Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  “Sorry,” Hair Oil muttered several times, his cheek twitching uncontrollably.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the warden to smooth things over. “Shall we let it go this time, Tadokoro? They’ll catch on soon enough.”

  Tadokoro, the head of Supervision, waddled along ahead of them. They could see that both his ears were badly mangled after years of doing judo, probably. He may have been fat, but his flesh looked quite firm. They followed him into what appeared to be a classroom, where two guards drew heavy curtains over a wall of windows that looked down on the sea. Once they were seated, a movie started: a beach scene at sunset with a voice-over saying “This film is designed to help you get acquainted with prison life. Pay close attention.” A silhouette of the statue out in front was superimposed on the seascape. “A noted sculptor spent more than a year creating this image—your image—the image of young men working hard to reform themselves, working toward the day when they will rejoin the world outside.” The statue faded into a shot of inmates in an auto body shop. “Our Juvenile Detention Center is renowned for the variety and quality of its vocational training programs and the outstanding job placement rate for its graduates. Graduates of the woodworking, printing, garment manufacturing, and metalworking programs are provided with certificates by the bureau chief of the Vocational Training Division of the Labor Ministry.”

  The film went on to introduce the various training programs. “Our center can take pride in a vast array of state-of-the-art facilities including: a high-speed timber drier and ultra-modern planer in the woodworking department, an electric lithographic printer in the print shop, an eyelet setter in the tailoring studio, a fully automatic treadle cutter in the sheet metal department, acetylene torches in the welding department, hydraulic jacks and superchargers in the automobile service department, our maritime division’s 89-ton Yuyo Maru, our communications department’s microwave telephone equipment, the barber school’s lifelike practice dummies, the automatic high-speed potato peeler in the cooking department, and the hundred-cubic-meter Corniche boiler in the boiler division.” In each scene, the men running the machines were smiling.

  The next sequence showed happy inmates in the recreation room playing cards or strumming a guitar and singing. A closeup from a high angle revealed the silver and gold stripes embroidered on the shoulders of their uniforms. “For six months of exemplary behavior, an inmate is awarded a silver stripe. Four silver stripes—in other words, two years without incident—and the inmate is awarded a gold stripe which the warden presents at morning assembly along with a commendation. Those with two or more gold stripes are designated as model prisoners and are eligible for transfer to deluxe individual cells featuring curtains, a mirror, and shelf space.” To protect the privacy of the prisoners, most of the scenes in the film avoided showing any faces, but where faces appeared, they had been blacked out on the negative. Little clusters of faceless figures practiced judo, jogged around the yard, painted in watercolors, made pottery, or listened attentively to a sermon.

  “Twice a year, in spring and autumn, a field day is held, where the vocational counselors and guards join in. The various cell blocks also organize annual intramural competitions in ping-pong, rugby, softball, volleyball, soccer, judo, and kendo. In autumn as well, our cultural clubs arrange recitals and presentations in the fine arts, calligraphy, poetry, choir singing, creative writing, and drama, inviting guests in from the surrounding community.” There were quick cuts to the infirmary, baths, barbershop, chapel, a typical communal cell, solitary confinement, and the toilets, ending with the visitors’ room. “Visiting privileges are ranked in two classes, with model prisoners entitled to first-class rooms.” The shot of the second-class room showed the prisoner behind a wire grill and a guard keeping watch, while the first-class room had a table surrounded with chairs and a small vase of flowers in the center. The rest of the film focused on life in a communal cell with detailed instructions for reveille, roll call, tidying the cell, bed-making, etc., and ended with a sequence showing a prisoner on the day of his release: the lucky ex-con, once again in civilian dress, standing at the main gate saying good-bye to the warden and his vocational counselor, before being welcomed with open arms by his assembled family; then a closeup of his face as he takes a big bite of his mother’s sushi, with tears trickling down from the blacked-out area around his eyes. “We encourage each of you to do your best to reach this happy outcome just as soon as possible.”

  Someone sighed as “The End” appeared on the screen and the guards drew the curtains. Two prisoners, Hair Oil and a large man with pale, lifeless-looking skin, took this as a cue to get up.

