Coin Locker Babies E-Book

Ryu Murakami

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 793

Beschreibung

'A cyberpunk coming-of-age tale' Japan Times 'Encapsulates the fin de siècle cultural detonation of Japanese youth' Kirkus Two babies are left in a Tokyo station coin locker and survive against the odds, but their lives are forever tainted by this inauspicious start. Raised amidst the outcasts and misfits of Toxitown, they carve out vastly different paths: one as a bisexual rock star on a desperate search for his mother, the other as an athlete consumed by revenge against the woman who left him behind. When their twisted journeys start to intertwine, this savage and stunning story plunges headlong into a surrealistic whirl of violence. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. Translated by Stephen Snyder Born in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. Murakami is also a screenwriter and director; among his films are Tokyo Decadence, Auditionand Because of You. His novels Sixty-Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era and From the Fatherland, with Love are also available from Pushkin Press.

Leseprobe

‘Ably encapsulates the fin de siècle cultural detonation of Japanese youth… Snyder’s agile translation preserves much of the shock, beauty, and pathos in this apocalyptic minisaga of troubled times’

KIRKUS

‘Ryu Murakami is known for the sex-drugs-and-violence style of his fiction and Coin Locker Babies has it all… A cyberpunk coming-of-age tale’

JAPAN TIMES

‘Readers can live dynamically through the psychology of two rebels, moving alongside their ecstasies, melancholies, and many transformations’

PEN

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COIN LOCKER BABIES

RYU MURAKAMI

TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY STEPHEN SNYDER

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

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COIN LOCKER BABIES

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Contents

Title Page

 

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About the Authors

Available and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press Classics

Copyright

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1

The woman pushed on the baby’s stomach and sucked its penis into her mouth; it was thinner than the American menthols she smoked and a bit slimy, like raw fish. She was testing to see if the baby would cry, but the little arms and legs were still, so she peeled away the plastic wrapping over its face. She lined a cardboard box with towels, laid the baby inside, and taped the box shut. Then she tied it with string and wrote a made-up name and address on the side in big print.

Her breasts started to ache again just as she finished doing her makeup and was about to put on a polka-dot dress. They were still swollen with milk, and she stopped for a minute to rub them, without bothering to wipe up the whitish liquid that dripped on the carpet. Slipping on her sandals, she left the apartment with the box. As she got into a cab she’d hailed, her mind was on the lace tablemat she was making; it would be done soon, and she decided to put it under the pot of geraniums. The heat had made her a little dizzy, which wasn’t surprising since the man on the radio said it was breaking records. Six people—most of them elderly or unwell—had already died. She got out at the station, went straight to the coin lockers, and shoved the box into an empty one in the back row.

Wrapping the key in a sanitary napkin, she disposed of it in the toilet, then left the station, which was stifling, for the comfort of a 10department store. When she’d cooled down a bit after a cigarette in the restroom there, she did some shopping: pantyhose, nail polish, bleach. She had an orange juice, then went to the ladies’ again to put on the nail polish. Around the time she was finishing the thumb of her left hand, the baby, half-suffocated in the dark box, broke out in a sweat. At first it was just a little dampness on the forehead and chest, perhaps under his arms, but soon he was wet all over and his temperature began to drop. Finally, his fingers twitched, his mouth opened, and he let out a tremendous wail.

It was the heat. No one could have gone on sleeping in a damp, double-sealed box like that. The heat had started the baby’s blood pumping, which woke him up, and so, just seventy-six hours after he first emerged between his mother’s legs, he was virtually born again, in a hot coin locker. The baby continued to cry until he was found.

He was taken to the police hospital, then placed in the custody of an orphanage. A month later he was given a name: Kikuyuki Sekiguchi. Sekiguchi was the name the woman had written on the box; Kikuyuki, the eighteenth entry on the list for naming abandoned children used by the welfare office in the north ward of the city of Yokohama. Kikuyuki Sekiguchi had been found on July 18, 1972.

A high metal fence surrounded the orphanage where Kikuyuki was raised; the building was set back from the road, at the end of a drive lined with cherry trees, and there was a cemetery on the grounds. The other children at the Cherryfield Orphanage of the Virgin Mary called him Kiku. As soon as he was old enough to understand, he learned that the nuns there prayed for him every day; they were also fond of telling him, “Your Father in Heaven is watching over you, little Kiku.” There was a picture of this Father hanging on the wall of the chapel, a bearded man standing on a 11cliff looking out at the sea. In his arms he held a newborn lamb which he seemed to be offering to the sky.

“How come I’m not in the picture?” Kiku wanted to know. “And why doesn’t my father look Japanese?”

The nuns said the picture was done before he was born, and that the Father had lots of children, with different colors of hair and eyes…

Children at the Cherryfield Orphanage were adopted according to looks, the cutest ones going first. On Sunday, when they were finished with church, they all went to play outside, where they were looked over by the prospective parents. Kiku wasn’t what you would call an ugly child, but at Cherryfield the orphans of choice had lost their parents in traffic accidents or some other tragedy, and those who had simply been abandoned had to be exceptionally attractive to get the nod. Kiku had learned to walk, and then was old enough to run around the playground, and still he was one of the leftovers when the Sunday inspection ended.

The nuns hadn’t told him yet that he had been born in a coin locker. That was left to another child at the orphanage, Hashi, to do. Hashio Mizouchi, like Kiku, was a leftover. One day he approached Kiku in the sandbox:

“We’re the only two, you know. All the others died. You and me, we’re the only ones who made it out of the coin lockers alive.”

Hashi was thin, a bit nearsighted, and gave off a slightly antiseptic smell. His eyes were moist and seemed to stare right through you, off into the distance; when he spoke to Hashi, Kiku felt like the Invisible Man. Unlike Kiku, who had screamed in the box until a policeman found him, Hashi was saved by his delicate constitution. The woman who abandoned him had wrapped him naked in a paper bag without even bothering to wash him and 12had just tossed the bundle into a coin locker. Fortunately, however, she’d dusted him all over with talcum powder for a protein allergy rash, and the powder had made him vomit; the smell of the vomit, laced with the fragrance of the powder, had seeped out of the locker, and a blind man’s dog that happened to be passing by had begun to howl.

“It was a big black dog. I love that kind of dog,” Hashi would say to anybody who’d listen.

The first time Kiku actually saw a coin locker was on a trip to an amusement park in the suburbs. Hashi pointed it out to him by the entrance to the roller-skating rink. A man with skates opened one of the little doors and put his overcoat and a bag inside. It’s just a kind of shelf, thought Kiku, going up for a closer look. The dust from the locker smudged his hand as he poked around.

“It’s like a beehive, isn’t it?” Hashi said. “Remember? We saw it once on TV: bees hatch their eggs in these little boxes. But you and me, Kiku, we’re not bees… so we must have come from people eggs… I wonder if bees have the same problem?—they lay lots of eggs, but most of them die.”

Kiku imagined the bearded Father on the chapel wall putting slimy human eggs in the coin lockers. But somehow he knew it wasn’t quite like that. He had a feeling that women laid the eggs, and the Father just held them up to show heaven once they were born.

“Hey, look!” Hashi was calling him again.

A woman in sunglasses with dyed red hair was walking around with a key searching for her locker.

“She’s going to lay one right now. Look how big her butt is,” Hashi noted.

The woman stopped at a locker and inserted the key. As the door opened, a round red object fell to the ground, and Kiku and 13Hashi let out a cry. More of the red things tumbled out as the woman struggled to hold them back, and one rolled over to where the two boys were standing: a tomato, not an egg. Kiku stamped on it as hard as he could, getting juice all over his shoe, but there was no baby brother inside.

The other children at the orphanage had tended to pick on Hashi, but now Kiku came to his rescue. Soon, Hashi would let no one else near him. He had a particular fear of grown-up men, and burst into tears so easily that Kiku sometimes wondered whether his body wasn’t hollow and filled with water. Once, for example, the man who delivered bread to the orphanage had patted Hashi lightly on the shoulder and joked that he smelled of liniment, and even this had set him off. But Kiku knew that all he could do to help was sit with him until he calmed down. No matter how much he cried or shook or babbled on about how sorry he was for this or that, Kiku would just sit by impassively and wait. When Hashi took to following him around and even refused to let him go to the toilet alone, Kiku didn’t seemed to mind. The truth was, he needed Hashi as much as Hashi needed him, the way a healthy person sometimes needs a disease, imaginary though it may be, as a kind of retreat, a safe haven from the problems of the real world.

Every year, about the time the cherry trees were in full bloom, Hashi used to get a cough that sounded like a storm in his throat. One year his condition—“nervous asthma,” as the doctors called it—was particularly bad and was accompanied by a slight fever, preventing him from playing outdoors with Kiku. Alone in his room, Hashi retreated even further into himself, developing a passion for a strange game of “house” played out on the floor next to his bed. First he would arrange neat place-settings of 14plastic dishes, knives, forks, and spoons; then he would carefully position a toy washing machine, refrigerator, and tiny pots and pans until he had created the model of an efficient kitchen. Once the room was done, however, God help whoever touched it: the least nudge or shift of the tiniest detail, even by accident, and Hashi burst into a violent tantrum, far beyond anything the nuns ever thought possible in a timid boy like him. At night he slept near his model kitchen, and in the morning the first thing he did was to check every item to make sure nothing had been moved. When he was convinced that all was well, he would sit motionless for a long time gazing contentedly at his handiwork; but, as often as not, a faint tinge of displeasure would then show on his face, followed by growing rage, until at last he would leap to his feet and smash the whole thing to smithereens.

Eventually, the kitchen alone was not enough: he needed to expand. He collected scraps of cloth, spools, buttons, thumbtacks, random bicycle parts, stones, sand, and bits of broken glass—all the materials he needed for a more ambitious kingdom. And when it was finished, his protective instincts were all the stronger, as one unfortunate little girl who happened to trip over a tower of spools soon discovered: by the time the nuns pried him loose, he had come as close to strangling her as his strength would allow. That night his cough was worse than ever, and he was running a high fever.

When Kiku finally came to see the model, though, Hashi cheered up.

“This is the bakery over here. These are gas tanks, and this is the graveyard.”

Kiku waited until Hashi had finished.

“So where are the coin lockers?” he asked at last. Hashi pointed at the taillight from a bicycle.

15“There,” he said.

The taillight was perfect: a bright orange plastic reflector covered the tiny light bulb, the chrome casing was spotless, and the red and blue wires had been carefully wrapped in a neat ball. The coin lockers shone at the heart of Hashi’s kingdom.

As he conducted the tour Hashi grew lively, almost talkative, which bothered Kiku for some reason. When Kiku sat and watched him in one of his moods, crying or pouting, he felt like a patient being shown his own X-rays; he knew that hidden inside himself were the same fears and anxieties that were transparent in Hashi, and somehow he’d been hoping that Hashi’s tears would heal both their wounds. But now Hashi had taken to sleeping near this model kingdom, and seemed to have forgotten Kiku; his tears and apprehensions were reserved for his miniature world. The disease that had served as a sort of sanctuary for the healthy one of them had somehow escaped and remained alive on its own. In an obscure way, Kiku realized he would have to find a new disease.

One day, he went to a public clinic with one of the nuns for a polio vaccination, and managed to get lost on the way back, ending up at the city bus yard. The driver said that the boy had boarded the bus at the first stop and had stayed on through four round trips to the yacht harbor. Eventually the driver had asked him where he was going, but Kiku just sat there staring out the window, so he’d called the police. That was the first incident.

