The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (31 page)

“Are you OK?” asked May Kasahara.

“Yeah, I’m OK,” I said.

“I made the call,” she said. “Told them I was a relative. That’s OK, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This person, Kumiko Okada, that’s Mrs. Wind-Up Bird, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They said she didn’t come to work—today or yesterday. Just took off without a word. It’s a real problem for them. She’s not the type to do this kind of thing, they said.”

“It’s true. She’s not the type.”

“She’s been gone since yesterday?”

I nodded.

“Poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said. She sounded as if she really did feel sorry for me. She put her hand on my forehead. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Not now,” I said. “But thanks.”

“Do you mind if I ask more? Or would you rather I didn’t?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m not sure I can answer, though.”

“Did your wife run away with a man?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe so. It’s possible.”

“But you’ve been living together all this time. How can you not be sure?”

She was right. How could I not be sure?

“Poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said again. “I wish I had something to say to help you, but I don’t know anything about married life.”

I got out of my chair. The effort required to stand was far greater than I would have imagined. “Thanks for everything. You’ve been a big help. I’ve got to go now. I should be at home in case word comes. Somebody might call.”

“As soon as you get home, take a shower. First thing. OK? Then put on clean clothes. And shave.”

“Shave?” I stroked my jaw. It was true: I had forgotten to shave. The thought hadn’t crossed my mind all morning.

“The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” May Kasahara said, looking into my eyes. “Go home and take a good look in the mirror.”

“I will,” I said.

“Mind if I come over later?”

“Fine,” I said. Then I added: “You’d be a big help.”

May Kasahara nodded in silence.

•

At home, I looked at my face in the mirror. It was true: I looked terrible. I got undressed, showered; gave myself a good shampoo, shaved, brushed my teeth, put aftershave lotion on my face, and went to the mirror again for a close examination. A little better than before, it seemed. My nausea was gone. My head was still a little foggy, though.

I put on short pants and a fresh polo shirt. I sat on the veranda, leaning against a pillar and watching the garden while my hair dried. I tried to put the events of recent days in order. First there was the call from Lieutenant Mamiya. That had been yesterday morning? Yes, no doubt about it: yesterday morning. Then Kumiko had left the house. I had zipped up her dress. Then I had found the cologne box. Then Lieutenant Mamiya had come and told me his strange war stories: how he had been captured by Outer Mongolian troops and thrown into a well. He had left me the keepsake from Mr. Honda. An empty box. Then Kumiko had failed to come home. She had picked up her cleaning that morning by the station and afterward just disappeared somewhere. Without a word to her company. So that was what had happened yesterday.

I could hardly believe that all that had happened in the course of a single day. It was too much for one day.

As I mulled these things over, I began to feel incredibly sleepy. This was not an ordinary kind of sleepiness. It was an intense, even violent, sleepiness. Sleep was stripping me of consciousness the way the clothes might be stripped from the body of an unresisting person. I went to the bedroom without thinking, took everything off but my underwear, and got in bed. I tried to look at the clock on the night table, but I couldn’t even turn my head sideways. I closed my eyes and fell instantly into a deep, bottomless sleep.

•

In my sleep, I was zipping up Kumiko’s dress. I could see her smooth white back. But by the time I had the zipper to the top, I realized it was not Kumiko but Creta Kano. She and I were the only ones in the room.

It was the same room as in the last dream: a room in the same hotel suite. On the table was a bottle of Cutty Sark and two glasses. There was also a stainless-steel ice bucket, full of ice. In the corridor outside, someone was passing by, speaking in a loud voice. I couldn’t catch the words, which seemed to be in a foreign language. An unlighted chandelier hung from the ceiling. The only illumination in this murky room came from lamps mounted on the wall. Again the windows had thick curtains that were closed tight.

Creta Kano was wearing a summer dress of Kumiko’s: pale blue, with an openwork pattern of birds. The skirt came to just above her knees. As always, her makeup was in the Jacqueline Kennedy style. On her left wrist she wore a matched pair of bracelets.

“How did you get that dress?” I asked. “Is it yours?”

