Remember when I kissed your mark that time? I’ve been thinking about that ever since I said goodbye to you last summer, thinking about it over and over, like a cat watching the rain fall, and wondering what was that all about? I don’t think I can explain it myself, to tell you the truth. Sometime way in the future, maybe ten years or twenty years from now, if we have a chance to talk about it, and if I’m more grown up and a lot smarter than I am now, I might be able to tell you what it meant. Right now, though, I’m sorry to say, I think I just don’t have the ability, or the brains, to put it into the right words.
One thing I can tell you honestly, though, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, is that I like you better without the mark on your face. No; wait a minute; that’s not fair. You didn’t put the mark there on purpose. Maybe I should say that even without your mark, you’re good enough for me. Is that it? No, that doesn’t explain anything.
Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. That mark is maybe going to give you something important. But it also must be robbing you of something. Kind of like a trade-off. And if everybody keeps taking stuff from you like that, you’re going to be worn away until there’s nothing left of you. So, I don’t know, I guess what I really want to say is that it wouldn’t make any difference to me if you didn’t have that thing.
Sometimes I think that the reason I’m sitting here making wigs like this every day is because I kissed your mark that time. It’s because I did that that I made up my mind to leave that place, to get as far away as I could from you. I know I might be hurting you by saying this, but I think it’s true. Still, though, it’s because of that that I was finally able to find the place where I belong. So, in a sense, I am grateful to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. I don’t suppose it’s much fun to have somebody be “in a sense” grateful to you, though, is it?
So now I feel like I’ve said just about everything I have to say to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. It’s almost four o’clock in the morning. I have to get up at seven-thirty, so maybe I’ll be able to sleep three hours and a little bit. I hope I can get to sleep right away. Anyhow, I’m going to end this letter here. Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Please say a little prayer so I can get to sleep.
The Subterranean Labyrinth
•
Cinnamon’s Two Doors
“There’s a computer in that house, isn’t there, Mr. Okada? I don’t know who’s using it, though,” said Ushikawa.
It was nine o’clock at night, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, with the phone to my ear.
“There is,” I said, and left it at that.
Ushikawa made a sniffling sound. “I know that much from my usual snooping,” he said. “Of course, I’m not saying anything one way or another about the fact that you’ve got a computer there. Nowadays, anybody doing any kind of brainwork has to have a computer. There’s nothing weird about it.
“To make a long story short, though, the idea kind of hit me that it might be good if I could contact you through the computer. So I looked into it, but damn, it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than I imagined. Just calling up on an ordinary phone line wouldn’t make the connection. Plus, you need a special password for access. No password, and the door doesn’t budge. That did it for me.”
I kept silent.
“Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Okada. I’m not trying to crawl inside your computer and fool around in there. I don’t have anything like that in mind. With all the security you’ve got in place, I couldn’t pull data out even if I wanted to. No, that was never an issue. All I have in mind is trying to set up a conversation between you and Ms. Kumiko. I promised you I’d do that, remember, that I’d do what I could to help you and her talk to each other directly. It’s been a long time since she left your house, and it’s a bad idea to leave things hanging like this. The way it stands now, your life is probably just going to get weirder and weirder. It’s always best for people to talk to each other face-to-face, to open themselves up. Otherwise, misunderstandings are bound to arise, and misunderstandings make people unhappy.… Anyhow, that’s how I tried to appeal to Ms. Kumiko. I did everything I could.
“But I just couldn’t get her to agree. She insisted she wouldn’t talk to you directly—not even on the phone (since a face-to-face meeting was out of the question). Not even on the phone! I was ready to give up. I tried every trick in the book, but her mind was made up. Like a rock.”
Ushikawa paused for me to react, but I said nothing.
“Still, I couldn’t just take her at her word and back off. Dr. Wataya would really give it to me if I started acting like that. The other person can be a rock or a wall, but I’ll find that one tiny point of compromise. That’s our job: finding that point of compromise. If they won’t sell you the refrigerator, make them sell you some ice. So I racked my brains trying to find some way to pull this off. Let me tell you, that’s what makes us human—coming up with a million different ideas. So all of a sudden, a good one popped up in my foggy brain, like a star showing through a break in the clouds. ‘That’s it!’ I told myself. ‘Why not have a conversation on computer screens?’ You know: put words on the screen with a keyboard. You can do that, can’t you, Mr. Okada?”
I had used a computer when I worked in the law firm, researching precedents, looking up personal data for clients, and communicating with E-mail. Kumiko had also used computers at work. The health food magazine she edited had computer files on recipes and nutritional analyses.
“It wouldn’t work on just any old computer,” continued Ushikawa, “but with our machine and yours, you ought to be able to communicate at a pretty fast pace. Ms. Kumiko says she’s willing to talk with you that way. It was as much as I could get her to bend. Trading messages real time, it would almost be like talking to each other. That’s the one last point of compromise I could come up with. Squeezing wisdom out of a monkey. What do you say? You may not be too crazy about the idea, but I literally put my brains on the rack for that one. Let me tell you, it’s tiring work thinking that hard with brains you don’t even have!”
