The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (51 page)

“Not bad at all,” I said. “Kind of sudden, maybe, but not a bad beginning.”

Creta Kano smiled at me. When I thought about it, I realized this was the first time she had ever done so. It made me feel that, to some extent, history was beginning to head in the right direction. “We still have time,” she said. “Even if I hurry, it will take me at least two weeks to get ready. Please use the time to think it over, Mr. Okada. I don’t know if there is anything I can give you. It seems to me that I don’t have anything to give at this point in time. I am quite literally empty. I am just getting started, putting some contents into this empty container little by little. I can give you myself, Mr. Okada, if you say that is good enough for you. I believe we can help each other.”

I nodded. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’m very pleased that you made me this offer, and I think it would be great if we could go together. I really do. But I’ve got a lot of things I have to think about and a lot of things I have to straighten out.”

“And if, in the end, you say you don’t want to go to Crete, don’t worry. I won’t be hurt. I will be sorry, but I want your honest answer.”

•

Creta Kano stayed in my house again that night. As the sun was going down, she invited me out for a stroll in the neighborhood park. I decided to forget about my bruise and leave the house. What was the point of worrying about such things? We walked for an hour in the pleasant summer evening, then came home and ate.

After our supper, Creta Kano said she wanted to sleep with me. She wanted to have physical sex with me, she said. This was so sudden, I didn’t know what to do, which is exactly what I said to her: “This is so sudden. I don’t know what to do.”

Looking directly at me, Creta Kano said, “Whether or not you go with me to Crete, Mr. Okada, entirely separately from that, I want you to take me one time—just one time—as a prostitute. I want you to buy my flesh. Here. Tonight. It will be my last time. I will cease to be a prostitute, whether of the flesh or of the mind. I will abandon the name of Creta Kano as well. In order to do that, however, I want to have a clearly visible point of demarcation, something that says, ‘It ends here.’ ”

“I understand your wanting a point of demarcation, but why do you have to sleep with me?”

“Don’t you see, Mr. Okada? By sleeping with the real you, by joining
my body with yours in reality, I want to pass through you, this person called Mr. Okada. By doing that, I want to be liberated from this defilementlike something inside me. That will be the point of demarcation.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t buy people’s flesh.”

Creta Kano bit her lip. “How about this, then? Instead of money, give me some of your wife’s clothing. And shoes. We’ll make that the pro forma price of my flesh. That should be all right, don’t you think? Then I will be saved.”

“Saved. By which you mean that you will be liberated from the defilement that Noboru Wataya left inside you?”

“Yes, that is exactly what I mean,” said Creta Kano.

I stared at her. Without false eyelashes, Creta Kano’s face had a much more childish look. “Tell me,” I said, “who is this Noboru Wataya guy, really? He’s my wife’s brother, but I hardly know him. What is he thinking? What does he want? All I know for sure is that he and I hate each other.”

“Noboru Wataya is a person who belongs to a world that is the exact opposite of yours,” said Creta Kano. Then she seemed to be searching for the words she needed to continue. “In a world where you are losing everything, Mr. Okada, Noboru Wataya is gaining everything. In a world where you are rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why he hates you so intensely.”

“I don’t get it. Why would he even notice that I’m alive? He’s famous, he’s powerful. Compared to him, I’m an absolute zero. Why does he have to take the time and trouble to bother hating me?”

Creta Kano shook her head. “Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of. Please be careful, Mr. Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult thing in the world to shake off.”

“And you were able to feel it, weren’t you?—the root of the hatred that was in Noboru Wataya’s heart.”

“Yes, I was. I am,” said Creta Kano. “That is the thing that split my flesh in two, that defiled me, Mr. Okada. Which is why I do not want him to be my last customer as a prostitute. Do you understand?”

That night I went to bed with Creta Kano. I took off what she was wearing of Kumiko’s and joined my body with hers. Quietly and gently. It
felt like an extension of my dream, as if I were re-creating exactly, in reality, the very acts I had performed with Creta Kano in my dream. Her body was real and alive. But there was something missing: the clear sense that this was actually happening. Several times the illusion overtook me that I was doing this with Kumiko, not Creta Kano. I was sure I would wake up the moment I came. But I did not wake up. I came inside her. It was reality. True reality. But each time I recognized that fact, reality felt a little less real. Reality was coming undone and moving away from reality, one small step at a time. But still, it was reality.

“Mr. Okada,” said Creta Kano, with her arms wrapped around my back, “let’s go to Crete together. This is not the place for us anymore: not for you and not for me. We have to go to Crete. If you stay here, something bad is going to happen to you. I know it. I am sure of it.”

“Something bad?”

“Something very, very bad,” Creta Kano prophesied—in a small but penetrating voice, like the prophet bird that lived in the forest.

“Hello, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said the woman’s voice. Pressing the receiver against my ear, I looked at my watch. Four o’clock in the afternoon. When the phone rang, I had been asleep on the sofa, drenched in sweat. It had been a short, unpleasant nap. And now there remained with me the physical sensation of someone’s having been sitting on top of me the whole time I was asleep. Whoever it was had waited until I was asleep, come to sit on top of me, and gotten up and gone away just before I woke.

“Hel-looo,” cooed the woman’s voice in a near whisper. The sound seemed to have to pass through some extra-thin air to reach me. “This is May Kasahara calling.…”

“Hey,” I tried to say, but my mouth still wasn’t moving the way I wanted it to. The word may have come out sounding to her like some kind of groan.

