The crew of the transport ship held their breaths, waiting for a torpedo attack. The Americans might have simply changed their plans, deciding that sinking the ship with a torpedo would be faster and easier than a time-consuming volley from the gun. The ship ran in short zigzags, the captain and navigator scanning the ocean’s surface with their binoculars, searching for the deadly white wake of a torpedo. But there was no torpedo. Twenty minutes after the submarine had disappeared beneath the waves, people at last began to break free of the death curse that had hung over them. They could only half believe it at first, but little by little they came to feel that it was true: they had come back alive from the verge of death. Not even the captain knew why the Americans had suddenly abandoned their attack. What could have changed their minds? (Only later did it become clear that instructions had arrived from headquarters just moments before the attack was to have begun, advising them to suspend all hostilities unless attacked by the enemy. The Japanese government had telegraphed the Allied powers that they were prepared to accept the Potsdam Declaration and surrender unconditionally.) Released now from the unbearable tension, several passengers plopped down on the deck where they stood and began to wail, but most of them could neither cry nor laugh. For several hours—and, in the case of some, for several days—they remained in a state of total abstraction, the spike of a long and twisted nightmare thrust unmercifully into their lungs, their hearts, their spines, their brains, their wombs.
Little Nutmeg Akasaka remained sound asleep in her mother’s arms all the while this was happening. She slept for a solid twenty hours, as if she had been knocked unconscious. Her mother shouted and slapped her cheeks to no avail. She might as well have sunk to the bottom of the sea. The intervals between her breaths grew longer and longer, and her pulse slowed. Her breathing was all but inaudible. But when the ship arrived in Sasebo, she woke without warning, as if some great power had dragged her back into this world. And so Nutmeg did not herself witness the events surrounding the aborted attack and disappearance of the American submarine. She heard everything much later, from her mother.
The freighter finally limped into the port of Sasebo a little past ten in the morning on August 16, the day after the nonattack. The port was weirdly silent, and no one came out to greet the ship. Not even at the antiaircraft emplacement by the harbor mouth were there signs of humanity. The summer sunlight baked the ground with dumb intensity. The whole world seemed caught in a deep paralysis, and some on board felt as if they had stumbled by accident into the land of the dead. After years spent abroad, they could only stare in silence at the country of their ancestors. At noon on August 15, the radio had broadcast the Emperor’s announcement of the war’s end. Six days before that, the nearby city of Nagasaki had been incinerated by a single atomic bomb. The phantom empire of Manchukuo was disappearing into history. And caught unawares in the wrong section of the revolving door, the veterinarian with the mark on his cheek would share the fate of Manchukuo.
So, Then, the Next Problem
(May Kasahara’s Point of View: 2)
•
Hi, again, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.
Have you thought about where I am and what I’m doing, the way I told you to at the end of my last letter? Were you able to imagine anything at all?
Oh, well, I guess I’ll just go on under the assumption that you couldn’t figure out a thing—which I’m sure is true.
So let me just get it over with and tell you right from the start.
I’m working in—let’s say—a certain factory. A big factory. It’s in a certain provincial city—or, should I say, in the mountains on the outskirts of a certain provincial city that faces the Sea of Japan. Don’t let the word “factory” fool you, though. It’s not what you’d imagine: one of those macho places full of big, hightech machines grinding away and conveyor belts running and smoke pouring out of smokestacks. It’s big, all right, but the grounds are spread out over a wide area and it’s bright and quiet. It doesn’t produce any smoke at all. I never imagined the world had such widely spread-out factories. The only other factory I’ve ever seen was the Tokyo caramel factory our class visited on a field trip in elementary school, and all I remember is how noisy and cramped it was and how people were just slaving away with gloomy expressions on their faces. So to me, a “factory” was always like some illustration you’d see in a textbook under “Industrial Revolution.”
The people working here are almost all girls. There’s a separate building nearby, a laboratory, where men in white coats work on product development, wearing very serious looks on their faces, but they make up a very small proportion of the whole. All the rest are girls in their late teens or early twenties, and maybe seventy percent of those live in the dorms inside the company compound, like me. Commuting to this place from the town every day by bus or car is a real pain, and the dorms are nice. The buildings are new, the rooms are all singles, the food is good and they let you choose what you want, the facilities are complete, and room and board is cheap for all that. There’s a heated pool and a library, and you can do things like tea ceremony and flower arranging if you want (but I don’t want), and they even have an active program of sports teams, so a lot of girls who start out commuting end up moving into a dorm. All of them return home on weekends to eat with their families or go to the movies or go on dates with their boyfriends and stuff, so on Saturday the place turns into an empty ruin. There aren’t too many people like me, without a family to go home to on weekends. But like I said before, I like the big, hollow, empty feeling of the place on weekends. I can spend the day reading, or listening to music with the volume turned up, or walking in the hills, or, like now, sitting at my desk and writing to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.
