The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

  “In college, I found a boyfriend, and in the summer of my freshman year I lost my virginity. Even this—as I could have predicted—gave me only pain. An experienced girlfriend of mine assured me that it would stop hurting when I got used to it, but it never did. Whenever I slept with him, the pain would bring tears to my eyes. One day I told my boyfriend that I didn’t want to have sex anymore. I told him, ‘I love you, but I never want to experience this pain again.’ He said he had never heard anything so ridiculous. ‘You’ve got an emotional problem,’ he said. ‘Just relax and it’ll stop hurting. It’ll even feel good. Everybody else does it, so you can too. You’re just not trying hard enough. You’re babying yourself. You’re using this “pain” thing to cover up your problems. Stop complaining; it won’t do you any good.’

  “When I heard this, after all I had endured over the years, I exploded. ‘What do you know about pain?’ I shouted at him. ‘The pain I feel is no ordinary pain. I know what pain is like. I’ve had them all. When I say something hurts, it really hurts!’ I tried to explain by listing every single pain I had ever experienced, but he didn’t understand a thing. It’s impossible to understand real pain unless you’ve experienced it yourself. So that was the end of our relationship.

  “My twentieth birthday came soon after that. For twenty long years I had endured the pain, hoping there would be some bright turning point, but it had never happened. I felt utterly defeated. I wished I had died sooner. My long detour had only stretched out the pain.”

  At this point, Creta Kano took a single deep breath. On the table in front of her sat the dish with eggshells and her empty coffee cup. On her lap lay the handkerchief that she had folded with such care. As if recalling the time, she glanced at the clock on the shelf. “I’m very sorry,” she said in a dry little voice. “I hadn’t intended to talk so long. I’ve taken far too much of your time as it is. I won’t impose on you any longer. I don’t know how to apologize for having bored you at such length.”

  She grasped the strap of her white patent-leather bag and stood up from the sofa.

  This took me off guard. “Just a minute, please,” I said, flustered. I didn’t want her to end her story in the middle. “If you’re worried about taking my time, then don’t worry. I’m free all afternoon. As long as you’ve told me this much, why not go to the end? There’s more to your story, I’m sure.”

  “Of course there is,” she said, looking down at me, both hands in a tight grip on the strap of her bag. “What I’ve told you so far is more like an introduction.”

  I asked her to wait a moment and went to the kitchen. Standing in front of the sink, I gave myself time for two deep breaths. Then I took two glasses from the cabinet, put ice in them, and filled them with orange juice from the refrigerator. Placing the glasses on a small tray, I brought them into the living room. I had gone through these motions with deliberate slowness, but I found her standing as I had left her. When I set the glasses of juice on the table, though, she seemed to have second thoughts. She settled onto the sofa again and placed her bag at her side.

  “You want me to tell my story to the very end?” she asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” I said.

  She drank half her orange juice and went on with her story.

  “I failed to kill myself, of course. If I had succeeded, I wouldn’t be here now, drinking orange juice with you, Mr. Okada.” She looked into my eyes, and I gave her a little smile of agreement. “If I had died according to plan, it would have been the final solution for me. Dying would have meant the end of consciousness, and I would never have had to feel pain again. Which is exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, however, I chose the wrong method to die.

  “At nine o’clock on the night of May twenty-ninth, I went to my brother’s room and asked to borrow his car. It was a shiny new Toyota MR2, and the thought of letting me take it made him look very unhappy. But I didn’t care. He couldn’t refuse, because I had lent him money to help him buy it. I took the key and drove it for half an hour. The car still had barely a thousand miles on it. A touch of the gas pedal could make it fly. It was the perfect car for my purposes. I drove as far as the Tama River on the outskirts of the city, and there I found a massive stone wall of the kind I had in mind. It was the outer wall of a big condominium building, and it stood at the far end of a dead-end street. I gave myself plenty of room to accelerate, and then I pressed the accelerator to the floor. I must have been doing close to a hundred miles an hour when I slammed into the wall and lost consciousness.

  “Unfortunately for me, however, the wall turned out to be far less solid than it had appeared. To save money, they had not anchored it properly. The wall simply crumbled, and the front end of the car was crushed flat. That’s all that happened. Because it was so soft, the wall absorbed the impact. As if that weren’t bad enough, in my confusion I had forgotten to undo my seat belt.

  “And so I escaped death. I was hardly even injured. And strangest of all, I felt almost no pain. It was the weirdest thing. They took me to the hospital and patched up my one broken rib. The police came to investigate, but I told them I didn’t remember a thing. I said I had probably mixed up the gas and the brake. And they believed me. I had just turned twenty, and it had been only six months since I got my license. Besides, I just didn’t look like the suicidal type. Who would try to kill herself with her seat belt fastened?