  “Who told you to stand?” barked the guard running the projector. “Whaddya do, sleep through the fuckin’ movie? They just said you don’t even shit without asking permission! Get it, you morons?”

  Hair Oil immediately fell back in his chair, but the pale giant remained standing.

  “Did you hear that? What the fuck’s the matter with you? You speak Japanese?” said Tadokoro, scowling.

  “No one ordered me to sit,” said the prisoner, a deadpan expression on his face.

  “So that’s the way you want it,” Tadokoro muttered, marching up to him. He was almost as tall, and both of them were at least fifteen centimeters taller than Kiku. Tadokoro ordered the man to sit down and then asked his name.

  “Motohiko Yamane,” he replied coolly, glancing around the room. For a moment his eyes met Kiku’s. A shock of soft hair fell across his smooth, pale forehead, shading his graying eyebrows and lashes. The eyes peering out below were all but colorless, and his nose was just a round blob like a rubber doll’s. The lips were also smooth, almost hard-looking. The whole effect was masklike, as if his face had been sprayed with a coat of gray plastic.

  The four prisoners were led down a flight of stairs and along a dark corridor that ended at an iron door. At a signal from Tadokoro, the door opened with a creak onto a small room. Two guards were waiting for them, billyclubs dangling at their sides. One handed Tadokoro a black notebook labeled “Register,” which he filled in under columns marked “Date,” “Name,” and “Reason for Entry”: “March 29; Tadokoro; accompanying new prisoners.” The other guard slipped a large key into one of the room’s metal walls, which Kiku soon realized was actually a door as both guards pushed it open. A blinding light poured into the room, and at Tadokoro’s command they walked squinting through the door. On the other side was yet another barrier, a turnstile made of tubular spikes protruding from rotating poles. They were sent through one at a time, the turnstile closing and then, with a buzz, spitting them out on the other side. Four turns of this contraption, metal grinding against metal, and Tadokoro pointed down a dauntingly long hall:

  “Your new home, boys.”

  The light was coming from windows in the ceiling, fitted with steel grating. On either side of the corridor, stretching off almost as far as the eye could see, were heavy doors set in cement walls and a floor dyed ocher by the light from above. They could hear the iron door shutting behind them.

  “Shit,” murmured Hair Oil, crumpling to the floor and hanging his head. Shuffling up behind him, Tadokoro grabbed his collar and hauled him to his feet again. The bright light and sheer length of the place made them all a bit dizzy as they set off down the spotless hall past lines of the massive wooden doors fastened with steel locks. The only decoration was a heavy latticed shadow from the sunlight streaming through the grating overhead.

  Tadokoro was lecturing them again: “If you boys were machines, we’d have to say you’ve broken down, you’re out of order for the time being. Now usually, when you take a broken machine in to get it fixed, the repairman charges you a fee, right? You take a broken washing machine to an electrician, he sends you a bill, right? But the beauty of a jail is, it works backward: the government pays you to get fixed. A pretty good deal, eh? But the first thing we’ve got to do here is convince you just how good a deal it is.” He kept this up until they reached
the Intake Room, where canvas screens had been set up to form a line of cubicles. They were each told to enter a cubicle, strip, and hop for a minute or so on one leg and then the other. Then they were issued skivvies and prison uniforms, the latter exactly the same shade as the concrete all around them. The pants fastened at the waist with drawstrings. The shoes were canvas with crepe soles. No socks. Their own clothes were numbered and tagged and stored away in wooden boxes, each item being carefully recorded in the personal property register. In the column marked “Other Possessions” Kiku wrote “American-made fiberglass pole-vaulting pole.”

  When they had finished changing, they were led to the prison barbershop for regulation haircuts. Shoulders bowed, Hair Oil watched as his slimy locks fell on the floor, and then broke into loud sobs. The barber, a fellow prisoner, shook him by the tuft of hair in his hand.

  “Wriggle around like that and I’ll cut your head to ribbons,” he warned. “And what is this shit you got in your hair, anyway? Stinks like hell.”

