Nutmeg quit high school and transferred to a school of dressmaking. To raise the money for her tuition, she begged her mother to sell one of her last remaining pieces of jewelry. With that, she was able to study sewing and cutting and designing and other such useful skills for two years. When she graduated, she took an apartment and started living alone. She put herself through a professional fashion design school by waiting on tables and taking odd jobs sewing and knitting. And when she had finally graduated from this school, she went to work for a manufacturer of quality ladies’ garments, where she succeeded in having herself assigned to the design department.
There was no question but that she had an original talent. Not only could she draw well, but her ideas and her point of view were different from those of other people. She had a clear image of precisely what she wanted to make, and it was not something she had borrowed from anyone else: it was always her own, and it always came out of her quite naturally. She pursued the tiny details of her image with all the intensity of a salmon swimming upstream through a great river to its source. She had no time for sleep. She loved her work and dreamed only of the day she could become an independent designer. She never thought about having fun outside of work: in fact, she didn’t know how to do any of the things people did to have fun.
Before long, her bosses came to recognize the quality of her work and took an interest in her extravagant, free-flowing lines. Her years of apprenticeship thus came to an end, and she was given full discretion as the head of her own small section—a most unusual promotion.
Nutmeg went on to compile a magnificent record of accomplishment year after year. Her talent and energy caught the interest of people not only within the company but throughout the industry. The world of fashion design was a closed world, but at the same time it was a fair one, a society ruled by competition. A designer’s power was determined by one thing alone: the number of advance orders that came in for the clothing that he or she had designed. There was never any doubt about who had won and who had lost: the figures told the whole story. Nutmeg never felt that she was competing with anyone, but her record could not be denied.
She worked with total dedication until her late twenties. She met many people through her work, and several men showed interest in her, but their relationships proved short and shallow. Nutmeg could never take a deep interest in living human beings. Her mind was filled with images of clothing, and a man’s designs had a far more visceral impact on her than the man himself ever could.
When she turned twenty-seven, though, Nutmeg was introduced to a strange-looking man at an industry New Year’s party. The man’s features were regular enough, but his hair was a wild mass, and his nose and chin had the hard sharpness of stone tools. He looked more like some phony preacher than a designer of women’s clothing. He was a year younger than Nutmeg, as thin as a wire, and had eyes of bottomless depth, from which he looked at people with an aggressive stare that seemed deliberately designed to make them feel uncomfortable. In his eyes, though, Nutmeg was able to see her own reflection. At the time, he was an unknown but up-and-coming designer, and the two were meeting for the first time. She had, of course, heard people talking about him. He had a unique talent, they said, but he was arrogant and egotistical and argumentative, liked by almost no one.
“We were two of a kind,” she said. “Both born on the continent. He had also been shipped back after the war, in his case from Korea, stripped of possessions. His father had been a professional soldier, and they experienced serious poverty in the postwar years. His mother had died of typhus when he was very small, and I suppose that’s what led to his strong interest in women’s clothing. He did have talent, but he had no idea how to deal with people. Here he was, a designer of women’s clothing, but when he came into a woman’s presence, he would turn red and act crazy. In other words, we were both strays who had become separated from the herd.”
They married the following year, 1963, and the child they gave birth to in the spring of the year after that (the year of the Tokyo Olympics), was Cinnamon. “His name was Cinnamon, wasn’t it?” No sooner was Cinnamon born than Nutmeg brought her mother into the house to take care of him. She herself had to work nonstop from morning to night and had no time to be caring for infants. Thus Cinnamon was more or less raised by his grandmother.
•
It was never clear to Nutmeg whether she had ever truly loved her husband as a man. She lacked any criterion by which to make such a judgment, and this was true for her husband also. What had brought them together was the power of a chance meeting and their shared passion for fashion design. Still, their first ten years together was a fruitful time for both. As soon as they were married, they quit their respective companies and set up their own independent design studio in a small apartment in a small, west-facing building just behind Aoyama Avenue. Poorly ventilated and lacking air-conditioning, the place was so hot in summer that the sweat would make their pencils slip from their grasps. The business did not go smoothly at first. Nutmeg and her husband were both almost shockingly lacking in practical business sense, as a result of which they were easily duped by unscrupulous members of the industry, or they would fail to secure orders because they were ignorant of standard practice or would make unimaginably simple mistakes that kept them from getting on track. Their debts mounted up so greatly that at one point it seemed the only solution would be to abscond. The breakthrough came when Nutmeg happened to meet a capable business manager who recognized their talent and could serve them with integrity. From that point on, the company developed so well that all their previous troubles began to seem like a bad dream. Their sales doubled each year until, by 1970, the little company they had started on a shoestring had become a miraculous success—so much so that it surprised even the arrogant, aloof young couple who had started it. They increased their staff, moved to a big building on the avenue, and opened their own shops in such fashionable neighborhoods as the Ginza, Aoyama, and Shinjuku. Their original line of designer clothes figured often in the mass media and became widely known.
