All of a sudden, I noticed that the room had gone dark. I tried to look around, but I could hardly see a thing. The wall lamps had all been extinguished. There was only the faint silhouette of Creta Kano’s blue dress rocking on top of me. “Just forget,” she said, but it was not Creta Kano’s voice. “Forget about everything. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You’re lying in nice, warm mud. We all come out of the warm mud, and we all go back to it.”
It was the voice of the woman on the telephone. The mysterious woman on the phone was now mounted atop me and joining her body with mine. She, too, wore Kumiko’s dress. She and Creta Kano had traded places without my being aware of it. I tried to speak. I did not know what I was hoping to say, but at least I tried to speak. I was too confused, though, and my voice would not work. All I could expel from my mouth was a hot blast of air. I opened my eyes wide and tried to see the face of the woman mounted on top of me, but the room was too dark.
The woman said nothing more. Instead, she began to move her hips in an even more erotically stimulating way. Her soft flesh, itself almost an independent organism, enveloped my erection with a gentle pulling motion. From behind her I heard—or thought I heard—the sound of a knob being turned. A white flash went through the darkness. The ice bucket on the table might have shone momentarily in the light from the corridor. Or the flash might have been the glint of a sharp blade. But I couldn’t think anymore. There was only one thing I could do: I came.
•
I washed myself off in the shower and laundered my semen-stained underwear by hand. Terrific, I thought. Why did I have to be having wet dreams at such a difficult time in my life?
Once again I put on fresh clothing, and once again I sat on the veranda, looking at the garden. Splashes of sunlight danced on everything, filtered through thick green leaves. Several days of rain had promoted the powerful growth of bright-green weeds here and there, giving the garden a subtle shading of ruin and stagnation.
Creta Kano again. Two wet dreams in a short interval, and both times it had been Creta Kano. Never once had I thought of sleeping with her. The desire had not even flashed through my mind. And yet both times I had been in that room, joining my body with hers. What could possibly be the reason for this? And who was that telephone woman who had taken her place? She knew me, and I supposedly knew her. I went through the various sexual partners I had had in life, but none of them was the telephone woman. Still, there was something about her that seemed familiar. And that was what annoyed me so.
Some kind of memory was trying to find its way out. I could feel it in there, bumping around. All I needed was a little hint. If I pulled that one tiny thread, then everything would come unraveled. The mystery was waiting for me to solve it. But the one slim thread was something I couldn’t find.
I gave up trying to think. “Forget everything. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You’re lying in nice, warm mud. We all come out of the warm mud, and we all go back to it.”
Six o’clock came, and still no phone call. Only May Kasahara showed up. All she wanted, she said, was a sip of beer. I took a cold can from the refrigerator and split it with her. I was hungry, so I put some ham and lettuce between two slices of bread and ate that. When she saw me eating, May said she would like the same. I made her a sandwich too. We ate in silence and drank our beer. I kept looking up at the wall clock.
“Don’t you have a TV in this house?”
“No TV,” I said.
She gave the edge of her lip a little bite. “I kinda figured that. Don’t you like TV?”
“I don’t dislike it. I get along fine without it.”
May Kasahara let that sink in for a while. “How many years have you been married, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”
“Six years,” I said.
“And you did without TV for six years?”
“Uh-huh. At first we didn’t have the money to buy one. Then we got used to living without it. It’s nice and quiet that way.”
“The two of you must have been happy.”
“What makes you think so?”
She wrinkled up her face. “Well, I couldn’t live a day without television.”
“Because you’re unhappy?”
May Kasahara did not reply to that. “But now Kumiko is gone. You must not be so happy anymore, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”
I nodded and sipped my beer. “That’s about the size of it,” I said. That was about the size of it.
She put a cigarette between her lips and, in a practiced motion, struck a match to light it. “Now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said, “I want you to tell me the absolute truth: Do you think I’m ugly?”
I put my beer glass down and took another look at May Kasahara’s face. All this time while talking with her, I had been vaguely thinking of other things. She was wearing an oversize black tank top, which gave a clear view of the girlish swell of her breasts.
“You’re not the least bit ugly,” I said. “That’s for sure. Why do you ask?”
“My boyfriend always used to tell me how ugly I was, that I didn’t have any boobs.”
“The boy who wrecked the bike?”
“Yeah, him.”
I watched May Kasahara slowly exhaling her cigarette smoke. “Boys that age will say things like that. They don’t know how to express exactly what they feel, so they say and do the exact opposite. They hurt people that way, for no reason at all, and they hurt themselves too. Anyhow, you’re not the least bit ugly. I think you’re very cute. No flattery intended.”
May Kasahara mulled that one over for a while. She dropped ashes into the empty beer can. “Is Mrs. Wind-Up Bird pretty?”
“Hmm, that’s hard for me to say. Some would say she is, and some would say not. It’s a matter of taste.”
“I see,” she said. She tapped on her glass as if bored.
“What’s your biker boyfriend doing?” I asked. “Doesn’t he come to see you anymore?”