  “And look at this one,” said Tadokoro, pointing at Yamane. “A regular fuckin’ Frankenstein!” The haircut had revealed a thick scar running in a circle around Yamane’s skull just above his ears, with red cross-hatching forming a grim lattice where, it seemed, the top of his head had been sewn back on. The sight was so peculiar that Hair Oil stopped crying and sat wide-eyed and sniffling.

  “I had a plastic plate put in my head,” said Yamane, sounding slightly less confident than he had before.

  They were assigned prison numbers, which were written in black ink on white patches on their uniforms. Then they practiced answering as Tadokoro called their names and numbers; when they weren’t loud enough, he made them repeat the answer again and again.

  “Kunio Hirayama, 418; Takumi Kudo, 477; Motohiko Yamane, 539; Kikuyuki Kuwayama, 603.”

  The one-man cells were two meters square. The floor was covered with thin straw matting, and rolled up in the corner was a mattress and one blanket. A plastic bag stuffed with a towel served as a pillow. That was it. On three sides, the walls were cream-colored concrete; on the fourth was the thick wooden door with two small windows that opened only from the outside. One window, face-high, was for the guard on patrol to check on the occupant; the other, about thirty centimeters off the ground, was for passing in a plate of food in the morning and evening. From the ceiling hung a fluorescent light, too high for even the tallest prisoner to reach. Toilets and drinking water were down the hall, and except for designated periods, dry throats and full bladders had to wait for the guard to come by on his rounds.

  While they were finishing the orientation program and a battery of tests and evaluations, new prisoners were kept in these one-man cells. Invariably the thick walls that deadened every contact with the outside world, blunting light, smells, and sound, brought on some degree of claustrophobia. From the warden’s point of view, this spell of solitude was useful in arousing a need for social contact in his prisoners, and for helping the staff assess their character. It was also effective as a preliminary course in prison discipline. Forbidden to speak, the inmates sat in their cells with only their own resources to relieve the tedium and nervous tension; the most popular remedies included exercise, deep breathing, Zen meditation, and jerking off. But they soon found themselves anxiously hoping for transfer to the group cells with their vocational training sessions and club activities. The majority were begging for an activity, any activity, before very long; and the few who bore up under the solitude without seeming to mind it were noted on the Supervision Department’s list of people in need of special psychological evaluation.

  Kiku, who actually seemed to like solitary confinement, was at the top of the list. He would sit in his cell, uncomplaining, for whole days at a time. At night, his screaming often brought the guard running, but, apart from these nightmares, his condition seemed unchanged since he’d arrived: he was a blank slate. He showed no interest in anything or anybody else; he followed orders well enough, but it was almost as if he didn’t even hear them, as if his will had unconditionally surrendered. When the official administering the aptitude test had asked him what he wanted to do, his answer was noncommittal.

  “You’ve got to do something,” the man insisted.

  “Anything’s fine. It doesn’t matter,” said Kiku quietly, hardly looking up.

  The psychologist assigned to his case examined him and decided that the severe emotional withdrawal for which Kiku had been hospitalized immediately after the shooting had not yet been cured. “My conclusion,” he wrote, “is that rather than overcoming the psychological trauma of having killed his own mother, he has retreated into the trauma itself, using it as a kind of refuge.”

  On entering the prison, each inmate was given a complete physical examination which, in addition to checking his height, weight, eyesight, and hearing, involved a whole series of X-rays. He was then made to take a variety of intelligence tests before being sent to the training division for a Vocational Aptitude Test and a Kraepelin Personality Census. Finally, when all this probing was over, he sat down for an interview with a vocational counselor who had studied his academic and, usually, his criminal records, and together they worked out a “vocational goal.” In a case like Kiku’s, however, where the prisoner was still experiencing emotional complications, or in cases where the inmate had difficulty adjusting to the idea of prison life, this counseling was put off for six months and the prisoner was assigned to work teams involved in the day-to-day operation of the prison. Thus, when his time in solitary was up, Kiku found himself attached to the Food Service Unit No. 3, and getting up two hours before everybody else to help make breakfast.

