Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  The honeymoon in Alaska and Canada was postponed for a year when it couldn’t be worked into Hashi’s packed schedule of recording sessions, television and radio appearances, filming, and a six-month concert tour. It was, in fact, Neva who made the schedule, going against D’s recommendation that Hashi get some rest. She’d come to the conclusion that it would be better not to give him any time to stop and brood about everything that had happened in the past few months. “At the moment,” she told D, “he’s like a guy who can’t swim who gets thrown in a fast-flowing stream. Rather than dragging him out and letting him rest, it makes more sense to leave him where he is a while and let him learn to swim. If it turns out he’s not up to it and drowns, that’s just proof he wasn’t fit to be out in the water anyway.

  “Going on tour is murder, but that’s where real musicians get made. The longer you’re on the road, the more the towns all start to look alike. To make it, you’ve got to be able to put up with the same songs, the same bump and grind night after night. And in the end, even the excitement of the crowds doesn’t get you off any more. When you get to the point that you’re totally strung out, you have to ask yourself if it’s really worth it, if you really like the life.”

  A good deal of attention was paid to putting together a band, with Hashi giving D very specific instructions as to style and personnel. The sound was to be as close as possible to French pop groups of the early sixties, with simple, straightforward drums (lots of snare), a muddy bass line, a jazzy guitar (more Django Reinhardt than Jimi Hendrix), a sax, and an accordion—exactly like the band Johnny Hallyday took on tour to Denmark in 1963. He also had two conditions for selecting the musicians: they had to be financially secure and they had to be gay. When D wanted to know why, he refused to say. Neva supposed Hashi wanted the band members more or less to fall in love with him. As for the money part, perhaps he was afraid that younger guys joining the group to get rich would create problems. Then, too, his peculiar style might not suit most musicians. For Hashi, the idea that music could express human emotions was bullshit; in fact, the whole idea of human emotions made him feel a bit queasy. “Let the sound stand on its own,” he was always telling the players. “What I want is a sound that’s cut loose from you as people, as humans playing music; what I want is naked sound, period—sound washed clean of your sweat glands, your body heat.” His own reasons for setting these conditions were that only well-heeled musicians would take radical risks, and that if they were all gay there was less chance of their turning against him. He had what could be called an intimate knowledge of the art of handling gay men.

  The drummer they chose was a thirty-one-year-old Japanese American named John Sparks Shimoda whose day job was running an antique shop specializing in Ch’ing dynasty pieces. Shimoda had been playing drums since he was eight, and in his teens, while living on the West Coast, had actually sat in with the Lee Connitz group. Six years earlier, he had come to Japan with his lover and patron, the head of the Japanese branch of a fountain pen company. Though he only worked off and on, he had continued to keep his hand in as a studio musician. The bass player was a twenty-nine-year-old photographer named Toru who had started as a hairdresser and gone to the States to take pictures of hair fashions. He came back with three new habits: jazz bass, cocaine, and sleeping with men. Six years ago he had been given a suspended sentence for possession. In a pinch, he could make it with women too. On guitar was Yuji Matsuyama, twenty-two, the only son of the owner of a large firm that provided security guards for the huge industrial complexes along the coast east of Tokyo. Matsuyama had had private guitar lessons beginning in elementary school; Wes Montgomery was his idol. He, too, was capable of sex with women so long as they were thin and relatively odor-free. The sax player was Hiroshi Kitami, twenty-one, the scion of a long line of doctors who was forced to break with family tradition because he was color-blind and couldn’t get into medical school. The failure had led to his parents’ divorce, which resulted in Kitami living with his mother, who managed several condominiums. After dropping out of music school where he had studied clarinet, he had gone on tour as the accompanist for a chanson singer. He was just back, and free. Finally, the accordion slot was taken by Shizuya Tokumaru. Tokumaru, sixty-two, was well known as a composer, and with over a dozen hits to his credit was able to live comfortably on his royalties. He had got his start in a tango orchestra while still at school, and his arrangement of “Olé Guapa” was still something of a legend in postwar tango history. In addition to his musical notoriety, he was a regular at The Market in Toxitown and known as a connoisseur of beautiful boys. Once a year he made a pilgrimage to Rio de Janeiro to sample the local talent.

