Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  As Neva entered the room, the four employees stopped what they were doing to greet her.

  “Where’s the boss?” she asked one of them.

  “He’s just gone out for a sec,” said a young woman with a ribbon tied around her bangs in an odd-looking clump. Telling them to go find him, Neva sat down on a couch. Hashi stood behind her. A few minutes later, a heavyset man in a baseball uniform bustled sweatily into the shop. The letter “P” was embroidered on his cap, and he had a mustache. After wiping his face and lighting a cigarette, he turned to Neva.

  “This the kid?” he asked her, one eye drifting shut.

  “This is the one,” she said, rising from the couch to run her fingers through Hashi’s hair. She showed the man some of her sketches, and he produced several thick, worn books of his own from the back of the shop. Flipping through the pages, he stopped and pointed at one. Neva nodded. When Hashi asked whose picture it was, the man answered in a high, fluty voice: “Brian Jones at seventeen.”

  First they washed his hair, for which the fat man changed the regular nozzle on the hose for an old, rusty brass one. As he rinsed Hashi’s head, he explained that he’d stolen it from the bathroom in a hotel room where Rudolph Valentino had once stayed.

  “It’s a lucky charm. I always say with performers ‘Your hair is your trademark…’ So, D’s calling you his ‘Beggar Prince.’ What’s he mean by that?”

  “…”

  While his hair was being cut, Hashi studied Neva in the mirror. Her eyes and eyebrows were somehow suspended on the surface of her oval face; her lips were pencil thin. Like women must have looked during the war, he thought. She wore a sober, navy blue suit, slightly wrinkled flesh-tone stockings, and high heels, and she carried a heavy-looking purse. Put a little headband on her and get her to stand up straight and salute, and she’d fit right in on any battlefield, he thought, smiling to himself. His eyes met hers in the mirror as she was sawing at her teeth with a piece of dental floss, and he noticed that the hand holding the floss was that of an old woman, wrinkled, dry, and blotchy.

  Next they went to a fancy hotel with a fountain in the lobby, where Neva ordered Hashi’s costumes, five identical sets, from a shop in the basement: five black satin blouson jackets and five pairs of toreador pants with little bows down the sides. Since they had a photo session later, she explained, they wanted the silk shirts altered on the spot. While they were waiting, the manager, an older gay man, told Neva the story of a trip he’d taken the month before to a South Pacific island in the company of a male actor. He repeated the same details over and over: how they had gone deep-sea fishing and the actor got so excited when he was about to land a swordfish that he’d sprained his ankle and nearly fallen overboard; how the locals made fun of him; how they’d smoked the thing and had a party; how they’d forced him to be the floor show, making him stick a neon bulb up his bum and do an imitation of a phosphorescent fish—that kind of thing. Neva nodded at all the right places in the story and managed to talk him into a five percent discount.

  “From now on, you’ve got to pay attention to how you look,” she said when they were back in the car. As he stared at the ravaged hands clutching the wheel, Hashi felt they belonged to someone else. “You’ve got to be fashion-conscious,” she was saying. “Fashion is the silliest, vainest game there is, which is exactly why it’s so much fun. Do you know what clothes and makeup are for? Why we put them on? It’s simple: just to take them off, to have something to strip away in order to feel naked. Clothes are there to make other people think about what they can’t see. But that, of course, is the great joke, because when you strip off the clothes and wash off all that makeup, what do you have? Zero, that’s what. But then again, that’s the fun of it, don’t you think?” She laughed for the first time since they’d met.

  Hashi’s publicity stills were to be shot on a set that consisted of a large-scale model of the city, complete with Tokyo Tower. Since they had some work to do on the model, he went to have a look at some of the other studios while they were getting it ready. In the first, sumo wrestlers were waltzing with pregnant women in a plastic watermelon patch. The melons were fitted with blinking lights. A young man with a megaphone explained that they were shooting a commercial for a tranquilizer.

