“Yeah, really.”
“He survived, but he lost all his hair and teeth. Everything. Even if he lived, it must have been terrible.”
“Yeah, really.”
“Even if you lose your teeth and hair, though, I suppose you can live a pretty normal life if you’ve got a decent wig and false teeth.”
“Yeah, and wigs and dentures have made great strides since the time of the Russian Revolution, too. That might make things a little easier.”
“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird …,” said May Kasahara, clearing her throat.
“What?”
“If people lived forever—if they never got any older—if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy—do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way we’re doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less—philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world. I mean—”
May Kasahara cut herself short and remained silent for a while, during which her “I mean” hung in the darkness of the well like a hacked-off fragment of thought. Maybe she had lost the will to say any more. Or maybe she needed time to think of what came next. I just waited in silence for her to continue, my head lowered as from the beginning. The thought crossed my mind that if May Kasahara wanted to kill me right away, it would be no trouble for her at all. She could just drop a big rock down the well. If she tried a few times, one was bound to hit me in the head.
“I mean … this is what I think, but … people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they’re going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? Why would they have to bother? Or even if they should bother, they’d probably just figure, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got plenty of time for that. I’ll think about it later.’ But we can’t wait till later. We’ve got to think about it right this second. I might get run over by a truck tomorrow afternoon. And you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird: you might starve to death. One morning three days from now, you could be dead in the bottom of a well. See? Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That’s what I think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things.”
May Kasahara paused.
“Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird …”
“What?”
“Down there in the darkness, have you been thinking about your own death? About how you would die down there?”
I took a moment to think about her question. “Nope,” I said. “That’s one thing I haven’t been thinking about.”
“Why not?” May Kasahara asked, with a note of disgust, as if she were speaking to a deformed animal. “Why haven’t you been thinking about it? You’re literally facing death right now. I’m not kidding around. I told you before, it’s up to me whether you live or die.”
“You could drop a rock,” I said.
“A rock? What are you talking about?”
“You could go find a big rock and drop it on me.”
“Well, sure, I could do that.” But she didn’t seem to like the idea. “Anyhow, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you must be starving. It’s just gonna get worse and worse. And you’ll run out of water. So how can you not think about death? Don’t you think it’s weird?”
“Yeah, I suppose it’s kind of weird,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking about other things the whole time. I’ll probably think about death, too, when I start to get really hungry. I’ve still got three weeks before I die, right?”
“That’s if you have water,” said May Kasahara. “That’s what happened with that Russian guy. He was some big landowner or something. The revolutionary guard threw him down an old mine shaft, but there was water seeping through the wall, so he licked it and kept himself alive. He was in total darkness, just like you. But you don’t have much water, do you?”
“No,” I said honestly. “Just a little left.”
“Then you’d better be careful with it,” said May Kasahara. “Take little sips. And take your time thinking. About death. About how you’re dying. You’ve still got plenty of time.”
“Why are you so determined to make me think about death? What’s in it for you?”
“Nothing’s in it for me,” May Kasahara shot back. “What makes you think there’s anything in it for me for you to think about your own death? It’s your life. It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m just … interested.”
“Out of curiosity?”
“Yeah. Curiosity. About how people die. About how it feels to die. Curiosity.”
May Kasahara fell silent. When the conversation broke off, a deep stillness filled in the space around me, as if it had been waiting for this opportunity. I wanted to raise my face and look up. To see whether May Kasahara was visible from down here. But the light was too strong. I was sure it would burn my eyes out.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” I said.
“OK. Tell me.”
“My wife had a lover,” I said. “At least I’m pretty sure she did. I never realized it, but for months, while she was still living with me, she was sleeping with this guy. I couldn’t believe it at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced. Now, looking back, I can see there were all kinds of little clues. She’d come home at crazy hours, or she’d flinch when I touched her. But I couldn’t read the signals. I trusted her. I never thought she’d have an affair. It just never occurred to me.”
“Wow,” said May Kasahara.
“So then one day she just left the house and never came back. We had breakfast together that morning. She went off to work in her usual outfit. All she had with her was her handbag, and she picked up a blouse and skirt at the cleaner’s. And that was it. No goodbye. No note. Nothing. Kumiko was gone. Left all her things—clothes and everything. And she’ll probably never come back here—back to me. Not of her own accord, at least. That much I know.”
“Is Kumiko with the other guy now, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. As my head moved slowly through it, the surrounding air felt like some kind of heavy water, without the watery feel. “They probably are together.”
“And so now you’re crushed, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, and that’s why you went down in the well.”
