as a kid with this detailed description of how you take care of a fish like this, all written in a little girl’s handwriting—it was cute, I’m telling you. That’s the kind of kid she was; it got to me. You know, she really loved little live things; that notebook was proof—it was written long before she’d ever met me, so it had to be true. I guess you could say the past never lies, does it? And I suppose I always wanted to trust her; I used to tell myself over and over what a strong, good woman she was. But, you know, in the end I had to face it: Miki’s a good woman who happens to kill babies. Who knows, maybe she’s just too good.”

  As he was listening to Yoshikawa’s story, Handy was doing some calculating that proved rather discouraging: seventeen years ago, Miki and her husband had been living in city housing; in such close quarters, surrounded by his co-workers, it wasn’t likely that a pregnancy or birth could have gone unnoticed. What’s more, after the later incidents, there would have been a thorough investigation that would have turned up any previous suspicious activities. No, he had to accept the fact that Miki Yoshikawa couldn’t possibly have left Hashi in locker 309, and that meant that his original hunch, which he’d known all along was pretty shaky, was in fact just wrong. He smiled bitterly as he thought of the huge reward D had offered. When Yoshikawa fini
shed speaking, Handy tapped on the fish tank and asked absently:

  “Don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a woman who left a baby in a coin locker?”

  “Yep. I heard of one,” Yoshikawa said.

  “You have?” said Handy, coming to life.

  “Yep, from when I drove a recycling truck. There was this guy they called Goat who worked for the same company; funny sort of fella—used to be a roof tiler, they said, but as far as I could see he spent most of his time playing checkers for money. As I remember, he was missing the little finger on his left hand. He used to like to talk about the women he’d made it with; usually, they were middle-aged waitresses or hookers, but there was this one time he came in bragging how he’d scored with a girl from a massage parlor. Said she really knew how to rub him the right way. Anyway, seems she got a bit drunk and started talking about her past; Goat said she told him she came from… Kochi, I think it was, and how this one time she’d run into a guy she’d known back there… I guess I still remember all this ’cause of what happened with Miki… Well, the guy she met was married, but they did it once anyway, and she ended up having a kid. She told Goat it was dead when she had it, and that’s why she left it in a coin locker.”

  Handy slipped a five thousand yen bill into Yoshikawa’s pocket and headed back to his car. His next stop was the recycling company, where he was told that Goat had quit long ago but was now working as a driver for a pet grooming school.

  The Aoyagi Pet Care Academy was located on the banks of the Tama River in Kawasaki City. In order to give its students training in grooming live cats and dogs, the school arranged to borrow pets from neighborhood residents in return for a free shampoo or clip. Goat was in charge of transporting the pets. Handy dropped in on the school and found out where Goat was supposed to be making stops. When he caught up with him, the truck was parked by the side of the road and Goat was standing in the street spinning a cage containing a poodle around and around. Ignoring the howls, which were getting more and more frantic, he calmly spun the cage until the dog stopped barking and began to be sick. Satisfied, he then tossed the cage into the back of the truck and went over to piss by a telephone pole. It was at this point that Handy and his helper approached to make inquiries about a certain girl in a certain massage parlor; as an ice-breaker they brought with them some money and a knife, and a minute later, with a small slice in his cheek and a five thousand yen bill in his pocket, Goat got talkative.

  “It was a place called Tenman round back of Kawasaki Station. But that was more than ten years ago; who knows if she’s still there.” He didn’t know her name, but she was a big girl, especially her hands. Her eyes were narrower than usual, and if he remembered right, she had a scar, like from an appendectomy. And a whole lot of dyed blond hair. That was about it. At Tenman, of course, there was no such person, but the manager said they’d always used licensed girls and they could check with the union to find out who it might have been. He even made the call himself.

  A week later, Handy received his fee: five times what he normally charged. Kimie Numata, forty-four, was currently employed in a massage parlor in Tachikawa City, but Handy had heard that back in May 1972 she had unmistakably been pregnant, and after taking a month off from work in June and July, she had told at least four people that she’d left the baby in a coin locker. Two of these were girls from the massage parlor, one was Goat, and the other was a young bartender with whom she’d been living at one point for six months. The bartender was sure of the following: Kimie had abandoned the baby when she was twenty-seven years old, that is, in 1972; it was summer; and the baby had been a boy. Furthermore, Kimie didn’t go on vacation that summer; this last Handy learned from the lady who delivered milk door-to-door in the neighborhood—it seems Kimie had put out empties every day. In short, in the summer of 1972, Kimie Numata had left a male infant in a coin locker in the city of Yokohama. Facts were facts. And there were only were only two baby boys discovered in Yokohama that summer…

  18

  The crocodile was submerged in the artificial pond that occupied much of Anemone’s living room, the single eyeball protruding above the surface following the lumps of meat swinging overhead. Kiku had secured two dripping red chunks the size of babies’ heads on a pole and was gingerly proffering them in Gulliver’s direction. According to Anemone’s instructions, he had to keep dinner moving until Gulliver came after it; the point was to lure him out of the water and get him to walk around a little before feeding him. Gulliver was prone to a crocodile disease that left its victims too fat to walk, with teeth and bones brittle and atrophied. Unchecked, Anemone was afraid it would kill him.

