The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (15 page)

“From there she went to Canada, and after traveling around the northern United States, she continued on to Europe. She sampled the water everywhere she went and succeeded in finding marvelous water in several places, but none of it was the perfect water. So she kept traveling. Whenever she ran out of money, she would do something like fortune-telling. People would reward her for helping them find lost things or missing persons. She would have preferred not to take the money. Powers bestowed by heaven should not be exchanged for worldly goods. At the time, though, it was the only way she could keep herself alive. People heard about her divination everywhere she went. It was easy for her to make money. She even helped the police with an investigation in England. A little girl was missing, and she found where the body had been hidden. She also found the murderer’s glove nearby. The man was arrested and confessed. It was in all the papers. I’ll show you the clippings sometime. Anyhow, she went on wandering through Europe like this until she ended up in Malta. Close to five years had gone by since her departure from Japan, and this place turned out to be her destination in her search for water. I suppose she must have told you about this herself?”

I nodded.

“All the time she was wandering through the world, Malta would send me letters. Of course, there were times when she couldn’t manage to write, but almost every week I would receive a long letter from her about where she was and what she was doing. We were still very close. Even over long distances, we were able to share our feelings with each other through her letters. And what wonderful letters they were! If you could read them, you’d see what a wonderful person she is. Through her letters, I was able to encounter so many different worlds, so many interesting people! Her letters gave me such encouragement! They helped me grow. For that, I will always be deeply grateful to my sister. I don’t negate what she did for me in any way. But finally, letters are just letters. When
I was in my most difficult teenage years, when I needed my sister more than ever, she was always somewhere far away. I could not stretch out my hand and find her there next to me. In our family, I was all alone. Isolated. My teen years were filled with pain—and later I will tell you more about that pain. There was no one I could go to for advice. In that sense, I was just as lonely as Malta had been. If she had been near me then, my life would have been different from what it is today. She would have given me words of advice and encouragement and salvation. But what’s the point of bringing such things up now? Just as Malta had to find her own way by herself, I had to find my own way by myself. And when I turned twenty, I decided to kill myself.”

Creta Kano took her cup and drank her remaining coffee.

“What delicious coffee!” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, as casually as possible. “Can I offer you something to eat? I boiled some eggs a little while ago.”

After some hesitation, she said she would have one. I brought eggs and salt from the kitchen and poured her more coffee. With no sense of urgency, Creta Kano and I set about peeling and eating our eggs and drinking coffee. While we were doing this, the phone rang, but I didn’t answer it. After fifteen or sixteen rings, it stopped. All that time, Creta Kano seemed unaware of the ringing.

When she finished her egg, Creta Kano took a small handkerchief from her white patent-leather bag and wiped her mouth. Then she tugged at the hem of her skirt.

“Once I had decided to kill myself, I wanted to leave a note behind. I sat at my desk for an hour, trying to write down my reasons for dying. I wanted to make it clear that no one else was to blame, that the reasons were all inside me. I didn’t want my family feeling responsible for something that was not their fault.

“But I could not finish the note. I tried over and over, but each new version seemed worse than the last. When I read what I had written, it sounded foolish, even comical. The more serious I tried to make it, the more ridiculous it came out. In the end, I decided not to write anything at all.

“It was a very simple matter, I felt. I was disappointed with my life. I could no longer endure the many kinds of pain that my life continued to cause me. I had endured the pain for twenty years. My life had been nothing but an unremitting source of pain. But I had tried to bear it as best I could. I have absolute confidence in the validity of my efforts to bear the
pain. I can declare here with genuine pride that my efforts were second to none. I was not giving up without a fight. But the day I turned twenty, I reached a simple conclusion: life was not worth it. Life was not worth continuing such a struggle.”

She stopped speaking and spent some time aligning the corners of the white handkerchief on her lap. When she looked down, her long false eyelashes cast gentle shadows on her face.

I cleared my throat. I felt I ought to say something, but I didn’t know what to say, and so I kept silent. In the distance, I heard the wind-up bird cry.

