The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

  Back on the living room sofa, she put the two vials into a small plastic freezer bag and sealed the zip lock. She placed the bag carefully in her white patent-leather bag, the metal clasp of which closed with a dry click. Her hands moved with practiced efficiency. She had obviously done this many times before.

  “Thank you very much,” said Creta Kano.

  “Is that all?” I asked.

  “Yes, for today,” she said. She smoothed her skirt, slipped her bag under her arm, and made as if to stand up.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, with some confusion. I hadn’t been expecting her to leave so suddenly. “Wait just a minute, will you, please? My wife wants to know what’s happened with the cat. It’s been gone for almost two weeks now. If you know anything at all, I’d like you to share it with me.”

  Still clutching the white bag under her arm, Creta Kano looked at me for a moment, then she gave a few quick nods. When she moved her head, the curled-up ends of her hair bobbed with an early-sixties lightness. Whenever she blinked, her long fake eyelashes moved slowly up and down, like the long-handled fans operated by slaves in movies set in ancient Egypt.

  “To tell you the truth, my sister says that this will be a longer story than it seemed at first.”

  “A longer story than it seemed?”

  The phrase “a longer story” brought to mind a tall stake set in the desert, where nothing else stood as far as the eye could see. As the sun began to sink, the shadow of the stake grew longer and longer, until its tip was too far away to be seen by the naked eye.

  “That’s what she says,” Creta Kano continued. “This story will be about more than the disappearance of a cat.”

  “I’m confused,” I said. “All we’re asking you to do is help us find the cat. Nothing more. If the cat’s dead, we want to know that for sure. Why does it have to be ‘a longer story’? I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I,” she said. She brought her hand up to the shiny barrette on her head and pushed it back a little. “But please put your faith in my sister. I’m not saying that she knows everything. But if she says there will be a longer story, you can be sure there will be a longer story.”

  I nodded without saying anything. There was nothing more I could say.

  Looking directly into my eyes and speaking with a new formality, Creta Kano asked, “Are you busy, Mr. Okada? Do you have any plans for the rest of the afternoon?”

  No, I said, I had no plans.

  “Would you mind, then, if I told you a few things about myself?” Creta Kano asked. She put the white patent-leather bag she was holding down on the sofa and rested her hands, one atop the other, on her tight green skirt, at the knees. Her nails had been done in a lovely pink color. She wore no rings.

  “Please,” I said. “Tell me anything you’d like.” And so the flow of my life—as had been foretold from the moment Creta Kano rang my doorbell—was being led in ever stranger directions.

  Creta Kano’s Long Story

  •

  An Inquiry into the Nature of Pain

  “I was born on May twenty-ninth,” Creta Kano began her story, “and the night of my twentieth birthday, I resolved to take my own life.”

  I put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her. She added cream and gave it a languid stir. No sugar. I drank my coffee black, as always. The clock on the shelf continued its dry rapping on the walls of time.

  Creta Kano looked hard at me and said, “I wonder if I should begin at the beginning—where I was born, family life, that kind of thing.”

  “Whatever you like. It’s up to you. Whatever you find most comfortable,” I said.

  “I was the third of three children,” she said. “Malta and I have an older brother. My father ran his own clinic in Kanagawa Prefecture. The family had nothing you could call domestic problems. I grew up in an ordinary home, the kind you can find anywhere. My parents were very serious people who believed strongly in the value of hard work. They were rather strict with us, but it seems to me they also gave us a fair amount of autonomy where little things were concerned. We were well off, but my parents did not believe in giving their children extra money for frills. I suppose I had a rather frugal upbringing.

  “Malta was five years older than I. There had been something different about her from the beginning. She was able to guess things. She’d know that the patient in room so-and-so had just died, or exactly where they could find a lost wallet, or whatever. Everybody enjoyed this, at first, and often found it useful, but soon it began to bother my parents. They ordered her never to talk about ‘things that did not have a clear basis in fact’ in the presence of other people. My father had his position as head of the hospital to think about. He didn’t want people hearing that his daughter had supernatural powers. Malta put a lock on her mouth after that. Not only did she stop talking about ‘things that did not have a clear basis in fact,’ but she rarely joined in even the most ordinary conversations.

  “To me, though, she opened her heart. We grew up very close. She would say, ‘Don’t ever tell anybody I told you this,’ and then she’d say something like, ‘There’s going to be a fire down the street’ or ‘Auntie So-and-so in Setagaya is going to get worse.’ And she was always right. I was still just a little girl, so I thought it was great fun. It never occurred to me to be frightened or to find it eerie. Ever since I can remember, I would always follow my big sister around and expect to hear her ‘messages.’

  “These special powers of hers grew stronger as she grew older, but she did not know how to use or nurture them, and this caused her a great deal of anguish. There was no one she could go to for advice, no one she could look up to for guidance. This made her a very lonely teenager. She had to solve everything by herself. She had to find all the answers herself. In our home, she was unhappy. There was never a time when she could find peace in her heart. She had to suppress her own powers and keep them hidden. It was like growing a large, powerful plant in a little pot. It was unnatural. It was wrong. All she knew was that she had to get out of there as soon as possible. She believed that somewhere there was a world that was right for her, a way of life that was right for her. Until she graduated from high school, though, she had to keep herself in check.