  “Once I was out of the hospital, I had several difficult problems to face. First I had to pay off the outstanding loan on the MR2 that I had turned into scrap metal. Through some error with the insurance company, the car had not been covered.

  “Now that it was too late, I realized that to do myself in, I should have rented a car with the proper insurance. At the time, of course, insurance was the last thing on my mind. It never occurred to me that my brother’s car wouldn’t have enough insurance on it or that I would fail to kill myself. I ran into a stone wall at a hundred miles an hour: it was amazing that I survived.

  “A short time later, I received a bill from the condominium association for repair of the wall. They were demanding 1,364,294 yen from me. Immediately. In cash. All I could do was borrow it from my father. He was willing to give it to me in the form of a loan, but he insisted that I pay him back. My father was very proper when it came to matters of money. He said it was my responsibility for having caused the accident, and he expected me to pay him back in full and on schedule. In fact, at the time, he had very little money to spare. He was in the process of expanding his clinic and was having trouble raising the money for the project.

  “I thought again about killing myself. This time I would do a proper job. I would jump from the fifteenth floor of the university administration building. There would be no slip-ups that way. I would die for sure. I made several trial runs. I picked the best window for the job. I was on the verge of jumping.

  “But something held me back. There was something wrong, something nagging at me. At the last second, that ‘something’ almost literally pulled me back from the edge. A good deal of time went by, though, before I realized what that ‘something’ was.

  “I didn’t have any pain.

  “I had felt hardly any pain since the accident. What with one thing coming up after another, I hadn’t had a moment to notice, but pain had disappeared from my body. My bowel movements were normal. My menstrual cramps were gone. No more headaches or stomachaches. Even my broken rib caused me hardly any pain. I had no idea why such a thing had happened. But suddenly I was free of pain.

  “I decided to go on living for the time being. If only for a little while, I wanted to find out what it meant to live life without pain. I could die whenever I wanted to.

  “But to go on living meant for me to pay back my debt. Altogether, I owed more than three million yen. In order to pay it back, I became a prostitute.”

  “A prostitute?!”

  “That’s right,” said Creta Kano, as if it were nothing at all. “I needed money over the short term
. I wanted to pay off my debts as quickly as possible, and that was the only way I knew of to raise the money. I didn’t have the slightest hesitation. I had seriously intended to die. And I still intended to die, sooner or later. The curiosity I felt about a life without pain was keeping me alive, but strictly on a temporary basis. And compared with death, it would be nothing at all for me to sell my body.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said.

  The ice in her orange juice had melted, and Creta Kano stirred it with her straw before taking a sip.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I asked.

  “No, not at all. Please.”

  “Didn’t you consult with your sister about this?”

  “She was practicing her austerities on Malta at the time. As long as that went on, she refused to send me her address. She didn’t want me to disrupt her concentration. It was virtually impossible for me to write to her during the entire three years she lived on Malta.”

  “I see,” I said. “Would you like some more coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” said Creta Kano.

  I went to the kitchen and warmed the coffee. While I waited, I stared at the exhaust fan and took several deep breaths. When it was ready, I poured the coffee into fresh cups and brought it to the living room on a tray, together with a plate of chocolate cookies. We ate and drank for a while.

  “How long ago did you try to kill yourself?” I asked.

  “I was twenty at the time. That was six years ago, in May of 1978.”

  May of 1978 was the month that Kumiko and I had married. So, then, the very month we were married, Creta Kano had tried to kill herself and Malta Kano was practicing her austerities in Malta.

  “I went to a neighborhood that had lots of bars, approached the first likely-looking man I saw, negotiated a price, went to a hotel, and slept with him,” said Creta Kano. “Sex no longer gave me any physical pain at all. Nor any pleasure, either. It was just a physical movement. Neither did I feel guilt at doing sex for money. I was enveloped in numbness, an absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.

  “I made very good money this way—close to a million yen in the first month alone. At that rate, I could easily repay what I owed in three or four months. I would come home from campus, go out in the evening, and get home from work by ten at the latest. I told my parents I was waiting on tables, and no one suspected the truth. Of course, they would have thought it strange if I returned so much money all at once, so I decided to give my father 100,000 yen a month and save the rest.

  “But then one night, when I was propositioning men by the station, two men grabbed me from behind. At first I thought it was the police, but then I realized that they were gangsters. They dragged me into a back street, showed me some kind of knife, and took me to their local headquarters. They shoved me into a back room, stripped my clothes off, strung me up by the wrists, and proceeded to rape me over and over in front of a video camera. I kept my eyes closed the entire time and tried not to think. Which was not difficult for me, because I felt neither pain nor pleasure.

