Coin Locker Babies

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
department 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
cliff 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
had 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
Hashi 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
plastic 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.

“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
to 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
get 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.