I nodded.
“I’ve got a relative with six fingers on each hand. She’s just a little older than me. Next to her pinkie she’s got this extra finger, like a baby’s finger. She knows how to keep it folded up so most people don’t notice. She’s really pretty.”
I nodded again.
“You think it’s in the family? What do you call it … part of the bloodline?”
“I don’t know much about heredity.”
She stopped talking. I sucked on my lemon drop and looked hard at the cat path. Not one cat had shown itself so far.
“Sure you don’t want something to drink?” she asked. “I’m going to have a Coke.”
I said I didn’t need a drink.
She left her deck chair and disappeared through the trees, dragging her bad leg slightly. I picked up her magazine from the grass and leafed through it. Much to my surprise, it turned out to be a men’s magazine, one of the glossy monthlies. The woman in the foldout wore thin panties that showed her slit and pubic hair. She sat on a stool with her legs spread out at weird angles. With a sigh, I put the magazine back, folded my hands on my chest, and focused on the cat path again.
•
A very long time went by before the girl came back, with a Coke in her hand. The heat was getting to me. Sitting under the sun, I felt my brain fogging over. The last thing I wanted to do was think.
“Tell me,” she said, picking up her earlier conversation. “If you were in love with a girl and she turned out to have six fingers, what would you do?”
“Sell her to the circus,” I answered.
“Really?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “I’m kidding. I don’t think it would bother me.”
“Even if your kids might inherit it?”
I took a moment to think about that.
“No, I really don’t think it would bother me. What harm would an extra finger do?”
“What if she had four breasts?”
I thought about that too.
“I don’t know.”
Four breasts? This kind of thing could go on forever. I decided to change the subject.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Sixteen,” she said. “Just had my birthday. First year in high school.”
“Have you been out of school long?”
“My leg hurts if I walk too much. And I’ve got this scar near my eye. My school’s very strict. They’d probably start bugging me if they found out I hurt myself falling off a motorcycle. So I’m out ‘sick.’ I could take a year off. I’m not in any hurry to go up a grade.”
“No, I guess not,” I said.
“Anyhow, what you were saying before, that you wouldn’t mind marrying a girl with six fingers but not four breasts …”
“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“I don’t know—it’s hard to imagine such a thing.”
“Can you imagine someone with six fingers?”
“Sure, I guess so.”
“So why not four breasts? What’s the difference?”
I took another moment to think it over, but I couldn’t find an answer.
“Do I ask too many questions?”
“Do people tell you that?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
I turned toward the cat path again. What the hell was I doing here? Not one cat had showed itself the whole time. Hands still folded on my chest, I closed my eyes for maybe thirty seconds. I could feel the sweat forming on different parts of my body. The sun poured into me with a strange heaviness. Whenever the girl moved her glass, the ice clinked inside it like a cowbell.
“Go to sleep if you want,” she whispered. “I’ll wake you if a cat shows up.”
Eyes closed, I nodded in silence.
The air was still. There were no sounds of any kind. The pigeon had long since disappeared. I kept thinking about the woman on the telephone. Did I really know her? There had been nothing remotely familiar about her voice or her manner of speaking. But she definitely knew me. I could have been looking at a De Chirico scene: the woman’s long shadow cutting across an empty street and stretching toward me, but she herself in a place far removed from the bounds of my consciousness. A bell went on ringing and ringing next to my ear.
“Are you asleep?” the girl asked, in a voice so tiny I could not be sure I was hearing it.
“No, I’m not sleeping,” I said.
“Can I get closer? It’ll be … easier if I keep my voice low.”
“Fine with me,” I said, eyes still closed.
She moved her chair until it struck mine with a dry, wooden clack.
Strange, the girl’s voice sounded completely different, depending on whether my eyes were open or closed.
“Can I talk? I’ll keep real quiet, and you don’t have to answer. You can even fall asleep. I don’t mind.”
“OK,” I said.
“When people die, it’s so neat.”
Her mouth was next to my ear now, so the words worked their way inside me along with her warm, moist breath.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
She put a finger on my lips as if to seal them.
“No questions,” she said. “And don’t open your eyes. OK?”
My nod was as small as her voice.
She took her finger from my lips and placed it on my wrist.
“I wish I had a scalpel. I’d cut it open and look inside. Not the corpse … the lump of death. I’m sure there must be something like that. Something round and squishy, like a softball, with a hard little core of dead nerves. I want to take it out of a dead person and cut it open and look inside. I always wonder what it’s like. Maybe it’s all hard, like toothpaste dried up inside the tube. That’s it, don’t you think? No, don’t answer. It’s squishy on the outside, and the deeper you go inside, the harder it gets. I want to cut open the skin and take out the squishy stuff, use a scalpel and some kind of spatula to get through it, and the closer you get to the center, the harder the squishy stuff gets, until you reach this tiny core. It’s sooo tiny, like a tiny ball bearing, and really hard. It must be like that, don’t you think?”
She cleared her throat a few times.
“That’s all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don’t have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out—so far out you can’t follow them all the way to the end.”
She took the finger from my wrist and drank down the rest of her cola. I knew the glass was empty from the sound of the ice.
“Don’t worry about the cat—I’m watching for it. I’ll let you know if Noboru Wataya shows up. Keep your eyes closed. I’m sure Noboru Wataya is walking around here someplace. He’ll be here any minute now. He’s coming. I know he’s coming—through the grass, under the fence, stopping to sniff the flowers along the way, little by little Noboru Wataya is coming closer. Picture him that way, get his image in mind.”
I tried to picture the image of the cat, but the best I could do was a blurry, backlighted photo. The sunlight penetrating my eyelids destabilized and diffused my inner darkness, making it impossible for me to bring up a precise image of the cat. Instead, what I imagined was a failed portrait, a strange, distorted picture, certain distinguishing features bearing some resemblance to the original but the most important parts missing. I couldn’t even recall how the cat looked when it walked.
The girl put her finger on my wrist again, using the tip to draw an odd diagram of uncertain shape. As if in response, a new kind of darkness—different in quality from the darkness I had been experiencing until that moment—began to burrow into my consciousness. I was probably falling asleep. I didn’t want this to happen, but there was no way I could resist it. My body felt like a corpse—someone else’s corpse—sinking into the canvas deck chair.
In the darkness, I saw the four legs of Noboru Wataya, four silent brown legs atop four soft paws with swelling, rubb
erlike pads, legs that were soundlessly treading the earth somewhere.
But where?
“Ten minutes is all it will take,” said the woman on the phone. No, she had to be wrong. Sometimes ten minutes is not ten minutes. It can stretch and shrink. That was something I did know for sure.
•
When I woke up, I was alone. The girl had disappeared from the deck chair, which was still touching mine. The towel and cigarettes and magazine were there, but not the glass or the boom box. The sun had begun to sink in the west, and the shadow of an oak branch had crept across my knees. My watch said it was four-fifteen. I sat up and looked around. Broad lawn, dry pond, fence, stone bird, goldenrod, TV antenna. Still no sign of the cat. Or of the girl.
I glanced at the cat path and waited for the girl to come back. Ten minutes went by, and neither cat nor girl showed up. Nothing moved. I felt as if I had aged tremendously while I slept.
I stood and glanced toward the house, where there was no sign of a human presence. The bay window reflected the glare of the western sun. I gave up waiting and crossed the lawn to the alley, returning home. I hadn’t found the cat, but I had tried my best.
•
At home, I took in the wash and made preparations for a simple dinner. The phone rang twelve times at five-thirty, but I didn’t answer it. Even after the ringing stopped, the sound of the bell lingered in the indoor evening gloom like dust floating in the air. With the tips of its hard claws, the table clock tapped at a transparent board floating in space.
Why not write a poem about the wind-up bird? The idea struck me, but the first line would not come. How could high school girls possibly enjoy a poem about a wind-up bird?
•
Kumiko came home at seven-thirty. She had been arriving later and later over the past month. It was not unusual for her to return after eight, and sometimes even after ten. Now that I was at home preparing dinner, she no longer had to hurry back. They were understaffed, in any case, and lately one of her colleagues had been out sick.
“Sorry,” she said. “The work just wouldn’t end, and that part-time girl is useless.”
I went to the kitchen and cooked: fish sautéed in butter, salad, and miso soup. Kumiko sat at the kitchen table and vegged out.
“Where were you at five-thirty?” she asked. “I tried to call to say I’d be late.”
“The butter ran out. I went to the store,” I lied.
“Did you go to the bank?”
“Sure.”
“And the cat?”
“Couldn’t find it. I went to the vacant house, like you said, but there was no trace of it. I bet it went farther away than that.”
She said nothing.
When I finished bathing after dinner, Kumiko was sitting in the living room with the lights out. Hunched down in the dark with her gray shirt on, she looked like a piece of luggage that had been left in the wrong place.
Drying my hair with a bath towel, I sat on the sofa opposite Kumiko.
In a voice I could barely catch, she said, “I’m sure the cat’s dead.”
“Don’t be silly,” I replied. “I’m sure it’s having a grand old time somewhere. It’ll get hungry and come home soon. The same thing happened once before, remember? When we lived in Koenji …”
“This time’s different,” she said. “This time you’re wrong. I know it. The cat’s dead. It’s rotting in a clump of grass. Did you look in the grass in the vacant house?”
“No, I didn’t. The house may be vacant, but it does belong to somebody. I can’t just go barging in there.”
“Then where did you look for the cat? I’ll bet you didn’t even try. That’s why you didn’t find it.”
I sighed and wiped my hair again with the towel. I started to speak but gave up when I realized that Kumiko was crying. It was understandable: Kumiko loved the cat. It had been with us since shortly after our wedding. I threw my towel in the bathroom hamper and went to the kitchen for a cold beer. What a stupid day it had been: a stupid day of a stupid month of a stupid year.