“What are you doing now?” she asked, in an insinuating tone.

“Nothing,” I said, moving the mouthpiece away to clear my throat. “Nothing. Napping.”

“Did I wake you?”

“Sure you did. But that’s OK. It was just a nap.”

May Kasahara seemed to hesitate a moment. Then she said, “How about it, Mr. Wind-Up Bird: would you come over to my house?”

I closed my eyes. In the darkness hovered lights of different colors and shapes.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“I’m sunbathing in the yard, so just let yourself in from the back.”

“OK.”

“Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, are you mad at me?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Anyhow, I’m going to take a shower and change, and then I’ll come over. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

I took a quick cold shower to clear my head, turned on the hot water to wash, and finished off cold again. This did manage to wake me up, but my body still felt dull and heavy. My legs would begin trembling, and at several points during my shower I had to grab the towel bar or sit on the edge of the tub. Maybe I was more fatigued than I had thought.

After I stepped out of the shower and wiped myself down, I brushed my teeth and looked at myself in the mirror. The dark-blue mark was still there on my right cheek, neither darker nor lighter than before. My eyeballs had a network of tiny red lines, and there were dark circles under my eyes. My cheeks looked sunken, and my hair was in need of a trim. I looked like a fresh corpse that had just come back to life and dug its way out of the grave.

I put on a T-shirt and short pants, a hat and dark glasses. Out in the alley, I found that the hot day was far from over. Everything alive aboveground—everything visible—was gasping in hopes of a sudden shower, but there was no hint of a cloud in the sky. A blanket of hot, stagnant air enveloped the alley. The place was deserted, as always. Good. On a hot day like this, and with my face looking so awful, I didn’t want to meet anyone.

In the yard of the empty house, the bird sculpture was glaring at the sky, as usual, its beak held aloft. It looked far more grimy than when I had last seen it, more worn down. And there was something more strained in its gaze. It seemed to be staring hard at some extraordinarily depressing sight that was floating in the sky. If only it could have done so, the bird would have liked to avert its gaze, but with its eyes locked in place the way they were, it had no choice except to look. The tall weeds surrounding the sculpture remained motionless, like a chorus in a Greek tragedy waiting breathlessly for an oracle to be handed down. The TV antenna on the roof apathetically thrust its silver feelers into the suffocating heat. Under the harsh summer light, everything was dried out and exhausted.

After I had surveyed the yard of the vacant house, I walked into May Kasahara’s yard. The oak tree cast a cool-looking shadow over the lawn, but May Kasahara had obviously avoided that, to stretch out in the harsh sunlight. She lay on her back in a deck chair, wearing an incredibly tiny chocolate-colored bikini, its little cloth patches held in place by bits of string. I couldn’t help wondering if a person could actually swim in a thing like that. She wore the same sunglasses she had on when we first met, and large beads of sweat dotted her face. Under her deck chair she had a white beach towel, a container of suntan cream, and a few magazines. Two empty Sprite cans lay nearby, one apparently serving as an ashtray. A plastic hose with a sprinkler lay out on the lawn, where no one had bothered to reel it in after its last use.

When I drew near, May Kasahara sat up and reached out to turn off her radio. She had a far deeper tan than last time. This was no ordinary tan from a weekend at the beach. Every bit of her body—literally from head to toe—had been beautifully roasted. Sunning was all she did here all day, it seemed—including the whole time I was in the well, no doubt. I took a moment to glance at the yard. It looked pretty much as it had before, the broad lawn well manicured, the pond still unfilled and looking parched enough to make you thirsty.

I sat on the deck chair next to hers and took a lemon drop from my pocket. The heat had caused the paper wrapper to stick to the candy.

May Kasahara looked at me for some time without saying anything. “What happened to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? What’s that mark on your face? It is a mark, isn’t it?”

“I think it is. Probably. But I don’t know how it happened. I looked—and there it was.”

May Kasahara raised herself on one elbow and stared at my face. She brushed away the drops of sweat beside her nose and gave her sunglasses a little push up to where they belonged. The dark lenses all but hid her eyes.

“You have no idea at all? No clue where it happened or how it happened?”

“None at all.”

“None?”

“I got out of the well, and a little while later I looked in the mirror, and there it was. Really. That’s all.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t itch. It
is
a little warm, though.”

“Did you go to the doctor?”

I shook my head. “It’d probably be a waste of time.”

“Probably,” said May Kasahara. “I hate doctors too.”

I took off my hat and sunglasses and used my handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my forehead. The armpits of my gray T-shirt were already black with sweat.

“Great bikini,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“Looks like they put it together from scraps—making the maximum use of our limited natural resources.”

“I take off the top when everybody’s out.”

“Well, well,” I said.

“Not that there’s all that much underneath to uncover,” she said, as if by way of excuse.

True, the breasts inside her bikini top were still small and undeveloped. “Have you ever swum in that thing?” I asked.

“Never. I don’t know how to swim. How about you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

“Yeah, I can swim.”

“How far?”

“Far.”

“Ten kilometers?”

“Probably.… Nobody home now?”

“They left yesterday, for our summer house in Izu. They all want to go swimming for the weekend. ‘All’ is my parents and my little brother.”

“Not you?”

She gave a tiny shrug. Then she took her Hope regulars and matches from the folds of her beach towel and lit up.

“You look terrible, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”