The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (20 page)

I wrote my reply at the kitchen table. I had hoped to keep the postcard short and simple, but once I had pen in hand, those few concise phrases were not forthcoming. “I was fortunate enough to have known the late Mr. Honda and benefited from our brief acquaintance. The news that he is no longer living brings back memories of those times. Our ages were very different, of course, and our association lasted but a single year, yet
I always used to feel that there was something about the deceased that moved people deeply. To be quite honest, I would never have imagined that Mr. Honda would name me specifically to be the recipient of a keepsake, nor am I certain that I am even qualified to receive anything from him, but if such was his wish, then I will certainly do so with all due respect. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.”

When I dropped the card into the nearest mailbox, I found myself murmuring old Mr. Honda’s verse: “Dying is the only way / For you to float free: / Nomonhan.”

•

It was close to ten before Kumiko came home from work. She had called before six to say that she would be late again today, that I should have dinner without her and she would grab something outside. Fine, I said, and ate a simple meal. Again I stayed home alone, reading a book. When she came in, Kumiko said she wanted a few sips of beer. We shared a midsize bottle. She looked tired. Elbows on the kitchen table, she rested her chin in her hands and said little when I spoke to her. She seemed preoccupied. I told her that Mr. Honda had died. “Oh, really?” she said, with a sigh. “Oh, well, he was getting on in years, and he was almost deaf.” When I said that he had left a keepsake for me, though, she was shocked, as if something had suddenly fallen out of the sky.

“For you?!” she exclaimed, her eyebrows twisting into a frown.

“Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?”

“He must have liked you.”

“How could that be? I never really talked to the guy,” I said. “At least
I
never said much. And even if I did, he couldn’t hear anything. We used to sit and listen to his stories once a month. And all we ever heard from him was the Battle of Nomonhan: how they threw Molotov cocktails, and which tank burned, and which tank didn’t burn, that kind of stuff.”

“Don’t ask me,” said Kumiko. “He must have liked something about you. I don’t understand people like that, what’s in their minds.”

After that, she went silent again. It was a strained silence. I glanced at the calendar on the wall. Her period was not due yet. I imagined that something unpleasant might have happened at the office.

“Working too hard?” I asked.

“A little,” Kumiko said, after taking a sip of beer and staring at what was left in her glass. There was an almost defiant tone in her voice. “Sorry I was so late, but you know how it is with magazine work when we get busy. And it’s not as if I do this all the time. I get them to give me less overtime than most. They know I have a husband to go home to.”

I nodded. “I’m not blaming you,” I said. “I know you have to work late sometimes. I was just worried you’re letting yourself get tired out.”

She took a long shower. I drank my beer and flipped through a weekly magazine that she had brought home.

I shoved my hand in my pants pocket and found the pay there from my recent little part-time job. I hadn’t even taken the cash from the envelope. Another thing I hadn’t done was tell Kumiko about the job. Not that I had been hiding it from her, but I had let the opportunity to mention it slip by and there had never been another one. As time passed, I found it harder to bring up the subject, for some strange reason. All I would have had to say was, “I met this odd sixteen-year-old girl from down the street and took a job with her doing a survey for a wig maker. The pay was pretty good too.” And Kumiko could have said, “Oh, really? Isn’t that nice,” and that might have been the end of it. Or not. She might have wanted to know more about May Kasahara. She might have been bothered that I was making friends with a sixteen-year-old girl. Then I would have had to tell her about May Kasahara and explain in detail where, when, and how we happened to meet. But I’m not very good at giving people orderly explanations of things.

I took the money from the envelope and put it in my wallet. The envelope itself I crumpled and threw in the wastebasket. So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not consciously intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flowed down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original “intention” may have been. The same thing had happened with Creta Kano. I had told Kumiko that Malta Kano’s younger sister had come to the house, that her name was Creta, that she dressed in early-sixties style, that she took samples of our tap water. But I had remained silent on the fact that she had afterward begun to make startling revelations to me and had vanished without a word before reaching the end. Creta Kano’s story had been too far-out: I could never have re-created the nuances and conveyed them to Kumiko, and so I had not tried. Or then again, Kumiko might have been less than pleased that Creta Kano had stayed here long after her business was through and made all kinds of troubling personal confessions to me. And so that became another one of my little secrets.

Maybe Kumiko had the same kind of secrets that she was keeping from me. With my own fund of secrets, I was in no position to blame her
if she did, of course. Between the two of us, I was surely the more secretive. She tended to say what she was thinking. She was the type of person who thought things out while speaking. I was not like that.

Uneasy with these ruminations, I walked toward the bathroom. The door was wide open. I stood in the doorway and looked at Kumiko from behind. She had changed into solid-blue pajamas and was standing in front of the mirror, drying her hair with a towel.

“About a job for me,” I said. “I
have
been thinking about it. I’ve asked friends to be on the lookout, and I’ve tried a few places myself. There
are
jobs out there, so I can work anytime I decide to work. I can start tomorrow if I make up my mind to it. It’s making up my mind that’s hard. I’m just not sure. I’m not sure if it’s OK for me to pick a job out of a hat like that.”

“That’s why I keep telling you to do what you want,” she said, while looking at herself in the mirror. “You don’t
have
to find a job right away. If you’re worried about the economics of it, you don’t have to worry. If it makes you uneasy not to have a job, if it’s a burden to you to have me be the only one working outside the house while you stay home and take care of the housework, then take some job—any job—for a while. I don’t care.”

