Coin Locker Babies (22 page)

His nickname was Handy. An acquaintance of D’s from the mahjong tables, his job, ostensibly, was dealing in antiques, but he was really just a handy man to have around. It was to Handy that D went with his request: find the woman who abandoned the child Hashio Kuwayama, alias Hashi; do it in such a way that neither Hashi nor the woman knows what’s going on; and, finally, find out for certain where she’ll be on Christmas Eve and what she’ll be doing. To accomplish this, Handy was given exactly three months and two days.

Time being short, Handy figured he had no choice but to start with what seemed like a good hunch, one that, if correct, just might enable him to find the woman in time. If it proved wrong—well, he’d never find her in three decades, let alone three months. The hunch was this: the woman who left Hashi in the coin locker had had other children whom she’d also got rid of or killed. Working on this assumption, Handy did the only thing he could in the absence of other clues: he combed the police records of every woman who had ever been arrested for infanticide or abandonment.

Hashi, Handy learned, had been left in a paper bag in locker number 309 at Sekikawa Station on the Negishi Line of the National Railway. According to the report made by the officer who discovered him, his body had been covered with talcum
powder and he was vomiting a yellowish liquid that had a medicinal odor. The police hospital determined later that the stuff was a prescription cough syrup. Also, the baby appeared to be no more than thirty hours old when found. So, for a start, Handy knew that the woman he was looking for had been in Sekikawa Station on July 19, 1972, and that she had, in all likelihood, been in a hospital somewhere about thirty hours earlier. So far so good.

The next clue: the bag in which baby Hashi had been left came from a shop selling imported goods in downtown Yokohama by the name of Gingham. It was a largish bag, the sort that might have been used for a coat or suit, and it was brand-new. Then there was the spray of bougainvillea which was still fresh when the baby was discovered. Handy did a little digging and found that there were no more than eleven flower shops in the greater metropolitan area that would have had bougainvillea in those days. OK, he reasoned, everything taken together—fancy shop with a name like Gingham, fancy flowers and all—it looked like the woman hadn’t come to town from the country to have this baby, and he felt safe in concentrating on women who were living in the vicinity of Yokohama in July 1972. When he had correlated all the variables, he found there were, fortunately, only three women with records for infanticide or abandonment who fitted the bill.

Subject number one, Chiyoko Kunisaki, had been
twenty-three
at the time in question and was living in Yokosuka with her boyfriend who worked for a used-car dealership. The two had split up six months later, and in February of the next year Chiyoko had taken a job as a waitress at a restaurant in the suburbs. That same year she married a man who earned his living as a broker for golf club memberships. It was a second marriage for him, and he brought along a baby from his first marriage. Chiyoko, Handy
learned, had just one hobby, playing the stock market, which she had refrained from doing for a time after her marriage; but eventually, without her husband’s knowledge, she invested heavily in the stock of a household-appliance manufacturer and the stock had suddenly taken a tumble. A terrible fight broke out when her husband discovered her losses—nearly two hundred thousand yen—and by the end of it Chiyoko had strangled the child who had been sleeping in the next room. She served six years of her eight-year sentence before being paroled from Tochigi Prison in 1980; currently, she was living alone in an apartment in Hodogaya Ward, Yokohama City. Age: forty. Occupation: cleaning lady.

Handy secured the services of a young man who styled himself an “enforcer” and went to pay a visit to a certain car wax salesman living in public housing in Yokohama—the man who had once lived with Chiyoko Kunisaki in Yokosuka. Pretending to be Chiyoko’s elder brother, Handy showed up at the old boyfriend’s door at noon on Sunday just as he was sitting down to a lunch of instant noodles with his wife and two kids. When Handy mentioned Chiyoko’s name, the man nearly choked. With a slight nod from Handy to the young “enforcer,” he was led trembling to a nearby park where he willingly told them everything he knew about Chiyoko Kunisaki, even the fact that she liked it from behind, but as far as he knew she’d never got rid of a child. She had, he admitted, had a couple of abortions, but she’d never abandoned one she’d given birth to. Handy gave the man five thousand yen and suggested he forget the whole thing.

