The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Page 9

  Still, Kumiko would occasionally phone him at his campus office, and he would occasionally phone her at her company office (though never at our home). She would announce these contacts to me without going into detail about the substance of their conversations. I never asked, and she never volunteered the information unless it was necessary.

  I didn’t care to know what Kumiko and Noboru Wataya were talking about. Which is not to say that I resented the fact that they were talking. I just didn’t get it. What was there for two such different human beings to say to each other? Or was it only through the special filter of the blood relationship that this came about?

  •

  Though brother and sister, Noboru Wataya and Kumiko were separated in age by nine years. Another factor behind the lack of any perceptible closeness between the two was Kumiko’s having lived for several years with her father’s family.

  Kumiko and Noboru had not been the only children in the Wataya house. Between them there had been a sister, five years older than Kumiko. At the age of three, however, Kumiko had been sent from Tokyo to distant Niigata, to be raised for a time by her grandmother. Kumiko’s parents later told her that this was done because she had been a sickly child and they thought she would benefit from the clean air of the countryside, but she never quite believed this. As far as she herself could remember, she had never been physically weak. She had never suffered from any major illnesses, and no one in her Niigata home seemed overly concerned about her health. “I’m sure it was just some kind of excuse,” Kumiko once told me.

  Her doubts had been reinforced by something she heard from a relative. Apparently, there had been a long-standing feud between Kumiko’s mother and grandmother, and the decision to bring Kumiko to Niigata was the product of a truce they had concluded. By offering her up for a time, Kumiko’s parents had quelled her grandmother’s rage, and by having a grandchild in her possession, the grandmother had obtained concrete confirmation of her ties with her son (Kumiko’s father). In other words, Kumiko had been a kind of hostage.

  “Besides,” Kumiko said to me, “they already had two other children. Their third one was no great loss to them. Not that they were planning to get rid of me: I think they just figured it wouldn’t be too hard on such a young child to be sent away. They probably didn’t give it much thought. It was just the easiest solution to the problem. Can you believe it? I don’t know why, but they had absolutely no idea what something like that can do to a small child.”

  She was raised by her grandmother in Niigata from the age of three to six. Nor was there anything sad or twisted about the life she led in the country. Her grandmother was crazy about her, and Kumiko had more fun playing with her cousins, who were closer in age to herself, than with her own brother and sister. She was finally brought back to Tokyo the year she was to enter elementary school. Her parents had become nervous about the lengthening separation from their daughter, and they insisted on bringing her back before it was too late. In a sense, though, it was already too late. In the weeks following the decision to send her back, her grandmother became increasingly overwrought. She stopped eating and could hardly sleep. One minute she would be hugging and squeezing little Kumiko with all her might, and the next she would be slapping her arm with a ruler, hard enough to raise welts. One minute she would be saying she didn’t want to let her go, that she would rather die than lose her, and the next she would tell her to go away, that she never wanted to see her again. In the foulest language imaginable, she would tell Kumiko what a terrible woman her mother was. She even tried to stab herself in the wrist with a pair of scissors. Kumiko could not understand what was happening around her. The situation was simply too much for her to comprehend.

  What she did then was to shut herself off from the outer world. She closed her eyes. She closed her ears. She shut her mind down. She put an end to any form of thinking or of hoping. The next several months were a blank. She had no memory of anything that happened in that time. When she came out of it, she found herself in a new home. It was the home where she should have been all along. Her parents were there, her brother and her sister. But it was not her home. It was simply a new environment.

  Kumiko became a difficult, taciturn child in these new surroundings. There was no one she could trust, no one she could depend upon unconditionally. Even in her parents’ embrace, she never felt entirely at ease. She did not know their smell. It made her uneasy. She even hated it at times. In the family, it was only toward her sister that she began, with difficulty, to open up. Her parents despaired of ever breaking through to her; her brother hardly knew she existed. But her sister understood the confusion and loneliness that lay behind her stubborn moods. She stayed with Kumiko through it all, slept in the same room with her, talked with her, read to her, walked with her to school, helped her with her homework. If Kumiko spent hours huddled in the corner of her room in tears, the sister would be there, holding her. She did everything she could to find a way into Kumiko’s heart. Had she not died from food poisoning the year after Kumiko returned from Niigata, the situation would have been very different.

  “If my sister had lived, things might have been better at home,” Kumiko said. “She was just a little girl, a sixth grader, but she was the heart of that household. Maybe if she hadn’t died, all of us would have been more normal than we are now. At least I wouldn’t be such a hopeless case. Do you see what I mean? I felt so guilty after that. Why hadn’t I died in my sister’s place? I was no good for anybody. I couldn’t make anybody happy. Why couldn’t I have been the one? My parents and brother knew exactly how I felt, but they said nothing to comfort me. Far from it. They’d talk about my dead sister every chance they got: how pretty she was, how smart, how much everybody liked her, what a thoughtful person she was, how well she played the piano. And then they made me take piano lessons! Somebody had to use the big grand piano after she died. I didn’t have the slightest interest in playing. I knew I could never play as well as she had played, and I didn’t need yet another way to demonstrate how inferior I was to her as a human being. I couldn’t take anyone’s place, least of all hers, and I didn’t want to try. But they wouldn’t listen to me. They just wouldn’t listen. So to this day, I hate the sight of a piano. I hate seeing anyone play.”