“No, he doesn’t,” said May Kasahara, laying a finger on the scar by her left eye. “I’ll never see him again, that’s for sure. Two hundred percent sure. I’d bet my left little toe on it. But I’d rather not talk about that right now. Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true? You know what I mean, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”
“I think I do,” I said. Then I glanced at the phone in the living room. It sat on the table, cloaked in silence. It looked like a deep-sea creature pretending to be an inanimate object, crouching there in wait for its prey.
“Someday, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, I’ll tell you all about him. When I feel like it. But not now. I just don’t feel like it now.”
She looked at her watch. “Gotta get home. Thanks for the beer.”
I saw her out to the garden wall. A nearly full moon was pouring its grainy light down to the earth. The sight of the full moon reminded me that Kumiko’s period was approaching. But that would probably have nothing to do with me anymore. The thought sent a sharp pain through my chest. The intensity of it caught me off guard: it resembled sorrow.
With her hand on the wall, May Kasahara looked at me. “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you do love Kumiko, don’t you?”
“I think I do.”
“Even though she might have gone off with a lover? If she said she wanted to come back to you, would you take her back?”
I released a sigh. “That’s a tough question,” I said. “I’d have to think about it once it really happened.”
“Sorry for sticking my nose in,” said May Kasahara, with a little click of the tongue. “But don’t get mad. I’m just trying to learn. I want to know what it means for a wife to run away. There’re all kinds of things I don’t know.”
“I’m not mad,” I said. Then I looked up at the full moon again.
“All right, then, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You take care of yourself. I hope your wife comes back and everything works out.” Moving with incredible lightness, May Kasahara swung herself over the wall and disappeared into the summer night.
•
Wi
th May Kasahara gone, I was alone again. I sat on the veranda, thinking about the questions she had raised. If Kumiko had gone off somewhere with a lover, could I take her back again? I didn’t know the answer. I really didn’t know. There were all kinds of things that I didn’t know.
Suddenly the phone rang. My hand shot out in a conditioned reflex and picked up the receiver.
The voice at the other end belonged to a woman. “This is Malta Kano,” she said. “Please forgive me for calling you so often, Mr. Okada, but I was wondering if you might happen to have any plans for tomorrow.”
I had no plans, I said. Plans were simply something I did not have.
“In that case, I wonder if it might be possible for me to see you after noon.”
“Does this have something to do with Kumiko?”
“I do believe that it does,” said Malta Kano, choosing her words carefully. “Noboru Wataya will also be joining us, most likely.”
I almost dropped the receiver when I heard this. “You mean the three of us will be getting together to talk?”
“Yes, I believe that is the case,” said Malta Kano. “The present situation makes this necessary. I am sorry, but I cannot go into any further detail on the telephone.”
“I see. All right, then,” I said.
“Shall we meet at one o’clock? In the same place we met before: the tearoom of the Shinagawa Pacific Hotel.”
One o’clock in the tearoom of the Shinagawa Pacific Hotel, I said, and hung up.
•
May Kasahara called at ten o’clock. She had nothing in particular to say; she just wanted to talk to somebody. We chatted about harmless topics for a while. “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said in the end. “Have you had any good news since I was there?”
“No good news,” I said. “Nothing.”
Noboru Wataya Speaks
•
The Story of the Monkeys of the Shitty Island
I arrived at the tearoom ten minutes early, but Noboru Wataya and Malta Kano had already found a table and were waiting for me. The lunchtime crowd was thick, but I spotted Malta Kano immediately. Not too many people wore red vinyl hats on sunny summer afternoons. It must have been the same hat she had on the day I met her, unless she owned a collection of vinyl hats, all the same style and color. She dressed with the same tasteful simplicity as before: a short-sleeved linen jacket over a collarless cotton top. Both pieces were perfectly white and perfectly free of wrinkles. No accessories, no makeup. Only the red vinyl hat clashed with the rest of the outfit, both in ambience and in material. As if she had been waiting for my arrival to do so, she removed the hat when I took my seat, placing it on the table. Beside the hat lay a small yellow leather handbag. She had ordered some sort of tonic water but had not touched it, as before. The liquid seemed vaguely uncomfortable in its tall glass, as if it had nothing better to do than produce its little bubbles.
Noboru Wataya was wearing green sunglasses. As soon as I sat down, he removed them and stared at the lenses for a while, then he put them back on. He wore what looked like a brand-new white polo shirt under a navy cotton sports coat. There was a glass of iced tea on the table in front of him, but he had apparently not touched his drink yet, either.
I ordered coffee and took a sip of ice water.
No one said anything. Noboru Wataya appeared not to have even noticed that I had arrived. In order to make sure that I had not suddenly turned transparent, I put a hand on the table and watched it as I turned it over and back a few times. Eventually, the waiter came, set a cup in front of me, and filled it with coffee. After he left, Malta Kano made little throat-clearing sounds as if testing a microphone, but still she said nothing.
The first to speak was Noboru Wataya. “I have very little time to spare, so let’s make this as simple and straightforward as possible.” He seemed to be talking to the stainless-steel sugar bowl in the middle of the table, but of course he was speaking to me. The sugar bowl was just a convenient midpoint between us, toward which he could direct his speech.
“Make what as simple and straightforward as possible?” I asked straightforwardly.
