The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (30 page)

In contrast to
A Farewell to Arms
, though, I developed no appetite at all as I watched the hands of the clock in this quiet house, waiting for something to happen. And soon the thought crossed my mind that my failure to develop an appetite might be owing to the lack within me of this kind of literary reality. I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true.

•

The phone finally rang, just before two in the afternoon.

“Is this the Okada residence?” asked an unfamiliar male voice. It was a young man’s voice, low and smooth.

“Yes, it is,” I answered, my own voice somewhat tense.

“Block two, number twenty-six?”

“That’s right.”

“This is the Omura liquor store calling. Thank you for your continued patronage. I was just about to leave to make my collections, and I wanted to check to see if this was a good time for you.”

“Collections?”

“Yes, sir. I have you down for two cases of beer and a case of juice.”

“Oh. Fine. I’ll be home for a while yet,” I said, bringing our conversation to a close.

After hanging up, I wondered whether that conversation had contained any information regarding Kumiko. But viewed from all possible angles, it had been nothing but a short, practical call from a liquor store about collections. I had ordered beer and juice from them, and they had delivered it, that much was certain. Half an hour later, the fellow came to the door, and I paid for two cases of beer and a case of juice.

The friendly young man smiled as he filled out the receipt.

“By the way, Mr. Okada, did you hear about the accident by the station this morning? About half past nine.”

“Accident?” I asked with a shock. “Who was in an accident?”

“A little girl,” he said. “Got run over by a van backing up. Hurt bad, too, I hear. I got there just after it happened. It’s awful to see something like that first thing in the morning. Little kids scare the heck out of me: you can’t see them in your rearview mirror. You know the cleaner’s by the station? It happened right in front of his place. People park their bikes there, and all these cartons are piled up: you can’t see a thing.”

After he left, I felt I couldn’t stay in the house a minute longer. All of a sudden, the place felt hot and stuffy, dark and cramped. I stepped into my shoes and got out of there as fast as I could. I didn’t even lock the door. I left the windows open and the kitchen light on. I wandered around the neighborhood, sucking on a lemon drop. As I replayed the words of the young liquor store employee in my mind, it slowly dawned on me that I had left some clothes at the cleaner’s by the station. Kumiko’s blouse and skirt. The ticket was in the house, but if I just went and asked for them, the man would probably let me have them.

The neighborhood looked a little different to me. The people I passed on the street all had an unnatural, even artificial, look to them. I examined each face as I walked by, and I wondered what kind of people these could be. What kind of houses did they live in? What kind of families did they have? What kind of lives did they lead? Did they sleep with women other than their wives, or men other than their husbands? Were they happy? Did they know how unnatural and artificial they looked?

Signs of the morning’s accident were still fresh outside the cleaner’s: on the ground, the police chalk line; nearby, a few shoppers discussing the accident, with grave expressions on their faces. Inside, the cleaner’s shop looked the same as ever. The same black boom box played the same kind of mood music, while in back an old-fashioned air conditioner roared along and clouds of steam rose from the iron to the ceiling. The song was “Ebb Tide.” Robert Maxwell, harp. I thought how wonderful it would be if I could go to the ocean. I imagined the smell of the beach and the sound of waves breaking on the shore. Seagulls. Ice-cold cans of beer.

To the owner, I said only that I had forgotten my receipt. “I’m pretty sure I brought them in last Friday or Saturday: a blouse and skirt.”

“Okada … Okada …,” he said, and flipped through the pages of a college notebook. “Sure, here it is. One blouse, one skirt. But Mrs. Okada picked them up already.”

“She did?” I asked, taken aback.

“Yesterday morning. I clearly remember handing them to her myself. I figured she was on her way to work. Brought the receipt in too.”

I had no words to answer him with. I could only stare at him.

“Ask the missus,” he said. “She’s got ’em, no mistake.” He took a cigarette from the box on the register, put it in his mouth, and lit it with a lighter.

“Yesterday morning?” I asked. “Not evening?”

“Morning for sure. Eight o’clock. Your wife was the first customer of the day. I wouldn’t forget something like that. Hey, when your very first customer is a young woman, it puts you in a good mood, know what I mean?”

I was unable to fake a smile for him, and the voice that came out of me didn’t sound like my own. “Oh, well, I guess that takes care of that. Sorry, I didn’t know she picked them up.”

He nodded and glanced at me, crushed out the cigarette, from which he had taken no more than two or three puffs, and went back to his ironing. He seemed to have become interested in me, as if he wanted to tell me something but decided in the end to say nothing. And I, meanwhile, had things I wanted to ask him. How had Kumiko looked when she came for her cleaning? What had she been carrying? But I was confused and very thirsty. What I most wanted was to sit down somewhere and have a cold drink. That was the only way I would ever be able to think about anything again, I felt.

I went straight from the cleaner’s to the coffeehouse a few doors away and ordered a glass of iced tea. The place was cool inside, and I was the
only customer. Small wall-mounted speakers were playing an orchestrated version of the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week.” I thought about the seashore again. I imagined myself barefoot and moving along the beach at the water’s edge. The sand was burning hot, and the wind carried the heavy smell of the tide. I inhaled deeply and looked up at the sky. Stretching out my hands, palms upward, I could feel the summer sun burning into them. Soon a cold wave washed over my feet.

