The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (70 page)

Once he had sucked all the nicotine he needed into his lungs, he gave a sigh of relief and produced a strange look on his face that hovered somewhere midway between a smile and a smirk. Then he opened his mouth.

“Well, now, let me not forget to introduce myself. I am not usually so rude. The name is Ushikawa. That’s
ushi
for ‘bull’ and
kawa
for ‘river.’ Easy enough to remember, don’t you think? Everybody calls me Ushi. Funny: the more I hear that, the more I feel like a real bull. I even feel a kind of closeness whenever I happen to see a bull out in a field somewhere. Names are funny things, don’t you think, Mr. Okada? Take Okada, for example. Now, there’s a nice, clean name: ‘hill-field.’ I sometimes wish I had a normal name like that, but unfortunately, a surname is not something you’re free to pick. Once you’re born into this world as Ushikawa, you’re Ushikawa for life, like it or not. They’ve been calling me Ushi since the day I started kindergarten. There’s no way around it. You get a guy named Ushikawa, and people are bound to call him Ushi, right? They say a name expresses the thing it stands for, but I wonder if it isn’t the other way around—the thing gets more and more like its name. Anyhow, just think of me as Ushikawa, and if you feel like it, call me Ushi. I don’t mind.”

I went to the kitchen and brought back a can of beer from the refrigerator. I did not offer any to Ushikawa. I hadn’t invited him here, after all. I said nothing and drank my beer, and Ushikawa said nothing and drew
deeply on his cigarette. I did not sit in the chair across from him but rather stood leaning against a pillar, looking down at him. Finally, he crushed his butt out in the empty cat food can and looked up at me.

“I’m sure you’re wondering how I got in here, Mr. Okada. True? You’re sure you locked the door. And in fact, it
was
locked. But I have a key. A real key. Look, here it is.”

He thrust his hand into his jacket pocket, pulled out a key ring with one key attached, and held it up for me to see. It certainly did look like the key to this house. But what attracted my attention was the key holder. It was just like Kumiko’s—a simple-styled green leather key holder with a ring that opened in an unusual way.

“It’s the real thing,” said Ushikawa. “As you can see. And the holder belongs to your wife. Let me say this to avoid any misunderstanding: This was given to me by your wife, Kumiko. I did not steal it or take it by force.”

“Where is Kumiko?” I asked, my voice sounding somewhat mangled.

Ushikawa took his glasses off, seemed to check on the cloudiness of the lenses, then put them back on. “I know exactly where she is,” he said. “In fact, I am taking care of her.”

“Taking care of her’?”

“Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean it that way. Don’t worry,” Ushikawa said, with a smile. When he smiled, his face broke up asymmetrically from side to side, and his glasses went up at an angle. “Please don’t glare at me like that. I’m just sort of helping her as part of my work—running errands, doing odd jobs. I’m a gofer, that’s all. You know how she can’t go outside.”

“ ‘Can’t go outside’?” I parroted his words again.

He hesitated a moment, his tongue flicking across his lips. “Well, maybe you don’t know. That’s all right. I can’t really say whether she
can’t
go out or
doesn’t want
to go out. I’m sure you would like to know, Mr. Okada, but please don’t ask me. Not even I know all the details. But there’s nothing for you to worry about. She is not being held against her will. I mean, this is not a movie or a novel. We can’t really do that sort of thing.”

I set my beer can down carefully at my feet. “So anyway, tell me, what did you come here for?”

After patting his knees several times with outstretched palms, Ushikawa gave one deep, sharp nod. “Ah, yes. I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? I go to all the trouble of introducing myself, and then I forget to
tell you what I’m here for! That has been one of my most consistent flaws over the years: to go on and on about foolish things and leave out the main point. No wonder I’m always doing the wrong thing! Well, then, belated though it may be, here it is: I work for your wife Kumiko’s elder brother. Ushikawa’s the name—but I already told you that, about the Ushi and everything. I work for Dr. Noboru Wataya as a kind of private secretary—though not the usual ‘private secretary’ that a member of the Diet might have. Only a certain kind of person, a superior kind of person, can be a real ‘private secretary.’ The term covers a wide range of types. I mean, there are private secretaries, and then there are private secretaries, and I’m as close to the second kind as you can get. I’m down there—I mean, way, way down there. If there are spirits lurking everywhere, I’m one of the dirty little ones down in the corner of a bathroom or a closet. But I can’t complain. If somebody this messy came right out in the open, think of what it could do to Dr. Wataya’s clean-cut image! No, the ones who face the cameras have to be slick, intelligent-looking types, not bald midgets. ‘How-dee-doo, folks, it’s me, Dr. Wataya’s private sec-ruh-tehree.’ What a laugh! Right, Mr. Okada?”