At last Noboru Wataya took off his sunglasses, folded them, placed them on the table, and looked directly at me. More than three years had gone by since I had last met and spoken to the man, but I felt no sense of the intervening time—thanks, I assumed, to having had his face thrust in front of me so often by the media. Certain kinds of information are like smoke: they work their way into people’s eyes and minds whether sought out or not, and with no regard to personal preference.
Forced now to see the man in person, I couldn’t help but notice how much the three years had changed the impression his face made. That almost stagnant, muddy look of his had been pushed into the background, to be covered over by something slick and artificial. Noboru Wataya had managed to find for himself a new, more sophisticated mask—a very well-made mask, to be sure: perhaps even a new skin. Whatever it was, mask or skin, I had to admit—yes, even I had to admit—that it had a certain kind of attractive power. And then it hit me: looking at this face was like looking at a television image. He talked the way people on television talked, and he moved the way people on television moved. There was always a layer of glass between us. I was on this side, and he was on that side.
“As I am sure you must realize, we are here today to talk about Kumiko,” said Noboru Wataya. “About Kumiko and you. About your future. What you and she are going to do.”
“Going to do?” I said, lifting my coffee cup and taking a sip. “Can you be a little more concrete?”
Noboru Wataya looked at me with strangely expressionless eyes. “A little more concrete? Kumiko has taken a lover. She’s left you. Surely you are not suggesting that anyone involved in the present situation wants it to continue indefinitely. That would not be good for anyone.”
“Taken a lover?” I asked.
“Now please, wait just a moment.” Malta Kano chose at this point to intervene. “A discussion such as this has its own proper order. Mr. Wataya, Mr. Okada, it is important to proceed with this discussion in an orderly fashion.”
“I don’t see that,” said Noboru Wataya, without any sense of life in his voice. “There’s no order to this. What kind of order do you mean? This discussion doesn’t have any.”
“Let him speak first,” I said to Malta Kano. “We can add the proper order afterward—assuming there is one.”
Malta Kano looked at me for a few seconds with her lips lightly pursed, then gave a little nod. “All right, then,” she said. “Mr. Wataya first. Please.”
“Kumiko has had another man in her life,” he began. “And now she’s gone off with him. This much is clear. Which means there would be no point in your continuing to stay married. Fortunately, there are no children involved, and in view of the circumstances, no money need change hands. Everything can be settled quickly. She simply pulls out of your family register. You just have to sign and put your seal on forms prepared by a lawyer, and that takes care of that. And let me add this to avoid any misunderstanding: What I am saying now is the final view of the entire Wataya family.”
I folded my arms and mulled over his words for a time. “I have a few questions,” I said. “First of all, how do you know that Kumiko has another man?”
“She told me so herself,” said Noboru Wataya.
I did not know what to say to that. I put my hands on the table and remained silent. It was hard for me to imagine Kumiko going to Noboru Wataya with such a personal matter.
“She called me a week ago and said she had something to discuss,” continued Noboru Wataya. “We met and talked. Face-to-face. That’s when Kumiko told me she was seeing a man.”
For the first time in months, I felt like a smoke. Of course, I had no cigarettes with me. Instead, I took a sip of coffee and put the cup back in the saucer with a loud, dry clash.
“Then she left home,” he said.
“I see,” I said. “If you say so, it must be
true. Kumiko must have had a lover. And she went to you for advice. It’s still hard for me to believe, but I can’t imagine your lying to me about such a thing.”
“No, of course I’m not lying,” said Noboru Wataya, with the hint of a smile on his lips.
“So is that all you have to tell me? Kumiko left me for another man, so I should agree to a divorce?”
Noboru Wataya responded with a single small nod, as if he were trying to conserve energy. “I suppose you realize that I was not in favor of Kumiko’s marrying you, to begin with. I took no positive steps to interfere, on the assumption that it was a matter that did not concern me, but now I almost wish I had.” He took a sip of water and quietly set his glass on the table again. Then he continued: “From the first day I met you, I knew better than to hope you might amount to anything. I saw no sign of promise, nothing in you that suggested you might accomplish something worthwhile or even turn yourself into a respectable human being: nothing there to shine or to shed light on anything. I knew that whatever you set your hand to would end up half-baked, that you would never see anything through to the end. And I was right. You have been married to my sister for six years, and what have you done in all that time? Nothing, right? All you’ve accomplished in six long years is to quit your job and ruin Kumiko’s life. Now you’re out of work and you have no plans for the future. There’s nothing inside that head of yours but garbage and rocks.
“Why Kumiko ever got together with the likes of you I’ll never understand. Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks. You were wrong for her from the start. Which is not to say that Kumiko was all perfection, either. She’s had her own oddities since childhood, for one reason or another. I suppose that’s why she was momentarily attracted to you. But that’s all over now. In any case, the best thing will be to finish this business as quickly as possible. My parents and I will watch out for Kumiko. We want you to back off. And don’t try to find her. You’ve got nothing to do with her anymore. All you can do is cause trouble if you try to get involved. The best thing you can do is begin a new life in a new place—a life that is better suited to you. That would be best for you and best for us.”