“The pain was what caused me to decide to die,” said Creta Kano. “And when I say ‘pain,’ that is exactly what I mean. Nothing mental or metaphorical, but physical pain, pure and simple. Plain, ordinary, direct, physical—and, for that reason, all the more intense—pain: headache, toothache, menstrual cramps, lower back pain, stiff shoulders, fever, muscle ache, burns, frostbite, sprains, fractures, blows to the body. All my life I have experienced physical pain with far greater frequency and intensity than others. Take my teeth, for example. They seemed to have some inborn defect. They would give me pain from one end of the year to the other. No matter how carefully I brushed, or how many times a day, or how strictly I avoided sweets, it did no good. All my efforts ended in cavities. To make matters worse, anesthetics seemed to have no effect on me. Going to the dentist was always a nightmare. The pain was beyond describing. It scared me to death. And then my terrible periods began. They were incredibly heavy. For a week at a time, I would be in such pain, it was as if someone were twisting a drill inside me. My head would throb. You probably can’t imagine what it was like, Mr. Okada, but the pain would bring tears to my eyes. For a week out of every month, I would be tortured by this unbearable pain.

“If I boarded a plane, my head would feel as if it were splitting open from the changes in air pressure. The doctor said it had something to do with the structure of my ears, that this sort of thing happens if the inner ear has a shape that is sensitive to pressure changes. The same thing often happened to me on elevators. I can’t take elevators in tall buildings. The pain is so intense, it feels as if my head is going to split open in several places and the blood gush out. And then there was my stomach. At least once a week it would give me such sharp, piercing pain that I couldn’t get up in the morning. The doctors could never find a cause. Some suggested it was mental. But even if it was, the pain still hurt. As
much as I was suffering, though, I could not stay home from school. If I had skipped school every time something hurt me, I would never have gone at all.

“Whenever I bumped into something, it would leave a bruise on my body. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror always made me want to cry. My body was covered with so many dark bruises I looked like a rotten apple. I hated to let anyone see me in a bathing suit. Ever since I can remember, I’ve hardly ever gone swimming for that reason. Another problem I had was the difference in the size of my feet. Whenever I bought new shoes, the larger foot would be in terrible pain until the shoe was broken in.

“Because of all these problems, I almost never did sports. In junior high school, my friends once dragged me to an ice-skating rink. I fell and hurt my hip so badly that afterward I would get a terrible ache there every winter. It felt as if I had been jabbed with a big, thick needle. Any number of times, I fell over trying to get up from a chair.

“I suffered from constipation as well. A bowel movement every few days would be nothing but pain for me. And my shoulders would stiffen up terribly. The muscles would tighten until they were literally as hard as a rock. It was so painful, I couldn’t stand up, but lying down was no help, either. I imagined that my suffering must be much like that of a Chinese punishment I had read about. They would stuff the person in a box for several years. When my shoulders were at their worst, I could hardly breathe.

“I could go on and on listing all the various pains I have suffered in my life, but it would only bore you, Mr. Okada, so I will just leave it at this. What I want to convey to you is the fact that my body was a virtual sample book of pain. I experienced every pain imaginable. I began to think I had been cursed, that life was so unfair. I might have been able to go on bearing the pain if the other people in the world had had to live the way I did, but they didn’t, and I couldn’t. Pain was not something that was dealt out fairly. I tried asking people about pain, but nobody knew what real pain was. The majority of people in the world live without feeling much pain—at least on a daily basis. When this finally hit me (I had just entered junior high school at the time), it made me so sad I couldn’t stop crying. Why me? Why did I have to be the one to bear such a terrible burden? I wanted to die right then and there.

“But at the same time, another thought came to me. This could not go on forever. One morning I would wake up and the pain would have disappeared
—suddenly, with no explanation—and a whole new and peaceful life without pain would open up for me. It was not a thought in which I could place a great deal of faith, however.

