Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  “Hashi!” he yelled into the sudden silence. “Come on! I’ve got a car waiting. Let’s go home.”

  Hashi appeared between the photographers, his face barely visible, backlit by the huge lights, but Kiku could see that he was waving.

  “Kiku, come over here a minute. There’s somebody I want you to meet,” he said.

  Kiku advanced into the pool of staring eyes and artificial daylight surrounded by high steel frames holding black boxes. It was the boxes that made all the light. Staring into one of them, he felt dizzy, his vision became a yellow blur, and for a moment he was nearly blind. When he could see again, he noticed that D was standing nearby with the tall woman who had been on TV with Hashi. The announcer had lit a cigarette. And there was one more woman there, someone he didn’t recognize, who for some reason was crouching on the ground and trying to cover her face with her sweater. She was shaking, her skirt and boots were covered with mud, and she refused to look up even though the lights were focused mainly in her direction. There were four television cameras, Kiku noticed, two rigged up on the scaffolding, one on a dolly next to the announcer, and a hand-held one circulating through the crowd. D stared long and hard at Kiku, then mumbled something to himself that sounded like “Damned if they don’t look alike.”

  When he got to where Hashi was standing, Kiku could see that his eyes were moist, and he waited for the familiar “Thank you” he’d heard so many times after a rescue. Instead, Hashi pointed at the woman cowering under her sweater and said:

  “Kiku, that’s your mother.”

  Kiku had no idea what he was talking about.

  “I went to see that old lady writer I saw on TV. She told me my mother died last year, so this has to be your mother!”

  The announcer took this as his cue to run up to the woman: “Mrs. Numata, your son is here—the real one, this time. Please, say something to him. He’s come specially to meet you, and I must say, he looks just like you. A big, healthy kid, a fine young man. Come on, you must have something to say to your own son after all these years. He’s an athlete, apparently. Won’t you at least have a look at him? Here he is, standing right here, the baby you left in a coin locker seventeen years ago. I’m sure he’s come here to forgive you. Please…” The man holding the portable camera swooped in on Kiku for a closeup only to be shoved back as he tried to force his way out of the shimmering ring of people closing like a noose around him. Dozens of clicking cameramen pressed in to block his way.

  “Get back, please,” he told them, his voice beginning to waver. “I’m leaving now.” His mind was set on heading back to Anemone’s apartment, but something else, not quite a thought and not yet a memory, began to twitch somewhere inside his head. Something metallic—silver it was—and heavy and shining, something that had been buried in the walls of his brain, began to heat up, to hum and whirr. Suddenly feeling sick, he closed his eyes, but on the back of his eyelids he saw a rubber doll with red liquid dribbling from its mouth; a doll with Kazuyo’s stiffened thighs. Stop looking at me! Let me out of here! Shut off that light and let me go home now! As he opened his eyes, an eddy of snow blew past and for a moment everything was blurred again. The first thing to come back into focus in the field of white was the shivering sweater woman. They’re saying that’s my mother? To him she was like a figure in a nightmare. The stiff, ungainly body trembling in the snow might have been every feeling of dread, every sense of loathing he’d ever had—covered with a sweater. She was hardly human, more like some… blob… of metal. His eyes had started to ache, strafed by the light from the black boxes overhead. He could feel his eyeballs drying in their sockets, and the focus was beginning to go again, beginning to form the familiar gap between left and right. That was where the colors always appeared, bright primary colors, and from the gap they started to spread. They poured into the eyes of the people standing around him, and onto their cheeks and lips and down their necks. Now I know what’s going on, Hashi. You’ve cooked up one of your little model worlds—and you got me here by pretending to cry. Kiku’s whole field of vision now was filled with a blazing white metal wheel which threw off shards of light as it began to turn, glowing shards that cut deep into one’s skin. As the wheel picked up speed, Kiku could hear the whirring noise it made.

  When the TV cameraman crept up again, close enough to touch his pale face, Kiku let out a scream and drew the third shotgun.

  “Get back!” D bellowed. The cameraman dived out of the way just as the gun went off, and the lens turned to powder, sifting down into the snow. His back heaving, Kiku tossed the empty gun aside and took out the last one.

  “Stop this,” a voice said. “Please.”

