Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  “You fuckers got no respect. Rookies are supposed to be on their best behavior, but you assholes go monkeying around like I don’t know what,” he shouted, giving Nakakura’s back a light kick with his boot.

  “Could you please shut up?” murmured Yamane, still crouching in the corner. “Please.” Kiku could tell that he was trying to focus on his son’s heartbeat. The immediate problem, though, was to find a way of cooling things down; but the more he apologized, the more indignant they became, until finally one of them gave a howl and slapped Nakakura across the face, accidentally hitting Yamane in the process.

  “Stop it!” Yamane hissed; then, without any warning, he jumped to his feet, let out an odd soft of squawk, and drove his fist clean through the nearest wall, a solid plaster affair about five centimeters thick. “Just be quiet!” he wailed.

  The rest of the room watched, slack-jawed. The men who a minute ago had been making all the fuss now sat silent and slightly pale as Yamane resumed his crouch, clutching his skull to ward off the pain.

  “So how long would I have to train to get as strong as you?” Nakakura asked Yamane as he plotted a position on a set of mock nautical charts.

  “Whaddya mean ‘strong as me’?” said Yamane, struggling with his own chart. The classroom part of the course, charts, compasses, and the rest, was his weak point. His massive torso and powerful arms seemed useless pushing a little ruler around a desk.

  “You know what I mean: strong enough to punch my fist through a wall. How ’bout it? Five years? Something like that?”

  “No way! Anybody can do that shit. You don’t have to practice to stick your hand through a wall.”

  “Come on, don’t get humble, man,” laughed Nakakura.

  “Nothing humble about it. I’m serious; all you’d need’s a hammer in your hand.”

  “A hammer, huh? I’m not so sure I could do it even with a hammer. What do you think, Kiku?” Kiku was sitting at the next desk, calculating compass bearings. “I don’t see how a hammer’d make much difference.”

  “I don’t see what the connection is between the hammer and training,” Kiku said. “How about it Yamane?” Yamane was busy trying to determine the point of intersection between the sightline from an imaginary lighthouse to an imaginary mountaintop and a line of imaginary buoys in an imaginary harbor. He looked up just long enough to tell them to wait while he checked the latitude and longitude against the figures Kiku had come up with earlier. They must have matched since he snapped his fingers happily as he turned to answer.

  “The point of karate practice isn’t to toughen up your fists,” he said at last.

  “Then what is it?” asked Nakakura.

  “It’s all about speed. If you don’t think you could smash through the wall with a steel hammer, how would it help to have hands as hard as steel?…” Just then the bell rang and the instructor told them to turn in their answer sheets, so Yamane interrupted his explanation again to start furiously copying Kiku’s paper.

  “Crime doesn’t pay, Yamane,” chirped the wizened instructor, catching sight of him. A ripple of laughter went through the class as he sheepishly handed in his work.

  After lunch, Yamane took a single sheet of newspaper and held it out in front of Nakakura.

  “See if you can punch a clean hole in this,” he said.

  “A newspaper? You kidding?” But a dozen lunges later he was beginning to sweat while the newspaper just seemed to flutter aside, still intact. Finally Yamane had Kiku hold the paper. The squawk rose again from somewhere in his throat and a moment later his fist had opened a neat little hole almost without rustling the paper.

  “If you think about punching a hole, you’ll never do it,” he said. “Suppose you’re trying to split a board; most people are going to start out thinking, ‘OK, now I’m going to split this board.’ But most people’d be wrong. You’ve got to think something like this: you following me?—‘I will now concentrate all my strength and all my willpower in this fist and then my fist will be on the other side of the board. My fist will slip through the board like the wind and just be on the other side.’ That’s what you’ve got to tell yourself. See what I mean?”

  “It’s all concentration,” said Kiku. Yamane nodded.

  “A good way to start is to try to remember the most dangerous moment you can think of, a time when a little slip would have meant the difference between life and death, and use the energy you felt then in your punch. Give it a try.”

