Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  “The repairs are done,” the old man announced, and Anemone stood up.

  “Kiku!” she called. “Time to go bomb Tokyo!” Kiku held his arm up as if to say he’d be ready in a minute.

  “What’s that all about?” the old man muttered, more or less to himself, as he stood watching. The goat’s teats were swollen, and from time to time a milky drop fell on the hot sand.

  “He’s going to jump with that pole,” Anemone said. The sweet smell of the milk drew a swarm of flies as Kiku checked his grip.

  “Kiku! Jump over me!” Anemone called, standing, umbrella high over her head, where the waves were lapping at the sand. Kiku stared at the red plastic dome and started his sprint, aiming straight for the nearly naked Anemone in its shadow. A streak of taut muscle, a wake of dancing white sand, and the waves of heat rising placidly from the beach were left unsettled for a moment. The leaves of the mangrove trees rustled and sweat streamed from Kiku’s body. When she could almost feel his breath on her—that hot breath she’d felt so often in her ears or against her side—she closed her eyes, opening them just as the thick pole was planted in the sand in front of her. A cool puff of air played over her skin, as if the sweat had been briefly frozen, and the umbrella was swept from her hand. It rolled down the beach, a crimson whirl on the white sand, then out over the water above the reef. She stood for a long while staring at the shrinking dot of red plastic as it spun across the deep green sea…

  The bats began to stir. Their black bodies covered the walls and ceiling of the hangar, and when their wings began to flutter, it was as if the whole building were shifting and shivering. The engine of the helicopter groaned to life and the rotor turned. As Kiku dragged open the doors of the hangar, bright, dusty light streamed in and a cloudburst of black bats fell from the ceiling. The sound of small, soft bodies hitting concrete mixed with their unnerving squeaks.

  The helicopter began to move slowly forward over a carpet of bats, and the speed of the blades increased, sending clumps of them spinning against the walls. The survivors huddled in the corners of the hangar, clawing their way into what was left of the damp shade. Outside, the helicopter soon rose slowly into the sky, leaving behind patches of twitching black wings.

  “Hold on, Hashi,” Kiku murmured. An image of Hashi beset by demons of some kind floated into his mind. “I’m coming!”

  In the courtyard of the building they brought him to, a young woman in a bathrobe was knitting in the shade of a cherry tree. The men in pajamas playing volleyball stopped to stare at him as he was carried past. So did the women gathered around a harmonium. As they cut across the courtyard, a mixture of sweat and drool ran down his chin. The sun rocked back and forth in the sky in time with the steps of the white-coated attendants, until they passed through a barbed-wire fence at one end of the yard. It was dark inside, but he could make out a mannequin by the entrance: a child in a school cap and knapsack holding a plastic card that read “Mommy, Daddy, don’t worry, I’m fine—and waiting for you!” Little cracks ran through the smooth brown plastic of the mannequin’s face and arms.

  He was carried into a room with white walls and ceiling and set down on a bed. The straps around his thighs were unfastened, and a pair of scissors glided past his face, followed by the sound of his pants being cut away. He felt something soft and cool on his hip, a drop from the end of the needle, and then the injection. Warmth spread through his body, and his jaw went slack. He found he could no longer distinguish between the rubber gag in his mouth and his own tongue and teeth. He could feel himself sinking deep into the bed as he studied the one broken tube among the line of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. It blinked feebly on and off, a pale, jagged shadow keeping it company. Hashi could hear someone undoing the rest of the buckles on his straps, then saw a hand removing the black gag, its surface dripping with saliva.

  Lifting him off the bed and setting him on his feet, the men in white half dragged him down a hall lined with barred cells. When they came to his, he was tossed in onto some damp floor matting. The only other furnishing was a pile of blankets in one corner. An old man was staring at Hashi from the cell across the way, his skin covered with blotches and his open robe revealing a diaper.

  “Are you a Good Person?” the stranger asked. Hashi raised himself on one elbow, at which the old man gave a little yelp and shrank back into one corner. Hashi looked around his cell and was startled to see some toes poking out under the pile of blankets. On further investigation, he found, in addition, the hair, forehead, and left hand of a woman, the rest of whom was covered by the blankets. He decided it had to be a woman from the white skin and the slender hands and feet.

