The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (81 page)

>Well, I DO know
.

I set my coffee cup down and type as quickly as I can, as if to catch the fleeting tail of time.

I know this. I know that I want to find my way to where you are—you, the Kumiko who wants me to rescue her. What I do not know yet, unfortunately, is how to get there and what it is that’s waiting for me there. In this whole long time since you left, I’ve lived with a feeling as if I had been thrown into absolute darkness. Slowly but surely, though, I am getting closer to the core, to that place where the core of things is located. I wanted to let you know that. I’m getting closer to where you are, and I intend to get closer still.

I rest my hands on the keyboard and wait for her answer.

>I don’t understand any of this
.

Kumiko types this and ends our conversation:

Goodbye.

•

The screen informs me that the other party has left the circuit. Our conversation is finished. Still, I go on staring at the screen, waiting for something to happen. Maybe Kumiko will change her mind and come back on-line. Maybe she’ll think of something she forgot to say. But she does not come back. I give up after twenty minutes. I save the file, then go to the kitchen for a drink of cold water. I empty my mind out for a while, breathing steadily by the refrigerator. A terrible quiet seems to have descended on everything. I feel as if the world is listening for my next thought. But I can’t think of anything. Sorry, but I just can’t think of anything.

I go back to the computer and sit there, carefully rereading our entire exchange on the glowing tube from beginning to end: what I said, what she said, what I said to that, what she said to that. The whole thing is still there on the screen, with a certain graphic intensity. As my eyes follow the rows of characters she has made, I can hear her voice. I can recognize the rise and fall of her voice, the subtle tones and pauses. The cursor on the last line keeps up its blinking with all the regularity of a heartbeat, waiting with bated breath for the next word to be sent. But there is no next word.

After engraving the entire conversation in my mind (having decided I had better not print it out), I click on the box to exit communications mode. I direct the program to leave no record in the operations file, and after checking to be sure that this has been done, I cut the switch. The computer beeps, and the monitor screen goes dead white. The monotonous mechanical drone is swallowed up in the silence of the room, like a vivid dream ripped out by the hand of nothingness.

•

I don’t know how much time has gone by since then. But when I realize where I am, I find myself staring at my hands lying on the table. They bear the marks of having had eyes sharply focused on them for a long time.

“Going bad” is something that happens over a longer period of time
.

How long a period of time is that?

A few days after Ushikawa’s first visit, I asked Cinnamon to bring me a newspaper whenever he came to the Residence. It was time for me to begin getting in touch with the reality of the outside world. Try as you might to avoid it, when it was time, they came for you.

Cinnamon nodded, and every day after that he would arrive with three newspapers.

I would look through the papers in the morning after breakfast. I had not bothered with newspapers for such a long time that they now struck me as strange—cold and empty. The stimulating smell of the ink gave me a headache, and the intensely black little gangs of type seemed to stab at my eyes. The layout and the headlines’ type style and the tone of the writing seemed unreal to me. I often had to put the paper down, close my eyes, and release a sigh. It couldn’t have been like this in the old days. Reading a newspaper must have been a far more ordinary experience for me than this. What had changed so much about them? Or rather, what had changed so much about
me?

After I had been reading the papers for a while, I was able to achieve a clear understanding of one fact concerning Noboru Wataya: namely, that he was constructing an ever more solid position for himself in society. At the same time that he was conducting an ambitious program of
political activity as one of the up-and-coming new members of the House of Representatives, he was constantly making public pronouncements as a magazine columnist and a regular commentator on TV. I would see his name everywhere. For some reason I could not fathom, people were actually listening to his opinions—and with ever increasing enthusiasm. He was brand-new on the political stage, but he was already being celebrated as one of the young politicians from whom great things could be expected. He was named the country’s most popular politician in a poll conducted by a women’s magazine. He was hailed as an activist intellectual, a new type of intelligent politician that had not been seen before.