  I felt tremendous anger toward her family when Kumiko told me this. For what they had done to her. For what they had failed to do for her. This was before we were married. We had known each other only a little over two months. It was a quiet Sunday morning, and we were in bed. She talked for a long time about her childhood, as if unraveling a tangled thread, pausing to assess the validity of each event as she brought it forth. It was the first time she told me so much about herself. I hardly knew anything about her family or her childhood until that morning. I knew that she was quiet, that she liked to draw, that she had long, beautiful hair, that she had two moles on her right shoulder blade. And that sleeping with me was her first sexual experience.

  She cried a little as she spoke. I could understand why she would need to cry. I held her and stroked her hair. “If she had lived, I’m sure you would have loved her,” said Kumiko. “Everybody loved her. It was love at first sight.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But you’re the one I happen to be in love with. It’s really very simple, you know. It’s just you and me. Your sister’s got nothing to do with it.”

  For a while, Kumiko lay there, thinking. Seven-thirty Sunday morning: a time when everything sounds soft and hollow. I listened to the pigeons shuffling across my apartment roof, to someone calling a dog in the distance. Kumiko stared at a single spot on the ceiling for the longest time.

  “Tell me,” she said at last, “do you like cats?”

  “Crazy about ’em,” I said. “Always had one when I was a kid. I played with it constantly, even slept with it.”

  “Lucky you. I was dying to have a cat. But they wouldn’t let me. My mother hated them. Not once in my life have I managed to get something I really wanted. Not
once. Can you believe it? You can’t understand what it’s like to live like that. When you get used to that kind of life—of never having anything you want—then you stop knowing what it is you want.”

  I took her hand. “Maybe it’s been like that for you till now. But you’re not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It’s simple. It’s your right … right?”

  Her eyes stayed locked on mine. “Mmm,” she said. “Right.” A few months later, Kumiko and I were talking about marriage.

  •

  If the childhood that Kumiko spent in that house was warped and difficult, Noboru Wataya’s boyhood there was strangely distorted in another sense. The parents were mad for their only son, but they didn’t merely shower him with affection; they demanded certain things of him as well. The father was convinced that the only way to live a full life in Japanese society was to earn the highest possible marks and to shove aside anyone and everyone standing in your path to the top. He believed this with absolute conviction.

  It was shortly after I had married his daughter that I heard these very words from the man himself. All men are not created equal, he said. That was just some righteous-sounding nonsense they taught you in school. Japan might have the political structure of a democratic nation, but it was at the same time a fiercely carnivorous society of class in which the weak were devoured by the strong, and unless you became one of the elite, there was no point in living in this country. You’d just be ground to dust in the millstones. You had to fight your way up every rung of the ladder. This kind of ambition was entirely healthy. If people lost that ambition, Japan would perish. In response to my father-in-law’s view, I offered no opinion. He was not looking for my opinion. He had merely been spouting his belief, a conviction that would remain unchanged for all eternity.

  Kumiko’s mother was the daughter of a high-ranking official. She had been raised in the finest Tokyo neighborhood, wanting for nothing, and she possessed neither the opinions nor the character to oppose her husband’s opinions. As far as I could see, she had no opinion at all about anything that was not set directly in front of her (and in fact, she was extremely nearsighted). Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband’s. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn’t have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of their own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people’s standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question “How do I look?” And so Mrs. Wataya became a narrow, high-strung woman whose only concerns were her husband’s place in the government and her son’s academic performance. Anything that failed to enter her narrow field of vision ceased to have meaning for her.

  And so the parents pounded their questionable philosophy and their warped view of the world into the head of the young Noboru Wataya. They egged him on, providing him with the best tutors their money could buy. When he took top honors, they rewarded their son by buying him anything he wanted. His childhood was one of extreme material luxury, but when he entered the most sensitive and vulnerable phase of life, he had no time for girlfriends, no chance to go wild with other boys. He had to pour all his energies into maintaining his position as number one. Whether Noboru Wataya was pleased to live that way or not I do not know. Kumiko did not know. Noboru Wataya was not the sort of person to reveal his feelings: not to her, not to his parents, not to anyone. He had no choice anyway. It seems to me that certain patterns of thought are so simple and one-sided that they become irresistible. In any case, Noboru Wataya graduated from his elite private preparatory school, majored in economics at the University of Tokyo, and graduated from this top institution with top grades.

