The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

  “As I told you before, I was in a state at that time in which I had absolutely no perception of pain. And not only pain: I had no sensations of any kind. I lived in a bottomless numbness. Of course, I don’t mean to say that I was unable to feel any sensations at all—I knew when something was hot or cold or painful. But these sensations came to me as if from a distance, from a world that had nothing to do with me. Which is why I felt no resistance to the idea of having sexual relations with men for money. No matter what anyone did to me, the sensations I felt did not belong to me. My unfeeling flesh was not my flesh.

  “Now, let’s see, I told you about how I had been recruited by the mob’s prostitution ring. When they told me to sleep with men I did it, and when they paid me I took it. I left off at that point.”

  I nodded to her.

  “That day they told me to go to a room on the sixteenth floor of a downtown hotel. The client had the unusual name of Wataya. I knocked on the door and went in, to find the man sitting on the sofa. He had apparently been drinking room-service coffee while reading a book. He wore a green polo shirt and brown cotton pants. His hair was short, and he wore brown-framed glasses. On the coffee table in front of him were his cup and a coffeepot and the book. He seemed to have been deeply absorbed in his reading: there was a kind of excitement still in his eyes. His features were in no way remarkable, but those eyes of his had an energy about them that was almost weird. When I first saw them, I thought for a moment that I was in the wrong room. But it was not the wrong room. The man told me to come inside and lock the door.

  “Still seated on the sofa, without saying a word, he ran his eyes over my body. From head to foot. That was what usually happened when I entered a client’s room. Most men would look me over. Excuse me for asking, Mr. Okada, but have you ever bought a prostitute?”

  I said that I had not.

  “It’s as if they were looking over merchandise. It doesn’t take long to get used to being looked at like that. They are paying money for flesh, after all; it makes sense for them to examine the goods. But the way that man looked at me was different. He seemed to be looking through my flesh to something on the other side. His eyes made me feel uneasy, as if I had become a half-transparent human being.

  “I was a little confused, I suppose: I dropped my handbag on the floor. It made a small sound, but I was in such an abstracted state that, for a time, I was almost unaware of what I had done. Then I stooped down to pick up the bag. The clasp had opened when it hit the floor, and some of my cosmetics had fallen out. I picked up my eyebrow pencil and lip cream and a small bottle of eau de cologne, returning each of them to my bag. He kept those eyes of his trained on me the whole time.

  “When I had finished gathering up my things from the floor and putting them back in the bag, he told me to undress. I asked him if it would be all right for me to take a shower first, because I had been perspiring quite a bit. The weather was hot that day, and I had been sweating on the subway. He didn’t care about that, he said. He didn’t have much time. He wanted me to undress right away.

  “Once I was naked, he told me to lie on the bed facedown, which I did. He ordered me to stay still, to keep my eyes closed, and not to speak until I was spoken to.

  “He sat down next to me with his clothes on. That was all he did: sit down. He did not lay a finger on me. He just sat and looked down at my naked body. He kept this up for some ten minutes, while I lay there, unmoving, facedown. I could feel his eyes boring into the nape of my neck, my back, my buttocks, and my legs, with almost painful intensity. It occurred to me that he might be impotent. Customers like that turn up now and then. They buy a prostitute, have her undress, and they look at her. Some will undress the woman and finish themselves off in her presence. All kinds of men buy prostitutes, for all kinds of reasons. I just assumed he was one of those.

  “After a while, though, he reached out and began to touch me. His ten fingers moved down my body, from my shoulders to my back, from my back to my buttocks, in search of something. This was not foreplay. Neither, of course, was it a massage. His fingers moved over my body with the utmost care, as if tracing a route on a map. And all the while he touched my flesh, he seemed to be thinking—not in any ordinary sense of the word, but seriously thinking about something with the utmost concentration.

  “One minute his fingers would seem to be wandering here and there at random, and the next they would come to a stop and remain for a long time in the one place. It felt as if the fingers themselves were going from confusion to certainty. Am I making myself clear? Each finger seemed to be alive and thinking, with a will of its own. It was a very strange sensation. Strange and disturbing.

  “And yet the touch of his fingers aroused me sexually. For the first time in my life. Sex had been nothing but a source of pain for me until I became a prostitute. The mere thought of it had filled me with fear—fear of the pain I knew I would have to endure. Just the opposite happened after I became a prostitute: I felt nothing. I no longer felt pain, but I felt no other sensations, either. I would sigh and pretend to be aroused for the pleasure of the customer, but it was all fake, a professional act. When he touched me, though, my sighs were real. They came out of my body’s innermost depths. I knew that something inside me had begun to move, as if my center of gravity were changing locations in my body, first to one place and then to another.

  “Eventually, the man stopped moving his fingers. With his hands on my waist, he seemed to be thinking. Through his fingertips, I could tell that he was steadying himself, quietly regularizing his breathing. Then he began to remove his clothing. I kept my eyes closed and my face buried in the pillow, waiting for what would come next. Once he was naked, he spread my arms and legs open wide.