  “OK, here goes,” said Kiku, handing him a new sheet of paper. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe slowly and evenly. Suddenly, his eyes flicked open and his fist flew out, puncturing the newspaper. The hole was perhaps less perfect than Yamane’s but it was a hole nonetheless.

  “You were thinking about pole-vaulting, weren’t you?” said Yamane. Kiku nodded, smiling broadly.

  Next was Hayashi, whose style was slightly different; pumping himself up with little barks of encouragement, he swayed back and forth until he stopped, quite still, and struck. His hole was more of a tear, but he still managed to get through.

  “What was that you were doing?” asked Kiku. “Water-skiing?”

  Hayashi shook his head bashfully. “Actually, I was imagining I was shooting a goal in water polo. I used to play a lot, even though there wasn’t any money in it.”

  Nakakura had watched the other two in silence, but at last he spoke up. “What’s a guy supposed to think about if he’s not exactly the athletic type?” he said, looking a bit put out. “I was a cook before they stuck me in here.”

  “But you worked on a salvage boat, didn’t you? And you’re a professional diver,” said Hayashi.

  “You don’t have to concentrate so much to scuba dive. It’s more a matter of just sticking it out.”

  “Still, it doesn’t have to be a sport you think about,” Yamane told him. “The important thing is that you have the feeling of getting all your strength and all your willpower in the fist.”

  “Hey! Wait! I’ve got it!” said Nakakura. For a moment he looked up, and then, nodding as if he’d remembered something, he licked his lips and addressed his newsprint opponent. His eyes grew wide and his breathing rough. “Die!” he screamed as his fist shot out. The hole was clean; the others clapped.

  “Nice work. What were you thinking about?” said Kiku.

  “Nothing,” Nakakura muttered, his head bobbing shyly.

  Later, on the way back to navigation class, he tapped Kiku on the shoulder. “You know back there, I was thinking about my mother’s face. I saw her plain as day on the other side of the newspaper. Once I thought about slamming her in the puss, it was easy to concentrate.”

  “Btt, btt.” Nakakura was leaning against the wall of the cell making a clicking sound with his lips. His neck was bent all the way to one side. “Btt, btt.”

  “What the hell’s that?” asked Yamane.

  “You can’t tell? Kiku, bet you know.” Kiku shook his head. “It’s the sound a cigarette lighter makes, but not some cheap piece of shit. It’s supposed to be the click of a Dunhill just like the one I got from a buddy of mine who went to Macau. You ever used a Dunhill? Fuckin’ heavy. You flick it, but the flame doesn’t come up right away. There’s like this little delay, till your thumb runs all the way around the wheel, and then ‘btt!’ Prettiest damn sound in the world. But there’s no way to explain it if you’ve never heard it, it’s one of a kind. It sounds just like… like fire, dammit. Cigarette even tastes better when you light it with one of those. I was just trying to remember the sound, but I can’t quite get it. It’s not ‘btt’ exactly; it’s more like ‘shbtt, shbtt.’”

  On Sundays and holidays there were no vocational classes. If the weather was good, they played softball or soccer in the recreation area, but today it was raining. Some inmates still had club activities: art classes, guitar lessons, choir practice, and so on. Most of the others were in their cells reading. But Kiku and the rest of the Nautical Training Unit had time on their hands. The on
ly one who had anything to do was Yamane, who had borrowed a book from the library: The Secret of the Dragon King. But he gave up trying to read it after a few minutes when Nakakura started babbling.

  They had already killed part of the day with a round-robin arm wrestling tournament which Hayashi, surprisingly, won. Kiku, who had never lost a match himself, had thought he would make a good showing, but after barely managing to beat Nakakura, he was wiped out by both Hayashi and Yamane who were in a different class altogether. After the preliminary rounds, these two faced off in the finals, and even just watching, Kiku could tell there was an incredible amount of strength involved; at times he wondered if one of their arms wasn’t going to snap clean in two. Hayashi’s arm was only about half as big around as Yamane’s, but the muscles were supple and all the power seemed to be focused in the wrist. Their two arms were nearly motionless, apparently an equal match in strength, but the struggle could be seen below where the pillows that cushioned their elbows had been torn open and were spilling their stuffing around the room. In the end, the match came down to Hayashi’s ability to withstand a series of aggressive moves by Yamane, who finally ran out of steam and gave in to superior stamina. When it was over, Yamane lay on his back for a while rubbing his arm.