  On the day of his reassignment, Kiku was moved to a group cell reserved exclusively for this Food Service Unit. When he arrived, he found that Yamane, the tall, pale man with the masklike face, had been put in the same outfit. Together they were made to kneel at the entrance to their new home and pay their respects to their new roommates, four older prisoners who identified themselves as Fukuda, Hayashi, Sajima, and Nakakura. After the newcomers had finished their introductions and the guard had left, Fukuda, who seemed to be the oldest, spoke up.

  “There’s something we’ve got to know right off,” he said, scratching his head. “It’s kind of a rule with us: new guys have to tell us what they did to get put inside. Then we clue them in on the stuff they need to know to get by in here…”

  “Murder,” said Yamane, still kneeling, before Fukuda had even finished.

  “A killer,” murmured Hayashi and Sajima, turning to give each other a look.

  “Well, it’s always good to know what you’re dealing with,” said Fukuda. “So how ’bout you, Kuwayama?”

  “Me, too. Murder,” said Kiku.

  “Full house,” laughed Nakakura, and the others were chuckling as well. Kiku and Yamane remained silent, eyes down. “Us too, we’re all in for murder. Kind of funny, isn’t it? Our little family here helps keep the country from getting overcrowded: all told, we managed to lower the population by six.”

  “A bit more,” said Yamane. “I killed four people myself.” The laughter died.

  “Four?” said Nakakura, leaning forward and cocking his fingers into a gun. “Whaddya use? Zip gun? Saturday Night Special?”

  “No. My hands.”

  “Your hands?! Whaddya mean? Karate? Boxing?” he asked, staring at Yamane’s hands.

  “Karate.”

  “And how many years you get for that?”

  “Ten.”

  “Ten fuckin’ years! What kinda sentence is that? You ain’t no minor. Kills four people and all he ends up with is ten fuckin’ years.” Nakakura was indignant.

  “I got pretty messed up myself,” said Yamane quietly.

  “You mean that head of yours? Yeah, I can see that. OK, let’s drop it. Anyway, now we know you’re a tough guy, so don’t go beatin’ on any of us, even as a joke. I can’t think of anything dumber than getting yourself killed while you’re in jail.”
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  Nakakura, they learned, had worked in a restaurant. One day, while he was learning to trim pork from the bone, his grandmother came in to see him. Apparently she was a funny-looking old lady, and the other guys in the kitchen had started making fun of her. Before he knew what he was doing, Nakakura had planted his carving knife in the chest of the man next to him. “I didn’t even mean to stab him,” he explained. “I was only trying to make him shut up, and the thing went in up to the handle. Human meat’s a helluva lot softer than pork.”

  Sajima had worked on a sport fishing boat. The day of the murder, it had been cloudy since morning and his back right molar had started hurting as it always did in that kind of weather. Despite the pain, he’d had herring for lunch, and some little bones had got stuck in his teeth. Just as he was trying to pull the bones out of his mouth, one of their clients had puked all over the deck. “I started thinking how I’d have to clean up that asshole’s mess, and how bad my tooth was hurting, and then another guy started complaining ’cause I wasn’t watching the wheel, and I just kind of flipped. I ended up kicking the guy; I didn’t even kick him that hard, but he fell on the screw and got all tangled up in it. Chopped him to bits, and I end up a murderer. If you ask me, they should have tried the boat, not me.”

  Fukuda had cleaned boilers in a shipyard. During junior high school he’d been a pitcher on the baseball team. In high school he’d been moved to the outfield, but he’d always been proud of his strong arm. Soon after he got the job in the shipyard, he’d married and had a son; he got through the long days at the yard by telling himself that when the boy grew up he’d be proud of his dad’s strong arm too. He worked for two years hammering clots of hardened oil out of boilers before he realized that a hundred thousand strokes of the heavy hammer had ruined his arm. A couple of days after he found out he would never throw a ball again, he got drunk, got dragged into a fight, and ended up killing a man with a chair. “I used to be able to throw a softball sixty-five meters. A fuckin’ softball! Big as a grapefruit. That was something.”