The girls who work here are all locals—which means farmers’ daughters. Well, maybe not every single one, but they’re mostly happy, healthy, optimistic, hardworking girls. There aren’t many big industries in this district, so before, girls would go to the city to find jobs when they graduated from high school. That meant the guys left in town couldn’t find anybody to marry, which only added to the depopulation problem. So then the town got together and offered businesses this big tract of land to set up a factory, and the girls didn’t have to leave. I think it was a great idea. I mean, look, they got somebody like me to come all the way out here. So now, when they graduate from high school (or drop out, like me), the girls all go to work at the factory and save their pay and get married when they’re old enough and quit their jobs and have a couple of kids and turn into fat walruses that all look alike. Of course, there are a few who go on working here after they get married, but most of them quit.
This should give you a pretty good idea of what this place is like. OK?
So now the next question for you is this: What do they make in this factory?
Hint: You and I once went out on a job connected with it. Remember? We went to the Ginza and did a survey.
Oh, come on. Even you must have figured it out by now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird!
That’s it! I’m working in a wig factory! Surprised?
I told you before how I got out of that high-class hotel/jail/country school after six months and just hung around at home, like a dog with a broken leg. Then, all of a sudden, the thought of the wig company’s factory popped into my head. I remembered something my boss at the company had once said to me, more as a joke than anything, about how they never had enough girls for the factory and they’d hire me anytime I wanted to go work there. He even showed me a pamphlet from the place, and I remember sort of thinking it looked like a really cool factory and I wouldn’t mind working there. My boss said the girls all did hand labor, implanting hairs into the toupees. A hairpiece is a very delicately made product, not like some aluminum pot you can stamp out one two three. You have to plant little bunches of real hair very very very carefully, one bunch at a time, to make a quality hairpiece. Doesn’t it make you faint, just thinking about it? I mean, how many hairs do you think there are on a hum
an head? You have to count them in the hundreds of thousands! And to make a wig you have to plant them all by hand, the way they plant seedlings in a rice field. None of the girls here complain about the work, though. They don’t mind because this region is in the snow country, where it has always been the custom for the farm women to do detailed handiwork to make money during the long winters. That’s supposedly why the company chose this area for its factory.
To tell you the truth, I’ve never minded doing this kind of hand labor. I know I don’t look it, but I’m actually pretty good at sewing. I always impressed my teachers. You still don’t believe me? It’s true, though! That’s why it ever occurred to me that I might enjoy spending part of my life in a factory in the mountains, keeping my hands busy from morning to night and never thinking about anything upsetting. I was sick of school, but I hated the thought of just hanging around and letting my parents take care of me (and I’m sure they hated the thought of that too), but I didn’t have any one thing that I was dying to do, so the more I thought of it, the more it seemed that the only thing I could do was go to work in this factory.
I got my parents to act as my sponsors and my boss to give me a recommendation (they liked my survey work), I passed my interview at company headquarters, and the very next week I was all packed (not that I took anything more than my clothes and my boom box). I got on the bullet train by myself, transferred to a cute little train that goes up into the hills, and made it all the way to this nothing little town. But it was like I came to the other side of the earth. I was sooo bummed out when I got off the train! I figured I had made a terrible mistake. But finally, no: I’ve been here six months now without any special problems, and I feel settled in.
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always been interested in wigs. Or maybe I should say I’ve always been “attracted” to them, the way some guys are attracted to motorcycles. You know, I hadn’t really been aware of it before, but when I went out to do that market research and I had a chance to see all those bald men (or what the company calls “men with a thinning problem”), it really struck me what a lot of guys like that there are in the world! Not that I have personal feelings one way or another toward men who are bald (or have a thinning problem). I don’t especially “like” them or “dislike” them. Take you, for example, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Even if your hair were thinner than it is now (and it will be before too long), my feelings toward you would absolutely not change in any way. The only strong feeling I have when I see a man with a thinning problem is that sense I think I mentioned to you before of life being worn away. Now, that is something I’m really interested in!
I once heard that people reach the peak of their growth at a certain age (I forget whether it was nineteen or twenty or what), after which the body starts to wear out. If that’s the case, then it’s just one part of the “wearing away” of the body for the hair to fall out and grow thinner. There’s nothing strange about it at all. Maybe it’s normal and natural. If there’s any problem in all this, it’s the fact that some guys go bald young and others never go bald, even when they’re old. I know if I were bald, I’d think it was unfair. I mean, it’s a part of the body that really sticks out! Even I understand how they feel, and the problem of thinning hair has nothing to do with me.
In most cases, the person losing his hair is in no way responsible for whether the volume of hair he loses is greater or less than anybody else’s. When I was working part time, my boss told me that the genes determine ninety percent of whether a person is going to go bald or not. A man who has inherited a gene for thinning hair from his grandfather and father is going to lose his hair sooner or later, no matter what he does to prevent it. “Where there’s a will there’s a way” just doesn’t apply to baldness. When the time comes for the gene to stand up and say, “All right, now, let’s get this show on the road” (that is, if genes can stand up and say “Let’s get this show on the road”), the hair has no choice but to start falling out. It is unfair, don’t you think? I know I think it is.
