Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  The next day she sold the condo and just about everything in it—jewelry, tennis rackets, everything—and put the proceeds in seven different bank accounts around the city; the deposits together came to just over two hundred million yen. She told her parents she was going to London, and then phoned the modeling agency to tell them she was breaking her contract. In return for letting her out four months early, she offered to forego the payment she still had coming from the previous year. No trouble there.

  Now, her bags all packed, she sat eating the last of the omelettes. Gulliver waited below, his tail curled to fit inside the tank that occupied most of the rear of her remodeled ’87 Ford Bronco. She had wavered over whether to take him, but in the end it had been impossible to do anything else. “You’ll only be stuck in there ten hours or so,” she told him as she loaded enough diving gear for two and a small bag containing clothes into what remained of the cargo space. “Then we’ll get to see Kiku. You miss him as much as I do, don’t you, fella?” At three in the morning, the Ford rolled out of Tokyo.

  She headed north on the Tohoku Expressway. The jail where Kiku was being sent was in the harbor town of Hakodate at the end of the highway and across a narrow strait. Anemone’s foot, shod in a red satin Chinese slipper with a design of cabbage flowers done in gold thread, maintained an even pressure on the gas pedal. The Bronco purred along at 130 kph, 4500 rpms. Anemone was whistling. As yet it hadn’t hit her that she was leaving Tokyo behind; every light in the city still lingered in the fibers of her gold lame shirt.

  Anemone hated traveling; in fact, up till now she had only made one other long journey in her life. That had been her middle school class trip: four days and three nights in Kyoto and Nara. At the first hotel, she had eaten three times more than she was used to and talked all night with her friends. After that, she slept through the rest of the journey on the bus. She knew they were supposed to have toured some old buildings and gardens, but she could hardly remember anything about them. All she registered, in a vague, physical way, was the motion, the moving from place to place. Collapsed in her seat, from time to time she’d been woken by the noise and vibration; and through a tiny crack in her eyelids, she would check the view out the window, which invariably had changed from the last time she had checked. The scene would fade, and in the distance lights would come on. So this is traveling, she remembered thinking at the time. Why bother, if that’s all it’s got to offer?

  She kept her foot on the gas pedal, watching the way the headlights would pick out a patch of darkness, freeze it in an instant of daylight, and then send it hurtling back into oblivion. The sliver of ghost-gray road streaming out ahead was growing imperceptibly lighter; it would soon be dawn. Deciding she should stop for gas and something to eat, she pulled into a service area. She fished a chunk of horsemeat out of the cooler on the passenger’s seat, took a peek at the tank behind her and, after tossing Gulliver his breakfast, headed across the parking lot for the restaurant. The clientele at that hour was mostly truck drivers, and Anemone, with her frosted perm, silver fox coat, black leather pants, and Chinese slippers, attracted a fair amount of attention. When she got up to go to the restroom, thinking she would freshen up a bit while she was waiting for her curry and miso soup with clams, every head in the place rose from the plate or bowl it had been buried in and followed her narrow hips across the room.

  The restroom, out behind the kitchen, had apparently just been cleaned since the floor was still wet. There was no heating in it, and Anemone’s breath appeared as white puffs in the broken mirror. The icy tap water felt good on her face. The steam seeping through the cracks in the door from the kitchen brought a faint smell of cabbage with it. Suddenly, one of the stalls opened and two men stumbled out; one of them, naked from the waist down, was shivering violently.

  “Cut it out,” he was blubbering. The other man, who brandished a hypodermic needle, was laughing. All at once, they noticed Anemone standing by the sink.

  “A woman!” hissed the first man as he lost his footing and planted his bare ass on the wet floor. As he fell, he grabbed at his crotch with both hands to cover his hard-on. He came to rest in front of the exit, blocking the way and leaving Anemone to inspect his companion’s costume: snakeskin jacket, beret, baggy riding pants, and heavy work shoes. He was a short man, with a powerful neck and large hands. For a moment he stopped laughing, but when he saw his friend trying to stuff himself into a pair of underpants and hide the bulge under the tails of his shirt, he burst out laughing even louder.

  “Doooon’t!” the guy on the floor pleaded. “Not in front of her!” He picked himself up and dressed himself in a hurry: yellow pants, pink socks, and black leather boots that laced up the side. The socks were worn through at the heel. While he got dressed, he looked at the ground to avoid meeting Anemone’s eyes. He was even shorter than the man with the needle, the top of his head not reaching Anemone’s mouth. Though he couldn’t have been more than thirty, he had a bald patch in the middle where the few remaining hairs had been slathered with oil and parted neatly on one side.

  He began trying to explain, telling her how he’d been raised by his granny and it was her fault he’d turned out this way, made him put this electric thing up his ass because his bowels were bad, and so on… His breath was sour, and flecks of spit at the corner of his mouth sprayed on Anemone’s arm as he talked. She began to feel sick. The other man had put away the needle and turned to the window where sunlight was streaming in.

  “You don’t think I’m a creep, do you, miss? You just feel sorry for me, don’t you?” Thick veins bulged in his neck and along his temples, and he was sweating heavily though the room was freezing. Finally, Anemone tried to dodge under his arm and squeeze past him.

