Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

Kuwayama had soon distributed tea cups and was on his way back from the kitchen carrying a bottle of sake.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he was saying. “How do you figure it? Two brothers, and they couldn’t be more different. And you end up being the pride of the island. When we read all those write-ups in the magazines, it makes us feel like they were saying it about us.” With the exception of the taxi driver, they all began drinking. Even though it was broad daylight outside, with the shutters closed and the lights on, it seemed like nighttime.

  “Have you seen Kiku?” the old lady from the grocery store asked quietly. Hashi shook his head. “They say he’s in prison,” she continued. “Should have stuck with those sports, if you ask me.” Though it was impossible to tell where Kuwayama was looking behind the dark glass of the goggles, he seemed to be listening to her. Suddenly he turned to her.

  “Please—let’s not mention Kiku. He’s brought us nothing but shame. Nothing but shame!” he blubbered, emptying his cup in one gulp. Silence fell over the room except for the sound of Kuwayama’s coughing. The guests exchanged glances. Finally the shoe man spoke up as if trying to put a bit of life back into the party.

  “Hashi… if it’s not rude to ask a pro like you in a place like this… d’you think you could sing something for us?” The guests studied Hashi’s face, gauging his reaction, then turned to Kuwayama to guess at the expression on his downcast, goggled face.

  “I bet Kazuyo would have been tickled to hear Hashi sing,” said the stationer. Hashi too was looking at Kuwayama. He was thinner than he had been, with hollow cheeks and a bony chest, and he seemed somehow to have shrunk. He hadn’t much hair left either, and his scrawny limbs and neck were covered with blotches and protruding veins. Looks just like a bug, thought Hashi to himself. He was already wearing bulging goggles; if you stuck on some antennae and wings and covered him with scales, he’d probably fly straight off toward the nearest light bulb.

  “How ’bout it, Hashi? Won’t you give us a song?” he said eventually, pushing aside the goggles for a moment to wipe something, tears or sweat or whatever, from his eyes. “How ’bout a song for Kazuyo? Imagine how happy it’d make her.” The others chimed in, and started to applaud.

  “Sorry, I’m tired,” Hashi said, looking around at them. “And besides I just don’t feel like it.” As he spoke, Kuwayama had begun to nod deeply at each word.

  “That’s just fine, boy. I’m sure your mother’s happy enough just to have you home, like the rest of us. You don’t have to sing a note if you don’t want to.” The guests nodded vaguely in agreement, and Kuwayama, looking down again, fell silent.

  Hashi left them for a moment to go into the sitting room. Opening a drawer in the desk, he started rooting around for something. While he was gone, the old woman who ran the grocery stood up to go, and the others followed suit. A minute or two later, only the young man who owned the shoe store remained, half sitting and half standing, with an embarrassed look on his face.

  “Uhhh,” he started when Hashi returned carrying a handful of cassette tapes. “Sorry about asking you to sing. Hope you’re not upset.”

  “That’s OK. Like I said, I’m just tired and I don’t feel like it.” Looking somewhat reassured, the man bowed to Kuwayama and made his way to the door and back into the bright world outside. “This place is incredible,” Hashi told Kuwayama, who was watching him shove the tapes into his bag. “Not one thing’s changed since I left. Even the same stuff in the drawers.” Kuwayama poured some more sake into his teacup and gulped it down.

  “I’m not one for messing in other people’s drawers,” he said. “So, you staying the night?”

  “No, have to get back.”

  “That so? ’Sa shame. So how’s Tokyo? You like it there?”

  “Not particularly. To tell the truth, I came to see Milk. Once I’ve done that, I don’t want to miss the last ferry.” Kuwayama said nothing but staggered after him when Hashi rose and headed for the door. He caught up with him as he was slipping into his shoes.

  “I guess I haven’t been much of a father,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?” laughed Hashi, looking back over his shoulder. Kuwayama was rubbing at his eyes.

  “Well, what I mean is… you with so much on your mind and all…” He waved as Hashi walked away. Hashi wondered what the eyes were doing behind the goggles. The hand, at any rate, waved feebly, like the leg of a bug stripped of its wings and antennae, wriggling in a dark hole. “Take care of yourself now!” Kuwayama called. “Take care!”