  “The room was almost frighteningly quiet. The only sound was the soft rush of the air conditioner. The man himself made almost no perceptible sounds. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. He placed his palms on my back. I went limp. His penis touched my buttocks, but it was still soft.

  “Just then the phone on the night table began to ring. I opened my eyes and turned my head to look at the man’s face, but he seemed unaware that the phone was ringing. It rang eight or nine times and then stopped. Again the room became silent.”

  Creta Kano paused at that point for a few measured breaths. She remained silent, looking at her own hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but do you mind if I take a short break?”

  “Not at all,” I said. I refilled my coffee cup and took a sip. She drank her cold water. We sat there without speaking for a good ten minutes.

  “His fingers began to move again, touching every part of my body,” Creta Kano continued, “every part without exception. I lost the power to think. My ears were filled with the sound of my own heart, pounding but with strange slowness. I could no longer control myself. I cried out aloud again and again as he caressed me. I tried to keep my voice in check, but another someone was using my voice to moan and shout. I felt as if every screw in my body had come loose. Then, after a very long time, and with me still lying facedown, he put something inside me from behind. What it was, I still have no idea. It was huge and hard, but it was not his penis. I am certain of that. I remember thinking that I had been right: he was impotent, after all.

  “Whatever it was that he put inside me, it made me feel pain for the first time since my failed suicide attempt—real, intense pain that belonged to me and to no one else. How can I put this? The pain was almost impossibly intense, as if my physical self were splitting in two from the inside out. And yet, as terrible as it felt, I was writhing as much in pleasure as in pain. The pleasure and pain were one. Do you see what I mean? The pain was founded on pleasure, and the pleasure on pain. I had to swallow the two as a single entity. In the midst of this pain and pleasure, my flesh went on splitting in two. There was no way for me to prevent it from happening. Then something very weird occurred. Out from between the two cleanly split halves of my physical self came crawling a thing that I had never se
en or touched before. How large it was I could not tell, but it was as wet and slippery as a newborn baby. I had absolutely no idea what it was. It had always been inside me, and yet it was something of which I had no knowledge. This man had drawn it out of me.

  “I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. It was a part of me, after all, I had a right to see it. But this was impossible. I was caught in the torrent of pleasure and pain. An entirely physical being, I could only cry out, and drool, and churn my hips. The mere act of opening my eyes was an impossibility.

  “I then reached the sexual peak—although, rather than a peak, it felt more as if I were being thrown down from a high cliff. I screamed, and I felt as if every piece of glass in the room had shattered. I not only felt it: I actually saw and heard the windows and drinking glasses shattering into powdered fragments and felt them raining down on me. I then felt horribly sick to my stomach. My consciousness began to slip away, and my body turned cold. I know this will sound strange, but I felt as if I had turned into a bowl of cold porridge—all sticky and lumpy, and the lumps were throbbing, slowly and hugely, with each beat of my heart. I recognized this throbbing: it had happened to me before. Nor did it take very long for me to recall what it was. I knew it as that dull, fatal, never-ending pain that I had experienced before my failed suicide attempt. And, like a crowbar, the pain was prying open the lid of my consciousness—prying it open with an irresistible force and dragging out the jellied contents of my memory without reference to my will. Strange as it may sound, this was like a dead person watching her own autopsy. Do you see what I mean? I felt as if I were watching from some vantage point as my body was being cut open and one slimy organ after another was being pulled out of me.

  “I continued to lie there, drooling on the pillow, my body racked with convulsions, and incontinent. I knew that I should try to control myself, but I had lost the power for such control. Every screw in my body had not only come loose but had fallen out. In my clouded brain, I felt with incredible intensity exactly how alone and how powerless I was. Everything came gushing out of me. Things both tangible and intangible turned to liquid and flowed out through my flesh like saliva or urine. I knew that I should not let this happen, that I should not allow my very self to spill out this way and be lost forever, but there was nothing I could do to stanch the flow. I could only watch it happen. How long this continued, I have no idea. It seemed as if all my memories, all my consciousness, had just slipped away. Everything that had been inside me was outside now. Eventually, like a heavy curtain falling, darkness enveloped me in an instant.

  “And when I regained consciousness, I was a different person.”

  Creta Kano stopped speaking at that point and looked at me.

  “That is what happened then,” she said softly.

  I said nothing but waited instead for the rest of her story.

  Creta Kano’s New Departure

  •

  Creta Kano went on with her story.

  “For some days after that, I lived with the feeling that my body had fallen apart. Walking, I had no sense that my feet were actually touching the ground. Eating, I had no sense that I was actually chewing on anything. Sitting still, I had the terrifying feeling that my body was either endlessly falling or endlessly floating up beneath a big balloon kind of thing, through infinite space. I could no longer connect my body’s movements or sensations with my own self. They were functioning as they wished, without reference to my will, without order or direction. And yet I knew no way to bring calm to this intense chaos. All I could do was wait for things to settle down in their own good time. I locked myself in my room from morning to night, hardly eating a thing, and telling my family only that I was not feeling well.

