The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (77 page)

Nutmeg Akasaka took several months to tell me the story of her life. It was a long, long story, with many detours, so that what I am recording here is a very simplified (though not necessarily short) summary of the whole. I cannot honestly claim with confidence that it contains the essence of her story, but it should at least convey the outline of important events that occurred at crucial points in her life.

•

Nutmeg and her mother escaped from Manchuria to Japan, their only valuables the jewelry they were able to wear on their bodies. They traveled up from the port of Sasebo to Yokohama, to stay with the mother’s family, which had long owned an import-export business primarily focused on Taiwan. Prosperous before the war, they had lost most of their business when Japan lost Taiwan. The father died of heart disease, and the family’s second son, who had been second in command, was killed in an air raid just before the war ended. The eldest son left his teaching post to carry on the family business, but never temperamentally suited to a life of commerce, he was unable to recoup the family fortunes. They still had their comfortable house and land, but it was not a pleasant place for Nutmeg and her mother to live as extra mouths to feed during those straitened postwar years. They were always at pains to keep their presence as
unobtrusive as possible, taking less than the others at mealtimes, waking earlier than the others each morning, taking on an outsize share of the household chores. Every piece of clothing the young Nutmeg wore was a hand-me-down from her older cousins—gloves, socks, even underwear. For pencils, she collected the others’ cast-off stubs. Just waking up in the morning was painful to her. The thought that a new day was starting was enough to make her chest hurt.

She wanted to get out of this house, to live alone with her mother someplace where they didn’t always have to feel so constrained, even if it meant living in poverty. But her mother never tried to leave. “My mother had always been an active person,” said Nutmeg, “but after we escaped from Manchuria, she was like an empty shell. It was as if the very strength to go on living had evaporated from inside her.” She could no longer rouse herself for anything. All she could do was tell Nutmeg over and over about the happy times they used to have. This left to Nutmeg the task of finding for herself the resources to go on living.

Nutmeg did not dislike studying as such, but she had almost no interest in the courses they offered in high school. She couldn’t believe that it would do her any good to stuff her head full of historical dates or the rules of English grammar or geometric formulas. What she wanted more than anything was to learn a useful skill and make herself independent as soon as possible. She was in a place far away from her classmates and their comfortable enjoyment of high school life.

The only thing she cared about was fashion. Her mind was filled with thoughts of clothing from morning to night. Not that she had the wherewithal to dress in style: she could only read and reread the fashion magazines she managed to find, and to fill notebooks with drawings of dresses in imitation of those she found in the magazines or clothes she had dreamed up herself. She had no idea what it was about the fancy dresses that so captivated her imagination. Perhaps, she said, it came from her habit of always playing with the huge wardrobe that her mother had in Manchuria. Her mother was a genuine clotheshorse. She had had more kimonos and dresses than room in their chests to store them, and the young Nutmeg would always pull them out and touch them whenever she had a chance. Most of those dresses and kimonos had had to remain in Manchuria when the two of them left, and whatever they had been able to stuff into rucksacks they had had to exchange along the way for food. Her mother would spread out the next dress to be traded, and sigh over it before letting it go.

“Designing clothes was my secret little door to a different world,” said Nutmeg, “a world that belonged only to me. In that world, imagination was everything. The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality. And what I really liked about it was that it was free. It didn’t cost a thing. It was wonderful! Imagining beautiful clothes in my mind and transferring the images to paper was not just a way for me to leave reality behind and steep myself in dreams, though. I needed it to go on living. It was as natural and obvious to me as breathing. So I assumed that everyone else was doing it too. When I realized that everyone else was
not
doing it—that they couldn’t do it even if they tried—I told myself, ‘I’m different from other people, so the life I live will have to be different from theirs.’ ”

Nutmeg quit high school and transferred to a school of dressmaking. To raise the money for her tuition, she begged her mother to sell one of her last remaining pieces of jewelry. With that, she was able to study sewing and cutting and designing and other such useful skills for two years. When she graduated, she took an apartment and started living alone. She put herself through a professional fashion design school by waiting on tables and taking odd jobs sewing and knitting. And when she had finally graduated from this school, she went to work for a manufacturer of quality ladies’ garments, where she succeeded in having herself assigned to the design department.

There was no question but that she had an original talent. Not only could she draw well, but her ideas and her point of view were different from those of other people. She had a clear image of precisely what she wanted to make, and it was not something she had borrowed from anyone else: it was always her own, and it always came out of her quite naturally. She pursued the tiny details of her image with all the intensity of a salmon swimming upstream through a great river to its source. She had no time for sleep. She loved her work and dreamed only of the day she could become an independent designer. She never thought about having fun outside of work: in fact, she didn’t know how to do any of the things people did to have fun.

Before long, her bosses came to recognize the quality of her work and took an interest in her extravagant, free-flowing lines. Her years of apprenticeship thus came to an end, and she was given full discretion as the head of her own small section—a most unusual promotion.

Nutmeg went on to compile a magnificent record of accomplishment year after year. Her talent and energy caught the interest of people not
only within the company but throughout the industry. The world of fashion design was a closed world, but at the same time it was a fair one, a society ruled by competition. A designer’s power was determined by one thing alone: the number of advance orders that came in for the clothing that he or she had designed. There was never any doubt about who had won and who had lost: the figures told the whole story. Nutmeg never felt that she was competing with anyone, but her record could not be denied.

She worked with total dedication until her late twenties. She met many people through her work, and several men showed interest in her, but their relationships proved short and shallow. Nutmeg could never take a deep interest in living human beings. Her mind was filled with images of clothing, and a man’s designs had a far more visceral impact on her than the man himself ever could.