  “Her head’s messed up,” the old man explained, his courage returning. “She’s neither a Good Person nor a Bad Person: she’s just a Cabbage. Slightly rotten Cabbage at that, so don’t try eating her.” The Cabbage wore a small gold ring on the little finger of her left hand. There were no windows in the cell, and Hashi wondered whether she was hot under all those blankets. He could hear the sound of ventilator fans at each end of the corridor, but not even the faintest breeze reached them. He propped himself against the wall and continued his inspection. It was very humid, yet the Cabbage didn’t seem to be sweating. The shadow cast by the lampshade covering the yellowish light bulb overhead just reached her left hand, and the ring seemed to be glinting at regular intervals. Hashi looked up at the ceiling. Neither the bulb nor the shade was swaying, so it had to be a tiny motion of her hand that was catching the light at certain angles. Sure enough, a closer look revealed that the finger was wagging slightly, but quite regularly, above the blanket.

  An attendant brought dinner, or some mushy stuff in tubes that passed for dinner: milk, rice, powdered vegetables, and salt. Hashi watched as he put the tip of a tube into the Cabbage’s mouth and squeezed the food down her throat, but he could see almost nothing of her face due to the strange mask she was wearing: something not unlike the gas masks he’d seen in the deserted mines on the island, with a corrugated rubber snout hanging down in front. The attendant loosened a valve at the end of the snout and stuck the tube into the dark hole, and judging from the movements in her throat, the Cabbage seemed to be eating.

  When the meal was over, the blankets were peeled back to reveal that this was, in fact, a woman. The attendant changed her diaper, wiping her bottom and giving her a liberal sprinkling of talcum powder, but no matter what was done to her she remained as still as a block of wood. Only when the blankets were replaced did she give a low moan.

  “The head of this here Cabbage has been cleaned out nice and neat,” the attendant told Hashi, “just like yours’ll be pretty soon now.” When he was gone, the slight twitching in the Cabbage’s finger started again. As Hashi studied the movement, he caught an occasional whiff of talcum powder sent his way, apparently, by a tiny draft created by the pulsing finger. He approached her, and as his feet moved over the damp matting, the movement of her finger changed, reminding him, for some reason, of the sad man in the park in Toxitown who suffered from convulsions. How many hours had he spent practicing his singing in the company of the man who danced as if someone were firing a machine gun at his feet? How many thousands of tunes had come into his head back then? Worming his way across the floor, he had come close enough to touch the Cabbage. The dry brown foot protruding from the blankets was swollen, probably due to poor circulation. Gently, he touched it. No response. He tried pinching it. Her skin felt like a rubber sack heavy with liquid, as if she would shrivel up if he pricked her with a pin. He remembered the drifter who had ministered to him in the toilet by the river in Sasebo. Then a new idea occurred to him: this sad creature might once have been a dog, the handsome black dog that had saved him from the coin locker, and for that he owed her a real debt of gratitude. But what could he do for her here? About the only thing he had to give her, he thought, was a song; and so, facing in the general direction of the head that must be somewhere under the blankets, he began to sing, pitching his
voice to sound like a wind instrument playing in the deeper registers.

  At first there was no reaction from the Cabbage, and Hashi wondered whether she wasn’t deaf. But gradually he changed his song, shifting from a horn resounding through a thick forest to leaves drifting down onto a lake, then to rings of water spreading out to lap against a sandy shore, and finally—with his mouth closed—the first few bird trills in “The St. Vitus’s Blues.” Soon Hashi noticed that the blanket had begun to stir, and when he increased the volume her fingers began to twitch faster and beads of sweat formed on her palms. But before he could go on, he heard a voice behind him shout:

  “Come on, put a little life in it!” Hashi turned to find a line of faces pressed against the bars of the cells across the way. It was the old man who had shouted. “Hey, so it really was you,” he said when Hashi fell silent. “I was sure it wasn’t the radio since they didn’t come on with the weather forecast. You being a Good Person and all, how about singing a bit louder, though? How about a hiking song or ‘Happy Birthday’? Hey, is the girl dead? Could be that little dirge of yours. Cabbage there, she hates that kind of thing. The weaker you sing, the weaker she gets.”