I kept silent as he prattled on.

“So what I do for the Doctor are the unseen jobs, the ‘shadow’ jobs, so to speak, the ones that aren’t out in the open. I’m the fiddler under the porch. Jobs like that are my specialty. Like this business with Ms. Kumiko. Now, don’t get me wrong, though: don’t think that taking care of her is just some busywork for a lowly hack. If what I’ve said has given you that impression, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, Ms. Kumiko is the Doctor’s one and only dear little sister, after all. I consider it a consummate honor to have been allowed to take on such an important task, believe me!

“Oh, by the way, this may seem very rude, but I wonder if I could ask you for a beer. All this talking has made me very thirsty. If you don’t mind, I’ll just grab one myself. I know where it is. While I was waiting, I took the liberty of peeking into the refrigerator.”

I nodded to him. Ushikawa went to the kitchen and took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. Then he sat down on the sofa again, drinking straight from the bottle with obvious relish, his huge Adam’s apple twitching above the knot of his tie like some kind of animal.

“I tell you, Mr. Okada, a cold beer at the end of the day is the best thing life has to offer. Some choosy people say that a too cold beer doesn’t taste good, but I couldn’t disagree more. The first beer should be so cold
you can’t even taste it. The second one should be a little less chilled, but I want that first one to be like ice. I want it to be so cold my temples throb with pain. This is my own personal preference, of course.”

Still leaning against the pillar, I took another sip of my own beer. Lips tightly closed in a straight line, Ushikawa surveyed the room for some moments.

“I must say, Mr. Okada, for a man without a wife, you do keep the house clean. I’m very impressed. I myself am absolutely hopeless, I’m embarrassed to say. My place is a mess, a garbage heap, a pigsty. I haven’t washed the bathtub for a year or more. Perhaps I neglected to tell you that I was also deserted by my wife. Five years ago. So I can feel a certain sympathy for you, Mr. Okada, or to avoid the risk of misinterpretation, let me just say that I can understand how you feel. Of course, my situation was different from yours. It was only natural for my wife to leave me. I was the worst husband in the world. Far from complaining, I have to admire her for having put up with me as long as she did. I used to beat her. No one else: she was the only one I could beat up on. You can tell what a weakling I am. Got the heart of a flea. I would do nothing but kiss ass outside the house; people would call me Ushi and order me around, and I would just suck up to them all the more. So when I got home I would take it out on my wife. Heh heh heh—pretty bad, eh? And I knew just how bad I was, but I couldn’t stop. It was like a sickness. I’d beat her face out of shape until you couldn’t recognize her. And not just beat her: I’d slam her against the wall and kick her, pour hot tea on her, throw things at her, you name it. The kids would try to stop me, and I’d end up hitting them. Little kids: seven, eight years old. And not just push them around: I’d wallop them with everything I had. I was an absolute devil. I’d try to stop myself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t control myself. After a certain point, I would tell myself that I had done enough damage, that I had to stop, but I didn’t know how to stop. Do you see what a horror I was? So then, five years ago, when my daughter was five, I broke her arm—just snapped it. That’s when my wife finally got fed up with me and left with both kids. I haven’t seen any of them since. Haven’t even heard from them. But what can I do? It’s my own fault.”

I said nothing to him. The cat came over to me and gave a short meow, as if looking for attention.

“Anyway, I’m sorry, I wasn’t planning to exhaust you with all these boring details. You must be wondering if I have any business that has brought me here this evening. Well, I have. I didn’t come here for small
talk, Mr. Okada. The Doctor—which is to say, Dr. Wataya—ordered me to come to see you. I will now tell you exactly what he told me, so please listen.