Viewed from any angle, it was odd for Kumiko to have picked things up from the cleaner’s on her way to work. For one thing, she would have had to squeeze onto a jam-packed commuter train holding freshly pressed clothing on hangers. Then she would have had to do it again on the way home. Not only would they be something extra to carry, but the cleaner’s careful work would have been reduced to a mass of wrinkles. Sensitive as Kumiko was about such things, I couldn’t imagine she would have done something so pointless. All she had to do was stop by on the way home from work. Or if she was going to be late, she could have asked me to pick them up. There was only one conceivable explanation: she had known she was not coming home. Blouse and skirt in hand, she had gone off somewhere. That way, she would have at least one change of clothing with her, and anything else she needed she could buy. She had her credit cards and her ATM card and her own bank account. She could go anywhere she wanted.

And she was with someone—a man. There was no other reason for her to leave home, probably.

This was serious. Kumiko had disappeared, leaving behind all her clothes and shoes. She had always enjoyed shopping to add to her wardrobe, to which she devoted considerable care and attention. For her to have abandoned it and left home with little more than the literal clothes on her back would have taken a major act of will. And yet without the slightest hesitation—it seemed to me—she had walked out of the house with nothing more in her hand than a blouse and skirt. No, her clothing was probably the last thing on her mind.

Leaning back in my chair, half listening to the painfully sanitized background music, I imagined Kumiko boarding a crowded commuter train with her clothes on wire hangers in the cleaner’s plastic bags. I recalled the color of the dress she was wearing, the fragrance of the cologne behind her ears, the smooth perfection of her back. I must have been exhausted. If I shut my eyes, I felt, I would float off somewhere else; I would end up in a wholly different place.

I left the coffeehouse and wandered through the streets. The intense heat of the afternoon began to make me feel sick, even chilled. But the one place I didn’t want to go was home. The thought of waiting alone in that silent house for a phone call that would probably never come I found suffocating.

All I could think to do was go see May Kasahara. I went home, climbed the wall, and made my way down the alley to the back of her house. Leaning against the fence of the vacant house on the other side of the alley, I stared at the garden with its bird sculpture. May would notice me if I stood here like this. Aside from those few times when she was out working for the wig company, she was always at home, keeping watch over the alley from her room or while sunbathing in the yard.

But I saw no sign of May Kasahara. There was not a cloud in the sky. The summer sunlight was roasting the back of my neck. The heavy smell of grass rose from the ground, invading my lungs. I stared at the bird statue and tried to think about the stories my uncle had recently told me of the fates of those who had lived in this house. But all I could think of was the sea, cold and blue. I took several long, deep breaths. I looked at my watch. I was ready to give up for the day, when May Kasahara finally came out. She ambled slowly through her yard to where I stood. She wore
denim shorts, a blue aloha shirt, and red thongs. Standing before me, she smiled through her sunglasses.

“Hello there, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Find your cat—Noboru Wataya?”

“Not yet,” I said. “What took you so long to come out today?”

She thrust her hands into her hip pockets and looked all around, amused. “Look, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, I may have a lot of free time, but I don’t live to stand guard over this alley from morning to night. I have
some
things to keep me busy. But anyhow, I’m sorry. Were you waiting long?”

“Not so long. I got hot standing out here.”

May Kasahara stared hard at my face, then wrinkled her eyebrows slightly. “What’s wrong, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? You look terrible—like somebody who’s just been dug up out of the ground. Better come over here and rest in the shade for a while.”

She took me by the hand and led me into her yard. There she moved a canvas deck chair into the shade of the oak tree and sat me down on it. The thick green branches cast cool shadows that had the fragrance of life.

“Don’t worry, there’s nobody here, as usual,” she said. “You don’t have to be the least bit concerned. Take your time. Stop thinking and relax.”

“I do have one favor to ask you,” I said.

“Try me,” she said.

“I want you to make a call for me. Instead of me.”

Taking out a notepad and pen, I wrote down the number of Kumiko’s office. Then I tore off the page and handed it to her. The little vinyl-covered notepad was warm and damp with sweat. “All I want you to do is call this place and ask if Kumiko Okada is there, and if she’s not, ask if she came to work yesterday.”

May Kasahara took the paper and looked at it, with pursed lips. Then she looked at me. “Fine, I’ll take care of it. You just empty your head out and get horizontal. You are
not
allowed to move. I’ll be right back.”

Once she was gone, I stretched out and closed my eyes as ordered. I was soaked with sweat from head to foot. Trying to think, I felt a throbbing deep in my head, and I seemed to have a lump of string in the pit of my stomach. Every once in a while, a hint of nausea came over me. The neighborhood was absolutely silent. It suddenly occurred to me that I had not heard the wind-up bird for quite some time. When had I last heard it? Probably four or five days earlier. But my memory was uncertain. By the time I noticed, its cry had been missing too long to tell. Maybe it was a bird that migrated seasonally. Come to think of it, we had
started hearing it about a month before. And for a time, the wind-up bird had continued each day to wind the spring of our little world. That had been the wind-up bird’s season.

After ten minutes, May Kasahara came back. She handed me a large glass. Ice clinked inside when I took it. The sound seemed to reach me from a distant world. There were several gates connecting that world with the place where I was, and I could hear the sound because they all just happened to be open at the moment. But this was strictly temporary. If even one of them closed, the sound would no longer reach my ears. “Drink it,” she said. “Lemon juice in water. It’ll clear your head.”

I managed to drink half and returned the glass to her. The cold water passed my throat and made its way down slowly into my body, after which a violent wave of nausea overtook me. The decomposing lump of string in my stomach began to unravel and make its way up to the base of my throat. I closed my eyes and tried to let it pass. With my eyes closed, I saw Kumiko boarding the train, with her blouse and skirt in hand. I thought it might be better to vomit. But I did not vomit. I took several deep breaths until the feeling diminished and disappeared altogether.