The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (48 page)

I recalled my mark. That patch on my cheek was still slightly warm to the touch. It was still there, all right—I had no need to look in the mirror. It wasn’t the kind of little nothing that just disappears by itself overnight. I thought about looking up a nearby dermatologist in the phone book when it got light out, but how could I answer if a doctor asked me what I thought the cause might be? I was in a well for two or
three days. No, it had nothing to do with work or anything; I was just there to do a little thinking. I figured the bottom of a well would be a good place for that. No, I didn’t take any food with me. No, it wasn’t on my property; it belonged to another house. A vacant house in the neighborhood. I went in without permission.

I sighed. I could never say these things to anyone, of course.

I set my elbows on the table and, without really intending to, found myself thinking in strangely vivid detail about Creta Kano’s naked body. She was sound asleep in my bed. I thought about the time in my dream when I joined my body with hers as she wore Kumiko’s dress. I still had a clear impression of the touch of her skin, the weight of her flesh. Without a step-by-step investigation of that event, I would not be able to distinguish the point at which the real ended and the unreal took over. The wall separating the two regions had begun to melt. In my memory, at least, the real and the unreal seemed to be residing together with equal weight and vividness. I had joined my body with Creta Kano’s, and at the same time, I had not.

To clear my head of these jumbled sexual images, I had to go to the washbasin and splash my face with cold water. A little while later, I looked in on Creta Kano. She was still sound asleep. She had pushed the cover down to her waist. From where I stood, I could see only her back. It reminded me of my last view of Kumiko’s back. Now that I thought about it, Creta Kano’s figure was amazingly like Kumiko’s. I had failed to notice the resemblance until now because their hair and their taste in clothes and their makeup were so utterly different. They were the same height and appeared to be about the same weight. They probably wore the same dress size.

I carried my own summer comforter to the living room, stretched out on the sofa, and opened my book. I had been reading a history book from the library. It was all about Japanese management of Manchuria before the war and the battle with the Soviets in Nomonhan. Lieutenant Mamiya’s story had aroused my interest in continental affairs of the period, and I had borrowed several books on the subject. Now, however, less than ten minutes into the finely detailed historical narrative, I was falling asleep. I laid the book on the floor, intending to rest my eyes for a few moments, but I fell into a deep sleep, with the lights still on.

A sound from the kitchen woke me up. When I went to investigate, Creta Kano was there, making breakfast, wearing a white T-shirt and blue shorts, both of which belonged to Kumiko.

“Where are your clothes?” I demanded, standing in the kitchen door.

“Oh, I’m sorry. You were asleep, so I took the liberty of borrowing some of your wife’s clothing. I knew it was terribly forward of me, but I didn’t have a thing to wear,” said Creta Kano, turning just her head to look at me. At some point since I last saw her, she had reverted to her usual sixties style of hair and makeup, lacking only the fake eyelashes.

“No, that’s no problem,” I said. “What I want to know is what happened to your clothes.”

“I lost them,” she said simply.

“Lost them?”

“Yes. I lost them somewhere.”

I stepped into the kitchen and watched, leaning against the table, as Creta Kano made an omelette. With deft movements, she cracked the eggs, added seasoning, and beat the mixture.

“Meaning you came here naked?”

“Yes, that is correct,” said Creta Kano, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I was completely naked. You know that, Mr. Okada. You put the cover on me.”

“Well, true enough,” I mumbled. “But what I’d like to know is, where and how did you lose your clothing, and how did you manage to get here with nothing on?”

“I don’t know that any better than you do,” said Creta Kano, while shaking the frying pan to fold the omelette over on itself.

“You don’t know that any better than I do,” I said.

Creta Kano slipped the omelette onto a plate and garnished it with a few stalks of freshly steamed broccoli. She had also made toast, which she set on the table, along with coffee. I put out the butter and salt and pepper. Then, like a newly married couple, we sat down to breakfast, facing each other.

It was then that I recalled my mark. Creta Kano had shown no surprise when she looked at me, and she asked me nothing about it. I reached up to touch the spot and found it slightly warm, as before.