  “Miss, don’t go yet… You see, my granny’s real sick now, ’bout to die, they say, but I can’t quit working so I get these injections of Korean vitamins to keep me going. Can’t be all that bad, can I?…” He had grabbed Anemone’s arm and was squealing in her ear.

  “You!” she shouted at the guy by the window. “Do something!”

  The muscleman in the beret frowned at his friend and shook his head. “Cool it,” he said. “You’re getting messy again.” Then he turned to Anemone. “You want me to shut him up?” And when Anemone nodded, he launched himself across the room and landed a big, meaty fist right between the bald man’s eyes. Baldy clutched at his face, then crumpled to the floor, his eyes wide and unfocused. In no time, there was blood everywhere.

  Anemone made her escape, almost puking by this stage, but as she returned to her seat the muscleman came trailing after.

  “Hey, how ’bout a little thank-you?” he said.

  She ignored him. Her curry was cold, and she’d lost her appetite anyway. She took a half-hearted sip of the soup as the man swung into the next seat.

  “Well, how ’bout it? Where’s my thank-you?” His front teeth were plated with gold fillings, and when he leaned toward her his pendant dangled in front of her eyes: a miniature of a woman giving a blow job. “I beat the shit out of him for you and you can’t even say ‘Thanks, mister’?” The rest of the drivers were grinning at them now. Anemone reached into her purse, took out two thousand-yen bills, and handed them over. For a moment he held them up to the light and examined them thoughtfully; then he spat on the floor and, using the bills as a ladle, sloshed the curry over Anemone’s hand which was still resting on the table. Bits of the brown stuff sprayed in her face and over the fur coat. “Bitch!” he hissed.

  Anemone put the bills back in the bowl and wiped herself with a handkerchief. Just as she was finishing, though, she looked up: the other man was standing at the end of the table, his face covered with blood. He had one hand on the table to steady himself and with the other was clutching his nose to stop the flow, but a steady stream came from another cut on his forehead.

  “Hurt much?” asked his friend. He shook his head. Noticing the blood, some of the waitresses came running up. “Don’t get excited,” sa
id the muscleman, waving them off. “He just slipped in the toilet. He’ll be fine; just seems to have broken his nose.” Still clutching his face, the first man nodded in agreement, then slid into the seat across from Anemone and started eating the cold curry. After a minute he stopped, fished the thousand-yen bills from the bowl, and studied them with a puzzled look. Finally he started laughing uncontrollably, sending a stream of blood trickling into the bowl.

  “Fir… fir… fir… ha… first time I… I… ha … ha… ever ate curry with… ha… cash in it!!!” As Anemone left the restaurant, she looked back over her shoulder. The two were still pointing at the limp brown bills and laughing.

  She cut across the parking lot in front of a line of huge trucks. There was no sign of her friends as she had the Bronco filled at the gas pump. An hour later, she was listening to Hashi’s voice on the radio singing “I’ll drive you crazy, the story’s just begun,” and was just reaching for her sunglasses to ward off the glare, when a horn blasted behind her. Startled, she looked in the rearview mirror to find a truck right on her tail, less than a meter from her bumper. The truck was too high for her to see the driver’s seat in the mirror, which showed nothing but a massive strip of grillwork, so she downshifted and hit the gas, pulling ahead for a moment. As the window of the truck came into view, she recognized her two friends from the truckstop. Baldy was driving; his face had been cleaned up but his shirt was still stained with blood. She rolled down her window and signaled for them to pass, but the truck’s horn let out an ear-splitting blast and they closed in on her again. She tried to tell herself to stay cool; she’d wait till the next hill and pull away on the upgrade, but if she lost her head now, they’d rear-end her and she’d wind up in a ditch.

  Unfortunately, the highway continued on a long, gentle downward slope. Anemone dropped her speed. She wasn’t sure what they were planning to do, but whatever it was, it would be easier to deal with at a slow speed. She was only doing about 30 kph when the truck suddenly came to a near stop and opened a gap of a hundred meters between them. After a few kilometers like that, however, Anemone checked the mirror again to find the truck had accelerated and was closing fast. Instantly, she stamped on the gas, but it was too late. Horn blaring, the truck slammed into the right rear end of the Bronco and went tearing by. The steering wheel shuddered as she fought to keep control; downshifting and pumping the brakes at the same time, she barely managed to keep from running off the road, but the side of the Bronco made a hideous noise as it scraped along the steel and cement guardrail. With her teeth clenched together, she held tight to the wheel and forced her way back into the lane; then, just as she was beginning to relax, she took one more look in the rearview mirror and let out a scream.

  “Gulliver!”

  The door of the cargo area was sprung and there was no sign of the crocodile. She hit the brakes, threw the Bronco in reverse, and started to back along the highway until other cars appeared and she had to stop, pulling over to one side. Climbing out, she ran along the road until she spotted him, lying on his back at the edge of the median strip. She screamed again and was about to go across when a steady stream of traffic cut her off. Gulliver lay still, probably in shock from the fall and the cold, but at the sound of Anemone’s voice, his tail began to twitch.

