Coin Locker Babies

Recent events have blown the lid off the view of Japan as a pocket of social stability, obedience and honor. The Aum cult's nerve gas attacks, lurid tales of the Japanese mafia (the Yakuza), widespread political corruption, guns on the streets, and the government's failure to effectively respond to the victims of the Kobe earthquake have revealed the seems of a society long regarded as airtight and orderly. Ryu Murakami's latest novel, Coin Locker Babies, is a brilliantly inspired coming-of-age tale set in this increasingly amorphous, dark underbelly of modern Japan. Hashi and Kiku, both abandoned at birth by their mother in the coin lockers of a Tokyo train station, are rescued and sent to an orphanage where they are the subjects of an experiment that exposes them to subliminal sound and film. Eventually adopted by a family on a remote Japanese island, the boys are both guided and haunted by those subversive hypnotic impressions--the constant rhythm of a woman's heart beating accompanied by images of animals running across an opening range--as they grow up exploring the lush natural environment of their new home. Models of rejection and alienation, Hashi and Kiku develop separate ways of coping with their condition. While working as a prostitute in Toxitown, Hashi's otherworldly voice is discovered by an unscrupulous pimp (Mr. D), and he becomes an overnight pop-star sensation. His singing actually induces the audience into a deep trance where the emotions, images, and sensations of their lives play out in languid stream-of-consciousness sequences. Hashi believes he can heal the world with his vocal cords and campy stage productions, which fall somewhere between Ziggy Stardust and Liberace. Kiku become a championship pole vaulter. Outwardly, he's the strong and silent type, but beneath the surface rages the angst of a man hell-bent on destroying Tokyo as revenge for his abandonment. His quest for Datura, a poison eerily echoing the Sarin used in the Tokyo subway gassings, leads him on several adventures, finally to a mysterious government test site in a cave beneath the ocean. Coin Locker Babies establishes Murakami as a writer to watch. While tempting to compare his work to the troubled youth stories of J. D. Salinger and S. E. Hinton, it's probably more accurate to place him in the context of contemporaries such as Mark Richard (Fishboy; Doubleday, 1993) and Patrick Süskind (Perfume; Knopf, 1986). Murukami is a literary contortionist, effortlessly shifting between elements of cyber culture, absurdism, existentialism, and magical realism; all of this offset by soaring descriptions of nature, the senses, and the darkness that lurks beneath. In this way, Murakami masters the transition from the roar of apocalyptic chaos to the tranquility of a quiet meditation. The effect is dazzling and surprisingly lucid. (originally published in San Francisco Review of Books, 1995. now defunct, © by author, todd jatras)

I read this book about 3 years ago and what I remember the most was that the first page invoked a kind of emotion that I can't quite describe. Murakami's writing is so vivid in detail, but unlike many writers, every single word is important. I've read 2 of his other novels, but this, in my opinion is the best.

This is the second Murakami Ryu book that I have read. My interest in him was peaked by talk of the "Other Murakami," the dark reflection of award-winning popular novelist Murakami Haruki. My first Ryu book, "Almost Transparent Blue," was a captivating tale of bottom-feeders and gutter-life in tune with Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting" and William S. Burroughs's "Junky." This dirty little tale grabbed my interest and got me hunting for the next adventure. And then "Coin Locker Baby" blew me away. Unlike the semi-autobiographical nature of "Almost Transparent Blue," "Coin Locker Babies" is a full-fledged novel, an unsettling fantasy firmly rooted in a grim reality. Taking its title and beginning on an actual cultural phenomenon in Japan, that of unhappy mothers abandoning their new-born children in train station coin lockers, Ryu then manifests a strange Japan, an amalgamation of anime-world and modern troubles. It is a place where Tokyo harbors a corrupted and polluted abandoned city, called Toxitown, right in the middle of its most exclusive business district. A place where a fashion model keeps a full-grown crocodile in her swampy apartment, and a hero's greatest ambition is to kill everyone and bring peace. Into this bizarro Japan Ryu introduces two boys, the only survivors of the coin-locker baby fad. A bi-sexual popstar (Hashi) who is slowly being consumed by his fame, and a jockish pole-vaulter (Kiku) who seeks to unleash poison death and silence the world. Each has an equally fitting lover: Anemone, a ethereal beauty who hunts for a Crocodile Heaven, and Neva, whose breasts having been lost to cancer makes her the perfect companion for the bi-sexual star. These four wind their intertwining lives together, never quite admirable but somehow remaining sympathetic. One does not know whether to root for their success or destruction. It is a tribute to Ryu's writing that he keeps the reader always on his/her toes, flitting between reality and fantasy, rarely giving something solid to hold on to. Originally published in 1980, "Coin Locker Babies" is eerily prophetic of the 1995 Sarin Gas attacks on Tokyo from the Aum Shinrikyo Apocalypse cult. Kiku's desire to unleash the toxin Datura rings a little bit too true after the fact. The translation is flawless, with important cultural notes seamlessly blended, giving the Western reader much-needed clues on otherwise unfamiliar cultural practices. While not able to fully yield to his depressing reality, I am finding myself more attracted to the dark vision of the "Other Murakami." I am eager to see what else this amazing talent has to offer, and will definitely be checking out more novels as they are translated.

Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies (Kodansha, 1995)For thirty years, Japan has waited for someone to step up and fill the rather sizable shoes left by Yukio Mishima when he committed suicide after a failed attempt at a coup d'etat. It seems that Ryu Murakami has finally stepped up for the job. Mishima's work was singular in that it combined the beauty and spareness of haiku with random, seemingly meaningless (until one looked below the surface) acts of despair and violence. Murakami treaded these waters in such previous works as Sixty-Nine and Audition while adding his own touches to the mix; in Coin Locker Babies, Murakami has fully assimilated the spirit of Mishima while simultaneously strengthening his own voice into something that is both complete and stunning.Coin Locker Babies is the story of two brothers. Well, almost brothers. Both abandoned by heir mothers in bus station coin lockers as infants, the two are discovered and sent to the same orphanage, where they become inseparable. Adopted by the same couple, they grow up together on a southern island, but eventually return to the city to find their mothers. Along the way, one grows up to become a decadent pop star; the other, a disciplined pole vaulter. Yet the differences between the two are always overshadowed by their similarities as they progress through their lives.Kiku and Hashi are destined to become two of literature's classic antiheroes. Angry, confused, incapable of understanding how their circumstances have molded them, the two stumble through life facing misfortune after misfortune, still somehow managing to come out in front of everyone else. They juggle their conflicting emotions with aplomb, being completely irratinoal much of the time yet without ever doing anything even remotely out of character. Murakami's deftness with the depths of his characters is easily on a par with that of Stephen King of John Irving (in fact, oftentimes when reading Murakami one is reminded of the scene in Garp where the child is looking out the psychiatrists' window and counting off the number of disabled people he sees on the street below), but his ability to take a seemingly unrelated stream of events and whip them into a coherent plot within a few pages far surpasses either of them. His writing is gorgeous, if somewhat less spare than Mishima's, and infused with a constant stream of gallows humor broken only temporarily by the wordless, wailing pain that underlies every page.The various blurbs on the back of Coin Locker Babies (half from writers, half from filmmakers) praise Murakami as a Renaissance man for the new age, half cyberpunk and half manga, a mirror in which all of society can be seen. Murakami is all of these things and more (though one wonders, idly, if the reviewers have ever been exposed to Hideshi Hino); he stands, at present, as Japan's most brilliant writer whose works have been translated into English. (Now if only someone would translate Audition.) Coin Locker Babies may not

I put off reading this book for a long time because I thought, from reading the cover, that I knew exactly what it was going to be like; snide, hip and cynical, and hopelessly depressing. It is all of those things to a degree, but it's amazing in that despite its relentless depiction of casual violence, squalor and destruction, Coin Locker Babies still manages to be deeply human at every turn.Sympathy is developed first of all for the main characters, who seem completley justified in their bitterness and eccentricty; the book first follows their twisted yet idyllic childhood with their foster parents on an island. The foster parents, painfully ordinary people, are treated with much more tact than I expected. At different points, the mother and the father each express regret that they failed to be better parents; the moments are touching and redeeming.The psychology in this book, though spotty at times (because some of the characters are just so bizzare), is accurate in that the signficance of it is considered. While Kiku and Hashi might be dramatic and larger-than-life, their dependance on each other and on their foster parents, and their complicated attitudes towards the mothers who left them to die, keep showing through. The relationship between the bisexual Hashi and his wife is also very convincing; that between Kiku and his girlfriend less so, though.The author also doesn't neglect scenery, or the small, basically irrelevant details which add charm to a narrative. There's a host of loveable minor characters, the best of them convicted murderers, who become in time as sympathetic as Hashi and Kiku. In the end, also, the message is tentatively optomistic, holding up the decree YOU MUST LIVE in the face of disaster. This is one of the most complex, engaging and endearing contemporary novels I've come across, and shows that there may be hope even for this frenetic, disillusioned generation.