E-Book, Englisch, 512 Seiten
Murakami Coin Locker Babies
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78227-034-8
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 512 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-034-8
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
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. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine, From the Fatherland, with Love and Popular Hits of the Showa Era, all published by Pushkin Press, as well as Audition and In the Miso Soup. Murakami is also a screenwriter and director; among his films are Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.
Weitere Infos & Material
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 Kuwayama 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 sea 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 down 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 to 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 child 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,...