  When the players had been picked, Hashi gave the group a name: Träumerei.

  Almost immediately, Träumerei took off on five weeks of closed rehearsals at D’s studio in the Izu highlands, and from the very start Hashi was pleased with the way things went. D had promised to put together the best band that money could buy and he’d kept his promise. Each of the five musicians brought an uncommon sensitivity to his playing (which Hashi attributed partly to sexual orientation), and as time went by he could feel his voice wrapping around their sound. There were none of the irritations that had routinely cropped up with previous bands, and it was a treat to be able simply to describe what he had in mind—an intro like the sound of rain on a stormy spring night, say—and hear it pouring out of their instruments.

  “You guys are fabulous! Real poets!” he told them. As the rehearsals progressed, his enthusiasm grew.

  The studio was large enough for each man to have his own room. Wake-up call was at 11:00 A.M., but Matsuyama, the guitarist, was up by nine even if they’d rehearsed until nearly dawn the night before. He had a morning regime that included a strenuous workout combining calisthenics and karate, but he went for an occasional ride on his motorbike as well. In general, he was the quietest of the group, and often, before the others crawled out of bed, he could be seen out on the lawn that sloped down to the coast road sipping tea and watching the birds peck at pieces of apple he’d set out for them. The last up was usually Toru who would invariably make his appearance, singing, only after all the others were at the breakfast table and the cook was about to go rouse him forcibly. The lyrics were always the same: “Hey, baby! Let me squeeze your lemon juice, till it flows down round your feet…” His silk shirt and flannel pants reeked of aftershave. Toru, unlike Matsuyama, could seldom keep his mouth shut, and it made little difference to him who was listening.

  “Hey, Kitami, watch that second beat in the third bar of ‘Rust.’ Don’t blow it, you hear? Eggs sunnyside up, again?… Any of you guys have a tape of the ’79 Grammies? I’m trying to remember who won the gospel award… By the way, did you know that TWA is the only airline that lets cats ride inside with the passengers? Rest of them don’t allow any kind of pets at all.”

  Breakfast lasted until late, but half an hour after it was over, rehearsal started and continued without a break until dinner. Each man had his instrument, his score, his own sound, but it was generally left to Kitami to make sure the number added up to a coherent whole and moved along as it was meant to; not because he was especially good at this but because no one else was much interested in doing it. The role fell to the youngest player partly because he hero-worshiped Hashi, the only person younger, and seemed determined to serve as his go-between with the band. During the session he would stand close to Hashi and repeat every instruction that came from his mouth as if through a loudspeaker:

  “That guitar riff needs to sound more metallic… And see if you can go easy on the bass from the second bar where the accordion comes in… And put a little heat into that final drum roll, could you?”

  The reminders might almost have been unnecessary since the other four seemed quite willing and able to give Hashi the sound he wanted, that stripped-down sound without a trace of sweat or blood in it. In fact, it was often Kitami who, for all his eagerness, found himself odd man out in th
is group with its cool, crisp, mechanical sound. After a particularly frantic sax solo that stood out from the seamless line, the others would give him a hard time, obliging Hashi sometimes to come to his rescue, patting him on the back as he looked around sheepishly and telling him he’d done “just fine.”

  In the first week of rehearsals, Neva phoned D three times.

  “Things seem to be coming together pretty much along the lines Hashi had in mind, but something’s still bothering me… there’s something missing. The band is too tight, too perfect. It’s not the kind of thing that works in a concert; you’ll have half the audience asleep in their seats and the other half heading for the doors. Hashi has no idea what it means to sing in front of a crowd that size.” But each call produced the same response from D.