“Of course I was crushed when I realized what was happening. But that’s not why I’m in here. I’m not hiding from reality. Like I said before, I needed a place where I could be alone and concentrate on my thinking. Where and how did my relationship with Kumiko go wrong? That’s what I can’t understand. Not that I’m saying everything was perfect until that point. A man and a woman in their twenties, with two distinct personalities, just happen to meet somewhere and start living together. There’s not a married couple anywhere without their problems. But I thought we were doing OK, basically, that any little problems would solve themselves over time. But I was wrong. I was missing something big, making some kind of mistake on a really basic level, I suppose. That’s what I came in here to think about.”
May Kasahara said nothing. I swallowed once.
“I wonder if this’ll make any sense to you: When we got married, six years ago, the two of us were trying to make a brand-new world—like building a new house on an empty lot. We had this clear image of what we wanted. We didn’t need a fancy house or anything, just something to keep the weather out, as long as the two of us could be together. We didn’t need any extras. Things would just get in the way. It all seemed so simple to us. Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”
“Sure,” said May Kasahara. “I feel that way all the time.”
“Well, that’s what we were trying to do when we got married. I wanted to get outside myself: the m
e that had existed until then. And it was the same for Kumiko. In that new world of ours, we were trying to get hold of new selves that were better suited to who we were deep down. We believed we could live in a way that was more perfectly suited to who we were.”
May Kasahara seemed to shift her center of gravity in the light somewhat. I could sense her movement. She seemed to be waiting for me to continue. But I had nothing more to say at that point. Nothing came to mind. I felt tired from the sound of my own voice in the concrete tube of the well.
“Does this make any sense to you?” I asked.
“Sure it does.”
“What do you think about it?”
“Hey, I’m still a kid, ya know. I don’t know anything about marriage. I don’t know what was in your wife’s mind when she started fooling around with another man or when she left you. But from what you just told me, I think you kinda had the wrong idea from the very beginning. You know what I mean, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? What you were just talking about … I don’t know, it’s kind of impossible for anybody to do that stuff, like, ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new world’ or ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new self.’ That’s what I think. You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi.’ You don’t seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else. And even this idea you have of remaking yourself: even that was made somewhere else. Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You’re a grown-up, aren’t you? How come you don’t get it? That’s a big problem, if you ask me. And that’s what you’re being punished for—by all kinds of things: by the world you tried to get rid of, or by the self you tried to get rid of. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I remained silent, staring at the darkness that enveloped my feet. I didn’t know what to say.
“OK, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said softly. “You go ahead and think. Think. Think.”
The cover snapped into place, and the well opening was blocked once again.
•
I took the canteen from my knapsack and gave it a shake. The light sloshing sound echoed in the darkness. Maybe a quarter left. I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes. May Kasahara was probably right. This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.
Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. How come you don’t get it?
Hunger as Pain
•
Kumiko’s Long Letter
•
Bird as Prophet
I fell asleep a few times and woke up just as often. These were short, unsettled snatches of sleep, as on an airplane. Whenever deep sleep was about to arrive, I would shrink back and wake up; whenever full wakefulness was about to arrive, I would drift off into sleep, in endless repetition. Without changes in the light, time wobbled by like a wagon with a loose axle. My cramped, unnatural posture robbed my body of rest in small, accumulating doses. Each time I woke, I would check the time on my watch. Its pace was heavy and uneven.
With nothing better to do, I would pick up the flashlight and shine it at random—at the ground, at the walls, at the well cover. What I found there was always the same ground, the same walls, the same well cover. The shadows cast by the moving beam would sway, stretch and shrink, swell and contract. When I tired of this, I would spend time feeling my face, probing every line and crevice, examining my features anew to learn their shape. I had never been seriously concerned about the shape of my ears before this. If someone had told me to draw a picture of my own ears—even a rough sketch—I would have been at a loss. Now, though, I would have been able to reproduce every hollow and curve in accurate detail. I found it odd how different the ears were. I had no idea how this had come about or what effect this lack of symmetry might have (it probably had some effect).
The hands of my watch showed seven twenty-eight. I must have looked at my watch some two thousand times since coming down here. Now it was seven twenty-eight at night, that much was certain; at a ball game, it would be the bottom of the third or the top of the fourth. When I was a kid, I used to like to sit up high in the outfield stands and watch the summer day trying not to end. The sun had sunk below the western horizon, but the afterglow was still brilliant and beautiful. The stadium lights stretched their long shadows across the field as if to hint at something. First one and then another light would be turned on with the utmost caution shortly after the game got going. Still, there was enough light in the sky to read a newspaper by. The memory of the long day’s glow remained at the door to keep the summer night from entering.
