Coin Locker Babys by Ryu Murakami & Stephen Snyder (translator)

Author:Ryu Murakami & Stephen Snyder (translator)
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9783903061156
Publisher: Septime Verlag
Published: 2015-06-18T23:00:00+00:00

A faint rush of wings over the water, ducks probably, and a cry carried off by the wind. Hashi’s breath was white as he crossed the park for a second time. The bodies of two lovers kissing on a bench made a rustling sound. A cigarette dangled from the man’s hand; her hair had a scorched, dry look. Another rustling sound, their lips still stuck together, and the cigarette went out. It had begun to snow, a light, big-flaked snow so fluffy it hardly seemed to reach the ground, sticking instead to the trees, the lovers, the streetlights, the birds’ wings. A young girl came running up with a dog that started barking at him. The girl jerked the dog’s chain and apologized, then ran on. As she passed, he thought he saw a faint smile on her lips, and he suddenly wanted to call to her, to stop her, to make contact. He wanted to ask her the question that was preying on his mind: if you met the mother who abandoned you, what would you say to her?

It was Neva who had told him, three days earlier.

“It’s a done deal, Hashi, and there’s nothing we can do about it. You’ve got to go through with it. Neither of us is strong enough to stop it. I tried to think of a way out; I knew how much it would hurt you—I swear I want it to hurt me just as much. But the way I see it, we only have two choices: one is for you to act your way through the whole thing; go through with it, meet this woman—who may or may not be your mother—but tell yourself that she means nothing to you, that you just happened to have borrowed her womb for a while. No matter what she does, you don’t get angry, you don’t cry, you just stare at her with a sad look on your face, and that’s that. It’s all over in thirty minutes, and everybody goes home and forgets about it. The audience forgets, you forget, and it’s history. The other choice is for you to go with your feelings, which could be more dangerous, but in a way it could be easier, too. You just do what comes naturally if it’s too hard to control your emotions. But I doubt you’ll feel anything anyway. I bet you when you meet this woman she’ll seem just like a stranger, like anybody else you were meeting for the first time, and it won’t be such a big deal.”

But Neva, thought Hashi, understood nothing, nothing at all. She just didn’t see how it was; she couldn’t understand what hell it had been imagining the sort of woman who might be his mother. The images were never pleasant, the face never smiled, marked for life with the horror of having thrown away a child. The women who lingered at the edges of Hashi’s mind were racked by remorse, doomed to blame themselves continually, eternally.

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