•
Once the company had reached a certain size, the nature of the work they divided between themselves began to change. While designing and manufacturing clothes might be a creative process, it was also, unlike sculpting or novel writing, a business upon which the fortunes of many people depended. One could not simply stay at home and create whatever one liked. Someone would have to go out and present the company’s “face” to the world. This need only increased as the size of the company’s transactions continued to grow. One of them would have to appear at parties and fashion shows to give little speeches and hobnob with the guests, and to be interviewed by the media. Nutmeg had absolutely no intention of taking on that role, and so her husband became the one to step forward. Just as poor at socializing as she was, he found the whole thing excruciating at first. He was unable to speak well in front of a lot of strangers, and so he would come home from each such event exhausted. After six months of this, however, he noticed that he was finding it less painful. He was still not much of a speaker, but people did not react to his brusque and awkward manner the way they had when he was young; now they seemed to be drawn to him. They took his curt style (which derived from his naturally introverted personality) as evidence not of arrogant aloofness but rather of a charming artistic temperament. He actually began to enjoy this new position in which he found himself, and before long he was being celebrated as a cultural hero of his time.
“You’ve probably heard his name,” Nutmeg said. “But in fact, by then I was doing two-thirds of the design work myself. His bold, original ideas had taken off commercially, and he had already come up with more than enough of them to keep us going. It was my job to develop and expand them and give them form. No matter how large the company grew, we never hired other designers. Our support staff expanded, but the crucial part we did ourselves. All we wanted was to make the clothing we wanted to make, not worry about the class of people who would buy
it. We did absolutely no market research or cost calculations or strategy planning. If we decided we wanted to make something a certain way, we designed it that way, used the best materials we could find, and took all the time we needed to make it. What other houses could do in two steps, we did in four. Where they used three yards of cloth, we used four. We personally inspected and passed every piece that left our shop. What didn’t sell we disposed of. We sold nothing at discount. Our prices were on the high side, of course. Industry people thought we were crazy, but our clothing became a symbol of the era, right along with Peter Max, Woodstock, Twiggy, Easy Rider, and all that. We had so much fun designing clothes back then! We could do the wildest things, and our clients were right there with us. It was as if we had sprouted great big wings and could fly anywhere we liked.”
•
Just as their business was hitting its stride, however, Nutmeg and her husband began to grow more distant. Even as they worked side by side, she would sense now and then that his heart was wandering somewhere far away. His eyes seemed to have lost that hungry gleam they once had. The violent streak that used to make him throw things now almost never surfaced. Instead, she would often find him staring off into space as if deep in thought. The two of them hardly ever talked outside the workplace, and the nights when he did not come home at all grew in number. Nutmeg sensed that he had several women in his life now, but this was not a source of pain for her. She thought of it as inevitable, because they had long since ceased having physical relations (mainly because Nutmeg had lost the desire for sex).
•
It was late in 1975, when Nutmeg was forty and Cinnamon eleven, that her husband was killed. His body was found in an Akasaka hotel room, slashed to bits. The maid found him when she used her passkey to enter the room for cleaning at eleven in the morning. The lavatory looked as if it had been the site of a blood bath. The body itself had been virtually drained dry, and it was missing its heart and stomach and liver and both kidneys and pancreas, as if whoever had killed him had cut those organs out and taken them somewhere in plastic bags or some such containers. The head had been severed from the torso and set on the lid of the toilet, facing outward, the face chopped to mincemeat. The killer had apparently cut and chopped the head first, then set about collecting the organs.
To cut the organs out of a human being must have taken some exceptionally sharp implements and considerable technical skill. Several ribs had had to be cut out with a saw—a time-consuming and bloody operation. Nor was it clear why anyone would have gone to so much trouble.
Taken up with the holiday rush, the clerk at the front desk recalled only that Nutmeg’s husband had checked into his twelfth-floor room at ten o’clock the previous night with a woman—a pretty woman perhaps thirty years of age, wearing a red overcoat and not particularly tall. She had been carrying nothing more than a small purse. The bed showed signs of sexual activity. The hair and fluid recovered from the sheets were his pubic hair and semen. The room was full of fingerprints, but too many to be of use in the investigation. His small leather suitcase held only a change of underwear, a few toilet articles, a folder holding some work-related documents, and one magazine. More than one hundred thousand yen in cash and several credit cards remained in his wallet, but a notebook that he should have had was missing. There were no signs of struggle in the room.
The police investigated all his known associates but could not come up with a woman who fit the hotel clerk’s description. The few women they did find had no causes for deep-seated hatred or jealousy, and all had solid alibis. There were a good number of people who disliked him in the fashion world (not a world known for its warm, friendly atmosphere, in any case), but none who seemed to have hated him enough to kill him, and no one who would have had the technical training to cut six organs out of his body.
The murder of a well-known fashion designer was of course widely reported in the press, and with some sensationalism, but the police used a number of technicalities to suppress the information about the taking of the organs, in order to avoid the glare of publicity that would surround such a bizarre murder case. The prestigious hotel seems also to have exerted some pressure to keep its association with the affair to a minimum. Little more was released than the fact that he had been stabbed to death in one of their rooms. Rumors circulated for a while that there had been “something abnormal” involved, but nothing more specific ever emerged. The police conducted a massive investigation, but the killer was never caught, nor was a motive established.