Fumiko Itoya had been twenty at the time, a student living in central Yokohama who was involved with a man old enough to be her father—a veterinarian. In July 1970 she had been arrested for abandoning a child and sentenced to two years and eight months,
though the sentence had then been suspended and she was given five years’ parole. The child had apparently been dumped in a ditch at the side of a road.

“He refused to own up that the kid was his,” she explained to Handy, referring to the vet. “You see, I worked as a sculptor’s model while I was going to night school trying to get into college. I was a dumb kid from the country and I had it bad for that sculptor. I guess I was wowed by all those beautiful things he made. He promised me that I could keep my clothes on, but then he started saying he needed to see my ‘womb,’ as he called it; something about how the statue was supposed to show a woman’s strength, and for that he had to see where the strength came from. He insisted it wasn’t my privates he wanted to see, it was my womb—nothing dirty about it, just the opposite. He was very persuasive. Anyway, in the end I showed him. Afterward I realized what a disgusting man he was. I guess I cried a lot at the time, but by then it was too late.

“I started college and tried to forget all about him, and not long after that I met the Doctor”—her name for the vet—“and then I guess I really did forget him. When I got pregnant, though, the Doctor didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I thought a lot about abortion, but I was afraid if I had somebody go poking around in my ‘womb,’ I’d start thinking about the sculptor again. Well, while I was trying to decide, my stomach was getting bigger and bigger, and before I knew it, out popped the baby. I went to show it to the Doctor, but he got mad; I guess I’d lied somewhere along the line and told him I’d got rid of it. Anyway, he said some terrible things, called me a slut, said I was trying to blackmail him. Then he kicked me out. And that’s when I went a bit crazy. On the way home I started thinking that the baby looked just like the sculptor, that it wasn’t really the Doctor’s kid at all, that I’d got
it from the sculptor that time, from all the gross stuff he’d done to me that day, all those strange things he stuck in me. Anyway, I guess that’s when I just dropped the baby in the ditch and ran off. Somebody saw me and started yelling, but I just kept running.”

Custody of the child was eventually assumed by Fumiko’s parents, and, perhaps surprisingly, Fumiko continued to see the vet for nearly three years. But in January of 1973 she went through a nasty breakup with him, sued him successfully for a share of his considerable fortune, and went to live with her parents. At present, she was thirty-nine, single, and still living there.

As he was returning home one evening, the Doctor found himself suddenly pulled into a passing car and driven away.

“Did Fumiko Itoya abandon your child in a coin locker in July 1972?” asked Handy straight out.

“Who the hell are you?” the Doctor wanted to know. “Yakuza? You can’t frighten me. I’m sure you’ve already checked, but I haven’t got any family—except a sick old father, and you’d only be doing me a favor if you bumped him off.”

“We’re not interested in hurting you or anybody else. We just want you to tell us the truth,” said Handy.

“What gang are you from? I’ll have you know that I’m a staff doctor for the Kennel Club, and I know everybody, all the big guys, so I’m telling you, don’t fool around with me… OK, how about this? I promise I won’t say anything to anybody and you let me out now. But I should warn you, I’ve already memorized your license number.” As the Doctor rattled on, Handy followed his assistant’s directions all the way to a large factory, the main processing center for a restaurant chain. The guard at the gate took one look at the hired thug and let them pass. Handy’s helper also seemed to be in possession of a key and, once inside, led the Doctor to a huge, funnel-shaped machine whose function he proceeded to explain.

“This here’s the machine they use to turn meat into mush. You put the whole thing in here—don’t matter if it’s a cow or an elephant—and it comes out the other end like a pile of shit. Then they freeze it and two or three years down the line it’s somebody’s hamburger.” When the explanation was over, the Doctor had a good deal to say.

“When I first met her, she seemed perfect—at least, in bed. You know about boxers, the way they say they’ve got to be both fighter and technician? Well, she was both in spades. Quite a woman. The only trouble was, I didn’t really want to get married. I was happy single and, besides, she wasn’t exactly the smartest person I’d ever met.

