And so Noboru Wataya came to be seen as one of the most intelligent figures of the day. Nobody seemed to care about consistency anymore. All they looked for on the tube were the bouts of intellectual gladiators; the redder the blood they drew, the better. It didn’t matter if the same person said one thing on Monday and the opposite on Thursday.
•
I first met Noboru Wataya when Kumiko and I decided to get married. I wanted to talk to him before I saw her father. I figured that as a man closer to my own age, he might be persuaded to smooth the way for me with his father.
“I don’t think you should count on his help,” Kumiko said to me, with apparent difficulty. “I can’t explain it, exactly, but he’s just not the type.” “Well, I’ll have to meet him sooner or later,” I said.
“I guess,” said Kumiko.
“It’s worth a try,” I said. “You never know.”
“I guess,” said Kumiko. “Maybe.”
On the phone, Noboru Wataya displayed little enthusiasm for the prospect of meeting me. If I insisted, he said, he could spare me half an hour. We decided to meet at a coffeehouse near Ochanomizu Station. He was just a college instructor at the time, long before he had written his book and long before his sartorial conversion. The pockets of his sports coat bulged from having had fists thrust into them too long. His hair was at least two weeks overdue for a trim. His mustard-color polo shirt clashed with his blue and gray tweed jacket. He had the look of the typical young assistant professor for whom money was an alien object. His eyes had that sleepy expression of someone who has just slipped out of the library after a day of research in the stacks, but there was a piercing, cold gleam in them too, if you looked closely.
After introducing myself, I said that I was planning to marry Kumiko in the near future. I tried to explain things as honestly as possible. I was working in a law firm, I said, but I knew this was not the right job for me. I was still searching for myself. For such a person to risk marriage might seem to be a reckless act, but I loved his sister, I said, and I believed I could make her happy. The two of us could give each other strength and comfort.
My words appeared lost on Noboru Wataya. He sat with his arms folded, listening in silence. Even after I finished my little speech, he remained perfectly still. He seemed to be thinking about something else.
I had felt awkward in his presence from the start and assumed this was because of the situation. Anybody would feel awkward telling a total stranger, “I want to marry your sister.” But as I sat there across from him, an unpleasant feeling began to well up inside me. It was like having some kind of sour-smelling, alien gunk growing in the pit of your stomach. Not that there was anything in particular about what he said or did that rubbed me the wrong way. It was his face: the face of Noboru Wataya itself. It gave me the intuitive sense that it was covered over with a whole other layer of something. Something wrong. It was not his real face. I couldn’t shake off this feeling.
I wanted to get the hell out of there. I actually considered getting up and leaving, but I had to see things through to the end. I stayed there, sipping my lukewarm coffee and waiting for him to say something.
When he spoke, it was as if he were deliberately setting the volume of his voice on low to conserve energy. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I can neither understand nor care about what you have been telling me. The things I care about are of an entirely different order, things that I suspect you can neither understand nor care about. To state my conclusion as concisely as possible, if you wish to marry Kumiko and she wishes to marry you, I have neither the right nor any reason to stand in your way. Therefore, I shall not stand in your way. I wouldn’t even think of doing so. But don’t expect anything further from me, either. And most important, don’t expect me to waste any more time on this matter than I already have.”
He looked at his watch and stood up. His declaration had been concise and to the point. It suffered from neither excess nor omission. I understood with perfect clarity both what he wanted to say and what he thought of me.
And so we parted that day.
After Kumiko and I were married, a number of occasions arose in which it was necessary for Noboru Wataya and me, as brothers-in-law, to exchange words—if not to engage in actual conversation. As he had suggested, there was no common ground between us, and so however much we might speak words in each other’s vicinity, this could never develop into anything that could be called a conversation. It was as though we were speaking to each other in different languages. If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one’s engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been a touch more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.