  Normally she fed Gulliver herself, but today she’d got up early and worked all day on a Christmas dinner for Kiku. The menu was to include a potato salad with shrimp, candied yams with chestnuts, sea bream soup, turkey teriyaki, and a chocolate cake. Kiku said he thought yams were New Year’s food, but Anemone explained that when she’d taken Home Economics in junior high school, it was the one dish her teacher said she made well—and anyway, a holiday was a holiday. She’d bought a whole bucket of chestnuts.

  No matter how much Kiku shook the meat, Gulliver made no move to go after it. The two five-kilo lumps of flesh suspended from a drying pole cut in half had long since worn out Kiku’s arms; but just as he was going to tell Anemone that it was no good, Gulliver gave a huge twitch of his tail, leapt a meter out of the water, and downed one of the meatballs in a single gulp. Kiku had no chance to yank the pole away, and now he was wet from head to foot.

  “Something the matter?” said Anemone, poking her head around the kitchen door to find Kiku holding the pole with only one piece of meat on it.

  “Seems he got it,” said Kiku.

  “I guess I’ll have to show you how it’s done,” said Anemone, handing him the bowl of yams and taking the pole. Having polished off the first lump of horsemeat, Gulliver had sunk back to the bottom of the pond, but when she dangled the remaining lump over his nose, he began to stir. “You can tell when he’s about to make his move by the way he tenses up his tail.”

  As tiny ripples broke the surface of the pond, Anemone started shaking the pole, and almost simultaneously Gulliver gave a powerful rake of his tail and lunged out of the water. Anemone, however, was quicker, pulling the meat just out of reach and going on with her lesson:

  “You see, a crocodile doesn’t move along at an even pace; it kind of jerks forward five or six quick steps, using its tail for balance, and then stops still as a stone. But it’s not like he’s thinking or anything when he just stands there; he’s actually storing up energy for the next rush. He seems to get energy from just about anything: you, me, the wall, the ceiling, even the air; and then when he’s got it, he can run a few more steps. But sometimes, in Gulliver’s case, I think he’s just disgusted at being penned in and he’s trying to turn disgust into the killer instinct.”

  Just as she was finishing, Gulliver lashed out as though trying to flip himself around, and in the process caught the lump of meat with his tail. The cord from which the meat was hung eventually snapped, but not before Anemone was pulled up over the railing and almost into the pond. Kiku was just quick enough to catch her, and as they tottered on the edge, Gulliver and the meat disappeared beneath the surface. In a moment, a film of blood and grease began to spread across Uranus.

  The Christmas tree on the dinner table was made of interlocking plastic panels bristling with hair-thin tubes filled with a glowing liquid, looking like luminous pine needles. To add to the effect, the liquid turned all the colors of the rainbow when it changed direction in the tube. Blowing on the tree set off a regular light show, and a puff of air from below created an effect not unlike a triangular cloud at sunset, with the bottom white, the middle various shades of blazing orange, and the top fading to deep red with just a hint of blue. Anemone had five bottles of Pommery champagne chilling in a tub of ice, and from the sideboard she selected two crystal glasses etched with a floral pattern.
She had been to the beauty parlor, returning with her hair swept up to the right and held back with a pin embossed with an image of a naked nymph perched on a dragonfly. It was Christmas Eve.

  Kiku was thinking about Christmas Eves at the orphanage. In the afternoon they used to put on red and white costumes with tassels on the cuffs and hems, and then file into the chapel to sing hymns. The curtains were always drawn, and in the darkness each child carried a single candle, tiny fingers numbed by the cold. To warm up their hands and avoid dropping the candles, they sang the hymns as loudly as they could. When the service was over, a trombone-playing Santa Claus appeared and presented each child with a paper stocking. Among the contents, Kiku could remember caramels, cocoa powder, a plastic rugby ball, a panda bear balloon, and an eraser shaped like an army tank.

  Earlier in the day, Anemone had handed Kiku a package, telling him he couldn’t open it until she gave the word. Kiku had one for her as well: a book called All about Omelettes, with a recipe for rice omelettes in it. Having finished the rest of the cooking, she was busy with the chocolate cake. Kiku was changing into the black suit she’d bought for him when the phone rang. Anemone answered it, then handed the receiver to him with a strange look on her face. “It’s for you,” she said.

  “You remember me, kid? Sorry if I was a little rough on you.” The voice, all sugar and gravel, was unforgettable: it was Mr. D.

  “How’d you get this number?” asked Kiku.

  “Does it matter? I hear you’re living with a real doll. I guess Hashi isn’t the only one of you boys with ‘talent,’ shall we say.”

  “Good-bye,” said Kiku.

  “Wait a second. I just wanted to find out if Hashi’s there.” Instantly, Kiku had a sinking feeling.

  “Why should he be here? Has something happened to him?”