The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (86 page)

Once the veterinarian had been freed from the dead man’s grasp, the soldiers pulled him and the lieutenant out of the grave. The veterinarian
squatted down on the grass and took several deep breaths. Then he looked at his wrist. The man’s fingers had left five bright-red marks. On this hot August afternoon, the veterinarian felt chilled to the core of his body. I’ll never get rid of this coldness, he thought. That man was truly, seriously, trying to take me with him wherever he was going.

The lieutenant reset the pistol’s safety and carefully slipped the gun into its holster. This was the first time he had ever fired a gun at a human being. But he tried not to think about it. The war would continue for a little while at least, and people would continue to die. He could leave the deep thinking for later. He wiped his sweaty right palm on his pants, then ordered the soldiers who had not participated in the execution to fill in the hole. A huge swarm of flies had already taken custody of the pile of corpses.

The young soldier went on standing where he was, stupefied, gripping the bat. He couldn’t seem to make his hands let go. The lieutenant and the corporal left him alone. He had seemed to be watching the whole bizarre series of events—the “dead” Chinese suddenly grabbing the veterinarian by the wrist, their falling into the grave, the lieutenant’s leaping in and finishing him off, and now the other soldiers’ filling in the hole. But in fact, he had not been watching any of it. He had been listening to the wind-up bird. As it had been the previous afternoon, the bird was in a tree somewhere, making that
creeeak, creeeak
sound as if winding a spring. The soldier looked up, trying to pinpoint the direction of the cries, but he could see no sign of the bird. He felt a slight sense of nausea at the back of his throat, though nothing as violent as yesterday’s.

As he listened to the winding of the spring, the young soldier saw one fragmentary image after another rise up before him and fade away. After they were disarmed by the Soviets, the young paymaster lieutenant would be handed over to the Chinese and hanged for his responsibility in these executions. The corporal would die of the plague in a Siberian concentration camp: he would be thrown into a quarantine shed and left there until dead, though in fact he had merely collapsed from malnutrition and had not contracted the plague—not, at least, until he was thrown into the shed. The veterinarian with the mark on his face would die in an accident a year later. A civilian, he would be taken by the Soviets for cooperating with the military and sent to another Siberian camp to do hard labor. He would be working in a deep shaft of a Siberian coal mine when a flood would drown him, along with many soldiers. And I …, thought the young soldier with the bat in his hands, but he could
not see his own future. He could not even see the events that were transpiring before his very eyes. He now closed his eyes and listened to the call of the wind-up bird.

Then, all at once, he thought of the ocean—the ocean he had seen from the deck of the ship that brought him from Japan to Manchuria. He had never seen the ocean before, nor had he seen it since. That had happened eight years ago. He could still remember the smell of the salt air. The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort. Would he ever see it again? He loosened his grip and let the bat fall to the ground. It made a dry sound as it struck the earth. After the bat left his hands, he felt a slight increase in his nausea.

The wind-up bird went on crying, but no one else could hear its call.

•

Here ended “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8.”

Here ended “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8.”

•

I exited the document to the original menu and clicked on “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #9.” I wanted to read the continuation of the story. But instead of a new document, I saw this message:

Access denied to “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #9” based on Code R24
.

Choose another document
.

I chose #10, but with the same results.

Access denied to “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #10” based on Code R24
.

Choose another document
.

The same thing happened with #11—and with all the other documents, including #8. I had no idea what this “Code R24” was, but it was obviously blocking access to everything now. At the moment I had opened “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8,” I probably could have had access to any one of them, but #8 having been opened and closed, the doors were locked to all of them now. Maybe this program did not permit access to more than one document at a time.

I sat in front of the computer, wondering what to do next. But there
was nothing I could do next. This was a precisely articulated world, which had been conceived in Cinnamon’s mind and which functioned according to his principles. I did not know the rules of the game. I gave up trying and shut down the computer.

•

Without a doubt, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8” was a story told by Cinnamon. He had put sixteen stories into the computer under the title “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” and it just so happened that I had chosen and read #8. Judging from the length of the one story, sixteen such stories would have made a fairly thick book if set in type.

What could “#8” signify? The word “chronicle” in the title probably meant that the stories were related in chronological order, #8 following #7, #9 following #8, and so on. That was a reasonable assumption, if not necessarily true. They could just as well have been arranged in a different order. They might even run backward, from the present to the past. A bolder hypothesis might make them sixteen different versions of the same story told in parallel. In any case, the one I had chosen was a sequel to the story that Cinnamon’s mother, Nutmeg, had told me about soldiers killing animals in the Hsin-ching zoo in August 1945. It was set in the same zoo on the following day, and again the central character was Nutmeg’s father, Cinnamon’s grandfather, the nameless veterinarian.

