Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  When he got back to the room in the other bar where Kazuyo was waiting, the young guy was nowhere in sight. Kazuyo was still on the couch, but she had gone white as a sheet and was shivering. She managed to explain that soon after Kiku left she had given some money to the friendly waiter and he had vanished. Kiku would have gone to look for him, but Kazuyo kept repeating that she wanted to go back to the hotel and lie down, so he helped her to her feet and they made their way down to the street. But they couldn’t get a cab to stop. As she stood leaning against Kiku with her eyes closed, Kazuyo asked whether he had found Hashi.

  “You saw him, didn’t you?” she said in a tiny voice.

  “No, he wasn’t there,” Kiku answered.

  She nodded, then mumbled against his shoulder, “But we sure did have some fun today. Such a good movie…” Her voice trailed off and she was quiet. When Kiku asked if she was all right, she just breathed softly and unevenly on his arm.

  Cab after cab sped by, each with the “For hire” light shining in the window, but none stopped. Kiku was puzzled. Even when he frantically waved his arms, they hardly slowed down, hurtling past as if he weren’t there. There was something in the rules of the city he didn’t understand. Just how do you make contact with these people? Doesn’t seem to be money, or even force—at one point he had gone out into the traffic and waved a cab down, but when he pounded on the window and threatened to break the glass, the driver just laughed and shook his head. He had tried waving money at him and screaming that he’d pay triple the fare, but still the door hadn’t opened. As they stood by the road, Kiku could feel the strength draining from his body, as if blood were trickling from his toes. He had never felt so powerless. After about thirty minutes, by pure chance, a cab suddenly drew up and let them in, and it occurred to Kiku that he had now learned one of the rules of the city: waiting. No need to make a noise, to get violent, to run around; you just stood still, face blank, and waited—until all the energy in you had dissipated into thin air.

  Kazuyo went to bed without even getting out of her clothes. She must have caught a cold or something, Kiku thought as he pulled off her stockings and put a blanket over her. He got a damp towel to cool her forehead, and before long she was snoring a reassuring, wide-mouthed snore. Kiku decided to take a shower. As he stood under the faucet, he wondered how they managed to get the water up five floors to this bathroom. The city was full of strange things, including all those tough people who managed to live in it. He thought to himself that he would never be one of them.

  While the water ran down his body, he remembered something that Gazelle had once said to him. Why do you suppose human beings learned to make tools, Gazelle had asked. Why had they first piled up rocks? To knock them down, he’d said, answering his own question. It’s the need to destroy that makes people build things. The destroyers of this world are the chosen ones. And you’re one of them, Kiku; you’ve got the right, and when your time comes and you realize you’ve got to start busting things up, remember the magic formula: DATURA. He said it again. When you want to do it, one by one or all of them at once, DATURA’s the thing… It occurred to Kiku that if he lived in this city, he’d be saying DATURA twenty-four hours a day. A small smile curled the corners of his mouth: DATURA for the lump-man at Blind Mice; DATURA for the father and child begging in the street; DATURA for the drunk, for the taxi drivers, for the cleaning lady. DATURA for the lot of them, and he wished it weren’t just a word but something that, like the magnet, had the invisible power to “rearrange” their miserable lives.

  When he turned off the shower, someone was knocking at the door of the room. He thought perhaps Kazuyo would answer it, but when the knocking continued he dried himself quickly, put a towel around his waist, and left the bathroom. She was still asleep but no longer snoring. There was another knock, so Kiku went to the door and opened it a crack to find a foreign woman with a heavy coat draped over her shoulders despite the heat. The coat parted in the middle to reveal rich, dark breasts and, below, a darker triangle. Muttering, “DATURA,” Kiku pointed at the sleeping Kazuyo, and it was only then that he noticed something strange about the way she was lying. Watching for a moment, he realized that the blanket no longer seemed to move; she had stopped snoring—it finally sunk in—but there was no sound of any breath at all. He went over and put his hand on her hip to shake her, and immediately let go in shock; but as he did so, a naked leg snaked through the half-open door, bringing into the room the sour smell of body odor and damp wool. Distracted, he grabbed an ashtray from the nightstand and threw it at the leg. The ashtray shattered, and the leg was quickly withdrawn with a hail of incomprehensible abuse. Gathering his courage again, Kiku touched Kazuyo’s hip a second time: it felt like wood. Poking here and there, he found it all felt the same. She was obviously dead.

