“Crazy things?”
“Like, say, trapping you in the well, or, like, when I’m riding on the back of a motorcycle, putting my hands over the eyes of the guy who’s driving.”
When she said this, she touched the wound next to her eye.
“And that’s how the motorcycle accident happened?” I asked.
May Kasahara gave me a questioning look, as if she had not heard what I said to her. But every word that I had spoken should have reached her ears. I couldn’t make out the expression in her eyes behind the dark glasses, but a kind of numbness seemed to have spread over her face, like oil poured on still water.
“What happened to the guy?” I asked.
Cigarette between her lips, May Kasahara continued to look at me. Or rather, she continued to look at my mark. “Do I have to answer that question, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?”
“Not if you don’t want to. You’re the one who brought it up. If you don’t want to talk about it, then don’t.”
May Kasahara grew very quiet. She seemed to be having trouble deciding what to do. Then she drew in a chestful of cigarette smoke and let it out slowly. With heavy movements, she dragged her sunglasses off and turned her face to the sun, eyes closed tight. Watching her, I felt as if the flow of time were slowing down little by little—as if time’s spring were beginning to run down.
“He died,” she said at last, in a voice with no expression, as though she had resigned herself to something.
“He died?”
May Kasahara tapped the ashes off her cigarette. Then she picked up her towel and wiped the sweat from her face over and over again. Finally, as if recalling a task that she had forgotten, she said in a clipped, businesslike way, “We were going pretty fast. It happened near Enoshima.”
I looked at her without a word. She held an edge of the beach towel in each hand, pressing the edges against her cheeks. White smoke was rising from the cigarette between her fingers. With no wind to disturb it, the smoke rose straight up, like a miniature smoke signal. She was apparently having trouble deciding whether to cry or to laugh. At least she looked that way to me. She wavered atop the narrow line that divided one possibility from the other, but in the end she fell to neither side. May Kasahara pulled her expression together, put the towel on the ground, and took a drag on her cigarette. The time was nearly five o’clock, but the heat showed no sign of abating.
“I killed him,” she said. “Of course, I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to push the limits. We did stuff like that all the time. It was like a game. I’d cover his eyes or tickle him when we were on the bike. But nothing ever happened. Until that day …”
May Kasahara raised her face and looked straight at me.
“Anyway, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, no, I don’t feel as if I’ve been defiled. I just wanted to get close to that gooshy thing if I could. I wanted to trick it into coming out of me and then crush it to bits. You’ve got to really push the limits if you’re going to trick it into coming out. It’s the only way. You’ve got to offer it good bait.” She shook her head slowly. “No, I don’t think I’ve been defiled. But I haven’t been saved, either. There’s nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing that isn’t fake is that gooshy thing inside me.”
May Kasahara sat there for a long while, taking small, regular breaths. There were no other sounds, no bird or insect cries. A terrible quiet settled over the yard, as though the world had in fact become empty.
May Kasahara turned to face me in her chair. She seemed to have suddenly remembered something. Now all expression was gone from her face, as if she had been washed clean. “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, did you sleep with that Creta Kano person?”
I nodded.
“Will you write to me from Crete?” asked May Kasahara.
“Sure I will. If I go.”
“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said after some hesitation, “I think I might be going back to school.”
“Oh, so you’ve changed your mind about school, huh?”
She gave a little shrug. “It’s a different one. I absolutely refuse to go back to my old school. The new one’s kinda far from here. So anyway, I probably won’t be able to see you for a while.”
I nodded. Then I took a lemon drop from my pocket and put it into my mouth. May Kasahara glanced around and lit up a cigarette.
“Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, is it fun to sleep with a bunch of different women?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one already.”
“Right,” I said, but I didn’t know what else to say.
“Oh, forget it. But you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, it’s just because I met you that I finally decided to go back to school. No kidding.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Yeah, why is that?” May Kasahara said. Then she wrinkled up the corners of her eyes and looked at me. “Maybe I wanted to go back to a more normal world. But really, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, it’s been a lot of fun being with you. No kidding. I mean, you’re such a supernormal guy, but you do such unnormal things. And you’re so—what?—unpredictable. So hanging around with you hasn’t been boring in any way. You have no idea how much good that’s done me. Not being bored means not having to think about a lot of stupid stuff. Right? So where that’s concerned, I’m glad you’ve been around. But tell you the truth, it’s made me nervous too.”
“In what way?”
“Well, how can I put this? Sometimes, when I’m looking at you, I get this feeling like maybe you’re fighting real hard against something for me. I know this sounds weird, but when that happens, I feel like I’m right with you, sweating with you. See what I mean? You always look so cool, like no matter what happens, it’s got nothing to do with you, but you’re not really like that. In your own way, you’re out there fighting as hard as you can, even if other people can’t tell by looking at you. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have gone into the well like that, right? But anyhow, you’re not fighting for me, of course. You’re falling all over yourself, trying to wrestle with this big whatever-it-is, and the only reason you’re doing it is so you can find Kumiko. So there’s no point in me getting all sweaty for you. I know all that, but still, I can’t help feeling that you are fighting for me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird—that, in a way, you probably are fighting for a lot of other people at the same time you’re fighting for Kumiko. And that’s maybe why you look like an absolute idiot sometimes. That’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. But when I see you doing this, I get all tense and nervous, and I end up feeling just totally drained. I mean, it looks like you can’t possibly win. If I had to bet on the match, I’d bet on you to lose. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. I like you a lot, but I don’t want to go broke.”