I rarely suffer lengthy emotional distress from contact with other people. A person may anger or annoy me, but not for long. I can distinguish between myself and another as beings of two different realms. It’s a kind of talent (by which I do not mean to boast: it’s not an easy thing to do, so if you can do it, it is a kind of talent—a special power). When someone gets on my nerves, the first thing I do is transfer the object of my unpleasant feelings to another domain, one having no connection with me. Then I tell myself, Fine, I’m feeling bad, but I’ve put the source of these feelings into another zone, away from here, where I can examine it and deal with it later in my own good time. In other words, I put a freeze on my emotions. Later, when I thaw them out to perform the examination, I do occasionally find my emotions still in a distressed state, but that is rare. The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless. Then, sooner or later, I forget about them.
In the course of my life so far, I’ve been able to keep my world in a relatively stable state by avoiding most useless troubles through activation of this emotional management system. That I have succeeded in maintaining such an effective system all this time is a matter of some pride to me.
When it came to Noboru Wataya, though, my system refused to function. I was unable simply to shove Noboru Wataya into a domain having no connection with me. And that fact itself annoyed the hell out of me. Kumiko’s father was an arrogant, unpleasant man, to be sure, but finally he was a small-minded character who had lived by clinging to a simple set of narrow beliefs. I could forget about someone like that. But not Noboru Wataya. He knew what kind of a man he was. And he had a pretty good idea of what made me tick as well. If he had felt like it, he could have crushed me until there was nothing left. The only reason he hadn’t was that he didn’t give a damn about me. I wasn’t worth the time and energy it would have taken to crush me. And that’s what got me about him. He was a despicable human being, an egoist with nothing inside him. But he was a far more capable individual than I was.
After that first meeting of ours, I had a bad taste in my mouth that wouldn’t go away. I felt as if someone had force-fed me a clump of foul-smelling bugs. Spitting them out did no good: I could still feel them inside my mouth. Day after day, Noboru Wataya was all I could think about. I tried going to concerts and movies. I even went to a baseball game with the guys from the office. I drank, and I read the books that I had been waiting to read when I could find the time. But Noboru Wataya was always there, arms folded, looking at me with those malignant eyes of his, threatening to suck me in like a bottomless swamp. This set my nerves on edge and sent tremors through the ground on which I stood.
The next time I saw her, Kumiko asked me my impressions of her brother. I wasn’t able to tell her honestly. I wanted to ask her about the mask he wore and about the twisted “something” that lay behind it. I wanted to tell her everything I had thought about this brother of hers. But I said nothing. I felt that these were things I would never be able to convey to her, that if I couldn’t express myself clearly I shouldn’t express myself at all—not now.
“He’s … different, that’s for sure,” I said. I wanted t
o add something to this, but I couldn’t find the words. Nor did she press me for more. She simply nodded in silence.
My feelings toward Noboru Wataya never changed after that. He continued to set my nerves on edge in the same way. It was like a persistent low-grade fever. I never had a television in the house, but by some uncanny coincidence, whenever I glanced at a TV somewhere, he would be on it, making some pronouncement. If I flipped through the pages of a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room, there would be a picture of Noboru Wataya, with an article he had written. I felt as if Noboru Wataya were lying in wait for me just around every corner in the known world.
OK, let’s face it. I hated the guy.
The Happy Cleaners
•
And Creta Kano Makes Her Entrance
I took a blouse and skirt of Kumiko’s to the cleaner’s by the station. Normally, I brought our laundry to the cleaner’s around the corner from us, not because I preferred it but because it was closer. Kumiko sometimes used the station cleaner’s in the course of her commute. She’d drop something off in the morning on her way to the office and pick it up on the way home. This place was a little more expensive, but they did a better job than the neighborhood cleaner’s, according to Kumiko. And her better dresses she would always bring there. Which is why on that particular day I decided to take my bike to the station. I figured she would prefer to have her clothes done there.
