The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

  But why, finally, had Cinnamon written such stories? And why stories? Why not some other form? And why had he found it necessary to use the word “chronicle” in the title? I thought about these things while seated on the fitting room sofa, turning a colored design pencil over and over in my hand.

  I probably would have had to read all sixteen stories to find the answers to my questions, but even after a single reading of #8, I had some idea, however vague, of what Cinnamon was looking for in his writing. He was engaged in a serious search for the meaning of his own existence. And he was hoping to find it by looking into the events that had preceded his birth.

  To do that, Cinnamon had to fill in those blank spots in the past that he could not reach with his own hands. By using those hands to make a story, he was trying to supply the missing links. From the stories he had heard repeatedly from his mother, he derived further stories in an attempt to re-create the enigmatic figure of his grandfather in a new setting. He inherited from his mother’s stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of a story were factual and which parts were not was probably not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.

  His stories used “wind-up bird” as a key phrase, and they almost certainly brought the narrative up to the present day in the form of a chronicle (or perhaps not in the form of a chronicle). But “wind-up bird” was not a term invented by Cinnamon. It was a phrase spoken unconsciously by his mother, Nutmeg, in a story she told me in the Aoyama restaurant where we ate together. Nutmeg almost certainly did not know at that time that I had been given the name “Mr. Wind-Up Bird.” Which meant that I was connected with their story through some chance conjunction.

  I could not be certain of this, however. Nutmeg might possibly have known that I was called “wind-up bird.” The words might have affected her story (or, rather, their story), might have eaten their way into it on an unconscious level. This story jointly possessed by mother and son might not exist in a single fixed form but could go on taking in changes and growing as a story does in oral transmission.

  Whether by chance conjunction or not, the “wind-up bird” was a powerful presence in Cinnamon’s story. The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin. The will of human beings meant nothing, then, as the veterinarian always seemed to feel. People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose. Nearly all within range of the wind-up bird’s cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.

  •

  Cinnamon had almost certainly monitored my conversation with Kumiko. He probably knew everything that went on in this computer. He had probably waited until I had finished before presenting me with the story of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” This had clearly not happened by chance or a sudden whim. Cinnamon had run the machine with a definite purpose in mind and shown me one story. He had also made sure I knew that there might possibly exist a whole, huge cluster of stories.

  I lay down on the sofa and looked at the ceiling of the fitting room in the half-dark. The night was deep and heavy, the area almost painfully quiet. The white ceiling looked like a thick white cap of ice that had been set on top of the room.

  Cinnamon’s grandfather, the nameless veterinarian, and I had a number of unusual things in common—a mark on the face, a baseball bat, the cry of the wind-up bird. And then there was the lieutenant who appeared in Cinnamon’s story: he reminded me of Lieutenant Mamiya. Lieutenant Mamiya had also been assigned to Kwantung Army Headquarters in Hsin-ching at that time. The real Lieutenant Mamiya, however, was not a paymaster officer but belonged to the mapmaking corps, and after the war he was not hanged (fate had denied him death at all) but rather returned to Japan, having lost his left hand in battle. Still, I could not shake off the impression that the officer who had directed the executions of the Chinese cadets had really been Lieutenant Mamiya. At least if it had been Lieutenant Mamiya, that would not have been the least bit strange.

  Then there was the problem of the baseball bats. Cinnamon knew that I kept a bat in the bottom of the well. Which meant that the image of the bat could have “eaten its way” into his story the same way the words “wind-up bird chronicle” could have. Even if this was true, however, there was still something about the bat that could not be explained so simply: the man with the guitar case who attacked me with the bat in the entryway of the abandoned apartment house. This was the man who had made a show of burning the palm of his hand in a candle flame in a bar in Sapporo and who later hit me with the bat, only to have me beat him with it. He was the one who had surrendered the bat to me.

  And finally, why did I have burned into my face a mark the same color and shape as that of Cinnamon’s grandfather? Was this, too, something that came up in their story as a result of my presence having “eaten” its way into it? Did the actual veterinarian not have a mark on his face? Nutmeg certainly had no need to make up such a thing in describing her father to me. The very thing that had led her to “find” me on the streets of Shinjuku was this mark that we possessed in common. Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle—a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth.

  •

  I stood up from the sofa and went to Cinnamon’s small office once again. There I sat at the desk, elbows resting on the table, and stared at the computer screen. Cinnamon was probably inside there. In there, his silent words lived and breathed as stories. They could think and seek and grow and give off heat. But the screen before me remained as deep in death as the moon, hiding Cinnamon’s words in a labyrinthine forest. Neither the monitor’s screen nor Cinnamon himself, behind it, tried to tell me any more than I had already been told.

  You Just Can’t Trust a House

  (May Kasahara’s Point of View: 5)

  •

  How are you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?