  “I don’t want you to say anything until Hashi realizes the problem himself. And don’t worry about it; those guys in his band aren’t likely to sit around and just take orders forever. He’ll hear about it from them soon enough.”

  Around seven, the tall cook would march into the practice session and wave perfunctorily to indicate that dinner was ready. Before their period of seclusion began, they had all been given the option of ordering a special, personalized menu, but only John Sparks Shimoda had availed himself of the opportunity, the rest being content to eat whatever the cook put in front of them. Shimoda the gourmet, however, had ordered several cases of wine and other provisions to satisfy his needs. Nor was it just in the matter of taste that Shimoda seemed a little different from the rest. Though his features looked Japanese enough, his hair was almost silver and his skin was pale and thin, revealing a net of bluish veins below. He also had a morbid fear of dirt that nearly made him vomit once when he happened to notice dark smudges under Matsuyama’s fingernails. While the others usually finished dinner as quickly as they could and went off to do other things, Shimoda would linger at the table savoring whatever dish had been prepared for him with only Neva for company. She, it seemed, was the only one who could put up with endless conversations about porcelain, screens, ivory carvings and other Chinese antiques.

  There was a two-hour break following dinner, during which Hashi studied videos of various lighting effects that might be used on the tour: lights thrown from spherical mirrors, lasers, a device that resembled a funhouse mirror, a 3-D film projected on a dome, and a machine that cast huge silhouettes of the band on a screen. Hashi finally came up with an idea to run by the design crew: a film of pigs being dissected, projected on the inside of a huge domed screen, combined with a pump that spewed out glittery, metallic confetti.

  While Hashi was watching videos, Matsuyama used to go for a walk, sometimes returning dripping wet from a dip in the sea. Kitami religiously practiced scales on his sax, while Shimoda played chess by himself. Toru would call his lover or watch TV or amuse himself creating a new style for Neva’s hair; he seemed somewhat at a loss, not having enough players for a game of mahjong. Tokumaru read books on gardening or called in a masseuse from a nearby inn before lying down for a nap. But once the rest period was over, they all got back to work again until three in the morning or later.

  When Hashi and Neva were finally alone in their room, Neva often began haranguing him about the band:

  “Hashi, I know you’re pretty pleased with things, but I’m telling you, I know this business, and at this rate Träumerei will end up self-destructing in no time. You haven’t even been together ten days and already the band sounds like it’s twenty years old. It’s too neat, too cold-sounding, like a bunch of corpses up there playing something they’ve played a million times before.”

  “You think I can’t hear it?” said Hashi, who was already much more subdued than he had been when rehearsals had started. “I began to hear it myself a few days ago, but I don’t know what to do about it. In the beginning I couldn’t believe how good they were, just about perfect. Now I keep thinking they must be laughing at me behind my back.”

  “Well, you had me fooled. It looked to me like you were sailing along loving every minute of it. But I don’t think you realize just how much energy it takes to make a concert tour work. At the level you’re playing at now, you’d never make it beyond the first show.”

  “So you’re saying we need to pull together, up the energy level and really work as a group?” asked Hashi.

  “That’s not exactly it either. When you’re doing a concert, it’s you, the singer, who has to control the crowd; you’ve got to grab every one of however many thousands of people you’ve got out there in front of you and shake them up; you’ve got to wrap them in your arms and then shove them away—you’ve got to make each one of them feel it, feel that you’re the boss. It’s a kind of power, like the pull of a huge magnet, almost a kind of magic. But if a guy doesn’t even have the power to control his own backup band, you can bet he’s not going to be able to control an audience.”

  “Neva, I’m scared,” said Hashi.

  “What of?”

  “I feel as though I’ve been dragged to the top of this high mountain and I’m standing there all alone looking down. I’ve actually had a dream like that the past few nights.”

  “What is it you’re doing at the top of this mountain?”

  “I’m flapping my arms trying to fly.”

  “And can you?”

