Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami Page B

told himself; it was just that everything suddenly seemed a bit stupid—the island, the way the sea sparkled, the smell of fish drying, the canna lilies down by the hill, Milk’s barking… everything. I’m bored, he thought, standing on the practice field. The warm, soft breeze blowing from the sea was particularly unbearable.

7
    Kiku was reading a novel on the Bullet Train. The summer of the year after Hashi had left home, Kazuyo had announced that she was going to Tokyo to look for him, so Kiku agreed to go along. As he read, she picked over a box lunch they’d bought at the station, looking as though she were about to burst into tears, but Kiku was secretly in a good mood. Looking up from his book, he gazed at the fresh green fields as the train hurtled along. Hashi will probably be waiting on the platform for us, all smiles, he thought, but the feeling might also have had something to do with the fact that he’d almost finished
Apples and Hot Water
. It was nice to reach the end of a book; liberating somehow.
    “Next stop, New Yokohama Station,” the public address system on the train repeated and repeated until it seemed to Kiku that it was urging him personally to dredge up memories of Yokohama. But the only memory he had was shut inside a coin locker, and he wasn’t anxious to take it out and dust it off.
    At Tokyo Station they were met on the platform by a staff member from the National High School Track Association. A coach at Kiku’s school, realizing they knew no one in Tokyo, had made a phone call that had apparently resulted in this small man in a green suit standing by the stairs calling Kiku’s name in exactly the same tone as the recorded announcements on the train. His jaw pumped so regularly and his tone was so flat thatKiku thought of a robot. Machinelike, arms folded, the green suit repeated its taped message: “Kikuyuki Kuwayama! Kikuyuki Kuwayama!”
    All the same, Kazuyo seemed pleased to be met. When she caught sight of the little robot, she paused for a moment, pulling a mirror from her purse to check her makeup, and then rushed up to the man bowing at full speed. She said her hellos, then went on bowing to what Kiku thought was a ridiculous degree.
    “He liked music,” she was saying to the man as Kiku approached. The green suit told them that runaways tended to congregate in Shinjuku.
    Their hotel had been picked by Kazuyo from a picture in a travel magazine. It turned out to be behind a pinball parlor in east Nakano: “Hotel Springtime,” in large neon letters with the “t” in “Hotel” burned out. In real life, the outside didn’t look much like the magazine picture. In the photograph there had been a little pond stocked with goldfish and, flowing into the pond, a waterfall flecked with maple leaves. Parked in front were big foreign cars, and a foreign couple was walking out of the door arm-in-arm under a colorful display of flags. Since the picture was taken, however, the waterfall had dried up and a movie poster had been pasted over the cracked cement. The pond, also dry, was stacked with boxes, and a cleaning woman with dyed hair was standing in for the couple in the entranceway. She puffed away at a cigarette as she slopped water around with a mop, keeping one eye on the television in the lobby blaring a program about an air show. The silver in the cleaning woman’s teeth glinted as she flicked her cigarette ash into the mop bucket.
    At the front desk were two men in bow ties who interrupted their game of checkers to greet the new guests. Kazuyo took her time filling out the registration card, carefully writing “beautician”in large letters in the blank marked “occupation.” After giving them the key, one of the men carried their luggage to the elevator where two dark-skinned, strong-smelling women were just getting out. One of them turned to look at Kazuyo and Kiku and said something in a foreign language. As the doors were closing, Kiku could see them pointing at