Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  “What do you see when you hear that noise?” he asked.

  “The sea,” they answered together.

  Kiku would describe the image flashing on the inside of his eyeballs: his own small body being held up to heaven by the bearded Christ standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. He was wrapped in something soft, and a cool breeze was blowing. The sea was calm and sparkling. The treatment continued for about three months, at which point the psychiatrist called in the nuns again.

  “The therapy is nearly finished. The important thing now is to avoid giving the boys any idea how much they’ve changed. Above all, you mustn’t tell them about the heartbeat or anything else we’ve been doing here.”

  Kiku and Hashi, waiting in the corridor, stared out the window at the golden glow of the sky and, below, a line of deep green ginkgo trees trembling in the wind. As the elevator doors opened, they turned to look at an old man, his chest bandaged and a tube extending from one nostril, who was being wheeled into the hall. A young girl carrying a large bunch of lilies was talking to the nurse pushing him along. Kiku and Hashi went up closer to him. His veins were visible under the transparent skin, while his lips were moist and red. His ankles were strapped to the trolley with leather belts, and tiny spots of blood oozed from around the needles of the tubes attached to both arms. The old man opened his eyes and, seeing the boys peering down at him, twisted the corners of his mouth into a smile. At that moment, the nuns emerged from the room directly in front of them repeating the doctor’s last words:

  “They don’t realize that they’ve changed; they think it’s the world that changed.”

  2

  An adoption was finally arranged for Kiku and Hashi during the summer before they were to begin school. The nuns persuaded a couple who had applied for twins to take the boys. The application had come via the Holy Virgin Relief Society from a small island off the west coast of Kyushu. At first the boys refused to even consider leaving the orphanage, but they were shown a picture of the people who would be their foster parents and at last they agreed; the couple had been photographed with the sea in the background.

  In the company of a welfare officer, they made the long journey south by ferry, sitting inside on torn plastic-covered seats, where the heat was made worse by the oil fumes. They were met at the dock by their new parents. Perhaps it was the fading light, but to Hashi they looked more like mother and child than man and wife. As the welfare officer made the necessary introductions, Kiku studied his new father, Shuichi Kuwayama, with disappointment. Not only was he short but his pale arms and legs were spindly and the flesh seemed to sag on his body. He was clean-shaven, and the hair on his head was thinning; he had absolutely nothing in common with the Father in the picture in the chapel.

  From the neck up, his wife was thickly painted with white powder, which was beginning to dissolve in her sweat and trickle down into a pool collecting on her collarbone. Kazuyo Kuwayama was in fact six years older than her husband, and had just turned forty. After leaving her first husband, she had come to the island with her uncle, a miner, in the days before the coal mines that were dug under the sea were closed down. Big-boned, with rather narrow eyes and a nose too large for her face, she had trained as a beautician, then worked in a bar, before settling down with Kuwayama, who had a small factory next door to his place where he produced disposable styrofoam lunchboxes.

  Kiku and Hashi, as soon as they got home, were put to bed in matching pajamas with locomotives on them. Hashi was exhausted and running a slight temperature, for which Kazuyo made him an ice bag. She fanned the boy as he slept while her husband saw the welfare officer off. When he was gone, Kuwayama went straight back to work. A bug Kiku had never seen before flew in through the window, and he got out of bed to look out into the darkness. From the windows of the orphanage he had liked to watch the lights of the city and the stream of cars passing, but here it was pitch dark, though he thought he could just make out a tree with big black leaves rustling in the mild breeze. When Kuwayama turned on the styrofoam press, the noise drowned out the pleasant hum of the bugs.

  “It makes a racket, but he can never get to sleep unless he gets a little work done before going to bed,” Kazuyo explained. Ignoring her, Kiku eyed the strange beetle, and when it landed nearby he stamped on it.

  “You mustn’t kill living things like that!” Kazuyo scolded.

  Back at the window, Kiku spotted a tiny point of light in the distance; a star, he thought, but Kazuyo told him it was a lighthouse.

  “It shines all night so the ships at sea don’t bump into the rocks.” The light spun around, revealing the rough surface of the sea for an instant. “Time for bed,” said Kazuyo. “You must be tired, too. Get some sleep.”