  Kiku decided he had to try to open her eyes, convinced for some reason that the body had gone rigid so quickly because her eyes were shut so tight. He pinched the stiff eyelids and pulled until the lids suddenly gave way, peeling back with a snap to reveal blank, staring eyeballs that seemed drier than in life. The effort he put into this made Kazuyo’s head slip off the pillow, and then the whole body began to slide over the side of the bed as if melting. Kiku managed to prop her back up, but now he found the staring eyes unnerving. Since it was clear that she was dead, he thought it would probably be better now to close them. Supporting her cheek and jaw with his left hand, he tried to push the lids down with his right, but her makeup by now was greasy, and this proved difficult. Only the eyeballs seemed to be drier than ever.

  It was then that Kiku realized for the first time that he was fumbling around with a corpse. It struck him as strange that it hadn’t bothered him before. But he still hadn’t managed to get the eyes closed; in fact, they seemed to be opening wider every minute until he wondered whether the whole face would eventually become two dry, staring eyes. Not willing to wait to find out, he stripped the sheets from the bed and wrapped the body tightly in them, binding it at the feet and waist with the belts from their bathrobes. When he had finished, he lay down on the sheetless bed, recalling something that Kazuyo had often said. The first time he’d heard it was long ago on the island one day when he woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. Opening his eyes, he’d seen Kazuyo sitting bolt upright in bed, hands on her knees, and when he asked her what she was doing, she had said bashfully that she was thinking… thinking about where and how she was likely to die.

  The white of the sheets on the body reflected the glare of the lights, so Kiku turned them off. Once it was dark, he realized how tired he was, how much he wanted to sleep. He knew he should call a doctor right away, and the police had to be notified, and Kuwayama. He really ought to do it now… but she was dead, he thought, drifting into a light sleep. In his dream, he was being trampled by a giant.

  Sunlight straggled through the gaps in the curtains, heating the sealed concrete-and-glass box where Kiku slept, soaked with sweat. Outside, the generator at the demolition site came to life and set the windows of the hotel rattling. As the wrecking ball made its first strike of the morning at the shattered building, Kiku woke from his dream with a wail. He had no idea where he was until he looked around the room and saw the shrouded figure on the bed next to him. But now it was only half white; Kazuyo’s body had apparently bled from the mouth in the night, dyeing the top half of the mummy a deep rust color and laminating the sheet to the skin so that Kiku could see every detail of the face and chest.

  He began to shake. His hands still smelled of Kazuyo’s makeup, as if her scent had lived on after her body had become a statue. The wrecking ball went on battering the building. But as his own skin broke into yet another sweat, something carefully hidden in him began to rise to the surface, and his fear from the night before changed to anger. With a sudden intensity, he was aware that he was shut up tight in a box of a room, that the heat was unbearable. He wondered how long he had been here. Since the moment he was born, it seemed, sealed inside these
gummy walls. And how long would he have to stay here? Until he too was a hard red doll draped in a sheet? Outside, concrete was being pulverized, the street was melting in the sun, the buildings panted audibly—and suddenly Kiku thought he could hear the city calling him. Not this city, not Tokyo exactly, but a vast, empty city that stretched from here to the island he’d come from, a huge, dead metropolis rising up inside his head. The vision lasted only a moment, then settled back into the real Tokyo; but the call went on, Tokyo was calling Kiku and he was listening. “Destroy me!” it was saying. “Smash everything!” Looking down from the window on the people and cars writhing in the street, Kiku felt the way he did at the moment he was attempting a pole vault. He saw his own body as he wanted it: an image of himself razing Tokyo, a visionary Kiku slaughtering every living soul, leveling every last building. He saw the city as a sea of ashes, bloodied children wandering among the few surviving birds and insects and wild dogs. And the image, for some reason, set Kiku free. Abruptly, and for the first time, he burst out of the cramped, hot, miserable box he’d been shut up in, as though bursting from an outgrown shell or castoff skin. And with liberation, memories he had kept buried began to worm their way to the surface—memories, he realized, of summer. He remembered another Kiku, one seventeen years younger, and the suffocating heat of the coin locker. He remembered how he had resisted it, had screamed at the top of his lungs, and all at once he remembered for the first time the voice that had called to him then as it was calling to him now, a voice that urged him on, urged him to revive, to escape. Then, as now, it told him: “Kill them! Destroy everything!” The voice came from somewhere down there among the people and the cars, blending with the shrill noise of the city, adding its chant to theirs: “Kill them all! Smash everything! Wipe this cesspool off the face of the earth!”

