The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (11 page)

“Gee,” I said.

“But you know,” she said, dropping her cigarette butt on the ground and stepping on it, “in the company I work for, they won’t let you say anybody’s ‘bald.’ You have to say ‘men with a thinning problem.’ ‘Bald’ is discriminatory language. I was joking around once and suggested ‘gentlemen who are follically challenged,’ and boy, did
they
get mad! ‘This is no laughing matter, young lady,’ they said. They’re so damned seeerious. Did you know that? Everybody in the whole damned world is so damned serious.”

I took out my lemon drops, popped one in my mouth, and offered one to May Kasahara. She shook her head and took out a cigarette.

“Come to think of it, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said, “you were unemployed. Are you still?”

“Sure am.”

“Are you serious about working?”

“Sure am.” No sooner had the words left my mouth than I began to wonder how true they were. “Actually, I’m not so sure,” I said. “I think I need time. Time to think. I’m not sure myself what I need. It’s hard to explain.”

Chewing on a nail, May Kasahara looked at me for a while. “Tell you what, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said. “Why don’t you come to work with me one day? At the wig company. They don’t pay much, but the work’s easy, and you can set your own hours. What do you say? Don’t think about it too much, just do it. For a change of pace. It might help you figure out all kinds of things.”

She had a point there. “You’ve got a point there,” I said.

“Great!” she said. “Next time I go, I’ll come and get you. Now, where did you say your house is?”

“Hmm, that’s a tough one. Or maybe not. You just keep going and going down the alley, taking all the turns. On the left you’ll see a house with a red Honda Civic parked in back. It’s got one of those bumper stickers ‘Let There Be Peace for All the Peoples of the World.’ Ours is the next house, but there’s no gate opening on the alley. It’s just a cinder-block wall, and you have to climb over it. It’s about chin height on me.”

“Don’t worry. I can get over a wall that high, no problem.”

“Your leg doesn’t hurt anymore?”

She exhaled smoke with a little sighing kind of sound and said, “Don’t worry. It’s nothing. I limp when my parents are around because I don’t
want to go to school. I’m faking. It just sort of turned into a habit. I do it even when nobody’s looking, when I’m in my room all by myself. I’m a perfectionist. What is it they say—‘Fool yourself to fool others’? But anyhow, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, tell me, have you got guts?”

“Not really, no.”

“Never had ’em?”

“No, I was never one for guts. Not likely to change, either.”

“How about curiosity?”

“Curiosity’s another matter. I’ve got some of that.”

“Well, don’t you think guts and curiosity are kind of similar?” said May Kasahara. “Where there’s guts there’s curiosity, and where there’s curiosity there’s guts. No?”

“Hmm, maybe they are kind of similar,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they do overlap at times.”

“Times like when you sneak into somebody’s backyard, say.”

“Yeah, like that,” I said, rolling a lemon drop on my tongue. “When you sneak into somebody’s backyard, it does seem that guts and curiosity are working together. Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own—with whatever guts you can muster.”

She thought this over for a time. “I guess so,” she said. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.” She stood up and brushed off the dirt clinging to the seat of her short pants. Then she looked down at me. “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, would you like to see the well?”

“The well?” I asked. The well?

“There’s a dried-up well here. I like it. Kind of. Want to see it?”

•

We cut through the yard and walked around to the side of the house. It was a round well, maybe four and a half feet in diameter. Thick planking, cut to shape and size, had been used to cap the well, and two concrete blocks had been set on the round wooden cap to keep it in place. The well curb stood perhaps three feet high, and close by grew a single old tree, as if standing guard. It was a fruit tree, but I couldn’t tell what kind.

Like most everything else connected with this house, the well looked as though it had been abandoned long before. Something about it felt as if it should be called “overwhelming numbness.” Maybe when people take their eyes off them, inanimate objects become even more inanimate.

Close inspection revealed that the well was in fact far older than the
objects that surrounded it. It had been made in another age, long before the house was built. Even the wooden cap was an antique. The well curb had been coated with a thick layer of concrete, almost certainly to strengthen a structure that had been built long before. The nearby tree seemed to boast of having stood there far longer than any other tree in the area.

I lowered a concrete block to the ground and removed one of the two half-moons that constituted the wooden cap. Hands on the edge of the well, I leaned over and looked down, but I could not see to the bottom. It was obviously a deep well, its lower half swallowed in darkness. I took a sniff. It had a slightly moldy smell.

“It doesn’t have any water,” said May Kasahara.

A well without water. A bird that can’t fly. An alley with no exit. And—

May picked up a chunk of brick from the ground and threw it into the well. A moment later came a small, dry thud. Nothing more. The sound was utterly dry, desiccated, as if you could crumble it in your hands. I straightened up and looked at May Kasahara. “I wonder why it hasn’t got any water. Did it dry up? Did somebody fill it in?”

She shrugged. “When people fill in a well, don’t they fill it all the way to the top? There’d be no point in leaving a dry hole like this. Somebody could fall in and get hurt. Don’t you think?”

“I think you’re right,” I said. “Something probably made the water dry up.”

I suddenly recalled Mr. Honda’s words from long before. “When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom.” So now I had a well if I needed one.

I leaned over the edge again and looked down into the darkness, anticipating nothing in particular. So, I thought, in a place like this, in the middle of the day like this, there existed a darkness as deep as this. I cleared my throat and swallowed. The sound echoed in the darkness, as if someone else had cleared his throat. My saliva still tasted like lemon drops.

•

I put the cover back on the well and set the block atop it. Then I looked at my watch. Almost eleven-thirty. Time to call Kumiko during her lunch break.