  As he walked down the hill, Hashi decided he really ought to send him a pair of sunglasses; those goggles must hurt after a while, he thought. He reached the main road and wandered along it looking for the lane leading to the salt works. The landmark was a building with a red tiled roof, the ruins of the warehouse used for storing explosives for the mines; next to it was the narrow road of reddish earth that led down to the sea. Halfway down the slope was a large pig shed and the dump for the lime left over from salt-making, which had seeped into a boggy area lined with shacks that had been built for the miners. Someone had surrounded part of the bog with barbed wire when it turned white from the dissolving lime, and Kiku and Hashi had once tried to crawl under it. They had wanted to see what had happened to the frogs that lived there. Hashi had maintained that everything must have died when the water turned a murky white. Kiku’s theory had been that the frogs themselves might have been dyed white and could then be sold as rarities. In the end, they had retreated without penetrating the barbed wire, not, of course, because of the “No Trespassing” sign but because of the terrible stink around there. No way a frog or a killifish or anything else could live in water that smelled like that, they’d reasoned. And if anything is living in there, Hashi had told himself at the time, I don’t want to see it. Even with the sun directly overhead, the chalky water gave back no reflection, catching every ray and sinking it in its depths.

  The salt works were further down, at the edge of the water. They had been built during the summer of Hashi’s third year in junior high school, and he could still remember the day of the dedication ceremony. There had been fireworks and red-and-white rice cakes, and in the evening of that same day, Gazelle had died. Rode his motorbike off a cliff. He and Kiku had gone to see the bike while it was still burning. Some gasoline had dripped down on to the rocks where the waves were pounding, and a pale flame shivered in the surf. Kiku had been too sad even to eat any of the rice cakes.

  Hashi stopped at the gate to ask where the watchman and his dog were, but was told they didn’t show up till six. Cutting through the grounds of the factory, he came out onto the beach; the tide was out. He walked along the damp rocks until he came across an old woman gathering seaweed. As he looked at her a shudder ran through him: the woman was very much like the old beggar who he used to imagine was the woman who’d left him in the locker. She wore a pair of man’s pants rolled to the knees and was holding a bamboo pole, frayed at one end, with which she was tugging at the seaweed. Her kimono, a thin, gray thing, had been discarded higher up on the rocks. Hashi assumed she was one of the people who lived on the small boats that had always been anchored in a cove on the far side of the island. He had often seen them when he was younger, these people from the boats, and they had always worn this type of kimono.

  When he approached and greeted her the old woman gave a cackle, dropped her pole, and clutched at the kimono to cover herself. The pole began to slide off the rock into the water, but Hashi managed to catch it and hand it back. The wet seaweed still wrapped around the end glistened in a rainbow of colors that probably came from oil leaking down from the factory.

  “You from Tokyo?” she asked him.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Oh, just seemed like it,” she laughed, turning to thrust the pole back into the water.

  “You know, I’m…” he yelled at her back, “I’m crazy! Raving mad!” The old woman turned and fixed him with a serious stare.

&nbs
p; “People who are really crazy don’t run around saying so,” she told him.

  Hashi found a dry place on the rocks and sprawled out on it. A brackish smell had sunk into the stone. Stretched out on his back, he yelled again, this time at the sky.

  “I’m mad! My head’s come off my body!” The old lady came closer and peered down at his face.

  “You haven’t swallowed a fly, have you, by any chance?”

  “Huh?” said Hashi.

  “My son-in-law started acting just like you are now.”

  “Crazy, you mean?”

  “Yep. And that was what he always used to say: ‘I swallowed a fly.’” In every ten thousand flies, she said, it seemed there was one that had a human-looking face, and these human-faced flies were attracted by the smell of people’s vocal chords, so it happened occasionally that when someone was asleep they’d wander into his open mouth. The vocal chords, apparently, were the sweetest meat on the whole human body. The trouble was, once these human-looking flies started chewing on them, the person would begin to go crazy from all that buzzing going on in there. And in the end he’d lose not just his voice but his mind as well, and the fly was running the whole show.

  Hashi listened carefully to her story before asking: “Is there any cure?”

  “Nope, none,” said the woman.

  “Then what do you do about these flies?”

  “Be nice to them.”

  “The flies?”

  “Sure. Get to know them, make friends. That’s the only way to go,” she laughed. In the distance, a dog began to bark. With a yell, Hashi jumped to his feet.

  “Milk! Milk!” he called as a white speck appeared on a breakwater across the way. “Milk! Over here!” He started to run, slipping and staggering on the wet rocks. Held in place by a length of chain, the dog could only rise up on his back legs and bark, until finally the little man holding him let go. Long white fur billowing, Milk took off like a shot. Jumping from the breakwater to the rocks, he charged toward Hashi, barely skirting the spray. The white fur was ablaze in the setting sun. Hashi ran to meet him, arms outspread.

  “That’s right! It’s me! Nothing’s changed, nothing!”

  27

  The engines of the Yuyo Maru at its mooring in Hakodate harbor had been stopped for a bit of on-the-job training. The six trainees in the engineering section were doing some sort of technical inspection while the nine working toward becoming deck crew had been divided into two groups, taking turns with chart work, loran and radar readings, and an oral exam on maritime law. Offering guidance to these last two groups, in a near shout, was Captain Eda, the commander of the Yuyo Maru. Eda, a smallish, taciturn man who had had a career with the coast guard, was the sort of unassuming figure who, seen on the street, might have been taken for a rather run-down pensioner. Once he set foot on board a ship, however, he underwent an amazing transformation. The Eda who taught courses in the prison had heavy, sagging eyelids which he scratched continually with the end of his little finger; but with his feet planted on the deck of a ship, his eyelids seemed to snap up, revealing a piercing stare. His voice, too, was noticeably more powerful, though at times his body was unable to keep up with his enthusiasm for training his would-be crew. Apart from these training sessions, however, Captain Eda was hardly ever known to say a word.

  With its engines cut, the ship was pitching about a fair bit. Kiku and the others were in the crowded wheelhouse gathered around a set of charts making practice entries for compass bearing, speed, actual and calculated position, course, sunrise and sunset, high and low tides, and tidal rates and currents. Desk work in a close, swaying room heightened the effects of seasickness, which Kiku and Yamane were already prone to. Before long, Yamane tossed aside his ruler and triangle and headed for the door to get some air, but he had only gone a few steps before the captain brought him up short.

  “And where do you think you’re going, mister?”

  “I was just going to have a look at cloud conditions, sir,” Yamane lied, his face pale.

  “Forget it, pea brain. Back to the charts,” said the captain, who seemed to enjoy nothing more than watching Kiku or Yamane turn green around the gills. “If you concentrate on the charts, you won’t feel so bad. Besides, nobody ever died from getting seasick, but if you can’t read the charts, you could end up at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “Try pretending the ship’s not moving,” suggested Nakakura, whose stint on the salvage ship seemed to make him immune. “The captain’s right, you know. Try concentrating on something else—women, getting out of stir, whatever—really concentrate and you won’t notice the roll.”

  The first symptom of seasickness was a feeling of numbness around the temples, followed by a dry mouth and a sense that something was creeping up one’s throat. Fighting back the urge to puke, Kiku stared at the charts until he couldn’t bear it any longer and looked up with a groan. Staring out at the horizon, he waited for the sick feeling to pass. Hayashi, who was standing next to him calmly calculating the time of the next high tide, pointed out his distress to Nakakura, and they shared a laugh.

  “Hey, Kiku,” Nakakura called out as Kiku stood there gazing out the window, still a shade of puke-green. Kiku looked vaguely in his direction. “What the hell’s ‘datura’?” Kiku frowned but did his best to look dumb. “That’s what you’ve been yelling in your dreams. Last night I could hardly sleep from all the racket. At first I couldn’t tell what the hell you were saying, but that’s what it was—‘datura,’ over and over again. What’s it mean? One of these?” he said, raising his little finger to indicate a woman. “If it’s a girl, sure is a weird name.”