  His father expected him to enter the government or a major corporation upon graduation from the university, but Noboru Wataya chose to remain in academe and become a scholar. He was no fool. He knew what he was best suited for: not the real world of group action but a world that called for the disciplined and systematic use of knowledge, that prized the individual skills of the intellect. He did two years of graduate study at Yale before returning to the graduate school at Tokyo. He followed his parents’ promptings shortly thereafter and agreed to an arranged marriage, but that lasted no more than two years. After his divorce, he returned to his parents’ home to live with them. By the time I first met him, Noboru Wataya was a fully developed oddity, a thoroughly disagreeable character.

  About two years after I married Kumiko, Noboru Wataya published a big, thick book. It was an economics study full of technical jargon, and I couldn’t understand a thing he was trying to say in it. Not one page made sense to me. I tried, but I couldn’t make any headway because I found the writing indecipherable. I couldn’t even tell whether this was because the contents were so difficult or the writing itself was bad. People in the field thought it was great, though. One reviewer declared that it was “an entirely new kind of economics written from an entirely new perspective,” but that was as much as I could understand of the review itself. Soon the mass media began to introduce him as a “hero for a new age.” Whole books appeared, interpreting his book. Two expressions he had coined, “sexual economics” and “excretory economics,” became the year’s buzzwords. Newspapers and magazines carried feature sections on him as one of the intellectuals of the new age. I couldn’t believe that anyone who wrote these articles understood what Noboru Wataya was saying in his book. I had my doubts they had even opened it. But such things were of no concern to them. Noboru Wataya was young and single and smart enough to write a book that nobody could understand.

  It made him famous. The magazines all came to him for critical pieces. He appeared on television to comment on political and economic questions. Soon he was a regular panel member on one of the political debate shows. Those who knew Noboru Wataya (including Kumiko and me) had never imagined him to be suited to such glamorous work. Everyone thought of him as the high-strung academic type interested in nothing but his field of specialization. Once he got a taste of the world of mass media, though, you could almost see him licking his chops. He was good. He didn’t mind having a camera pointed at him. If anything, he even seemed more relaxed in front of the cameras than in the real world. We watched his sudden transformation in amazement. The Noboru Wataya we saw on television wore expensive suits with perfectly matching ties, and eyeglass frames of fine tortoiseshell. His hair had been done in the latest style. He had obviously been worked on by a professional. I had never seen him exuding such luxury before. And even if he had been outfitted by the network, he wore the style with perfect ease, as if he had dressed that way all his life. Who was this man? I wondered, when I first saw him. Where was the real Noboru Wataya?

  In front of the cameras, he played the role of Man of Few Words. When asked for an opinion, he would state it simply, clearly, and precisely. Whenever the debate heated up and everyone else was shouting, he kept his cool. When challenged, he would hold back, let his opponent have his say, and then demolish the person’s argument with a single phrase. He had mastered the art of delivering the fatal blow with a purr and a smile. On the television screen, he looked far more intelligent and reliable than the real Noboru Wataya. I’m not sure how he accomplished this. He certainly wasn’t handsome. But he was tall and slim and had an air of good breeding. In the medium of television, Noboru Wataya had found the place where he belonged. The mass media welcomed him with open arms, and he welcomed them with equal enthusiasm.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t stand the sight of him—in print or on TV. He was a man of talent and ability, to be sure. I recognized that much. He knew how to knock his opponent down quickly and effectively with the fewest possible words. He had an animal instinct for sensing the direction of the wind. But if you paid close attention to what h
e was saying or what he had written, you knew that his words lacked consistency. They reflected no single worldview based on profound conviction. His was a world that he had fabricated by combining several one-dimensional systems of thought. He could rearrange the combination in an instant, as needed. These were ingenious—even artistic—intellectual permutations and combinations. But to me they amounted to nothing more than a game. If there was any consistency to his opinions, it was the consistent lack of consistency, and if he had a worldview, it was a view that proclaimed his lack of a worldview. But these very absences were what constituted his intellectual assets. Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things.

  He had nothing to protect, which meant that he could concentrate all his attention on pure acts of combat. He needed only to attack, to knock his enemy down. Noboru Wataya was an intellectual chameleon, changing his color in accordance with his opponent’s, ad-libbing his logic for maximum effectiveness, mobilizing all the rhetoric at his command. I had no idea how he had acquired these techniques, but he clearly had the knack of appealing directly to the feelings of the mass audience. He knew how to use the kind of logic that moved the great majority. Nor did it even have to be logic: it had only to appear so, as long as it aroused the feelings of the masses.

  Trotting out the technical jargon was another forte of his. No one knew what it meant, of course, but he was able to present it in such a way that you knew it was your fault if you didn’t get it. And he was always citing statistics. They were engraved in his brain, and they carried tremendous persuasive power, but if you stopped to think about it afterward, you realized that no one had questioned his sources or their reliability.

  These clever tactics of his used to drive me mad, but I was never able to explain to anyone exactly what upset me so. I was never able to construct an argument to refute him. It was like boxing with a ghost: your punches just swished through the air. There was nothing solid for them to hit. I was shocked to see even sophisticated intellectuals responding to him. It would leave me feeling strangely annoyed.