I wore my suit and the polka-dot tie. As soon as I spotted Malta Kano, I tried to walk in her direction, but the crowd kept getting in my way. By the time I reached the bar, she was gone. The tropical drink stood there on the bar, in front of her now empty stool. I took the next seat at the bar and ordered a scotch on the rocks. The bartender asked me what kind of scotch I’d like, and I answered Cutty Sark. I really didn’t care which brand of scotch he served me, but Cutty Sark was the first thing that came to mind.
Before he could give me my drink, I felt a hand take my arm from behind, the touch as soft as if the person were grasping something that might fall apart at any moment. I turned. There stood a man without a face. Whether or not he actually had no face, I could not tell, but the place where his face was supposed to be was wrapped in a dark shadow, and I could not see what lay beyond it. “This way, Mr. Okada,” he said. I tried to speak, but before I could open my mouth, he said to me, “Please, come with me. We have so little time. Hurry.” Hand still on my arm, he guided me with rapid steps through the crowd and out into a corridor. I followed him down the corridor, unresisting. He did know my name, after all. It wasn’t as if I were letting a total stranger take me anywhere he liked. There was some kind of reason and purpose to all this.
After continuing down the corridor for some time, the faceless man came to a stop in front of a door. The number on the doorplate was 208. “It isn’t locked. You should be the one to open it.” I did as I was told and opened the door. Beyond it lay a large room. It seemed to be part of a suite of rooms in an old-fashioned hotel. The ceiling was high, and from it hung an old-fashioned chandelier. The chandelier was not lit. A small wall lamp gave off a gloomy light, the only source of illumination in the room. The curtains were closed tight.
“If it’s whiskey you want, Mr. Okada,” said the faceless man, “we have plenty. Cutty Sark, wasn’t it? Drink as much as you’d like.” He pointed to a cabinet beside the door, then closed the door silently, leaving me alone. I stood in the middle of the room for a long time, wondering what to do.
A large oil painting hung on the wall. It was a picture of a river. I looked at it for a while, hoping to calm myself down. The moon was up over the river. Its light fell faintly on the opposite shore, but so very faintly that I could not make out the scenery there. It was all vague outlines, running together.
Soon I felt a strong craving for whiskey. I thought I would open the cabinet and take a drink, as suggested by the faceless man, but the cabinet would not open. What looked like doors were actually well-made imitations of doors. I tried pushing and pulling on the various protruding parts, but the cabinet remained firmly shut.
“It’s not easy to open, Mr. Okada,” said Creta Kano. I realized she was standing there—and in her early-sixties outfit. “Some time must go by before it will open. Today is out of the question. You might as well give up.”
As I watched, she shed her clothes as easily as opening a pea pod and stood before me naked, without warning or explanation. “We have so little time, Mr. Okada, let’s finish this as quickly as possible. I am sorry for the rush, but I have my reasons. Just getting here was hard enough.” Then she came up to me, opened my fly, and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, took out my penis. Lowering her eyes, with their false lashes, she enclosed my penis with her mouth. Her mouth was far larger than I had imagined. Inside, I immediately came erect. When she moved her tongue, the curled ends of her hair trembled as in a gentle breeze, caressing my thighs. All I could see was her hair and her false eyelashes. I sat on the bed, and she went down on her knees, her face buried in my crotch. “Stop it,” I said. “Noboru Wataya will be here any minute. I don’t want to see him here.”
Creta Kano took her mouth from my penis and said, “Don’t worry. We have plenty of time for this, at least.”
She ran the tip of her tongue over my penis. I didn’t want to come, but there was no way of stopping it. I felt as if it were being sucked out of me. Her lips and tongue held on to me like slippery life forms. I came. I opened my eyes.
Terrific. I went to the bathroom, washed my soiled underpants, and took a hot shower, washing myself with care to get rid of the sticky sensations of the dream. How many years had it been since my last wet dream? I tried to recall exactly but couldn’t, it had been so long.
I stepped out of the shower and was still drying myself when the phone rang. It was Kumiko. Having just had a wet dream over another woman, I felt a little tense speaking with her.
“Your voice is strange,” she said. “What’s wrong?” Her sensitivity to such things was frightening.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was dozing. You woke me up.”
“Oh, really?” she said. I could feel her suspicions coming through the earpiece, which made me all the more tense.
“Anyway, sorry, but I’m going to be a little late today,” Kumiko said. “Maybe as late as nine. So I’ll eat out.”
“That’s OK,” I said. “I’ll find something for myself. Don’t worry.”
“I really am sorry,” she said. It had the sound of an afterthought. There was a pause, and then she hung up.
I looked at the receiver for a few seconds. Then I went to the kitchen and peeled an apple.
•
In the six years since I had married Kumiko, I had never slept with another woman. Which is not to say that I never felt the desire for another woman or never had the chance. Just that I never pursued it when the opportunity arose. I can’t explain why, exactly, but it probably has something to do with life’s priorities.
I did once happen to spend the night with another woman. She was someone I liked, and I knew she would have slept with me. But finally, I didn’t do it.