  Kiku looked down again at the traverse tables without answering. Traverse tables are used to read longitude and latitude by means of cruising distance and compass bearing. The problem at hand was to check the change in longitude and latitude of a ship cruising at eighteen and a half knots for forty-five minutes at a bearing of 119°.

  “Come on, Kiku. What the fuck’s ‘datura’?” said Nakakura. Nakakura’s was the type of face that told even the most casual observer that there were certain people in the world who were capable of murder at the slightest provocation, the least change in temperament or physical condition. There was no saying why exactly, but it was that kind of face.

  It had started to rain. During lunch, Nakakura and the others had kept after him to tell them what ‘datura’ was, so Kiku had lied and said it was, in fact, a woman’s name.

  “I don’t know myself if that was her real name. She used to be a model, so I suppose it could have been made up.”

  “Back when I was teaching water-skiing, I once did it with a fashion model,” Hayashi put in, sounding rather pleased with himself. “Know what I found out? When you’re doing it, those long legs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. If she sticks them up over your shoulders, they get too heavy, and if you do it doggie-style, the thighs are so long your dick’s too low to get it in.”

  After a morning of training, the afternoon was devoted to practical application. In days gone by that had meant fishing for squid, but a sharp drop in the available catch had put an end to it four years earlier, and now the Yuyo Maru performed mass burials at sea. This didn’t mean dumping shrouded bodies into the waves; no, the bodies had been properly cremated on shore and the bones placed in square lead boxes, which were then dropped overboard. The service was aimed at people who couldn’t afford a burial plot on land, and as such it was something of a fad. For this part of the ship’s duties, there was one more man on board in addition to the captain, chief engineer, two guards, and Tadakoro, from Supervision: the prison chaplain.

  The boxes, each bearing a number and a name carved in the side, were loaded one by one while the ship was still in dock. Then, putting to sea, they headed for Cape Ohana, the ship running low in the water with its cargo of lead. Just beyond the cape was the Public Maritime Cemetery, which consisted of a small watchman’s shed on shore and an area marked off on the water by ye
llow rope. The ropes were attached to four buoys, on each of which was a sign reading “Persons entering the marked area or abandoning objects without permission will be punished in accordance with municipal ordinances.”

  After getting clearance from the watchman, the ship sailed into the cemetery, where Eda ordered them to drop anchor. Pulling on their rain gear, the trainees assembled on deck and began taking the boxes out of the hold. Each man would carry one box up on deck, place it at his feet, press his hands together in a brief imitation prayer, and then toss it in the drink. The chaplain, meanwhile, had begun to recite some real prayers, urging the occupant of each box to sleep peacefully, lulled by the sound of God’s own voice—the waves—and cradled in the arms of Mother Sea, shining with the light of heaven.

  Kiku and friends were having a competition to see who could throw his box furthest—a marine shot put, as it were. Predictably, Yamane was the winner. Kiku thought perhaps his raincoat was interfering with his form. The glassy surface of the sea sucked up the fine raindrops, and everything around had gone gray: the sky, the harbor in the distance, the fog rolling in, the smoke from the incense the guards had lit, the prisoners’ coats, and the heavy boxes. The only relief was the white splash that each box made before vanishing beneath the waves.

  When all the boxes had been disposed of and the guards had tossed some flowers in after them, the captain began barking orders: “OK, we’re heading home! Start the engines, and get all these lubbers to stations.” Kiku and Nakakura went to the bow to weigh anchor, and the ship moved out of the cemetery and back toward harbor.

  As they approached the harbor, Kiku stood on deck and stared at the breakwater along the opposite shore. Suddenly, his hand shot up in a quick little wave, but not quickly enough to escape Nakakura’s notice.

  “What was that?” Kiku stuck out his little finger. “A woman?” He nodded. Now Nakakura was staring at the breakwater. “The red umbrella?” Kiku waved again, and Nakakura joined in as the figure on shore stood watching them through a pair of binoculars. It was Anemone. “So this babe of yours is in Hakodate?”