Creta Kano looked at me and shook her head. When she did this, the curled tips of her hair moved in a pleasant way. “No, it is not mine,” she said. “I’m borrowing it. But don’t worry, Mr. Okada, this is not causing anyone any difficulty.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

Creta Kano didn’t answer. As before, I was sitting on the edge of the bed. I wore a suit and my polka-dot tie.

“You don’t have to think about a thing, Mr. Okada,” said Creta Kano. “There is nothing to worry about. Everything is going to be fine.”

And again, as before, she unzipped my fly, took out my penis, and put it in her mouth. The one thing different from before was that she did not take off her own clothing. She wore Kumiko’s dress the whole time. I tried to move, but it felt as if my body were tied down by invisible threads. I felt myself growing big and hard inside her mouth.

I saw her fake eyelashes and curled hair tips moving. Her bracelets made a dry sound against each other. Her tongue was long and soft and seemed to wrap itself around me. Just as I was about to come, she suddenly moved away and began slowly to undress me. She took off my jacket, my tie, my pants, my shirt, my underwear, and made me lie down on the bed. Her own clothes she kept on, though. She sat on the bed, took my hand, and brought it under her dress. She was not wearing panties. My hand felt the warmth of her vagina. It was deep, warm, and very wet. My fingers were all but sucked inside.

“Won’t Noboru Wataya be here any minute?” I asked. “Weren’t you expecting to see him here?”

Instead of answering, Creta Kano touched my forehead. “You don’t have to think, Mr. Okada. We’ll take care of all that. Leave everything to us.”

“To
us?
” I asked, but there was no reply.

Then Creta Kano mounted me and used her hand to slip me inside her. Once she had me deep inside, she began a slow rotation of her hips. As she moved, the edges of the pale-blue dress caressed my naked stomach and thighs. With the skirts of the dress spread out around her, Creta Kano, riding atop me, looked like a soft, gigantic mushroom that had silently poked its face up through the dead leaves on the ground and opened under the sheltering wings of night. Her vagina felt warm and at the same time cold. It tried to envelop me, to draw me in, and at the same time to press me out. My erection grew larger and harder. I felt I was about to burst wide open. It was the strangest sensation, something that went beyond simple sexual pleasure. It felt as if something inside her, something special inside her, were slowly working its way through my organ into me.

With her eyes closed and her chin lifted slightly, Creta Kano rocked quietly forward and back as if she were dreaming. I could see her chest rising and falling with each breath beneath the dress. A few hairs had come loose and hung over her forehead. I imagined myself floating alone in the middle of a vast sea. I closed my eyes and listened, expecting to hear the sound of little waves hitting my face. My body was bathed in lukewarm ocean water. I sensed the gradual flow of the tide. It was carrying me away. I decided to do as Creta Kano had said and not think about anything. I closed my eyes, let the strength go out of my limbs, and gave myself up to the current.

All of a sudden, I noticed that the room had gone dark. I tried to look around, but I could hardly see a thing. The wall lamps had all been extinguished.
There was only the faint silhouette of Creta Kano’s blue dress rocking on top of me. “Just forget,” she said, but it was not Creta Kano’s voice. “Forget about everything. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You’re lying in nice, warm mud. We all come out of the warm mud, and we all go back to it.”

It was the voice of the woman on the telephone. The mysterious woman on the phone was now mounted atop me and joining her body with mine. She, too, wore Kumiko’s dress. She and Creta Kano had traded places without my being aware of it. I tried to speak. I did not know what I was hoping to say, but at least I tried to speak. I was too confused, though, and my voice would not work. All I could expel from my mouth was a hot blast of air. I opened my eyes wide and tried to see the face of the woman mounted on top of me, but the room was too dark.

The woman said nothing more. Instead, she began to move her hips in an even more erotically stimulating way. Her soft flesh, itself almost an independent organism, enveloped my erection with a gentle pulling motion. From behind her I heard—or thought I heard—the sound of a knob being turned. A white flash went through the darkness. The ice bucket on the table might have shone momentarily in the light from the corridor. Or the flash might have been the glint of a sharp blade. But I couldn’t think anymore. There was only one thing I could do: I came.

