Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami Page A

novelist, who had been a kleptomaniac since childhood and had served four separate sentences for larceny. A book of hers called
Apples and Hot Water
, based on her own experiences, had apparently become a bestseller and won some sort of prize. The interviewer’s first question was why she had written the novel.
    “No reason in particular,” she’d answered. “When I was a young girl, I enjoyed writing little compositions, but somewhere along the line I got interested in stealing, and one thing led to another until now I’m old and don’t go in for theft much any more. I suppose I couldn’t think of anything else I really wanted to do, so I took up writing again after all these years. The main thing is, you see, I realized that I knew hundreds of unhappy women, women with no other way to express themselves than through crime, and I wanted to tell their stories in my book. One of these women—if we have time?—one of them stabbed her husband to death, but was so scared by what she’d done she threw up all over the carpet. She then wasted every last bit of her best perfume trying to get rid of the smell. I think the perfume was called Vol de Nuit. Is there one called that? Yes, that was it.
    “Another woman embezzled a hundred million yen from the bank she worked in for her boyfriend. She only used ¥350 for herself, and that only because she suddenly got her period and didn’t have the money for the necessaries. And another poor soul told me that she’d abandoned her own baby somewhere with only some bougainvilleas for comfort—bougainvilleas becausethey were the most expensive thing in the shop… With stories like these, I wanted to show the daily trials and triumphs that are all part of the life of the female criminal…”
    “Kiku, did you hear that?!” Hashi had said, white in the face, and spitting out bits of some fried egg he was eating. Bougainvilleas were what he’d been keeping as pressed flowers for years. He fished them out of a desk drawer, then checked in a dictionary to make sure he had got the color and shape of the petals right. “What should I do?” he said, beginning to tremble. “Kiku, that old lady knows the woman who put me in the locker. What do I do?”
    The next day he went out and bought
Apples and Hot Water
, but there was nothing about the bougainvillea lady in the book. Kuwayama and Kazuyo hadn’t been watching the program and knew nothing about his pressed flowers, so he had only Kiku to give him advice. But Kiku wasn’t much use; the whole episode had made him oddly angry. Why, Kiku wondered to himself, did this dumb story have to come and upset Hashi now like this?
    Hashi borrowed some money from him and began to make plans.
    “And what are you going to do if you find your mother?” Kiku wanted to know.
    “I’m not sure,” he said, shaking his head. “I just want to see her, that’s all. I don’t even have to meet her necessarily. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I suppose actually meeting her would be pretty scary; so I think I’d just watch her from a distance, see how she talks, how she walks. That kind of stuff.”

    Since then, only one postcard had come, telling them he was alive and well. The postmark was Tokyo but there was no return address. Kazuyo turned the card over and over in her hand,held it up to the light, and even sniffed it, looking for anything that might lead them in his direction. She had already filed a missing persons report and placed several items in the “Personal Inquiries” columns of Tokyo newspapers, but they had heard nothing. When Kiku picked up Hashi’s postcard, however, his reaction was a little different from Kazuyo’s; the card made him feel that he too would like to go somewhere far away and send someone a card just like this.
    Kiku did his best not to think too much about Hashi, though somehow he had lost interest in almost everything, including pole-vaulting practice. But it had nothing to do with Hashi, he