  “She was determined not to go to college, but rather to go abroad after graduating from high school. My parents had lived a very ordinary life, of course, and they were not prepared to let her do this. So my sister worked hard to raise the money she would need, and then she ran away. The first place she went to was Hawaii. She lived on Kauai for two years. She had read somewhere that Kauai’s north shore had an area with springs that produced marvelous water. Already, back then, my sister had a profound interest in water. She believed that human existence was largely controlled by the elements of water. Which is why she went to live on Kauai. At the time, there was still a hippie commune in the interior of the island. She lived as a member of the commune. The water there had a great influence on her spiritual powers. By taking that water into her body, she was able to attain a ‘greater harmony’ between her powers and her physical being. She wrote to me, telling me how wonderful this was, and her letters made me very happy. But soon the area could no longer satisfy her. True, it was a beautiful, peaceful land, and the people there sought only spiritual peace, free of material desires, but they were too dependent on sex and drugs. My sister did not need these things. After two years on Kauai, she left.

  “From there she went to Canada, and after traveling around the northern United States, she continued on to Europe. She sampled the water everywhere she went and succeeded in finding marvelous water in several places, but none of it was the perfect water. So she kept traveling. Whenever she ran out of money, she would do something like fortune-telling. People would reward her for helping them find lost things or missing persons. She would have preferred not to take the money. Powers bestowed by heaven should not be exchanged for worldly goods. At the time, though, it was the only way she could keep herself alive. Peopl
e heard about her divination everywhere she went. It was easy for her to make money. She even helped the police with an investigation in England. A little girl was missing, and she found where the body had been hidden. She also found the murderer’s glove nearby. The man was arrested and confessed. It was in all the papers. I’ll show you the clippings sometime. Anyhow, she went on wandering through Europe like this until she ended up in Malta. Close to five years had gone by since her departure from Japan, and this place turned out to be her destination in her search for water. I suppose she must have told you about this herself?”

  I nodded.

  “All the time she was wandering through the world, Malta would send me letters. Of course, there were times when she couldn’t manage to write, but almost every week I would receive a long letter from her about where she was and what she was doing. We were still very close. Even over long distances, we were able to share our feelings with each other through her letters. And what wonderful letters they were! If you could read them, you’d see what a wonderful person she is. Through her letters, I was able to encounter so many different worlds, so many interesting people! Her letters gave me such encouragement! They helped me grow. For that, I will always be deeply grateful to my sister. I don’t negate what she did for me in any way. But finally, letters are just letters. When I was in my most difficult teenage years, when I needed my sister more than ever, she was always somewhere far away. I could not stretch out my hand and find her there next to me. In our family, I was all alone. Isolated. My teen years were filled with pain—and later I will tell you more about that pain. There was no one I could go to for advice. In that sense, I was just as lonely as Malta had been. If she had been near me then, my life would have been different from what it is today. She would have given me words of advice and encouragement and salvation. But what’s the point of bringing such things up now? Just as Malta had to find her own way by herself, I had to find my own way by myself. And when I turned twenty, I decided to kill myself.”

  Creta Kano took her cup and drank her remaining coffee.

  “What delicious coffee!” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said, as casually as possible. “Can I offer you something to eat? I boiled some eggs a little while ago.”

  After some hesitation, she said she would have one. I brought eggs and salt from the kitchen and poured her more coffee. With no sense of urgency, Creta Kano and I set about peeling and eating our eggs and drinking coffee. While we were doing this, the phone rang, but I didn’t answer it. After fifteen or sixteen rings, it stopped. All that time, Creta Kano seemed unaware of the ringing.

  When she finished her egg, Creta Kano took a small handkerchief from her white patent-leather bag and wiped her mouth. Then she tugged at the hem of her skirt.

  “Once I had decided to kill myself, I wanted to leave a note behind. I sat at my desk for an hour, trying to write down my reasons for dying. I wanted to make it clear that no one else was to blame, that the reasons were all inside me. I didn’t want my family feeling responsible for something that was not their fault.

  “But I could not finish the note. I tried over and over, but each new version seemed worse than the last. When I read what I had written, it sounded foolish, even comical. The more serious I tried to make it, the more ridiculous it came out. In the end, I decided not to write anything at all.

  “It was a very simple matter, I felt. I was disappointed with my life. I could no longer endure the many kinds of pain that my life continued to cause me. I had endured the pain for twenty years. My life had been nothing but an unremitting source of pain. But I had tried to bear it as best I could. I have absolute confidence in the validity of my efforts to bear the pain. I can declare here with genuine pride that my efforts were second to none. I was not giving up without a fight. But the day I turned twenty, I reached a simple conclusion: life was not worth it. Life was not worth continuing such a struggle.”

  She stopped speaking and spent some time aligning the corners of the white handkerchief on her lap. When she looked down, her long false eyelashes cast gentle shadows on her face.

  I cleared my throat. I felt I ought to say something, but I didn’t know what to say, and so I kept silent. In the distance, I heard the wind-up bird cry.

