The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (62 page)

Now it was time for me to begin my new day. The cat had come back to me, and I had to begin to move forward to some extent. I took a shower and ironed a freshly laundered shirt. I put on a pair of cotton pants and my new sneakers. A hazy overcast filled the sky, but the weather was not especially cold. I decided to wear a thickish sweater without a coat. I took the train to Shinjuku, as usual, went through the underground passageway to the west exit plaza, and took a seat on my usual bench.

•

The woman showed up a little after three o’clock. She didn’t seem astonished to see me, and I reacted to her approach without surprise. Our encounter was entirely natural. We exchanged no greetings, as if this had all been prearranged. I raised my face slightly, and she looked at me with a flicker of the lips.

She wore a springlike orange cotton top, a tight skirt the color of topaz, and small gold earrings. She sat down next to me and, as always, took a pack of Virginia Slims from her purse. She put a cigarette in her mouth and lit up with a slim gold lighter. This time she knew better than to offer me a smoke. And after taking two or three leisurely puffs herself, with an air of deep thought, she dropped her cigarette to the ground as if testing gravity conditions for the day. She then patted me on the knee and said, “Come with me,” after which she stood to leave. I crushed her cigarette out and did as she said. She raised her hand to stop a passing taxi and climbed in. I climbed in beside her. She then announced very clearly an address in Aoyama, after which she said nothing at all until the cab
had threaded its way through thick traffic to Aoyama Boulevard. I watched the sights of Tokyo passing by the window. There were several new buildings that I had never seen before. The woman took a notebook from her bag and wrote something in it with a small gold pen. She looked at her watch now and then, as if checking on something. The watch was set in a gold bracelet. All the little accessories she carried with her seemed to be made of gold. Or was it that they turned to gold the moment she touched them?

She took me into a boutique on Omote Sando that featured designer brands. There she picked out two suits for me, both of thin material, one blue gray, the other dark gray. These were not suits I could have worn to the law firm: they even
felt
expensive. She did not offer any explanations, and I did not ask for them. I simply did as I was told. This reminded me of several so-called art films I had seen in college. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films’ “reality.” That was one way of thought, one way to look at things, no doubt, but it felt strange for me, as a real, live human being, to enter such a world.

I am of average build, so neither suit had to be altered other than to adjust the sleeves and pant legs. The woman picked out three dress shirts and three ties to match each shirt, then two belts and a half-dozen pairs of socks. She paid with a credit card and ordered them to deliver everything to my place. She seemed to have some kind of clear image in her mind of how I should look. It took her no time to pick out what she bought me. I would have spent more time at a stationer’s, picking out a new eraser. But I had to admit that her good taste in clothes was nothing short of astounding. The color and style of every shirt and tie she chose seemingly at random were perfectly coordinated, as if she had selected them after long, careful consideration. Nor were the combinations she came up with the least bit ordinary.

Next, she took me to a shoe store and bought me two pairs of shoes to go with the suits. This took no time, either. Again she paid with a credit card and asked for the items to be delivered to my house. Delivery seemed hardly necessary in the case of a couple of pairs of shoes, but this was apparently her way of doing things: pick things out fast, pay with a credit card, and have the stuff delivered.

Next, we went to a watchmaker’s and repeated the process. She bought me a stylish, elegant watch with an alligator band to go with the suits, and again she took almost no time picking it out. The price was
somewhere up around fifty to sixty thousand yen. I had a cheap plastic watch, but this was apparently not good enough for her. The watch, at least, she did not have delivered. Instead, she had them wrap it and handed it to me without a word.