“That hotel room is probably still sealed,” said Nutmeg.
•
The spring of the year after her husband was killed, Nutmeg sold the company—complete with retail stores, inventory, and brand name—to a major fashion manufacturer. When the lawyer who had conducted the negotiations for her brought the contract, Nutmeg set her seal to it without a word and with hardly a glance at the sale price.
Once she had let the company go, Nutmeg discovered that all trace of her passion for the designing of clothes had evaporated. The intense stream of desire had dried up, where once it had been the meaning of her life. She would accept an occasional assignment and carry it off with all the skill of a first-rate professional, but without a trace of joy. It was like eating food that had no taste. She felt as if “they” had plucked out her own innards. Those who knew her former energy and skill remembered Nutmeg as a kind of legendary presence, and requests never ceased to come from such people, but aside from the very few that she could not refuse, she turned them all down. Following the advice of her accountant, she invested her money in stocks and real estate, and her property expanded in those years of growth.
Not long after she sold the company, her mother died of heart disease. She was wetting down the pavement out front on a hot August afternoon, when suddenly she complained she “felt bad.” She lay down and slept, her snoring disturbingly loud, and soon she was dead. Nutmeg and Cinnamon were left alone in the world. Nutmeg closed herself up in the house for over a year, spending each day on the sofa, looking at the garden, as if trying to recoup all the peace and quiet that she had missed in her life thus far. Hardly eating, she would sleep ten hours a day. Cinnamon, who would normally have begun middle school, took care of the house in his mother’s stead, playing Mozart and Haydn sonatas between chores and studying several languages.
This nearly blank, quiet space in her life had gone on for one year when Nutmeg happened by chance to discover that she possessed a certain special “power,” a strange ability of which she had had no awareness. She imagined that it might have welled up inside her to replace the intense passion for design that had so wholly evaporated. And indeed, this power became her new profession, though it was not something she herself had sought out.
•
The first beneficiary of her strange power was the wife of a department store owner, a bright, energetic woman who had been an opera singer in her youth. She had recognized Nutmeg’s talent long before she became a famous designer, and she had watched over her career. Without this woman’s support, Nutmeg’s company might have failed in its infancy. Because of their special relationship, Nutmeg agreed to help the woman and her daughter choose and coordinate their outfits for the daughter’s wedding, a task that she did not find taxing.
Nutmeg and the woman were chatting as they waited for the daughter to be fitted when, without warning, the woman suddenly pressed her hands to her head and knelt down on the floor unsteadily. Nutmeg, horrified, grabbed her to keep her from falling and began stroking the woman’s right temple. She did this by reflex, without thought, but no sooner had her palm started moving than she felt “a certain something” there, as if she were feeling an object inside a cloth bag.
Confused, Nutmeg closed her eyes and tried to think about something else. What came to her then was the zoo in Hsin-ching—the zoo on a day when it was closed and she was there all by herself, something only she was permitted as the chief veterinarian’s daughter. That had been t
he happiest time of her life, when she was protected and loved and reassured. It was her earliest memory. The empty zoo. She thought of the smells and the brilliant light, and the shape of each cloud floating in the sky. She walked alone from cage to cage. The season was autumn, the sky high and clear, and flocks of Manchurian birds were winging from tree to tree. That had been her original world, a world that, in many senses, had been lost forever. She did not know how much time passed like this, but eventually the woman raised herself to her full height and apologized to Nutmeg. She was still disoriented, but her headache seemed to be gone, she said. Some days later, Nutmeg was amazed to receive a far larger payment than she had anticipated for the job she had done.
The department store owner’s wife called Nutmeg about a month after the event, inviting her out to lunch. After they had finished eating, she suggested that they go to her home, where she said to Nutmeg, “I wonder if you would mind putting your hand on my head the way you did before. There’s something I want to check.” Nutmeg had no particular reason to refuse. She sat next to the woman and placed her palm on the woman’s temple. She could feel that same “something” she had felt before. Now she concentrated all her attention on it to get a better sense of its shape, but the shape began to twist and change. It’s alive! Nutmeg felt a twinge of fear. She closed her eyes and thought about the Hsin-ching zoo. This was not hard for her. All she had to do was bring back the story she had told Cinnamon and the scenes she had described for him. Her consciousness left her body, wandered for a while in the spaces between memory and story, then came back. When she regained consciousness, the woman took her hand and thanked her. Nutmeg asked nothing about what had just happened, and the woman offered no explanations. As before, Nutmeg felt a mild fatigue, and a light film of sweat clung to her forehead. When she left, the woman thanked her for taking the time and trouble to visit and tried to hand her an envelope containing money, but Nutmeg refused to take it—politely, but firmly. “This is not my job,” she said, “and besides, you paid me too much last time.” The woman did not insist.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Page 58
