Book Three: The Birdcatcher
October 1984 to December 1985
The Wind-Up Bird in Winter
•
Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. It rained a lot in September. October had several warm, sweaty days. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals.
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.
•
And yet there were a few people who wouldn’t leave me alone—people from Kumiko’s family, who wrote me letters. Kumiko could not go on being married to me, they said, and so I should immediately agree to a divorce. That would supposedly solve all the problems. The first few letters tried to exert pressure on me in a businesslike manner. When I failed to answer, they resorted to threats and, in the end, turned to pleading. All were looking for the same thing.
Eventually, Kumiko’s father called.
“I am not saying that I am absolutely opposed to a divorce,” I said. “But first I want to see Kumiko and talk to her, alone. If she can convince me it’s what she wants, then I will give her a divorce. That is the only way I will agree to it.”
I turned toward the kitchen window and looked at the dark, rain-filled sky stretching away into the distance. It had been raining for four straight days, into a wet, black world.
“Kumiko and I talked everything over before we decided to get married, and if we are going to end that marriage, I want to do it the same way.”
Kumiko’s father and I went on making parallel statements, arriving nowhere—or nowhere fruitful, at least.
•
Several questions remained unanswered. Did Kumiko really want to divorce me? And had she asked her parents to try to convince me to go along with that? “Kumiko says she doesn’t want to see you,” her father had told me, exactly as her brother, Noboru Wataya, had said. This was probably not an out-and-out lie. Kumiko’s parents were not above interpreting things in a manner convenient to themselves, but as far as I knew, they were not the sort to manufacture facts out of nothing. They were, for better or worse, realistic people. If what her father had said was true, then, was Kumiko now being “sheltered” by them?
But that I found impossible to believe. Love was simply not an emotion that Kumiko had felt for her parents and brother from the time she was a little girl. She had struggled for years to keep herself independent of them. It could well be that Kumiko had chosen to leave me because she had taken a lover. Even if I could not fully accept the explanation she had given me in her letter, I knew that it was not entirely out of the question. But what I could not accept was that Kumiko could have gone straight from me to them—or to some place they had prepared for her—and that she could be communicating with me through them.
The more I thought about it, the less I understood. One possibility was that Kumiko had experienced an emotional breakdown and could no longer sustain herself. Another was that she was being held against her will. I spent several days arranging and rearranging a variety of facts and words and memories, until I had to give up thinking. Speculation was getting me nowhere.
•
Autumn was drawing to a close, and a touch of winter hung in the air. As I always did in that season, I raked the dead leaves in the garden and stuffed them into vinyl bags. I set a ladder against the roof and cleaned the leaves out of the gutters. The little garden of the house I lived in had no trees, but the wind carried leaves in abundance from the broad-spreading deciduous trees in the gardens on both sides. I didn’t mind the work. The time would pass as I watched the withered leaves floating down in the afternoon sunshine. One big tree in the neighbor’s to the right put out bright-red berries. Flocks of birds would perch there and chirp as if in competition with each other. These were brightly colored birds, with short, sharp cries that stabbed the air.
I wondered about how best to store Kumiko’s summer clothing. I could do as she had said in her letter and get rid of them. But I remembered the care that she had given each piece. And it was not as if I had no place to keep them. I decided to leave them for the time being where they were.
Still, whenever I opened the closet, I was confronted by Kumiko’s absence. The dresses hanging there were the husks of something that had once existed. I knew how she looked in these clothes, and to some of them were attached specific memories. Sometimes I would find myself sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the rows of dresses or blouses or skirts. I would have no idea how long I had been sitting there. It could have been ten minutes or an hour.
Sometimes, as I sat staring at a dress, I would imagine a man I didn’t know helping Kumiko out of it. His hands would slip the dress off, then go on to remove the underwear beneath. They would caress her breasts and press her thighs apart. I could see those breasts and thighs in all their white softness, and the other man’s hands touching them. I didn’t want to think about such things, but I had no choice. They had probably happened in reality. I had to get myself used to such images. I couldn’t just shove reality aside.
Now and then, I would recall the night I slept with Creta Kano, but the memory of it was mysteriously vague. I held her in my arms that night and joined my body with hers any number of times: that was an undeniable fact. But as the weeks passed by, the feeling of certainty began to disappear. I couldn’t bring back concrete images of her body or of the ways in which it had joined with mine. If anything, the memories of what I had done with her earlier, in my mind—in unreality—were far more vivid than the memories of the reality of that night. The image of her mounted on me, wearing Kumiko’s blue dress, in that strange hotel room, came back to me over and over again with amazing clarity.