Three days later, a little after noon, Kiku walked out of the front gate and flagged down a cab. He told the driver to take him all the way to Shinjuku, and when they arrived at the station there, he muttered “Now Shibuya.” The driver deposited him at the police box in front of Shibuya Station, and he was returned 16to the orphanage. Another time, when he tried to stow away in the back of a liquor store delivery truck, the nuns had managed to find him before he left the grounds, but soon afterward he got as far as Kamakura, an hour down the coast, by tricking a couple who had come to tend a grave in the cemetery. After that, Kiku used to go up to complete strangers and say, “I’m lost. Could you take me home to Kamakura?”

A young nun was assigned to watch him, to make sure he stayed put, but she was too softhearted to be very strict. Whenever she could, she borrowed her family’s car and took him out for a drive.

“You love cars and buses, don’t you? Why do you like riding around so much?”

“The earth goes around,” Kiku blurted out, “so why should I sit still?”

In fact, it had nothing to do with the earth—it was just something he couldn’t help. Sitting still made him fidgety. He would get this feeling that something, not far off, was spinning fiercely round and round, and that this thing, whatever it was, was about to blast off at any minute. He would feel the ground tremble, hear the air fill with a whirring sound. Eventually, these liftoffs were occurring at regular intervals, and each time Kiku was left behind he felt a sharp despair. But then, almost immediately, preparations would begin for the next one—the smell of fuel in the air, the rumbling, the spinning—and his anxiety would begin to build all over again.

Kiku knew he had to keep moving, he had to do something. As the launch approached, as the whirring grew shriller, his discomfort would turn into a real panic, and keep growing. He had to get on board!

One day, when the children were taken on an outing to the amusement park, Kiku got on the roller coaster and wouldn’t 17get off; but, unlike the other kids, he wasn’t screaming with delight, he just sat there, stock still, with a blank look on his face. When the attendant finally told the young nun to get the boy out of there, she found him crouched down in the seat, rigid and pale as a ghost. His skin was damp and covered with gooseflesh, and the sister had to pry his fingers from the rail of the car one by one. It was only then that she realized that Kiku’s fascination with locomotion was more disease than hobby, and it was soon afterward that he and the other boy—the one whose bedside was arrayed with fiercely guarded rubbish and who had recently ripped an intravenous needle from his arm in a bid to fend off an intruder—were taken to see a psychiatrist.

The doctor, idly examining a photograph of Hashi’s bedside kingdom, said he assumed that the nuns, accustomed as they were to caring for orphans, were aware that such children frequently developed symptoms of autism due to lack of a normal parental relationship.

The very next day, Kiku and Hashi started going there for therapy. They were given some guava juice laced with something to induce a certain drowsiness, followed by an hour or two of exposure to the soothing sound of an in utero heartbeat in a special chamber. The room had padding on the floor and walls so that even the most violent patient would be safe from himself. Inside, the heartbeat was broadcast from speakers set in the walls and ceiling and covered with some sort of material so as to be invisible. Tiny recessed lights, which lined the edge of the padding where the ceiling and walls met, could be adjusted to give a uniform brightness. The room contained nothing but one oversized couch facing a 72-inch video screen behind a layer of thick glass. Once the sleeping drug had taken effect, the 18boys were joined on the couch by a doctor. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the lights dimmed while a variety of images played across the screen: waves lapping on a South Pacific beach; skiers negotiating new powder snow; a herd of giraffes running in slow motion against a sunset; a white sailboat cresting the waves; thousands of tropical fish skimming along a coral reef; birds and gliders, ballerinas and trapeze artists. The images changed only very gradually, in the tiniest of increments—the size of the waves, the intensity of the setting sun, the color of the reef, the speed of the yacht, the scenery on the stage. By the time the changes became imperceptible and consciousness had begun to fade, the room had grown completely dark. As for the sound, it had been playing from the time the boys entered the place at an almost inaudible volume, but as the room grew dark and the images slowed, it gradually increased to a crescendo just as they fell asleep. Somewhere between fifty and eighty minutes later the boys would wake up from their nap, but the tape loop would still be showing the same images so they would have no sense that time had passed. To add to the illusion, the treatment was scheduled from 10:30 a.m. to noon, the time of day when the change in the angle of the sun is least noticeable. There were even ways to compensate for days when the weather didn’t cooperate with the illusion; for example, when it was clear in the morning but started to rain while the boys were inside, the sound of rain could be added to the audio in the room several minutes before they regained consciousness, and the lighting was adjusted to resemble a rainy day. Throughout all this, however, Kiku and Hashi were not told that they were being treated at all; they thought they were just going to the hospital to see a movie, and a movie is what they saw.

Within a week, results were apparent. As the sessions 19progressed and the boys got used to the treatment room, the nuns were no longer needed as chaperones. In a month’s time, the psychiatrist was using hypnotism in place of the sleeping drug and exploring the changes in the boys’ subconscious brought on by the “rechanneling” of their special energy.

“What do you see when you hear that noise?” he asked.

“The sea,” they answered together.

Kiku would describe the image flashing on the inside of his eyeballs: his own small body being held up to heaven by the bearded Christ standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. He was wrapped in something soft, and a cool breeze was blowing. The sea was calm and sparkling. The treatment continued for about three months, at which point the psychiatrist called in the nuns again.

“The therapy is nearly finished. The important thing now is to avoid giving the boys any idea how much they’ve changed. Above all, you mustn’t tell them about the heartbeat or anything else we’ve been doing here.”

Kiku and Hashi, waiting in the corridor, stared out the window at the golden glow of the sky and, below, a line of deep green ginkgo trees trembling in the wind. As the elevator doors opened, they turned to look at an old man, his chest bandaged and a tube extending from one nostril, who was being wheeled into the hall. A young girl carrying a large bunch of lilies was talking to the nurse pushing him along. Kiku and Hashi went up closer to him. His veins were visible under the transparent skin, while his lips were moist and red. His ankles were strapped to the trolley with leather belts, and tiny spots of blood oozed from around the needles of the tubes attached to both arms. The old man opened his eyes and, seeing the boys peering down at him, twisted the corners of his mouth into a smile. At that moment, the nuns 20emerged from the room directly in front of them repeating the doctor’s last words:

“They don’t realize that they’ve changed; they think it’s the world that changed.”