So now you know I’m out here in this factory, far away from where you are, working hard every day. And you know about my deep personal interest in the toupee and its manufacture. Next I’m going to go into somewhat greater detail on my life and work here.
Nah, forget it. Bye-bye.
Is This Shovel a Real Shovel?
(What Happened in the Night: 2)
•
After he fell into his deep sleep, the boy had a vivid dream. He knew it was a dream, though, which came as some comfort to him. I know this is a dream, so what happened before was not a dream. It really, really happened. I can tell the difference between the two.
In his dream, the boy had gone out to the garden. It was still the middle of the night, and he was alone. He picked up the shovel and started digging out the hole that the tall man had filled in. The man had left the shovel leaning against the trunk of the tree. Freshly filled in, the hole was not that hard to dig, but just picking up the heavy shovel was enough to take the boy’s breath away. And he had no shoes on. The soles of his feet were freezing cold. Even so, he went on panting and digging until he had uncovered the cloth bundle that the man had buried.
The wind-up bird no longer cried. The man who had climbed the tree never came down. The night was so silent it almost hurt the boy’s ears. The man had just disappeared, it seemed. But finally, this is a dream, the boy thought. It was not a dream that the wind-up bird had cried and the man who looked like his father had climbed the tree. Those things had really happened. So there must not be any connection between this and that. Strange, though: here he was, in a dream, digging out the real hole. So how was he to distinguish between what was a dream and what was not a dream? Was this shovel a real shovel? Or was it a dream shovel?
The more he thought, the less he understood. And so the boy stopped thinking and put all his energy into digging the hole. Finally, the shovel came up against the cloth bundle.
The boy took great care after that to remove the surrounding dirt so as not to damage the cloth bundle. Then he went down on his knees and lifted the bundle from the hole. There was not a cloud in the sky, and there was no one there to block the moist light of the full moon that poured down on the ground. In the dream, he was strangely free of fear. Curiosity was the feeling that dominated him with its power. He opened the bundle, to find a human heart inside. He recognized its shape and color from the picture he had seen in his encyclopedia. The heart was still fresh and alive and moving, like a newly abandoned infant. True, it was sending no blood out through its severed artery, but it continued to beat with a strong pulse. The boy heard a loud throbbing in his ears, but it was the sound of his own heart. The buried heart and the boy’s own heart went on pounding in perfect unison, as if communicating with each other.
The boy steadied his breathing and told himself firmly, “You are not afraid of this. This is just a human heart, that’s all. Just like in the encyclopedia. Everybody has one of these. I have one.” With steady hands, the boy wrapped the beating heart in the cloth again, returned it to the bottom of the hole, and covered it over with earth. He smoothed the earth with his bare foot so that no one could tell a hole had been dug there, and he stood the shovel against the tree as he had found it. The ground at night was like ice. Climbing over the sill of his window, the boy returned to his own warm, friendly room. He brushed the mud from his feet into his wastebasket so as not to dirty his sheets, and he started to crawl into bed. But then he realized that someone was already lying there. Someone was sleeping in his bed, under the covers, in his place.
Angry now, the boy stripped the covers back. “Hey, you, get out of there! This is my bed!” he wanted to shout at the person. But his voice would not come out, because the one he found in the bed was himself. He was already in his bed, asleep, breathing peacefully. The boy stood frozen in place, at a loss for words. If I am already sleeping here, then where should this me sleep? Now, for the first time, the boy felt afraid, with a fear that seem
ed as if it would chill him to the core. The boy wanted to shout. He wanted to scream as loud as he could to wake up his sleeping self and everyone else in the house. But his voice would not come. He strained with all his might, but he could produce no sound. Nothing at all. So he put his hand on the shoulder of his sleeping self and shook it as hard as he could. But the sleeping boy would not wake up.
There was nothing more he could do. The boy stripped off his cardigan and flung it on the floor. Then he pushed his other, sleeping self as hard as he could from the center of the bed and crammed himself into the small space that was left for him at the edge. He had to secure a spot for himself here. Otherwise, he might be pushed out of this world where he belonged. Cramped and without a pillow, the boy nevertheless felt incredibly sleepy as soon as he lay down. He could not think anymore. In the next moment, he was sound asleep.
•
When he woke up in the morning, the boy was in the middle of the bed, alone. His pillow was under his head, as always. He raised himself slowly and looked around the room. At first glance, the room seemed unchanged. It had the same desk, the same bureau, the same closet, the same floor lamp. The hands of the wall clock pointed to six-twenty. But the boy knew something was strange. It might all look the same, but this was not the same place where he had gone to sleep the previous night. The air, the light, the sounds, the smells, were all just a little bit different from before. Other people might not notice, but the boy knew. He stripped off the covers and looked at himself. He held his hands up and moved each of his fingers in turn. They moved as they should. And his legs moved. He felt no pain or itching. He slipped out of bed and went to the toilet. When he was through peeing, he stood at the sink and looked at his face in the mirror. He pulled off his pajama top, stood on a chair, and looked at the reflection of his fair-skinned little body. He found nothing unusual.