  “At first I can, but pretty soon I get tired and I always fall in the end. And when I fall, everybody laughs.”

  “You know if you lose your nerve now, it’s all over,” said Neva.

  “I know. But sometimes I wonder if it isn’t already over and nobody bothered to tell me. Neva, I’m scared to death.”

  “I still don’t see what of—of becoming famous overnight?”

  “No, not that exactly. But it does bother me that I became famous almost by accident, as if I’d fooled everybody. It seems every other famous person got that way by scratching their way up for years and years; it doesn’t matter if they’re boxers or pop stars, they had to work for it. But not me; I didn’t crawl or scrape or climb anything. I just sat around until a helicopter came along and gave me a ride to the top. This didn’t happen because of anything I can do; I’m famous because I was born in a coin locker. It’s not my singing that made me famous, it’s Kiku shooting that woman on national TV. I feel like a fraud, and I find myself wondering how long I can keep up the act. All those people who had to work their way up, they developed a kind of strength along the way, a kind of strength I just haven’t got.”

  “Are you telling me you’re worried about what’s going to happen years from now? Hashi, sometimes you’re really dumb. You keep on thinking like that and you’ll end up like a crazy who sits around paralyzed by the idea of his own death.”

  Hashi climbed out of his bed and crawled in with Neva. Having put his fears into words, he felt a little calmer. She reached up and gently closed his eyelids with her fingers as she started telling him a story.

  “Long ago there was this king of the Slavs named Fruksaz. But Fruksaz didn’t start out as king; he was originally a cattle herder, who was so brave and wise that he was able to defeat every foe he faced until finally he was made king. Now the minute he became king, Fruksaz started doing things: he built an irrigation system and developed new methods for raising cattle and conquered the surrounding lands—all those kingly kind of things—and he was so good at it that everyone around him came to see him as a kind of superman. Well, one day this Fruksaz was having a chat with the queen of one of the countries he’d conquered, and she said it looked like he’d done just about everything there was to do and she was wondering what kind of goals or aspirations a man like him could still have. So what do you think Fruksaz said?… He said that his only goal was to get through the rest of that day. That’s all.”

  At some point in Neva’s parable, Hashi had stopped listening and started to stroke her side. Her flesh was slack and soft, as if her bones had been coated with gelatin and then covered with a fine layer of skin. He remembered something Toru had s
aid a few days earlier about how men were reptiles but women were fruit, and when you took a little bite of some fruit, you could taste the roots, the deep, rich soil, the air and sunlight where it had ripened. A young woman was like firm, ripe fruit; it hadn’t been so long since it was still hanging on the branch, and when you poked it with your finger it might dent a little, turn a bit red, but it bounced right back, as though it were somehow still connected to that faraway tree. Not so with older women; their flesh had lost that connection, as if the peach had been made into a peach cake, sticky with a little too much sugar and gelatin. Toru had finished by turning to him and saying: “I’m amazed how well you seem to be doing with that lady of yours. Don’t think I could forget about the sticky peaches and keep my mind on the job.”

  Neva had shifted around in the bed, and as her tongue went to work between Hashi’s legs, her sugary buns shook lightly before his eyes. Suddenly, for no reason, he thought of the young woman who had shouted in the courtroom on the day of Kiku’s sentencing. He remembered how firmly her breasts had stood out under the skintight white suit, and he wondered what it would be like to run his hands over her body. He imagined the brilliant red traces his fingernails would leave, and as he leisurely conjured up her body in his mind, his cock began to stiffen. Neva sighed with satisfaction, the gap between her fleshy thighs looking like a slice cut out of a peach cake. Perhaps, he thought, his victory over Kiku wasn’t as complete as he’d imagined.

  “That’s it for me! Sorry, but you can count me out.”

  The rehearsals had barely entered their second week when suddenly one day the guitarist, Matsuyama, stopped in the middle of a number and threw his pick on the floor. Kitami tried to calm him down and start again from the top, but Matsuyama turned off the mike on his guitar.