  “Some days went by like this—three or four days, I would say. And then, all of a sudden, everything quieted down, as if a wild wind had blown through and gone on its way. I looked around, and I examined myself, and I realized that I had become a new person, entirely different from what I had been until then. This was my third self. My first self had been the one that lived in the endless anguish of pain. My second self had been the one that lived in a state of pain-free numbness. The first one had been me in my original state, unable to release the heavy yoke of pain from my neck. And when I did attempt to release it—which is to say, when I tried to kill myself and failed—I became my second self: an interim me. True, the physical pain that had tortured me until then had disappeared, but all other sensations had retreated with it into the haze. My will to live, my physical vitality, my mental powers of concentration: all these had disappeared along with the pain. After I passed through that strange period of transition, what emerged was a brand-new me. Whether this was the me that should have been there all along I could not yet tell. But I did have the sense, however vague and undefined it might be, that I was at least heading in the right direction.”

  Creta Kano raised her eyes and looked directly at me, as if she wanted to hear my impressions of her story. Her hands still rested on the table.

  “So, then,” I said, “what you’re saying is that the man gave you a new self, am I right?”

  “Perhaps he did,” said Creta Kano, nodding. Her face was as expressionless as the bottom of a dried-up pond. “Being caressed by that man, and held by him, and made to feel such impossibly intense sexual pleasure for the first time in my life, I experienced some kind of gigantic physical change. Why it happened, and why, of all people, it had to be that man who made it happen, I have no idea. Whatever the process may have been, the fact remains that at the end of it, I found myself in a whole new container. And once I had passed through the deep confusion I mentioned earlier, I sought to accept this new self as something truer—if for no other reason than that I had been enabled to escape from my profound numbness, which had been such a suffocating prison to me.

  “Still, the bad aftertaste remained with me for a long time, like a dark shadow. Each time I recalled those ten fingers of his, each time I recalled that thing he put inside me, each time I recalled that slimy, lumpish thing that came (or felt as if it came) out of me, I felt terribly uneasy. I felt a sense of anger—and despair—that I had no way to deal with. I tried to erase that day from my memory, but this I was unable to do, because the man had pried open something inside my body. The sensation of having been pried open stayed with me, inseparably bonded to the memory of that man, along with an unmistakable sense of defilement. It was a contradictory feeling. Do you see what I mean? The transformation that I had experienced was undoubtedly something right and true, but the transformation had been caused by something filthy, something wrong and false. This contradiction—this split—would torment me for a very long time.”

  Again Creta Kano stared at her hands atop the table.

  “After that, I stopped selling my body. There was no longer any point to it.” Creta Kano’s face remained expressionless.

  “You could quit just like that?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Just like that,” she said. “I didn’t say anything to anybody, just stopped selling myself, but this caused no problem. It was almost disappointingly easy. I had thought they would at least call me, and I was bracing myself for the day, but it never came. They never said a thing to me. They knew my address. They knew my phone number. They could have threatened me. But nothing happened.

  “And so, on the surface at least, I had become an ordinary girl again. By that time, I had repaid my parents everything I owed them, and I had put away a good deal of money. With what I gave him, my brother had bought another new car to waste his time driving around in, but he could never have imagined what I had done to pay him back.

  “I needed time to get used to my new self. What kind of a being was this self of mine? How did it function? What did it feel—and how? I had to grasp each of these things through experience, to memorize and stockpile them. Do you see what I am saying? Virtually everything inside me had spilled out and been lost. At the same time that I was entir
ely new, I was almost entirely empty. I had to fill in that blank, little by little. One by one, with my own hands, I had to make this thing I called ‘I’—or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

  “I was still officially a student, but I had no intention of returning to the university. I would leave the house in the morning, go to a park, and sit by myself on a bench all day, doing nothing. Or I would wander up and down the paths in the park. When it rained, I would go to the library, put a book on the table in front of me, and pretend to be reading. I sometimes spent the whole day in a movie theater or riding round and round the city on the Yamanote Circle Line. I felt as if I were floating in a pitch-dark space, all by myself. There was no one I could go to for advice. If my sister Malta had been there, I could have shared everything with her, but at that time, of course, she was in seclusion far away on the island of Malta, performing her austerities. I did not know her address. I had no way of contacting her. And so I had to solve these problems entirely by myself. No book explained the kind of thing that I had experienced. Still, although I was lonely, I was not unhappy. I was able to cling to myself. At least now I had a self to cling to.

  “My new self was able to feel pain, though not with that earlier intensity. I could feel it, but at the same time I had learned a method to escape from it. Which is to say, I was able to separate from the physical self that was feeling the pain. Do you see what I am saying? I was able to divide myself into a physical self and a nonphysical self. It may sound difficult when I describe it like this, but once you learn the method, it is not difficult at all. When pain comes to me, I leave my physical self. It’s just like quietly slipping into the next room when someone you don’t want to meet comes along. I can do it very naturally. I recognize that pain has come to my body; I feel the existence of the pain; but I am not there. I am in the next room. And so the yoke of the pain is not able to capture me.”