The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

  “Uh-oh.”

  “She missed her footing, fell over, and couldn’t walk after that. And her vision started getting even worse. She was practically blind. It was a shame; she was still young and pretty. Of course her movie-making days were over. All she could do was stay at home. And then the maid took all her money and ran off with some guy. This maid was the one person she knew she could trust, depended on her for everything, and the woman took her savings, her stocks, everything. Boy, talk about terrible stories! So what do you think she did?”

  “Well, obviously this story can’t have a bright, happy ending.”

  “No, obviously,” said my uncle. “She filled the tub, stuck her face in, and drowned herself. You realize, of course, that to die that way, you have to be pretty damned determined.”

  “Nothing bright and happy about that.”

  “No, nothing bright and happy. Miyawaki bought the property soon afterward. I mean, it’s a nice place; everybody wants it when they see it. The neighborhood is pleasant, the plot is on high ground and gets good sunlight, the lot is big. But Miyawaki had heard the dark stories about the people who had lived there, so he had the whole thing torn down, foundation and all, and put up a new house. He even had Shinto priests come in to do a purification. But that wasn’t enough, I guess. Bad things happen to anybody who lives there. It’s just one of those pieces of land. They exist, that’s all. I wouldn’t take it if they gave it to me.”

  •

  After shopping at the supermarket, I organized my ingredients for making dinner. I then took in the laundry, folded it neatly, and put it away. Back in the kitchen, I made myself a pot of coffee. This was a nice, quiet day, without calls from anybody. I stretched out on the sofa and read a book. There was no one to disturb my reading. Every once in a while, the wind-up bird would creak in the backyard. It was virtually the only sound I heard all day.

  Someone rang the front doorbell at four o’clock. It was the postman. “Registered mail,” he said, and handed me a thick envelope. I took it and put my seal on the receipt.

  This was no ordinary envelope. It was made of old-fashioned heavy rice paper, and someone had gone to the trouble of writing my name and address on it with a brush, in bold black characters. The sender’s name on the back was Tokutaro Mamiya, the address somewhere in Hiroshima Prefecture. I had absolutely no knowledge of either. Judging from the brushwork, this Tokutaro Mamiya was a man of advanced age. No one knew how to write like that anymore.

  I sat on the sofa and used a scissors to cut the envelope open. The letter itself, just as old-fashioned as the envelope, was written on rolled rice paper in a flowing hand by an obviously cultivated person. Lacking such cultivation myself, I could hardly read it. The sentence style matched the handwriting in its extreme formality, which only complicated the process, but with enough time, I managed to decipher the general meaning. It said that old Mr. Honda, the fortune-teller whom Kumiko and I had gone to see so long ago, had died of a heart attack two weeks earlier in his Meguro home. Living alone, he had died without company, but the doctors believed that he had gone quickly and without a great deal of suffering—perhaps the one bright spot in this sad tale. The maid had found him in the morning, slumped forward on the low table of his foot warmer. The letter writer, Tokutaro Mamiya, had been stationed in Manchuria as a first lieutenant and had chanced to share the dangers of war with Corporal Oishi Honda. Now, in compliance with the strong wishes of the deceased, and in the absence of surviving relatives, Mamiya had undertaken the task of distributing the keepsakes. The deceased had left behind extremely minute written instructions in this regard. “The detailed and meticulous will suggests that Mr. Honda had anticipated his own impending death. It states explicitly that he would be extremely pleased if you, Mr. Toru Okada, would be so kind as to receive a certain item as a remembrance of him. I can imagine how very busy you must be, Mr. Okada, but I can assure you, as an old comrade in arms of the deceased with few years to look forward to myself, that I could have no greater joy than if you were indeed to be so kind as to receive this item as a small remembrance of the late Mr. Honda.” The letter concluded with the address at which Mr. Mamiya was presently staying in Tokyo, care of someone else named Mamiya in Hongo 2-chome, Bunkyo Ward. I imagined he must be in the house of a relative.

  I wrote my reply at the kitchen table. I had hoped to keep the postcard short and simple, but once I had pen in hand, those few concise phrases were not forthcoming. “I was fortunate enough to have known the late Mr. Honda and benefited from our brief acquaintance. The news that he is no longer living brings back memories of those times. Our ages were very different, of course, and our association lasted but a single year, yet I always used to feel that there was something about the deceased that moved people deeply. To be quite honest, I would never have imagined that Mr. Honda would name me specifically to be the recipient of a keepsake, nor am I certain that I am even qualified to receive anything from him, but if such was his wish, then I will certainly do so with all due respect. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.”

  When I dropped the card into the nearest mailbox, I found myself murmuring old Mr. Honda’s verse: “Dying is the only way / For you to float free: / Nomonhan.”

  •

  It was close to ten before Kumiko came home from work. She had called before six to say that she would be late again today, that I should have dinner without her and she would grab something outside. Fine, I said, and ate a simple meal. Again I stayed home alone, reading a book. When she came in, Kumiko said she wanted a few sips of beer. We shared a midsize bottle. She looked tired. Elbows on the kitchen table, she rested her chin in her hands and said little when I spoke to her. She seemed preoccupied. I told her that Mr. Honda had died. “Oh, really?” she said, with a sigh. “Oh, well, he was getting on in years, and he was almost deaf.” When I said that he had left a keepsake for me, though, she was shocked, as if something had suddenly fallen out of the sky.

  “For you?!” she exclaimed, her eyebrows twisting into a frown.

  “Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?”

  “He must have liked you.”

  “How could that be? I never really talked to the guy,” I said. “At least I never said much. And even if I did, he couldn’t hear anything. We used to sit and listen to his stories once a month. And all we ever heard from him was the Battle of Nomonhan: how they threw Molotov cocktails, and which tank burned, and which tank didn’t burn, that kind of stuff.”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Kumiko. “He must have liked something about you. I don’t understand people like that, what’s in their minds.”

  After that, she went silent again. It was a strained silence. I glanced at the calendar on the wall. Her period was not due yet. I imagined that something unpleasant might have happened at the office.

  “Working too hard?” I asked.

  “A little,” Kumiko said, after taking a sip of beer and staring at what was left in her glass. There was an almost defiant tone in her voice. “Sorry I was so late, but you know how it is with magazine work when we get busy. And it’s not as if I do this all the time. I get them to give me less overtime than most. They know I have a husband to go home to.”

  I nodded. “I’m not blaming you,” I said. “I know you have to work late sometimes. I was just worried you’re letting yourself get tired out.”

  She took a long shower. I drank my beer and flipped through a weekly magazine that she had brought home.

  I shoved my hand in my pants pocket and found the pay there from my recent little part-time job. I hadn’t even taken the cash from the envelope. Another thing I hadn’t done was tell Kumiko about the job. Not that I had been hiding it from her, but I had let the opportunity to mention it slip by and there had never been another one. As time passed, I found it harder to bring up the subject, for some strange reason. All I would have had to say was, “I met this odd sixteen-year-old girl from down the street and took a job with her doing a survey for a wig maker. The pa
y was pretty good too.” And Kumiko could have said, “Oh, really? Isn’t that nice,” and that might have been the end of it. Or not. She might have wanted to know more about May Kasahara. She might have been bothered that I was making friends with a sixteen-year-old girl. Then I would have had to tell her about May Kasahara and explain in detail where, when, and how we happened to meet. But I’m not very good at giving people orderly explanations of things.

  I took the money from the envelope and put it in my wallet. The envelope itself I crumpled and threw in the wastebasket. So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not consciously intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flowed down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original “intention” may have been. The same thing had happened with Creta Kano. I had told Kumiko that Malta Kano’s younger sister had come to the house, that her name was Creta, that she dressed in early-sixties style, that she took samples of our tap water. But I had remained silent on the fact that she had afterward begun to make startling revelations to me and had vanished without a word before reaching the end. Creta Kano’s story had been too far-out: I could never have re-created the nuances and conveyed them to Kumiko, and so I had not tried. Or then again, Kumiko might have been less than pleased that Creta Kano had stayed here long after her business was through and made all kinds of troubling personal confessions to me. And so that became another one of my little secrets.

  Maybe Kumiko had the same kind of secrets that she was keeping from me. With my own fund of secrets, I was in no position to blame her if she did, of course. Between the two of us, I was surely the more secretive. She tended to say what she was thinking. She was the type of person who thought things out while speaking. I was not like that.

  Uneasy with these ruminations, I walked toward the bathroom. The door was wide open. I stood in the doorway and looked at Kumiko from behind. She had changed into solid-blue pajamas and was standing in front of the mirror, drying her hair with a towel.

  “About a job for me,” I said. “I have been thinking about it. I’ve asked friends to be on the lookout, and I’ve tried a few places myself. There are jobs out there, so I can work anytime I decide to work. I can start tomorrow if I make up my mind to it. It’s making up my mind that’s hard. I’m just not sure. I’m not sure if it’s OK for me to pick a job out of a hat like that.”

  “That’s why I keep telling you to do what you want,” she said, while looking at herself in the mirror. “You don’t have to find a job right away. If you’re worried about the economics of it, you don’t have to worry. If it makes you uneasy not to have a job, if it’s a burden to you to have me be the only one working outside the house while you stay home and take care of the housework, then take some job—any job—for a while. I don’t care.”

  “Of course, I’ll have to find a job eventually. I know that. You know that. I can’t go on hanging around like this forever. And I will find a job sooner or later. It’s just that right now, I don’t know what kind of a job I should take. For a while after I quit, I just figured I’d take some other law-related job. I do have connections in the field. But now I can’t get myself into that mood. The more time that goes by, the less interest I have in law. I feel more and more that it’s simply not the work for me.”