21

2

An adoption was finally arranged for Kiku and Hashi during the summer before they were to begin school. The nuns persuaded a couple who had applied for twins to take the boys. The application had come via the Holy Virgin Relief Society from a small island off the west coast of Kyushu. At first the boys refused to even consider leaving the orphanage, but they were shown a picture of the people who would be their foster parents and at last they agreed; the couple had been photographed with the sea in the background.

In the company of a welfare officer, they made the long journey south by ferry, sitting inside on torn plastic-covered seats, where the heat was made worse by the oil fumes. They were met at the dock by their new parents. Perhaps it was the fading light, but to Hashi they looked more like mother and child than man and wife. As the welfare officer made the necessary introductions, Kiku studied his new father, Shuichi Kuwayama, with disappointment. Not only was he short but his pale arms and legs were spindly and the flesh seemed to sag on his body. He was clean-shaven, and the hair on his head was thinning; he had absolutely nothing in common with the Father in the picture in the chapel.

From the neck up, his wife was thickly painted with white powder, which was beginning to dissolve in her sweat and trickle down into a pool collecting on her collarbone. Kazuyo 22Kuwayama was in fact six years older than her husband, and had just turned forty. After leaving her first husband, she had come to the island with her uncle, a miner, in the days before the coal mines that were dug under the sea were closed down. Big-boned, with rather narrow eyes and a nose too large for her face, she had trained as a beautician, then worked in a bar, before settling down with Kuwayama, who had a small factory next door to his place where he produced disposable styrofoam lunchboxes.

Kiku and Hashi, as soon as they got home, were put to bed in matching pajamas with locomotives on them. Hashi was exhausted and running a slight temperature, for which Kazuyo made him an ice bag. She fanned the boy as he slept while her husband saw the welfare officer off. When he was gone, Kuwayama went straight back to work. A bug Kiku had never seen before flew in through the window, and he got out of bed to look out into the darkness. From the windows of the orphanage he had liked to watch the lights of the city and the stream of cars passing, but here it was pitch dark, though he thought he could just make out a tree with big black leaves rustling in the mild breeze. When Kuwayama turned on the styrofoam press, the noise drowned out the pleasant hum of the bugs.

“It makes a racket, but he can never get to sleep unless he gets a little work done before going to bed,” Kazuyo explained. Ignoring her, Kiku eyed the strange beetle, and when it landed nearby he stamped on it.

“You mustn’t kill living things like that!” Kazuyo scolded.

Back at the window, Kiku spotted a tiny point of light in the distance; a star, he thought, but Kazuyo told him it was a lighthouse.

“It shines all night so the ships at sea don’t bump into the rocks.” The light spun around, revealing the rough surface of the 23sea for an instant. “Time for bed,” said Kazuyo. “You must be tired, too. Get some sleep.”

Kiku suddenly wanted to scream, to turn himself into a huge jet plane and bomb the hell out of the bugs, the leaves, this window, Kuwayama’s machine, the lighthouse. The smell of the summer night, of sun-warmed trees cooling in the darkness, was somehow unbearable.

“Hashi and the nuns call me Kiku, but my real name’s Kikuyuki,” he managed to say before he burst into tears. Kazuyo went on fanning, without saying anything. As he got into bed, Kiku realized he had no idea why he was crying. Before long he was fast asleep and the new sheets were damp with sweat.

By the time the boys woke the next morning, Kuwayama’s press was already humming. Kazuyo presented them with new shorts, shirts, and tennis shoes before leaving for the beauty parlor that she owned and worked at.

“You two can watch TV or whatever. We’ll be back at noon,” she told them.

Kiku and Hashi had some rice with a raw egg and miso soup, then counted the sailboats printed on their shirts. The TV had nothing but cooking programs to offer, so they turned it off and wrestled for a while on the floor. Then they discovered an awl on the desk and practiced sticking it in the paper doors from several paces away, but, getting bored with this, they ran out into the small garden, which had some tomatoes and eggplants growing in it. They could see Kuwayama’s sweat-soaked back as he bent over the machine in the shed at the end of the yard, raising and lowering a steel bar.

“Looks like a robot, huh?”

Lush carina lilies lined the steep, narrow road that stretched 24down from the front of the house, then crossed the main road that ran the length of the island and led straight on to the sea. Beneath a large tree, three sunburned children were busy catching cicadas. As Kiku and Hashi approached, the children eyed their new clothes.

“What are you doing?” Hashi asked, and one of them held up a cage full of insects. Hashi took the cage, buzzing like a broken radio, and peered at its contents. Then they looked up at the tree where the children were pointing, but no matter how hard they stared, they couldn’t spot the cicadas on the bark through the gaps in the thick branches. When the trap—a shell filled with birdlime tied to the end of a stick—was pushed gently nearer the trunk, however, the sawing of the insects suddenly became louder, wings began to beat like toy birds, and the bugs were easily snared. Kiku and Hashi were as excited as if they’d seen a magic trick. One of the kids spotted a large bug high up on a limb and passed the stick to Kiku, who was the tallest among them.

“I can’t see it,” Kiku protested, but several dirty fingers pointed at what looked like a knot on the branch. Kiku held his breath and crept nearer; the cicada was trilling for all it was worth on a branch just at a height he could reach standing on tiptoe. He stepped up onto a broken concrete block at the base of the tree as the children explained that he had to maneuver the stick to approach from the bug’s blind spot. As he was adjusting his angle, the block began to totter. Hashi cried out and Kiku thrust the stick out as if trying to spear the cicada in the tail, barely managing to catch the fluttering wings and bring the insect down as the others cheered. The huge cicada struggled to free itself, making the stick to which it was attached dance on the ground, but the children had soon freed it and, wiping the birdlime away, presented it to Kiku. Hashi asked whether the steep road was a good way to get 25to the beach, but was told it ended in a cliff with no way down. The best route, they explained, was to take the main road as far as the second side street, which led to the beach.