I left the house carrying Kumiko’s blouse and skirt and wearing a pair of thin green cotton pants, my usual tennis shoes, and the yellow Van Halen promotional T-shirt that Kumiko had received from a record company. The owner of the shop had his JVC boom box turned up loud, as he had on my last trip. This morning it was an Andy Williams tape. “Hawaiian Wedding Song” was just ending as I walked in, and “Canadian Sunset” started. Whistling happily to the tune, the owner was writing in a notebook with a ballpoint pen, his movements as energetic as before. In the pile of tapes on the shelf, I spotted such names as Sergio Mendes, Bert Kaempfert, and 101 Strings. So he was an easy-listenin’ freak. It suddenly occurred to me that true believers in hard-driving jazz—Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor—could never become owners of cleaning shops in malls across from railroad stations. Or maybe they could. They just wouldn’t be happy cleaners.
When I put the green floral-pattern blouse and sage-colored skirt on the counter, he spread them out for a quick inspection, then wrote on the receipt, “Blouse and Skirt.” His writing was clear and carefully formed. I like cleaners who write clearly. And if they like Andy Williams, so much the better.
“Mr. Okada, right?” I said he was right. He wrote in my name, tore out the carbon copy, and gave it to me. “They’ll be ready next Tuesday, so don’t forget to come and get them this time. Mrs. Okada’s?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Very pretty,” he said.
A dull layer of clouds filled the sky. The weather forecast had predicted rain. The time was after nine-thirty, but there were still plenty of men with briefcases and folded umbrellas hurrying toward the station steps. Late commuters. The morning was hot and humid, but that made no difference to these men, all of whom were properly dressed in suits and ties and black shoes. I saw lots of men my age, but not one of them wore a Van Halen T-shirt. Each wore his company’s lapel pin and clutched a copy of the Nikkei News under his arm. The bell rang, and a number of them dashed up the stairs. I hadn’t seen men like this for a long time.
Heading home on my bike, I found myself whistling “Canadian Sunset.”
•
Malta Kano called at eleven o’clock. “Hello. I wonder if this might possibly be the home of Mr. Toru Okada?” she asked.
“Yes, this is Toru Okada.” I knew it was Malta Kano from the first hello.
“My name is Malta Kano. You were kind enough to see me the other day. Would you happen to have any plans for this afternoon?”
None, I said. I had no more plans for the afternoon than a migrating bird has collateral assets.
“In that case, my younger sister, Creta Kano, will come to visit you at one o’clock.”
“Creta Kano?” I asked in a flat voice.
“Yes,” said Malta Kano. “I believe I showed you her photograph the other day.”
“I remember her, of course. It’s just that—”
“Her name is Creta Kano. She will come to visit you as my representative. Is one o’clock a good time for you?”
“Fine,” I said.
“She’ll be there,” said Malta Kano, and hung up.
Creta Kano?
I vacuumed the floors and straightened the house. I tied our old newspapers in a bundle and threw them in a closet. I put scattered cassette tapes back in their cases and lined them up by the stereo. I washed the things piled in the kitchen. Then I washed myself: shower, shampoo, clean clothes. I made fresh coffee and ate lunch: ham sandwich and hard-boiled egg. I sat on the sofa, reading the Home Journal and wondering what to make for dinner. I marked the recipe for Seaweed and Tofu Salad and wrote the ingredients on a shopping list. I turned on the FM radio. Michael Jackson was singing “Billy Jean.” I thought about the sisters Malta Kano and Creta Kano. What names for a couple of sisters! They sounded like a comedy team. Malta Kano. Creta Kano.
My life was heading in new directions, that was certain. The cat had run away. Strange calls had come from a strange woman. I had met an odd girl and started visiting a vacant house. Noboru Wataya had raped Creta Kano. Malta Kano had predicted I’d find my necktie. Kumiko had told me I didn’t have to work.
I turned off the radio, returned the Home Journal to the bookshelf, and drank another cup of coffee.