When I had read as much as I could stand about current events and Noboru Wataya’s prominent place in them, I turned to my growing collection of books on Manchukuo. Cinnamon had been bringing me everything he could find on the subject. Even here, though, I could not escape the shadow of Noboru Wataya. That day it emerged from the pages of a book on logistical problems. Published in 1978, the library copy had been borrowed only once before, when the book was new, and returned almost immediately. Perhaps only acquaintances of Lieutenant Mamiya were interested in logistical problems in Manchukuo.

As early as 1920, according to the author, Japan’s imperial army was looking into the possibility of amassing a huge inventory of winter survival gear in anticipation of all-out war with the Soviets. Equipping the army to fight in bitter cold was viewed as an urgent matter because they lacked the experience of having fought a real battle anyplace with such extreme winter cold as Siberia. If a border dispute led suddenly to a declaration of war against the Soviet Union (which was by no means out of the question in those days), the army was simply unprepared to persevere in a winter campaign. For this reason, a research team was established within the General Staff Office to prepare to fight a hypothetical war with the Soviet Union, the logistics section being charged with investigating the procurement of special winter clothing. In order to grasp what real cold was like, they went to the far northern island of Sakhalin, long a point of dispute with Czarist Russia and then the Soviet Union, and used an actual fighting unit to test insulated boots and coats and underwear. They ran thoroughgoing tests on equipment currently in use by the Soviet Army and on the kind of clothing that Napoleon’s army had used in its Russian campaign, reaching the conclusion that it would be impossible for the Japanese Army to survive a winter in Siberia with its present equipment. They estimated that some two-thirds of the foot soldiers
on the front lines would be put out of commission by frostbite. The army’s current survival gear had been manufactured with the somewhat gentler northern China winters in mind, and it was lacking in terms of absolute numbers as well. The research team calculated the number of sheep necessary to manufacture sufficient effective winter clothing to outfit ten divisions (the joke making the rounds of the team then being that they were too busy counting sheep to sleep), and they submitted this in their report, along with estimates of the scale of mechanical equipment that would be needed to process the wool.

The number of sheep on the Japanese home islands was clearly insufficient for fighting an extended war in the northern territories against the Soviet Army in the event of economic sanctions or an actual blockade against Japan, and thus it was imperative that Japan secure both a stable supply of wool (and of rabbit and other pelts) in the Manchuria-Mongolia region and the mechanical equipment for processing it, said the report. The man dispatched to make on-the-spot observations in Manchukuo in 1932, immediately after the founding of the puppet regime there, was a young technocrat newly graduated from the Military Staff College with a major in logistics; his name was Yoshitaka Wataya.

Yoshitaka Wataya! This could only have been Noboru’s uncle. There just weren’t that many Watayas in the world, and the name Yoshitaka was the clincher.

His mission was to calculate the time that would be needed before such stable supplies of wool could be secured in Manchukuo. Yoshitaka Wataya seized upon this problem of cold-weather clothing as a model case for modern logistics and carried out an exhaustive numerical analysis.

When he was in Mukden, Yoshitaka Wataya sought an introduction to—and spent the entire night drinking and talking with—Lieutenant General Kanji Ishiwara.

Kanji Ishiwara. Another name I knew well. Noboru Wataya’s uncle had been in touch with Kanji Ishiwara, the ringleader the year before of the staged Chinese attack on Japanese troops known as the “Manchurian Incident,” the event that had enabled Japan to turn Manchuria into Manchukuo—and that later would prove to have been the first act in fifteen years of war.

Ishiwara had toured the continent and become convinced not only that all-out war with the Soviet Union was inevitable but that the key to winning that war lay in strengthening Japan’s logistical position by rapidly industrializing the newly formed empire of Manchukuo and
establishing a self-sufficient economy. He presented his case to Yoshitaka Wataya with eloquence and passion. He argued, too, the importance of bringing farmers from Japan to systematize Manchukuo’s farming and cattle industries and to raise the level of their efficiency.