Kazuyo’s beauty parlor was above a bus stop not far down the main street, and when she saw the boys passing she came down, shouting “Where do you think you’re going?” Kiku pointed mutely toward the sea. “Well, all right, but you’re not to go near the old mines.” Kiku and Hashi had never heard of “mines” before.

The second side street, which the other kids had recommended, was so overgrown the boys walked right by it. They turned instead at a likely looking lane that soon divided into two winding tracks, and after several turns they had no idea at all how to get back to the main road. Attacked by swarms of mosquitoes, their legs cut by the thick grass, the boys began to panic. They wanted to yell for help, but they knew no one was around to hear them. The road divided again, with a dark tunnel to the right, so they went left, only to find a snake slithering across the ground ahead of them. With a scream they headed for the tunnel.

A gradual curve made the opening at the other end of the tunnel appear as a distant tube of light. It was cool inside, and the boys found themselves walking through thick mud. Before they had gone very far, a drop of water from the ceiling caught Hashi on the back of the neck and he took off with another shout that seemed about to bring the tunnel down on their heads. After a few steps, he tripped and lay blubbering in the mud.

“Stop it,” Kiku ordered. “Get up and walk. We’re almost out.” Skirting the smelly, stagnant puddles, they headed for the far end of the tunnel, but when they finally emerged, covered with dirt, they found the way blocked by a tangle of grass and barbed wire. There was, however, a hole on the right just big enough for a 26child to squirm through, and with some damage to the little boats on their new shirts, they managed to wriggle on. Once through, Hashi again refused to move, but Kiku reminded him that there were snakes if they went back, and they inched along on their bellies, propelling themselves with their elbows. Finally the grass gave way to concrete, and, standing up, they looked out over an extraordinary scene: a full-scale version of the toy city Hashi had constructed next to his bed the year before.

Hashi’s kingdom lay before them, life-sized but apparently lifeless. The neat gray rows of miners’ quarters seemed normal enough except for the occasional tuft of weeds pushing through a broken window, but there was an eerie stillness, almost as if a siren had sounded and everyone had cleared out, leaving the boys as a human sacrifice. The inhabitants were all waiting now, wherever they were hiding, for the boys to be slaughtered. Posters were still stuck to a bulletin board: a concert by the Kyushu Naval Brass Band playing “The River Kwai March,” “Anchors Away,” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The boys stood stock still for a moment, then, spooked by the silence, began to run. They ran among the houses, but the only sound they heard was the echo of their own footsteps. They stopped when they came to an abandoned tricycle with grass sprouting through its faded plastic seat, half expecting the children who had been trapping cicadas to appear from somewhere. When Hashi gingerly touched the handlebars, the bike collapsed with a rusty squeal, like a pig having a spike driven into its head, and a watery mixture of oil and rust oozed from the frame. Unnerved by this sight, they fled the rows of houses up a flight of crumbling wood and gravel stairs to a world that seemed to have been suddenly dyed red, where the sun shone through the cracks in a brick wall that stretched as far as the boys could see. Peering through the cracks, they discovered 27a group of structures unlike any they had seen before: a funnel-shaped tower linked by a ditch to a concrete pond divided into neat compartments; bare steel skeletons; brick cylinders choked with ivy. It all seemed familiar to Hashi, but when he turned to ask if Kiku had the same feeling, Hashi saw that he’d gone pale. More than mere models grown out of proportion, this new vision looked like an exact replica, all in concrete, of the chart of the human digestive system that had hung on the wall of the waiting room at the hospital where they’d gone for the movies. But for Kiku there was something else besides: the ruins, bathed in heat and shadows, were also the blast-off site for the great spinning rocket that had haunted him.

When they were able to go on, they found a school nearby, gutted and half collapsing, and in front a dried-up fountain with succulent plants forcing thick leaves through the cracks in the concrete. On closer inspection, though, the spiked leaves were not from a plant at all, but part of a machine, perhaps of the sort that might excavate undersea tunnels. Around the fountain were flower beds, but the neglected seeds had blown away, and the only sign of flowers was the few stray blossoms in the dirt that had collected in the bottom of an overturned toilet. The school was partly covered with tarpaulins that fluttered noisily when the wind blew and stirred up a great flock of crows perched on the roof. The birds taking flight made it seem as if part of the building were caving in.

Hashi was still wondering where they could be, what sort of place this was, and whether he might be dreaming. Everything was clear up to the point where he had fallen in the tunnel; he was sure of that part because his shirt was caked with dried mud and reeked of oil and stagnant water. Kiku, however, had just noticed that the sun was beginning to go down, and it occurred to him 28that in the dark the ruins would no longer be much fun. They would have to start looking for a way back.

They cut across the playground of the abandoned school, past a twisted and broken horizontal bar. Cactuses grew luxuriantly in the sandbox, their needles covering the surface of a nearby pool filled with murky water. Three telephone poles, rotted and splitting, provided a nest for thousands of termites, and clouds of transparent wings filled the air. Beyond this translucent curtain, the boys could make out a town, or rather a row of empty shops facing a row of abandoned brothels and bars, and between the two a street from which the pavement was mostly gone.

“Look! Isn’t that beautiful!” cried Hashi, suddenly pointing toward a pit which contained, apparently, all the broken glass tubing from the neon signs on the bars and restaurants. The shards formed a luminous carpet that sparkled when the wind blew, shifting the bits of glass to catch the sunlight at new angles. As they watched, shivers of color shot through the pit, recreating a huge, formless neon sign. Kiku went up to it and selected a gently curved piece of glass that was smooth and pink on the outside and a rough yellow inside. He gave it a heave and followed it with his eyes as it came to rest in the dust some distance away. When he went to retrieve it, though, he made a startling discovery. Getting down on his hands and knees, he crawled along studying the ground.

