The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (18 page)

“Please don’t hate me for this,” she said. “My electricity is just so low I can’t help it.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand.”

I knew I should call home, but what could I have said to Kumiko? I didn’t want to lie, but I knew it would be impossible for me to explain to her what was happening. And after a while, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Whatever happened would happen. I left her apartment at two o’clock and didn’t get home until three. It was tough finding a cab.

Kumiko was furious, of course. She was sitting at the kitchen table, wide awake, waiting for me. I said I had been out drinking and playing mah-jongg with the guys from the office. Why couldn’t I have made a simple phone call? she demanded. It had never crossed my mind, I said. She was not convinced, and the lie became apparent almost immediately. I hadn’t played mah-jongg in years, and I just wasn’t cut out for lying in any case. I ended up confessing the truth. I told her the entire story from beginning to end—without the erection part, of course—maintaining that I had done nothing with the woman.

Kumiko refused to speak to me for three days. Literally. Not a word. She slept in the other room, and she ate her meals alone. This was the greatest crisis our marriage had faced. She was genuinely angry with me, and I understood exactly how she felt.

After her three days of silence, Kumiko asked me, “What would
you
think if you were in
my
position?” These were the very first words she spoke. “What if I had come home at three o’clock Sunday morning without so much as a telephone call? ‘I’ve been in bed with a man all this time, but don’t worry, I didn’t do anything, please believe me. I was just
recharging his batteries. OK, great, let’s have breakfast and go to sleep.’ You mean to say you wouldn’t get angry, you’d just believe me?”

I kept quiet.

“And what you did was even worse than that,” Kumiko continued. “You
lied
to me! You said you were drinking and playing mah-jongg. A total lie! How do you expect me to believe you didn’t sleep with her?”

“I’m sorry I lied,” I said. “I should never have done that. But the only reason I lied was because the truth was so difficult to explain. I want you to believe me: I really didn’t do anything wrong.”

Kumiko put her head down on the table. I felt as if the air in the room were gradually thinning out.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “I can’t explain it other than to ask you to believe me.”

“All right. If you want me to believe you, I will,” she said. “But I want
you
to remember this: I’m probably going to do the same thing to you someday. And when that time comes, I want
you
to believe
me
. I have that right.”

Kumiko had never exercised that right. Every once in a while, I imagined how I would feel if she did exercise it. I would probably believe her, but my reaction would no doubt be as complex and as difficult to deal with as Kumiko’s. To think that she had made a point of doing such a thing—and for what? Which was exactly how she must have felt about me back then.

•

“Mr. Wind-Up Bird!” came a voice from the garden. It was May Kasahara.

Still toweling my hair, I went out to the veranda. She was sitting on the edge, biting a thumbnail. She wore the same dark sunglasses as when I had first met her, plus cream-colored cotton pants and a black polo shirt. In her hand was a clipboard.

“I climbed it,” she said, pointing to the cinder-block wall. Then she brushed away the dirt clinging to her pants. “I kinda figured I had the right place. I’m glad it was yours! Think if I had come over the wall into the wrong house!”

She took a pack of Hope regulars from her pocket and lit up.

“Anyhow, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, how are you?”

“OK, I guess.”

“I’m going to work now,” she said. “Why don’t you come along? We work in teams of two, and it’d be
sooo
much better for me to have somebody I know. Some new guy’d ask me all kinds of questions—‘How old
are you? Why aren’t you in school?’ It’s such a pain! Or maybe he’d turn out to be a pervert. It happens, you know! Do it for me, will you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

“Is it that job you told me about—some kind of survey for a toupee maker?”

“That’s it,” she said. “All you have to do is count bald heads on the Ginza from one to four. It’s easy! And it’ll be good for you. You’ll be bald someday too, the way you’re going, so you better check it out now while you still have hair.”

“Yeah, but how about you? Isn’t the truant officer going to get you if they see you doing this stuff on the Ginza in the middle of the day?”

“Nah. I just tell ’em it’s fieldwork for social studies. It always works.”

With no plans for the afternoon, I decided to tag along. May Kasahara phoned her company to say we would be coming in. On the telephone, she turned into a very proper young woman: Yes, sir, I would like to team up with him, yes, that is correct, thank you very much, yes, I understand, yes, we can be there after noon. I left a note for Kumiko saying I would be back by six, in case she got home early, then I left the house with May Kasahara.

The toupee company was in Shimbashi. On the subway, May Kasahara explained how the survey worked. We were to stand on a street corner and count all the bald men (or those with thinning hair) who walked by. We were to classify them according to the degree of their baldness: C, those whose hair might have thinned somewhat; B, those who had lost a lot; and A, those who were really bald. May took a pamphlet from her folder and showed me examples of the three stages.

“You get the idea pretty much, right, which heads fit which categories? I won’t go into detail. It’d take all day. But you get it pretty much, right, which is which?”

“Pretty much,” I said, without exuding a great deal of confidence.

On May Kasahara’s other side sat an overweight company type—a very definite B—who kept glancing uneasily at the pamphlet, but she seemed not to notice how nervous this was making him.

“I’ll be in charge of putting them into categories, and you stand next to me with a survey sheet. You put them in A, B, or C, depending on what I tell you. That’s all there is to it. Easy, right?”

“I guess so,” I said. “But what’s the point of taking a survey like this?”

“I dunno,” she said. “They’re doing them all over Tokyo—in Shinjuku, Shibuya, Aoyama. Maybe they’re trying to find out which neighborhood
has the most bald men? Or they want to know the proportions of A, B, and C types in the population? Who knows? They’ve got so much money, they don’t know what to do with it. So they can waste it on stuff like this. Profits are huge in the wig business. The employees get
much
bigger bonuses than in just any old company. Know why?”

“No. Why?”

“Wigs don’t last long. Bet you didn’t know: toupees are good for two, maybe three years max. The better made they are, the faster they get used up. They’re the ultimate consumer product. It’s ’cause they fit so tightly against the scalp: the hair underneath gets thinner than ever. Once that happens, you have to buy a new one to get that perfect fit again. And think about it: What if you were using a toupee and it was no good after two years—what would go through your mind? Would you think, OK, my wig’s worn out. Can’t wear it anymore. But it’ll cost too much to buy a new one, so tomorrow I’ll start going to work without one? Is that what you’d think?”

I shook my head. “Probably not,” I said.

“Of course not. Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It’s, like, his fate. That’s why the wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they’re like drug dealers. Once they get their hooks into a guy, he’s a customer for life. Have you ever heard of a bald guy suddenly growing a head of hair?
I
never have. A wig’s got to cost half a million yen at least, maybe a million for a tough one. And you need a new one every two years! Wow! Even a car lasts longer than that—four or five years. And then you can trade it in!”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

“Plus, the wig makers run their own hairstyling salons. They wash the wigs and cut the customers’ real hair. I mean, think about it: you can’t just plunk yourself down in an ordinary barber’s chair, rip off your wig, and say, ‘I’d like a trim,’ can you? The income from these places alone is tremendous.”

“You know all kinds of things,” I said, with genuine admiration. The B-category company type next to May was listening to our conversation with obvious fascination.

“Sure,” she said. “The guys at the office like me. They tell me everything. The profits in this business are huge. They make the wigs in Southeast Asia and places like that, where labor is cheap. They even get the hair there—in Thailand or the Philippines. The women sell their hair to the wig companies. That’s how they earn their dowries in some places. The
whole world’s so weird! The guy sitting next to you might actually be wearing the hair of some woman in Indonesia.”

By reflex, I and the B-man looked around at the others in the car.

•

We stopped off at the company’s Shimbashi office to pick up an envelope containing survey sheets and pencils. This company supposedly had a number two market share, but it was utterly discreet, without even a name plaque at the entrance, so that customers could come and go with ease. Neither the envelope nor the survey sheets bore the company name. At the survey department, I filled out a part-time worker’s registration form with my name, address, educational background, and age. This office was an incredibly quiet place of business. There was no one shouting into the telephone, no one banging away at a computer keyboard with sleeves rolled up. Each individual worker was neatly dressed and pursuing his or her own task with quiet concentration. As might be expected at a toupee maker’s office, not one man here was bald. Some might even be wearing the company’s product, but it was impossible for me to tell those who were from those who weren’t. Of all the companies I had ever visited, this had the strangest ambience.

We took the subway to the Ginza. Early and hungry, we stopped at the Dairy Queen for a hamburger.

“Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara, “would you wear a toupee if you were bald?”

“I wonder,” I said. “I don’t like things that take time and trouble. I probably wouldn’t try to fight it if I went bald.”

“Good,” she said, wiping the ketchup from her mouth with a paper napkin. “That’s the way. Bald men never look as bad as they think. To me, it’s nothing to get so upset about.”

“I wonder,” I said.

•

For the next three hours, we sat at the subway entrance by the Wako Building, counting the bald-headed men who passed by. Looking down at the heads going up and down the subway stairs was the most accurate method of determining the degree of baldness of any one head. May Kasahara would say “A” or “B” or “C,” and I would write it down. She had obviously done this many times. She never fumbled or hesitated or corrected herself, but assigned each head to its proper category with great speed and precision, uttering the letters in low, clipped tones so as not to be noticed by the passersby. This called for some rapid-fire naming whenever
a large group of bald heads passed by at once: “CCBABCAACCBBB.” At one point, an elegant-looking old gentleman (who himself possessed a full head of snow-white hair) stopped to watch us in action. “Pardon me,” he said to me after a while, “but might I ask what you two are doing?”

“Survey,” I said.

“What kind of survey?” he asked.

“Social studies,” I said.

“CACABC,” said May Kasahara.

The old gentleman seemed less than convinced, but he went on watching us until he gave up and wandered off somewhere.

When the Mitsukoshi clock across the street signaled four o’clock, we ended our survey and went back to the Dairy Queen for a cup of coffee. It had not been strenuous work, but I found my neck and shoulders strangely stiff. Maybe it was from the covert nature of the job, a guilty feeling I had about counting bald men in secret. All the time we were on the subway heading back to company headquarters in Shimbashi, I found myself automatically assigning each bald head I saw to category A or B or C, which almost made me queasy. I tried to stop myself, but by then a kind of momentum had set in. We handed in our survey forms and received our pay—rather good pay for the amount of time and effort involved. I signed a receipt and put the money in my pocket. May Kasahara and I rode the subway to Shinjuku and from there took the Odakyu Line home. The afternoon rush hour was starting. This was my first ride on a crowded train in some time, but it hardly filled me with nostalgia.

“Pretty good job, don’t you think?” said May Kasahara, standing next to me on the train. “It’s easy, pay’s not bad.”

“Pretty good,” I said, sucking on a lemon drop.

“Go with me next time? We can do it once a week.”

“Why not?” I said.

“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” May Kasahara said after a short silence, as if a thought had suddenly come to her, “I bet the reason people are afraid of going bald is because it makes them think of the end of life. I mean, when your hair starts to thin, it must feel as if your life is being worn away … as if you’ve taken a giant step in the direction of death, the last Big Consumption.”

I thought about it for a while. “That’s one way to look at it, I’m sure,” I said.

“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, I sometimes wonder what it must feel like to die little by little over a long period of time. What do you think?”

Unsure exactly what she was getting at, I changed my grip on the hand strap and looked into her eyes. “Can you give me a concrete example of what you mean by that—to die little by little?”

“Well … I don’t know. You’re trapped in the dark all alone, with nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and little by little you die.…”

“It must be terrible,” I said. “Painful. I wouldn’t want to die like that if I could help it.”

“But finally, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, isn’t that just what life is? Aren’t we all trapped in the dark somewhere, and they’ve taken away our food and water, and we’re slowly dying, little by little …?”