The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

  “Hel-looo,” cooed the woman’s voice in a near whisper. The sound seemed to have to pass through some extra-thin air to reach me. “This is May Kasahara calling.…”

  “Hey,” I tried to say, but my mouth still wasn’t moving the way I wanted it to. The word may have come out sounding to her like some kind of groan.

  “What are you doing now?” she asked, in an insinuating tone.

  “Nothing,” I said, moving the mouthpiece away to clear my throat. “Nothing. Napping.”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Sure you did. But that’s OK. It was just a nap.”

  May Kasahara seemed to hesitate a moment. Then she said, “How about it, Mr. Wind-Up Bird: would you come over to my house?”

  I closed my eyes. In the darkness hovered lights of different colors and shapes.

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  “I’m sunbathing in the yard, so just let yourself in from the back.”

  “OK.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Anyhow, I’m going to take a shower and change, and then I’ll come over. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

  I took a quick cold shower to clear my head, turned on the hot water to wash, and finished off cold again. This did manage to wake me up, but my body still felt dull and heavy. My legs would begin trembling, and at several points during my shower I had to grab the towel bar or sit on the edge of the tub. Maybe I was more fatigued than I had thought.

  After I stepped out of the shower and wiped myself down, I brushed my teeth and looked at myself in the mirror. The dark-blue mark was still there on my right cheek, neither darker nor lighter than before. My eyeballs had a network of tiny red lines, and there were dark circles under my eyes. My cheeks looked sunken, and my hair was in need of a trim. I looked like a fresh corpse that had just come back to life and dug its way out of the grave.

  I put on a T-shirt and short pants, a hat and dark glasses. Out in the alley, I found that the hot day was far from over. Everything alive aboveground—everything visible—was gasping in hopes of a sudden shower, but there was no hint of a cloud in the sky. A blanket of hot, stagnant air enveloped the alley. The place was deserted, as always. Good. On a hot day like this, and with my face looking so awful, I didn’t want to meet anyone.

  In the yard of the empty house, the bird sculpture was glaring at the sky, as usual, its beak held aloft. It looked far more grimy than when I had last seen it, more worn down. And there was something more strained in its gaze. It seemed to be staring hard at some extraordinarily depressing sight that was floating in the sky. If only it could have done so, the bird would have liked to avert its gaze, but with its eyes locked in place the way they were, it had no choice except to look. The tall weeds surrounding the sculpture remained motionless, like a chorus in a Greek tragedy waiting breathlessly for an oracle to be handed down. The TV antenna on the roof apathetically thrust its silver feelers into the suffocating heat. Under the harsh summer light, everything was dried out and exhausted.

  After I had surveyed the yard of the vacant house, I walked into May Kasahara’s yard. The oak tree cast a cool-looking shadow over the lawn, but May Kasahara had obviously avoided that, to stretch out in the harsh sunlight. She lay on her back in a deck chair, wearing an incredibly tiny chocolate-colored bikini, its little cloth patches held in place by bits of string. I couldn’t help wondering if a person could actually swim in a thing like that. She wore the same sunglasses she had on when we first met, and large beads of sweat dotted her face. Under her deck chair she had a white beach towel, a container of suntan cream, and a few magazines. Two empty Sprite cans lay nearby, one apparently serving as an ashtray. A plastic hose with a sprinkler lay out on the lawn, where no one had bothered to reel it in after its last use.

  When I drew near, May Kasahara sat up and reached out to turn off her radio. She had a far deeper tan than last time. This was no ordinary tan from a weekend at the beach. Every bit of her body—literally from head to toe—had been beautifully roasted. Sunning was all she did here all day, it seemed—including the whole time I was in the well, no doubt. I took a moment to glance at the yard. It looked pretty much as it had before, the broad lawn well manicured, the pond still unfilled and looking parched enough to make you thirsty.

  I sat on the deck chair next to hers and took a lemon drop from my pocket. The heat had caused the paper wrapper to stick to the candy.

  May Kasahara looked at me for some time without saying anything. “What happened to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? What’s that mark on your face? It is a mark, isn’t it?”

  “I think it is. Probably. But I don’t know how it happened. I looked—and there it was.”

  May Kasahara raised herself on one elbow and stared at my face. She brushed away the drops of sweat beside her nose and gave her sunglasses a little push up to where they belonged. The dark lenses all but hid her eyes.

  “You have no idea at all? No clue where it happened or how it happened?”

  “None at all.”

  “None?”

  “I got out of the well, and a little while later I looked in the mirror, and there it was. Really. That’s all.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t itch. It is a little warm, though.”

  “Did you go to the doctor?”

  I shook my head. “It’d probably be a waste of time.”

  “Probably,” said May Kasahara. “I hate doctors too.”

