Coin Locker Babies Read Online Free PDF Page A

creature with his free hand, he only succeeded in transferring its grip to the other arm and boosting it up until a tentacle reached his shoulder. From a distance, Hashi’s gyrations might have been mistaken for a dance, but Kazuyo came running when she heard the screams, to find Hashi on the ground with the octopus about to cover his face. Kiku and the other children were doing their best to peel the monster off, but it was stuck so fast it was like part of his skin. Kazuyo ripped off her blouse, wrapped the dry cloth around her hand, and began to peel away the tentacles one by one. Once she had transferred the octopus to the blouse, she banged it again and again on the rocks.
    Hashi’s shoulder and neck were swollen and red, and the suckers had left round marks, but he managed to get to his feet to stare at the dead octopus before he burst into tears. Kazuyo gathered him in her arms. Her breast digging into his side tickled a little, and when he buried his face on her shoulder, he could taste the salt on her skin.

    The flowers on the canna lilies on the hillside were falling. Cracked brown petals turned to dust underfoot. When a typhoon blew through scattering faded summer blooms and overripe nuts, Kazuyo showed Kiku and Hashi how to gather chestnuts in the hills, now beginning to turn dry and sere. First you stamped on the thorny balls, then picked the kernels, three to a nut and all different sizes, from the cracked shell. The bit sandwiched in the middle was always the biggest, having sucked most of the nourishment away from the other two, which were often shriveled and dead.
    “Look how lonely it is when you’re selfish and crowd the others out,” Kazuyo would say.
    Kiku found a chestnut with two kernels exactly the same size joined back to back in the shell.
    “Now that’s odd,” said Kazuyo. “Usually ones like this get a little bubble inside the shell and end up rotting.”
    Kiku and Hashi put half each in their pockets.
    Twice a month Kuwayama rented a small boat to go fishing. These outings started well before dawn when it was icy cold, but he insisted on taking the boys along however much they hated it. Sipping hot green tea flavored with salt, they would huddle in the tiny cabin watching the first rays of sunlight on the surface of the sea. Eventually, the air began to warm a little, and the fish began to accumulate in the bottom of the boat, blue fins sharp as knives in pools of clear, dark blood. There was the smell of drying scales, the yellowish waves lapping the hull, the faint hiss of snowflakes expiring in the sea.
    About the time that thousands of small white butterflies began hatching in the cabbage fields, Kazuyo presented Kiku and Hashi with boxes tied up with ribbon; inside they found school satchels.

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    The old woman cut across the playground. A drifter, she survived by sleeping in abandoned miners’ sheds, pilfering from the fish-drying racks, begging rice door to door, or, occasionally, stealing potatoes from the fields. She had lived on the island a long time, left a widow and childless when her husband was killed in an accident in the days before the mines were closed. For a time she had been in a mental hospital, but she escaped, made her way back to the island, and refused to leave. Everyone agreed she was harmless and left her alone. Hashi, however, couldn’t get her out of his head.
    “Every time I see her,” he told Kiku, “I wonder if she could be my mom. I hate seeing women like her going around begging and scraping. It makes me think my mom’s probably having the same kind of bad luck for throwing me away. She couldn’t be happy, not after doing something like that. So when I see some poor old lady, I feel like running up and hugging her and calling her Mommy. But then I think, if it really were my mom, I’d probably kill her instead.” Not long after they had started elementary school, another child had seen the old woman passing through the schoolyard and shouted at