The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (39 page)

There was a growing touch of impatience in her words. The moment had arrived to end this conversation. It was after one o’clock in the morning. I reached across the table and took her hand.

“You know,” said Kumiko, “I kind of wish you’d let me decide this for myself. I realize it’s a big problem for both of us. I really do. But this one
I want you to let
me
decide. I feel bad that I can’t explain very well what I’m thinking and feeling.”

“Basically, I think the right to make the decision is yours,” I said, “and I respect that right.”

“I think there’s a month or so left to decide. We’ve been talking about this together all along now, and I think I have a pretty good idea how you feel about it. So now let me do the thinking. Let’s stop talking about it for a while.”

•

I was in Hokkaido when Kumiko had the abortion. The firm never sent its lackeys out of town on business, but on that particular occasion no one else could go, so I ended up being the one sent north. I was supposed to deliver a briefcase stuffed with papers, give the other party a simple explanation, take delivery of their papers, and come straight home. The papers were too important to mail or entrust to some courier. Because all return flights to Tokyo were full, I would have to spend a night in a Sapporo business hotel. Kumiko went for the abortion that day, alone. She phoned me after ten at the hotel and said, “I had the operation this afternoon. Sorry to be informing you after the fact like this, but they had an opening on short notice, and I thought it would be easier on both of us if I made the decision and took care of it by myself while you were away.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Whatever you think is best.”

“I want to tell you more, but I can’t do it yet. I think I’ll have to tell you sometime.”

“We can talk when I get back.”

After the call, I put on my coat and went out to wander through the streets of Sapporo. It was still early March, and both sides of the roadways were lined with high mounds of snow. The air was almost painfully cold, and your breath would come out in white clouds that vanished in an instant. People wore heavy coats and gloves and scarves wrapped up to their chins and made their way down the icy sidewalks with careful steps. Taxis ran back and forth, their studded tires scratching at the road. When I couldn’t stand the cold any longer, I stepped into a bar for a few quick straights and went out to walk some more.

I stayed on the move for a very long time. Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance. The second bar I visited was below street level. It turned out to be a much bigger place than the entrance suggested. There was a small stage
next to the bar, and on it was a slim man with glasses, playing a guitar and singing. He sat on a metal chair with his legs crossed, guitar case at his feet.

I sat at the bar, drinking and half listening to the music. Between songs, the man explained that the music was all his own. In his late twenties, he had a face with no distinguishing characteristics, and he wore glasses with black plastic frames. His outfit consisted of jeans, high lace-up boots, and a checked flannel work shirt that hung loose around his waist. The type of music was hard to define—something that might have been called “folk” in the old days, though a Japanese version of folk. Simple chords, simple melodies, unremarkable words. Not the kind of stuff I’d go out of my way to listen to.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have paid any attention to music like that. I would have had my whiskey, paid my bill, and left the place. But that night I was chilled, right to the bone, and had no intention of going outside again under any circumstances until I had warmed up all the way through. I drank one straight and ordered another. I made no attempt to remove my coat or my scarf. When the bartender asked if I wanted a snack, I ordered some cheese and ate a single slice. I tried to think, but I couldn’t get my head to work right. I didn’t even know what it was I wanted to think about. I was a vacant room. Inside, the music produced only a dry, hollow echo.

When the man finished singing, there was scattered applause, neither overly enthusiastic nor entirely perfunctory. There were no more than ten or fifteen customers in the place. The fellow stood and bowed. He seemed to make some kind of funny remarks that caused a few of the customers to laugh. I called the bartender and ordered my third whiskey. Then, finally, I took off my coat and my scarf.

“That concludes my show for tonight,” announced the singer. He seemed to pause and survey the room. “But there must be some of you here tonight who didn’t like my songs. For you, I’ve got a little something extra. I don’t do this all the time, so you should consider yourselves very lucky.”

He set his guitar on the floor and, from the guitar case, took a single thick white candle. He lit it with a match, dripped some wax into a plate, and stood the candle up. Then, looking like the Greek philosopher, he held the plate aloft. “Can I have the lights down, please?” One of the employees dimmed the lights somewhat. “A little darker, if you don’t mind.” Now the place became much darker, and the candle flame stood out
clearly. Palms wrapped around my whiskey glass to warm it, I kept my eyes on the man and his candle.

“As you are well aware,” the man continued, his voice soft but penetrating, “in the course of life we experience many kinds of pain. Pains of the body and pains of the heart. I know I have experienced pain in many different forms in my life, and I’m sure you have too. In most cases, though, I’m sure you’ve found it very difficult to convey the truth of that pain to another person: to explain it in words. People say that only they themselves can understand the pain they are feeling. But is this true? I for one do not believe that it is. If, before our eyes, we see someone who is truly suffering, we do sometimes feel his suffering and pain as our own. This is the power of empathy. Am I making myself clear?”

He broke off and looked around the room once again.

“The reason that people sing songs for other people is because they want to have the power to arouse empathy, to break free of the narrow shell of the self and share their pain and joy with others. This is not an easy thing to do, of course. And so tonight, as a kind of experiment, I want you to experience a simpler, more physical kind of empathy.”