  8

  Kiku spent July 18, 1989, his seventeenth birthday, in Tokyo. At Kazuyo’s funeral, Kuwayama had done his best to persuade him to go back to the island, but he had refused. When they were scraping around among Kazuyo’s ashes collecting the bones, Kuwayama had picked out a finger-sized piece and, wrapping it in a white cloth, had handed it to him. “If you’re absolutely certain you won’t come home, at least take this,” he said. Kiku pocketed the little bundle, deciding he would show it to Hashi if he ever found him.

  There was something Kiku wanted to do: go to one of those big bookstores to check the dictionaries. He wanted to look up DATURA. He started with the dozen or so encyclopedias, but, having no luck there, he went to find a clerk.

  “What do you do when the word you’re looking for isn’t in those big reference books?” he asked.

  “Maybe it’s some sort of specialist term,” said the clerk, directing him to a row of smaller volumes divided up according to subject. Kiku plowed into these, beginning with the thickest and heaviest. It took him a whole day, but he went through the dictionaries of philosophy, psychology, law, medicine, and engineering without finding it. Whenever he came across a similar word, he made a note:

  Dachua. Minor fishing port on southern shore of Black Sea; principal industry: caviar. Local legend links children in region born with black fingernails to caviar fishery.

  Datcher, Matthew. English painter of military subjects; born suburban London, second son of a fireworks technician. Self-taught tempera artist, began painting military scenes on joining the army; produced over 2,000 works before dying in battle during Ceylon rebellion.

  datural. Anonymous choral work; Latin and German lyrics extant.

  daturany polyp. Egg-shaped tumor growing on short stem from mucous membrane in nostril; usually result of chronic inflammation. Also known as nasal bud tumor.

  Daturaz Brothers. Centrifuge manufacturer for Apollo Space project soil survey. Main facility: Arlington, Virginia.

  Eventually, the store clerk couldn’t resist asking Kiku what he was looking for.

  “DATURA,” Kiku answered. “But I don’t even know if it’s Japanese or English or what.”

  The clerk went to a shelf, pulled down an enormous English-Japanese dictionary, and turned to a thick section under “D.” He flipped through the pages for a moment, then ran his finger down a column.

  “Ah! Could be this,” he said at last. “But the pronunciation seems to be ‘Datsura’ rather than ‘Datura’… Maybe it’s either way. Says it’s a kind of plant, Datura alba, or Korean morning glory; a member of the eggplant family.”

  Kiku felt a bit let down: the magic formula for annihilating the human race, for wiping out the entire planet, was… a kind of eggplant. The clerk fished his glasses out of his pocket.

  “Hold on a second. There’s something else here in smaller print. Second definition says ‘poison.’”

  “Poison?” Kiku repeated, suddenly perking up.

  “Yep. Common name ‘Korean morning glory’; also called ‘crazy eggplant.’ Says it ‘contains alkaloids that can be poisonous, also known to cause disorientation, mood swings, even hallucinations. Cultivated in Central and South America (Sp. bolatiero) for important medicinal tropane alkaloids such as atorphine and scopolamine.’”

  “What’s all that mean?” asked Kiku.

  “Sounds like it’s poison,” muttered the clerk, sliding a thin green book out of its slipcase. Kiku made out the words “Compendium of Psychoactive Drugs” on the spine. The clerk thumbed through the index.