I had no way of telling how much of the story was true. Was every bit of it Cinnamon’s creation, or were parts of it based on actual events? Nutmeg had told me that “absolutely nothing” was known about what happened to her father after she saw him last. Which meant that the story could not be entirely true. Still, it was conceivable that some of the details were based on historical fact. It was possible that during such a time of chaos, a number of cadets from the Manchukuo Army officer candidate school were executed and buried in a hole in the Hsin-ching zoo and that the Japanese officer in charge of the operation had been executed after the war. Incidents of desertion and rebellion by Manchukuo Army troops were by no means rare at the time, and although it was rather strange to have the murdered Chinese cadets dressed in baseball uniforms, this could have happened as well. Knowing such facts, Cinnamon might have combined them with the image he had of his grandfather and made up
his own
story.

But why, finally, had Cinnamon written such stories? And why
stories?
Why not some other form? And why had he found it necessary to use the word “chronicle” in the title? I thought about these things while seated
on the fitting room sofa, turning a colored design pencil over and over in my hand.

I probably would have had to read all sixteen stories to find the answers to my questions, but even after a single reading of #8, I had some idea, however vague, of what Cinnamon was looking for in his writing. He was engaged in a serious search for the meaning of his own existence. And he was hoping to find it by looking into the events that had preceded his birth.

To do that, Cinnamon had to fill in those blank spots in the past that he could not reach with his own hands. By using those hands to make a story, he was trying to supply the missing links. From the stories he had heard repeatedly from his mother, he derived further stories in an attempt to re-create the enigmatic figure of his grandfather in a new setting. He inherited from his mother’s stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that
fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual
. The question of which parts of a story were factual and which parts were not was probably not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather
did
but what his grandfather
might have done
. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.

His stories used “wind-up bird” as a key phrase, and they almost certainly brought the narrative up to the present day in the form of a chronicle (or perhaps
not
in the form of a chronicle). But “wind-up bird” was not a term invented by Cinnamon. It was a phrase spoken unconsciously by his mother, Nutmeg, in a story she told me in the Aoyama restaurant where we ate together. Nutmeg almost certainly did not know at that time that I had been given the name “Mr. Wind-Up Bird.” Which meant that I was connected with their story through some chance conjunction.

I could not be certain of this, however. Nutmeg might possibly have known that I was called “wind-up bird.” The words might have affected her story (or, rather,
their
story), might have eaten their way into it on an unconscious level. This story jointly possessed by mother and son might not exist in a single fixed form but could go on taking in changes and growing as a story does in oral transmission.

Whether by chance conjunction or not, the “wind-up bird” was a powerful presence in Cinnamon’s story. The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin. The will of human beings meant nothing, then, as the veterinarian always
seemed to feel. People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose. Nearly all within range of the wind-up bird’s cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.

•

Cinnamon had almost certainly monitored my conversation with Kumiko. He probably knew everything that went on in this computer. He had probably waited until I had finished before presenting me with the story of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” This had clearly not happened by chance or a sudden whim. Cinnamon had run the machine with a definite purpose in mind and shown me
one
story. He had also made sure I knew that there might possibly exist a whole, huge cluster of stories.

I lay down on the sofa and looked at the ceiling of the fitting room in the half-dark. The night was deep and heavy, the area almost painfully quiet. The white ceiling looked like a thick white cap of ice that had been set on top of the room.

Cinnamon’s grandfather, the nameless veterinarian, and I had a number of unusual things in common—a mark on the face, a baseball bat, the cry of the wind-up bird. And then there was the lieutenant who appeared in Cinnamon’s story: he reminded me of Lieutenant Mamiya. Lieutenant Mamiya had also been assigned to Kwantung Army Headquarters in Hsin-ching at that time. The real Lieutenant Mamiya, however, was not a paymaster officer but belonged to the mapmaking corps, and after the war he was not hanged (fate had denied him death at all) but rather returned to Japan, having lost his left hand in battle. Still, I could not shake off the impression that the officer who had directed the executions of the Chinese cadets had
really
been Lieutenant Mamiya. At least if it
had
been Lieutenant Mamiya, that would not have been the least bit strange.

Then there was the problem of the baseball bats. Cinnamon knew that I kept a bat in the bottom of the well. Which meant that the image of the bat could have “eaten its way” into his story the same way the words “wind-up bird chronicle” could have. Even if this was true, however, there was still something about the bat that could not be explained so simply: the man with the guitar case who attacked me with the bat in the entryway of the abandoned apartment house. This was the man who had made a show of burning the palm of his hand in a candle flame in a bar in Sapporo and who later hit me with the bat, only to have me beat him with it. He was the one who had
surrendered
the bat to me.

And finally, why did I have burned into my face a mark the same color and shape as that of Cinnamon’s grandfather? Was this, too, something that came up in their story as a result of my presence having “eaten” its way into it? Did the actual veterinarian not have a mark on his face? Nutmeg certainly had no need to make up such a thing in describing her father to me. The very thing that had led her to “find” me on the streets of Shinjuku was this mark that we possessed in common. Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle—a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth.