The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (56 page)

The number of individual human beings who voiced concern about the sudden appearance of a mark on my cheek was exactly four: the owner of the cleaning shop by the station, my barber, the young man from the Omura liquor store, and the woman at the counter of the neighborhood library. In each case, when asked about it, I made a show of annoyance and said something vague, like, “I had a little accident.” They would mumble, “My, my” or “That’s too bad,” as if apologizing for having mentioned it.

I seemed to be growing more distant from myself with each day that went by. If I stared at my hand for a while, I would begin to feel that I was looking through it. I spoke with almost no one. No one wrote to me or called. All I found in my mailbox were utility bills and junk mail, and
most of the junk mail consisted of designer-brand catalogs addressed to Kumiko, full of colorful photos of spring dresses and blouses and skirts. The winter was a cold one, but I sometimes forgot to turn on the heat, unsure whether the cold was real or just something inside me. I would throw the switch only after a look at the thermometer had convinced me that it really was cold, but even so, the cold I felt did not diminish.

•

I wrote to Lieutenant Mamiya with a general description of what had been happening to me. He might be more embarrassed than pleased to receive the letter, but I couldn’t think of anyone else I could write to. I opened with that exact apology. Then I told him that Kumiko left me on the very day he had visited my house, that she had been sleeping with another man for some months, that I had spent close to three days in the bottom of a well, thinking, that I was now living here all alone, and that the keepsake from Mr. Honda had been nothing but an empty whiskey box.

Lieutenant Mamiya sent me an answer a week later.

To tell you the truth, you have been in my thoughts to an almost strange degree since we last met. I left your home feeling that we really ought to go on talking, to “spill our guts” to each other, so to speak, and the fact that we did not has been no small source of regret to me. Unfortunately, however, some urgent business had come up, which required me to return to Hiroshima that night. Thus, in a certain sense, I was very glad to have had the opportunity to receive a letter from you. I wonder if it was not Mr. Honda’s intention all along to bring the two of us together. Perhaps he believed that it would be good for me to meet you and for you to meet me. The division of keepsakes may well have been an excuse to have me visit you. This may explain the empty box. My visit to you itself would have been his keepsake
.

I was utterly amazed to hear that you had spent time down in a well, for I, too, continue to feel myself strongly attracted to wells. Considering my own close call, one would think that I would never have wanted to see another well, but quite the contrary, even to this day, whenever I see a well, I can’t help looking in. And if it turns out to be a dry well, I feel the urge to climb down inside. I probably continue to hope that I will encounter something down there, that if I go down inside and simply wait, it will be possible for me to encounter a certain something. Not that I expect it to restore my life to me. No, I am far too old to hope for such things. What I hope to find is the meaning of the life that I have lost. By what was it taken away from me, and why? I want to know the answers to these questions with
absolute certainty. And I would go so far as to say that if I could have those answers, I would not mind being even more profoundly lost than I am already. Indeed, I would gladly accept such a burden for whatever years of life may be left to me
.

I was truly sorry to hear that your wife had left you, but that is a matter on which I am unable to offer you any advice. I have lived far too long a time without the benefit of love or family and am thus unqualified to speak on such matters. I do believe, however, that if you feel the slightest willingness to wait a while longer for her to come back, then you probably should continue to wait there as you are now. That is my opinion, for what it is worth. I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for
.

If possible, I would like to come to Tokyo sometime in the near future and see you again, but unfortunately I am having a little problem with one leg, and the treatment for it will take some time. Please take care and be well
.

Sometimes I climbed the garden wall and went down the winding alley to where the vacant Miyawaki house had stood. Dressed in a three-quarter-length coat, a scarf wrapped under my chin, I trod the alley’s dead winter grass. Short puffs of frozen winter wind whistled through the electric lines overhead. The house had been completely demolished, the yard now surrounded by a high plank fence. I could look in through the gaps in the fence, but there was nothing in there to see—no house, no paving stones, no well, no trees, no TV antenna, no bird sculpture: just a flat, black stretch of cold-looking earth, compacted by the treads of a bulldozer, and a few scattered clumps of weeds. I could hardly believe there had once been a deep well in the yard and that I had climbed down into it.