•
Early October saw the death of the uncle of Noboru Wataya who had served as Niigata’s representative to the Lower House. He suffered a heart attack shortly after midnight in his hospital bed in Niigata, and by dawn, despite the doctors’ best efforts, he was nothing but a corpse. The death had long been anticipated, of course, and a general election was expected shortly, so the uncle’s supporters lost no time in formalizing their earlier plan to have Noboru Wataya inherit the constituency. The late representative’s vote-gathering machinery was solidly based and solidly conservative. Barring some major unforeseen event, Noboru Wataya’s election was all but assured.
The first thing that crossed my mind when I read the article in a library newspaper was how busy the Wataya family was going to be from now on. The farthest thing from anybody’s mind would be Kumiko’s divorce.
•
The black-and-blue mark on my face neither grew nor shrank. It produced neither fever nor pain. I gradually forgot I even had it. I stopped trying to hide the mark by wearing sunglasses or a hat with the brim pulled down low. I would be reminded of it now and then when I went out shopping and people would stare at me or look away, but even these reactions stopped bothering me after a while. I wasn’t harming them by having a mark on my face. I would examine it each morning when I washed and shaved, but I could see no change. Its size, color, and shape remained the same.
The number of individual human beings who voiced concern about the sudden appearance of a mark on my cheek was exactly four: the owner of the cleaning shop by the station, my barber, the young man from the Omura liquor store, and the woman at the counter of the neighborhood library. In each case, when asked about it, I made a show of annoyance and said something vague, like, “I had a little accident.” They would mumbl
e, “My, my” or “That’s too bad,” as if apologizing for having mentioned it.
I seemed to be growing more distant from myself with each day that went by. If I stared at my hand for a while, I would begin to feel that I was looking through it. I spoke with almost no one. No one wrote to me or called. All I found in my mailbox were utility bills and junk mail, and most of the junk mail consisted of designer-brand catalogs addressed to Kumiko, full of colorful photos of spring dresses and blouses and skirts. The winter was a cold one, but I sometimes forgot to turn on the heat, unsure whether the cold was real or just something inside me. I would throw the switch only after a look at the thermometer had convinced me that it really was cold, but even so, the cold I felt did not diminish.
•
I wrote to Lieutenant Mamiya with a general description of what had been happening to me. He might be more embarrassed than pleased to receive the letter, but I couldn’t think of anyone else I could write to. I opened with that exact apology. Then I told him that Kumiko left me on the very day he had visited my house, that she had been sleeping with another man for some months, that I had spent close to three days in the bottom of a well, thinking, that I was now living here all alone, and that the keepsake from Mr. Honda had been nothing but an empty whiskey box.
Lieutenant Mamiya sent me an answer a week later.
To tell you the truth, you have been in my thoughts to an almost strange degree since we last met. I left your home feeling that we really ought to go on talking, to “spill our guts” to each other, so to speak, and the fact that we did not has been no small source of regret to me. Unfortunately, however, some urgent business had come up, which required me to return to Hiroshima that night. Thus, in a certain sense, I was very glad to have had the opportunity to receive a letter from you. I wonder if it was not Mr. Honda’s intention all along to bring the two of us together. Perhaps he believed that it would be good for me to meet you and for you to meet me. The division of keepsakes may well have been an excuse to have me visit you. This may explain the empty box. My visit to you itself would have been his keepsake.
I was utterly amazed to hear that you had spent time down in a well, for I, too, continue to feel myself strongly attracted to wells. Considering my own close call, one would think that I would never have wanted to see another well, but quite the contrary, even to this day, whenever I see a well, I can’t help looking in. And if it turns out to be a dry well, I feel the urge to climb down inside. I probably continue to hope that I will encounter something down there, that if I go down inside and simply wait, it will be possible for me to encounter a certain something. Not that I expect it to restore my life to me. No, I am far too old to hope for such things. What I hope to find is the meaning of the life that I have lost. By what was it taken away from me, and why? I want to know the answers to these questions with absolute certainty. And I would go so far as to say that if I could have those answers, I would not mind being even more profoundly lost than I am already. Indeed, I would gladly accept such a burden for whatever years of life may be left to me.
I was truly sorry to hear that your wife had left you, but that is a matter on which I am unable to offer you any advice. I have lived far too long a time without the benefit of love or family and am thus unqualified to speak on such matters. I do believe, however, that if you feel the slightest willingness to wait a while longer for her to come back, then you probably should continue to wait there as you are now. That is my opinion, for what it is worth. I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.
If possible, I would like to come to Tokyo sometime in the near future and see you again, but unfortunately I am having a little problem with one leg, and the treatment for it will take some time. Please take care and be well.
Sometimes I climbed the garden wall and went down the winding alley to where the vacant Miyawaki house had stood. Dressed in a three-quarter-length coat, a scarf wrapped under my chin, I trod the alley’s dead winter grass. Short puffs of frozen winter wind whistled through the electric lines overhead. The house had been completely demolished, the yard now surrounded by a high plank fence. I could look in through the gaps in the fence, but there was nothing in there to see—no house, no paving stones, no well, no trees, no TV antenna, no bird sculpture: just a flat, black stretch of cold-looking earth, compacted by the treads of a bulldozer, and a few scattered clumps of weeds. I could hardly believe there had once been a deep well in the yard and that I had climbed down into it.