  Kiku suddenly wanted to scream, to turn himself into a huge jet plane and bomb the hell out of the bugs, the leaves, this window, Kuwayama’s machine, the lighthouse. The smell of the summer night, of sun-warmed trees cooling in the darkness, was somehow unbearable.

  “Hashi and the nuns call me Kiku, but my real name’s Kikuyuki,” he managed to say before he burst into tears. Kazuyo went on fanning, without saying anything. As he got into bed, Kiku realized he had no idea why he was crying. Before long he was fast asleep and the new sheets were damp with sweat.

  By the time the boys woke the next morning, Kuwayama’s press was already humming. Kazuyo presented them with new shorts, shirts, and tennis shoes before leaving for the beauty parlor that she owned and worked at.

  “You two can watch TV or whatever. We’ll be back at noon,” she told them.

  Kiku and Hashi had some rice with a raw egg and miso soup, then counted the sailboats printed on their shirts. The TV had nothing but cooking programs to offer, so they turned it off and wrestled for a while on the floor. Then they discovered an awl on the desk and practiced sticking it in the paper doors from several paces away, but, getting bored with this, they ran out into the small garden, which had some tomatoes and eggplants growing in it. They could see Kuwayama’s sweat-soaked back as he bent over the machine in the shed at the end of the yard, raising and lowering a steel bar.

  “Looks like a robot, huh?”

  Lush carina lilies lined the steep, narrow road that stretched down from the front of the house, then crossed the main road that ran the length of the island and led straight on to the sea. Beneath a large tree, three sunburned children were busy catching cicadas. As Kiku and Hashi approached, the children eyed their new clothes.

  “What are you doing?” Hashi asked, and one of them held up a cage full of insects. Hashi took the cage, buzzing like a broken radio, and peered at its contents. Then they looked up at the tree where the children were pointing, but no matter how hard they stared, they couldn’t spot the cicadas on the bark through the gaps in the thick branches. When the trap—a shell filled with birdlime tied to the end of a stick—was pushed gently nearer the trunk, however, the sawing of the insects suddenly became louder, wings began to beat like toy birds, and the bugs were easily snared. Kiku and Hashi were as excited as if they’d seen a magic trick. One of the kids spotted a large bug high up on a limb and passed the stick to Kiku, who was the tallest among them.

  “I can’t see it,” Kiku protested, but several dirty fingers pointed at what looked like a knot on the branch. Kiku held his breath and crept nearer; the cicada was trilling for all it was worth on a branch just at a height he could reach standing on tiptoe. He stepped up onto a broken concrete block at the base of the tree as the children explained that he had to maneuver the stick to approach from the bug’s blind spot. As he was adjusting his angle, the block began to totter. Hashi cried out and Kiku thrust the stick out as if trying to spear the cicada in the tail, barely managing to catch the fluttering wings and bring the insect down as the others cheered. The huge cicada struggled to free itself, making the stick to which it was attached dance on the ground, but the children had soon freed it and, wiping the birdlime away, presented it to Kiku. Hashi asked whether the steep road was a
good way to get to the beach, but was told it ended in a cliff with no way down. The best route, they explained, was to take the main road as far as the second side street, which led to the beach.

  Kazuyo’s beauty parlor was above a bus stop not far down the main street, and when she saw the boys passing she came down, shouting “Where do you think you’re going?” Kiku pointed mutely toward the sea. “Well, all right, but you’re not to go near the old mines.” Kiku and Hashi had never heard of “mines” before.

  The second side street, which the other kids had recommended, was so overgrown the boys walked right by it. They turned instead at a likely looking lane that soon divided into two winding tracks, and after several turns they had no idea at all how to get back to the main road. Attacked by swarms of mosquitoes, their legs cut by the thick grass, the boys began to panic. They wanted to yell for help, but they knew no one was around to hear them. The road divided again, with a dark tunnel to the right, so they went left, only to find a snake slithering across the ground ahead of them. With a scream they headed for the tunnel.

