The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Page 8

  Passing the stone statue, I walked over to a nested pile of white plastic lawn chairs under the eaves. The topmost chair was filthy, but the next one down was not bad. I dusted it off with my hand and sat on it. The overgrown weeds between here and the fence made it impossible for me to be seen from the alley, and the eaves sheltered me from the rain. I sat and whistled and watched the garden receiving its bounty of fine raindrops. At first I was unaware of what tune I was whistling, but then I realized it was the overture to Rossini’s Thieving Magpie, the same tune I had been whistling when the strange woman called as I was cooking spaghetti.

  Sitting here in the garden like this, with no other people around, looking at the grass and the stone bird, whistling a tune (badly), I had the feeling that I had returned to my childhood. I was in a secret place where no one could see me. This put me in a quiet mood. I felt like throwing a stone—a small stone would be OK—at some target. The stone bird would be a good one. I’d hit it just hard enough to make a little clunk. I used to play by myself a lot like that when I was a kid. I’d set up an empty can, back way off, and throw rocks until the can filled up. I could do it for hours. Just now, though, I didn’t have any rocks at my feet. Oh, well. No place has everything you need.

  I pulled up my feet, bent my knees, and rested my chin on my hand. Then I closed my eyes. Still no sounds. The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray—one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.

  Browsing through my book of gray color samples, I started whistling again, without a thought in my head.

  “Hey,” said someone.

  I snapped my eyes open. Leaning to the side, I stretched to see the gate above the weed tops. It was open. Wide open. Someone had followed me inside. My heart started pounding.

  “Hey,” the someone said again. A woman’s voice. She stepped out from behind the statue and started toward me. It was the girl who had been sunbathing in the yard across the alley. She wore the same light-blue Adidas T-shirt and short pants. Again she walked with a slight limp. The one thing different from before was that she had taken off her sunglasses.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Looking for the cat,” I said.

  “Are you sure? It doesn’t look that way to me. You’re just sitting there and whistling with your eyes closed. It’d be kinda hard to find much of anything that way, don’t you think?”

  I felt myself blushing.

  “It doesn’t bother me,” she went on, “but somebody who doesn’t know you might think you were some kind of pervert.” She paused. “You’re not a pervert, are you?”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  She approached me and undertook a careful study of the nested lawn chairs, choosing one without too much dirt on it and doing one more close inspection before setting it on the ground and lowering herself into it.

  “And your whistling’s terrible,” she said. “I don’t know the tune, but it had no melody at all. You’re not gay, are you?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “Why?”

  “Somebody told me gays are lousy whistlers. Is that true?”

  “Who knows? It’s probably nonsense.”

  “Anyway, I don’t care even if you are gay or a pervert or anything. By the way, what’s your name? I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Toru Okada,” I said.

  She repeated my name to herself several times. “Not much of a name, is it?” she said.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “I’ve always thought it sounded kind of like some prewar foreign minister: Toru Okada. See?”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me. I hate history. It’s my worst subject. Anyhow, never mind. Haven’t you got a nickname? Something easier than Toru Okada?”

  I couldn’t recall ever having had a nickname. Never once in my life. Why was that? “No nickname,” I said.

  “Nothing? ‘Bear’? Or ‘Frog’?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Gee,” she said. “Think of something.”

  “Wind-up bird,” I said.

  “Wind-up bird?” she asked, looking at me with her mouth open. “What is that?”

  “The bird that winds the spring,” I said. “Every morning. In the tree-tops. It winds the world’s spring. Creeeak.”

  She went on staring at me.

  I sighed. “It just popped into my head,” I said. “And there’s more. The bird comes over by my place every day and goes Creeeak in the neighbor’s tree. But nobody’s ever seen it.”

  “That’s neat, I guess. So anyhow, you’ll be Mr. Wind-Up Bird. That’s not very easy to say, either, but it’s way better than Toru Okada.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  She pulled her feet up into the chair and put her chin on her knees.

  “How about your name?” I asked.

  “May Kasahara. May … like the month of May.”

  “Were you born in May?”

  “Do you have to ask? Can you imagine the confusion if somebody born in June was named May?”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I suppose you’re still out of school?”

  “I was watching you for a long time,” she said, ignoring my question. “From my room. With my binoculars. I saw you go in through the gate. I keep a little pair of binoculars handy, for watching what goes on in the alley. All kinds of people go through there. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. And not just people. Animals too. What were you doing here by yourself all that time?”

  “Spacing out,” I said. “Thinking about the old days. Whistling.”

  May Kasahara bit a thumbnail. “You’re kinda weird,” she said.

  “I’m not weird. People do it all the time.”

  “Maybe so, but they don’t do it in a neighbor’s vacant house. You can stay in your own yard if all you want to do is space out and think about the old days and whistle.”

  She had a point there.

  “Anyhow, I guess Noboru Wataya never came home, huh?”

