With no plans for the afternoon, I decided to tag along. May Kasahara phoned her company to say we would be coming in. On the telephone, she turned into a very proper young woman: Yes, sir, I would like to team up with him, yes, that is correct, thank you very much, yes, I understand, yes, we can be there after noon. I left a note for Kumiko saying I would be back by six, in case she got home early, then I left the house with May Kasahara.
The toupee company was in Shimbashi. On the subway, May Kasahara explained how the survey worked. We were to stand on a street corner and count all the bald men (or those with thinning hair) who walked by. We were to classify them according to the degree of their baldness: C, those whose hair might have thinned somewhat; B, those who had lost a lot; and A, those who were really bald. May took a pamphlet from her folder and showed me examples of the three stages.
“You get the idea pretty much, right, which heads fit which categories? I won’t go into detail. It’d take all day. But you get it pretty much, right, which is which?”
“Pretty much,” I said, without exuding a great deal of confidence.
On May Kasahara’s other side sat an overweight company type—a very definite B—who kept glancing uneasily at the pamphlet, but she seemed not to notice how nervous this was making him.
“I’ll be in charge of putting them into categories, and you stand next to me with a survey sheet. You put them in A, B, or C, depending on what I tell you. That’s all there is to it. Easy, right?”
“I guess so,” I said. “But what’s the point of taking a survey like this?”
“I dunno,” she said. “They’re doing them all over Tokyo—in Shinjuku, Shibuya, Aoyama. Maybe they’re trying to find out which neighborhood has the most bald men? Or they want to know the proportions of A, B, and C types in the population? Who knows? They’ve got so much money, they don’t know what to do with it. So they can waste it on stuff like this. Profits are huge in the wig business. The employees get much bigger bonuses than in just any old company. Know why?”
“No. Why?”
“Wigs don’t last long. Bet you didn’t know: toupees are good for two, maybe three years max. The better made they are, the faster they get used up. They’re the ultimate consumer product. It’s ’cause they fit so tightly against the scalp: the hair underneath gets thinner than ever. Once that happens, you have to buy a new one to get that perfect fit again. And think about it: What if you were using a toupee and it was no good after two years—what would go through your mind? Would you think, OK, my wig’s worn out. Can’t wear it anymore. But it’ll cost too much to buy a new one, so tomorrow I’ll start going to work without one? Is that what you’d think?”
I shook my head. “Probably not,” I said.
“Of course not. Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It’s, like, his fate. That’s why the wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they’re like drug dealers. Once they get their hooks into a guy, he’s a customer for life. Have you ever heard of a bald guy suddenly growing a head of hair? I never have. A wig’s got to cost half a million yen at least, maybe a million for a tough one. And you need a new one every two years! Wow! Even a car lasts longer than that—four or five years. And then you can trade it in!”
“I see what you mean,” I said.
“Plus, the wig makers run their own hairstyling salons. They wash the wigs and cut the customers’ real hair. I mean, think about it: you can’t just plunk yourself down in an ordinary barber’s chair, rip off your wig, and say, ‘I’d like a trim,’ can you? The income from these places alone is tremendous.”
“You know all kinds of things,” I said, with genuine admiration. The B-category company type next to May was listening to our conversation with obvious fascination.
“Sure,” she said. “The guys at the office like me. They tell me everything. The profits in this business are huge. They make the wigs in Southeast Asia and places like that, where labor is cheap. They even get the hair there—in Thailand or the Philippines. The women sell their hair to the wig companies. That’s how they earn their dowries in some places. The whole world’s so weird! The guy sitting next to you might actually be wearing the hair of some woman in Indonesia.”
By reflex, I and the B-man looked around at the others in the car.
•
We stopped off at the company’s Shimbashi office to pick up an envelope containing survey sheets and pencils. This company supposedly had a number two market share, but it was utterly discreet, without even a name plaque at the entrance, so that customers could come and go with ease. Neither the envelope nor the survey sheets bore the company name. At the survey department, I filled out a part-time worker’s registration form with my name, address, educational background, and age. This office was an incredibly quiet place of business. There was no one shouting into the telephone, no one banging away at a computer keyboard with sleeves rolled up. Each individual worker was neatly dressed and pursuing his or her own task with quiet concentration. As might be expected at a toupee maker’s office, not one man here was bald. Some might even be wearing the company’s product, but it was impossible for me to tell those who were from those who weren’t. Of all the companies I had ever visited, this had the strangest ambience.
We took the subway to the Ginza. Early and hungry, we stopped at the Dairy Queen for a hamburger.
“Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara, “would you wear a toupee if you were bald?”
“I wonder,” I said. “I don’t like things that take time and trouble. I probably wouldn’t try to fight it if I went bald.”
“Good,” she said, wiping the ketchup from her mouth with a paper napkin. “That’s the way. Bald men never look as bad as they think. To me, it’s nothing to get so upset about.”
“I wonder,” I said.
•
For the next three hours, we sat at the subway entrance by the Wako Building, counting the bald-headed men who passed by. Looking down at the heads going up and down the subway stairs was the most accurate method of determining the degree of baldness of any one head. May Kasahara would say “A” or “B” or “C,” and I would write it down. She had obviously done this many times. She never fumbled or hesitated or corrected herself, but assigned each head to its proper category with great speed and precision, uttering the letters in low, clipped tones so as not to be noticed by the passersby. This called for some rapid-fire naming whenever a large group of bald heads passed by at once: “CCBABCAACCBBB.” At one point, an elegant-looking old gentleman (who himself possessed a full head of snow-white hair) stopped to watch us in action. “Pardon me,” he said to me after a while, “but might I ask what you two are doing?”
“Survey,” I said.
“What kind of survey?” he asked.
“Social studies,” I said.
“CACABC,” said May Kasahara.
The old gentleman seemed less than convinced, but he went on watching us until he gave up and wandered off somewhere.
When the Mitsukoshi clock across the street signaled four o’clock, we ended our survey and went back to the Dairy Queen for a cup of coffee. It had not been strenuous work, but I found my neck and shoulders strangely stiff. Maybe it was from the covert nature of the job, a guilty feeling I had about counting bald men in secret. All the time we were on the subway heading back to company headquarters in Shimbashi, I found myself automatically assigning each bald head I saw to category A or B or C, which almost made me queasy. I tried to stop myself, but by then a kind of momentum had set in. We handed in our survey forms and received our pay—rather good pay for the amount of time and effort involved. I signed a receipt and put the money in my pocket. May Kasahara and I rode the subway to Shinjuku and from there took the Odakyu Line home. The afternoon rush hour was starting. This was my first ride on a crowded train in some time, but it hardly filled me with nostalgia.
“Pretty good job, don’t you think?” said May Kasahara, standing next to me on the
train. “It’s easy, pay’s not bad.”
“Pretty good,” I said, sucking on a lemon drop.
“Go with me next time? We can do it once a week.”
“Why not?” I said.
“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” May Kasahara said after a short silence, as if a thought had suddenly come to her, “I bet the reason people are afraid of going bald is because it makes them think of the end of life. I mean, when your hair starts to thin, it must feel as if your life is being worn away … as if you’ve taken a giant step in the direction of death, the last Big Consumption.”
I thought about it for a while. “That’s one way to look at it, I’m sure,” I said.
“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, I sometimes wonder what it must feel like to die little by little over a long period of time. What do you think?”
Unsure exactly what she was getting at, I changed my grip on the hand strap and looked into her eyes. “Can you give me a concrete example of what you mean by that—to die little by little?”
“Well … I don’t know. You’re trapped in the dark all alone, with nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and little by little you die.…”
“It must be terrible,” I said. “Painful. I wouldn’t want to die like that if I could help it.”
“But finally, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, isn’t that just what life is? Aren’t we all trapped in the dark somewhere, and they’ve taken away our food and water, and we’re slowly dying, little by little …?”
I laughed. “You’re too young to be so … pessimistic,” I said, using the English word.
“Pessi-what?”
“Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things.”
“Pessimistic … pessimistic …” She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. “I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”
Magic Touch
•
Death in the Bathtub
•
Messenger with Keepsakes
We had moved into our present house in the autumn of the second year we were married. The Koenji apartment we had lived in until then was slated for renovation. We looked for a cheap, convenient apartment to move into, but finding such a place was not easy with our budget. When he heard this, my uncle suggested that we move into a house he owned in Setagaya. He had bought it in his youth and lived there for ten years. He wanted to tear the old place down and put up something more functional, but architectural regulations prevented him from building the kind of house he wanted. He was waiting for a rumored relaxation of the rules to take effect, but if he left the place vacant in the meantime, he would have to pay the property taxes, and if he rented it to strangers, there could be trouble when he asked them to vacate. From us, he would take only a nominal rent to cover the taxes, but in return he wanted us to agree to give up the place with three months’ notice when the time came. We had no problem with that: the part about the taxes was not entirely clear to us, but we jumped at the chance to live in a real house, if only for a little while, paying the kind of rent we had been paying to live in an apartment (and a very cheap apartment at that). The house was pretty far from the nearest station on the Odakyu Line, but it was in a quiet residential neighborhood, and it had its own small yard. Even though it didn’t belong to us, it gave us the feeling, once we moved in, that we were now part of a real “household.”
My mother’s younger brother, this uncle of mine never made any demands on us. He was kind of a cool guy, I suppose, but there was something almost uncanny about him in the way he left us alone. Still, he was my favorite relative. He had graduated from a college in Tokyo and gone to work as a radio announcer, but when he got “sick of the work” after ten years, he quit the station and opened a bar on the Ginza. It was an almost austere little place, but it became widely known for the authenticity of its cocktails, and within a few years my uncle was running a string of bars and restaurants. Every one of his establishments did extremely well: apparently, he had that special spark you need for business. Once, while I was still in college, I asked him why every place he opened was such a success. In the very same location where one restaurant had failed on the Ginza, he might open up the same kind of restaurant and do just fine. Why was that? He held the palms of both hands out for me to see. “It’s my magic touch,” he said, without a hint of humor. And that was all he said.