  Kiku spun around. It was the woman; the sweater was no longer covering her head and she was looking straight at him.

  “Please, stop,” she said again. “If you’re going to shoot someone,” she said quietly, “shoot me.” She was standing now and walking slowly toward him.

  I’m trapped! Trapped in a dome of light! Got to break out! Got to smash the light! Kiku took aim at the brilliant shards and pulled the trigger. For one instant, the big woman was standing directly in his path, her head level with the mouth of the barrel. A second later, her face had been ripped away and her arms spread open as she collapsed into the same crouch as before, covered now with what might have been a bright red sweater. Her head was just a smooth globe with no trace of eyes, nose, lips, ears, or hair. The globe tilted up at Kiku, and a muddy red pool drank in the snowflakes from the sky, giving back a fine, faint steam.

  19

  Her bags packed, Anemone fried up the last omelette, dumped it out on the one remaining plate, and shoveled it into her mouth with the final fork. How many omelettes had she made since that night he’d told her not to open her present until he got back? She’d broken her promise and opened the package, and since then she’d eaten almost nothing but eggs—omelettes three meals a day.

  The police had called Anemone in for questioning on seven separate occasions, each time with something new to ask. “Did he tell you where he got the guns?” “Was he carrying them when he left your apartment on Christmas Eve?” “What did he say he was going to do when he left?” “Did he say he was going to kill someone?” “What was he doing that night before he left your apartment?” “When did you first meet him?” “How would you describe your relationship with the accused?” “Are you sexually involved?” “How old are you?” “Is Anemone your real name?” She refused to give them any information, but the interrogation never really got heavy; she only had to smile sadly and they broke off the session. It seemed that she wasn’t the most important witness anyway.

  Then there was the lawyer D had hired for Kiku; he’d been around several times asking her to testify at the trial. “Miss Anemone,” he’d said, “Hashio Kuwayama says he’s convinced that Kiku was only trying to save him, to help him avoid meeting his mother in front of a TV camera. Does that make sense to you? Was there anything Kiku said before he left that might have given you that idea? ‘I’m off to help Hashi’ or something like that? If you did hear something of that sort, it would be very much to Kiku’s advantage.” Still, Anemone refused to cooperate.

  “But why won’t you help us?” the lawyer wanted to know.

  “Because I hate all this legal bullshit,” she told him.

  When Anemone first saw Kiku again in court, she remembered that he’d spent a couple of days in a mental hospital for observation. From the look of him, she thought they might have done more than just observe, maybe tampered with his brain or something. The boy who stood in the dock was a bundle of nerves, fidgeting and rolling his eyes. His back was hunched and he seemed to have gained some weight. His dull, dry eyes stole rapid, anxious glances around the room. Anemone, who had dressed down to avoid attracting attention, watched from the spectators’ gallery as the prosecutor read the charges: illegal possession of firearms, willful destruction of property, assault and battery, and first-degree murder. Kiku tried to say some
thing to the bailiff, but when the judge warned him to be quiet and listen to the indictment, he shrank back in his seat.

  In the aftermath of the shooting, Kiku had become something of a celebrity. Though as a minor his name and photograph weren’t supposed to appear in print, he had done the deed on live, nationwide TV, with thirteen minutes’ worth of closeups of his face and an announcer shrieking “We are here with Kikuyuki Kuwayama, athlete and adopted brother of the pop singer Hashi.” The news reports dubbed him “Youth A,” the first person ever to commit murder on live TV, and thanks to the notoriety he attracted, Hashi’s new record, rushed to the stores a month later, was a huge hit.

  The trial did not get underway until some time later, after the fuss had died down a bit. When the indictment was finished, though, Kiku immediately pleaded guilty to all the charges, bringing his attorney running to the prisoner’s dock and sending a buzz through the gallery. The man whispered in his ear, trying to persuade him to plead innocent to the murder charge. For a few minutes, Kiku shook his head, but in the end he reluctantly stood up and said “I didn’t mean to kill her,” which, though sounding like a puppet’s voice, made his lawyer, the spectators, the judge, and even the prosecutor look relieved.