  “The pain was what caused me to decide to die,” said Creta Kano. “And when I say ‘pain,’ that is exactly what I mean. Nothing mental or metaphorical, but physical pain, pure and simple. Plain, ordinary, direct, physical—and, for that reason, all the more intense—pain: headache, toothache, menstrual cramps, lower back pain, stiff shoulders, fever, muscle ache, burns, frostbite, sprains, fractures, blows to the body. All my life I have experienced physical pain with far greater frequency and intensity than others. Take my teeth, for example. They seemed to have some inborn defect. They would give me pain from one end of the year to the other. No matter how carefully I brushed, or how many times a day, or how strictly I avoided sweets, it did no good. All my efforts ended in cavities. To make matters worse, anesthetics seemed to have no effect on me. Going to the dentist was always a nightmare. The pain was beyond describing. It scared me to death. And then my terrible periods began. They were incredibly heavy. For a week at a time, I would be in such pain, it was as if someone were twisting a drill inside me. My head would throb. You probably can’t imagine what it was like, Mr. Okada, but the pain would bring tears to my eyes. For a week out of every month, I would be tortured by this unbearable pain.

  “If I boarded a plane, my head would feel as if it were splitting open from the changes in air pressure. The doctor said it had something to do with the structure of my ears, that this sort of thing happens if the inner ear has a shape that is sensitive to pressure changes. The same thing often happened to me on elevators. I can’t take elevators in tall buildings. The pain is so intense, it feels as if my head is going to split open in several places and the blood gush out. And then there was my stomach. At least once a week it would give me such sharp, piercing pain that I couldn’t get up in the morning. The doctors could never find a cause. Some suggested it was mental. But even if it was, the pain still hurt. As much as I was suffering, though, I could not stay home from school. If I had skipped school every time something hurt me, I would never have gone at all.

  “Whenever I bumped into something, it would leave a bruise on my body. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror always made me want to cry. My body was covered with so many dark bruises I looked like a rotten apple. I hated to let anyone see me in a bathing suit. Ever since I can remember, I’ve hardly ever gone swimming for that reason. Another problem I had was the difference in the size of my feet. Whenever I bought new shoes, the larger foot would be in terrible pain until the shoe was broken in.

  “Because of all these problems, I almost never did sports. In junior high school, my friends once dragged me to an ice-skating rink. I fell and hurt my hip so badly that afterward I would get a terrible ache there every winter. It felt as if I had been jabbed with a big, thick needle. Any number of times, I fell over trying to get up from a chair.

  “I suffered from constipation as well. A bowel movement every few days would be nothing but pain for me. And my shoulders would stiffen up terribly. The muscles would tighten until they were literally as hard as a rock. It was so painful, I couldn’t stand up, but lying down was no help, either. I imagined that my suffering must be much like that of a Chinese punishment I had read about. They would stuff the person in a box for several years. When my shoulders were at their worst, I could hardly breathe.

  “I could go on and on listing all the various pains I have suffered in my life, but it would only bore you, Mr. Okada, so I will just leave it at this. What I want to convey to you is the fact that my body was a virtual sample book of pain. I experienced every pain imaginable. I began to think I had been cursed, that life was so unfair. I might have been able to go on bearing the pain if the other people in the world had had to live the way I did, but they didn’t, and I couldn’t. Pain was not
something that was dealt out fairly. I tried asking people about pain, but nobody knew what real pain was. The majority of people in the world live without feeling much pain—at least on a daily basis. When this finally hit me (I had just entered junior high school at the time), it made me so sad I couldn’t stop crying. Why me? Why did I have to be the one to bear such a terrible burden? I wanted to die right then and there.

  “But at the same time, another thought came to me. This could not go on forever. One morning I would wake up and the pain would have disappeared —suddenly, with no explanation—and a whole new and peaceful life without pain would open up for me. It was not a thought in which I could place a great deal of faith, however.

  “And so I revealed these thoughts of mine to my sister. I told her that I didn’t want to go on living in such pain: what was I to do? After she thought about it for a while, she said this: ‘There is definitely something wrong with you, I’m sure. But I don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what you should do about it. I don’t have the power yet to make such judgments. All I know is that you should at least wait until you’re twenty. Bear it until you turn twenty, and then make your decision. That would be the best thing.’

  “This was how I decided to go on living until I was twenty. But no matter how much time went by, the situation did not improve. Far from it. The pain became even more intense. This taught me only one thing: As the body develops, the volume of pain increases proportionately.’ I endured the pain, however, for eight years. I went on living all that time, trying to see only the good side of life. I didn’t complain to anyone. I strove to keep on smiling, even when the pain was at its worst. I disciplined myself always to present an exterior of calm when the pain was so intense that I could hardly go on standing. Crying and complaining could not reduce the pain; it could only make me more miserable than ever. As a result of my efforts, people loved me. They saw me as a quiet, good-natured girl. I had the confidence of grown-ups and the friendship of people my own age. I might have had a perfect life, a perfect adolescence, if it hadn’t been for the pain. But it was always there. It was like my shadow. If I forgot about it for an instant, the pain would attack yet another part of my body.