  A gradual curve made the opening at the other end of the tunnel appear as a distant tube of light. It was cool inside, and the boys found themselves walking through thick mud. Before they had gone very far, a drop of water from the ceiling caught Hashi on the back of the neck and he took off with another shout that seemed about to bring the tunnel down on their heads. After a few steps, he tripped and lay blubbering in the mud.

  “Stop it,” Kiku ordered. “Get up and walk. We’re almost out.” Skirting the smelly, stagnant puddles, they headed for the far end of the tunnel, but when they finally emerged, covered with dirt, they found the way blocked by a tangle of grass and barbed wire. There was, however, a hole on the right just big enough for a child to squirm through, and with some damage to the little boats on their new shirts, they managed to wriggle on. Once through, Hashi again refused to move, but Kiku reminded him that there were snakes if they went back, and they inched along on their bellies, propelling themselves with their elbows. Finally the grass gave way to concrete, and, standing up, they looked out over an extraordinary scene: a full-scale version of the toy city Hashi had constructed next to his bed the year before.

  Hashi’s kingdom lay before them, life-sized but apparently lifeless. The neat gray rows of miners’ quarters seemed normal enough except for the occasional tuft of weeds pushing through a broken window, but there was an eerie stillness, almost as if a siren had sounded and everyone had cleared out, leaving the boys as a human sacrifice. The inhabitants were all waiting now, wherever they were hiding, for the boys to be slaughtered. Posters were still stuck to a bulletin board: a concert by the Kyushu Naval Brass Band playing “The River Kwai March,” “Anchors Away,” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The boys stood stock still for a moment, then, spooked by the silence, began to run. They ran among the houses, but the only sound they heard was the echo of their own footsteps. They stopped when they came to an abandoned tricycle with grass sprouting through its faded plastic seat, half expecting the children who had been trapping cicadas to appear from somewhere. When Hashi gingerly touched the handlebars, the bike collapsed with a rusty squeal, like a pig having a spike driven into its head, and a watery mixture of oil and rust oozed from the frame. Unnerved by this sight, they fled the rows of houses up a flight of crumbling wood and gravel stairs to a world that seemed to have been suddenly dyed red, where the sun shone through the cracks in a brick wall that stretched as far as the boys could see. Peering through the cracks, they discovered a group of structures unlike any they had seen before: a funnel-shaped tower linked by a ditch to a concrete pond divided into neat compartments; bare steel skeletons; brick cylinders choked with ivy. It all seemed familiar to Hashi, but when he turned to ask if Kiku had the same feeling, Hashi saw that he’d gone pale. More than mere models grown out of proportion, this new vision looked like an exact replica, all in concrete, of the chart of the human digestive system that had hung on the wall of the waiting room at the hospital where they’d gone for the movies. But for Kiku there was something else besides: the ruins, bathed in heat and shadows, were also the blast-off site for the great spinning rocket that had haunted him.

  When they were able to go on, they found a school nearby, gutted and half collapsing, and in front a dried-up fountain with succulent plants forcing thick leaves through the cracks in the concrete. On closer inspection, though, the spiked leaves were not from a plant at all, but part of a machine, perhaps of the sort that might excavate undersea tunnels. Around the fountain were flower beds, but the neglected seeds had blown away, and the only sign of flowers was the few stray blossoms in the dirt that had collected in the bottom of an overturned toilet. The school was partly covered with tarpaulins that fluttered noisily when the wind blew and stirred up a great flock of crows perched on the roof. The birds taking flight made it seem as if part of the building were caving in.

  Hashi was still wondering where they could be, what sort of place this was, and whether he might be dreaming. Everything was clear up to the point where he had fallen in the tunnel; he was sure of that part because his shirt was caked with dried mud and reeked of oil and stagnant water. Kiku, however, had just noticed that the sun was beginning to go down, and it occurred to him that in the dark the ruins would no longer be much fun. They would have to start looking for a way back.

  They cut across the playground of the abandoned school, past a twisted and broken horizontal bar. Cactuses grew luxuriantly in the sandbox, their needles covering the surface of a nearby pool filled with murky water. Three telephone poles, rotted and splitting, provided a nest for thousands of termites, and clouds of transparent wings filled the air. Beyond this translucent curtain, the boys could make out a town, or rather a row of empty shops facing a row of abandoned brothels and bars, and between the two a street from which the pavement was mostly gone.

