The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (14 page)

“In that case, my younger sister, Creta Kano, will come to visit you at one o’clock.”

“Creta Kano?” I asked in a flat voice.

“Yes,” said Malta Kano. “I believe I showed you her photograph the other day.”

“I remember her, of course. It’s just that—”

“Her name is Creta Kano. She will come to visit you as my representative. Is one o’clock a good time for you?”

“Fine,” I said.

“She’ll be there,” said Malta Kano, and hung up.

Creta Kano?

I vacuumed the floors and straightened the house. I tied our old newspapers in a bundle and threw them in a closet. I put scattered cassette tapes back in their cases and lined them up by the stereo. I washed the things piled in the kitchen. Then I washed myself: shower, shampoo, clean clothes. I made fresh coffee and ate lunch: ham sandwich and hard-boiled egg. I sat on the sofa, reading the
Home Journal
and wondering what to make for dinner. I marked the recipe for Seaweed and Tofu Salad and wrote the ingredients on a shopping list. I turned on the FM radio. Michael Jackson was singing “Billy Jean.” I thought about the sisters Malta Kano and Creta Kano. What names for a couple of sisters! They sounded like a comedy team. Malta Kano. Creta Kano.

My life was heading in new directions, that was certain. The cat had run away. Strange calls had come from a strange woman. I had met an odd girl and started visiting a vacant house. Noboru Wataya had raped Creta Kano. Malta Kano had predicted I’d find my necktie. Kumiko had told me I didn’t have to work.

I turned off the radio, returned the
Home Journal
to the bookshelf, and drank another cup of coffee.

•

Creta Kano rang the doorbell at one o’clock on the dot. She looked exactly like her picture: a small woman in her early to mid-twenties, the quiet type. She did a remarkable job of preserving the look of the early sixties. She wore her hair in the bouffant style I had seen in the photograph, the ends curled upward. The hair at the forehead was pulled straight back and held in place by a large, glittering barrette. Her eyebrows were sharply outlined in pencil, mascara added mysterious shadows to her eyes, and her lipstick was a perfect re-creation of the kind of color popular back then. She looked ready to belt out “Johnny Angel” if you put a mike in her hand.

She dressed far more simply than she made herself up. Practical and businesslike, her outfit had nothing idiosyncratic about it: a white blouse, a green tight skirt, and no accessories to speak of. She had a white patent-leather bag tucked under her arm and wore sharp-pointed white pumps. The shoes were tiny. Their heels thin and sharp as a pencil lead, they
looked like a doll’s shoes. I almost wanted to congratulate her on having made it this far on them.

So this was Creta Kano. I showed her in, had her sit on the sofa, warmed the coffee, and served her a cup. Had she eaten lunch yet? I asked. She looked hungry to me. No, she said, she had not eaten.

“But don’t bother about me,” she hastened to add. “I don’t eat much of anything for lunch.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s nothing for me to fix a sandwich. Don’t stand on ceremony. I make snacks and things all the time. It’s no trouble at all.”

She responded with little shakes of the head. “It’s very kind of you to offer, but I’m fine, really. Don’t bother. A cup of coffee is more than enough.”

Still, I brought out a plate of cookies just in case. Creta Kano ate four of them with obvious pleasure. I ate two and drank my coffee.

She seemed somewhat more relaxed after the cookies and coffee.

“I am here today as the representative of my elder sister, Malta Kano,” she said. “Creta is not my real name, of course. My real name is Setsuko. I took the name Creta when I began working as my sister’s assistant. For professional purposes. Creta is the ancient name for the island of Crete, but I have no connection with Crete. I have never been there. My sister Malta chose the name to go with her own. Have you been to the island of Crete, by any chance, Mr. Okada?”

Unfortunately not, I said. I had never been to Crete and had no plans to visit it in the near future.

“I would like to go there sometime,” said Creta Kano, nodding, with a deadly serious look on her face. “Crete is the Greek island closest to Africa. It’s a large island, and a great civilization flourished there long ago. My sister Malta has been to Crete as well. She says it’s a wonderful place. The wind is strong, and the honey is delicious. I love honey.”

I nodded. I’m not that crazy about honey.

“I came today to ask you a favor,” said Creta Kano. “I’d like to take a sample of the water in your house.”

“The water?” I asked. “You mean the water from the faucet?”

“That would be fine,” she said. “And if there happens to be a well nearby, I would like a sample of that water also.”

“I don’t think so. I mean, there
is
a well in the neighborhood, but it’s on somebody else’s property, and it’s dry. It doesn’t produce water anymore.”

Creta Kano gave me a complicated look. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Are you sure it doesn’t have any water?”

I recalled the dry thud that the chunk of brick had made when the girl threw it down the well at the vacant house. “Yes, it’s dry, all right. I’m very sure.”

“I see,” said Creta Kano. “That’s fine. I’ll just take a sample of the water from the faucet, then, if you don’t mind.”

I showed her to the kitchen. From her white patent-leather bag she removed two small bottles of the type that might be used for medicine. She filled one with water and tightened the cap with great care. Then she said she wanted to take a sample from the line supplying the bathtub. I showed her to the bathroom. Undistracted by all the underwear and stockings that Kumiko had left drying in there, Creta Kano turned on the faucet and filled the other bottle. After capping it, she turned it upside down to make certain it didn’t leak. The bottle caps were color coded: blue for the bath water, and green for the kitchen water.

Back on the living room sofa, she put the two vials into a small plastic freezer bag and sealed the zip lock. She placed the bag carefully in her white patent-leather bag, the metal clasp of which closed with a dry click. Her hands moved with practiced efficiency. She had obviously done this many times before.

“Thank you very much,” said Creta Kano.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“Yes, for today,” she said. She smoothed her skirt, slipped her bag under her arm, and made as if to stand up.