  I shook my head. “And I guess you never saw him, either, after that?” I asked.

  “No, and I was on the lookout for him, too: a brown-striped tiger cat. Tail slightly bent at the tip. Right?”

  From the pocket of her short pants she took a box of Hope regulars and lit up with a match. After a few puffs, she stared right at me and said, “Your hair’s thinning a little, isn’t it?”

  My hand moved automatically to the back of my head.

  “Not there, silly,” she said. “Your front hairline. It’s higher than it should be, don’t you think?”

  “I never really noticed.”

  “Well, I did,” she said. “That’s where you’re going to go bald. Your hairline’s going to move up and up like this.” She grabbed a handful of her own hair in the front and thrust her bare forehead in my face. “You’d better be careful.”

  I touched my hairline. Maybe she was right. Maybe it had receded somewhat. Or was it my imagination? Something new to worry about.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “How can I be careful?”

  “You can’t, I guess. There’s nothing you can do. There’s no way to prevent baldness. Guys who are going to go bald go bald. When their time comes, that’s it: they just go bald. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. They tell you you can keep from going bald with proper hair care, but that’s bullshit. Look at the bums who sleep in Shinjuku Station. They’ve all got great heads of hair. You think they’re washing it every day with Clinique or Vidal Sassoon or rubbing Lotion X into it? That’s what the cosmetics makers will tell you, to get your money.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said, impressed. “But how do you know so much about baldness?”

  “I’ve b
een working part time for a wig company. Quite a while now. You know I don’t go to school, and I’ve got all this time to kill. I’ve beer doing surveys and questionnaires, that kind of stuff. So I know all about men losing their hair. I’m just loaded with information.”

  “Gee,” I said.

  “But you know,” she said, dropping her cigarette butt on the ground and stepping on it, “in the company I work for, they won’t let you say anybody’s ‘bald.’ You have to say ‘men with a thinning problem.’ ‘Bald’ is discriminatory language. I was joking around once and suggested ‘gentlemen who are follically challenged,’ and boy, did they get mad! ‘This is no laughing matter, young lady,’ they said. They’re so damned seeerious. Did you know that? Everybody in the whole damned world is so damned serious.”

  I took out my lemon drops, popped one in my mouth, and offered one to May Kasahara. She shook her head and took out a cigarette.

  “Come to think of it, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said, “you were unemployed. Are you still?”

  “Sure am.”

  “Are you serious about working?”

  “Sure am.” No sooner had the words left my mouth than I began to wonder how true they were. “Actually, I’m not so sure,” I said. “I think I need time. Time to think. I’m not sure myself what I need. It’s hard to explain.”

  Chewing on a nail, May Kasahara looked at me for a while. “Tell you what, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said. “Why don’t you come to work with me one day? At the wig company. They don’t pay much, but the work’s easy, and you can set your own hours. What do you say? Don’t think about it too much, just do it. For a change of pace. It might help you figure out all kinds of things.”

  She had a point there. “You’ve got a point there,” I said.

  “Great!” she said. “Next time I go, I’ll come and get you. Now, where did you say your house is?”

  “Hmm, that’s a tough one. Or maybe not. You just keep going and going down the alley, taking all the turns. On the left you’ll see a house with a red Honda Civic parked in back. It’s got one of those bumper stickers ‘Let There Be Peace for All the Peoples of the World.’ Ours is the next house, but there’s no gate opening on the alley. It’s just a cinder-block wall, and you have to climb over it. It’s about chin height on me.”

  “Don’t worry. I can get over a wall that high, no problem.”

  “Your leg doesn’t hurt anymore?”

  She exhaled smoke with a little sighing kind of sound and said, “Don’t worry. It’s nothing. I limp when my parents are around because I don’t want to go to school. I’m faking. It just sort of turned into a habit. I do it even when nobody’s looking, when I’m in my room all by myself. I’m a perfectionist. What is it they say—‘Fool yourself to fool others’? But anyhow, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, tell me, have you got guts?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Never had ’em?”

  “No, I was never one for guts. Not likely to change, either.”

  “How about curiosity?”

  “Curiosity’s another matter. I’ve got some of that.”

  “Well, don’t you think guts and curiosity are kind of similar?” said May Kasahara. “Where there’s guts there’s curiosity, and where there’s curiosity there’s guts. No?”

  “Hmm, maybe they are kind of similar,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they do overlap at times.”

  “Times like when you sneak into somebody’s backyard, say.”

  “Yeah, like that,” I said, rolling a lemon drop on my tongue. “When you sneak into somebody’s backyard, it does seem that guts and curiosity are working together. Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own—with whatever guts you can muster.”

  She thought this over for a time. “I guess so,” she said. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.” She stood up and brushed off the dirt clinging to the seat of her short pants. Then she looked down at me. “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, would you like to see the well?”

  “The well?” I asked. The well?

  “There’s a dried-up well here. I like it. Kind of. Want to see it?”