  “Look! Isn’t that beautiful!” cried Hashi, suddenly pointing toward a pit which contained, apparently, all the broken glass tubing from the neon signs on the bars and restaurants. The shards formed a luminous carpet that sparkled when the wind blew, shifting the bits of glass to catch the sunlight at new angles. As they watched, shivers of color shot through the pit, recreating a huge, formless neon sign. Kiku went up to it and selected a gently curved piece of glass that was smooth and pink on the outside and a rough yellow inside. He gave it a heave and followed it with his eyes as it came to rest in the dust some distance away. When he went to retrieve it, though, he made a startling discovery. Getting down on his hands and knees, he crawled along studying the ground.

  “Kiku?” said Hashi, still holding an S-shaped neon tube which was almost intact.

  “Tire tracks. Fresh ones. There’s only one, so it must have been a motorbike. Someone else has been here,” Kiku said. The tracks ended at a movie theater that stood at the entrance to a street lined with brothels. In front hung a crooked sign saying “Piccadilly.” Kiku studied the area. There were no other tracks and no sign that the rider had made a U-turn. Hashi meanwhile was looking at half a poster that still hung under the sign for coming attractions and some publicity photos from the movie that were stuck in a crack in the theater wall. The poster, a picture of a woman, was ripped off above her eyes, leaving a nose, tongue, and jaw, and a strangely disconnected breast. The photos included one of a foreign man brandishing a revolver, a prone blonde woman gushing blood, and two ladies on horses riding into the sunset. Careful not to tear the brittle paper, Hashi brushed the sand from each and inspected it closely. Somewhere toward the middle of the pile he came across one of a nude woman, which he tried to slip into his pocket, only to have it shred into little pieces. Meanwhile, Kiku was checking the windows of the theater which had all been boarded shut.

  Suddenly, Hashi looked up and his heart stopped. Somebody was watching them from the second floor of the theater… a young man dressed only in a pair of leather pants. Kiku had seen him too. The man looked first at one boy, the
n the other, then twitched his jaw as if to say “get lost.” Petrified, the boys stood their ground, until a low voice made it plainer:

  “Get lost!”

  At this point, Hashi would have taken to his heels, but Kiku still made no move to go.

  “Kiku!” Hashi shouted, but Kiku’s eyes were fixed on the thin young man with the long beard.

  “So I finally found you,” he was muttering to himself. “This is where you’ve been. The man who’s supposed to take me up to heaven lives in the town destroyed by the spinning rocket.” But as he spoke, the man pulled his head back inside the window, and they could hear a door close somewhere.

  Kiku shook himself and shouted: “But where’s the motorbike?” There was no answer.

  “Come on, let’s go home,” said Hashi, near tears as he tugged at Kiku’s sleeve. Kiku eventually gave up, but as they rounded the corner of the theater they heard a scraping sound, and a sheet of thin corrugated metal from the second story broke away and fell to earth. Then, all of a sudden, a motorbike exploded from the hole in the wall and disappeared in a cloud of dust. The noise of the engine faded in the distance, but Kiku was sure he’d seen the rider smile as he raced by.

  When questioned by Kazuyo about the mud on their shirts, Hashi confessed that they’d gone to investigate the area around the mines. For this she scolded them at length. Didn’t they know how dangerous it was? Hadn’t she told them about the two bums who’d been bitten by snakes while picking through one of those buildings? And then there was the little boy who’d fallen down a shaft… The planks that covered the entrances were all rotted out, Kazuyo told them, and the tunnels themselves were full of gas. If you fell in, you dropped three thousand meters straight to the bottom, where you became food for all sorts of creepy bugs and snakes. And there were chemicals in the old storerooms that could eat your flesh down to the bone in a second if you happened to spill them on you, not to mention the crazy old drifters who lived in the abandoned buildings and did nasty things to little girls and most likely to little boys, too. And if something were to happen, there was nobody to help you; you could never yell loud enough to be heard back in the village. When the lecture was over, she had managed to extract a promise from Kiku and Hashi never to go near the mines again.