The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (98 page)

I closed my eyes and tried to accept my impending death as calmly as I could. I struggled to overcome my fear. At least I was able to leave a few things behind. That was the one small bit of good news. I tried to smile, without much success. “I
am
afraid to die, though,” I whispered to myself. These turned out to be my last words. They were not very impressive words, but it was too late to change them. The water was over my mouth now. Then it came to my nose. I stopped breathing. My lungs fought to suck in new air. But there was no more air. There was only lukewarm water.

I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.

Hi, again, Mr. Wind-Up Bird
.

Hey, are these letters really getting to you?

I mean, I’ve been writing you tons and tons of letters, and I’m really starting to wonder if they ever reach you. The address I’ve been using is a “kind of” kind of thing, and I don’t put a return address on the envelope, so maybe they’re just piling up on the “little letter lost” shelf in a post office somewhere, unread and all covered with dust. Up to now, I figured: OK, if they’re not getting through, they’re not getting through, so what? I’ve been scratching away at these things, but the important thing was for me to put my thoughts down on paper. It’s easy for me to write if I think I’m writing to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, I don’t know why. Hey, yeah, why is that?

But this letter is one I really want you to read. I hope and pray it gets to you
.

Now I’m going to write about the duck people. Yes, I know this is the first time I’ve mentioned them, but here goes
.

I told you before how this factory I’m working in has this huge property, with woods and a pond and stuff. It’s great for taking walks. The pond’s a pretty big one, and that’s where the duck people live, maybe twelve birds altogether. I don’t know how their family is organized. I suppose they’ve got their internal arrangements, with some members getting along better with some and not so well with others, but I’ve never seen them fight
.

It’s December, so ice has started to form on the pond, but not such thick ice. Even when it’s cold, there’s still enough open water left so the ducks can swim around a little bit. When it’s cold enough for thick ice, I’m told, some of the girls come here to ice-skate. Then the duck people (yes, I know it’s a weird expression, but I’ve gotten in the habit of using it, so it just comes out) will have to go somewhere else. I don’t like ice-skating, so I’m kind of hoping there won’t be any ice, but I don’t think it’s going to do any good. I mean, it gets really cold in this part of the country, so as long as they go on living here, the duck people are going to have to resign themselves to it
.

I come here every weekend these days and kill time watching the duck people. When I’m doing that, two or three hours can go by before I know it. I go out in the cold, armed head to foot like some kind of polar-bear hunter: tights, hat, scarf, boots, fur-trimmed coat. And I spend hours sitting on a rock all by myself, spacing out, watching the duck people. Sometimes I feed them old bread. Of course, there’s nobody else here with the time to do such crazy things
.

You may not know this, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but ducks are very pleasant people to spend time with. I never get tired of watching them. I’ll never understand why everybody else bothers to go somewhere way far away and pay good money to see some stupid movie instead of enjoying these people. Like sometimes they’ll come flapping through the air and land on the ice, but their feet slide and they fall over. It’s like a TV comedy! They make me laugh even with nobody else around. Of course, they’re not clowning around trying to make me laugh. They’re doing their best to live very serious lives, and they just happen to fall down sometimes. I think that’s neat
.

The duck people have these flat orange feet that are really cute, like they’re wearing little kids’ rain boots, but they’re not made for walking on ice, I guess, because I see them slipping and sliding all over the place, and some even fall on their bottoms. They must not have nonslip treads. So winter is not a really fun season for the duck people, probably. I wonder what they think, deep down inside, about ice and stuff. I bet they don’t hate it all that much. It just seems that way to me from watching them. They look like they’re living happily enough, even if it’s winter, probably just grumbling to themselves, “Ice again? Oh, well …” That’s another thing I really like about the duck people
.

The pond is in the middle of the woods, far from everything. Nobody (but me, of course!) bothers to walk all the way over here at this time of year, except on unusually warm days. I walk down the path through the woods, and my boots crunch on the ice that’s left from a recent snowfall. I see lots of birds all around. When I’ve got my collar up and my scarf wrapped round and round under my chin, and my breath makes white puffs in the air, and I’ve got a chunk of bread in my pocket,
and I’m walking down the path in the woods, thinking about the duck people, I get this really warm, happy feeling, and it hits me that I haven’t felt happy like this for a long, long time
.

OK, that’s enough about the duck people
.

To tell you the truth, I woke up an hour ago from a dream about you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, and I’ve been sitting here, writing you this letter. Right now it’s (I look at my clock) exactly 2:18 a.m. I got into bed just before ten o’clock, as usual, said “Good night, everybody” to the duck people, and fell fast asleep, but then, a little while ago, I woke up—bang! Actually, I’m not sure it was a dream. I mean, I don’t remember anything I was dreaming about. Maybe I wasn’t dreaming. But whatever it was, I heard your voice right next to my ear. You were calling to me over and over in this really loud voice. That’s what shocked me awake
.

