Why Cinnamon and his mother had had to make an exact reproduction of the original “fitting room” in this house I had no idea. Here there was no need for such camouflage. Maybe they (and their clients) had become so accustomed to the look of the “fitting room” in the Akasaka office that they were unable to come up with any new ideas for decorating this place. Of course, they could just as well ask, “What’s wrong with a fitting room?” Whatever the reason for having it, I myself was pleased with it. It was the “fitting room,” not any other room, and I felt a strange sense of security there, surrounded by all kinds of dressmaking tools. It was an unreal setting, but not an unnatural one.
Nutmeg had me sit on the leather sofa, and she sat down next to me.
“So. How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Not bad,” I answered.
Nutmeg was wearing a bright-green suit. The skirt was short, and the large hexagonal buttons came up to the throat like one of those old Nehru jackets. The shoulders had pads the size of dinner rolls. The look reminded me of a science fiction movie I had seen a long time ago, set in the near future. Almost all the women in the movie wore suits like this and lived in a futuristic city.
Nutmeg’s earrings were large plastic things, the same exact color as her suit. They were a unique deep green that seemed to have been made from a combination of several colors, and so they had probably been special-ordered to match the suit. Or perhaps the opposite was true: the suit had been made to match the earrings—like making a niche in the wall the exact shape of a refrigerator. Maybe not a bad way to look at things, I thought. She had come in wearing sunglasses in spite of the rain, and their lenses had almost certainly been green. Her stockings were green too. Today was obviously green day.
With her usual series of smooth linked movements, Nutmeg drew a cigarette from her bag, put it in her mouth, and lit it with her cigarette lighter, curling her lip just slightly. The lighter, at least, was not green but the expensive-looking slim gold one she always used. It did go very well with the green, though. Nutmeg then crossed her green-stockinged legs. Checking her knees carefully, she adjusted her skirt. Then, as if it were an extension of her knees, she looked at my face.
“Not bad,” I said again. “The same as always.”
Nutmeg nodded. “You’re not tired? You don’t feel as if you need some rest?”
“No, not especially. I think I’ve gotten used to the work. It’s a lot easier for me now than it was at first.”
Nutmeg said nothing to that. The smoke of her cigarette rose straight up like an Indian fakir’s magic rope, to be sucked in by the ceiling ventilator. As far as I knew, this ventilator was the world’s quietest and strongest.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Me?”
“Are you tired?”
Nutmeg looked at me. “Do I look tired?”
She had in fact looked tired to me from the moment our eyes first met. When I told her this, she gave a short sigh.
“There was another article about this place in a magazine that came out this morning—part of the ‘Mystery of the Hanging House’ series. Sounds like the title of a horror movie.”
“That’s the second one, isn’t it?” I said.
“It certainly is,” said Nutmeg. “And in fact, another magazine carried a related article not too long ago, but fortunately no one seems to have noticed the connection. So far.”
“Did something new come out? About us?”
She reached toward an ashtray and carefully crushed out her cigarette. Then she gave her head a little shake. Her green earrings fluttered like butterflies in early spring.
“Not really,” she said, then paused. “Who we are, what we’re doing here: no one knows yet. I’ll leave you a copy, so you can read it if you’re interested. But what I’d really like to ask you about is something that somebody whispered to me the other day: that you have a brother-in-law who’s a famous young politician. Is it true?”
“Unfortunately, it is,” I said. “My wife’s brother.”
“Meaning the brother of the wife who is no longer with you?”
“That’s right.”
“I wonder if he’s caught wind of what you’re doing here?”
“He knows I come here every day and that I’m doing something. He had somebody investigate for him. I think he was worried about what I might be doing. But I don’t think he’s figured out anything else yet.”
Nutmeg thought about my answer for a while. Then she raised her face to mine and asked, “You don’t like this brother-in-law of yours very much, do you?”
“Not very much, no.”
“And he doesn’t like you.”
“To put it mildly.”
“And now he’s worried about what you’re doing here. Why is that?”
“If it comes out that his brother-in-law is involved with something suspicious, it could turn into a scandal for him. He’s the man of the moment, after all. I suppose it’s natural that he would worry about such things.”
“So he couldn’t be the one leaking information about this place to the mass media, then, could he?”
“To be quite honest, I don’t know what Noboru Wataya has in mind. But common sense tells me he’d have nothing to gain by leaking things to the press. He’d be more likely to want to keep things under wraps.”
For a long time, Nutmeg went on turning the slim gold lighter in her fingers. It looked like a gold windmill on a day with little wind.
“Why haven’t you said anything to us about this brother-in-law of yours?” Nutmeg asked.
“It isn’t just you. I try not to mention him to anybody,” I said. “We haven’t liked each other from the beginning, and now we practically hate each other. I wasn’t hiding him from you. I just didn’t think there was any need to bring up the subject.”
Nutmeg released a somewhat longer sigh. “You should have told us.”
“Maybe I should have,” I said.