When she turned twenty-seven, though, Nutmeg was introduced to a strange-looking man at an industry New Year’s party. The man’s features were regular enough, but his hair was a wild mass, and his nose and chin had the hard sharpness of stone tools. He looked more like some phony preacher than a designer of women’s clothing. He was a year younger than Nutmeg, as thin as a wire, and had eyes of bottomless depth, from which he looked at people with an aggressive stare that seemed deliberately designed to make them feel uncomfortable. In his eyes, though, Nutmeg was able to see her own reflection. At the time, he was an unknown but up-and-coming designer, and the two were meeting for the first time. She had, of course, heard people talking about him. He had a unique talent, they said, but he was arrogant and egotistical and argumentative, liked by almost no one.

“We were two of a kind,” she said. “Both born on the continent. He had also been shipped back after the war, in his case from Korea, stripped of possessions. His father had been a professional soldier, and they experienced serious poverty in the postwar years. His mother had died of typhus when he was very small, and I suppose that’s what led to his strong interest in women’s clothing. He did have talent, but he had no idea how to deal with people. Here he was, a designer of women’s clothing, but when he came into a woman’s presence, he would turn red and act crazy. In other words, we were both strays who had become separated from the herd.”

They married the following year, 1963, and the child they gave birth to in the spring of the year after that (the year of the Tokyo Olympics), was Cinnamon. “His name
was
Cinnamon, wasn’t it?” No sooner was
Cinnamon born than Nutmeg brought her mother into the house to take care of him. She herself had to work nonstop from morning to night and had no time to be caring for infants. Thus Cinnamon was more or less raised by his grandmother.

•

It was never clear to Nutmeg whether she had ever truly loved her husband as a man. She lacked any criterion by which to make such a judgment, and this was true for her husband also. What had brought them together was the power of a chance meeting and their shared passion for fashion design. Still, their first ten years together was a fruitful time for both. As soon as they were married, they quit their respective companies and set up their own independent design studio in a small apartment in a small, west-facing building just behind Aoyama Avenue. Poorly ventilated and lacking air-conditioning, the place was so hot in summer that the sweat would make their pencils slip from their grasps. The business did not go smoothly at first. Nutmeg and her husband were both almost shockingly lacking in practical business sense, as a result of which they were easily duped by unscrupulous members of the industry, or they would fail to secure orders because they were ignorant of standard practice or would make unimaginably simple mistakes that kept them from getting on track. Their debts mounted up so greatly that at one point it seemed the only solution would be to abscond. The breakthrough came when Nutmeg happened to meet a capable business manager who recognized their talent and could serve them with integrity. From that point on, the company developed so well that all their previous troubles began to seem like a bad dream. Their sales doubled each year until, by 1970, the little company they had started on a shoestring had become a miraculous success—so much so that it surprised even the arrogant, aloof young couple who had started it. They increased their staff, moved to a big building on the avenue, and opened their own shops in such fashionable neighborhoods as the Ginza, Aoyama, and Shinjuku. Their original line of designer clothes figured often in the mass media and became widely known.

•

Once the company had reached a certain size, the nature of the work they divided between themselves began to change. While designing and manufacturing clothes might be a creative process, it was also, unlike sculpting or novel writing, a business upon which the fortunes of many people depended. One could not simply stay at home and create whatever one
liked. Someone would have to go out and present the company’s “face” to the world. This need only increased as the size of the company’s transactions continued to grow. One of them would have to appear at parties and fashion shows to give little speeches and hobnob with the guests, and to be interviewed by the media. Nutmeg had absolutely no intention of taking on that role, and so her husband became the one to step forward. Just as poor at socializing as she was, he found the whole thing excruciating at first. He was unable to speak well in front of a lot of strangers, and so he would come home from each such event exhausted. After six months of this, however, he noticed that he was finding it less painful. He was still not much of a speaker, but people did not react to his brusque and awkward manner the way they had when he was young; now they seemed to be drawn to him. They took his curt style (which derived from his naturally introverted personality) as evidence not of arrogant aloofness but rather of a charming artistic temperament. He actually began to enjoy this new position in which he found himself, and before long he was being celebrated as a cultural hero of his time.

“You’ve probably heard his name,” Nutmeg said. “But in fact, by then I was doing two-thirds of the design work myself. His bold, original ideas had taken off commercially, and he had already come up with more than enough of them to keep us going. It was my job to develop and expand them and give them form. No matter how large the company grew, we never hired other designers. Our support staff expanded, but the crucial part we did ourselves. All we wanted was to make the clothing we wanted to make, not worry about the class of people who would buy it. We did absolutely no market research or cost calculations or strategy planning. If we decided we wanted to make something a certain way, we designed it that way, used the best materials we could find, and took all the time we needed to make it. What other houses could do in two steps, we did in four. Where they used three yards of cloth, we used four. We personally inspected and passed every piece that left our shop. What didn’t sell we disposed of. We sold nothing at discount. Our prices were on the high side, of course. Industry people thought we were crazy, but our clothing became a symbol of the era, right along with Peter Max, Woodstock, Twiggy,
Easy Rider
, and all that. We had so much fun designing clothes back then! We could do the wildest things, and our clients were right there with us. It was as if we had sprouted great big wings and could fly anywhere we liked.”

•

Just as their business was hitting its stride, however, Nutmeg and her husband began to grow more distant. Even as they worked side by side, she would sense now and then that his heart was wandering somewhere far away. His eyes seemed to have lost that hungry gleam they once had. The violent streak that used to make him throw things now almost never surfaced. Instead, she would often find him staring off into space as if deep in thought. The two of them hardly ever talked outside the workplace, and the nights when he did not come home at all grew in number. Nutmeg sensed that he had several women in his life now, but this was not a source of pain for her. She thought of it as inevitable, because they had long since ceased having physical relations (mainly because Nutmeg had lost the desire for sex).