“Kiku?” said Hashi, still holding an S-shaped neon tube which was almost intact.

“Tire tracks. Fresh ones. There’s only one, so it must have been a motorbike. Someone else has been here,” Kiku said. The tracks ended at a movie theater that stood at the entrance to a street lined with brothels. In front hung a crooked sign saying “Piccadilly.” Kiku studied the area. There were no other tracks and no sign that the rider had made a U-turn. Hashi meanwhile 29was looking at half a poster that still hung under the sign for coming attractions and some publicity photos from the movie that were stuck in a crack in the theater wall. The poster, a picture of a woman, was ripped off above her eyes, leaving a nose, tongue, and jaw, and a strangely disconnected breast. The photos included one of a foreign man brandishing a revolver, a prone blonde woman gushing blood, and two ladies on horses riding into the sunset. Careful not to tear the brittle paper, Hashi brushed the sand from each and inspected it closely. Somewhere toward the middle of the pile he came across one of a nude woman, which he tried to slip into his pocket, only to have it shred into little pieces. Meanwhile, Kiku was checking the windows of the theater which had all been boarded shut.

Suddenly, Hashi looked up and his heart stopped. Somebody was watching them from the second floor of the theater… a young man dressed only in a pair of leather pants. Kiku had seen him too. The man looked first at one boy, then the other, then twitched his jaw as if to say “get lost.” Petrified, the boys stood their ground, until a low voice made it plainer:

“Get lost!”

At this point, Hashi would have taken to his heels, but Kiku still made no move to go.

“Kiku!” Hashi shouted, but Kiku’s eyes were fixed on the thin young man with the long beard.

“So I finally found you,” he was muttering to himself. “This is where you’ve been. The man who’s supposed to take me up to heaven lives in the town destroyed by the spinning rocket.” But as he spoke, the man pulled his head back inside the window, and they could hear a door close somewhere.

Kiku shook himself and shouted: “But where’s the motorbike?” There was no answer.

30“Come on, let’s go home,” said Hashi, near tears as he tugged at Kiku’s sleeve. Kiku eventually gave up, but as they rounded the corner of the theater they heard a scraping sound, and a sheet of thin corrugated metal from the second story broke away and fell to earth. Then, all of a sudden, a motorbike exploded from the hole in the wall and disappeared in a cloud of dust. The noise of the engine faded in the distance, but Kiku was sure he’d seen the rider smile as he raced by.

When questioned by Kazuyo about the mud on their shirts, Hashi confessed that they’d gone to investigate the area around the mines. For this she scolded them at length. Didn’t they know how dangerous it was? Hadn’t she told them about the two bums who’d been bitten by snakes while picking through one of those buildings? And then there was the little boy who’d fallen down a shaft… The planks that covered the entrances were all rotted out, Kazuyo told them, and the tunnels themselves were full of gas. If you fell in, you dropped three thousand meters straight to the bottom, where you became food for all sorts of creepy bugs and snakes. And there were chemicals in the old storerooms that could eat your flesh down to the bone in a second if you happened to spill them on you, not to mention the crazy old drifters who lived in the abandoned buildings and did nasty things to little girls and most likely to little boys, too. And if something were to happen, there was nobody to help you; you could never yell loud enough to be heard back in the village. When the lecture was over, she had managed to extract a promise from Kiku and Hashi never to go near the mines again.

Kuwayama and Kazuyo decided that the beauty shop should be closed until the boys were used to life on the island, so Kazuyo had time to take them around and introduce them at each house 31in the neighborhood. Then she bought them bathing suits to take them swimming.

The boys caught a whiff of salt air through the high grass and ran yelling in the direction of the beach. Just as their bare feet sank into the hot sand, a wave broke, showering them with spray. Tiny crabs scuttled into holes, and small fish stranded by the receding tide lurked in the shadows of the tidal pools. Kiku and Hashi groped around trying to catch the minnows, smaller than one’s thumb, but had no luck. Still, they learned to poke their fingers into the tips of the brightly colored sea anemones to feel the pleasant sucking sensation when the mouths closed. After that, they watched the hermit crabs swarm over the remains of their lunch, then held races from the dunes to the waterline.

Hashi waved at the cicada kids who came down to the beach wearing goggles and carrying spears. They quickly disappeared into the sea, and before long a spear broke the surface, its end decorated with what seemed to be a lump of plastic.

“Octopus!” yelled the boy brandishing the spear, and Kiku and Hashi ran to look as he clambered back on shore. This octopus was different from the one they’d seen at the aquarium on an orphanage outing. That one had been reddish, with a head, eight legs, even little eyes; this one was a mass of splotchy darkness oozing black liquid as it writhed atop the prongs, more like a tattered rag than a living thing. As it was being pulled from the spear, the rag managed to wriggle free and set off slithering toward the water, which happened to take it right to where Kiku and Hashi were standing.

“Grab it!” a boy yelled, so Hashi stuck out a hand, only to have the octopus latch on tight. Speechless with fear, he watched the slimy, shapeless, glistening thing squirm up his arm toward his face. When he finally realized what was happening and began 32clawing at the creature with his free hand, he only succeeded in transferring its grip to the other arm and boosting it up until a tentacle reached his shoulder. From a distance, Hashi’s gyrations might have been mistaken for a dance, but Kazuyo came running when she heard the screams, to find Hashi on the ground with the octopus about to cover his face. Kiku and the other children were doing their best to peel the monster off, but it was stuck so fast it was like part of his skin. Kazuyo ripped off her blouse, wrapped the dry cloth around her hand, and began to peel away the tentacles one by one. Once she had transferred the octopus to the blouse, she banged it again and again on the rocks.