I leaned against the fence, looking up at May Kasahara’s house, to where her room was, on the second floor. But she was no longer there. She wouldn’t be coming out anymore to say, “Hi, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”

•

On a bitter-cold afternoon in mid-February, I dropped in at the real estate office by the station that my uncle had told me about, Setagaya Dai-ichi Realtors. When I walked in, the first person I saw was a middle-aged female receptionist. Several desks were lined up near the entrance, but their chairs were empty, as if all the brokers were out on appointments. A large gas heater glowed bright red in the middle of the room. On a sofa in a small reception area toward the back sat a slightly built old man, engrossed in a newspaper. I asked the receptionist if a Mr. Ichikawa might
be there. “That’s me,” said the old man, turning in my direction. “Can I help you?”

I introduced myself as my uncle’s nephew and mentioned that I lived in one of the houses that my uncle owned.

“Oh, I see,” said the old man, laying his paper down. “So
you’re
Mr. Tsuruta’s nephew!” He folded his reading glasses and gave me a head-to-toe inspection. I couldn’t tell what kind of impression I was making on him. “Come in, come in. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

I told him not to bother, but either he didn’t hear me or he ignored my refusal. He had the receptionist make tea. It didn’t take her long to bring it to us, but by the time he and I were sitting opposite each other, drinking tea, the stove had gone out and the room was getting chilly. A detailed map showing all the houses in the area hung on the wall, marked here and there in pencil or felt-tip pen. Next to it hung a calendar with van Gogh’s famous bridge painting: a bank calendar.

“I haven’t seen your uncle in quite a while. How is he doing?” the old man asked after a sip of tea.

“I think he’s fine, busy as ever. I don’t see him much myself,” I said.

“I’m glad to hear he’s doing well. How many years has it been since I last saw him? I wonder. At least it
seems
like years.” He took a cigarette from his jacket pocket, and after apparently taking careful aim, he struck a match with a vigorous swipe. “I was the one who found that house for him, and I managed it for him for a long time too. Anyhow, it’s good to hear he’s keeping busy.”

Old Mr. Ichikawa himself seemed anything but busy. I imagined he must be half retired, showing up at the office now and then to take care of longtime clients.

“So how do you like the house? No problems?”

“No, none at all,” I said.

The old man nodded. “That’s good. It’s a nice place. Maybe on the small side, but a nice place to live. Things have always gone well for the people who lived there. For you too?”

“Not bad,” I said to him. At least I’m alive, I said to myself. “I had something I wanted to ask you about, though. My uncle says you know more than anybody about this area.”

The old man chuckled. “This area is one thing I
do
know,” he said. “I’ve been dealing in real estate here for close to forty years.”

“The thing I want to ask you about is the Miyawaki place behind ours. They’ve bulldozed it, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said the old man, pursing his lips as though rummaging
through the drawers in his mind. “It sold last August. They
finally
got all the mortgage and title and legal problems straightened out and put it on the market. A speculator bought it, to tear down the house and sell the land. Leave a house vacant that long, I don’t care how good it is, it’s not going to sell. Of course, the people who bought it are not local. Nobody local would touch the place. Have you heard some of the stories?”

“Yes, I have, from my uncle.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about. I suppose we could have bought it and sold it to somebody who didn’t know any better, but we don’t do business that way. It just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

I nodded in agreement. “So who did buy it, then?”

The old man knit his brow and shook his head, then told me the name of a well-known real estate corporation. “They probably didn’t do any research, just snapped it up when they saw the location and the price, figured they’d turn a quick profit. But it’s not going to be so easy.”

“They haven’t been able to sell it?”