  In the studio next door, an orangutan waving an American flag was hanging from the turret of a tank, but as the cameras started to roll, the monkey dropped off. The trainer tried to coax it back up with a lump of sugar, making a muffled apology about the lights probably being too bright. They decided to lower the lights until the orangutan was in position and then turn them up as shooting started, but when the lights dimmed, the ape let out a long, low screech. In the dark, the trainer did what he could, wrapping one of the monkey’s hands around the gun turret and the other around the little flag, but as the lights came up several of the women on the set screamed: the flag was nowhere to be seen, and the hairy little hand held a swollen monkey penis which it was vigorously pumping. As Hashi stood there laughing, Neva came up from behind to tell him that they were almost ready on the set. The smile faded from his lips when he saw her glance at the penis, a troubled look showing on her face.

  As they walked back to the studio, they passed twin girls in swimsuits with baskets of fruit balanced on their heads. The girls glistened all over with some sort of oil, and they were crying. One had a thermometer in her mouth. After them came a man, apparently their manager, screaming “Tits! All the asshole wants is tits! Tits, tits, tits!” The strong smell that came from the girls as they passed made Hashi turn, and as he did so, a melon fell from one girl’s basket and split at her feet, showering bright red toenails with flesh and seeds. While the manager was wiping her feet, she noticed Hashi staring at her and smiled, thermometer and all. Hashi did not return the smile.

  That night Hashi drank for the first time in his life. The photo session had run three hours over schedule, ending well past midnight, and after taking him to dinner Neva invited him to a bar on the top floor of a tall building. Hashi said he was worn out from smiling so much and following the photographer’s orders, and she suggested that he have a drink. He hesitated, instinctively hating anything to do with alcohol from years of Kuwayama’s nightly drinking. After a few drinks, this usually quiet man would get loud and talkative; it also made his piss stink, Hashi remembered. He would drone on about how much he had suffered, about the joys and sorrows in life, and in the end he would start to cry and break into an old mining song. That was as much as Hashi knew about liquor.

  Neva, who had already had several whiskeys, called the waiter over, and he came back almost immediately with a clear drink garnished with several slices of lemon.

  “This’ll be good for your nerves,” she told him. His tongue was numb after the first sip.

  Neva’s cigarette butts piled up in the ashtray, the filters smudged with red. When she reached for the one she was still smoking, Hashi noticed the thin, ruined fingers and remembered that he wanted to ask her what had happened to her hands.

  “Mind if I ask you a question?” he said, downing the rest of his drink. “Your hands…” he managed to get out before a fit of coughing shook him, making him feel as if burning sand were being poured down his throat and then shoveled out of his stomach. Neva laughed as she patted his back. At about the time the cough subsided, the alcohol began to take effect; the noise around them receded into the distance, while Neva herself seemed painfully real and close. Hashi ordered another drink and drained it, this time without coughing. Neva applauded, but his head had started to pound before he put down the glass, and he decided not to ask again about her hands.

  Now he was staring at the way her smooth, plump ankles arched down into her patent leather shoes as if by suction. He thought it was beautiful. Next he studied her lips and the cigarette silhouetted in the dim bar light. The waiter came over to empty the ashtray, and Hashi noticed that Neva seemed to hide her hands from him. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed by all the sadness in the world,
by the thought that there was no such thing as happiness, and as he struggled to keep from weeping, his mood slowly changed, gradually becoming more like rage. This beautiful woman, he thought, this woman who slaved all day for me—the hair, the clothes, the photo session—this woman who had kept a straight face while she haggled over the price of silk shirts, this woman sitting here sipping her whiskey, with her elegant legs, her soft lips, and her shrewd eyes that turned sweet when she laughed, this wonderful woman was miserable all on account of her wrinkled hands. I just can’t let it happen, he thought… Still, there was nothing he could do to prevent her unhappiness, no way he knew of fixing her hands. If only he could, if only he were some kind of magician and could make them young again. He’d do anything to help her. He’d give her anything he had, the shirts, Kazuyo’s bone, his voice, anything. He was surprised himself how angry it made him, so surprised he sat for a moment, stunned.

