The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (55 page)

Then I realized the man was smiling. Even as I went on hitting him, the man kept smiling at me—the more I hit him, the bigger the smile, until finally, with blood streaming from his nose and lips, and choking on his own spit, the man gave out a high, thin laugh. He must be crazy, I thought, and I stopped punching him and stood up straight.

I looked around and saw the black guitar case propped against the side of the shoe cabinet. I left the man where he lay, still laughing, and approached the guitar case. Lowering it to the floor, I opened the clasps and lifted the cover. There was nothing inside. It was absolutely empty—no guitar, no candles. The man looked at me, laughing and coughing. I could hardly breathe. All of a sudden, the hot, steamy air inside this building became unbearable. The smell of mold, the touch of my own sweat, the smell of blood and saliva, my own sense of anger and of hatred: all became more than I could bear. I pushed the door open and went outside, closing the door behind me. As before, there was no sign of anyone in the area. All that moved was a large brown cat, slowly making its way across the vacant lot, oblivious of me.

I wanted to get out of there before anyone spotted me. I wasn’t sure which way I should go, but I started walking and before long managed to find a bus stop labeled “To Shinjuku Station.” I hoped to calm my breathing and straighten my head out before the next bus came, but failed to do either. Over and over, I told myself: All I was trying to do was look at people’s faces! I was just looking at the faces of people passing by on the street, the way my uncle had said. I was just trying to untangle the simplest complications in my life, that’s all. When I entered the bus, the passengers turned toward me. Each of them gave me the same shocked look and then averted his eyes. I assumed it was because of the mark on my face. Some time had to go by before I realized it was because of the splatters on my white shirt of the man’s blood (mostly blood from his nose) and the baseball bat I was still clutching in my hands.

I ended up bringing the bat all the way home with me and throwing it in the closet.

That night I stayed awake until the sun came up. The places on my shoulder and left arm where the man had hit me with the bat began to swell and to throb with pain, and my right fist retained the sensation of punching the man over and over and over again. The hand was still a fist, I realized, still clutched into a ball and ready to fight. I tried to relax it, but the hand would not cooperate. And where sleeping was concerned, it was less a matter of being unable to sleep than of not wanting to sleep. If I went to sleep in my present state, there was no way I could avoid having terrible dreams. Trying to calm myself, I sat at the kitchen table, taking straight sips of the whiskey my uncle had left with me and listening to quiet music on the cassette player. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted someone to talk to me. I set the telephone on the table and stared at it for hours. Call me, somebody, please, anybody—even the mysterious phone woman; I didn’t care. It could be the most filthy and meaningless talk, the most disgusting and sinister conversation. That didn’t matter. I just wanted someone to talk to me.

But the telephone never rang. I finished the remaining half-bottle of scotch, and after the sky grew light, I crawled into bed and went to sleep. Please don’t let me dream, please just let my sleep be a blank space, if only for today.

But of course I did dream. And as I had expected, it was a terrible dream. The man with the guitar case was in it. I performed the same actions in the dream as I had in reality—following him, opening the front door of the apartment house, feeling the impact of the bat, and hitting and hitting and hitting the man. But after that it was different. When I stopped hitting him and stood up, the man, drooling and laughing wildly as he had in reality, pulled a knife from his pocket—a small, sharp-looking knife. The blade caught the faint evening glow that spilled in through the curtains, reflecting a white glimmer reminiscent of bone. But the man did not use the knife to attack me. Instead, he took all his clothes off and started to peel his own skin as if it were the skin of an apple. He worked quickly, laughing aloud all the while. The blood gushed out of him, forming a black, menacing pool on the floor. With his right hand, he peeled the skin of his left arm, and with his bloody, peeled left hand he peeled the skin of his right arm. In the end, he became a bright-red lump of flesh, but even then, he went on laughing from the dark hole of his open mouth, the white eyeballs moving spasmodically against the raw
lump of flesh. Soon, as if in response to his unnaturally loud laughter, the man’s peeled skin began to slither across the floor toward me. I tried to run away, but my legs would not move. The skin reached my feet and began to crawl upward. It crept over my own skin, the man’s blood-soaked skin clinging to mine as an overlay. The heavy smell of blood was everywhere. Soon my legs, my body, my face, were entirely covered by the thin membrane of the man’s skin. Then my eyes could no longer see, and the man’s laughter reverberated in the hollow darkness. At that point, I woke up.

Confusion and fear overtook me then. For a while, I even lost hold of my own existence. My fingers were trembling. But at the same time, I knew that I had reached a conclusion.

I could not—and should not—run away, not to Crete, not to anyplace. I had to get Kumiko back. With my own hands, I had to pull her back into
this world
. Because if I didn’t, that would be the end of me. This person, this self that I thought of as “me,” would be lost.

Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. It rained a lot in September. October had several warm, sweaty days. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.

•

And yet there were a few people who wouldn’t leave me alone—people from Kumiko’s family, who wrote me letters. Kumiko could not go on being married to me, they said, and so I should immediately agree to a divorce. That would supposedly solve all the problems. The first few letters tried to exert pressure on me in a businesslike manner. When I failed to answer, they resorted to threats and, in the end, turned to pleading. All were looking for the same thing.