“I’d better go home,” I said.

May Kasahara gave a little frown. “Go right ahead, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said. “You fly on home.”

When we crossed the yard, the stone bird was still glaring at the sky with its dry eyes. The sky itself was still filled with its unbroken covering of gray clouds, but at least the rain had stopped. May Kasahara tore off a fistful of grass and threw it toward the sky. With no wind to carry them, the blades of grass dropped to her feet.

“Think of all the hours left between now and the time the sun goes down,” she said, without looking at me.

“True,” I said. “Lots of hours.”

Raised as an only child, I find it difficult to imagine how grown siblings must feel when they come in contact with each other in the course of leading their independent lives. In Kumiko’s case, whenever the topic of Noboru Wataya came up, she would get a strange look on her face, as if she had put some odd-tasting thing in her mouth by accident, but
exactly
what that look meant I had no way of knowing. In my own feelings toward her elder brother there was not a trace of anything positive. Kumiko knew this and thought it entirely reasonable. She herself was far from fond of the man. It was hard to imagine them ever speaking to each other had the blood relationship not existed between them. But in fact, they
were
brother and sister, which made things somewhat more complicated.

After I had my argument with her father and ended all contact with her family, Kumiko had virtually no occasion to see Noboru Wataya. The argument had been a violent one. I haven’t had many arguments in the course of my life—I’m just not the type—but once I do get going, I go all the way. And so my break with Kumiko’s father had been complete. Afterward, when I had gotten everything off my chest that I needed to get off, anger was mysteriously absent. I felt only relief. I never had to see him again: it was as if a great burden that I had been carrying for a long time had been lifted from my shoulders. None of the rage or the hatred was left. I even felt a touch of sympathy for the difficulties he had faced
in his life, however stupid and repulsive the shape of that life might appear to me. I told Kumiko that I would never see her parents again but she was free to visit them without me anytime she wanted. Kumiko made no attempt to see them. “Never mind,” she said. “I wasn’t all that crazy about visiting them anyway.”

Noboru Wataya had been living with his parents at the time, but when the argument started between his father and me, he had simply withdrawn without a word to anyone. This hadn’t taken me by surprise. I was a person of no interest to him. He did his best to avoid personal contact with me unless it was absolutely necessary. And so, when I stopped seeing Kumiko’s parents, there was no longer any reason for me to see Noboru Wataya. Kumiko herself had no reason to make a point of seeing him. He was busy, she was busy, and they had never been that close to begin with.

Still, Kumiko would occasionally phone him at his campus office, and he would occasionally phone her at her company office (though never at our home). She would announce these contacts to me without going into detail about the substance of their conversations. I never asked, and she never volunteered the information unless it was necessary.

I didn’t care to know what Kumiko and Noboru Wataya were talking about. Which is not to say that I resented the fact that they were talking. I just didn’t get it. What was there for two such different human beings to say to each other? Or was it only through the special filter of the blood relationship that this came about?

•

Though brother and sister, Noboru Wataya and Kumiko were separated in age by nine years. Another factor behind the lack of any perceptible closeness between the two was Kumiko’s having lived for several years with her father’s family.

Kumiko and Noboru had not been the only children in the Wataya house. Between them there had been a sister, five years older than Kumiko. At the age of three, however, Kumiko had been sent from Tokyo to distant Niigata, to be raised for a time by her grandmother. Kumiko’s parents later told her that this was done because she had been a sickly child and they thought she would benefit from the clean air of the countryside, but she never quite believed this. As far as she herself could remember, she had never been physically weak. She had never suffered from any major illnesses, and no one in her Niigata home seemed overly concerned about her health. “I’m sure it was just some kind of excuse,” Kumiko once told me.

Her doubts had been reinforced by something she heard from a relative. Apparently, there had been a long-standing feud between Kumiko’s mother and grandmother, and the decision to bring Kumiko to Niigata was the product of a truce they had concluded. By offering her up for a time, Kumiko’s parents had quelled her grandmother’s rage, and by having a grandchild in her possession, the grandmother had obtained concrete confirmation of her ties with her son (Kumiko’s father). In other words, Kumiko had been a kind of hostage.

“Besides,” Kumiko said to me, “they already had two other children. Their third one was no great loss to them. Not that they were planning to get rid of me: I think they just figured it wouldn’t be too hard on such a young child to be sent away. They probably didn’t give it much thought. It was just the easiest solution to the problem. Can you believe it? I don’t know why, but they had absolutely no idea what something like that can do to a small child.”

She was raised by her grandmother in Niigata from the age of three to six. Nor was there anything sad or twisted about the life she led in the country. Her grandmother was crazy about her, and Kumiko had more fun playing with her cousins, who were closer in age to herself, than with her own brother and sister. She was finally brought back to Tokyo the year she was to enter elementary school. Her parents had become nervous about the lengthening separation from their daughter, and they insisted on bringing her back before it was too late. In a sense, though, it was already too late. In the weeks following the decision to send her back, her grandmother became increasingly overwrought. She stopped eating and could hardly sleep. One minute she would be hugging and squeezing little Kumiko with all her might, and the next she would be slapping her arm with a ruler, hard enough to raise welts. One minute she would be saying she didn’t want to let her go, that she would rather die than lose her, and the next she would tell her to go away, that she never wanted to see her again. In the foulest language imaginable, she would tell Kumiko what a terrible woman her mother was. She even tried to stab herself in the wrist with a pair of scissors. Kumiko could not understand what was happening around her. The situation was simply too much for her to comprehend.