With patience and persistence, though, the artificial illumination was winning its quiet victory over the light of the sun, bringing forth a flood of festive colors. The brilliant green of the playing field, the handsome black earth, the straight white lines newly drawn upon it, the glinting varnish on the bats of players waiting for their turn at the plate, the cigarette smoke floating in the beams of light (looking, on windless days, like souls wandering in search of someone to take them in)—all these would begin to show up with tremendous clarity. The young beer sellers would hold their hands up in the light, flashing bills tucked between their fingers. The crowd would rise from their seats to follow the path of a high fly ball, their voices rising with its arc or dissolving into a sigh. Small flocks of birds returning to their roosts would fly past toward the sea. This was the stadium at seven-thirty in the evening.
I thought about the baseball games I had seen over the years. The Saint Louis Cardinals had come to Japan once, when I was little, for a friendship game. I had seen that one with my father from an infield seat. Before the game itself, the Cardinals players stood along the perimeter of the field with baskets full of autographed tennis balls, throwing them into the stands as fast as they could. People went crazy trying to grab a ball for themselves, but I just stayed in my seat without moving, and before I knew it, I had a ball in my lap. It was a magical happening: strange and sudden.
I looked at my watch again. Seven thirty-six. Eight minutes had gone by since the last look. Just eight minutes. I took the watch off and held it against my ear. It was ticking away just fine. I shrugged my shoulders in the darkness. Something strange was happening to my sense of time. I decided not to look at my watch for a while. Maybe I didn’t have anything else to do, but it wasn’t healthy to be looking at a watch this often. I had to make a tremendous effort to keep myself from looking, though. The pain was like what I had felt when I quit smoking. From the moment I decided to give up thinking about time, my mind could think of nothing else. It was a kind of contradiction, a schizoid split. The more I tried to forget about time, the more I was compelled to think about it. Before I knew it, my eyes would be seeking out the watch on my left wrist. Whenever this happened, I would avert my face, close my eyes, and struggle not to look. I ended up taking the watch off and stuffing it into my knapsack. Even so, my mind went on groping for the watch inside the pack, where it continued to tick off the time.
And so time flowed on through the darkness, deprived of advancing watch hands: time undivided and unmeasured. Once it lost its points of demarcation, time ceased being a continuous line and became instead a kind of formless fluid that expanded or contracted at will. Within this kind of time, I slept and woke and slept and woke, and became slowly and increasingly accustomed to life without timepieces. I trained my body to realize that I no longer needed time. But soon I was feeling tremendous anxiety. True, I had been liberated from the nervous habit of checking my watch every five minutes, but once the frame of reference of time faded completely away, I began to feel as if I had been flung into the ocean at night from the deck of a moving ship. No one noticed my screams, and the boat continued its forward advance, moving farther and farther away until it was about to fade from view.
Abandoning the effort, I
took the watch from the knapsack and returned it to my wrist. The hands were pointing to six-fifteen. Probably six-fifteen a.m. The last time I had looked at my watch, it had been seven thirty-six. Seven thirty-six at night. It seemed reasonable to conclude that eleven hours had gone by since then. It could hardly have been twenty-three hours. But I could not be sure. What was the essential difference between eleven hours and twenty-three hours? Whichever it was—eleven or twenty-three—my hunger had become far more intense. The sensation was nothing like what I had vaguely imagined an intense hunger to be. I had assumed that hunger would be a feeling of absence. Instead, it was closer to pure physical pain—utterly physical and utterly direct, like being stabbed or throttled. And the pain was uneven. It lacked consistency. It would rise like a swelling tide until I was on the verge of fainting, and then it would gradually recede.
To divert my attention from these intensely painful hunger pangs, I tried to concentrate my thoughts on something else. But it was no longer possible for me to do any serious thinking. Fragmentary thoughts would drift into my mind, then disappear just as quickly as they had come. Whenever I tried to grab one, it would slip through my fingers like some slimy, shapeless animal.
I stood up and stretched and took a deep breath. Every part of my body hurt. Every muscle and joint cried out in pain from having been in an awkward position for so long. I stretched myself slowly upward, then did some knee bends, but after ten of those I felt dizzy. Sitting down again on the well floor, I closed my eyes. My ears were ringing, and sweat streamed down my face. I wanted to hold on to something, but there was nothing to hold on to. I felt like throwing up, but there was nothing inside me that I could have thrown up. I tried deep breathing, hoping to refresh my mind by exchanging the air inside my body and giving my circulation a charge, but the clouds in my mind refused to clear. My body’s so weak now, I thought, and in fact I tried saying the words aloud—“My body’s so weak now”—but my mouth had difficulty forming the words. If only I could see the stars, I thought, but I could not see stars. May Kasahara had sealed the mouth of the well.