“I understand completely.”
“I don’t want to watch you going under, and I don’t want to sweat any more for you than I already have. That’s why I’ve decided to go back to a world that’s a little more normal. But if I hadn’t met you here—here, in front of this vacant house—I don’t think things would have turned out this way. I never would have thought about going back to school. I’d still be hanging around in some not-so-normal world. So in that sense, it’s all because of you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You’re not totally useless.”
I nodded. It was the first time in a long time anyone had said anything nice about me.
“C’mere, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. She raised herself on her deck chair.
I got out of my chair and went to hers.
“Sit down right here, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara.
I did as I was told and sat down next to her.
“Show me your face, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.”
She stared directly at me for a time. Then, placing one hand on my knee, she pressed the palm of the other against the mark on my cheek.
“Poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara, in a near whisper. “I kn
ow you’re going to take on all kinds of things. Even before you know it. And you won’t have any choice in the matter. The way rain falls in a field. And now close your eyes, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Really tight. Like they’re glued shut.”
I closed my eyes tightly.
May Kasahara touched her lips to my mark—her lips small and thin, like an extremely well-made imitation. Then she parted those lips and ran her tongue across my mark—very slowly, covering every bit of it. The hand she had placed on my knee remained there the whole time. Its warm, moist touch came to me from far away, from a place still farther than if it had passed through all the fields in the world. Then she took my hand and touched it to the wound beside her eye. I caressed the half-inch scar. As I did so, the waves of her consciousness pulsed through my fingertips and into me—a delicate resonance of longing. Probably someone should take this girl in his arms and hold her tight, I thought. Probably someone other than me. Someone qualified to give her something.
“Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. See you again sometime.”
The Simplest Thing
•
Revenge in a Sophisticated Form
•
The Thing in the Guitar Case
The next day I called my uncle and told him I might be moving out of the house sometime in the next few weeks. I apologized for springing it on him so suddenly but explained that it was because Kumiko had left me, with just as little warning. There was no point in covering up anymore. I told him that she had written to say she would not be coming back, and that I wanted to get away from this place, though exactly for how long I could not be sure. My summary explanation was followed by a thoughtful silence at my uncle’s end of the line. He seemed to be mulling something over. Then he said, “Mind if I come over there for a visit sometime soon? I’d kind of like to see with my own eyes what’s going on. And I haven’t been to the house for quite a while now.”
•
My uncle came to the house two evenings later. He looked at my mark but had nothing to say about it. He probably didn’t know what to say about it. He just gave it one funny look, with his eyes narrowed. He had brought me a good bottle of scotch and a package of fish-paste cakes that he had bought in Odawara. We sat on the veranda, eating the cakes and drinking the whiskey.
“What a pleasure it is to be sitting on a veranda again,” my uncle said, nodding several times. “Our condo doesn’t have one, of course. Sometimes I really miss this place. There’s a special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can’t get anywhere else.”
For a while, he sat there gazing at the moon, a slim white crescent of a moon that looked as if someone had just finished sharpening it. That such a thing could actually go on floating in the sky seemed almost miraculous to me.
Then, in an utterly offhand manner, my uncle asked, “How’d you get that mark?”
“I really don’t know,” I said, and took a gulp of whiskey. “All of a sudden, it was there. Maybe a week ago? I wish I could explain it better, but I just don’t know how.”
“Did you go to the doctor with it?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t want to stick my nose in where I’m not wanted, but just let me say this: you really ought to sit down and think hard about what it is that’s most important to you.”
I nodded. “I have been thinking about that,” I said. “But things are so complicated and tangled together. I can’t seem to separate them out and do one thing at a time. I don’t know how to untangle things.”
My uncle smiled. “You know what I think? I think what you ought to do is start by thinking about the simplest things and go from there. For example, you could, stand on a street corner somewhere day after day and look at the people who come by there. You’re not in any hurry to decide anything. It may be tough, but sometimes you’ve got to just stop and take time. You ought to train yourself to look at things with your own eyes until something comes clear. And don’t be afraid of putting some time into it. Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.”
“Revenge?! What do you mean, ‘revenge’? Revenge against whom?”
“You’ll understand soon enough,” said my uncle, with a smile.
•
All told, we sat on the veranda, drinking together, for something over an hour. Then, announcing that he had stayed too long, my uncle stood up and left. Alone again, I sat on the veranda, leaning against a pillar and staring out at the garden under the moon. For a time, I was able to breathe deeply of the air of realism or whatever it was that my uncle left behind, and to feel, for the first time in a very long time, a sense of genuine relief.