  “First time I ever lost,” he marveled.

  Hayashi’s face was flushed. “When I was in high school, I could swim five thousand meters with just my arms and then ten thousand with just my legs. Swimmers get to be real flexible; not strong, just flexible.”

  “Wrong,” laughed Yamane, getting to his feet. “That’s strong.”

  Next, at Yamane’s suggestion, they tried something called “seat wrestling”: you sat on the ground and locked legs and then tried to flip your opponent over. Predictably, Yamane was by far the best at this, and the others quickly got tired of it. It was somewhere in the middle of this last contest that Nakakura had started in with “btt, btt.”

  “‘Shbtt, shbtt.’ No, that’s not quite it either. Shit! How did it go? Something like ‘bhao, bhao.’ Maybe ‘jbha, jbha.’ ‘Shba, shba.’ ‘Subo, subo.’ ‘Bot, hot.’ I can hear it, but I just can’t figure out exactly what it was.”

  “Chugga, chugga, choo, choo!” Hayashi began to chant, and they all broke up. When the laughter had died down, it was very quiet.

  “Shit, what wouldn’t I give for a smoke,” moaned Nakakura. His face was twisted into an attempted smile, but it wasn’t quite working. In the end he actually seemed to have started crying.

  Yamane went to open a window. The smell of damp spring leaves came drifting into the room along with the sound of the prison choir rehearsing. He was just about to say something to Nakakura when the little shutter of the peephole opened and a guard’s face appeared. Nakakura stopped crying instantly.

  “You’re getting a little treat at four o’clock, so line up out in the hall,” said the guard, closing the shutter when he was done.

  “Something special on?” Hayashi asked.

  “Some people from town coming to put on a play for you guys,” the guard said over his shoulder as he moved on down the corridor.

  Not long afterward, all the inmates and nearly all the staff were assembled in the auditorium. There weren’t enough chairs, so some of the prisoners were sitting on the wooden floor. The assembly started with an address by the warden.

  “Today we’re been honored with a visit from the drama club at Hakodate Commercial College. These nice people come here at about this time every year to help brighten up these rainy days when you can’t get out for sports and whatnot. This is their third visit, and I know that some of you out there who have seen their productions in the past have been looking forward to this day. So sit back, see a bit of the outside world for a change and, above all, enjoy the show.”

  The curtain was raised to reveal a title card to one side of the stage with the words “Blue Nymph of the Alps: A Musical” written on it. A bent old man entered from stage left. The backcloth showed a hut, some trees, and snow-capped mountains, and birds could be heard chirping; then the music swelled and the old man’s hoarse voice suddenly burst into song.

  Ah! Spring again!

  Oh! Flowers bloom!

  The snow will melt.

  Bear cubs wake.

  Fish will jump…

  “Now where’s my daughter gone? Down to the village, I suppose.”

  And what will she buy there,

  Do you suppose?

  Some candy she’ll buy there,

  I suppose.

  And what else will she buy there,

  Do you suppose?

  A fine red dress she’ll buy there,

  I suppose.

  “Who the fuck’s this old guy?” said Nakakura in a loud whisper.

  “Shhhh!” said Hayashi, glancing nervously at a guard standing nearby.

  “When do the babes come on?” Nakakura muttered, wrapping his arms around his legs.

  “He said something about his daughter, so there’ll be some later,” Kiku whispered in his ear.

  Unfortunately, the “babes” were slow to appear. Old Sahei had a string of visitors to the mountain hut—villagers, travelers, woodcutters, and trappers—but there wasn’t a woman among them.