  I took off my hat and sunglasses and used my handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my forehead. The armpits of my gray T-shirt were already black with sweat.

  “Great bikini,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Looks like they put it together from scraps—making the maximum use of our limited natural resources.”

  “I take off the top when everybody’s out.”

  “Well, well,” I said.

  “Not that there’s all that much underneath to uncover,” she said, as if by way of excuse.

  True, the breasts inside her bikini top were still small and undeveloped. “Have you ever swum in that thing?” I asked.

  “Never. I don’t know how to swim. How about you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

  “Yeah, I can swim.”

  “How far?”

  “Far.”

  “Ten kilometers?”

  “Probably.… Nobody home now?”

  “They left yesterday, for our summer house in Izu. They all want to go swimming for the weekend. ‘All’ is my parents and my little brother.”

  “Not you?”

  She gave a tiny shrug. Then she took her Hope regulars and matches from the folds of her beach towel and lit up.

  “You look terrible, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”

  “Of course I look terrible—after days in the bottom of a well with almost nothing to eat or drink, who wouldn’t look terrible?”

  May Kasahara took off her sunglasses and turned to face me. She still had that deep cut next to her eye. “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve got tons of things I have to think about before I start getting mad at you.”

  “Did your wife come back?”

  I shook my head. “She sent me a letter. Says she’s never coming back.”

  “Poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. She sat up and reached out to place her hand lightly on my knee. “Poor, poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you may not believe this, but I was planning to save you from the well at the very end. I just wanted to frighten you a little, torment you a little. I wanted to see if I could make you scream. I wanted to see how much it would take until you were so mixed up you kinda lost your world.”

  I didn’t know how to reply to this, so I just nodded.

  “Did you think I was serious when I said I was going to let you die down there?”

  Instead of answering right away, I roll
ed the lemon drop wrapper into a ball. Then I said, “I really wasn’t sure. You sounded serious, but you sounded like you were just trying to scare me too. When you’re down in a well, talking to somebody up top, something weird happens to the sound: you can’t really catch the expression in the other person’s voice. But finally, it’s not a question of which is right. I mean, reality is kind of made up of these different layers. So maybe in that reality you were serious about trying to kill me, but in this reality you weren’t. It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take.”

  I pushed my rolled-up candy wrapper into the hole of a Sprite can.

  “Say, could you do me a favor, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?” said May Kasahara, pointing at the hose on the lawn. “Would you spray me with that? It’s sooo hot! My brain’s gonna fry if I don’t wet myself down.”

  I left my deck chair and walked over to pick up the blue plastic hose on the lawn. It was warm and limp. I reached behind the bushes and turned on the spigot. At first only hot water that had been warmed inside the hose came out, but it cooled down until it was spraying cold water. May Kasahara stretched out on the lawn, and I aimed a good, strong spray at her.

  She closed her eyes and let the water wash over her body. “Oh, that feels so good! You should do it too, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”

  “This isn’t a bathing suit,” I said, but May Kasahara looked as if she was enjoying the water a lot, and the heat was just too intense for me to keep resisting. I took off my sweat-soaked T-shirt, bent forward, and let the cold water run over my head. While I was at it, I took a swallow of the water: it was cold and delicious.

  “Hey, is this well water?” I asked.

  “Sure is! It comes up through a pump. Feels great, doesn’t it? It’s so cold. You can drink it too. We had a guy from the health department do a water quality inspection, and he said there’s nothing wrong with it, you almost never get water this clean in Tokyo. He was amazed. But still, we’re kind of afraid to drink it. With all these houses packed together like this, you never know what’s going to get into it.”

  “But don’t you think it’s weird? The Miyawakis’ well is bone dry, but yours has all this nice, fresh water. They’re just across the alley. Why should they be so different?”

  “Yeah, really,” said May Kasahara, cocking her head. “Maybe something caused the underground water flow to change just a little bit, so their well dried up and ours didn’t. Of course, I don’t know what the exact reason would be.”

  “Has anything bad happened in your house?” I asked.

  May Kasahara wrinkled up her face and shook her head. “The only bad thing that’s happened in this house in the last ten years is that it’s so damned boring!”

  May Kasahara wiped herself down and asked if I wanted a beer. I said I did. She brought two cold cans of Heineken from the house. She drank one, and I drank the other.

  “So tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, what’s your plan from now on?”

  “I haven’t really decided,” I said. “But I’ll probably get out of here. I might even get out of Japan.”

  “Get out of Japan? Where would you go?”

  “To Crete.”

  “Crete? Does this have something to do with that Creta What’s-her-name woman?”

  “Something, yeah.”

  May Kasahara thought this over for a moment.

  “And was it Creta What’s-her-name that saved you from the well?”

  “Creta Kano,” I said. “Yeah, she’s the one.”