  Kumiko looked at me in the mirror. I went on:

  “But knowing what I don’t want to do doesn’t help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don’t have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That’s my problem now. I can’t find the image.”

  “So, then,” she said, putting her towel down and turning to face me, “if you’re tired of law, don’t do it anymore. Just forget about the bar exam. Don’t get all worked up about finding a job. If you can’t find the image, wait until it forms by itself. What’s wrong with that?”

  I nodded. “I just wanted to make sure I had explained to you exactly how I felt.”

  “Good,” she said.

  I went to the kitchen and washed my glass. She came in from the bathroom and sat at the kitchen table.

  “Guess who called me this afternoon,” she said. “My brother.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s thinking of running for office. In fact, he’s just about decided to do it.”

  “Running for office?!” This came as such a shock to me, I could hardly speak for a moment. “You mean … for the Diet?”

  “That’s right. They’re asking him to run for my uncle’s seat in Niigata.”

  “I thought it was all set for your uncle’s son to succeed him. He was going to resign his directorship at Dentsu or something and go back to Niigata.”

  She started cleaning her ears with a cotton swab. “That was the plan, but my cousin doesn’t want to do it. He’s got his family in Tokyo, and he enjoys his work. He’s not ready to give up such an important post with the world’s largest advertising firm and move back to the wilds of Niigata just to become a Diet member. The main opposition is from his wife. She doesn’t want him sacrificing the family to run for office.”

  The elder brother of Kumiko’s father had spent four or five terms in the Lower House, representing that electoral district in Niigata. While not exactly a heavyweight, he had compiled a fairly impressive record, rising at one point to a minor cabinet post. Now, however, advanced age and heart disease would make it impossible for him to enter the next election, which meant that someone would have to succeed to his constituency. This uncle had two sons, but the elder had never intended to go into politics, and so the younger was the obvious choice.

  “Now the people in the district are dying to have my brother run. They want somebody young and smart and energetic. Somebody who can serve for several terms, with the talent to become a major power in the central government. My brother has the name recognition, he’ll attract the young vote: he’s perfect. True, he can’t schmooze with the locals, but the support organization is strong, and they’ll take care of that. Plus, if he wants to go on living in Tokyo, that’s no problem. All he has to do is show up for the election.”

  I had trouble picturing Noboru Wataya as a Diet member. “What do you think of all this?” I asked.

  “He’s got nothing to do with me. He can become a Diet member or an astronaut, for all I care.”

  “But why did he make a point of coming to you for advice?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, with a dry voice. “He wasn’t asking my advice. You know he’d never do that. He was just keeping me informed. As a member of the family.”

  “I see,” I said. “Still, if he’s going to run for the Diet, won’t it be a problem that he’s divorced and single?”

  “I wonder,” said Kumiko. “I don’t know anything about politics or elections or anything. They just don’t interest me. But anyway, I’m pretty sure he’ll never get married again. To anybody. He should never have gotten married in the first place. That’s not what he wants out of life. He’s after something else, something completely different from what you or I want. I know that for sure.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Kumiko wrapped two used cotton swabs in a tissue and threw them in the wastebasket. Then she raised her face and looked straight at me. “I once saw him masturbating. I opened a door, and there he was.”

  “So what? Everybody masturbates,” I said.

  “No, you don’t understand,” she said. Then she sighed. “It happened maybe two years after my sister died. He was probably in college, and I was something like a third grader. My mother had wavered between getting rid of my sister’s things and putting them away, and in the end she decided to keep them, thinking I might wear them when I got older. She had put them in a carton in a closet. My brother had taken them out and was smelling them and doing it.�
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  I kept silent.

  “I was just a little girl then. I didn’t know anything about sex. I really didn’t know what he was doing, but I could tell that it was something twisted, something I wasn’t supposed to see, something much deeper than it appeared on the surface.” Kumiko shook her head.

  “Does Noboru Wataya know you saw him?”

  “Of course. We looked right into each other’s eyes.”

  I nodded. “And how about your sister’s clothes?” I asked. “Did you wear them when you got bigger?”

  “No way,” she said.

  “So you think he was in love with your sister?”

  “I wonder,” said Kumiko. “I’m not even sure he had a sexual interest in her, but he certainly had something, and I suspect he’s never been able to get away from that something. That’s what I mean when I say he should never have gotten married in the first place.”

  Kumiko fell silent. For a long time, neither of us said anything. Then she spoke first. “In that sense, I think he may have some serious psychological problems. Of course, we all have psychological problems to some extent, but his are a lot worse than whatever you or I might have. They’re a lot deeper and more persistent. And he has no intention of letting these scars or weaknesses or whatever they are be seen by anybody else. Ever. Do you understand what I’m saying? This election coming up: it worries me.”