  The defense case took three days to present. Kiku’s lawyer did not contest any of the other charges, but insisted that there was no premeditation on his client’s part, in fact no murderous intent at all. His strategy was to argue that Kiku had been unable to bear the idea that his dearest friend—indeed, his brother—was to be made a spectacle of on TV, and had committed the assault in a state of severe emotional distress. Angling for a reduced sentence, he called various witnesses, who adopted much the same tone as that of the media reports, one sympathetic to Kiku’s plight. His foster father came from the island, joined by the nuns from the orphanage, to testify to the utter inseparability of the two boys, a story that left the gallery in tears. And, after them, an unusually candid Mr. D took the stand.

  “If there’s anyone to blame here, it’s me,” he announced. “I’m the one who should be on trial. This whole thing started when I got the bright idea of cashing in on Hashi’s background to sell records. I’d be the first to admit it wasn’t the kind of thing one human being should do to another, and I guess I must look pretty much like a monster—guess I am one. You just don’t go around playing with other people’s pain to sell some lousy records… Anyway, it seems to me there’s nothing very strange about young Kiku here coming to the rescue of his little brother.”

  Kiku made no secret of where the shotguns had come from, which Hashi was called on to corroborate: “Yes, he was keeping them for a Filipino named Tatsuo de la Cruz.” The last witness for the defense was the coroner who had performed the autopsy on the body of Kimie Numata. He was asked specifically about the wound in her skull. From the angle of entry, he had determined that the barrel of the gun at the time it was fired was somewhere between fourteen and twenty-eight degrees above horizontal. In other words, the evidence showed that Kiku had fired virtually into the air, probably due to the violent emotion he was experiencing.

  “And so, just as Kikuyuki fired the gun, Kimie Numata—who was an unfortunately tall woman—stumbled in front of the barrel,” his lawyer concluded. “There was no intent to injure. The barrel, as we have shown, was pointed skyward, endangering no one—not the reporters, not the photographers, no one. What we have here is a tragic accident, pure and simple.” Kiku squirmed uncomfortably and began to shiver as the coroner went over the X-rays of the dead woman’s skull; wincing at particularly gruesome details, he closed his eyes and tried to cover his ears. Eventually he burst into tears. Cutting short the coroner’s testimony, the judge ordered a thirty-minute recess, and Kiku was led out, back bent and hands covering his face. No one in the courtroom seemed to doubt his suffering.

  When the prosecutor started to make his case, it quickly became apparent that he wouldn’t even try to prove Kiku had intended to commit murder. He made no attempt to discredit the defense witnesses, settling for a brief review of the highlights of the case which took less than half a day. The only point he hadn’t raised before was that the gun Kiku used was, in fact, a lethal weapon. When he was done, everyone in the courtroom, Kiku included, seemed somehow relieved and satisfied with the way things had gone. Everyone, that is, except Anemone.

  The defense proceeded with its summing-up:

  “I am the first to recognize that we must be wary of allowing ourselves to be swayed by the drama of this case. The law, and rightly so, must ignore the complex fabric of human history and psychology that serves as a backdrop to these events. The law must be applied sternly and with the evenest of hands. Nevertheless, when I think of the very origin of that self-same law, namely, an abiding respect for human life, I can’t help feeling that the fault here lies not with this young man but with the society that each and every one of us has helped to create. Make no mistake about it, seventeen years ago when he was abandoned, completely helpless, in that coin locker, the young man who stands before you today as defendant was himself already a victim. Which is not, I hasten to say, a justification for his actions in the present case; yet we must bear in mind that those actions—heinous as they may be—spring from nothing more reprehensible than the desire to help a brother who had shared similar sorrow and shame. In the final analysis, it is manifestly clear that this tragic accident in no way demonstrates the defendant’s disregard for the sanctity of human life, but rather just the opposite.”