  “Afterward, they showed me the video and told me that if I didn’t want anyone to see it, I should join their organization and work for them. They took my student ID from my purse. If I refused to do what they wanted, they said, they would send a copy of the tape to my parents and blackmail them for all the money they were worth. I had no choice. I told them I would do as they said, that it didn’t matter to me. And it really didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to me then. They pointed out that my income would go down if I joined their organization, because they would take seventy percent, but that I would no longer have to go to the trouble of finding customers by myself or worry about the police. They would send me high-quality customers. If I went on propositioning men indiscriminately, I would end up strangled to death in some hotel room.

  “After that, I didn’t have to stand on street corners anymore. All I had to do was show up at their office in the evening, and they would tell me which hotel to go to. They sent me good customers, as they had promised. I’m not sure why, but I received special treatment. Maybe it was because I looked so innocent. I had an air of breeding about me that the other girls lacked. There were probably a lot of customers who wanted this not-so-professional type. The other girls had three or more customers a day, but I could get away with seeing only one or, at most, two. The other girls carried beepers with them and had to hurry to some run-down hotel when the office called them to sleep with men of uncertain background. In my case, though, I always had a proper appointment in a proper first-class hotel—or sometimes even a condo. My customers were usually older men, rarely young ones.

  “The office paid me once a week—not as much as I used to make on my own, but not a bad amount including individual tips from customers. Some customers wanted me to do some pretty weird things for them, of course, but I didn’t mind. The weirder the request, the bigger the tip. A few of the men started asking for me on a regular basis. These tended to be good tippers. I saved my money in several different accounts. But actually, by then, the money didn’t matter to me. It was just rows of figures. I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

  “I would wake up in the morning and lie there, checking to see that my body was not sensing anything that could be called pain. I would open my eyes, slowly collect my thoughts, and then, one part at a time, check the feeling I had in my body from head to foot. I had no pain at all. Did this mean that there was nothing hurting me or that, even though there was pain, I was not feeling it? I couldn’t tell the difference. Either way, it didn’t hurt. In fact, I had no sensations at all. After this procedure, I would get out of bed, go to the bathroom, and brush my teeth. Then I would strip off my pajamas and take a hot shower. There was a terrible lightness to my body. It was so light and airy, it didn’t feel like my body. I felt as if my spirit had taken up residence inside a body that was not my own. I looked at it in the mirror, but between myself and the body I saw there, I felt a long, terrible distance.

  “A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn’t find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to the world—this world that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world had ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me.

  “I began to cry a lot. In the afternoons I would go to a park—the Shinjuku Imperial Gardens or Yoyogi Park—to sit on the grass and cry. Sometimes I would cry for an hour or two at a time, sobbing out loud. Passersby would stare at me, but I didn’t care. I wished that I had died that time, that I had ended my life on the night of May twenty-ninth. How much better off I would be! But now I could not even die. In my numbness, I lacked the strength to kill myself. I felt nothing: no pain, no joy. All feeling was gone. And I was not even me.”

  Creta Kano took a deep breath and held it. Then she picked up her coffee cup, stared into it for a while, gave her head a little shake, and put the cup back on the saucer.

  “It was around that time that I met Noboru Wataya.”

  “Noboru Wataya?! As a customer?!”

  Creta Kano nodded in silence.

  “But—” I began, then stopped to consider my words for a time. “I’m having a little trouble with this. Your sister told me the other day that Noboru Wataya raped you. Was that something separate from what you’re telling me now?”

  Creta Kano took the handkerchief from her lap and dabbed at her mouth again. Then she looked directly at me. Something about her eyes stirred my heart in a way I found unsettling.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I wonder if I might have another cup of coffee.”

  “Of course,” I said. I transferred her cup from the table to the tray and carried it into the kitchen. Waiting for the cof
fee to boil, I leaned against the drainboard, with my hands thrust in my pockets. When I carried the coffee back into the living room, Creta Kano had vanished from the sofa. Her bag, her handkerchief, every visible sign of her, was gone. I went to the front entrance, from which her shoes were gone as well.

  Terrific.

  Culverts and an Absolute

  Insufficiency of Electricity

  •

  May Kasahara’s Inquiry into

  the Nature of Hairpieces

  After seeing Kumiko off the next morning, I went to the ward pool for a swim. Mornings were best, to avoid the crowds. Back home again, I brewed myself some coffee and sat drinking it in the kitchen, going over Creta Kano’s weird, unfinished story, trying to recall each event of her life in chronological order. The more I recalled, the weirder the story seemed, but soon the revolutions of my brain slowed down and I began to drift into sleep. I went to the living room, lay down on the sofa, and closed my eyes. In a moment, I was asleep and dreaming.

  I dreamed about Creta Kano. Before she appeared, though, I dreamed about Malta Kano. She was wearing a Tyrolean hat with a big, brightly colored feather. The place was crowded (it was some kind of large hall), but Malta Kano’s hat caught my attention immediately. She was sitting alone at the bar. She had a big tropical drink kind of thing in front of her, but I couldn’t tell whether she was actually drinking it.