Eventually, Kumiko’s father called.

“I am not saying that I am absolutely opposed to a divorce,” I said. “But first I want to see Kumiko and talk to her, alone. If she can convince me it’s what she wants, then I will give her a divorce. That is the only way I will agree to it.”

I turned toward the kitchen window and looked at the dark, rain-filled sky stretching away into the distance. It had been raining for four straight days, into a wet, black world.

“Kumiko and I talked everything over before we decided to get married, and if we are going to end that marriage, I want to do it the same way.”

Kumiko’s father and I went on making parallel statements, arriving nowhere—or nowhere fruitful, at least.

•

Several questions remained unanswered. Did Kumiko really want to divorce me? And had she asked her parents to try to convince me to go along with that? “Kumiko
says
she doesn’t want to see you,” her father had told me, exactly as her brother, Noboru Wataya, had said. This was probably not an out-and-out lie. Kumiko’s parents were not above interpreting things in a manner convenient to themselves, but as far as I knew, they were not the sort to manufacture facts out of nothing. They were, for better or worse, realistic people. If what her father had said was true, then, was Kumiko now being “sheltered” by them?

But that I found impossible to believe. Love was simply not an emotion that Kumiko had felt for her parents and brother from the time she was a little girl. She had struggled for years to keep herself independent of them. It could well be that Kumiko had chosen to leave me because she had taken a lover. Even if I could not fully accept the explanation she had given me in her letter, I knew that it was not entirely out of the question. But what I could not accept was that Kumiko could have gone straight from me to them—or to some place they had prepared for her—and that she could be communicating with me through them.

The more I thought about it, the less I understood. One possibility was that Kumiko had experienced an emotional breakdown and could no longer sustain herself. Another was that she was being held against her will. I spent several days arranging and rearranging a variety of facts and words and memories, until I had to give up thinking. Speculation was getting me nowhere.

•

Autumn was drawing to a close, and a touch of winter hung in the air. As I always did in that season, I raked the dead leaves in the garden and stuffed them into vinyl bags. I set a ladder against the roof and cleaned the leaves out of the gutters. The little garden of the house I lived in had no trees, but the wind carried leaves in abundance from the broad-spreading deciduous trees in the gardens on both sides. I didn’t mind the work. The time would pass as I watched the withered leaves floating down in the afternoon sunshine. One big tree in the neighbor’s to the right put out bright-red berries. Flocks of birds would perch there and chirp as if in competition with each other. These were brightly colored birds, with short, sharp cries that stabbed the air.

I wondered about how best to store Kumiko’s summer clothing. I could do as she had said in her letter and get rid of them. But I remembered the care that she had given each piece. And it was not as if I had no place to keep them. I decided to leave them for the time being where they were.

Still, whenever I opened the closet, I was confronted by Kumiko’s absence. The dresses hanging there were the husks of something that had once existed. I knew how she looked in these clothes, and to some of them were attached specific memories. Sometimes I would find myself sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the rows of dresses or blouses or skirts. I would have no idea how long I had been sitting there. It could have been ten minutes or an hour.

Sometimes, as I sat staring at a dress, I would imagine a man I didn’t know helping Kumiko out of it. His hands would slip the dress off, then go on to remove the underwear beneath. They would caress her breasts and press her thighs apart. I could see those breasts and thighs in all their white softness, and the other man’s hands touching them. I didn’t want to think about such things, but I had no choice. They had probably happened in reality. I had to get myself used to such images. I couldn’t just shove reality aside.

Now and then, I would recall the night I slept with Creta Kano, but the memory of it was mysteriously vague. I held her in my arms that night and joined my body with hers any number of times: that was an undeniable fact. But as the weeks passed by, the feeling of certainty began to disappear. I couldn’t bring back concrete images of her body or of the ways in which it had joined with mine. If anything, the memories of what I had done with her earlier, in my mind—in unreality—were far more vivid than the memories of the reality of that night. The image of her
mounted on me, wearing Kumiko’s blue dress, in that strange hotel room, came back to me over and over again with amazing clarity.

•

Early October saw the death of the uncle of Noboru Wataya who had served as Niigata’s representative to the Lower House. He suffered a heart attack shortly after midnight in his hospital bed in Niigata, and by dawn, despite the doctors’ best efforts, he was nothing but a corpse. The death had long been anticipated, of course, and a general election was expected shortly, so the uncle’s supporters lost no time in formalizing their earlier plan to have Noboru Wataya inherit the constituency. The late representative’s vote-gathering machinery was solidly based and solidly conservative. Barring some major unforeseen event, Noboru Wataya’s election was all but assured.

The first thing that crossed my mind when I read the article in a library newspaper was how busy the Wataya family was going to be from now on. The farthest thing from anybody’s mind would be Kumiko’s divorce.

•

The black-and-blue mark on my face neither grew nor shrank. It produced neither fever nor pain. I gradually forgot I even had it. I stopped trying to hide the mark by wearing sunglasses or a hat with the brim pulled down low. I would be reminded of it now and then when I went out shopping and people would stare at me or look away, but even these reactions stopped bothering me after a while. I wasn’t harming them by having a mark on my face. I would examine it each morning when I washed and shaved, but I could see no change. Its size, color, and shape remained the same.