The room wasn’t dark when I opened my eyes. Moonlight was pouring through the window. This great big moon like a stainless-steel tray was hanging over the hill. It was so huge, it looked as if I could have reached out and written something on it. And the light coming in the window looked like a big, white pool of water. I sat up in bed, racking my brains, trying to figure out what had just happened. Why had you been calling my name in such a sharp, clear voice? My heart kept pounding for the longest time. If I had been in my own house, I would have gotten dressed—even if it was the middle of the night—and run down the alley to your house, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. But out here, a million miles away in the mountains, I couldn’t run anywhere, right?

So then you know what I did?

I got naked. Ahem. Don’t ask me why. I’m really not sure myself So just be quiet and listen to the rest. Anyhow, I took every stitch of clothing off and got out of bed. And I got down on my knees on the floor in the white moonlight. The heat was off and the room must have been cold, but I didn’t feel cold. There was some kind of special something in the moonlight that was coming in the window, and it was wrapping my body in a thin, protective, skintight film. At least that’s how I felt. I just stayed there naked for a while, spacing out, but then I took turns holding different parts of my body out to be bathed in the moonlight. I don’t know, it just seemed like the most natural thing to do. The moonlight was so absolutely, incredibly beautiful that I couldn’t not do it. My head and shoulders and arms and breasts and tummy and legs and bottom and, you know, around there: one after another, I dipped them in the moonlight, like taking a bath
.

If somebody had seen me from outside, they’d have thought it was very, very strange. I must have looked like some kind of full-moon pervert going absolutely bonkers in the moonlight. But nobody saw me, of course. Though, come to think of
it, maybe that boy on the motorcycle was somewhere, looking at me. But that’s OK. He’s dead. If he wanted to look, and if he’d be satisfied with that, I’d be glad to let him see me
.

But anyhow, nobody was looking at me. I was doing it all alone in the moonlight. And every once in a while, I’d close my eyes and think about the duck people, who were probably sleeping near the pond somewhere. I’d think about the warm, happy feeling that the duck people and I had created together in the daytime. Because, finally, the duck people are an important kind of magic kind of protective amulet kind of thing for me
.

I stayed kneeling there for a long time after that, just kneeling all alone, all naked, in the moonlight. The light gave my skin a magical color, and it threw a sharp black shadow of my body across the floor, all the way to the wall. It didn’t look like the shadow of my body, but one that belonged to a much more mature woman. It wasn’t a virgin like me, it didn’t have my corners and angles but was fuller and rounder, with much bigger breasts and nipples. But it was the shadow that I was making—just stretched out longer, with a different shape. When I moved, it moved. For a while, I tried moving in different ways and watching very, very carefully to see what the connection was between me and my shadow, trying to figure out why it should look so different. But I couldn’t figure it out, finally. The more I looked, the stranger it seemed
.

Now, here comes the part that’s
really
hard to explain, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. I doubt if I can do it, but here goes
.

Well, to make a long story short, all of a sudden I burst into tears. I mean, if it was like in a film scenario or something, it’d go: “May Kasahara: Here, with no warning, covers face with hands, wails aloud, collapses in tears.” But don’t be too shocked. I’ve been hiding it from you all this time, but in fact, I’m the world’s biggest crybaby. I cry for anything. It’s my secret weakness. So for me, the sheer fact that I burst out crying for no reason at all was not such a surprise. Usually, though, I just have myself a little cry, and then I tell myself it’s time to stop. I cry easily, but I stop just as easily. Tonight, though, I just couldn’t stop. The cork popped, and that was that. I didn’t know what had started me, so I didn’t know how to stop myself The tears just came gushing out, like blood from a huge wound. I couldn’t believe the amount of tears I was producing. I seriously started to worry I might get dehydrated and turn into a mummy if this kept up
.

I could actually see and hear my tears dripping down into the white pool of moonlight, where they were sucked in as if they had always been part of the light. As they fell, the tears caught the light of the moon and sparkled like beautiful crystals. Then I noticed that my shadow was crying too, shedding clear, sharp shadow tears. Have you ever seen the shadows of tears, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? They’re nothing
like ordinary shadows. Nothing at all. They come here from some other, distant world, especially for our hearts. Or maybe not. It struck me then that the tears my shadow was shedding might be the real thing, and the tears that I was shedding were just shadows. You don’t get it, I’m sure, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. When a naked seventeen-year-old girl is shedding tears in the moonlight, anything can happen. It’s true
.

So that’s what happened in this room about an hour ago. And now I’m sitting at my desk, writing a letter to you in pencil, Mr. Wind-Up Bird (with my clothes on, of course!)
.

Bye-bye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. I don’t quite know how to put this, but the duck people in the woods and I are praying for you to be warm and happy. If anything happens to you, don’t hesitate to call me out loud again
.

Good night
.

“Cinnamon carried you here,” said Nutmeg.

The first thing that came to me when I woke was pain, in different, twisted forms. The knife wound gave me pain, and all the joints and bones and muscles in my body gave me pain. Different parts of my body must have slammed up against things as I fled through the darkness. And yet the form of each of these different pains was still not quite right. They were somewhere close to pain, but they could not exactly be called pain.