I silently shifted the receiver to my left hand.
“Hello? Mr. Okada? Are you listening?”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“All right, then: the one thing I need from you is the password to access your computer. Then I can set up a conversation between you and Ms. Kumiko. What do you say?”
“I’d say there are some practical problems standing in the way.”
“Oh? And what might those be?”
“Well, first of all, how can I be sure the other person is Kumiko? When you’re talking on the computer screen, you can’t see other people’s faces or hear their voices. Someone else could be sitting at the keyboard, pretending to be Kumiko.”
“I see what you mean,” said Ushikawa, seemingly impressed. “I never thought of that. But I’m sure there must be some way around it. Not to flatter you, but it’s good to view things with skepticism, to have your doubts. ‘I doubt, therefore I am.’ All right, then: how about this? You start out by asking a question that only Ms. Kumiko would know the answer to. If the other person can come up with the answer, it must be Kumiko. I mean, you lived together as man and wife for several years; there must be a few things that only the two of you would know.”
What Ushikawa was saying made sense. “That would probably work,” I said, “but I don’t know the password. I’ve never touched that machine.”
•
Nutmeg had told me that Cinnamon had customized every inch of the computer’s system. He had compiled his own complex database and protected it from outside access with a secret code and other ingenious devices. Fingers on the keyboard, Cinnamon was absolute ruler over this three-dimensional subterranean labyrinth. He knew every one of its intertwined passages and could leap from one to another with the stroke of a key. For an uninformed invader (which is to say, anyone but Cinnamon) to grope his way through the labyrinth, past the alarms and traps, to where important data lay, would have taken months, according to Nutmeg. Not that
the computer installed in the Residence was especially big: it was the same class of machine as the one in the Akasaka office. Both were hard-wired to the mainframe they had at home, though. There Cinnamon no doubt stored their client data and did their complex double bookkeeping, but I imagined that he kept something more in there than the secrets connected with the work that he and Nutmeg had done over the years.
What led me to believe this, was the depth of the commitment to his machine that Cinnamon displayed on occasion when he was in our special Residence. He normally stayed shut up in the small office he had there, but every now and then he would leave the door ajar, and I was able to observe him at work—not without a certain guilty sense of invading someone’s privacy. He and his computer seemed to be moving together in an almost erotic union. After a burst of strokes on the keyboard, he would gaze at the screen, his mouth twisted in apparent dissatisfaction or curled with the suggestion of a smile. Sometimes he seemed deep in thought as he touched one key, then another, then another; and sometimes he ran his fingers over the keys with all the energy of a pianist playing a Liszt étude. As he engaged in silent conversation with his machine, he seemed to be peering through the screen of his monitor into another world, with which he shared a special intimacy. I couldn’t help but feel that reality resided for him not so much in the earthly world but in his subterranean labyrinth. Perhaps in that world Cinnamon had a clear, ringing voice, with which he spoke eloquently and laughed and cried aloud.
•
“Can’t I access your computer from the one here?” I asked Ushikawa. “Then you wouldn’t need a password.”
“No, that wouldn’t work. Your transmissions might reach here, but transmissions from here wouldn’t reach there. The problem is the password—the open sesame. Without that, there’s nothing we can do. The door won’t open for the wolf, no matter how hard he tries to disguise his voice. He can knock and say, ‘Hi, it’s me, your friend Rabbit,’ but if he hasn’t got the password, he gets turned away at the door. We’re talking about an iron maiden here.”
Ushikawa struck a match at his end and lit a cigarette. I pictured his snaggled yellow teeth and drooping mouth.
“It’s a three-character alphanumeric password. You have ten seconds to input it after the prompt shows. Get it wrong three times, and access is denied, plus the alarm goes off. Not that there are any sirens that ring or anything, but the wolf leaves his footprints, so you know he was there. Clever, huh? If you calculate all possible permutations and combinations of twenty-six letters and ten numbers, it’s practically infinite. You just have to know the password, or there’s nothing you can do.”
I thought this over for a time without replying.
“Any good ideas, Mr. Okada?”
After the client was driven away in the back seat of the Mercedes the following afternoon, I walked into Cinnamon’s small office, sat down in front of his computer, and flipped the switch. The cool blue light of the monitor came on with a simple message:
Enter password within ten seconds.
I input the three-letter word that I had prepared:
zoo
The computer beeped once and displayed an error message:
Incorrect password.
Enter password within ten seconds.
The ten seconds started counting down on the screen. I changed to upper case and input the same letters:
ZOO
Again I was refused access:
Incorrect password.
Enter correct password within ten seconds.
If incorrect password is input once more, access will automatically be denied.
Again the ten seconds began counting down on the screen. This time I made only the Z uppercase. It was my last chance.
Zoo
Instead of an error message, a menu screen opened, with the instruction:
Choose one of the following programs.