  The plot of the play went something like this: the girl raised by Sahei as his daughter was actually his granddaughter, abandoned by her mother, Torie, who had run off with a passing traveler soon after her husband’s death. Together Sahei and his granddaughter had endured the rigors of life in the mountain cottage, until one spring day when the girl was almost fourteen they were visited by a fine gentleman who introduced himself as her mother’s secretary, Torie now being the manager of four circus troupes, apparently. The visitor informed Sahei that Torie now wanted her daughter back, but the old man chased him away with a shower of abuse. It was at about this point that Yamane dozed off, but Nakakura was watching with rapt attention.

  “Right on!” he muttered. “Serves her fuckin’ right for running off like that. He shoulda wasted her!”

  Finally, the daughter made her entrance. Nakakura nearly jumped out of his seat, but Hayashi and Kiku each grabbed a handful of uniform to hold him down. The pair of legs below the girl’s short skirt drew a long ovation before she started her song and dance.

  I am a child of the mountains,

  These lovely mountains I call home.

  The birds and other creatures are my friends.

  Oh! How I love my mountain home!

  “Yes, indeed, I love these mountains. And yet, do you suppose it could be true what I hear? That my mother still lives, and Father is, in truth, my grandfather? What am I to do? Whatever shall I do? O Queen Akebi, show me the way!”

  A figure wrapped from head to foot in vines appeared on stage: Queen Akebi, spirit of the mountains, mistress of the wild things.

  “Dear child, what is it that you wish? Speak. You have always been a friend to the animals, and now, in your need, I will grant you anything you wish.”

  The girl, however, was at a loss for an answer.

  “I know not what to say,” she sang.

  “Know not?!” cried the queen in a sudden rage. “Those who don’t know what they want I turn into stone guardians of the high mountain pass.”

  The queen whirled the vines around her as a flash of magnesium and a billow of smoke obscured the stage, and while the prisoners in the front rows coughed, a statue of the girl appeared. Her voice could be heard sobbing from speakers offstage.

  “Nasty,” said Nakakura. “That’s one nasty goddess, turning little girls into stone.” The play, however, had a happy ending: unaware that her daughter has become a statue, Torie and her secretary reveal their evil intentions, the girl finally realizes that it’s her grandfather who really loves her, and Queen Akebi restores her to life. In the last scene, the girl sang one more song.

  How little I knew until I was stone,

  How little I knew.

  I hated the queen for making me stone,

 
; But how little I knew.

  The great wide world, and poor little me,

  But what did I know?

  (Chorus)

  So you’ve got to sit down…

  put on your thinking cap…

  and think!

  Don’t let these walls of stone get you down…

  put on your thinking cap…

  and soon it’s spring!

  The play had a big effect on Nakakura, who talked about it all the way back to the cell.

  “Still seems like a pretty crummy thing to do—turning that little girl to stone,” he said, his eyes misting over.

  “Don’t you get it?” said Hayashi. “The story was meant for us; we’re supposed to sit it out here like good little statues and everything’ll be fine in the end.” Yamane was nodding in agreement.

  “Bullshit,” said Nakakura firmly. “That bad mother who ran off with another guy was the whole point of it. Good thing the girl ended up with her grandfather.” Hayashi and Yamane looked at one another and laughed, so he tried to get Kiku to back him up. “What do you think? Bullshit or not bullshit?”

  “Nah, I thought it was pretty interesting,” said Kiku, turning to look back at the others who were walking behind.

  “Interesting? What was interesting?” said Yamane.

  “The part where the girl got turned to stone.”

  “What?!” said Nakakura. “That’s cold, man. That was the saddest part.” Kiku laughed.

  “Not the way I look at it. Seems to me it would be just fine if people who don’t know what they want got turned to stone. That queen was right. People who don’t know what they want won’t get it anyhow, so they’re pretty much stone as it is. If you ask me, they should have just left that dumb girl a statue.”

  26

  Hashi had developed a strong aversion to anything that could reflect an image. Mirrors horrified him, as did windows at night, polished black marble, shiny chrome bumpers, or a still body of water.