“Anyway, when I found out she’d had that baby, I wasn’t exactly overjoyed. It felt weird to think there’d be a kid of mine running around somewhere. So I got hold of this stuff we use on sheep and horses to keep them from getting in the family way; it’s highly acidic and makes the eggs disintegrate. Makes the cunt hot and tight too—I could get you boys some if you’re interested. Anyway, it works as well with people as it does with animals, and after that first time, I can guarantee you Fumiko never got pregnant again. No way she could have even if she wanted to.”

Miki Yoshikawa, twenty-one years of age in 1972, had been a housewife living in the Kohoku district of Yokohama. Her husband had worked for the city, but after Miki’s first “incident,” he quit to drive a recycling truck. Miki herself was still serving time in Tochigi Prison.

The first case had occurred in 1974. Miki was arrested for abandoning a dead infant; the child had apparently been suffocated under a mattress, and Miki had put it in a plastic bag and left it in a dumpster. The court found mitigating
circumstances—the fact that it was a first offense, the shock of having caused the death of her child—and the sentence was eventually suspended. Nevertheless, the publicity from the trial had made it impossible for her husband to go on working for the city government.

In 1976, Miki gave birth to a stillborn child. Immediately after the delivery, she had apparently become obsessed with the idea that the death of the second child was caused by a curse from the first one and, fearing that a proper burial for the second baby would arouse further jealousy, she dropped the tiny body down the shaft leading to the hospital incinerator. This time there was no indictment, on the grounds of temporary insanity from the loss of the child. In 1980, she had become pregnant for a third time; afterward, her husband made the following statement in court:

“In the early stages of this pregnancy, my wife became pretty unstable. I suppose she was worried because I was out of work and we didn’t really know how we were going to get by. She kept saying she was sure that the baby was already dead, that it had to be dead because the first two babies had left a curse on her. I thought this was all probably connected with her morning sickness, and she’d stop worrying as the pregnancy went along, so I didn’t do anything special. And, sure enough, about the fifth month she seemed to calm down.

“Things were still pretty tough, but I’d started working down on the docks around that time. Then, as she got closer to her due date, she started acting strange again; she’d say the baby wasn’t moving, that it felt like a rock and that meant it had to be dead, dead and rotting away inside her. That’s when I decided I’d better ask a psychiatrist about it. I guess you could say she was talking crazy by then; she’d say things like ‘You know, dear, even if this baby isn’t dead, I’m going to have to kill it once it’s born.
It just wouldn’t be fair to the other two to play favorites.’ The psychiatrist advised me to have her committed for a while after the birth, and that’s exactly what I did. She had a healthy baby girl and then went straight into a clinic for treatment.

“Well, things seemed to start to go a little better after that. I finally managed to find a proper job, and my wife seemed to be getting better. After about four months, she came home from the clinic all smiles and, soon as she was through the door, she went to pick up the baby. Unfortunately, the baby was a bit fussy and that seemed to set Miki off; before I could stop her she threw the kid down on its head.”

This time the court found criminal intent. Miki said in public that she hated the baby, resented it for crying at the sight of her after she’d spent so much time getting cured of her illness. She admitted to wanting to kill it. Furthermore, this time around the court psychiatrist found her sane, so there was no escaping the sentence. At present, she was forty-two years old and an inmate in Tochigi Prison.

Handy learned that the husband had not divorced Miki and was actually still waiting for her release. He was working as the driver for a tropical fish shop, which was where Handy decided to pay him a call. When he asked him about Miki, the man smiled fondly.

“She’s a good woman. You know what I mean? You can just feel it about her; she’s a real good woman.” He pointed at a fish swimming languidly in a large tank. “See that? It’s an Arowhana, worth more than two hundred thousand yen. Whenever I see it, I think of her. She wanted one of those fish more than anything in the world. I once went through some stuff she left at her parents’ house, and I found a notebook she kept as a kid with this detailed description of how you take care of a fish like this, all written
in a little girl’s handwriting—it was cute, I’m telling you. That’s the kind of kid she was; it got to me. You know, she really loved little live things; that notebook was proof—it was written long before she’d ever met me, so it had to be true. I guess you could say the past never lies, does it? And I suppose I always wanted to trust her; I used to tell myself over and over what a strong, good woman she was. But, you know, in the end I had to face it: Miki’s a good woman who happens to kill babies. Who knows, maybe she’s just too good.”