The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (52 page)

“Of course I look terrible—after days in the bottom of a well with almost nothing to eat or drink, who wouldn’t look terrible?”

May Kasahara took off her sunglasses and turned to face me. She still had that deep cut next to her eye. “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Are you mad at me?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve got tons of things I have to think about before I start getting mad at you.”

“Did your wife come back?”

I shook my head. “She sent me a letter. Says she’s never coming back.”

“Poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. She sat up and reached
out to place her hand lightly on my knee. “Poor, poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you may not believe this, but I was planning to save you from the well at the very end. I just wanted to frighten you a little, torment you a little. I wanted to see if I could make you scream. I wanted to see how much it would take until you were so mixed up you kinda lost your world.”

I didn’t know how to reply to this, so I just nodded.

“Did you think I was serious when I said I was going to let you die down there?”

Instead of answering right away, I rolled the lemon drop wrapper into a ball. Then I said, “I really wasn’t sure. You sounded serious, but you sounded like you were just trying to scare me too. When you’re down in a well, talking to somebody up top, something weird happens to the sound: you can’t really catch the expression in the other person’s voice. But finally, it’s not a question of which is right. I mean, reality is kind of made up of these different layers. So maybe in
that
reality you were serious about trying to kill me, but in
this
reality you weren’t. It depends on which reality
you
take and which reality
I
take.”

I pushed my rolled-up candy wrapper into the hole of a Sprite can.

“Say, could you do me a favor, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?” said May Kasahara, pointing at the hose on the lawn. “Would you spray me with that? It’s sooo hot! My brain’s gonna fry if I don’t wet myself down.”

I left my deck chair and walked over to pick up the blue plastic hose on the lawn. It was warm and limp. I reached behind the bushes and turned on the spigot. At first only hot water that had been warmed inside the hose came out, but it cooled down until it was spraying cold water. May Kasahara stretched out on the lawn, and I aimed a good, strong spray at her.

She closed her eyes and let the water wash over her body. “Oh, that feels so good! You should do it too, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”

“This isn’t a bathing suit,” I said, but May Kasahara looked as if she was enjoying the water a lot, and the heat was just too intense for me to keep resisting. I took off my sweat-soaked T-shirt, bent forward, and let the cold water run over my head. While I was at it, I took a swallow of the water: it was cold and delicious.

“Hey, is this well water?” I asked.

“Sure is! It comes up through a pump. Feels great, doesn’t it? It’s so cold. You can drink it too. We had a guy from the health department do a water quality inspection, and he said there’s nothing wrong with it, you
almost never get water this clean in Tokyo. He was amazed. But still, we’re kind of afraid to drink it. With all these houses packed together like this, you never know what’s going to get into it.”

“But don’t you think it’s weird? The Miyawakis’ well is bone dry, but yours has all this nice, fresh water. They’re just across the alley. Why should they be so different?”

“Yeah, really,” said May Kasahara, cocking her head. “Maybe something caused the underground water flow to change just a little bit, so their well dried up and ours didn’t. Of course, I don’t know what the exact reason would be.”

“Has anything bad happened in your house?” I asked.

May Kasahara wrinkled up her face and shook her head. “The only bad thing that’s happened in this house in the last ten years is that it’s so damned boring!”

May Kasahara wiped herself down and asked if I wanted a beer. I said I did. She brought two cold cans of Heineken from the house. She drank one, and I drank the other.

“So tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, what’s your plan from now on?”

“I haven’t really decided,” I said. “But I’ll probably get out of here. I might even get out of Japan.”

“Get out of Japan? Where would you go?”

“To Crete.”

“Crete? Does this have something to do with that Creta What’s-her-name woman?”

“Something, yeah.”

May Kasahara thought this over for a moment.

“And was it Creta What’s-her-name that saved you from the well?”

“Creta Kano,” I said. “Yeah, she’s the one.”

“You’ve got a lot of friends, don’t you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

“Not really. If anything, I’m famous for having so few friends.”

“Still, I wonder how Creta Kano found out you were down in the well. You didn’t tell anybody you were going down there, right? So how did she figure out where you were?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But anyhow, you’re going to Crete, right?”

“I haven’t really decided I’m going to go. It’s just one possibility. I have to settle things with Kumiko first.”

May Kasahara put a cigarette in her mouth and lit up. Then she touched the cut next to her eye with the tip of her little finger.

“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, just about the whole time you were down in the well, I was out here sunbathing. I was watching the garden of the vacant house, and baking myself, and thinking about you in the well, that you were starving and moving closer to death little by little. I was the only one who knew you were down there and couldn’t get out. And when I thought about that, I had this incredibly clear sense of what you were feeling: the pain and anxiety and fear. Do you see what I mean? By doing that, I was able to get sooo close to you! I really wasn’t gonna let you die. This is true. Really. But I wanted to keep going. Right down to the wire. Right down to where you would start to fall apart and be scared out of your mind and you couldn’t take it anymore. I really felt that that would be the best thing—for me and for you.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I think that if you really had gone down to the wire, you might have wanted to go all the way. It might have been a lot easier than you think. If you went that far, all it would have taken was one last push. And then afterward you would have told yourself that it was the best thing—for me and for you.” I took a swig of beer.

May Kasahara thought about that for a time, biting her lip. “You may be right,” she said. “Not even I know for sure.”

I took my last swallow of beer and stood up. I put on my sunglasses and slipped into my sweat-soaked T-shirt. “Thanks for the beer.”

“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara, “last night, after my family left for the summer house, I went down into the well. I stayed there five or maybe six hours altogether, just sitting still.”

“So you’re the one who took the rope ladder away.”