  I said at the end of my last letter that I had said just about everything I wanted to say to you—pretty much as if that were going to be “it.” Remember? I did some more thinking after that, though, and I started to get the feeling that I ought to write a little more. So here I am, creeping around in the middle of the night like a cockroach, sitting at my desk and writing to you again.

  I don’t know why, but I think about the Miyawaki family a lot these days—the poor Miyawakis who used to live in that vacant house, and then the bill collectors came after them, and they all went off and killed themselves. I’m pretty sure I saw something about how only the eldest daughter didn’t die and now nobody knows where she is.… Whether I’m working, or in the dining hall, or in my room listening to music and reading a book, the image of that family pops into my head. Not that I’m haunted by it or anything, but whenever there’s an opening (and my head has lots of openings!) it comes creeping in and sticks around for a while, the way smoke from a bonfire can come in through the window. It’s been happening all the time this past week or so.

  I lived in our house on the alley from the time I was born, and I grew up looking at the house on the other side. My window looks right at it. They gave me my own room when I started primary school. By then, the Miyawakis had already built their new house and were living in it. I could always see some member of the family in the house or yard, tons of clothes drying out back on nice days, the two girls there, yelling out the name of their big, black German shepherd (what was his name?). And when the sun went down, the lights would come on inside the house, looking warm and cozy, and then later the lights would go out one at a time. The older girl took piano lessons, the younger one violin
(the older one was older than me, the younger one younger). They’d have, like, parties and things on birthdays and Christmas, and lots of friends would come over, and it was happy and lively there. People who have seen the place only when it was a vacant ruin couldn’t imagine what it was like before.

  I used to see Mr. Miyawaki pruning trees and things on weekends. He seemed to enjoy doing all kinds of chores himself, things that took time, like cleaning the gutters or walking the dog or waxing his car. I’ll never understand why some people enjoy those things, they’re such a pain, but everybody’s different, I guess, and I suppose every family ought to have at least one person like that. The whole family used to ski, so every winter they’d strap their skis to the roof of this big car and go off somewhere, looking like they were going to have the greatest time (I hate skiing myself, but anyhow).

  This makes them sound like a typical, ordinary happy family, I suppose, but that’s really just what they were: a typical, ordinary happy family. There was absolutely nothing about them that would make you raise your eyebrows and say, “Yeah, OK, but how about that?”

  People in the neighborhood used to whisper, “I wouldn’t live in a creepy place like that if you gave it to me free,” but the Miyawakis lived such a peaceful life there, it could have been a picture in a frame without a speck of dust on it. They were the ones in the fairy tale who got to live “happily ever after.” At least compared to my family, they seemed to be living ten times as happily ever after. And the two girls seemed really nice whenever I met them outside. I used to wish that I had sisters like them. The whole family always seemed to be laughing—including the dog.

  I could never have imagined that you could blink one day and all of this would be gone. But that’s just what happened. One day I noticed that the whole family—the German shepherd with them—had disappeared as if a gust of wind had just blown them away, leaving only the house behind. For a while—maybe a week—no one in the neighborhood noticed that the Miyawakis had disappeared. It did cross my mind at first that it was strange the lights weren’t going on at night, but I figured they must be off on one of their family trips. Then my mother heard people saying that the Miyawakis seemed to have “absconded.” I remember asking her to explain to me what the word meant. Nowadays we just say “run away,” I guess.

  Whatever you call it, once the people who lived there had disappeared, the whole look of the house changed. It was almost creepy. I had never seen a vacant house before, so I didn’t know what an ordinary vacant house looked like, but I guess I figured it would have a sad, beaten sort of look, like an abandoned dog or a cicada’s cast-off shell. The Miyawakis’ house, though, was nothing like that. It didn’t look “beaten” at all. The minute the Miyawakis left, it got this know-nothing look on its face, like, “I never heard of anybody called Miyawaki.” At least that’s how it looked to me. It was like some stupid, ungrateful dog. As soon as they were gone, it turned into this totally self-sufficient vacant house that had nothing at all to do with the Miyawaki family’s happiness. It really made me mad! I mean, the house must have been just as happy as the rest of the family when the Miyawakis were there. I’m sure it enjoyed being cleaned so nicely and taken care of, and it wouldn’t have existed at all if Mr. Miyawaki hadn’t been nice enough to build it in the first place. Don’t you agree? You just can’t trust a house.

  You know as well as I do what the place was like after that, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The house was abandoned, with no one to live in it, and all smeared with bird shit and stuff. That was all I had to look at from my window for years when I was at my desk, studying—or pretending to be studying. On clear days, rainy days, snowy days, or in typhoons, it was right there, outside my window, so I couldn’t help but see it when I looked out. And strangely enough, as the years went by, I tried less and less not to notice it. I could—and often did—spend whole half hours at a time with my elbow on my desk, doing nothing but look at that vacant house. I don’t know—not very long ago the place had been overflowing with laughter, and clean white clothes had been flapping in the wind like in a commercial for laundry detergent (I wouldn’t say Mrs. Miyawaki was “abnormal” or anything, but she liked to do laundry—way more than most ordinary people). All of that was gone in a flash, the yard was covered with weeds, and there was nobody left to remember the happy days of the Miyawaki family. To me that seemed sooo strange!