We had been working together at the law firm for several years. She was probably two or three years younger than I. Her job was to take calls and coordinate everyone’s schedules, and she was very good at it. She was quick, and she had an outstanding memory. You could ask her anything and she would know the answer: who was working where at what, which files were in which cabinet, that kind of thing. She handled all appointments. Everybody liked her and depended on her. On an individual basis, too, she and I were fairly close. We had gone drinking together several times. She was not exactly what you would call a beauty, but I liked her looks.
When it came time for her to quit her job to get married (she would have to move to Kyushu in connection with her husband’s work), several colleagues and I invited her out for a last drink together. Afterward, she and I had to take the same train home, and because it was late, I saw her to her apartment. At the front door, she invited me in for a cup of coffee. I was worried about missing the last train, but I knew we might never see each other again, and I also liked the idea of sobering up with coffee, so I decided to go in. The place was a typical single girl’s apartment. It had a refrigerator that was just a little too grand for one person, and a bookshelf stereo. A friend had given her the refrigerator. She changed into something comfortable in the next room and made coffee in the kitchen. We sat on the floor, talking.
At one point when we had run out of things to say, she asked me, as if it had suddenly occurred to her, “Can you name something—some concrete thing—that you’re especially afraid of?”
“Not really,” I said, after a moment’s thought. I was afraid of all kinds of things, but no one thing in particular. “How about you?”
“I’m scared of culverts,” she said, hugging her knees. “You know what a culvert is, don’t you?”
“Some kind of ditch, isn’t it?” I didn’t have a very precise definition of the word in mind.
“Yeah, but it’s underground. An underground waterway. A drainage ditch with a lid on. A pitch-dark flow.”
“I see,” I said. “A culvert.”
“I was born and raised in the country. In Fukushima. There was a stream right near my house—a little stream, just the runoff from the fields. It flowed underground at one point into a culvert. I guess
I was playing with some of the older kids when it happened. I was just two or three. The others put me in a little boat and launched it into the stream. It was probably something they did all the time, but that day it had been raining, and the water was high. The boat got away from them and carried me straight for the opening of the culvert. I would have been sucked right in if one of the local farmers hadn’t happened by. I’m sure they never would have found me.”
She ran her left index finger over her mouth as if to check that she was still alive.
“I can still picture everything that happened. I’m lying on my back and being swept along by the water. The sides of the stream tower over me like high stone walls, and overhead is the blue sky. Sharp, clear blue. I’m being swept along in the flow. Swish, swish, faster and faster. But I can’t understand what it means. And then all of a sudden I do understand—that there’s darkness lying ahead. Real darkness. Soon it comes and tries to drink me down. I can feel a cold shadow beginning to wrap itself around me. That’s my earliest memory.”
She took a sip of coffee.
“I’m scared to death,” she said. “I’m so scared I can hardly stand it. I feel like I did back then, like I’m being swept along toward it and I can’t get away.”
She took a cigarette from her handbag, put it in her mouth, and lit it with a match, exhaling in one long, slow breath. This was the first time I had ever seen her smoke.
“Are you talking about your marriage?” I asked.
“That’s right,” she said. “My marriage.”
“Is there some particular problem?” I asked. “Something concrete?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not really. Just a lot of little things.”
I didn’t know what to say to her, but the situation demanded that I say something.
“Everybody experiences this feeling to some extent when they’re about to get married, I think. ‘Oh, no, I’m making this terrible mistake!’ You’d probably be abnormal if you didn’t feel it. It’s a big decision, picking somebody to spend your life with. So it’s natural to be scared, but you don’t have to be that scared.”
“That’s easy to say—‘Everybody feels like that. Everybody’s the same,’ ” she said.
Eleven o’clock had come and gone. I had to find a way to bring this conversation to a successful conclusion and get out of there. But before I could say anything, she suddenly asked me to hold her.
“Why?” I asked, caught off guard.
“To charge my batteries,” she said.
“Charge your batteries?”
“My body has run out of electricity. I haven’t been able to sleep for days now. The minute I get to sleep I wake up, and then I can’t get back to sleep. I can’t think. When I get like that, somebody has to charge my batteries. Otherwise, I can’t go on living. It’s true.”
I peered into her eyes, wondering if she was still drunk, but they were once again her usual cool, intelligent eyes. She was far from drunk.
“But you’re getting married next week. You can have him hold you all you want. Every night. That’s what marriage is for. You’ll never run out of electricity again.”
“The problem is now,” she said. “Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month. I’m out of electricity now.”
Lips clamped shut, she stared at her feet. They were in perfect alignment. Small and white, they had ten pretty toenails. She really, truly wanted somebody to hold her, it seemed, and so I took her in my arms. It was all very weird. To me, she was just a capable, pleasant colleague. We worked in the same office, told each other jokes, and had gone out for drinks now and then. But here, away from work, in her apartment, with my arms around her, we were nothing but warm lumps of flesh. We had been playing our assigned roles on the office stage, but stepping down from the stage, abandoning the provisional images that we had been exchanging there, we were both just unstable, awkward lumps of flesh, warm pieces of meat outfitted with digestive tracts and hearts and brains and reproductive organs. I had my arms wrapped around her back, and she had her breasts pressed hard against my chest. They were larger and softer than I had imagined them to be. I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, and she was slumped against me. We stayed in that position for a long time, holding each other without a word.