“Does that hurt, Mr. Okada?”

“No, not at all,” I said.

Creta Kano stared at my face for a time. “It looks like a mark,” she said.

“It looks like a mark to me too,” I said. “I’m wondering whether I should show it to a doctor or not.”

“It strikes me as something that a doctor would not be able to handle.”

“You may be right,” I said. “But I can’t just ignore it.”

Fork in hand, Creta Kano thought for a moment. “If you have shopping
or other business, I could do it for you. You can stay inside as long as you like, if you would rather not go out.”

“I’m grateful for the offer, but you must have your own things to do, and I can’t just stay holed up in here forever.”

Creta Kano thought about that for a while too. “Malta Kano would probably know how to deal with this.”

“Would you mind getting in touch with her for me, then?”

“Malta Kano gets in touch with other people, but she does not allow other people to get in touch with her.” Creta Kano bit into a piece of broccoli.

“But
you
can get in touch with her, I’m sure?”

“Of course. We’re sisters.”

“Well, next time you talk to her, why don’t you ask her about my mark? Or you could ask her to get in touch with me.”

“I am sorry, but that is something I cannot do. I am not allowed to approach my sister on someone else’s behalf. It’s a sort of rule we have.”

Buttering my toast, I let out a sigh. “You mean to say, if I have something I need to talk to Malta Kano about, all I can do is wait for her to get in touch with me?”

“That is exactly what I mean,” said Creta Kano. Then she nodded. “But about that mark. Unless it hurts or itches, I suggest that you forget about it for a while. I never let things like that bother me. And you should not let it bother you, either, Mr. Okada. People just get these things sometimes.”

“I wonder,” I said.

For several minutes after that, we went on eating our breakfast in silence. I hadn’t eaten breakfast with another person for quite a while now, and this one was particularly delicious. Creta Kano seemed pleased when I told her this.

“Anyhow,” I said, “about your clothes …”

“Does it bother you that I put on your wife’s clothing without permission?” she asked, with obvious concern.

“No, not at all. I don’t care what you wear of Kumiko’s. She left them here, after all. What I’m concerned about is how you lost your own clothes.”

“And not just my clothes. My shoes too.”

“So how did it happen?”

“I can’t remember,” said Creta Kano. “All I know is I woke up in your bed with nothing on. I can’t remember what happened before that.”

“You
did
go down into the well, didn’t you—after I left?”

“That I do remember. And I fell asleep down there. But I can’t remember anything after that.”

“Which means you don’t have any recollection of how you got out of the well?”

“None at all. There is a gap in my memory.” Creta Kano held up both index fingers, about eight inches apart. How much time that was supposed to represent I had no idea.

“I don’t suppose you remember what you did with the rope ladder, either. It’s gone, you know.”

“I don’t know anything about the ladder. I don’t even remember if I climbed it to get out of the well.”

I glared at the coffee cup in my hand for a time. “Do you mind showing me the bottoms of your feet?” I asked.

“No, not at all,” said Creta Kano. She sat down in the chair next to mine and stretched her legs out in my direction so that I could see the soles of her feet. I took her ankles in my hands and examined her soles. They were perfectly clean. Beautifully formed, the soles had not a mark on them—no cuts, no mud, nothing at all.

“No mud, no cuts,” I said.

“I see,” said Creta Kano.

“It was raining all day yesterday. If you lost your shoes somewhere and walked here from there, you should have some mud on your feet. And you must have come in through the garden. But your feet are clean, and there’s no mud anywhere.”

“I see.”

“Which means you didn’t walk here barefoot from anywhere.”

Creta Kano inclined her head slightly to one side as if impressed. “This is all logically consistent,” she said.

“It may be logically consistent, but it’s not getting us anywhere,” I said. “Where did you lose your shoes and clothes, and how did you walk here from there?”

Creta Kano shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said.

•

While she stood at the sink, intently washing the dishes, I stayed at the kitchen table, thinking about these things. Of course, I had no idea, either.

“Do these things happen to you often—that you can’t remember where you’ve been?” I asked.