Within a few hours, though, that air began to dissipate, and a kind of cloak of pale sorrow came to envelop me once again. In the end, I was in my world again, and my uncle was in his.
•
My uncle had said that I should think about the truly simple things first, but I found it impossible to distinguish between what was simple and what was difficult. And so the next morning, after the rush hour had ended, I took the train to Shinjuku. I decided just to stand there and really look at people’s faces. I didn’t know if it would do any good, but it was probably better than doing nothing. If looking at people’s faces until you got sick of them was an example of a simple thing, then it couldn’t hurt to give it a try. If it went well, it just might give me some indication of what constituted the “simple” things for me.
The first day, I spent two full hours sitting on the low brick wall that ran along the edge of the raised flower bed outside Shinjuku Station, watching the faces of the people who passed by. But the sheer numbers of people were too great, and they walked too quickly. I couldn’t manage a good look at any one person’s face. To make matters worse, some homeless guy came over to me after I had been there for a while and started haranguing me about something. A policeman came by several times, glaring at me. So I gave up on the busy area outside the station and decided to look for a place better suited to the leisurely study of passersby.
I took the passageway under the tracks to the west side of the station, and after I had spent some time walking around that neighborhood, I found a small, tiled plaza outside a glass high-rise. It had a little sculpture and some handsome benches where I could sit and look at people as much as I liked. The numbers were nowhere near as great as directly outside the main entrance of the station, and there weren’t any homeless guys here with bottles of whiskey stuck in their pockets. I spent the day there, making do for lunch with some doughnuts and coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, and going home before the evening rush.
At first the only ones who caught my eye were the men with thinning hair, thanks to the training I had received doing surveys with May Kasahara for the toupee maker. Before I knew it, my gaze would lock onto a bald head and I’d have the man classified as A, B, or C. At this rate, I might just as well have called May Kasahara and volunteered to join her for work again.
After a few days had gone by, though, I found myself capable of just sitting and watching people’s faces without a thought in my head. Most of the ones who passed by that place were men and women who worked in offices in the high-rise. The men wore white shirts and neckties and carried briefcases, the women mostly wore high-heeled shoes. Others I saw included patrons of the building’s restaurants and shops, family groups headed for the observation deck on the top floor, and a few people who were just passing through the space, walking from point A to point B. Here most of the people tended not to walk very quickly. I just let myself watch them all, without any clear purpose. Occasionally there would be people who attracted my interest for some reason or other, and then I would concentrate on their faces and follow them with my eyes.
Every day, I would take the train to Shinjuku at ten o’clock, after the rush hour, sit on the bench in the plaza, and stay there almost motionless until 4:00 p.m., staring at people’s faces. Only after I had actually tried this out did I realize that by training my eyes on one passing f
ace after another, I was able to make my head completely empty, like pulling the cork from a bottle. I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. I thought nothing, I felt nothing. I often had the sense that I had become part of the stone bench.
Someone did speak to me once, though—a thin, well-dressed middle-aged woman. She wore a bright-pink, tight-fitting dress, dark sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames, and a white hat, and she carried a white mesh handbag. She had nice legs and had on expensive-looking spotless white leather sandals. Her makeup was thick, but not offensively so. She asked me if I was in some kind of difficulty. Not at all, I replied. I seem to see you here every day, she said, and asked what I could be doing. I said I was looking at people’s faces. She asked if I was doing it for some purpose, and I said I was not.
Sitting down beside me, she took a pack of Virginia Slims from her bag and lit up with a small gold lighter. She offered me one, but I shook my head. Then she took off her sunglasses and, without a word, stared directly at my face. More precisely, she stared at the mark on my face. In return, I stared back, into her eyes. But I was unable to read any emotion stirring there. I saw nothing but two dark pupils that seemed to be functioning as they were meant to. She had a small, pointed nose. Her lips were thin, and color had been applied to them with great care. I found it hard to guess her age, but I supposed she was in her mid-forties. She looked younger than that at first glance, but the lines beside her nose had a special kind of weariness about them.
“Do you have any money?” she asked.
This took me off guard. “Money? What do you mean, do I have any money?”
“I’m just asking: Do you have any money? Are you broke?”
“No. At the moment, I’m not broke,” I said.
She drew her lips slightly to one side, as if examining what I had said, and continued to concentrate all her attention on me. Then she nodded. And then she put her sunglasses on, dropped her cigarette to the ground, rose gracefully from her seat, and, without a glance in my direction, slipped away. Amazed, I watched her disappear into the crowd. Maybe she was a little crazy. But her immaculate grooming made that hard to believe. I stepped on her discarded cigarette, crushing it out, and then I did a slow scan of my surroundings, which turned out to be filled with the usual real world. People were moving from one place to another, each with his or her own purpose. I didn’t know who they were, and they didn’t know who I was. I took a deep breath and went back to my task of looking at the faces of these people, without a thought in my head.