  With the song over, the fingers had resumed their former movement. Perhaps the old man was right.

  “Hey, Goody! You sick?” the man called again. A line of anxious faces stared at Hashi through the bars. “If you want, I’ll get the doctor for you. He could give you a shot.”

  “Doesn’t anybody like my singing?” Hashi asked the patients staring at him. The men looked at one another until the old fellow spoke up for them.

  “Well, you see, I’d like it a little cheerier myself,” he said, a bit reluctantly.

  “OK, I get it,” Hashi murmured, moving away from the Cabbage and lying down on the opposite side of the cell. The others stood looking at him for a time, then slowly withdrew their faces from the bars, retreating to corners where the light couldn’t reach, until finally only the old man remained to keep watch over Hashi with a worried look.

  “Good night,” said Hashi eventually, sitting up to peer across the corridor, and then the old man also disappeared, a look of pleasure spreading on his face.

  “Put a little life in it?” said Hashi to himself. Come to think of it, he didn’t know any songs that could be called lively. “No fucking way,” he muttered, laughing out loud. The Cabbage was stirring again under her blankets, and the thought crossed his mind that he should try another song, but he stopped himself. He realized that he was sick and tired of the old sounds, that he’d just as soon forget the whole thing. Closing his eyes, he cast about in his head for the makings of a new tune, but first he decided he had to clear out all the memories linked with his old repertoire. The drifter, a pair of bloody scissors, duck fat, a woman’s soft skin, the dank air in the old mines, the smile on Kiku’s sweaty face—every person and place, every smell and sensation had to go. He lay there a long time, slaying memories, but in the end there was always one image that remained behind his blank eyes, the one he’d seen earlier in some broken glass as he lay down to sleep: his own face, frightened, frozen, him. And for some reason, though he couldn’t have said why, he had the feeling that it was this face that would open its mouth and sing the new song. Naked, nameless, senseless, stripped of everything though it was, he decided then and there that he would follow this face. No matter what happened, he would never lose sight of it again. No man-faced fly inside his head could ever make him forget it. And no one could make him hate this craven, tearful face; for, search as he might, where else would he ever find himself?

  The sound of a helicopter could be heard in the distance: a highspeed whirlybird with dried bat blood on its skids. A grinning, elderly pilot sat at the controls as it sliced across the summer sky.

  “Sheee-it! Been four years since I’ve flown this thing,” he said as he set the chopper down at a landing pad on a spit of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay. Taking a bag full of metal cylinders with them, Kiku and Anemone got out and had a Coke in one corner of the cavernous hangar. The pilot seemed to know the two mechanics there, who started telling him about a new helicopter with a retractable rotor.

  “It’s a jet, man, when you lock that rotor in. It’ll do Mach 0.8.” During a pause in the conversation, Kiku interrupted.

  “We’ve got a few things to do but we’ll be right back,” he told the pilot. The old man nodded.

  “Don’t be late,” he said. “The control tower’s fussy about these things. I’ll be heading back to Miruri in four hours’ time.” Kiku and Anemone were already walking away, hand in hand.

  “Four hours is plenty,” said Kiku without looking back.

  They walked in silence along the almost deserted harbor road. Summer was hanging on in the city, and Tokyo was as hot as the islands had been. The difference was the smell of gasoline in the air and the wall of sound that reached them from a distance: millions of human voices merging together. As they made their way through a long, straight tunnel lined with sheets of metal, enormous trucks passed by from time to time with a moan that built to an explosive whoosh. Anemone thought of the pieces of Gulliver that had flopped around on the highway, and for a moment she wished it had been raining that day, then shook her head, knowing that wishful thinking got you nowhere. Reaching over to touch Kiku’s back, she found that his shirt was soaked with sweat.

  At the end of the tunnel, they came to an intersection, and on the cross street they found a small motorcycle repair shop marked only by a weathered, peeling sign. When Kiku and Anemone walked in, deeply tanned and dressed in white linen, the mechanic, a young man with his hair dyed red, gave them a long stare. There were two secondhand bikes in the frosted display window, and Anemone, having looked them over, pointed at the more powerful one, a 250cc off-road job.

