The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (47 page)

The best thing I could do for now was to wait and see. I could always go to a doctor afterward. It might be a temporary condition, something that would heal itself, like a lacquer eruption. It had formed in a few short days, so it might disappear just as easily. I went to the kitchen and made myself some coffee. I was hungry, but whenever I actually tried to eat anything, my appetite would vanish like water in a mirage.

I stretched out on the sofa and watched the rain that had begun to fall. Every now and then I would go to the bathroom and look in the mirror, but I could see no change in the mark. It had dyed that area of my cheek a deep, dark—almost handsome—blue.

I could think of only one thing that might have caused this, and that was my having passed through the wall in my predawn dreamlike illusion in the well, the telephone woman leading me by the hand. She had pulled me through the wall so that we could escape from the dangerous
someone
who had opened the door and was coming into the room. The moment I passed through the wall, I had had the clear sensation of heat on my cheek—in the exact spot where I now had this mark. Of course, whatever causal connection there might be between my passing through the wall and the forming of a mark on my face remained unexplained.

The man without a face had spoken to me in the hotel lobby. “This is the wrong time,” he had warned me. “You don’t belong here now.” But I had ignored his warning and continued on. I was angry at Noboru
Wataya, angry at my own confusion. And as a result, perhaps, I had received this mark.

Perhaps the mark was a brand that had been impressed on me by that strange dream or illusion or whatever it was.
That was no dream
, they were telling me through the mark:
It really happened. And every time you look in the mirror now, you will be forced to remember it
.

I shook my head. Too many things were being left unexplained. The one thing I understood for sure was that I didn’t understand a thing. A dull throbbing started in my head. I couldn’t think anymore. I felt no urge to do anything. I took a sip of lukewarm coffee and went on watching the rain.

•

After noon, I called my uncle for some small talk. I needed to talk to someone—it didn’t matter much who—to do something about this feeling I had that I was being ripped away from the world of reality.

When he asked how Kumiko was doing, I said fine and let it go at that. She was on a short business trip at the moment, I added. I could have told him honestly what had been happening, but to put the recent events into some kind of order that would make sense to a third party would have been impossible. They didn’t make much sense to me, so how could I explain them to someone else? I decided to keep the truth from my uncle for the time being.

“You used to live in this house, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Sure did,” he said. “Six or seven years altogether. Wait a minute … I bought the place when I was thirty-five and lived there till I was forty-two. Seven years. Moved into this condo when I got married. I lived there alone that whole time.”

“I was just wondering, did anything bad happen to you while you were here?”

“Anything bad? Like what?”

“Like you got sick or you split up with a woman or something.”

My uncle gave a hearty laugh on his end of the line. “I split up with more than one woman, that’s for sure. But not just while I was living there. Nah, I couldn’t count that as something especially bad. Nobody I hated to lose, tell you the truth. As far as getting sick goes … hmm. No, I don’t think so. I had a little growth removed from the back of my neck, but that’s about all I remember. The barber found it, said I ought to have it removed just to be safe. So I went to the doctor, but it turned out to be nothing much. That was the first time I went to see the doctor while I was
living in that house—and the last. I ought to get a rebate on my health insurance!”

“No bad memories you associate with the place, then?”

“Nope, none,” said my uncle, after he had thought about it for a moment. “But what’s this about, all of a sudden?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “Kumiko saw a fortune-teller the other day and came home with an earful about this house—that it’s unlucky, things like that,” I lied. “I think it’s nonsense, but I promised to ask you about it.”

“Hmm. What do they call it? ‘House physiognomy’? I don’t know anything about that stuff. You couldn’t tell by me. But I’ve lived in the place, and my impression is that it’s OK, it doesn’t have any problems. Miyawaki’s place is another matter, of course, but you’re pretty far away from there.”

“What kind of people lived here after you moved out?” I asked.

“Let’s see: after me a high school teacher and his family lived there for three years, and then a young couple for five years. He ran some kind of business, but I don’t remember what it was. I can’t swear that everybody lived a happy life in that house: I had a real estate agent managing the place for me. I never met the people, and I don’t know why they moved out, but I never heard about anything bad that happened to any of them. I just assumed the place got a little small for them and they wanted to build their own houses, that kind of thing.”

“Somebody once told me that the flow of this place has been obstructed. Does that ring a bell?”

“The flow has been obstructed?”

“I don’t know what it means, either,” I said. “It’s just what they told me.”

My uncle thought it over for a while. “No, nothing comes to mind. But it might have been a bad idea to fence off both ends of the alley. A road without an entrance or exit is a strange thing, when you stop to think about it. The fundamental principle of things like roads and rivers is for them to flow. Block them and they stagnate.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Now, there’s one more thing I need to ask you. Did you ever hear the cry of the wind-up bird in this neighborhood?”

“The wind-up bird,” said my uncle. “What’s that?”

I explained simply about the wind-up bird, how it came to the tree out back once a day and made that spring-winding cry.

“That’s news to me,” he said. “I’ve never seen or heard one. I like
birds, and I’ve always made a point of listening to their cries, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of such a thing. You mean it has something to do with the house?”

“No, not really. I was just wondering if you’d ever heard of it.”

“You know, if you really want the lowdown on things like this—the people who lived there after me and that kind of stuff—you ought to talk to old Mr. Ichikawa, the real estate agent across from the station. That’s Setagaya Dai-ichi Realtors. Tell him I sent you. He handled that house for me for years. He’s been living in the neighborhood forever, and he just might tell you everything you’d ever want to know. He’s the one who told me about the Miyawaki house. He’s one of those old guys that love to talk. You ought to go see him.”

