The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (38 page)

Despite these efforts, my body began to lose its density and weight, like sand gradually being washed away by flowing water. I felt as if a fierce and wordless tug-of-war were going on inside me, a contest in which my mind was slowly dragging my body into its own territory. The darkness was disrupting the proper balance between the two. The thought struck me that my own body was a mere provisional husk that had been prepared for my mind by a rearrangement of the signs known as chromosomes. If the signs were rearranged yet again, I would find myself inside a wholly different body than before. “Prostitute of the mind,” Creta Kano had called herself. I no longer had any trouble accepting the phrase. Yes, it was possible for us to couple in our minds and for me to come in reality. In truly deep darkness, all kinds of strange things were possible.

I shook my head and struggled to bring my mind back inside my body.

In the darkness, I pressed the fingertips of one hand against the fingertips of the other—thumb against thumb, index finger against index finger. My right-hand fingers ascertained the existence of my left-hand fingers, and the fingers of my left hand ascertained the existence of the fingers of my right hand. Then I took several slow, deep breaths. OK, then, enough of this thinking about the mind. Think about reality. Think about the real world. The body’s world. That’s why I’m here. To think about reality. The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible—a place like the bottom of a well, for example. “When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom,” Mr. Honda had said. Leaning against the wall, I slowly sucked the moldy air into my lungs.

•

We didn’t have a wedding ceremony. We couldn’t have afforded it, to begin with, and neither of us wanted to feel beholden to our parents. Beginning our life together, any way we could manage to do so, was far more important to us than a ceremony. We went to the ward office early one Sunday morning, woke the clerk on duty when we rang the bell at the Sunday window, and submitted a registration of marriage. Later, we went to the kind of high-class French restaurant that neither of us could usually afford, ordered a bottle of wine, and ate a full-course dinner. That was enough for us.

At the time we married, we had practically no savings (my mother had left me a little money when she died, but I made a point of never touching it except for a genuine emergency) and no furniture to speak of. We had no future to speak of, either. Working at a law firm without an attorney’s credentials, I had virtually nothing to look forward to, and Kumiko worked for a tiny, unknown publisher. If she had wanted to, she could have found a much better position through her father when she graduated, but she disliked the idea of going to him and instead found a job on her own. Neither of us was dissatisfied, though. We were pleased just to be able to survive without intrusion from anyone.

It wasn’t easy for the two of us to build something out of nothing. I had that tendency toward solitude common to only children. When trying to accomplish something serious, I liked to do it myself. Having to check things out with other people and get them to understand seemed to me a great waste of time and energy when it was a lot easier to work alone in silence. And Kumiko, after losing her sister, had closed her heart to her family and grown up as if alone. She never went to them for advice. In that sense, the two of us were very much alike.

Still, little by little, the two of us learned to devote our bodies and minds to this newly created being we called “our home.” We practiced thinking and feeling about things together. Things that happened to either of us individually we now strove to deal with together as something that belonged to both of us. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. But we enjoyed the fresh, new process of trial and error. And even violent collisions we could forget about in each other’s arms.

•

In the third year of our marriage, Kumiko became pregnant. This was a great shock to us—or to me, at least—because of the extreme care we had been taking with contraception. A moment of carelessness must have done it; not that we could determine which exact moment it had been, but there was no other explanation. In any case, we simply could not afford the expense of a child. Kumiko had just gotten into the swing of her publishing job and, if possible, wanted to keep it. A small company like hers made no provision for anything so grand as maternity leave. A woman working there who wanted to have a child had no choice but to quit. If Kumiko had done that, we would have had to survive on my pay alone, for a while, at least, but this would have been a virtual impossibility.

“I guess we’ll have to pass, this time,” Kumiko said to me in an expressionless voice the day the doctor gave her the news.

She was probably right. No matter how you looked at it, that was the most sensible conclusion. We were young and totally unprepared for parenthood. Both Kumiko and I needed time for ourselves. We had to establish our own life: that was the first priority. We’d have plenty of opportunities for making children in the future.

•

In fact, though, I did not want Kumiko to have an abortion. Once, in my second year of college, I had made a girl pregnant, someone I had met where I worked part time. She was a nice kid, a year younger than I, and we got along well. We liked each other, of course, but were by no means serious about each other, nor was there any possibility that we would ever become serious. We were just two lonely youngsters who needed someone to hold.

About the reason for her pregnancy there was never any doubt. I always used a condom, but that one day I forgot to have one ready. I had run out. When I told her so, she hesitated for a few seconds and then said, “Oh, well, I think I’m OK today anyway.” One time was all it took.

I couldn’t quite believe that I had “made a girl pregnant,” but I did know that an abortion was the only way. I scraped the money together and went with her to the clinic. We took a commuter train way out to a little town in Chiba, where a friend of hers had put her in touch with a doctor. We got off at a station I had never heard of and saw thousands of tiny houses, all stamped out of the same mold, crowded together and stretching over the rolling hills to the horizon. These were huge new developments that had gone up in recent years for the younger company employees who could not afford housing in Tokyo. The station itself was brand-new, and just across from it stretched huge, water-filled rice fields, bigger than any I had ever seen. The streets were lined with real estate signs.

The clinic waiting room overflowed with huge-bellied young women, most of whom must have been in their fourth or fifth year of marriage and finally settling down to make children in their newly mortgaged suburban homes. The only young male in the place was me. The pregnant ladies all looked my way with the most intense interest—and no hint of goodwill. Anyone could see at a glance that I was a college student who had accidentally gotten his girlfriend pregnant and had come with her for an abortion.