Noboru Wataya, where are you? Did the wind-up bird forget to wind your spring?
The words came to me like lines of poetry.
Noboru Wataya,
Where are you?
Did the wind-up bird
Forget to wind your spring?
When I was halfway through my beer, the phone started to ring.
“Get it, will you?” I shouted into the darkness of the living room.
“Not me,” she said. “You get it.”
“I don’t want to.”
The phone kept on ringing, stirring up the dust that floated in the darkness. Neither of us said a word. I drank my beer, and Kumiko went on crying soundlessly. I counted twenty rings and gave up. There was no point in counting forever.
Full Moon and Eclipse of the Sun
•
On Horses Dying in the Stables
Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
I started thinking seriously about such things a week after I quit my job at the law firm. Never until then—never in the whole course of my life—had I grappled with questions like this. And why not? Probably because my hands had been full just living. I had simply been too busy to think about myself.
Something trivial got me started, just as most important things in the world have small beginnings. One morning after Kumiko rushed through breakfast and left for work, I threw the laundry into the washing machine, made the bed, washed the dishes, and vacuumed. Then, with the cat beside me, I sat on the veranda, checking the want ads and the sales. At noon I had lunch and went to the supermarket. There I bought food for dinner and, from a sale table, bought detergent, tissues, and toilet paper. At home again, I made preparations for dinner and lay down on the sofa with a book, waiting for Kumiko to come home.
Newly unemployed, I found this kind of life refreshing. No more commuting to work on jam-packed subways, no more meetings with people I didn’t want to meet. And best of all, I could read any book I wanted, anytime I wanted. I had no idea how long this relaxed lifestyle would continue, but at that point, at least, after a week, I was enjoying it, and I tried hard not to think about the future. This was my one great vacation in life. It would have to end sometime, but until it did I was determined to enjoy it.
That particular evening, though, I was unable to lose myself in the pleasure of reading, because Kumiko was late coming home from work. She never got back later than six-thirty, and if she thought she was going to be delayed by as little as ten minutes, she always let me know. She was like that: almost too conscientious. But that day was an exception. She was still not home after seven, and there was no call. The meat and vegetables were ready and waiting, so that I could cook them the minute she came in. Not that I had any great feast in mind: I would be stir frying thin slices of beef, onions, green peppers, and bean sprouts with a little salt, pepper, soy sauce, and a splash of beer—a recipe from my single days. The rice was done, the miso soup was warm, and the vegetables were all sliced and arranged in separate piles in a large dish, ready for the wok. Only Kumiko was missing. I was hungry enough to think about cooking my own portion and eating alone, but I was not ready to make this move. It just didn’t seem right.
I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a beer and munching some slightly soggy soda crackers I had found in the back of the cabinet. I watched the small hand of the clock edging toward—and slowly passing—the seven-thirty position.
It was after nine when she came in. She looked exhausted. Her eyes were bloodshot: a bad sign. Something bad had always happened when her eyes were red.
OK, I told myself, stay cool, keep it simple and low key and natural. Don’t
get excited.
“I’m so sorry,” Kumiko said. “This one job wouldn’t go right. I thought of calling you, but things just kept getting in the way.”
“Never mind, it’s all right, don’t let it bother you,” I said as casually as I could. And in fact, I wasn’t feeling bad about it. I had had the same experience any number of times. Going out to work can be tough, not something sweet and peaceful like picking the prettiest rose in your garden for your sick grandmother and spending the day with her, two streets away. Sometimes you have to do unpleasant things with unpleasant people, and the chance to call home never comes up. Thirty seconds is all it would take to say, “I’ll be home late tonight,” and there are telephones everywhere, but you just can’t do it.
I started cooking: turned on the gas, put oil in the wok. Kumiko took a beer from the refrigerator and a glass from the cupboard, did a quick inspection of the food I was about to cook, and sat at the kitchen table without a word. Judging from the look on her face, she was not enjoying the beer.
“You should have eaten without me,” she said.
“Never mind. I wasn’t that hungry.”
While I fried the meat and vegetables, Kumiko went to wash up. I could hear her washing her face and brushing her teeth. A little later, she came out of the bathroom, holding something. It was the toilet paper and tissues I had bought at the supermarket.
“Why did you buy this stuff?” she asked, her voice weary.
Holding the wok, I looked at her. Then I looked at the box of tissues and the package of toilet paper. I had no idea what she was trying to say.
“What do you mean? They’re just tissues and toilet paper. We need those things. We’re not exactly out, but they won’t rot if they sit around a little while.”
“No, of course not. But why did you have to buy blue tissues and flower-pattern toilet paper?”
“I don’t get it,” I said, controlling myself. “They were on sale. Blue tissues are not going to turn your nose blue. What’s the big deal?”
“It is a big deal. I hate blue tissues and flower-pattern toilet paper. Didn’t you know that?”