“Is this all right?” I asked, in a voice that did not sound like my own. It was as if someone else were speaking for me.
She said nothing, but I could feel her nod.
She was wearing a sweatshirt and a thin skirt that came down to her knees, but soon I realized that she had nothing on underneath. Almost automatically, this gave me an erection, and she seemed to be aware of it. I could feel her warm breath on my neck.
In the end, I didn’t sleep with her. But I did have to go on “charging” her “batteries” until two in the morning. She pleaded with me to stay with her until she was asleep. I took her to her bed and tucked her in. But she remained awake for a long time. She changed into pajamas, and I went on holding and “recharging” her. In my arms, I felt her cheeks grow hot and her heart pound. I couldn’t be sure I was doing the right thing, but I knew of no other way to deal with the situation. The simplest thing would have been to sleep with her, but I managed to sweep that possibility from my mind. My instincts told me not to do it.
“Please don’t hate me for this,” she said. “My electricity is just so low I can’t help it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand.”
I knew I should call home, but what could I have said to Kumiko? I didn’t want to lie, but I knew it would be impossible for me to explain to her what was happening. And after a while, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Whatever happened would happen. I left her apartment at two o’clock and didn’t get home until three. It was tough finding a cab.
Kumiko was furious, of course. She was sitting at the kitchen table, wide awake, waiting for me. I said I had been out drinking and playing mah-jongg with the guys from the office. Why couldn’t I have made a simple phone call? she demanded. It had never crossed my mind, I said. She was not convinced, and the lie became apparent almost immediately. I hadn’t played mah-jongg in years, and I just wasn’t cut out for lying in any case. I ended up confessing the truth. I told her the entire story from beginning to end—without the erection part, of course—maintaining that I had done nothing with the woman.
Kumiko refused to speak to me for three days. Literally. Not a word. She slept in the other room, and she ate her meals alone. This was the greatest crisis our marriage had faced. She was genuinely angry with me, and I understood exactly how she felt.
After her three days of silence, Kumiko asked me, “What would you think if you were in my position?” These were the very first words she spoke. “What if I had come home at three o’clock Sunday morning without so much as a telephone call? ‘I’ve been in bed with a man all this time, but don’t worry, I didn’t do anything, please believe me. I was just recharging his batteries. OK, great, let’s have breakfast and go to sleep.’ You mean to say you wouldn’t get angry, you’d just believe me?”
I kept quiet.
“And what you did was even worse than that,” Kumiko continued. “You lied to me! You said you were drinking and playing mah-jongg. A total lie! How do you expect me to believe you didn’t sleep with her?”
“I’m sorry I lied,” I said. “I should never have done that. But the only reason I lied was because the truth was so difficult to explain. I want you to believe me: I really didn’t do anything wrong.”
Kumiko put her head down on the table. I felt as if the air in the room were gradually thinning out.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “I can’t explain it other than to ask you to believe me.”
“All right. If you want me to believe you, I will,” she said. “But I want you to remember this: I’m probably going to do the same thing to you someday. And when that time comes, I want you to believe me. I have that right.”
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Kumiko had never exercised that right. Every once in a while, I imagined how I would feel if she did exercise it. I would probably believe her, but my reaction would no doubt be as complex and as difficult to deal with as Kumiko’s. To think that she had made a point of doing such a thing—and for what? Which was exactly how she must have felt about me back then.
•
“Mr. Wind-Up Bird!” came a voice from the garden. It was May Kasahara.
Still toweling my hair, I went out to the veranda. She was sitting on the edge, biting a thumbnail. She wore the same dark sunglasses as when I had first met her, plus cream-colored cotton pants and a black polo shirt. In her hand was a clipboard.
“I climbed it,” she said, pointing to the cinder-block wall. Then she brushed away the dirt clinging to her pants. “I kinda figured I had the right place. I’m glad it was yours! Think if I had come over the wall into the wrong house!”
She took a pack of Hope regulars from her pocket and lit up.
“Anyhow, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, how are you?”
“OK, I guess.”
“I’m going to work now,” she said. “Why don’t you come along? We work in teams of two, and it’d be sooo much better for me to have somebody I know. Some new guy’d ask me all kinds of questions—‘How old are you? Why aren’t you in school?’ It’s such a pain! Or maybe he’d turn out to be a pervert. It happens, you know! Do it for me, will you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”
“Is it that job you told me about—some kind of survey for a toupee maker?”
“That’s it,” she said. “All you have to do is count bald heads on the Ginza from one to four. It’s easy! And it’ll be good for you. You’ll be bald someday too, the way you’re going, so you better check it out now while you still have hair.”
“Yeah, but how about you? Isn’t the truant officer going to get you if they see you doing this stuff on the Ginza in the middle of the day?”
“Nah. I just tell ’em it’s fieldwork for social studies. It always works.”