The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (37 page)

Although I said nothing to Kumiko, I actually hated jellyfish. I had often been stung by jellyfish while swimming in the ocean as a boy. Once, when swimming far out by myself, I wandered into a whole school of them. By the time I realized what I had done, I was surrounded. I never forgot the slimy, cold feeling of them touching me. In the center of that whirlpool of jellyfish, an immense terror overtook me, as if I had been dragged into a bottomless darkness. I wasn’t stung, for some reason, but in my panic I gulped a lot of ocean water. Which is why I would have liked to skip the jellyfish display if possible and go to see some ordinary fish, like tuna or flounder.

Kumiko, though, was fascinated. She stopped at every single tank, leaned over the railing, and stayed locked in place as if she had forgotten the passage of time. “Look at this,” she’d say to me. “I never knew there
were such vivid pink jellyfish. And look at the beautiful way it swims. They just keep wobbling along like this until they’ve been to every ocean in the world. Aren’t they wonderful?”

“Yeah, sure.” But the more I forced myself to keep examining jellyfish with her, the more I felt a tightness growing in my chest. Before I knew it, I had stopped replying to her and was counting the change in my pocket over and over, or wiping the corners of my mouth with my handkerchief. I kept wishing we would come to the last of the jellyfish tanks, but there was no end to them. The variety of jellyfish swimming in the oceans of the world was enormous. I was able to bear it for half an hour, but the tension was turning my head into mush. When, finally, it became too painful for me to stand leaning against the railing, I left Kumiko’s side and slumped down on a nearby bench. She came over to me and, obviously very concerned, asked if I was feeling bad. I answered honestly that looking at the jellyfish was making me dizzy.

She stared into my eyes with a grave expression on her face. “It’s true,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes. They’ve gone out of focus. It’s incredible—just from looking at jellyfish!” Kumiko took me by the arm and led me out of the gloomy, dank aquarium into the sunlight.

Sitting in the nearby park for ten minutes, taking long, slow breaths, I managed to return to a normal psychological state. The strong autumn sun cast its pleasant radiance everywhere, and the bone-dry leaves of the ginkgo trees rustled softly whenever the breeze picked up. “Are you all right?” Kumiko asked after several minutes had gone by. “You certainly are a strange one. If you hate jellyfish so much, you should have said so right away, instead of waiting until they made you sick.”

The sky was high and cloudless, the wind felt good, the people spending their Sunday in the park all wore happy expressions. A slim, pretty girl was walking a large, long-haired dog. An old fellow wearing a felt hat was watching his granddaughter on the swing. Several couples sat on benches, the way we were doing. Off in the distance, someone was practicing scales on a saxophone.

“Why do you like jellyfish so much?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I think they’re cute,” she said. “But one thing did occur to me when I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don’t you agree?
Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what’s underneath the skin.”

We took a long walk after that. At five o’clock, Kumiko said she had to go back to the hospital, so I took her there. “Thank you for a lovely day,” she said when we parted. There was a quiet glow in her smile that had not been there before. When I saw it, I realized that I had managed to draw a little closer to her in the course of the day—thanks, no doubt, to the jellyfish.

•

Kumiko and I continued to date. Her mother left the hospital without complications, and I no longer had to spend time there working on my client’s will, but we would get together once a week for a movie or a concert or a walk. We drew closer to each other each time we met. I enjoyed being with her, and if we should happen to touch, I felt a fluttering in the chest. I often found it difficult to work when the weekend was drawing near. I was sure she liked me. Otherwise, she wouldn’t see me every weekend.

Still, I was in no hurry to deepen my relationship with Kumiko. I sensed a kind of uncertainty in her. Exactly what it was I couldn’t have said, but it would come out every now and then in her words or actions. I might ask her something, and a single breath would intervene before she answered—just the slightest hesitation, but in that split-second interval I sensed a kind of shadow.

Winter came, and then the new year. We went on seeing each other every week. I never asked about that something, and she never said a word. We would meet and go someplace and eat and talk about innocuous things.

One day I took a chance and said, “You
must
have a boyfriend, don’t you?”

Kumiko looked at me for a moment and asked, “What makes you think so?”

“Just a hunch,” I said. We were walking through the wintry and deserted Shinjuku Imperial Gardens.

“What kind of hunch?”

“I don’t know. I get the feeling there’s something you want to tell me. You should if you can.”

The expression on her face wavered the slightest bit—almost imperceptibly. There might have been a moment of uncertainty, but there had
never been any doubt about her conclusion. “Thanks for asking,” she said, “but I don’t have anything that I want to make a special point of talking about.”

“You haven’t answered my question, though.”

“About whether I have a boyfriend?”

“Uh-huh.”

Kumiko came to a stop. Then she slipped her gloves off and put them into her coat pocket. She took my gloveless hand in hers. Her hand was warm and soft. When I squeezed her hand in return, it seemed to me that her breaths grew smaller and whiter.

“Can we go to your apartment now?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, somewhat taken aback. “It’s not much of a place, though.”

I was living in Asagaya at the time, in a one-room apartment with a tiny kitchen and a toilet and a shower the size of a phone booth. It was on the second floor and faced south, overlooking a construction company’s storage yard. That southern exposure was the apartment’s only good point. For a long time, Kumiko and I sat next to each other in the flood of sunlight, leaning against the wall.