Hashi’s shoulder and neck were swollen and red, and the suckers had left round marks, but he managed to get to his feet to stare at the dead octopus before he burst into tears. Kazuyo gathered him in her arms. Her breast digging into his side tickled a little, and when he buried his face on her shoulder, he could taste the salt on her skin.

The flowers on the canna lilies on the hillside were falling. Cracked brown petals turned to dust underfoot. When a typhoon blew through scattering faded summer blooms and overripe nuts, Kazuyo showed Kiku and Hashi how to gather chestnuts in the hills, now beginning to turn dry and sere. First you stamped on the thorny balls, then picked the kernels, three to a nut and all different sizes, from the cracked shell. The bit sandwiched in the middle was always the biggest, having sucked most of the nourishment away from the other two, which were often shriveled and dead.

“Look how lonely it is when you’re selfish and crowd the others out,” Kazuyo would say.

Kiku found a chestnut with two kernels exactly the same size joined back to back in the shell.

33“Now that’s odd,” said Kazuyo. “Usually ones like this get a little bubble inside the shell and end up rotting.”

Kiku and Hashi put half each in their pockets.

Twice a month Kuwayama rented a small boat to go fishing. These outings started well before dawn when it was icy cold, but he insisted on taking the boys along however much they hated it. Sipping hot green tea flavored with salt, they would huddle in the tiny cabin watching the first rays of sunlight on the surface of the sea. Eventually, the air began to warm a little, and the fish began to accumulate in the bottom of the boat, blue fins sharp as knives in pools of clear, dark blood. There was the smell of drying scales, the yellowish waves lapping the hull, the faint hiss of snowflakes expiring in the sea.

About the time that thousands of small white butterflies began hatching in the cabbage fields, Kazuyo presented Kiku and Hashi with boxes tied up with ribbon; inside they found school satchels.

34

3

The old woman cut across the playground. A drifter, she survived by sleeping in abandoned miners’ sheds, pilfering from the fish-drying racks, begging rice door to door, or, occasionally, stealing potatoes from the fields. She had lived on the island a long time, left a widow and childless when her husband was killed in an accident in the days before the mines were closed. For a time she had been in a mental hospital, but she escaped, made her way back to the island, and refused to leave. Everyone agreed she was harmless and left her alone. Hashi, however, couldn’t get her out of his head.

“Every time I see her,” he told Kiku, “I wonder if she could be my mom. I hate seeing women like her going around begging and scraping. It makes me think my mom’s probably having the same kind of bad luck for throwing me away. She couldn’t be happy, not after doing something like that. So when I see some poor old lady, I feel like running up and hugging her and calling her Mommy. But then I think, if it really were my mom, I’d probably kill her instead.” Not long after they had started elementary school, another child had seen the old woman passing through the schoolyard and shouted at Hashi, “Hey! Kuwayama, that old hag’s your mother.” The old rage had come back in an instant and Hashi had taken off after him. “Sorry, Grannie! I mistook you for Kuwayama’s mother!” the boy yelled again, exultant for 35a moment at least before Kiku joined in the fight and began to hit him. The encounter was Kiku’s introduction to violence, in a way, since neither the Kuwayamas nor the nuns had ever laid a hand on either of them. For the first time in his life he clenched his fist and planted it on someone’s chin, flattening the little boy with a single punch and knocking out two teeth. The whole thing was over in a second, and Kiku, as though a little disappointed, stood kicking him in the side until he lost consciousness. Then, for good measure, he went on to beat up the other kids who had laughed at the boy’s taunts. When he was done, the whole class was afraid of him. Perhaps because he was usually so mild-mannered, he seemed all the more frightening, but, whatever the reason, no one was willing to cross the two boys after that. Hashi’s sadness at the sight of the old woman, however, remained. Once he watched her from a distance as she was picking rags out of a dustbin—purple ones seemed to be her favorites—and draping them around her shoulders and hips. When the wind blew, she was like a figure in a dream, all fluttering lavender.

Breaking their promise to Kazuyo, they often went to explore the ruins. By the time they were in fourth grade, it was almost a daily routine; they would drop off their satchels at the house and head straight for the abandoned town. They had drawn a rough map dividing the area into quadrants—the miners’ quarters, the mines themselves, the school, and the deserted streets—and each was given a comic-book name: Zoule, Megad, Puton, and Gazelle. Zoule was the leader of a fierce band of space pirates, Megad a spaceship base on Venus, Puton was a robot serving in the defense of the Third Star in the constellation Cygnus, and Gazelle a noble emissary, son of Superman and a Chinese woman. The miners’ buildings, in Zoule zone, were surrounded on three sides by hills covered with vines under which vipers lived, so the boys had all 36but given up on the idea of exploring that section. All they knew for sure was that the wind could sometimes be heard whistling through tall buildings beyond the hill.

One day, however, while carefully hacking at the vines on the hillside, Kiku had discovered a concrete staircase which, if it went to the top, promised a view of the unexplored buildings and the sea beyond, and thus the possibility of completing their map. The stairs were steep and overgrown, so the boys worked cautiously, checking under the vines for snakes before cutting them. Finally, however, they reached a place where they could see the whole ruined complex: twelve eight-story apartment blocks overlooking the ocean.

The buildings, labeled with the letters A through L, were reached by a wide track that ran along the crest of the hill before sloping down to the apartments. In places the vines covered second-story balconies, but the glass in many of the windows seemed to be intact. Unlike buildings they had explored before, the entrances here were open. A plant cascading from a balcony on the seventh floor of building B looked, from a distance, like a pale green mattress set out to air; but from directly below, the gray vines and fuzzy green leaves were more like a monster that had devoured the inhabitants of the apartment. The boys knew from experience there could be all sorts of good stuff inside: broken dishes, graffiti, salvageable tatami mats. What a find—a dozen buildings, apparently untouched.