  “He’s OK, he’s OK,” she muttered. His skin’s tough and he weighs a ton—bet their stupid truck got the worst of it, she said to reassure herself. But how to help him? She went on calling his name, and the crocodile began to try to right himself, twisting his pale, lumpy belly and grasping at the air with his short legs. The passing cars managed to avoid hitting him as he bent his tail under his body and arched his back like a wrestler avoiding a pin. Anemone could see a tear in his side where the blood had started to flow. Next he tried raising his tail as high as he could and slapping it against the pavement while wrenching his body to one side, and eventually he managed to flip himself over. When he had regained his feet, Gulliver looked around and then headed for the bushes covering the center strip. Presumably that seemed preferable to braving the road, which shook under the wheels of the trucks passing in tight clusters.

  As Anemone stood there at the side of the highway, exhausted from calling Gulliver’s name, she felt something come stealing up from under her feet, through the Chinese slippers and leather pants: a wave of sympathy—or grief, perhaps—for the animal trying to hide itself in those scruffy bushes. She’d never felt this way before. It was like being very cold, and her whole body was shivering. Suddenly, she longed for rain; the clear blue sky above the ridge of hills was unbearable. The traffic was getting thicker, and as each truck went by in a cloud of dust, she gave a little yelp. The trucks had somehow grown to an immense size, and she felt like an ant, waiting for something even more massive than them to smash her. She began to sob: “Mama, help me! Mama, please!” Soon, on the far side of the median strip, there was a heavy thud, and Gulliver sailed up into the blue sky. As he reached the top of the arch, his body split in half, the head end coming to rest in the bushes while the back landed in the road to splatter against the next truck, which sped away, its wheels drawing parallel red lines into the distance.

  20

  A yellow fiberglass pole had been tied to the roof of the van carrying four new inmates and two guards to the prison. The prisoners sat silently in the dark rear of the van while the guards chatted about their fishing trip of the week before, when they’d caught over a dozen rock trout. One prisoner, his hair slicked back with oil, interrupted them.

  “Hey, jailer,” he started out but, noticing the frowns on the guards’ faces, immediately retreated: “Sorry, that’s what we used to say where we just been… But what I wanted to ask is, do they mix barley with the rice in jail? You see, I can’t take barley—the smell gets to me.” The guards looked at each other and burst out laughing. The prisoner laughed along with them, but when they noticed him, they scowled and looked away.

  On the lawn in front of the Juvenile Detention Center was a stand of palms and a bronze statue of two men wielding hammers. “Image of Hope” was carved in the stone that held the bronze. The gray, windowless building was immaculately maintained and in the early afternoon light might have been a suburban factory rather than a prison.

  “Hey, Kuwayama,” one of the guards in the van called to Kiku as he headed toward the entrance. He was carrying the fiberglass pole. “They’ll keep this for you in in the Intake Room. Be sure to write it down when they’re cataloguing your stuff. Understand?” Kiku nodded. “You got a tongue?” the guard prompted.

  “Yes,” said Kiku, almost inaudibly.

  The four prisoners entered the building.

  “Smells like a fuckin’ hospital, don’t it?” muttered the one with hair grease, but nobody bothered to answer. They were led up some steps and through a door labeled “Warden’s Office.” Three men were seated on a sofa in the bright, spacious room. One, a thin fellow with glasses in a double-breasted suit, was glancing through some papers. Next to him was an older man in a navy-blue uniform dragging on the butt of a filterless cigarette; and at the far end, a fat man, also in uniform, who had pulled off his boots and was lounging back scratching his feet.

  “The new intake has arrived, sir,” announced the guard who had brought them in. The man in the double-breasted suit looked up slowly as the fat guy squeezed back into his boots.

  “I’m Warden Tosa. You men have been assigned to this facility to serve your respective sentences, and I want you to know that our primary purpose here is not to punish you but to help you to reform, to get you ready to return to society as useful citizens. All of you are first offenders, which is why you’ve been sent to us. Our facility is designed for people who haven’t yet developed fixed criminal tendencies, and we have a number of activities and programs to help you turn things around. You’ll find we can offer you vocational training in a wide variety of fields; we also have conventional education programs, correspondence courses, club activities, sports, and cultur
al programs. In return for all these opportunities, we ask for your full cooperation; get yourself used to prison life as quickly as you can, get to know the other fellows who’ve made progress through our system, try to turn yourself into what we like to call ‘model prisoners,’ and do your damnedest to get out of here and back to your families as soon as possible. That’s all.”

  Just as his speech ended, the guy with greased-back hair gave a little laugh, more out of nervous tension than amusement. The fat man stepped forward.

  “Something funny, buster?” He stood inches away from him, smothering him in the smell of sweat from his bull neck and barrel chest. “Maybe you didn’t get what the warden was saying. That it, mister? Or maybe you’ve been itching to get thrown in jail since the day you were born, and now that you finally made it, you’re just tickled pink? How ’bout it, asshole?” His boots were nearly twice the size of the prisoner’s tennis shoes.