I released a long, slow breath, then began scrolling through the long list of programs until I came to communications software. Highlighting this, I pressed the mouse button.
Choose one of the following programs.
I chose “Chat Mode” and clicked the mouse.
Enter password within ten seconds.
This was an important junction for Cinnamon to lock out access to his computer. And if the junction was important, the password itself ought to be important. I typed in:
SUB
The screen read:
Incorrect password.
Input correct password within ten seconds.
The countdown began: 10, 9, 8 …
I tried the combination of upper- and lowercase letters that had worked the first time:
Sub
A prompt flashed on the screen:
Input telephone number.
I folded my arms and let my eyes take in this new message. Not bad. I had succeeded in opening two doors in Cinnamon’s labyrinth. No, not bad at all. “Zoo” and “Sub” would do it. I clicked on “Exit” and returned to the main menu, then chose “Shutdown,” which brought up the following options:
Record procedures in Operations File? Y/N (Y)
As instructed by Ushikawa, I chose “No” to avoid leaving a record of the procedures I had just executed.
The screen quietly died. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. After checking to be certain that I had left the keyboard and mouse exactly as I had found them, I moved away from the now cold monitor.
Nutmeg’s Story
•
Nutmeg Akasaka took several months to tell me the story of her life. It was a long, long story, with many detours, so that what I am recording here is a very simplified (though not necessarily short) summary of the whole. I cannot honestly claim with confidence that it contains the essence of her story, but it should at least convey the outline of important events that occurred at crucial points in her life.
•
Nutmeg and her mother escaped from Manchuria to Japan, their only valuables the jewelry they were able to wear on their bodies. They traveled up from the port of Sasebo to Yokohama, to stay with the mother’s family, which had long owned an import-export business primarily focused on Taiwan. Prosperous before the war, they had lost most of their business when Japan lost Taiwan. The father died of heart disease, and the family’s second son, who had been second in command, was killed in an air raid just before the war ended. The eldest son left his teaching post to carry on the family business, but never temperamentally suited to a life of commerce, he was unable to recoup the family fortunes. They still had their comfortable house and land, but it was not a pleasant place for Nutmeg and her mother to live as extra mouths to feed during those straitened postwar years. They were always at pains to keep their presence as unobtrusive as possible, taking less than the others at mealtimes, waking earlier than the others each morning, taking on an outsize share of the household chores. Every piece of clothing the young Nutmeg wore was a hand-me-down from her older cousins—gloves, socks, even underwear. For pencils, she collected the others’ cast-off stubs. Just waking up in the morning was painful to her. The thought that a new day was starting was enough to make her chest hurt.
She wanted to get out of this house, to live alone with her mother someplace where they didn’t always have to feel so constrained, even if it meant living in poverty. But her mother never tried to leave. “My mother had always been an active person,” said Nutmeg, “but after we escaped from Manchuria, she was like an empty shell. It was as if the very strength to go on living had evaporated from inside her.” She could no longer rouse herself for anything. All she could do was tell Nutmeg over and over about the happy times they used to have. This left to Nutmeg the task of finding for herself the resources to go on living.
Nutmeg did not dislike studying as such, but she had almost no interest in the courses they offered in high school. She couldn’t believe that it would do her any good to stuff her head full of historical dates or the rules of English grammar or geometric formulas. What s
he wanted more than anything was to learn a useful skill and make herself independent as soon as possible. She was in a place far away from her classmates and their comfortable enjoyment of high school life.
The only thing she cared about was fashion. Her mind was filled with thoughts of clothing from morning to night. Not that she had the wherewithal to dress in style: she could only read and reread the fashion magazines she managed to find, and to fill notebooks with drawings of dresses in imitation of those she found in the magazines or clothes she had dreamed up herself. She had no idea what it was about the fancy dresses that so captivated her imagination. Perhaps, she said, it came from her habit of always playing with the huge wardrobe that her mother had in Manchuria. Her mother was a genuine clotheshorse. She had had more kimonos and dresses than room in their chests to store them, and the young Nutmeg would always pull them out and touch them whenever she had a chance. Most of those dresses and kimonos had had to remain in Manchuria when the two of them left, and whatever they had been able to stuff into rucksacks they had had to exchange along the way for food. Her mother would spread out the next dress to be traded, and sigh over it before letting it go.
“Designing clothes was my secret little door to a different world,” said Nutmeg, “a world that belonged only to me. In that world, imagination was everything. The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality. And what I really liked about it was that it was free. It didn’t cost a thing. It was wonderful! Imagining beautiful clothes in my mind and transferring the images to paper was not just a way for me to leave reality behind and steep myself in dreams, though. I needed it to go on living. It was as natural and obvious to me as breathing. So I assumed that everyone else was doing it too. When I realized that everyone else was not doing it—that they couldn’t do it even if they tried—I told myself, ‘I’m different from other people, so the life I live will have to be different from theirs.’ ”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Page 57