“I’m sure you can imagine what’s involved here. We have clients coming to us from politics and business. Powerful people. And famous people. Their privacy has to be protected. That’s why we’ve taken such extreme precautions. You know that much.”
I nodded.
“Cinnamon has gone to a lot of time and trouble to put together the precise and complicated system we have for maintaining our secrecy—a labyrinth of dummy companies, books under layers of camouflage, a totally anonymous parking space in that hotel in Akasaka, stringent management of the clientele, control of income and expenses, design of this house: his mind gave birth to all of this. Until now, the system has worked almost perfectly in accordance with his calculations. Of course, it takes a lot of money to support such a system, but money is no problem for us. The important thing is that the women who come to us can feel secure that they will be protected absolutely.”
“What you’re saying is that that security is being undermined.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
Nutmeg picked up a box of cigarettes and took one out, but she just held it for a long time between her fingers without lighting it.
“And to make matters worse, I have this fairly famous politician for a brother-in-law, which only increases the possibility of scandal.”
“Exactly,” said Nutmeg, curling her lip slightly.
“So what is Cinnamon’s analysis of the situation?”
“He’s not saying anything. Like a big oyster on the bottom of the sea. He has burrowed inside himself and locked the door, and he’s doing some serious thinking.”
Nutmeg’s eyes were fixed on mine. At last, as though recalling that it was there in her hand, she lit her cigarette. Then she said, “I still think about it a lot—about my husband and the way he was killed. Why did they have to murder him? Why did they have to smear the hotel room with blood and tear out his insides and take them away? I just can’t think of any reason for doing such a thing. My husband was not the kind of person who had to be killed in such an unusual way.
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“But my husband’s death is not the only thing. All these inexplicable events that have occurred in my life so far—the intense passion that welled up inside me for fashion design and the way it suddenly disappeared; the way Cinnamon stopped speaking; the way I became swept up in this strange work we do—it’s as though they were all ingeniously programmed from the start for the very purpose of bringing me here, where I am today. It’s a thought I can’t seem to shake off. I feel as if my every move is being controlled by some kind of incredibly long arm that’s reaching out from somewhere far away, and that my life has been nothing more than a convenient passageway for all these things moving through it.”
The faint sounds of Cinnamon’s vacuuming came from the next room. He was performing his tasks in his usual concentrated, systematic manner.
“Haven’t you ever felt that way?” Nutmeg asked me.
“I don’t feel that I’ve been ‘swept up’ in anything,” I said. “I’m here now because it was necessary for me to be here.”
“So you could blow the magic flute and find Kumiko?”
“That’s right.”
“You have something you’re searching for,” she said, slowly recrossing her green-stockinged legs. “And everything has its price.”
I remained silent.
Then, at last, Nutmeg announced her conclusion: “We’ve decided not to bring any clients here for a while. It was Cinnamon’s decision. Because of the magazine articles and your brother-in-law’s entry on the scene, the signal has changed from yellow to red. Yesterday we canceled all remaining appointments, beginning with today’s.”
“How long will ‘a while’ be?”
“Until Cinnamon can patch the holes in the system and we can be sure that any crisis has been completely bypassed. Sorry, but we don’t want to take any chances—none at all. Cinnamon will come here every day, as he always has, but there will be no more clients.”
•
By the time Cinnamon and Nutmeg left, the morning rain had cleared. Half a dozen sparrows were washing their feathers in a puddle in the driveway. When Cinnamon’s Mercedes disappeared and the automatic gate closed, I sat at the window, looking at the cloudy winter sky beyond the tree branches. Nutmeg’s words came to mind: “some kind of incredibly long arm that’s reaching out from somewhere far away.” I imagined the arm reaching down from the dark, low-hanging clouds—like an illustration from a sinister picture book.
Triangular Ears
•
Sleigh Bells
I spent the rest of the day reading about Manchukuo. There was no need for me to hurry back to the house. Thinking I might be late, I had given Mackerel two days’ worth of dried cat food when I left in the morning. He might not like it much, but at least he wouldn’t starve. This made the thought of dragging myself home that much less appealing. I wanted to lie down and take a nap. I took a blanket and pillow from a cabinet, spread them on the sofa in the fitting room, and turned out the light. Then I lay down, closed my eyes, and began thinking about Mackerel. I wanted to fall asleep thinking about the cat. He was something that had come back to me. He had managed to come back to me from somewhere far away. That had to be a kind of blessing. As I lay there with my eyes closed, I thought about the soft touch of the pads beneath the cat’s paws, the cold triangular ears, the pink tongue. In my mind, Mackerel had curled up and was sleeping quietly. I felt his warmth with the palm of my hand. I could hear his regular breathing. I was far more on edge than usual, but sleep still came to me before too long, a deep sleep without dreams.
I awoke in the middle of the night. I thought I had heard sleigh bells somewhere far away, as in the background of Christmas music.
Sleigh bells?