“First of all, Dr. Wataya is not opposed to the idea of reconsidering a relationship between you and Ms. Kumiko. In other words, he would not object if both of you decided that you wanted to go back to your previous relationship. At the moment, Ms. Kumiko herself has no such intention, so nothing would happen right away, but if you were to reject any possibility of divorce and insist that you wanted to wait as long as it took, he could accept that. He will no longer insist upon a divorce, as he has in the past, and so he would not mind if you wanted to use me as a conduit if there was something you wanted to communicate to Ms. Kumiko. In other words, no more locking horns on every little thing: a renewal of diplomatic relations, as it were. This is the first item of business. How does it strike you, Mr. Okada?”

I lowered myself to the floor and stroked the cat’s head, but I said nothing. Ushikawa watched me and the cat for a time, then continued to speak.

“Well, of course, Mr. Okada, you can’t say a word until you’ve heard everything I have to say. All right, then, I will continue through to the end. Here is the second item of business. This gets a little complicated, I’m afraid. It has to do with an article called ‘The Hanging House,’ which appeared in one of the weekly magazines. I don’t know if you have read it or not, Mr. Okada, but it is a very interesting piece. Well written. ‘Jinxed land in posh Setagaya residential neighborhood. Many people met untimely deaths there over the years. What mystery man has recently bought the place? What is going on behind that high fence? One riddle after another …’

“Anyhow, Dr. Wataya read the piece and realized that the ‘hanging house’ is very close to the house you live in, Mr. Okada. The idea began to gnaw at him that there might be some connection between it and you. So he investigated … or, should I say the lowly Ushikawa, on his short little legs, took the liberty of investigating the matter, and—bingo!—there you were, Mr. Okada, just as he had predicted, going back and forth down that back passageway every day to the other house, obviously very much involved with whatever it is that is going on inside there. I myself was truly amazed to see such a powerful display of Dr. Wataya’s penetrating intelligence.

“There’s only been one article so far, with no follow-up, but who
knows? Dying embers can always rekindle. I mean, that’s a pretty fascinating story. So Dr. Wataya is more than a little nervous. What if his brother-in-law’s name were to come out in some unpleasant connection? Think of the scandal that could erupt! Dr. Wataya is the man of the moment, after all. The media would have a field day. And then there’s this difficult business with you and Ms. Kumiko. They would blow it up out of all proportion. I mean, everybody has something he would rather not have aired in public, right? Especially when it comes to personal affairs. This is a delicate moment in the Doctor’s political career, after all. He has to proceed with the utmost caution until he’s ready to take off. So what he has in mind for you is a little deal of sorts he’s cooked up. If you will cut all connection with this ‘hanging house,’ Mr. Okada, he will give some serious thought to bringing you and Ms. Kumiko back together again. That’s all there is to it. How does that strike you, Mr. Okada? Have I set it out clearly enough?”

“Probably,” I said.

“So what do you think? What is your reaction to all this?”

Stroking the cat’s neck, I thought about it for a while. Then I said, “I don’t get it. What made Noboru Wataya think that I had anything to do with that house? How did he make the connection?”

Ushikawa’s face broke up again into one of his big smiles, but his eyes remained as cold as glass. He took a crushed pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit up with a match. “Ah, Mr. Okada, you ask such difficult questions. Remember, I am just a lowly messenger. A stupid carrier pigeon. I carry slips of paper back and forth. I think you understand. I can say this, however: the Doctor is no fool. He knows how to use his brain, and he has a kind of sixth sense, something that ordinary people do not possess. And also let me tell you this, Mr. Okada: he has a very real kind of power that he can exercise in this world, a power that grows stronger every day. You had better not ignore it. You may have your reasons for not liking him—and that is perfectly fine as far as I am concerned, it’s none of my business—but things have gone beyond the level of simple likes and dislikes. I want you to understand that.”

“If Noboru Wataya is so powerful, why doesn’t he just stop the magazine from publishing any more articles? That would be a whole lot simpler.”

Ushikawa smiled. Then he inhaled deeply on his cigarette.

“Dear, dear Mr. Okada, you mustn’t say such reckless things. You and I live in Japan, after all, one of the world’s most truly democratic states. Correct? This is no dictatorship where all you see around you are banana
plantations and soccer fields. No matter how much power a politician may have in this country, quashing an article in a magazine is not a simple thing. It would be far too dangerous. You might succeed in getting the company brass in your pocket, but someone is going to be left dissatisfied. And that could end up attracting all the more attention. It just doesn’t pay to try pushing people around when such a hot story is involved. It’s true.