Coin Locker Babies

Ryu Murakami

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 be a perfect novel; it lacks that same indefinable something that keeps Kathe Koja's newest from achieving perfection. But it's close enough that it still rates five stars.