  Noticing that Hashi was beginning to behave oddly, Neva tried to get him to drink some water, but he dumped it on the floor, grabbed her hand, and burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry I can’t do anything for you,” he sobbed, “I’m so sorry.” His whole body shook as he looked around for some way to release his sorrow; but just when there seemed no hope of finding one, his eye fell on the pianist who had been playing, rather badly, the whole time. Still clutching Neva’s hand, he began shouting insults across the room in his direction.

  “Look what you’ve done! Your playing is so shitty you’ve made her hands shrivel up! You’ve made everybody miserable. Whoever wrote that tune worked his ass off to make it good, to come up with a few notes that would keep people from getting lonely, remind them of old friends or whatever, and look what you’ve done to it.” As he finished his speech, he saw himself producing Tatsuo’s shotgun from out of nowhere and blowing the pianist’s head to bits. It was about the only thing he could think of doing for Neva.

  Then he stood up, suddenly and resolutely.

  “OK. Now I’m going to save the beautiful Neva from all you fuckers,” he announced, moving toward the piano. When she tried to stop him, he shook her off and, grabbing a whiskey bottle, took a swing at the piano player… and missed, slamming the bottle on the keyboard in a grotesque chord of breaking glass, gushing whiskey, and Hashi spewing his gutful of dinner and cocktails. For a moment the bar was deathly silent, then broke into an uproar. In the midst of this commotion, Neva and a waiter ran over to try to calm Hashi down, but before they could reach him, he screamed in a voice that threatened to split the building down the middle:

  “DON’T TOUCH ME!”

  After that, he crouched on all fours while the other waiters, who had started cleaning up, apologized to disgruntled customers. The pianist, still muttering about the maniac with the bottle, stood next to Neva, who seemed a bit lost. Neva, though, was the first to hear it. Then the piano player seemed to prick up his ears. The waiters stopped sweeping and the customers froze in their tracks. Everything became absolutely still: Hashi was singing.

  On his knees, his eyes shut tight, he had started humming like a bird; and soon the hum began to grow into a tune, but one that nobody there had heard before. It was “The St. Vitus’s Blues.”

  Whatever it was, it made Neva break out in gooseflesh. The sound appeared to be coming through a sheer membrane woven from some incredibly fine animal hair. It didn’t flow through the room; it seemed instead to envelop the bar like a shroud. The tune was nearly inaudible, but it refused to die away, attaching itself to the skin and creeping in through the pores to mingle with the blood. And anything left over collected in the air, becoming thick and palpable. When the air had become as sticky as jam, Neva could feel the song beginning to probe her brain, reviving a memory of something long forgotten. She fought off the memory as long as she could, until a scene suddenly floated into her head: a city at dusk, the sky still glowing orange behind the mountains in the distance; everything else faded to a deep blue, broken only by the lights of a train speeding across town.

  As the train passed, she shook her head and looked around at the bar where she’d been a moment ago. Not a soul was moving. The pianist sat holding his head in his hands, slowly swaying back and forth. Realizing she had to put a stop to this, she made her way over to Hashi and cupped her hand over his mouth. Startled, he bit her and rolled around furiously for a moment. And just before he passed out, he murmured to her: “Useless—got no guts.”

  13

  Not wanting to go back to the apartment D had rented for him, Hashi walked off the effects of drink on the damp streets and thought about Neva. She was thirty-eight, he had learned, and had lost both breasts to cancer, making her a woman from the waist down only—but his first woman. He had no idea why he’d gone hard when he saw her naked; he never had before with a woman. It might have been because her chest was flat, or the way her warm, firm tongue had probed the pucker between his legs, or maybe just that he was drunk. He didn’t much mind the rain now, he just wanted to walk. Anyway, it had almost stopped, and the clouds, having split down the middle, were streaming off to the east. When the sky was like this, Hashi knew from experience, it was going to clear up.