After the operation, the girl and I took the train back to Tokyo. Headed into the city in the late afternoon, the train was nearly empty. I apologized to her. My carelessness had gotten her into this mess, I said.

“Don’t take it so hard,” she said. “At least you came with me to the clinic, and you paid for the operation.”

She and I soon stopped seeing each other, so I never knew what became of her, but for a very long time after the abortion—and even after we drifted apart—my feelings refused to settle down. Every time I recalled that day, the image would flash into my mind of the pregnant young women who filled the clinic waiting room to overflowing, their eyes so full of certainty. And the thought would strike me that I should never have gotten her pregnant.

In the train on the way back, to comfort me—to comfort
me
—she told me all the details that had made the operation so easy. “It’s not as bad as you’re thinking,” she said. “It doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t hurt. You just take your clothes off and lie there. Yeah, I suppose it’s kind of embarrassing, but the doctor was nice, and so were the nurses. Of course, they did lecture me a little, said to be more careful from now on. So don’t feel so bad. It’s partly my fault too. I was the one who said it’d be OK. Right? Cheer up.”

All during the long train ride to the little town in Chiba, and all the way back again, though, I felt I had become a different person. Even after I had seen her home and returned to my room, to lie in bed and look at the ceiling, I could sense the change. I was a new me, and I could never go back to where I had been before. What was getting to me was the awareness that I was no longer innocent. This was not a moralistic sense of wrongdoing, or the workings of a guilty conscience. I knew that I had made a terrible mistake, but I was not punishing myself for it. It was a
physical fact
that I would have to confront coolly and logically, beyond any question of punishment.

•

The first thing that came to mind when I heard that Kumiko was pregnant was the image of those pregnant young women who filled the clinic waiting room. Or rather, it was the special smell that seemed to hang in the air there. I had no idea what that smell had been—if it was the actual smell of something at all. Perhaps it had been something
like
a smell. When the nurse called her name, the girl slowly raised herself from the hard vinyl chair and walked straight for the door. Just before she stood up, she glanced at me with the hint of a smile on her lips—or what was left of a smile that she had changed her mind about.

I knew that it was unrealistic for us to have a child, but I didn’t want Kumiko to have an abortion, either. When I said this to her, she replied,
“We’ve been through all this. If I have a baby now, that’s the end of working for me, and you’ll have to find a better-paying job to support me and the baby. We won’t have money for anything extra. We won’t be able to do anything we want to do. From now on, the realistic possibilities for us will be narrowed down to nothing. Is that OK with you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think it is OK with me.”

“Really?”

“If I make up my mind to it, I can probably find work—with my uncle, say: he’s looking for help. He wants to open up a new place, but he can’t find anybody he can trust to run it. I’m sure I’d make a lot more with him than I’m making now. It’s not a law firm, but so what? I’m not crazy about the work I’m doing now.”

“So you’d run a restaurant?”

“I’m sure I could if I gave it a try. And in an emergency, I’ve got a little money my mother left me. We wouldn’t starve to death.”

Kumiko fell silent and stayed that way, thinking, for a long time, making tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She had these little expressions that I liked. “Does this mean you want to have a baby?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I know you’re pregnant, but it hasn’t really hit me that I might become a father. And I don’t really know how our life would change if we had a baby. You like your job, and it seems like a mistake to take that away from you. On the one hand, I think the two of us need more time with each other, but I also think that making a baby would expand our world. I don’t know what’s right. I’ve just got this feeling that I don’t want you to have an abortion. So I can’t make any guarantees. I’m not one hundred percent sure about any of this, and I don’t have any amazing solutions. All I’ve got is this feeling.”

Kumiko thought about this for a while, rubbing her stomach every now and then. “Tell me,” she said. “Why do you think I got pregnant? Nothing comes to mind?”

I shook my head. “Not really. We’ve always been careful. This is just the kind of trouble I wanted to avoid. So I don’t have any idea how it happened.”

“You think I might have had an affair? Haven’t you thought about that possibility?”

“Never.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I can’t claim a sixth sense or anything, but I’m sure of that much.”

We were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking wine. It was late at night and absolutely silent. Kumiko narrowed her eyes and stared at the last sip of wine in the bottom of her glass. She almost never drank, though she would have a glass of wine when she couldn’t get to sleep. It always worked for her. I was just drinking to keep her company. We didn’t have anything so sophisticated as real wineglasses. Instead, we were drinking from little beer glasses we got free at the neighborhood liquor store.

“
Did
you have an affair?” I asked, suddenly concerned.

Kumiko smiled and shook her head. “Don’t be silly. You know I wouldn’t do anything like that. I just brought it up as a theoretical possibility.” Then she turned serious and put her elbows on the table. “Sometimes, though, I can’t tell about things. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not real … what things really happened and what things didn’t really happen.… Just
sometimes
, though.”

“Is this one of those
sometimes?
”

“Well, sort of. Doesn’t this kind of thing ever happen to you?”

I thought about it for a minute. “Not that I can recall as a concrete example, no,” I said.

“How can I put this? There’s a kind of gap between what I think is real and what’s really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me … like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a closet … and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I’ve established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.”

“Some kind of little something-or-other? A burglar?” I said. “Wow, talk about vague!”

“It
is
vague. Really,” said Kumiko, then drank down the rest of her wine.

I looked at her for a time. “And you think there’s some kind of connection between that ‘some kind of little something-or-other’ and the fact that you’re pregnant?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not saying the two things are related or not related. It’s just that sometimes I’m not really sure about the order of things. That’s all I’m trying to say.”