“And so I revealed these thoughts of mine to my sister. I told her that I didn’t want to go on living in such pain: what was I to do? After she thought about it for a while, she said this: ‘There is definitely something wrong with you, I’m sure. But I don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what you should do about it. I don’t have the power yet to make such judgments. All I know is that you should at least wait until you’re twenty. Bear it until you turn twenty, and then make your decision. That would be the best thing.’

“This was how I decided to go on living until I was twenty. But no matter how much time went by, the situation did not improve. Far from it. The pain became even more intense. This taught me only one thing: As the body develops, the volume of pain increases proportionately.’ I endured the pain, however, for eight years. I went on living all that time, trying to see only the good side of life. I didn’t complain to anyone. I strove to keep on smiling, even when the pain was at its worst. I disciplined myself always to present an exterior of calm when the pain was so intense that I could hardly go on standing. Crying and complaining could not reduce the pain; it could only make me more miserable than ever. As a result of my efforts, people loved me. They saw me as a quiet, good-natured girl. I had the confidence of grown-ups and the friendship of people my own age. I might have had a perfect life, a perfect adolescence, if it hadn’t been for the pain. But it was always there. It was like my shadow. If I forgot about it for an instant, the pain would attack yet another part of my body.

“In college, I found a boyfriend, and in the summer of my freshman year I lost my virginity. Even this—as I could have predicted—gave me only pain. An experienced girlfriend of mine assured me that it would stop hurting when I got used to it, but it never did. Whenever I slept with him, the pain would bring tears to my eyes. One day I told my boyfriend that I didn’t want to have sex anymore. I told him, ‘I love you, but I never want to experience this pain again.’ He said he had never heard anything so ridiculous. ‘You’ve got an emotional problem,’ he said. ‘Just relax and it’ll stop hurting. It’ll even feel
good
. Everybody else does it, so you can too. You’re just not trying hard enough. You’re babying yourself. You’re using this “pain” thing to cover up your problems. Stop complaining; it won’t do you any good.’

“When I heard this, after all I had endured over the years, I exploded. ‘What do
you
know about pain?’ I shouted at him. ‘The pain I feel is no ordinary pain. I know what pain is like. I’ve had them all. When I say something hurts, it
really hurts!’
I tried to explain by listing every single pain I had ever experienced, but he didn’t understand a thing. It’s impossible to understand real pain unless you’ve experienced it yourself. So that was the end of our relationship.

“My twentieth birthday came soon after that. For twenty long years I had endured the pain, hoping there would be some bright turning point, but it had never happened. I felt utterly defeated. I wished I had died sooner. My long detour had only stretched out the pain.”

At this point, Creta Kano took a single deep breath. On the table in front of her sat the dish with eggshells and her empty coffee cup. On her lap lay the handkerchief that she had folded with such care. As if recalling the time, she glanced at the clock on the shelf. “I’m very sorry,” she said in a dry little voice. “I hadn’t intended to talk so long. I’ve taken far too much of your time as it is. I won’t impose on you any longer. I don’t know how to apologize for having bored you at such length.”

She grasped the strap of her white patent-leather bag and stood up from the sofa.

This took me off guard. “Just a minute, please,” I said, flustered. I didn’t want her to end her story in the middle. “If you’re worried about taking my time, then don’t worry. I’m free all afternoon. As long as you’ve told me this much, why not go to the end? There’s more to your story, I’m sure.”

“Of course there is,” she said, looking down at me, both hands in a tight grip on the strap of her bag. “What I’ve told you so far is more like an introduction.”

I asked her to wait a moment and went to the kitchen. Standing in front of the sink, I gave myself time for two deep breaths. Then I took two glasses from the cabinet, put ice in them, and filled them with orange juice from the refrigerator. Placing the glasses on a small tray, I brought them into the living room. I had gone through these motions with deliberate slowness, but I found her standing as I had left her. When I set the glasses of juice on the table, though, she seemed to have second thoughts. She settled onto the sofa again and placed her bag at her side.