“Wait a minute,” I said, with some confusion. I hadn’t been expecting her to leave so suddenly. “Wait just a minute, will you, please? My wife wants to know what’s happened with the cat. It’s been gone for almost two weeks now. If you know anything at all, I’d like you to share it with me.”

Still clutching the white bag under her arm, Creta Kano looked at me for a moment, then she gave a few quick nods. When she moved her head, the curled-up ends of her hair bobbed with an early-sixties lightness. Whenever she blinked, her long fake eyelashes moved slowly up and down, like the long-handled fans operated by slaves in movies set in ancient Egypt.

“To tell you the truth, my sister says that this will be a longer story than it seemed at first.”

“A longer story than it seemed?”

The phrase “a longer story” brought to mind a tall stake set in the desert, where nothing else stood as far as the eye could see. As the sun began to sink, the shadow of the stake grew longer and longer, until its tip was too far away to be seen by the naked eye.

“That’s what she says,” Creta Kano continued. “This story will be about more than the disappearance of a cat.”

“I’m confused,” I said. “All we’re asking you to do is help us find the cat. Nothing more. If the cat’s dead, we want to know that for sure. Why does it have to be ‘a longer story’? I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” she said. She brought her hand up to the shiny barrette on her head and pushed it back a little. “But please put your faith in my sister. I’m not saying that she knows everything. But if she says there will be a longer story, you can be sure there will be a longer story.”

I nodded without saying anything. There was nothing more I could say.

Looking directly into my eyes and speaking with a new formality, Creta Kano asked, “Are you busy, Mr. Okada? Do you have any plans for the rest of the afternoon?”

No, I said, I had no plans.

“Would you mind, then, if I told you a few things about myself?” Creta Kano asked. She put the white patent-leather bag she was holding down on the sofa and rested her hands, one atop the other, on her tight green skirt, at the knees. Her nails had been done in a lovely pink color. She wore no rings.

“Please,” I said. “Tell me anything you’d like.” And so the flow of my life—as had been foretold from the moment Creta Kano rang my doorbell—was being led in ever stranger directions.

“I was born on May twenty-ninth,” Creta Kano began her story, “and the night of my twentieth birthday, I resolved to take my own life.”

I put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her. She added cream and gave it a languid stir. No sugar. I drank my coffee black, as always. The clock on the shelf continued its dry rapping on the walls of time.

Creta Kano looked hard at me and said, “I wonder if I should begin at the beginning—where I was born, family life, that kind of thing.”

“Whatever you like. It’s up to you. Whatever you find most comfortable,” I said.

“I was the third of three children,” she said. “Malta and I have an older brother. My father ran his own clinic in Kanagawa Prefecture. The family had nothing you could call domestic problems. I grew up in an ordinary home, the kind you can find anywhere. My parents were very serious people who believed strongly in the value of hard work. They were rather strict with us, but it seems to me they also gave us a fair amount of autonomy where little things were concerned. We were well off, but my parents did not believe in giving their children extra money for frills. I suppose I had a rather frugal upbringing.

“Malta was five years older than I. There had been something different about her from the beginning. She was able to guess things. She’d
know that the patient in room so-and-so had just died, or exactly where they could find a lost wallet, or whatever. Everybody enjoyed this, at first, and often found it useful, but soon it began to bother my parents. They ordered her never to talk about ‘things that did not have a clear basis in fact’ in the presence of other people. My father had his position as head of the hospital to think about. He didn’t want people hearing that his daughter had supernatural powers. Malta put a lock on her mouth after that. Not only did she stop talking about ‘things that did not have a clear basis in fact,’ but she rarely joined in even the most ordinary conversations.

“To me, though, she opened her heart. We grew up very close. She would say, ‘Don’t ever tell anybody I told you this,’ and then she’d say something like, ‘There’s going to be a fire down the street’ or ‘Auntie So-and-so in Setagaya is going to get worse.’ And she was always right. I was still just a little girl, so I thought it was great fun. It never occurred to me to be frightened or to find it eerie. Ever since I can remember, I would always follow my big sister around and expect to hear her ‘messages.’

“These special powers of hers grew stronger as she grew older, but she did not know how to use or nurture them, and this caused her a great deal of anguish. There was no one she could go to for advice, no one she could look up to for guidance. This made her a very lonely teenager. She had to solve everything by herself. She had to find all the answers herself. In our home, she was unhappy. There was never a time when she could find peace in her heart. She had to suppress her own powers and keep them hidden. It was like growing a large, powerful plant in a little pot. It was unnatural. It was wrong. All she knew was that she had to get out of there as soon as possible. She believed that somewhere there was a world that was right for her, a way of life that was right for her. Until she graduated from high school, though, she had to keep herself in check.

“She was determined not to go to college, but rather to go abroad after graduating from high school. My parents had lived a very ordinary life, of course, and they were not prepared to let her do this. So my sister worked hard to raise the money she would need, and then she ran away. The first place she went to was Hawaii. She lived on Kauai for two years. She had read somewhere that Kauai’s north shore had an area with springs that produced marvelous water. Already, back then, my sister had a profound interest in water. She believed that human existence was largely controlled by the elements of water. Which is why she went to live on Kauai. At the time, there was still a hippie commune in the interior of the island.
She lived as a member of the commune. The water there had a great influence on her spiritual powers. By taking that water into her body, she was able to attain a ‘greater harmony’ between her powers and her physical being. She wrote to me, telling me how wonderful this was, and her letters made me very happy. But soon the area could no longer satisfy her. True, it was a beautiful, peaceful land, and the people there sought only spiritual peace, free of material desires, but they were too dependent on sex and drugs. My sister did not need these things. After two years on Kauai, she left.