“Thanks. I will,” I said.

“So anyway, how’s the job hunt going?”

“Nothing yet. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been looking very hard. Kumiko’s working, and I’m taking care of the house, and we’re managing for now.”

My uncle seemed to be thinking about something for a few moments. Then he said, “Let me know if it ever gets to the point where you just can’t make it. I might be able to give you a hand.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will.” And so our conversation ended.

I thought about calling the old real estate broker and asking him about the background of this house and about the people who had lived here before me, but it seemed ridiculous even to be thinking about such nonsense. I decided to forget it.

The rain kept falling at the same gentle rate into the afternoon, wetting the roofs of the houses, wetting the trees in the yards, wetting the earth. I had toast and soup for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon on the sofa. I wanted to do some shopping, but the thought of the mark on my face made me hesitate. I was sorry I hadn’t let my beard grow. I still had some vegetables in the refrigerator, and there was canned stuff in the cupboard. I had rice and I had eggs. I could feed myself for another two or three days if I kept my expectations low.

Lying on the sofa, I did no thinking at all. I read a book, I listened to a classical music tape, I stared out at the rain falling in the garden. My cogitative powers seemed to have reached an all-time low, thanks perhaps to that long period of all-too-concentrated thinking in the dark well bottom. If I tried to think seriously about anything, I felt a dull ache in my head, as if it were being squeezed in the jaws of a padded vise. If I
tried to recall anything, every muscle and nerve in my body seemed to creak with the effort. I felt I had turned into the tin man from
The Wizard of Oz
, my joints rusted and in need of oil.

Every now and then I would go to the lavatory and examine the condition of the mark on my face, but it remained unchanged. It neither spread nor shrank. The intensity of its color neither increased nor decreased. At one point, I noticed that I had left some hair unshaved on my upper lip. In my confusion at discovering the mark on my right cheek, I had forgotten to finish shaving. I washed my face again, spread on shaving cream, and took off what was left.

In the course of my occasional trips to the mirror, I thought of what Malta Kano had said on the phone: that I should be careful; that through experience, we come to
believe
that the image in the mirror is correct. To make certain, I went to the bedroom and looked at my face in the full-length mirror that Kumiko used whenever she got dressed. But the mark was still there. It was not just something in the other mirror.

I felt no physical abnormality aside from the mark. I took my temperature, but it was the same as always. Other than the fact that I felt little hunger, for someone who had not eaten in almost three days, and that I experienced a slight nausea every now and then (which was probably a continuation of what I had felt in the bottom of the well), my body was entirely normal.

The afternoon was a quiet one. The phone never rang. No letters arrived. No one came down the alley. No voices of neighbors disturbed the stillness. No cats crossed the garden, no birds came and called. Now and then a cicada would cry, but not with the usual intensity.

I began to feel some hunger just before seven o’clock, so I fixed myself a dinner of canned food and vegetables. I listened to the evening news on the radio for the first time in ages, but nothing special had been happening in the world. Some teenagers had been killed in an accident on the expressway when the driver of their car had failed in his attempt to pass another car and crashed into a wall. The branch manager and staff of a major bank were under police investigation in connection with an illegal loan they had made. A thirty-six-year-old housewife from Machida had been beaten to death with a hammer by a young man on the street. But these were all events from some other, distant world. The only thing happening in my world was the rain falling in the yard. Soundlessly. Gently.

When the clock showed nine, I moved from the sofa to bed, and after finishing a chapter of the book I had started, I turned out the light and went to sleep.

I awoke with a start in the middle of some kind of dream. I could not recall what had been happening in the dream, but it had obviously been one filled with tension, because my heart was pounding. The room was still pitch dark. For a time after I awoke, I could not remember where I was. A good deal of time had to go by before I realized that I was in my own house, in my own bed. The hands of the alarm clock showed it to be just after two in the morning. My irregular sleeping habits in the well were probably responsible for these unpredictable cycles of sleep and wakefulness. Once my confusion died down, I felt the need to urinate. It was probably the beer I’d drunk. I would have preferred to go back to sleep, but I had no choice in the matter. When I resigned myself to the fact and sat up in bed, my hand brushed against the skin of the person sleeping next to me. This came as no surprise. That was where Kumiko always slept. I was used to having someone sleeping by my side. But then I realized that Kumiko wasn’t with me anymore. She had left the house.
Some other person was sleeping next to me
.

I held my breath and turned on the light by the bed. It was Creta Kano.

Creta Kano was stark naked. Facing toward my side of the bed, she lay there asleep, with nothing on, not even a cover, revealing two well-shaped breasts, two small pink nipples, and, below a perfectly flat stomach, a black triangle of pubic hair, looking like a shaded area in a drawing. Her skin was very white, with a newly minted glow. At a loss to explain her presence here, I nevertheless went on staring at her beautiful body. She had her knees closed tightly together and slightly bent, her legs in perfect alignment. Her hair fell forward, covering half her face, which made it impossible for me to see her eyes, but she was obviously in a deep sleep: my turning on the bedside lamp had caused not the slightest tremble, and her breathing was quiet and regular. I myself, though, was now wide awake. I took a thin summer comforter from the closet and spread it over her. Then I turned out the lamp and, still in my pajamas, went to the kitchen to sit at the table for a while.