  He knew about rain because he had prayed for it so often back in junior high school, heavy rain being the only thing that could rescue him from gym class. On days when he was scheduled for gym, he had spent most of his time thinking about rain. And of all the sports to be dreaded, the worst was gymnastics, mostly because he was the only boy in his class who couldn’t do a backflip on the high bar. But what made it particularly hard to take was that Kiku, who was always the best in the class, had to witness his failure. Once, when gym class threatened, Hashi had gone to considerable trouble to perform a Central American Indian rain-making spell he had read about in a book. The spell involved hanging the bodies of mice under the eaves of the house, so he went to the abandoned mining town and caught a cageful. For Hashi, the hardest part of the spell was drowning the mice, and it occurred to him that if it didn’t rain after all this, he was sure to be punished for such a gruesome crime. He hated himself, but he also couldn’t think of any way to escape P.E. without a little self-hatred. And, on balance, he hated the high bar more than he hated himself.

  The twelve tiny corpses were hung beneath the eaves on pieces of thin wire, a job that strained his nerves to the point of collapse. As he worked, he had been thinking up an excuse for when the mice were discovered, and he decided eventually to say that it was some sort of biology experiment. When he was done and stood back to look, Hashi had the feeling that the mice could grant him anything he wished—maybe even the ability to do a backflip. And as he stood watching the mice swinging against a clear blue sky, he had really believed that thick black clouds would be coming over the horizon at any moment.

  A minute or two had passed when he heard the cry of birds and saw the shadow of wings wheeling over the yard. A dozen hawks circled briefly before settling on the roof. Hashi tried throwing stones at them for a while, but then gave up and watched quietly as the hawks rose up from the roof in unison, stalled above the house to sight their prey, and then fell from the sky. A single pass was enough: they left only spindly gray tails dangling from the wires like drips of water suspended in the air.

  Tokyo in the rain lacked definition. Instead of clear reflections, the puddles gave the passing nightwalker a muddied, warped image. Earlier, Hashi had stood at the window, watching the tiny drops on the pane.

  “Rain always makes me feel as though I should be remembering something,” he’d said as Neva came up behind him, fastening her padded bra.

  “Hashi, it’s OK for now to remember, but when you get famous, you’ve got to forget all about the past. You have to forget who you are. Once you’ve made it, you can’t think about where you came from; it’ll make you crazy if you do. You wouldn’t be the first.”

  Hashi wandered without paying much attention where he was going, and before he quite realized it he was at the entrance to the tunnel that led t
o Toxitown. It was nearly dawn and The Market was at last quieting down. The makeshift bars had closed, and the prostitutes who hadn’t gone home with a customer sat on the curb among litter and broken glass and cigarette butts. A foreign woman was changing into running shoes, and two others were doing deep knee bends; after standing around all night on the street, you would stiffen up if you didn’t stretch before going home. It was no fun, Hashi knew, waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the day with leg cramps. Then, all the curtains and shutters in the world couldn’t keep out the daylight, and there was no getting back to sleep.

  As Hashi watched, one of the women staggered and fell—apparently a broken heel—ripping her skirt and unceremoniously exposing her crotch. She was not wearing underwear.

  “Pardon me, honey,” said a ghostly male prostitute standing nearby, “but looks to me like somebody’s been using your pussy as an ashtray.” The woman ignored the remark and, without making any effort to cover herself, worked intently on her broken heel. After a few minutes, however, she gave up and, throwing the shoe as hard as she could, started limping away. The single heel made a rhythmic clicking on the pavement until she finally realized one shoe was useless as she reached the end of the tunnel. She came to a stop, then kicked the remaining shoe high in the air. Walking out of the tunnel barefoot, she stretched out her arms, palms up, and tilted back her head. The rain had stopped. As she disappeared into the light, she passed a boy racing in on a bike loaded with cartons of yogurt to sell to the hookers after their long night of work, a night in The Market that came to an end as a dozen hands slowly wiped the sticky white liquid from around weary mouths.