Everyone in the place was hushed now, all eyes fixed on the stage. Amid the silence, the man stared off into space, as if to insert a pause or to reach a state of mental concentration. Then, without a word, he held his left hand over the lighted candle. Little by little, he brought the palm closer and closer to the flame. Someone in the audience made a sound like a sigh or a moan. You could see the tip of the flame burning the man’s palm. You could almost hear the sizzle of the flesh. A woman released a hard little scream. Everyone else just watched in frozen horror. The man endured the pain, his face distorted in agony. What the hell was this? Why did he have to do such a stupid, senseless thing? I felt my mouth going dry. After five or six seconds of this, he slowly removed his hand from the flame and set the dish with the candle in it on the floor. Then he clasped his hands together, the right and left palms pressed against each other.

“As you have seen tonight, ladies and gentlemen, pain can actually burn a person’s flesh,” said the man. His voice sounded exactly as it had earlier: quiet, steady, cool. No trace of suffering remained on his face. Indeed, it had been replaced by a faint smile. “And the pain that must have been there, you have been able to feel as if it were your own. That is the power of empathy.”

The man slowly parted his clasped hands. From between them he
produced a thin red scarf, which he opened for all to see. Then he stretched his palms out toward the audience. There were no burns at all. A moment of silence followed, and then people expressed their relief in wild applause. The lights came up, and the chatter of voices replaced the tension that had filled the room. As if the whole thing had never happened, the man put his guitar into the case, stepped down from the stage, and disappeared.

When I paid my check, I asked the girl at the register if the man sang here often and whether he usually performed the trick.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “As far as I know, this was his first time here. I never heard of him until today. And nobody told me he did magic tricks. Wasn’t that amazing, though? I wonder how he does it. I bet he’d be a hit on TV.”

“It’s true,” I said. “It looked like he was really burning himself.”

I walked back to the hotel, and the minute I got into bed, sleep came for me as if it had been waiting all this time. As I drifted off, I thought of Kumiko, but she seemed very far away, and after that it was impossible for me to think of anything. Through my mind flashed the face of the man burning his palm. He really seemed to be burning himself, I thought. And then I fell asleep.

Before dawn, in the bottom of the well, I had a dream. But it was not a dream. It was some kind of something that happened to take the form of a dream.

I was walking alone. The face of Noboru Wataya was being projected on the screen of a large television in the center of a broad lobby. His speech had just begun. He wore a tweed suit, striped shirt, and navy-blue necktie. His hands were folded atop the table before him, and he was talking into the camera. A large map of the world hung on the wall behind him. There must have been over a hundred people in the lobby, and each and every one of them stopped what they were doing to listen to him, with serious expressions on their faces. Noboru Wataya was about to announce something that would determine people’s fate.

I, too, stopped and looked at the television screen. In practiced—but utterly sincere—tones, Noboru Wataya was addressing millions of people he could not see. That unbearable something I always felt when I was face-to-face with him was now hidden in some deep, invisible place. He spoke in his uniquely persuasive style—the carefully timed pauses, the ringing of the voice, the variety of facial expressions, all giving rise to a strangely effective sense of reality. Noboru Wataya seemed to have been growing more polished as an orator with each day that passed. Much as I hated to, I had to grant him that.

“And so you see, my friends,” he was saying, “everything is both complicated and simple. This is the fundamental rule that governs the world. We must never forget it. Things that appear to be complicated—and that, in fact,
are
complicated—are very simple where motives are concerned. It is just a matter of
what we are looking for
. Motive is the root of desire, so to speak. The important thing is to seek out the root. Dig beneath the complicated surface of reality. And keep on digging. Then dig even more until you come to the very tip of the root. If you will only do that”—and here he gestured toward the map—“everything will eventually come clear. That is how the world works. The stupid ones can never break free of the apparent complexity. They grope through the darkness, searching for the exit, and die before they are able to comprehend a single thing about the way of the world. They have lost all sense of direction. They might as well be deep in a forest or down in a well. And the reason they have lost all sense of direction is because they do not comprehend the fundamental principles. They have nothing in their heads but garbage and rocks. They understand nothing. Nothing at all. They can’t tell front from back, top from bottom, north from south. Which is why they can never break free of the darkness.”

Noboru Wataya paused at that point to give his words time to sink into the minds of his audience.

“But let’s forget about people like that,” he went on. “If people want to lose all sense of direction, the best thing that you and I can do is let them. We have more important things to do.”

The more I heard, the angrier I became, until my anger was almost choking me. He was pretending to talk to the world at large, but in fact he was talking to me alone. And he must have had some kind of twisted, distorted motive for doing so. But nobody else realized that. Which is precisely why Noboru Wataya was able to exploit the gigantic system of television in order to send me secret messages. In my pockets, I clenched my hands into fists, but there was no way I could vent my anger. And my inability to share this anger with anybody in the lobby aroused in me a profound sense of isolation.

The place was filled with people straining to catch every word that Noboru Wataya spoke. I cut across the lobby and headed straight for a corridor that connected with the guest rooms. The faceless man was standing there. As I approached, he looked at me with that faceless face of his. Then, soundlessly, he moved to block my way.

“This is the wrong time,” he said. “You don’t belong here now.”

But the deep, slashing pain from Noboru Wataya now urged me on. I reached out and pushed the faceless man aside. He wobbled like a shadow and fell away.

“I’m saying this for your sake,” he called from behind me, his every word lodging in my back like a piece of shrapnel. “If you go any farther, you won’t be able to come back. Do you understand?”