  Let me just say this: I wasn’t especially friendly with the Miyawaki family. In fact, I hardly ever talked to any of them, except to say “Hi” on the street. But because I spent so much time and energy watching them from my window every day, I felt as if the family’s happy doings had become a part of me. You know how in the corner of a family photo there’ll be a glimpse of this person who has nothing to do with them. So sometimes I get this feeling like part of me “absconded” with the Miyawakis and just disappeared. I guess that’s pretty weird, huh, to feel like part of you is gone because it “absconded” with people you hardly know?

  As long as I’ve started telling you one weird thing, I might as well tell you another one. Now, this one is really weird!

  Lately, I sometimes feel like I have turned into Kumiko. I am actually Mrs. Wind-Up Bird, and I’ve run away from you for some reason and I’m hiding here in the mountains, working in a wig factory. For all kinds of complicated reasons, I have to use the name “May Kasahara” as an alias and wear this mask and pretend I’m not Kumiko. And you’re just sitting there on that sad little veranda of yours, waiting for me to come back. I don’t know—I really feel like that.

  Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, do you ever get obsessed with these delusions? Not to boast or anything, but I do. All the time. Sometimes, when they’re really bad, I’ll spend the whole workday wrapped up in a cloud of delusion. Of course, I’m just performing these simple operations, so it doesn’t get in the way of my work, but the other girls sometimes give me strange looks. Or maybe I say crazy things to myself out loud. I hate that, but it doesn’t do any good to try and fight it. When a delusion wants to come, it comes, like a period. And you can’t just meet it at the front door and say, “Sorry, I’m busy today, try me later.” Anyway, I hope it doesn’t bother you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, that I sometimes pretend I’m Kumiko. I mean, I’m not doing it on purpose.

  I’m getting really really really tired. I’m going to go to sleep now for three or four hours—I mean out cold—then get up and work hard from morning to night. I’ll put in a good day making wigs with the other girls, listening to some kind of harmless music. Please don’t worry about me. I’m good at doing all kinds of things even when I’m in the middle of a delusion. And in my own way, I’m saying little prayers for you, hoping that everything works out for you, that Kumiko comes back and you can have your quiet, happy life again.

  Goodbye.

  A Vacant House Is Born

  •

  Nine o’clock, then ten o’clock, arrived the next morning, with no sign of Cinnamon. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He had never missed a single day, from the time I started “working” in this place. At exactly nine o’clock each morning, the gate would open and the bright glare of the Mercedes’s hood ornament would appear. This simultaneously mundane and theatrical appearance of Cinnamon would mark the clear beginning of each day for me. I had become accustomed to this fixed daily routine the way people become accustomed to gravity or barometric pressure. There was a kind of warmth to Cinnamon’s punctilious regularity, something beyond mere mechanical predictability, something that gave me comfort and encouragement. Which is why a morning without Cinnamon’s appearance was like a well-executed landscape painting that lacked a focal point.

  I gave up waiting for him, left the window, and peeled myself an apple as a substitute for breakfast. Then I peeked into Cinnamon’s room to see if there might be any messages on the computer, but the screen was as dead as ever. All I could do at that point was follow Cinnamon’s example and listen to a tape of Baroque music while doing laundry, vacuuming the floor
s, and cleaning windows. To kill time, I purposely performed each function slowly and carefully, going so far as to clean the blades of the kitchen exhaust fan, but still the time refused to move.

  I ran out of things to do by eleven o’clock, so I stretched out on the fitting room sofa and gave myself up to the languid flow of time. I tried to tell myself that Cinnamon had been delayed by some minor matter. Maybe the car had broken down, or he had been caught in an incredible traffic jam. But I knew that couldn’t be true. I would have bet all I had on it. Cinnamon’s car would never break down, and he always took the possibility of traffic jams into account. Plus, he had the car phone to call me on in case of an unforeseen emergency in traffic. No, Cinnamon was not here because he had decided not to come here.

  •

  I tried calling Nutmeg’s Akasaka office just before one, but there was no answer. I tried again and again, with the same results. Then I tried Ushikawa’s office but got only a message that the number had been disconnected. This was strange. I had called him at that number just two days earlier. I gave up and went back to the fitting room sofa again. All of a sudden in the last two days there seemed to be a conspiracy against contact with me.

  I went back to the window and peeked outside through the curtain. Two energetic-looking little winter birds had come to the yard and were perched on a branch, glancing wide-eyed at the area. Then, as if they had suddenly become fed up with everything there, they flew off. Nothing else seemed to be moving. The Residence felt like a brand-new vacant house.