I made love to her for the first time that day. It was what she wanted, I was sure. In a sense, it was she who seduced me. Not that she ever said or did anything overtly seductive. But when I put my arms around her naked body, I knew for certain that she had intended that this happen. Her body was soft and completely unresisting.

It was Kumiko’s first experience of sex. For a long time afterward, she said nothing. I tried several times to talk to her, but she made no reply. She took a shower, put her clothes on, and sat in the sunlight again. I had no idea what I should say to her. I simply joined her in the patch of sunlight and said nothing. The two of us edged along the wall as the sun moved. When evening came, Kumiko said she was leaving. I saw her home.

“Are you sure you don’t have something you want to say to me?” I asked again in the train.

She shook her head. “Never mind about that,” she murmured.

I never raised the topic again. Kumiko had chosen to sleep with me of her own volition, finally, and if indeed she was keeping something inside that she was not able to tell me, this would probably be resolved in the course of time.

We continued our weekly dates after that, part of which now usually included stopping by my apartment for sex. As we held and touched each
other, she began more and more to talk about herself, about the things she had experienced, about the thoughts and feelings these things had given her. And I began to understand the world as Kumiko saw it. I found myself increasingly able, too, to talk with Kumiko about the world as I saw it. I came to love her deeply, and she said she never wanted to leave me. We waited for her to graduate from college, and then we got married.

We were happy with our married life and had no problems to speak of. And yet there were times when I couldn’t help but sense an area inside Kumiko to which I had no access. In the middle of the most ordinary—or the most excited—conversation, and without the slightest warning, she might sink into silence. It would happen all of a sudden, for no reason at all (or at least no reason I could discern). It was like walking along the road and suddenly falling into a pit. Her silences never lasted very long, but afterward, until a fair amount of time had gone by, it was as if she were not really there.

The first time I went inside Kumiko, I sensed a strange kind of hesitation. Kumiko should have been feeling only pain this first time for her, and in fact she kept her body rigid with the pain she was obviously experiencing, but that was not the only reason for the hesitation I seemed to feel. There was something oddly lucid there, a sense of separation, of distance, though I don’t know exactly what to call it. I was seized by the bizarre thought that the body I was holding in my arms was not the body of the woman I had had next to me until a few moments earlier, the two of us engaged in intimate conversation: a switch had been pulled without my noticing, and someone else’s flesh had taken its place. While I held her, my hands continued to caress her back. The touch of her small, smooth back had an almost hypnotic effect on me, and yet, at the same time, Kumiko’s back seemed to be somewhere far away from me. The entire time she was in my arms, I could have sworn that Kumiko was somewhere else, thinking about something else, and the body I was holding was nothing but a temporary substitute. This might have been the reason why, although I was fully aroused, it took me a very long time to come.

I felt this way only the first time we had intercourse. After that, I felt her much closer to me, her physical responses far more sensitive. I convinced myself that my initial sense of distance had been the result of its being her first experience of sex.

•

Every now and then, while searching through my memories, I would reach out to where the rope ladder was hanging against the wall and give
it a tug to make sure it hadn’t come loose. I couldn’t seem to shake the fear that it might simply give way at any moment. Whenever the thought struck me, down there in the darkness, it made me uneasy. I could actually hear my own heart pounding. After I had checked a number of times—possibly twenty or thirty—I began to regain a measure of calm. I had done a good job of tying the ladder to the tree, after all. It wasn’t going to come loose just like that.

I looked at my watch. The luminous hands showed it to be just before three o’clock. Three p.m. I glanced upward. The half-moon slab of light was still floating there. The surface of the earth was flooded with blinding summer light. I pictured to myself a stream sparkling in the sunlight and green leaves trembling in the breeze. The light up there overwhelmed everything, and yet just below it, down here, there existed such a darkness. All you had to do was climb a little ways underground on a rope ladder, and you could reach a darkness this profound.

I pulled on the ladder one more time to be certain it was anchored firmly. Then I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes. Eventually, sleep overtook me, like a gradually rising tide.

When I woke, the half-moon mouth of the well had taken on the deep blue of evening. The hands of my watch showed seven-thirty. Seven-thirty p.m. Meaning I had been asleep down here for four and a half hours.

The air at the bottom of the well felt chilly. There had probably been too much nervous excitement involved for me to think about air temperature when I first climbed down. Now, though, my skin was reacting to the cold air. Rubbing my bare arms to warm them, I realized I should have brought something in the knapsack to put on over my T-shirt. It had never crossed my mind that the temperature in the bottom of the well might be different from the temperature at the surface.

Now I was enveloped by a darkness that was total. No amount of straining helped my eyes to see a thing. I couldn’t tell where my own hand was. I felt along the wall to where the ladder hung and gave it a tug. It was still firmly anchored at the surface. The movement of my hand seemed to cause the darkness itself to shift, but that could have been an illusion.

It felt extremely strange not to be able to see my own body with my own eyes, though I knew it must be there. Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed.
To cope with that, I would clear my throat now and then, or run my hand over my face. That way, my ears could check on the existence of my voice, my hand could check on the existence of my face, and my face could check on the existence of my hand.