  “We’ll take that one,” she said. “Would you mind starting it up for me?” After listening to the engine for a moment, she climbed on, linen dress and all, and rode out into the street. She had gone about ten meters when she let go of the handlebars and rode on no-handed.

  “That’s some chick you got there, buddy,” the mechanic said to Kiku. “She’s checking the balance; just what you’re supposed to do with a used bike.”

  While Anemone was fishing around for her license and signing the necessary papers, Kiku fastened the bag to the luggage rack on the bike.

  “That’s a mean tan you guys have got,” the mechanic said as he counted the money. “Bet you’re surfers. The white suits are a sure giveaway. Surf City Babies—must be nice.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Kiku, doing up the strap on his helmet. “Us? We’re Coin Locker Babies.”

  The freeway traffic was bumper to bumper, but Anemone made good time riding between the cars until they came up behind two trucks that wouldn’t let her through. As they crept along beside a taxi, Kiku studied a “Wanted” poster inside until he realized he was staring at his own face and, next to it, those of Nakakura and Hayashi. Under the pictures, in large lettering, were instructions for “anyone knowing the whereabouts of these men.” The picture of him was one the police had taken on Christmas Day, the morning after he had killed that woman; they’d had to drag him from the cell, where he’d been lying on the floor weeping and screaming, pleading with them not to touch him, pleading with someone for forgiveness. You could see something of what he’d been through in the photo: his eyes were blank, his mouth halfopen with a few teeth showing.

  “Pathetic,” Kiku muttered at the face in the cab. “Get a grip,” he advised it. “One false step and it’s all over; they’ll have you under glass, trapped like a bug.”

  The traffic cleared just as they passed a wrecked milk truck that had been blocking one lane. The tank on the truck had been damaged in the accident, and a sticky white puddle had formed along the road. Taking advantage of the opening, the cab with Kiku’s picture in it roared off, puffing milk-sweet air in their faces and revealing, where it hadn’t been a moment before, a view of the thirteen tow
ers. On top of one, an orange light blinked in the hazy heat, though it was almost invisible in bright sunlight. From a distance, the towers seemed to be leaning toward one another, panting in the hot summer sky, their stone walls and metallic windows softer than that turtle’s belly. A line of boxes half melting in the heat, the smell of milk… and suddenly Kiku thought of babies locked away inside, and reached for the bag at the back of the bike, checking the cylinders, ready to undo the straps. Anemone opened the throttle, moving out into the fast lane which seemed to suck them along the elevated highway straight toward the towers. Nothing ever changes, he thought. Everybody’s still trying to break out of themselves, hoping for that new wind to blow through and shake their hearts awake. But for us, for all the babies who slept their first sleep in those muggy boxes, who heard that sound, the only sound there was until the air first touched our skin—the sound of our mothers’ hearts—nothing ever changes. How could it? How could any of us forget—a sign that came to us in the dark, endlessly, ceaselessly, with just one message, over and over and over again?… He reached back and his hand closed around the DATURA. It was time now: the hatching of the babies, asleep in their summer boxes, spun from glass and steel and concrete.

  Hashi could hear glass breaking down the hall, and then an attendant shouting “Bring him down here! In the cell, quick!” The door of their block flew open and a man in a straitjacket was carried down the hall and thrown in with Hashi. The whole building seemed to shake when he hit the floor, as if a bronze statue had been dropped from the ceiling. Startled, the Cabbage groaned and burrowed deeper into the blankets, the snout of her gas mask flipping about. Several doctors and attendants pinned the man to the floor while one of them prepared a thick, dripping syringe. As he fought them, veins bulged on his head, and his bloodshot eyes seemed ready to pop from their sockets. The dark, congested areas above and below the red eyes made Hashi think of eyeliner. Suddenly, the man bucked so violently, straitjacket and all, that the attendant by his shoulder went flying against the wall. Hashi, who hadn’t been able to move so much as a finger in his jacket, knew what sort of strength this must have taken. From up and down the corridor, the other patients lining the bars gave a cheer.