•
Creta Kano rang the doorbell at one o’clock on the dot. She looked exactly like her picture: a small woman in her early to mid-twenties, the quiet type. She did a remarkable job of preserving the look of the early sixties. She wore her hair in the bouffant style I had seen in the photograph, the ends curled upward. The hair at the forehead was pulled straight back and held in place by a large, glittering barrette. Her eyebrows were sharply outlined in pencil, mascara added mysterious shadows to her eyes, and her lipstick was a perfect re-creation of the kind of color popular back then. She looked ready to belt out “Johnny Angel” if you put a mike in her hand.
She dressed far more simply than she made herself up. Practical and businesslike, her outfit had nothing idiosyncratic about it: a white blouse, a green tight skirt, and no accessories to speak of. She had a white patent-leather bag tucked under her arm and wore sharp-pointed white pumps. The shoes were tiny. Their heels thin and sharp as a pencil lead, they looked like a doll’s shoes. I almost wanted to congratulate her on having made it this far on them.
So this was Creta Kano. I showed her in, had her sit on the sofa, warmed the coffee, and served her a cup. Had she eaten lunch yet? I asked. She looked hungry to me. No, she said, she had not eaten.
“But don’t bother about me,” she hastened to add. “I don’t eat much of anything for lunch.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s nothing for me to fix a sandwich. Don’t stand on ceremony. I make snacks and things all the time. It’s no trouble at all.”
She responded with little shakes of the head. “It’s very kind of you to offer, but I’m fine, really. Don’t bother. A cup of coffee is more than enough.”
Still, I brought out a plate of cookies just in case. Creta Kano ate four of them with obvious pleasure. I ate two and drank my coffee.
She seemed somewhat more relaxed after the cookies and coffee.
“I am here today as the representative of my elder sister, Malta Kano,” she said. “Creta is not my real name, of course. My real name is Setsuko. I took the name Creta when I began working as my sister’s assistant. For professional purposes. Creta is the ancient name for the island of Crete, but I have no connection with Crete. I have never been there. My sister Malta chose the name to go with her own. Have you been to the island of Crete, by any chance, Mr. Okada?”
Unfortunately not, I said. I had never been to Crete and had no plans to visit it in the near future.
“I would like to go there sometime,” said Creta Kano, nodding, with a deadly serious look on her face. “Crete is the Greek island closest to Africa. It’s a large island, and a great civilization flourished there long ago. My sister Malta has been to Crete as well. She says it’s a wonderful place. The wind is strong, and the honey is delicious. I love honey.”
I nodded. I’m not that crazy about honey.
“I came today to ask you a favor,” said Creta Kano. “I’d like to take a sample of the water in your house.”
“The water?” I asked. “You mean the water from the faucet?”
“That would be fine,” she said. “And if there happens to be a well nearby, I would like a sample of that water also.”
“I don’t think so. I mean, there is a well in the neighborhood, but it’s on somebody else’s property, and it’s dry. It doesn’t produce water anymore.”
Creta Kano gave me a complicated look. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Are you sure it doesn’t have any water?”
I recalled the dry thud that the chunk of brick had made when the girl threw it down the well at the vacant house. “Yes, it’s dry, all right. I’m very sure.”
“I see,” said Creta Kano. “That’s fine. I’ll just take a sample of the water from the faucet, then, if you don’t mind.”
I showed her to the kitchen. From her white patent-leather bag she removed two small bottles of the type that might be used for medicine. She filled one with water and tightened the cap with great care. Then she said she wanted to take a sample from the line supplying the bathtub. I showed her to the bathroom. Undistracted by all the underwear and stockings that Kumiko had left drying in there, Creta Kano turned on the faucet and filled the other bottle. After capping it, she turned it upside down to make certain it didn’t leak. The bottle caps were color coded: blue for the bath water, and green for the kitchen water.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Page 10
