The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (42 page)

I was crouching down in the total darkness. All I could see was nothingness. And I was part of this nothingness. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of my heart, to the sound of the blood circulating through my body, to the bellows-like contractions of my lungs, to the slippery undulations of my food-starved gut. In the deep darkness, every movement, every throb, was magnified enormously. This was my body: my flesh. But in the darkness, it was all too raw and physical.

Soon my conscious mind began to slip away from my physical body.

I saw myself as the wind-up bird, flying through the summer sky, lighting on the branch of a huge tree somewhere, winding the world’s spring. If there really was no more wind-up bird, someone would have to take on its duties. Someone would have to wind the world’s spring in its place. Otherwise, the spring would run down and the delicately functioning system would grind to a halt. The only one who seemed to have noticed that the wind-up bird was gone, however, was me.

I tried my best to imitate the cry of the wind-up bird in the back of my throat. It didn’t work. All I could produce was a meaningless, ugly sound like the rubbing together of two meaningless, ugly things. Only the real wind-up bird could make the sound. Only the wind-up bird could wind the world’s spring the way it was supposed to be wound.

Still, as a voiceless wind-up bird unable to wind the world’s spring, I decided to go flying through the summer sky—which turned out to be fairly easy. Once you were up, all you had to do was flap your wings at the right angle to adjust direction and altitude. My body mastered the art in a moment and sent me flying effortlessly wherever I wanted to go. I looked at the world from the wind-up bird’s vantage point. Whenever I had had enough flying, I would light on a tree branch and peer through the green leaves at rooftops and roadways. I watched people moving over the ground, carrying on the functions of life. Unfortunately, though, I could not see my own body. This was because I had never once seen the wind-up bird and had no idea what it looked like.

For a long time—how long could it have been?—I remained the wind-up bird. But being the wind-up bird never got me anywhere. The flying part was fun, of course, but I couldn’t go on having fun forever. There was something I had to accomplish down here in the darkness at the bottom of the well. I stopped being the wind-up bird and returned to being myself.

•

May Kasahara paid her second visit a little after three. Three in the afternoon. When she opened half the well, light flooded in overhead—the blinding glare of a summer day. To protect my eyes, so accustomed now to total darkness, I closed them and kept my head down for a while. The mere thought of light up there caused a thin film of tears to ooze.

“Hi there, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Are you still alive? Mr. Wind-Up Bird? Answer if you’re still alive.”

“I’m alive,” I said.

“You must be hungry.”

“I think so.”

“Still just ‘I think so’? It’ll be a while before you starve to death, then. Starving people don’t die so easily, as long as they’ve got water.”

“That’s probably true,” I said, the uncertainty in my voice echoing in the well. The echo probably amplified any hint of anything contained in the voice.

“I know it’s true,” said May Kasahara. “I did a little research in the library this morning. All about hunger and thirst. Did you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, somebody once lived underground for twenty-one days? During the Russian Revolution.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“He must have suffered a lot.”

“Yeah, really.”

“He survived, but he lost all his hair and teeth. Everything. Even if he lived, it must have been terrible.”

“Yeah, really.”

“Even if you lose your teeth and hair, though, I suppose you can live a pretty normal life if you’ve got a decent wig and false teeth.”

“Yeah, and wigs and dentures have made great strides since the time of the Russian Revolution, too. That might make things a little easier.”

“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird …,” said May Kasahara, clearing her throat.

“What?”

“If people lived forever—if they never got any older—if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy—do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way we’re doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less—philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world. I mean—”

May Kasahara cut herself short and remained silent for a while, during which her “I mean” hung in the darkness of the well like a hacked-off fragment of thought. Maybe she had lost the will to say any more. Or maybe she needed time to think of what came next. I just waited in silence for her to continue, my head lowered as from the beginning. The thought crossed my mind that if May Kasahara wanted to kill me right away, it would be no trouble for her at all. She could just drop a big rock down the well. If she tried a few times, one was bound to hit me in the head.

“I mean … this is what I think, but … people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now
because
they know they’re going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? Why would they have to bother? Or even if they
should
bother, they’d probably just figure, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got plenty of time for that. I’ll think about it later.’ But we can’t wait till later. We’ve got to think about it right this second. I might get run over by a truck tomorrow afternoon. And you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird: you might starve to death. One morning three days from now, you could be dead in the bottom of a well. See? Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That’s what I think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and
brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things.”

May Kasahara paused.

“Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird …”

“What?”

“Down there in the darkness, have you been thinking about your own death? About how you would die down there?”

I took a moment to think about her question. “Nope,” I said. “That’s one thing I haven’t been thinking about.”

“Why not?” May Kasahara asked, with a note of disgust, as if she were speaking to a deformed animal. “Why
haven’t
you been thinking about it? You’re literally facing death right now. I’m not kidding around. I told you before, it’s up to
me
whether you live or die.”

“You could drop a rock,” I said.

“A rock? What are you talking about?”

“You could go find a big rock and drop it on me.”

“Well, sure, I could do that.” But she didn’t seem to like the idea. “Anyhow, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you must be starving. It’s just gonna get worse and worse. And you’ll run out of water. So how can you
not
think about death? Don’t you think it’s weird?”