“This is not the first time that something like this has happened to
me, when I can’t recall where I have been or what I was doing. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen to me now and then. I once lost some clothes, too. But this is the first time I lost all my clothes and my shoes and everything.”

Creta Kano turned off the water and wiped the table with a dish towel.

“You know, Creta Kano,” I said, “you haven’t told me your whole story. Last time, you were partway through when you disappeared. Remember? If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear the rest. You told me how the mob got hold of you and made you work as one of their prostitutes, but you didn’t tell me what happened after you met Noboru Wataya and slept with him.”

Creta Kano leaned against the kitchen sink and looked at me. Drops of water on her hands ran down her fingers and fell to the floor. The shape of her nipples showed clearly through the white T-shirt, a vivid reminder to me of the naked body I had seen the night before.

“All right, then. I
will
tell you everything that happened after that. Right now.”

Creta Kano sat down once again in the seat opposite mine.

“The reason I left that day when I was in the middle of my story, Mr. Okada, is that I was not fully prepared to tell it all. I had started my story precisely because I felt I ought to tell you, as honestly as possible, what really happened to me. But I found I could not go all the way to the end. You must have been shocked when I disappeared so suddenly.”

Creta Kano put her hands on the table and looked straight at me as she spoke.

“Well, yes, I was shocked, though it was not the most shocking thing that’s happened to me lately.”

•

“As I told you before, the very last customer I had as a prostitute of the flesh was Noboru Wataya. The second time I met him, as a client of Malta Kano’s, I recognized him immediately. It would have been impossible for me to forget him. Whether he remembered me or not I cannot be certain. Mr. Wataya is not a person who shows his feelings.

“But let me go back and put things in order. First I will tell you about the time I had Noboru Wataya as a customer. That would be six years ago.

“As I told you before, I was in a state at that time in which I had absolutely no perception of pain. And not only pain: I had no sensations of any kind. I lived in a bottomless numbness. Of course, I don’t mean to say that I was unable to feel any sensations at all—I knew when something
was hot or cold or painful. But these sensations came to me as if from a distance, from a world that had nothing to do with me. Which is why I felt no resistance to the idea of having sexual relations with men for money. No matter what anyone did to me, the sensations I felt did not belong to me. My unfeeling flesh was not my flesh.

“Now, let’s see, I told you about how I had been recruited by the mob’s prostitution ring. When they told me to sleep with men I did it, and when they paid me I took it. I left off at that point.”

I nodded to her.

“That day they told me to go to a room on the sixteenth floor of a downtown hotel. The client had the unusual name of Wataya. I knocked on the door and went in, to find the man sitting on the sofa. He had apparently been drinking room-service coffee while reading a book. He wore a green polo shirt and brown cotton pants. His hair was short, and he wore brown-framed glasses. On the coffee table in front of him were his cup and a coffeepot and the book. He seemed to have been deeply absorbed in his reading: there was a kind of excitement still in his eyes. His features were in no way remarkable, but those eyes of his had an energy about them that was almost weird. When I first saw them, I thought for a moment that I was in the wrong room. But it was not the wrong room. The man told me to come inside and lock the door.

“Still seated on the sofa, without saying a word, he ran his eyes over my body. From head to foot. That was what usually happened when I entered a client’s room. Most men would look me over. Excuse me for asking, Mr. Okada, but have you ever bought a prostitute?”

I said that I had not.

“It’s as if they were looking over merchandise. It doesn’t take long to get used to being looked at like that. They are paying money for flesh, after all; it makes sense for them to examine the goods. But the way that man looked at me was different. He seemed to be looking through my flesh to something on the other side. His eyes made me feel uneasy, as if I had become a half-transparent human being.

“I was a little confused, I suppose: I dropped my handbag on the floor. It made a small sound, but I was in such an abstracted state that, for a time, I was almost unaware of what I had done. Then I stooped down to pick up the bag. The clasp had opened when it hit the floor, and some of my cosmetics had fallen out. I picked up my eyebrow pencil and lip cream and a small bottle of eau de cologne, returning each of them to my bag. He kept those eyes of his trained on me the whole time.