I leaned against the fence, looking up at May Kasahara’s house, to where her room was, on the second floor. But she was no longer there. She wouldn’t be coming out anymore to say, “Hi, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”
•
On a bitter-cold afternoon in mid-February, I dropped in at the real estate office by the station that my uncle had told me about, Setagaya Dai-ichi Realtors. When I walked in, the first person I saw was a middle-aged female receptionist. Several desks were lined up near the entrance, but their chairs were empty, as if all the brokers were out on appointments. A large gas heater glowed bright red in the middle of the room. On a sofa in a small reception area toward the back sat a slightly built old man, engrossed in a newspaper. I asked the receptionist if a Mr. Ichikawa might be there. “That’s me,” said the old man, turning in my direction. “Can I help you?”
I introduced myself as my uncle’s nephew and mentioned that I lived in one of the houses that my uncle owned.
“Oh, I see,” said the old man, laying his paper down. “So you’re Mr. Tsuruta’s nephew!” He folded his reading glasses and gave me a head-to-toe inspection. I couldn’t tell what kind of impression I was making on him. “Come in, come in. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”
I told him not to bother, but either he didn’t hear me or he ignored my refusal. He had the receptionist make tea. It didn’t take her long to bring it to us, but by the time he and I were sitting opposite each other, drinking tea, the stove had gone out and the room was getting chilly. A detailed map showing all the houses in the area hung on the wall, marked here and there in pencil or felt-tip pen. Next to it hung a calendar with van Gogh’s famous bridge painting: a bank calendar.
“I haven’t seen your uncle in quite a while. How is he doing?” the old man asked after a sip of tea.
“I think he’s fine, busy as ever. I don’t see him much myself,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear he’s doing well. How many years has it been since I last saw him? I wonder. At least it seems like years.” He took a cigarette from his jacket pocket, and after apparently taking careful aim, he struck a match with a vigorous swipe. “I was the one who found that house for him, and I managed it for him for a long time too. Anyhow, it’s good to hear he’s keeping busy.”
Old Mr. Ichikawa himself seemed anything but busy. I imagined he must be half retired, showing up at the office now and then to take care of longtime clients.
“So how do you like the house? No problems?”
“No, none at all,” I said.
The old man nodded. “That’s good. It’s a nice place. Maybe on the small side, but a nice place to live. Things have always gone well for the people who lived there. For you too?”
“Not bad,” I said to him. At least I’m alive, I said to myself. “I had something I wanted to ask you about, though. My uncle says you know more than anybody about this area.”
The old man chuckled. “This area is one thing I do know,” he said. “I’ve been dealing in real estate here for close to forty years.”
“The thing I want to ask you about is the Miyawaki place behind ours. They’ve bulldozed it, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” said the old man, pursing his lips as though rummaging through the drawers in his mind. “It sold last August. They finally got all the mortgage and title and legal problems straightened out and put it on the market. A speculator
bought it, to tear down the house and sell the land. Leave a house vacant that long, I don’t care how good it is, it’s not going to sell. Of course, the people who bought it are not local. Nobody local would touch the place. Have you heard some of the stories?”
“Yes, I have, from my uncle.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about. I suppose we could have bought it and sold it to somebody who didn’t know any better, but we don’t do business that way. It just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”
I nodded in agreement. “So who did buy it, then?”
The old man knit his brow and shook his head, then told me the name of a well-known real estate corporation. “They probably didn’t do any research, just snapped it up when they saw the location and the price, figured they’d turn a quick profit. But it’s not going to be so easy.”
“They haven’t been able to sell it?”
“They came close a few times,” the old man said, folding his arms. “It’s not cheap, buying a piece of land. It’s a lifetime investment. People are careful. When they start looking into things, any stories come out, and in this case, not one of them is good. You hear stories like that, and the ordinary person is not going to buy. Most of the people who live around here know the stories about that place.”
“What are they asking?”
“Asking?”
“The price of the land where the Miyawaki house was.”
Old Mr. Ichikawa looked at me as if to say I had aroused his curiosity. “Well, let’s see. The lot is a little over thirty-five hundred square feet. Not quite a hundred tsubo. The market price would be one and a half million yen per tsubo. I mean, that’s a first-rate lot—wonderful setting, southern exposure. A million and a half, no problem, even with the market as slow as it is. You might have to wait a little while, but you’d get your price at that location. Ordinarily. But there’s nothing ordinary about the Miyawaki place. That’s not going to move, no matter how long you wait. So the price has to go down. It’s already down to a million ten per tsubo, so with a little more bargaining you could probably get the whole place for an even hundred million.”