  “Ah, here it is. Listed under ‘Gabaniazid: an anti-depressant developed in the United States in 1984 as a result of a search for a more powerful stimulant when commonly used mood enhancers, principally iproniazid, proved ineffective with a rapidly increasing population of depressive patients. Classified research on MAO inhibitors, a family of anti-depressants, and a third mood enhancer led to the development of gabaniazid; the drug was brought out by a multinational known as Greer Pharmaceutical, which declined to reveal its constituent ingredients but marketed the product as a powerful, non-addictive mood enhancer with no noticeable side effects. The product was an immediate and conspicuous success.’ Seems it was six months before they began to notice something was wrong: ‘Psychiatrists in England found that patients receiving large doses tended to lose self-control and often became violent, and they demanded that Greer reveal the contents of the drug. Greer refused, citing corporate privacy rights, but after it was discovered that the defendants in three separate murder cases in the United States had been undergoing treatment with gabaniazid, a Senate hearing was convened. A Dr. Goldman from the U.K. testified that he believed Greer was using a diluted form of a military toxin called DATURA as the principal ingredient in gabaniazid, something that had been rumored since the introduction of the drug but never proven. Goldman, however, revealed the results of his experiments with two groups of rats, one injected with diluted DATURA and the other with large doses of gabaniazid. Both groups exhibited violent behavior quite uncharacteristic of rats.’ The result of the hearings: Greer admitted to using DATURA in its drug and pulled it from the market; later it was rumored that a U.S. navy officer in charge of biological weaponry was arrested for allowing a chemical agent to get into private hands. Sounds like your DATURA is some kind of weapon,” the clerk concluded, closing the book.

  The street outside was jammed with people as Kiku emerged with The Compendium of Psychoactive Drugs tucked under his arm (the clerk had slipped a red bookmark in at the entry for gabaniazid). It was nine days since Kazuyo had died, seven since Kuwayama had gone back to the island with the bones. Having run out of money, Kiku checked out of the hotel and stood staring through frosted display windows at rows and mounds of food; at least no one would ever starve to death in this city, he lied to himself. The streets were clogged with cars and the occasional giant truck shaking the sidewalks. The whole scene made him think of the model of the human body that had stood in the corner of the science classroom at school. The physiological systems and organs mapped out on the dummy were just like those of the city: the raw materials flowing into the city were food coming down the throat; p
ower plants were the city’s lungs, and government offices and businesses were the digestive system, absorbing all available resources; the wires strung everywhere were the nervous system, streets were veins and arteries, and the people, cells; the harbor was a gaping mouth, and the runway out at the airport, a tongue.

  Kiku climbed the stairs of a pedestrian overpass and looked around; Tokyo was a mass of concrete in all directions, as far as the eye could see in the smoggy haze. The cluster of skyscrapers, thirteen in all, loomed up in front of him like great towered fortresses rather than office buildings. Now and then, the sun reflecting on the walls of glass transformed them into tall pillars of light, the shafts of searchlights in daytime, drawing him toward them. So he set out in that direction, mumbling to himself that even they would soon be full of stray dogs.

  He walked for quite a while, yet the buildings were still the same height, still leaning over him but apparently no closer. Distances were deceptive when dealing with towers. The road, though, was changing, getting narrower as he came to a shopping district filled with the smells of dinnertime. The sidewalks here were so crowded that people spilled over into the street, stopping traffic. Kiku moved past a woman yelling at a driver who had apparently nearly hit her child; her voice was accompanied by a chorus of honking horns from the cars backed up behind them. The driver, having heard enough, jammed his car in gear in mid-insult, and traffic began flowing again; but the mother, refusing to give up, ran after him. As she ran, lemons rolled out of her shopping basket and into the street to be crushed under the wheels of oncoming cars. A sour yellow smell followed Kiku as he walked away, wishing the book under his arm contained DATURA itself and not just its definition. Suddenly, he turned and pretended to lob the book, like a grenade, into the crowd. It exploded with a rumbling blast at the back of Kiku’s throat, as the woman scrambled around trying to retrieve the lemons. She stopped only long enough to slap her child, who began to wail.