Kiku and Hashi had already made quite a collection from the other abandoned buildings: a dagger, old records, photographs, a fishing rod, scuba tanks, a gas mask, a miner’s headlamp, a helmet with leather straps, goggles, eighteen cans of ammonium sulfate, a globe, an anatomical model of the human body, and a flag—all hidden safely away in the basement of the coal refinery. This time, Kiku was hoping for a bicycle.

37As they approached the buildings, Hashi suddenly stopped short.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. He was quick to sense things and would always warn Kiku of the clump of grass where a snake was hiding, the exact location of the bat in the tunnel, or the patch of seaweed with a jellyfish in it. “I can hear somebody breathing,” he said.

Kiku peered cautiously through the wall of weeds ahead and then broke into a smile.

“Hashi, come and look,” he called. But Hashi refused to budge, remembering other times when Kiku had said the same thing and he had gone cheerfully forward only to find a ceiling covered with bats, or worse. “It’s a puppy!” said Kiku at last.

It took a promise of his diving mask if he was lying, but Hashi finally came forward to find a white puppy playing in the entrance to building B. They watched as the puppy dug at a hole for a while, then ran off after a bug. Before Hashi could even suggest that they take the dog for a pet, Kiku had run out of the bushes. The puppy was still a little unsteady on its feet and should have been easy to catch, but it saw Kiku coming and set off in the other direction. Chasing it, they got as far as the entrance to building C when a growling sound froze them in their tracks. It seemed to come from the entire building, a low moan filling the great concrete cavity. A moment later they noticed several shining eyes in the dark entrance, and then as their own eyes adjusted to the light, they could make out bared teeth and crouching forms. Eyeing them malevolently, one dog crept out into the open and began howling, which set off all the others.

That was enough for Kiku; he was about to turn and run when Hashi grabbed him.

“If you turn your back on them they attack. I read in a book 38on big game hunting you’re supposed to look them in the eye and back up slowly.” As they watched more dogs appear from the building, they remembered that the body of some man—a vagrant, everyone had said—had washed ashore a while back with the haunches, belly, and sides eaten away. The police said it couldn’t have been fish since fish always eat the eyeballs first. And when a chicken or a pig disappeared from somebody’s farm, people talked about wild dogs, but no one had ever tried to hunt them, mostly because they lived right where the vipers were most abundant.

“What do you mean ‘look them in the eye’? Which eye? There’re hundreds of them,” moaned Kiku. “We’re dead if they get behind us. Can’t you think of something?” Hashi suggested they try yelling as loud as they could, but the yell rose to a shriek and the baying grew louder. By now they were surrounded.

“All they do is sit there and howl. Maybe they only eat stuff that’s already dead,” Kiku started to say, but just then a small reddish dog darted forward and snapped at Hashi’s leg. Kiku swung the sickle he’d been using on the weeds, catching it on the side of the head and drawing a spurt of blood. The animal rolled away, but another came jumping over it, biting Hashi’s collar and dragging him to the ground. This time Kiku couldn’t aim for the thing’s head for fear of hitting Hashi, so he drove the blade into its flank, but when it turned to run, the sickle was pulled from Kiku’s hands.

Now the ring of dogs was getting tighter. One leapt at Kiku’s throat, but he managed to grab Hashi’s sickle and jab it in its face. Almost without flinching, it turned and sank its teeth into Hashi’s wrist.

“Hashi! Get up!” Kiku screamed, cutting the dog along one side, but this only made it bite down harder. As he raised the 39blade to strike again, a mass of black fur fastened itself to Kiku’s thigh. He collapsed on top of Hashi, who had gone as white as a sheet, but by shielding himself with both arms he was able to keep the dog away from his throat. Then, suddenly, a deep roar shook the ground, a cloud of dust swept up, and from its midst a motorbike appeared outside the pack of dogs. It was Gazelle, the man from the theater in the old town. He pulled off his helmet, wiping his brow with the back of his hand, then tossed some white stuff in the dogs’ direction. A space opened in their circle and, yelling like a cowboy driving a herd of cattle, Gazelle advanced, scattering bread as a decoy as he came. Even the black creature that had hold of Kiku loosened its grip to pounce on a lump that fell nearby.

The motorbike drew slowly forward and the rider signaled for them to get on. Kiku managed to hoist Hashi, who was beginning to go faint, onto the seat, then climbed on behind to hold him in place by grabbing Gazelle’s belt. Gazelle donned his helmet, checked his cargo, and took off in another swirl of dust.

The bike headed toward the sea, wheels engulfed in vines, with Gazelle kicking the dogs that followed with his heavy boots. Cutting through the apartment buildings, they plunged into a thicket, finally coming out onto the bus road where they picked up speed. By now the boys could feel the air cooling and drying their wounds, and Kiku opened his eyes for a moment to catch a glimpse of the sea, glistening, smooth, and wide, before his vision blurred. As he rubbed his thigh, which was slippery with blood, he felt it was all part of a long, vivid dream; and in his mind’s eye he could see the bearded man standing on a cliff overlooking the sea, holding aloft a newborn Kiku as an offering to heaven. At last he had found his way into the picture on the wall of the orphanage chapel; at last he knew the blessing of a real birth.

40“D’you live in the theater?” he shouted.

Gazelle nodded.

“Can we come visit you sometime?”

“I once saw a guy with rabies,” said Gazelle. “He tried to stick his hand down his throat to scratch out his own lungs. If they tell you that you guys have rabies, come to the theater. I’ll scratch them out for you.”

Gazelle only allowed them in the theater once, for a tour of his digs. Since water to the abandoned town had been shut off, he had dug a well in the courtyard of the school, which he covered with stray lumber and grass to avoid detection by the local authorities. Inside the theater, he had put up steel struts to reinforce the mezzanine so it would support the weight of his bike. Apart from a large number of broken seats and a sheet hung in front of the screen, the place was much as it had always been. Gazelle had also managed to tap into a transformer to siphon off electricity, but except when he ran the projector, he rarely needed it.