Product Description

A surreal coming-of-age tale that establishes Ryu Murakami as one of the most inventive young writers in the world today. Abandoned at birth in adjacent train station lockers, two troubled boys spend their youth in an orphanage and with foster parents on a semi-deserted island before finally setting off for the city to find and destroy the women who first rejected them. Both are drawn to an area of freaks and hustlers called Toxitown. One becomes a bisexual rock singer, star of this exotic demimonde, while the other, a pole vaulter, seeks his revenge in the company of his girlfriend, Anemone, a model who has converted her condominium into a tropical swamp for her pet crocodile. Together and apart, their journey from a hot metal box to a stunning, savage climax is a brutal funhouse ride through the eerie landscape of late-twentieth-century Japan.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48767 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
A scholar of drugs, speed, violence, gore, and Tokyo's teenage underground, writer/filmmaker Murakami (69, 1993, etc.) weighs in with a new novel that ably encapsulates the fin de siecle cultural detonation of Japanese youth. The "coin locker babies" (an apt metaphor for kids unmoored from tradition) are Kiku and Hashi, left in train-station lockers by their mothers shortly after birth, who grow up to become templates for a society losing its religion. Adopted and raised on a remote island in the shadow of a ghost town, Kiku embraces his athleticism and learns to polevault while Hashi, the punier of the two, cultivates an interest in music that will eventually lead to runaway success as a pop star. Separated for a while, both boys gravitate to Tokyo, where they are reunited in Toxitown, a haven for freaks and hustlers. The bisexual Hashi has met a recording tycoon who will transform him from sniveling prostitute into captivating media god; Kiku, by contrast, shacks up in a condo with a model named Anemone and her pet crocodile. When a scheme to reunite Hashi with his mother goes awry, resulting in the televised shotgun death of a woman who is really Kiku's mother, Kiku is charged with murder and sent to a juvenile detention facility, where he meets a gang of teen offenders and enlists them in his plot to exterminate the population of Tokyo with DATURA, a deadly experimental chemical agent. Meanwhile, Hashi, who has practically disowned his coin-locker brother, undertakes a wildly successful but psychologically debilitating tour in the company of his beleaguered wife and a band of dissolute gay hipsters. He and Kiku never reunite, but in the book's closing pages they reach an eerie, elliptical detente. Snyder's agile translation preserves much of the shock, beauty, and pathos in this apocalyptic minisaga of troubled times. (Kirkus Reviews)

Banana Yoshimoto, author of Kitchen
"Its power grabbed me by the heart."

Beverley Curran, The Daily Yomiuri
"... an amazing, imaginative adventure."

Customer Reviews

Depressingly Dire
I've read the reviews by people on amazon, because a detailed book review is hard to find online, and I cannot fathom how anyone can see this book as being good.

It is extremely depressing and miserable, but not in a way that you can relate and feel emotional about, but in a horribly boring way. Every page turn, you soon learn to expect something terrible will happen, even if there is no real reason for it to. The author disjointedly writes about his shallow characters, whose actions can be predicted effortlessly.

Needlessly depressing, the plot slugglishly moves from one horribly predictable event to the next, dragging you into a world of misery, leaving all emotions except boredom behind.

I would not recommend this book, and although I have heard better things about his other novels, I shall be looking elsewhere.

translation isn't great.
I would've given this five stars, as it is imaginative, deep and shocking in all the right measures, but it fell down with a disappointing translation. It was clear at times that Snyder had literally translated whole sections from the Japanese which, although beautiful, makes no sense in English. I was also disheartened to see a well-spoken Japanese woman say "It must of hurt a lot."
But translation-holes aside, I really enjoyed this novel. It may have been depressing and frightening at times, but it is truly unique.

Coin Locker Babies
This is potentially the most enthralling and all encompassing of Ryu Murakami's novels. it explores the very depths of the human psyche and what it means to be an individual. it vividly colourful discriptions and unstoppable narative provide the reader with a journey of a lifetime. this book is perfect for keen readers of Oriental Literature or just individuals with a interest in a good read with an emotive storyline. let me finish by saying that the experience of the book stays with you, and your perception of normality and rationality for, life