  “You’ve got a lot of friends, don’t you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

  “Not really. If anything, I’m famous for having so few friends.”

  “Still, I wonder how Creta Kano found out you were down in the well. You didn’t tell anybody you were going down there, right? So how did she figure out where you were?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But anyhow, you’re going to Crete, right?”

  “I haven’t really decided I’m going to go. It’s just one possibility. I have to settle things with Kumiko first.”

  May Kasahara put a cigarette in her mouth and lit up. Then she touched the cut next to her eye with the tip of her little finger.

  “You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, just about the whole time you were down in the well, I was out here sunbathing. I was watching the garden of the vacant house, and baking myself, and thinking about you in the well, that you were starving and moving closer to death little by little. I was the only one who knew you were down there and couldn’t get out. And when I thought about that, I had this incredibly clear sense of what you were feeling: the pain and anxiety and fear. Do you see what I mean? By doing that, I was able to get sooo close to you! I really wasn’t gonna let you die. This is true. Really. But I wanted to keep going. Right down to the wire. Right down to where you would start to fall apart and be scared out of your mind and you couldn’t take it anymore. I really felt that that would be the best thing—for me and for you.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I think that if you really had gone down to the wire, you might have wanted to go all the way. It might have been a lot easier than you think. If you went that far, all it would have taken was one last push. And then afterward you would have told yourself that it was the best thing—for me and for you.” I took a swig of beer.

  May Kasahara thought about that for a time, biting her lip. “You may be right,” she said. “Not even I know for sure.”

  I took my last swallow of beer and stood up. I put on my sunglasses and slipped into my sweat-soaked T-shirt. “Thanks for the beer.”

  “You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara, “last night, after my family left for the summer house, I went down into the well. I stayed there five or maybe six hours altogether, just sitting still.”

  “So you’re the one who took the rope ladder away.”

  “Yeah,” said May Kasahara, with a little frown. “I’m the one.”

  I turned my eyes to the broad lawn. The moisture-laden earth was giving off vapor that looked like heat shimmer. May Kasahara pushed the butt of her cigarette into an empty Sprite can.

  “I didn’t feel anything special for the first few hours. Of course, it bothered me a little bit to be in such a totally dark place, but I wasn’t terrified or scared or anything. I’m not one of those ordinary girls that scream their heads off over every little thing. But I knew it wasn’t just dark. You were down there for days, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You know there’s nothing down there to be afraid of. But after a few hours, I knew less and less who I was. Sitting still down there in the darkness, I could tell that something inside me—inside my body—was getting bigger and bigger. It felt like this thing inside me was growing, like the roots of a tree in a pot, and when it got big enough it would break me apart. That would be the end of me, like the pot splitting into a million pieces. Whatever this thing was, it stayed put inside me when I was under the sun, but it, like, sucked up some special kind of nourishment in the darkness and started growing sooo fast it was scary. I tried to hold it down, but I couldn’t. And that’s when I really got scared. It was the scaredest I’ve ever been in my life. This thing inside me, this gooshy white thing like a lump of fat, was taking over, taking me over, eating me up. This gooshy thing was really small at first, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”

  May Kasahara stopped talking for a little while and stared at her hands, as if she were recalling what had happened to her that day. “I was really scared,” she said. “I guess that’s what I wanted you to feel. I guess I wanted you to hear the sound of the thing chewing you up.”

  I lowered myself into a deck chair and looked at the body of May Kasahara, hardly covered by her little bikini. She was sixteen years old, but she had the build of a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Her breasts and hips were far from fully matured. Her body reminded me of those drawings that use the absolute minimum of line yet still give an incredible sense of reality. But still, at the same time, there was something about it that gave an impression of extreme old ag
e.

  Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me to ask her, “Have you ever had the feeling that you had been defiled by something?”

  “Defiled?” She looked at me, her eyes slightly narrowed. “You mean physically? You mean, like, raped?”

  “Physically. Mentally. Either.”

  May Kasahara looked down at her own body, then returned her gaze to me. “Physically, no. I mean, I’m still a virgin. I’ve let a boy feel me up. But just through my clothes.”

  I nodded.

  “Mentally, hmm, I’m not sure. I don’t really know what it means to be defiled mentally.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “It’s just a question of whether you feel it’s happened to you or not. If you don’t feel it, that probably means you haven’t been defiled.”

  “Why are you asking me about this?”

  “Because some of the people I know have that feeling. And it causes all kinds of complicated problems. There’s one thing I want to ask you, though. Why are you always thinking about death?”

  She put a cigarette between her lips and nimbly struck a match with one hand. Then she put on her sunglasses.

  “You mean you don’t think much about death, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

  “I do think about death, of course. But not all the time. Just once in a while. Like most people.”

  “Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”