•

I washed myself off in the shower and laundered my semen-stained underwear by hand. Terrific, I thought. Why did I have to be having wet dreams at such a difficult time in my life?

Once again I put on fresh clothing, and once again I sat on the veranda, looking at the garden. Splashes of sunlight danced on everything, filtered through thick green leaves. Several days of rain had promoted the powerful growth of bright-green weeds here and there, giving the garden a subtle shading of ruin and stagnation.

Creta Kano again. Two wet dreams in a short interval, and both times it had been Creta Kano. Never once had I thought of sleeping with her. The desire had not even flashed through my mind. And yet both times I had been in that room, joining my body with hers. What could possibly be the reason for this? And who was that telephone woman who had taken her place? She knew me, and I supposedly knew her. I went through the various sexual partners I had had in life, but none of them was the telephone woman. Still, there was
something
about her that seemed familiar. And that was what annoyed me so.

Some kind of memory was trying to find its way out. I could feel it in there, bumping around. All I needed was a little hint. If I pulled that one tiny thread, then everything would come unraveled. The mystery was waiting for me to solve it. But the one slim thread was something I couldn’t find.

I gave up trying to think. “Forget everything. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You’re lying in nice, warm mud. We all come out of the warm mud, and we all go back to it.”

Six o’clock came, and still no phone call. Only May Kasahara showed up. All she wanted, she said, was a sip of beer. I took a cold can from the refrigerator and split it with her. I was hungry, so I put some ham and lettuce between two slices of bread and ate that. When she saw me eating, May said she would like the same. I made her a sandwich too. We ate in silence and drank our beer. I kept looking up at the wall clock.

“Don’t you have a TV in this house?”

“No TV,” I said.

She gave the edge of her lip a little bite. “I kinda figured that. Don’t you like TV?”

“I don’t dislike it. I get along fine without it.”

May Kasahara let that sink in for a while. “How many years have you been married, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”

“Six years,” I said.

“And you did without TV for six years?”

“Uh-huh. At first we didn’t have the money to buy one. Then we got used to living without it. It’s nice and quiet that way.”

“The two of you must have been happy.”

“What makes you think so?”

She wrinkled up her face. “Well, I couldn’t live a day without television.”

“Because you’re unhappy?”

May Kasahara did not reply to that. “But now Kumiko is gone. You must not be so happy anymore, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”

I nodded and sipped my beer. “That’s about the size of it,” I said. That was about the size of it.

She put a cigarette between her lips and, in a practiced motion, struck a match to light it. “Now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said, “I want you to tell me the absolute truth: Do you think I’m ugly?”

I put my beer glass down and took another look at May Kasahara’s
face. All this time while talking with her, I had been vaguely thinking of other things. She was wearing an oversize black tank top, which gave a clear view of the girlish swell of her breasts.

“You’re not the least bit ugly,” I said. “That’s for sure. Why do you ask?”

“My boyfriend always used to tell me how ugly I was, that I didn’t have any boobs.”

“The boy who wrecked the bike?”

“Yeah, him.”

I watched May Kasahara slowly exhaling her cigarette smoke. “Boys that age will say things like that. They don’t know how to express exactly what they feel, so they say and do the exact opposite. They hurt people that way, for no reason at all, and they hurt themselves too. Anyhow, you’re not the least bit ugly. I think you’re very cute. No flattery intended.”

May Kasahara mulled that one over for a while. She dropped ashes into the empty beer can. “Is Mrs. Wind-Up Bird pretty?”

“Hmm, that’s hard for me to say. Some would say she is, and some would say not. It’s a matter of taste.”

“I see,” she said. She tapped on her glass as if bored.

“What’s your biker boyfriend doing?” I asked. “Doesn’t he come to see you anymore?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said May Kasahara, laying a finger on the scar by her left eye. “I’ll never see him again, that’s for sure. Two hundred percent sure. I’d bet my left little toe on it. But I’d rather not talk about that right now. Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true? You know what I mean, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”