“Yeah, I suppose it’s kind of weird,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking about other things the whole time. I’ll probably think about death, too, when I start to get really hungry. I’ve still got three weeks before I die, right?”

“That’s
if
you have water,” said May Kasahara. “That’s what happened with that Russian guy. He was some big landowner or something. The revolutionary guard threw him down an old mine shaft, but there was water seeping through the wall, so he licked it and kept himself alive. He was in total darkness, just like you. But you don’t have much water, do you?”

“No,” I said honestly. “Just a little left.”

“Then you’d better be careful with it,” said May Kasahara. “Take little sips. And take your time thinking. About death. About how you’re dying. You’ve still got plenty of time.”

“Why are you so determined to make me think about death? What’s in it for you?”

“Nothing’s in it for me,” May Kasahara shot back. “What makes you think there’s anything in it for me for
you
to think about your own death? It’s
your
life. It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m just … interested.”

“Out of curiosity?”

“Yeah. Curiosity. About how people die. About how it feels to die. Curiosity.”

May Kasahara fell silent. When the conversation broke off, a deep stillness filled in the space around me, as if it had been waiting for this opportunity. I wanted to raise my face and look up. To see whether May Kasahara was visible from down here. But the light was too strong. I was sure it would burn my eyes out.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” I said.

“OK. Tell me.”

“My wife had a lover,” I said. “At least I’m pretty sure she did. I never realized it, but for months, while she was still living with me, she was sleeping with this guy. I couldn’t believe it at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced. Now, looking back, I can see there were all kinds of little clues. She’d come home at crazy hours, or she’d flinch when I touched her. But I couldn’t read the signals. I trusted her. I never thought she’d have an affair. It just never occurred to me.”

“Wow,” said May Kasahara.

“So then one day she just left the house and never came back. We had breakfast together that morning. She went off to work in her usual outfit. All she had with her was her handbag, and she picked up a blouse and skirt at the cleaner’s. And that was it. No goodbye. No note. Nothing. Kumiko was gone. Left all her things—clothes and everything. And she’ll probably never come back here—back to me. Not of her own accord, at least. That much I know.”

“Is Kumiko with the other guy now, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. As my head moved slowly through it, the surrounding air felt like some kind of heavy water, without the watery feel. “They probably are together.”

“And so now you’re crushed, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, and that’s why you went down in the well.”

“Of course I was crushed when I realized what was happening. But that’s not why I’m in here. I’m not hiding from reality. Like I said before, I needed a place where I could be alone and concentrate on my thinking. Where and how did my relationship with Kumiko go wrong? That’s what I can’t understand. Not that I’m saying everything was perfect until that point. A man and a woman in their twenties, with two distinct personalities, just happen to meet somewhere and start living together. There’s not a married couple anywhere without their problems. But I thought we
were doing OK, basically, that any little problems would solve themselves over time. But I was wrong. I was missing something big, making some kind of mistake on a really basic level, I suppose. That’s what I came in here to think about.”

May Kasahara said nothing. I swallowed once.

“I wonder if this’ll make any sense to you: When we got married, six years ago, the two of us were trying to make a brand-new world—like building a new house on an empty lot. We had this clear image of what we wanted. We didn’t need a fancy house or anything, just something to keep the weather out, as long as the two of us could be together. We didn’t need any extras. Things would just get in the way. It all seemed so simple to us. Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

“Sure,” said May Kasahara. “I feel that way all the time.”

“Well, that’s what we were trying to do when we got married. I wanted to get outside myself: the me that had existed until then. And it was the same for Kumiko. In that new world of ours, we were trying to get hold of new selves that were better suited to who we were deep down. We believed we could live in a way that was more perfectly suited to who we were.”

May Kasahara seemed to shift her center of gravity in the light somewhat. I could sense her movement. She seemed to be waiting for me to continue. But I had nothing more to say at that point. Nothing came to mind. I felt tired from the sound of my own voice in the concrete tube of the well.

“Does this make any sense to you?” I asked.

“Sure it does.”

“What do you think about it?”

“Hey, I’m still a kid, ya know. I don’t know anything about marriage. I don’t know what was in your wife’s mind when she started fooling around with another man or when she left you. But from what you just told me, I think you kinda had the wrong idea from the very beginning. You know what I mean, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? What you were just talking about … I don’t know, it’s kind of impossible for anybody to
do
that stuff, like, ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new world’ or ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new self.’ That’s what I think. You might
think
you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi.’ You don’t seem to realize that. You were made somewhere
else. And even this
idea
you have of remaking yourself: even
that
was made somewhere else. Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You’re a grown-up, aren’t you? How come you don’t get it? That’s a
big problem
, if you ask me. And that’s what you’re being punished for—by all kinds of things: by the world you tried to get rid of, or by the self you tried to get rid of. Do you see what I’m saying?”

I remained silent, staring at the darkness that enveloped my feet. I didn’t know what to say.

“OK, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said softly. “You go ahead and think. Think. Think.”

The cover snapped into place, and the well opening was blocked once again.

•

I took the canteen from my knapsack and gave it a shake. The light sloshing sound echoed in the darkness. Maybe a quarter left. I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes. May Kasahara was probably right. This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.