  The prosecutor insisted that it was the responsibility of the court to examine the nature of the crime and not the particular circumstances of the criminal:

  “It should be said here once and for all: it is not—it must not—be in the power of this court to grant clemency on the basis of a defendant’s unfortunate personal history. However, I would be the first to recognize that this was a crime brought about in large part by the desire of others to gain profit from the revelation of secrets which those involved might quite reasonably have preferred to leave undisclosed…”

  On the day the court’s decision was to be announced, Kiku was as nervous as he had been throughout the trial. He sat trembling in his chair, his eyes roaming the room. The verdict was much as expected: he was found guilty of possession of firearms, willful destruction of property, and assault and battery, while the first-degree murder charge was reduced to manslaughter in the absence of any demonstrable premeditation or intent on Kiku’s part. For these crimes, he was sentenced to five years. When the court had adjourned, the crowd stood to leave. Mr. D shook hands with Kiku’s lawyer. The prosecutor was smiling, and glancing around a bit sheepishly, as if to let everyone know how difficult he had found his role in the whole affair. And Hashi buried his face on Neva’s shoulder as she stroked his head.

  “He’ll be out in three years, no more, I promise. And then he can come live with us,” she whispered.

  The bailiff had taken Kiku by the arm and was leading him out of the room. As she watched, Anemone began to get a choking feeling in her chest. At first she thought it was the bad air in the courthouse, and she tried clearing her throat; opening her mouth, she placed her fingers along her delicate neck and forced air through her nose and teeth. But instead of the cough she expected, she produced a shrill wail.

  “Kiku!” she cried, leaning out from the spectators’ gallery and waving her white beret. “What about the DATURA? You can’t let them do this to you!” The other spectators stopped in their tracks and turned to stare at this doll-like figure in her snow-white suit and boots, neon brooch in the shape of a rose, and shining cap of tight, frosted curls. Kiku was the last to turn. The word DATURA had made him flinch.

  “We’re not through with this yet!” she screamed. He smiled at her for just a moment, standing up straight for the first time since the trial began, until the bailiff gave him a little shove and he stumbled through the door. He was still wearing the black suit she’d bought him for their Christmas dinner, though it was sli
ghtly the worse for wear, with buttons missing, cuffs frayed, and shiny patches at the knees and elbows. When she lost sight of him, Anemone headed for the exit, ignoring the stares of the crowd. Behind her she could hear Hashi’s voice talking about poor Kiku, how bad he must feel. At the door to the courtroom, she turned and eyed the friends of the defendant murderously, settling on Neva’s hollow face.

  “Someday you’ll be Gulliver’s supper,” she muttered at her.

  That night, Anemone opened Kiku’s Christmas present, the cookbook called All about Omelettes. Kiku had drawn a red circle around the recipe for Rice Omelettes on page 182. So she went out and bought a couple of hundred eggs and began to practice; and, except when she had to go shopping for more ingredients, she made rice omelettes from the time she got up in the morning to the time she went to bed, until the apartment was awash in eggs and ketchup and rice. When every horizontal surface, her bed excepted, was covered with the stuff, Anemone stopped to look around, laughed a moment at her own looniness, and then burst into tears.

  When she was through crying, she took the nearest plate and flung it against the map of Garagi Island on the wall. With the sound of it breaking, an image of Kiku’s naked body appeared before her eyes, his hard muscles covered with only a paper-thin layer of skin, and suddenly she was seized with the thought that she might have touched that body for the last time. She began to shake and tears came welling up again, though she thought she hadn’t any left in her to cry. I guess I’ll just go crazy, she decided. Instead, she took off her underpants and put her finger between her buns the way Kiku used to do. It felt cold, and she was covered with gooseflesh, but she dug her fingernail into the soft flesh and kept it there until she had stopped shivering. Finally, something began to ooze inside, and she slowly slid the finger along her ass, grabbing a nylon from beside her on the bed to stuff in behind it. Listening to the slurpy sound of the stocking in her pubic hair and the sour juice that was flowing freely now, she drew the outline of his hard-on in her mind, remembering how the real thing had always reminded her of steamed asparagus. But it didn’t work. She ended up seeing only the asparagus, or else her father’s penis which she’d seen long ago in the bath. She gave up on the cock, having better luck picturing the thick patch of hair on his chest, the deep folds of muscle across his stomach, the broad sinews down his side, and the calluses on the soles of his feet. But just as she’d worked her finger into her crotch, she realized she had completely forgotten what his face looked like, and she jumped out of bed wailing. With the stocking still hanging out of her, she waded through the swamp of ketchup-flavored rice, grabbed a framed picture of Kiku from the table, and stood staring at it. It took all of thirty seconds for her to make up her mind: she would have to follow him.