“Of course, I’ll have to find a job eventually.
I
know that.
You
know that. I can’t go on hanging around like this forever. And I
will
find a job sooner or later. It’s just that right now, I don’t know what kind of a job I should take. For a while after I quit, I just figured I’d take some other law-related job. I do have connections in the field. But now I can’t get myself into that mood. The more time that goes by, the less interest I have in law. I feel more and more that it’s simply not the work for me.”

Kumiko looked at me in the mirror. I went on:

“But knowing what I
don’t
want to do doesn’t help me figure out what I
do
want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don’t have an image of the
one thing
I really want to do. That’s my problem now. I can’t find the image.”

“So, then,” she said, putting her towel down and turning to face me, “if you’re tired of law, don’t do it anymore. Just forget about the bar exam. Don’t get all worked up about finding a job. If you can’t find the image, wait until it forms by itself. What’s wrong with that?”

I nodded. “I just wanted to make sure I had explained to you exactly how I felt.”

“Good,” she said.

I went to the kitchen and washed my glass. She came in from the bathroom and sat at the kitchen table.

“Guess who called me this afternoon,” she said. “My brother.”

“Oh?”

“He’s thinking of running for office. In fact, he’s just about decided to do it.”

“Running for office?!” This came as such a shock to me, I could hardly speak for a moment. “You mean … for the Diet?”

“That’s right. They’re asking him to run for my uncle’s seat in Niigata.”

“I thought it was all set for your uncle’s son to succeed him. He was going to resign his directorship at Dentsu or something and go back to Niigata.”

She started cleaning her ears with a cotton swab. “That was the plan, but my cousin doesn’t want to do it. He’s got his family in Tokyo, and he enjoys his work. He’s not ready to give up such an important post with the world’s largest advertising firm and move back to the wilds of Niigata just to become a Diet member. The main opposition is from his wife. She doesn’t want him sacrificing the family to run for office.”

The elder brother of Kumiko’s father had spent four or five terms in the Lower House, representing that electoral district in Niigata. While not exactly a heavyweight, he had compiled a fairly impressive record, rising at one point to a minor cabinet post. Now, however, advanced age and heart disease would make it impossible for him to enter the next election, which meant that someone would have to succeed to his constituency. This uncle had two sons, but the elder had never intended to go into politics, and so the younger was the obvious choice.

“Now the people in the district are dying to have my brother run. They want somebody young and smart and energetic. Somebody who can serve for several terms, with the talent to become a major power in the central government. My brother has the name recognition, he’ll attract the young vote: he’s perfect. True, he can’t schmooze with the locals, but the support organization is strong, and they’ll take care of that. Plus, if he wants to go on living in Tokyo, that’s no problem. All he has to do is show up for the election.”

I had trouble picturing Noboru Wataya as a Diet member. “What do you think of all this?” I asked.

“He’s got nothing to do with me. He can become a Diet member or an astronaut, for all I care.”

“But why did he make a point of coming to you for advice?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, with a dry voice. “He wasn’t asking my advice. You know he’d never do that. He was just keeping me informed. As a member of the family.”

“I see,” I said. “Still, if he’s going to run for the Diet, won’t it be a problem that he’s divorced and single?”

“I wonder,” said Kumiko. “I don’t know anything about politics or elections or anything. They just don’t interest me. But anyway, I’m pretty sure he’ll never get married again. To anybody. He should never have gotten married in the first place. That’s not what he wants out of life. He’s after something else, something completely different from what you or I want. I know that for sure.”

“Oh, really?”

Kumiko wrapped two used cotton swabs in a tissue and threw them in the wastebasket. Then she raised her face and looked straight at me. “I once saw him masturbating. I opened a door, and there he was.”

“So what? Everybody masturbates,” I said.

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. Then she sighed. “It happened maybe two years after my sister died. He was probably in college, and I was something like a third grader. My mother had wavered between getting rid of my sister’s things and putting them away, and in the end she decided to keep them, thinking I might wear them when I got older. She had put them in a carton in a closet. My brother had taken them out and was smelling them and doing it.”

I kept silent.

“I was just a little girl then. I didn’t know anything about sex. I really didn’t know what he was doing, but I could tell that it was something twisted, something I wasn’t supposed to see, something much deeper than it appeared on the surface.” Kumiko shook her head.

“Does Noboru Wataya know you saw him?”

“Of course. We looked right into each other’s eyes.”

I nodded. “And how about your sister’s clothes?” I asked. “Did you wear them when you got bigger?”

“No way,” she said.

“So you think he was in love with your sister?”

“I wonder,” said Kumiko. “I’m not even sure he had a sexual interest in her, but he certainly had
something
, and I suspect he’s never been able to get away from that something. That’s what I mean when I say he should never have gotten married in the first place.”

Kumiko fell silent. For a long time, neither of us said anything. Then she spoke first. “In that sense, I think he may have some serious psychological problems. Of course, we all have psychological problems to some extent, but his are a lot worse than whatever you or I might have. They’re a lot deeper and more persistent. And he has no intention of letting these scars or weaknesses or whatever they are be seen by anybody else. Ever. Do you understand what I’m saying? This election coming up: it worries me.”

“Worries you? How’s that?”

“I don’t know. It just does,” she said. “Anyhow, I’m tired. I can’t think anymore today. Let’s go to bed.”

Brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I studied my face in the mirror. For over two months now, since quitting my job, I had rarely entered the “outside world.” I had been moving back and forth between the neighborhood shops, the ward pool, and this house. Aside from the Ginza and that hotel in Shinagawa, the farthest point I had traveled from home was the cleaner’s by the station. And in all that time, I had hardly seen anyone. Aside from Kumiko, the only people I could be said to have “seen” in two months were Malta and Creta Kano and May Kasahara. It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descended more deeply into chaos.