Next, she took me to a unisex hair salon. The place was like a dance studio, with shiny wooden floors, and mirrors covering the walls. There were fifteen chairs, and everywhere technicians were coming and going with shears and hairbrushes and whatnot in their hands. Potted plants stood at various points on the floor, and from two black Bose speakers on the ceiling came the faint sounds of one of those wandering Keith Jarrett piano solos. I was shown to a chair immediately. The woman must have set up an appointment for me from one of the stores we had visited. She gave detailed instructions to the thin man who would be cutting my hair. They obviously knew each other. As he responded to each of her instructions, he kept his eyes on my face in the mirror with an expression he might have worn studying a bowlful of celery fibers he was expected to eat. He had a face like the young Solzhenitsyn. The woman said to him, “I’ll be back when you’re through,” and left the salon with quick steps.

The man said very little as he cut my hair—“This way, please,” when it was time for my shampoo, “Excuse me,” when he brushed off clippings. At times when he moved away, I would reach out from under the barber cloth and touch the mark on my right cheek. This was the first time I had ever seen it in mirrors other than my own at home. The wall-sized mirrors reflected the images of many people, my image among them. And on my face shone this bright blue mark. It didn’t seem ugly or unclean to me. It was simply part of me, something I would have to accept. I could feel people looking at it now and then—looking at its reflection in the mirror. But there were too many images in the mirror for me to be able to tell who. I just felt their eyes trained on the mark.

My haircut ended in half an hour. My hair, which had been growing longer and longer since I left my job, was short once again. I moved to one of the chairs along the wall and sat there listening to music and reading a magazine in which I had no interest until the woman came back. She seemed pleased with my new hairstyle. She took a ten-thousand-yen note from her purse, paid the bill, and led me outside. There she came to a stop and studied me from head to toe, exactly the same way I always examined the cat, as if to see whether there was something she had forgotten to do. Apparently, there was not. Then she glanced at her gold watch and released a kind of sigh. It was nearly seven o’clock.

“Let’s have dinner,” she said. “Can you eat?”

I had had one slice of toast for breakfast and one doughnut for lunch. “Probably,” I said.

She took me to a nearby Italian restaurant. They seemed to know her there. Without a word, we were shown to a quiet table in the back. As soon as I sat down across from her, she ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told, saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought. There was nothing special in my pockets: keys, handkerchief, wallet. She observed them with no show of interest, then picked up the wallet and looked inside. It contained about fifty-five hundred yen in cash, a telephone card, an ATM card, and my ward pool ID, nothing else. Nothing unusual. Nothing to prompt anyone to smell it or measure it or shake it or dip it in water or hold it up to the light. She handed it back to me with no change of expression.

“I want you to go out tomorrow and buy a dozen handkerchiefs, a new wallet and key holder,” she said. “That much you can pick out yourself, I’m sure. And when was the last time you bought yourself new underwear?”

I thought about it for a moment but couldn’t remember. “I can’t remember,” I said. “It’s been a while, I think, but I’m a little clean-crazy, and for a man living alone, I’m good about doing my laund—”

“Never mind. I want you to buy a dozen tops and bottoms.”

I nodded without speaking.

“Just bring me a receipt. I’ll pay for them. And make sure you buy the best they have. I’ll pay your cleaning bills too. Don’t wear a shirt more than once without sending it to the cleaner’s. All right?”

I nodded again. The cleaner by the station would be happy to hear this. But, I thought to myself, proceeding to extend this one, concise conjunction, clinging to the window by surface tension, into a proper, full-length sentence: “But why are you doing all this—buying me a whole new wardrobe, paying for my haircuts and cleaning?”

She did not answer me. Instead, she took a Virginia Slim from her pocketbook and put it in her mouth. A tall waiter with regular features appeared from nowhere and, with practiced movements, lit her cigarette with a match. He struck the match with a clean, dry sound—the kind of sound that could stimulate a person’s appetite. When he was through, he presented us with menus. She did not bother to look, however, and she told the waiter not to bother with the day’s specials. “Bring me a salad and a dinner roll, and some kind of fish with white meat. Just a few drops
of dressing on the salad, and a dash of pepper. And a glass of sparkling water, no ice.” I didn’t want to bother looking at the menu. “I’ll have the same,” I said. The waiter bowed and withdrew. My reality was still having trouble locating me, it seemed.