I sat up on the sofa and felt for my watch on the coffee table. The luminous hands showed one-thirty. I must have slept more soundly than I had expected to. I sat still and listened hard, but the only sound I could hear was the faint, dry thumping of my own heart. Maybe I had imagined the sleigh bells. Maybe I had been dreaming, after all. I decided, still, to check the house. I stepped into my slippers and padded my way into the kitchen. The sound grew more distinct when I left the room. It really did sound like sleigh bells, and it seemed to be coming from Cinnamon’s office. I stood by the door for a while, listening, then gave a knock. Cinnamon might have come back to the Residence while I was sleeping. But there was no answer. I opened the door a crack and looked inside.
Somewhere around waist height in the darkness, I could see a whitish glow with a square shape. It was the glow of the computer screen, and the bell sound was the machine’s repeated beeping (a new kind of beep, which I had not heard before). The computer was calling out to me. As if drawn toward it, I sat down in front of the glow and read the message on the screen:
You have now gained access to the program “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Choose a document (1–16).
Someone had turned the computer on and accessed documents titled “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” There should have been no one in the Residence besides me. Could someone have started it from outside the house? If so, it could only have been Cinnamon. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”?
The light, cheery sound, like sleigh bells, continued to emanate from the computer, as if this were Christmas morning. It seemed to be urging me to make a choice. After some hesitation, I picked #8 for no particular reason. The ringing immediately stopped, and a document opened on the screen like a horizontal scroll painting being spread out before me.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle # 8
(or, A Second Clumsy Massacre)
•
The veterinarian woke before 6:00 a.m. After washing his face in cold water, he made himself breakfast. Daybreak came at an early hour in summer, and most of the animals in the zoo were already awake. The open window let in their cries and the breeze that carried their smells, which told him the weather without his having to look outside. This was part of his routine. He would first listen, then inhale the morning air, and so ready himself for each new day.
Today, however, should have been different from the day before. It had to be different. So many voices and smells had been lost! The tigers, the leopards, the wolves, the bears: all had been liquidated—eliminated—by soldiers the previous afternoon. Now, after a night of sleep, those events seemed like part of a sluggish nightmare he had had long ago. But he knew they had actually happened. His ears still felt a dull ache from the roar of the soldiers’ rifles. That could not be a dream. It was August now, the year was 1945, and he was here in the city of Hsin-ching, where the Soviet troops that had burst across the border were pressing closer every hour. This was reality—as real as the sink and toothbrush he saw in front of him.
The sound of the elephants’ trumpeting gave him some sense of relief. Ah, yes—the elephants had survived. Fortunately, the young lieutenant in charge of the platoon had had enough normal human sensitivity to remove the elephants from the list, thought the veterinarian as he washed his face. Since coming to Manchuria, he had met any number of stiff-necked, fanatical young officers from his homeland, and the experience always left him shaken. Most of them were farmers’ sons who had spent their youthful years in the depressed thirties, steeped in the tragedies of poverty, while a megalomaniac nationalism was hammered into their skulls. They would follow without a second thought the orders of a superior, no matter how outlandish. Commanded in the name of the emperor to dig a hole through the earth to Brazil, they would grab a shovel and set to work. Some people called this “purity,” but the veterinarian had other words for it. An urban doctor’s son, educated in the relatively liberal atmosphere of the twenties, the veterinarian could never understand those young officers. Shooting a couple of elephants with small arms should have been far easier than digging through the earth to Brazil, but the lieutenant in charge of the firing squad, though he spoke with a slight country accent, seemed to be a more normal human being than the other young officers the veterinarian had met—better educated and more
reasonable. The veterinarian could sense this from the way the young man spoke and handled himself.
In any case, the elephants had not been killed, and the veterinarian told himself he should probably be grateful. The soldiers, too, must have been glad to be spared the task. The Chinese workers may have regretted the omission—they had missed out on a lot of meat and ivory.
The veterinarian boiled water in a kettle, soaked his beard in a hot towel, and shaved. Then he ate breakfast alone: tea, toast and butter. The food rations in Manchuria were far from sufficient, but compared with those elsewhere, they were still fairly generous. This was good news both for him and for the animals. The animals showed resentment at their reduced allotments of feed, but the situation here was far better than in Japanese homeland zoos, where foodstuffs had already bottomed out. No one could predict the future, but for now, at least, both animals and humans were being spared the pain of extreme hunger.
He wondered how his wife and daughter were doing. If all went according to plan, their train should have arrived in Pusan by now. There his cousin lived who worked for the railway company, and until the veterinarian’s wife and daughter were able to board the transport ship that would carry them to Japan, they would stay with the cousin’s family. The doctor missed seeing them when he woke up in the morning. He missed hearing their lively voices as they prepared breakfast. A hollow quiet ruled the house. This was no longer the home he loved, the place where he belonged. And yet, at the same time, he could not help feeling a certain strange joy at being left alone in this empty official residence; now he was able to sense the implacable power of fate in his very bones and flesh.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Page 61
