Take good care of the cat. I can’t tell you how happy I am that he is back. You say his name is Mackerel? I like that. He was always a symbol of something good that grew up between us. We should not have lost him when we did.
•
I can’t write anymore now. Goodbye.
Goodbye
•
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t show you the duck people, Mr. Wind-Up Bird!”
May Kasahara looked truly sorry.
She and I were sitting by the pond, looking at its thick cap of ice. It was a big pond, with thousands of little cuts on its surface from ice-skate blades. May Kasahara had taken off from work especially for me this Monday morning. I had intended to visit her on Sunday, but a train accident had made me a day late. May Kasahara had wrapped herself in a fur-lined coat. Her bright-blue woolen hat bore a geometrical design in white yarn and was topped with a little pom-pom. She had knitted the hat herself, and she said she would make one just like it for me before next winter. Her cheeks were red, her eyes as bright and clear as the surrounding air, which made me very happy: she was only seventeen, after all—the potential was there for almost limitless change.
“The duck people all moved somewhere else after the pond froze over. I’m sure you would have loved them. Come back in the spring, OK? I’ll introduce you.”
I smiled. I was wearing a duffle coat that was not quite warm enough, with a scarf wrapped up to my cheeks and my hands thrust in my pockets. A deep chill ran through the forest. Hard snow coated the ground. My sneakers were sliding all over the place. I should have bought some kind of nonslip boots for this trip.
“So you’re going to stay here a while longer?” I asked.
“I think so. I might want to go back to school after enough time goes by. Or I might not. I don’t know. I might just get married—no, not really.” She smiled with a white puff of breath. “But anyhow, I’ll stay for now. I need more time to think. About what I want to do, where I want to go. I want to take time and think about those things.”
I nodded. “Maybe that’s what you really ought to do,” I said.
“Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, did you think about those kinds of things when you were my age?”
“Hmm. Maybe not. I must have thought about them a little bit, but I really don’t remember thinking about things as seriously as you do. I guess I just figured if I went on living in the usual way, things would kind of work themselves out all right. But they didn’t, did they? Unfortunately.”
May Kasahara looked me in the eye, a calm expression on her face. Then she laid her gloved hands on her lap, one atop the other.
“So, finally, they wouldn’t let Kumiko out of jail?” she asked.
“She refused to be let out,” I said. “She figured she’d be mobbed. Better to stay in jail, where she could have peace and quiet. She’s not even seeing me. She doesn’t want to see anyone until everything is settled.”
“When does the trial start?”
“Sometime in the spring. Kumiko is pleading guilty. She’s going to accept the verdict, whatever it is. It shouldn’t be a long trial, and there’s a good possibility of a suspended sentence—or, at worst, a light one.”
May Kasahara picked up a stone at her feet and threw it toward the middle of the pond. It clattered across the ice to the other side.
“And you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird—you’ll stay home and wait for Kumiko again?”
I nodded.
“That’s good … or is it?”
I made my own big white cloud in the cold air. “I don’t know—I guess it’s how we worked things out.”
It could have been a whole lot worse, I told myself.
Far off in the woods that surrounded the pond, a bird cried. I looked up and scanned the area, but there was nothing more to hear. Nothing to see. There was only the dry, hollow sound of a woodpecker drilling a hole in a tree trunk.
“If Kumiko and I have a child, I’m thinking of naming it Corsica,” I said.
“What a neat name!” said May Kasahara.
•
As the two of us walked through the woods side by side, May Kasahara took off her right glove and put her hand in my pocket. This reminded me of Kumiko. She often used to do the same thing when we walked together in the winter, so we could share a pocket on a cold day. I held May Kasahara’s hand in my pocket. It was a small hand, and warm as a sequestered soul.
“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, everybody’s going to think we’re lovers.”
“You may be right.”
“So tell me, did you read all my letters?”
“Your letters?” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Sorry, but I’ve never gotten a single letter from you. I got your address and phone number from your mother. Which wasn’t easy: I had to stretch the truth quite a bit.”
“Oh, no! Where’d they all go? I must have written you five hundred letters!” May Kasahara looked up to the heavens.
•
Late that afternoon, May Kasahara saw me all the way to the station. We took a bus into town, ate pizza at a restaurant near the station, and waited for the little three-car diesel train that finally pulled in. Two or three people stood around the big woodstove that glowed red in the waiting room, but the two of us stayed out on the platform in the cold. A clear, hard-edged winter moon hung frozen in the sky. It was a young moon, with a sharp curve like a Chinese sword. Beneath that moon, May Kasahara stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek. I could feel her cold, thin lips touch me where my mark had been.
“Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she murmured. “Thanks for coming all the way out here to see me.”
Hands thrust deep in my pockets, I looked into her eyes. I didn’t know what to say.
When the train came, she slipped her hat off, took one step back, and said to me, “If anything ever happens to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, just call out to me in a really loud voice, OK? To me and the duck people.”
“Goodbye, May Kasahara,” I said.
•
The arc of the moon stayed over my head long after the train had left the station, appearing and disappearing each time the train rounded a curve. I kept my eyes on the moon, and whenever that was lost to sight, I watched the lights of the little towns as they went past the window. I thought of May Kasahara, with her blue wool hat, alone on the bus taking her back to her factory in the hills. Then I thought of the duck people, asleep in the grassy shadows somewhere. And finally, I thought of the world that I was heading back to.
“Goodbye, May Kasahara,” I said. Goodbye, May Kasahara: may there always be something watching over you.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
Works Consulted
•
Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Iwasaki Toshio, Yoshimoto Shin’ichirō, trans., Nomonhan: sōgen no Nisso-sen, 1939, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Asahi shinbun sha, 1989).
Ezawa Akira, Manshūkoku no shuto-keikaku: Tokyo no genzai to mirai o tou (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōron sha, 1988).
Itō Keiichi, Shizuka na Nomonhan (Tokyo: Kōdansha bunko, 1986).
Amy Knight, Beria, Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Kojima Jō, Manshū teikoku, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Bunshun bunko, 1983).
Onda Jūhō, Nomonhan sen: ningen no kiroku (Tokyo: Gendaishi shuppan kai, Tokuma shoten, 1977).
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. The most recent of his many honors is the Franz Kafka Prize.
www.harukimurakami.com
Books by Haruki Murakami
Fiction
After Dark
After the Quake
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Dance Dance Dance
The Elephant Vanishes
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Kafka on the Shore
Norwegian Wood
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Sputnik Sweetheart
A Wild Sheep Chase
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Nonfiction
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
ALSO BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
AFTER DARK
Murakami’s trademark humor and psychological insight are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery. Combining the pyrotechnical genius that made Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle international bestsellers, with a moving infusion of heart, Murakami has produced one of his most enchanting fictions yet.
Fiction/978-0307-27873-9
AFTER THE QUAKE
Set at the time of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Murakami’s characters emanate from a place where the human meets in the inhuman. An electronics salesman who has been abruptly deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package—and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who has been raised to view himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may or not be his human father. A collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-71327-9
BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN
This superb collection of stories generously express Murakami’s mastery of the form. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be closest of all.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-1-4000-9608-4
DANCE DANCE DANCE
As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Murakami’s protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls, plays chaperone to a lovely teenage psychic, and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75379-7
THE ELEPHANT VANISHES
With his genius for dislocation, Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75053-6
HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD
Japan’s most popular fiction writer hurtles into the consciousness of the West. Murakami draws readers into a narrative particle accelerator in which a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his undemure granddaughter, Bob Dylan, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74346-0
KAFKA ON THE SHORE
This book is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home—either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister—and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7927-8
NORWEGIAN WOOD
Toru, a college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman. But their relationship is colored by the tragic death of their mutual best friend years before. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70402-4
SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN
Born into an affluent family, Hajime has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career. Yet a sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens his happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76739-8
SPUTNIK SWEETHEART
A college student, identified only as “K,” falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to the writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments—until she meets Miu, an older and more sophisticated businesswoman. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, “K” is solicited to join the search party and finds himself beset by ominous, haunting visions.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72605-7
UNDER GROUND
It was a clear spring day, Monday, March 20, 1995, when five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo conducted chemical warfare on the Tokyo subway system using sarin, a poison gas twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide. The unthinkable had happened, a major urban transit system had become the target of a terrorist attack. In an attemp to discover why, Murakami talked to the people who lived through the catastrophe—from a Subway Authority employee with survivor guilt, to a fashion salesman with more venom for the media than for the perpetrators, to a young cult member who vehemently condemns the attack though he has not quit Aum. Through these and many other voices, Murakami exposes intriguing aspects of the Japanese psyche.
Fiction/978-0-375-72580-7
WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING
While training for the New York City Marathon, Haruki Murakami decided to keep a journal of his progress. The result is a beautiful memoir about his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid memories and insights, including the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the expanding population who find similar satisfaction in athletic pursuit.
Memoir/Running/978-0-307-38983-1
A WILD SHEEP CHASE
A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard and appropriates its image for an insurance company’s advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-71894-6
THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77543-0
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