“Yeah,” said May Kasahara, with a little frown. “I’m the one.”

I turned my eyes to the broad lawn. The moisture-laden earth was giving off vapor that looked like heat shimmer. May Kasahara pushed the butt of her cigarette into an empty Sprite can.

“I didn’t feel anything special for the first few hours. Of course, it bothered me a little bit to be in such a totally dark place, but I wasn’t terrified or scared or anything. I’m not one of those ordinary girls that scream their heads off over every little thing. But I knew it wasn’t just dark. You were down there for days, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You know there’s nothing down there to be afraid of. But after a few hours, I knew less and less who I was. Sitting still down there in the darkness, I could tell that
something
inside me—inside my body—was getting bigger and bigger. It felt like this
thing
inside me was growing, like the roots of a tree in a pot, and when it got big enough it would break me apart. That would be the
end of me, like the pot splitting into a million pieces. Whatever this thing was, it stayed put inside me when I was under the sun, but it, like, sucked up some special kind of nourishment in the darkness and started growing
sooo
fast it was scary. I tried to hold it down, but I couldn’t. And that’s when I really got scared. It was the scaredest I’ve ever been in my life. This thing inside me, this gooshy white thing like a lump of fat, was taking over, taking
me
over, eating me up. This gooshy thing was really small at first, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”

May Kasahara stopped talking for a little while and stared at her hands, as if she were recalling what had happened to her that day. “I was
really
scared,” she said. “I guess that’s what I wanted
you
to feel. I guess I wanted you to hear the sound of the
thing
chewing you up.”

I lowered myself into a deck chair and looked at the body of May Kasahara, hardly covered by her little bikini. She was sixteen years old, but she had the build of a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Her breasts and hips were far from fully matured. Her body reminded me of those drawings that use the absolute minimum of line yet still give an incredible sense of reality. But still, at the same time, there was something about it that gave an impression of extreme old age.

Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me to ask her, “Have you ever had the feeling that you had been defiled by something?”

“Defiled?” She looked at me, her eyes slightly narrowed. “You mean physically? You mean, like, raped?”

“Physically. Mentally. Either.”

May Kasahara looked down at her own body, then returned her gaze to me. “Physically, no. I mean, I’m still a virgin. I’ve let a boy feel me up. But just through my clothes.”

I nodded.

“Mentally, hmm, I’m not sure. I don’t really know what it means to be defiled mentally.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “It’s just a question of whether you
feel
it’s happened to you or not. If you don’t feel it, that probably means you haven’t been defiled.”

“Why are you asking me about this?”

“Because some of the people I know have that feeling. And it causes all kinds of complicated problems. There’s one thing I want to ask you, though. Why are you always thinking about death?”

She put a cigarette between her lips and nimbly struck a match with one hand. Then she put on her sunglasses.

“You mean you don’t think much about death, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

“I
do
think about death, of course. But not all the time. Just once in a while. Like most people.”

“Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”

“Crazy things?”

“Like, say, trapping you in the well, or, like, when I’m riding on the back of a motorcycle, putting my hands over the eyes of the guy who’s driving.”

When she said this, she touched the wound next to her eye.

“And that’s how the motorcycle accident happened?” I asked.

May Kasahara gave me a questioning look, as if she had not heard what I said to her. But every word that I had spoken should have reached her ears. I couldn’t make out the expression in her eyes behind the dark glasses, but a kind of numbness seemed to have spread over her face, like oil poured on still water.

“What happened to the guy?” I asked.

Cigarette between her lips, May Kasahara continued to look at me. Or rather, she continued to look at my mark. “Do I have to answer that question, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

“Not if you don’t want to. You’re the one who brought it up. If you don’t want to talk about it, then don’t.”

May Kasahara grew very quiet. She seemed to be having trouble deciding what to do. Then she drew in a chestful of cigarette smoke and let it out slowly. With heavy movements, she dragged her sunglasses off and turned her face to the sun, eyes closed tight. Watching her, I felt as if the flow of time were slowing down little by little—
as if time’s spring were beginning to run down
.

“He died,” she said at last, in a voice with no expression, as though she had resigned herself to something.

“He died?”

May Kasahara tapped the ashes off her cigarette. Then she picked up her towel and wiped the sweat from her face over and over again. Finally, as if recalling a task that she had forgotten, she said in a clipped, businesslike way, “We were going pretty fast. It happened near Enoshima.”

I looked at her without a word. She held an edge of the beach towel in each hand, pressing the edges against her cheeks. White smoke was rising from the cigarette between her fingers. With no wind to disturb it, the smoke rose straight up, like a miniature smoke signal. She was apparently having trouble deciding whether to cry or to laugh. At least she looked that way to me. She wavered atop the narrow line that divided one possibility from the other, but in the end she fell to neither side. May Kasahara pulled her expression together, put the towel on the ground, and took a drag on her cigarette. The time was nearly five o’clock, but the heat showed no sign of abating.

“I killed him,” she said. “Of course, I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to push the limits. We did stuff like that all the time. It was like a game. I’d cover his eyes or tickle him when we were on the bike. But nothing ever happened. Until that day …”

May Kasahara raised her face and looked straight at me.

“Anyway, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, no, I don’t feel as if I’ve been defiled. I just wanted to get close to that gooshy thing if I could. I wanted to trick it into coming out of me and then crush it to bits. You’ve got to really push the limits if you’re going to trick it into coming out. It’s the only way. You’ve got to offer it good bait.” She shook her head slowly. “No, I don’t think I’ve been defiled. But I haven’t been saved, either. There’s nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing that isn’t fake is that gooshy thing inside me.”