“They came close a few times,” the old man said, folding his arms. “It’s not cheap, buying a piece of land. It’s a lifetime investment. People are careful. When they start looking into things, any stories come out, and in this case, not one of them is good. You hear stories like that, and the ordinary person is not going to buy. Most of the people who live around here know the stories about that place.”

“What are they asking?”

“Asking?”

“The price of the land where the Miyawaki house was.”

Old Mr. Ichikawa looked at me as if to say I had aroused his curiosity. “Well, let’s see. The lot is a little over thirty-five hundred square feet. Not quite a hundred
tsubo
. The market price would be one and a half million yen per
tsubo
. I mean, that’s a first-rate lot—wonderful setting, southern exposure. A million and a half, no problem, even with the market as slow as it is. You might have to wait a little while, but you’d get your price at that location.
Ordinarily
. But there’s nothing ordinary about the Miyawaki place. That’s not going to move, no matter how long you wait. So the price has to go down. It’s already down to a million ten per
tsubo
, so with a little more bargaining you could probably get the whole place for an even hundred million.”

“Do you think the price will continue to fall?”

The old man gave a sharp nod. “Of course it’s going to fall. To nine hundred thousand per
tsubo
easy. That’s what they bought it for. They’re really getting worried now. They’d be thrilled if they could break even. I
don’t know if they’d go any lower. They might take a loss if they’re hurting for cash. Otherwise, they could afford to wait. I just don’t know what’s going on inside the company. What I do know is that they’re sorry they bought the place. Getting mixed up with that piece of land is not going to do anybody any good.” He tapped his ashes into the ashtray.

“The yard has a well, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Do you know anything about the well?”

“Hmm, it does have a well, doesn’t it,” said Mr. Ichikawa. “A deep well. But I think they filled it in. It was dry, after all. Useless.”

“Do you have any idea when it dried up?”

The old man glared at the ceiling for a while, with his arms folded. “That was a
long
time ago. I can’t remember, really, but I’m sure I heard it had water sometime before the war. It must have dried up after the war. I don’t know when, exactly. But I know it was dry when the actress moved in. There was a lot of talk then about whether or not to fill in the well. But nobody ever did anything about it. I guess it was too much bother.”

“The well in the Kasahara place across the alley still has plenty of water—good water, I’m told.”

“Maybe so, maybe so. The wells in that area always produced good-tasting water. It’s got something to do with the soil. You know, water veins are delicate things. It’s not unusual to get water in one place and nothing at all right close by. Is there something about that well that interests you?”

“To tell you the truth, I’d like to buy that piece of land.”

The old man raised his eyes and focused them on mine. Then he lifted his teacup and took a silent sip. “You want to buy that piece of land?”

My only reply was a nod.

The old man took another cigarette from his pack and tapped it against the tabletop. But then, instead of lighting it, he held it between his fingers. His tongue flicked across his lips. “Let me say one more time that that’s a place with a lot of problems. No one—and I mean
no
one—has ever done well there. You
do
realize that? I don’t care how cheap it gets, that place can never be a good buy. But you want it just the same?”

“Yes, I still want it, knowing what I know. But let
me
point out one thing: I don’t have enough money on hand to buy the place, no matter how far the price falls below market value. But I intend to raise the money, even if it takes me a while. So I would like to be kept informed of any new developments. Can I count on you to let me know if the price changes or if a buyer shows up?”

For a time, the old man just stared at his unlit cigarette, lost in
thought. Then, clearing his throat with a little cough, he said, “Don’t worry, you’ve got time; that place is not going to sell for a while, I guarantee you. It’s not going to move until they’re practically giving it away, and that won’t happen for a while. So take all the time you need to raise the money.
If you really want it.
”

I told him my phone number. The old man wrote it down in a little sweat-stained black notebook. After returning the notebook to his jacket pocket, he looked me in the eye for a while and then looked at the mark on my cheek.