  •

  We cut through the yard and walked around to the side of the house. It was a round well, maybe four and a half feet in diameter. Thick planking, cut to shape and size, had been used to cap the well, and two concrete blocks had been set on the round wooden cap to keep it in place. The well curb stood perhaps three feet high, and close by grew a single old tree, as if standing guard. It was a fruit tree, but I couldn’t tell what kind.

  Like most everything else connected with this house, the well looked as though it had been abandoned long before. Something about it felt as if it should be called “overwhelming numbness.” Maybe when people take their eyes off them, inanimate objects become even more inanimate.

  Close inspection revealed that the well was in fact far older than the objects that surrounded it. It had been made in another age, long before the house was built. Even the wooden cap was an antique. The well curb had been coated with a thick layer of concrete, almost certainly to strengthen a structure that had been built long before. The nearby tree seemed to boast of having stood there far longer than any other tree in the area.

  I lowered a concrete block to the ground and removed one of the two half-moons that constituted the wooden cap. Hands on the edge of the well, I leaned over and looked down, but I could not see to the bottom. It was obviously a deep well, its lower half swallowed in darkness. I took a sniff. It had a slightly moldy smell.

  “It doesn’t have any water,” said May Kasahara.

  A well without water. A bird that can’t fly. An alley with no exit. And—

  May picked up a chunk of brick from the ground and threw it into the well. A moment later came a small, dry thud. Nothing more. The sound was utterly dry, desiccated, as if you could crumble it in your hands. I straightened up and looked at May Kasahara. “I wonder why it hasn’t got any water. Did it dry up? Did somebody fill it in?”

  She shrugged. “When people fill in a well, don’t they fill it all the way to the top? There’d be no point in leaving a dry hole like this. Somebody could fall in and get hurt. Don’t you think?”

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “Something probably made the water dry up.”

  I suddenly recalled Mr. Honda’s words from long before. “When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom.” So now I had a well if I needed one.

  I leaned over the edge again and looked down into the darkness, anticipating nothing in particular. So, I thought, in a place like this, in the middle of the day like this, there existed a darkness as deep as this. I cleared my throat and swallowed. The sound echoed in the darkness, as if someone else had cleared his throat. My saliva still tasted like lemon drops.

  •

  I put the cover back on the well and set the block atop it. Then I looked at my watch. Almost eleven-thirty. Time to call Kumiko during her lunch break.

  “I’d better go home,” I said.

  May Kasahara gave a little frown. “Go right ahead, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said. “You fly on home.”

  When we crossed the yard, the stone bird was still glaring at the sky with its dry eyes. The sky itself was still filled with its unbroken covering of gray clouds, but at least the rain had stopped. May Kasahara tore off a fistful of grass and threw it toward the sky. With no wind to carry them, the blades of grass dropped to her feet.

  “Think of all the hours left between now and the time the sun goes down,” she said, without looking at me.

  “True,” I said. “Lots of hours.”

  On the Births of Kumiko Okada

  and Noboru Wataya

  •

  Rai
sed as an only child, I find it difficult to imagine how grown siblings must feel when they come in contact with each other in the course of leading their independent lives. In Kumiko’s case, whenever the topic of Noboru Wataya came up, she would get a strange look on her face, as if she had put some odd-tasting thing in her mouth by accident, but exactly what that look meant I had no way of knowing. In my own feelings toward her elder brother there was not a trace of anything positive. Kumiko knew this and thought it entirely reasonable. She herself was far from fond of the man. It was hard to imagine them ever speaking to each other had the blood relationship not existed between them. But in fact, they were brother and sister, which made things somewhat more complicated.

  After I had my argument with her father and ended all contact with her family, Kumiko had virtually no occasion to see Noboru Wataya. The argument had been a violent one. I haven’t had many arguments in the course of my life—I’m just not the type—but once I do get going, I go all the way. And so my break with Kumiko’s father had been complete. Afterward, when I had gotten everything off my chest that I needed to get off, anger was mysteriously absent. I felt only relief. I never had to see him again: it was as if a great burden that I had been carrying for a long time had been lifted from my shoulders. None of the rage or the hatred was left. I even felt a touch of sympathy for the difficulties he had faced in his life, however stupid and repulsive the shape of that life might appear to me. I told Kumiko that I would never see her parents again but she was free to visit them without me anytime she wanted. Kumiko made no attempt to see them. “Never mind,” she said. “I wasn’t all that crazy about visiting them anyway.”

  Noboru Wataya had been living with his parents at the time, but when the argument started between his father and me, he had simply withdrawn without a word to anyone. This hadn’t taken me by surprise. I was a person of no interest to him. He did his best to avoid personal contact with me unless it was absolutely necessary. And so, when I stopped seeing Kumiko’s parents, there was no longer any reason for me to see Noboru Wataya. Kumiko herself had no reason to make a point of seeing him. He was busy, she was busy, and they had never been that close to begin with.