Maybe he really did have a “magic touch,” but he also had a talent for finding capable people to work for him. He paid them high salaries and treated them well, and they in turn worked hard for him. “When I know I’ve got the right guy, I put a wad of bills in his hand and let him do his thing,” he once told me. “You’ve got to spend your money for the things that money can buy, not worry about profit or loss. Save your energy for the things that money can’t buy.”
He married late in life. Only after he had achieved financial success in his mid-forties did he settle down. His wife was a divorcée, three or four years his junior, and she brought her own considerable assets to the marriage. My uncle never told me how he happened to meet her, and all I could tell about her was that she was a quiet sort of woman of good background. They had no children. She had apparently had no children with her first husband, either, which may have been the reason for the divorce. In any case, though not exactly a rich man, my uncle was in a position in his mid-forties where it was no longer necessary for him to break his back for money. In addition to the profits from his restaurants and bars, he had rental income from several houses and condos that he owned, plus steady dividend income from investments. With its reputation for respectable businesses and modest lifestyles, the family tended to see my uncle as something of a black sheep, and he had never shown much inclination for consorting with relatives. As his only nephew, though, I had always been of some concern to him, especially after my mother died the year I entered college and I had a falling-out with my father, who remarried. When I was living the lonely life of a poor college student in Tokyo, my uncle often treated me to dinner in one or another of his Ginza restaurants.
He and his wife now lived in a condo on a hill in Azabu rather than be bothered with taking care of a house. He was not given to indulging in luxuries, but he did have one hobby, which was the purchase of rare automobiles. He kept a Jaguar and an Alfa Romeo in the garage, both of them nearly antiques and extremely well cared for, as shiny as newborn babes.
•
On the phone with my uncle about something else, I took the opportunity to ask him what he knew about May Kasahara’s family.
“Kasahara, you say?” He took a moment to think. “Never heard of them. I was a bachelor when I lived there, never had anything to do with the neighbors.”
“Actually, it’s the house opposite theirs I’m curious about, the vacant house on the other side of the alley from their backyard,” I said. “I guess somebody named Miyawaki used to live there. Now it’s all boarded up.”
“Oh, Miyawaki. Sure, I knew him,” said my uncle. “He used to own a few restaurants. Had one on the Ginza too. I met him professionally a few times. His places were nothing much, tell you the truth, but he had good locations. I thought he was doing all right. He was a nice guy, but kind of a spoiled-rich-kid type. He had never had to work hard, or he just never got the hang of it or something, but he never quite grew up. Somebody got him going on the stock market, took him for everything he had—house, land, businesses, everything. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. He was trying to open a new place, had his house and land up as collateral. Bang! The whole thing. Had a couple of daughters, I think, college age.”
“The house has been empty ever since, I guess.”
“No kidding? I’ll bet the title’s a mess and his assets have been frozen or something. You’d better not touch that place, no matter what kind of bargain they??
?re offering you.”
“Who? Me?” I laughed. “I could never afford a place like that. But what do you mean?”
“I looked into that house when I bought mine. There’s something wrong with it.”
“You mean like ghosts?”
“Maybe not ghosts, but I’ve never heard anything good about the place,” my uncle said. “Some fairly well-known army guy lived there till the end of the war, Colonel Somebody-or-other, a real superelite officer. The troops under his command in North China won all kinds of decorations, but they did some terrible things there—executing five hundred POWs, forcing tens of thousands of farmers to work for them until half of them dropped dead, stuff like that. These are the stories that were going around, so I don’t know how much is true. He was called home just before the end of the war, so he was here for the surrender, and he could see from what was going on that he was likely to be tried as a war criminal. The guys who had gone crazy in China—the generals, the field officers—were being dragged away by the MPs. Well, he had no intention of being put on trial. He was not going to be made a spectacle of and hanged in the bargain. He preferred to take his own life rather than let that happen. So one day when he saw a GI stop a jeep in front of his house, he blew his brains out on the spot. He would have preferred to slit his stomach open the old-fashioned samurai way, but there was no time for that. His wife hanged herself in the kitchen to ‘accompany’ her husband in death.”
“Wow.”
“Anyhow, it turned out the GI was just an ordinary GI, looking for his girlfriend. He was lost. He wanted to ask somebody directions. You know how tough it is to find your way around that place. Deciding it’s your time to die—that can’t be easy for anybody.”
“No, it can’t be.”
“The house was vacant for a while after that, until an actress bought it—a movie actress. You wouldn’t know her name. She was around long before your time, and she was never very famous. She lived there, say, ten years or so. Just she and her maid. She was single. A few years after she moved in, she contracted some eye disease. Everything looked cloudy to her, even close up. But she was an actress, after all; she couldn’t work with glasses on. And contact lenses were a new thing back then. They weren’t very good and almost nobody used them. So before the crew shot a scene, she would always go over the layout and memorize how many steps she had to take from A to B. She managed one way or another: they were pretty simple films, those old Shochiku domestic dramas. Everything was more relaxed in those days. Then one day, after she had checked over the set and gone back to her dressing room, a young cameraman who didn’t know what was going on moved the props and things just a little bit.”