“I’m asking purely out of curiosity,” I said, trying once more to elicit an explanation from her. “I’m not turning critical after you’ve bought me all these things, but is it really worth all the time and trouble and money?”

Still she would not answer.

“I’m just curious,” I said again.

Again no answer. She was too busy looking at the oil painting on the wall to answer my question. It was a picture of what I assumed was an Italian landscape, with a well-pruned pine tree, and several reddish farmhouses lining the hills. The houses were all somewhat small but pleasant. I wondered what kind of people might live in such houses: probably normal people living normal lives. None of them had inscrutable women coming out of nowhere to buy them suits and shoes and watches. None of them had to calculate the huge funds they would need to get possession of some dried-up well. I felt a stab of envy for people living in such a normal world. Envy is not an emotion I feel very often, but the scene in the painting aroused that sense in me to an almost amazing degree. If only I could have entered the picture right then and there! If only I could have walked into one of those farmhouses, enjoyed a glass of wine, then crawled under the covers and gone to sleep without a thought in my head!

The waiter came before long and placed glasses of sparkling water in front of the woman and me. She crushed out her cigarette in an ashtray.

“Why don’t you ask me something else?” she said.

While I was thinking about something else to ask, she took a sip of her sparkling water.

“Was that young man in the office in Akasaka your son?” I asked.

“Of course,” she answered without hesitation.

“Is he unable to speak?”

The woman nodded. “He never spoke much to begin with, but all of a sudden, at the age of six, he stopped speaking entirely. He stopped using his voice in any way.”

“Was there some kind of reason for that?”

She ignored this question. I tried to think of another. “If he doesn’t talk, how does he manage to take care of business?”

She wrinkled her brow just the slightest bit. She had not ignored my question, but she obviously had no intention of answering it.

“I’ll bet you picked out everything he was wearing, from head to foot. The way you did with me.”

“I do not like it when people wear the wrong thing. That is all. It is something I simply cannot—
cannot
—abide. I at least want the people around me to dress as well as possible. I want everything about them to look right, whether or not it can actually be seen.”

“I guess you don’t like my appendix, then,” I said, trying to make a joke.

“Do you have some problem with the shape of your appendix?” she asked, looking straight at me with an utterly serious expression. I regretted the joke.

“Nothing at the moment,” I said. “I didn’t really mean anything by it. It was just a kind of ‘for instance.’ ”

She kept her questioning stare fixed on me a while longer—she was probably thinking about my appendix.

“So anyhow, I want the people around me to look right, even if I have to pay for it myself. That is all there is to it. So don’t let it worry you. I am doing this entirely for myself. I feel a personal, almost physical, revulsion for messy clothing.”

“The way a musician can’t stand hearing music played off key?”

“Something like that.”

“So do you buy clothing this way for all the people around you?”

“I guess I do. Not that I have so many people around me, to begin with. I mean, I may not like what they wear, but I can’t exactly buy clothing for all the people in the world now, can I?”

“Everything has its limits,” I said.

“Exactly.”

•

Soon our salads came to the table, and we ate them. As the woman had specified, each salad had no more than a few drops of dressing—so few you could have counted them on one hand.

“Do you have anything else you want to ask me?” she asked.

“I’d like to know your name,” I said. “I mean, it would be helpful if you had a name or something I could use.”

She said nothing for a few moments, as she crunched on a radish. Then she formed a deep wrinkle between her eyebrows, as if she had just found something bitter in her mouth by mistake. “Why would you have to use my name? You won’t be writing me any letters, I’m sure. Names are, if anything, irrelevant.”

“But what if I have to call you from behind, for example? I’d need your name for that.”

She laid her fork in her plate and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. “I see what you mean,” she said. “That never crossed my mind. You’re right, though. You might very well need my name in a situation like that.”