The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (36 page)

I had forgotten all about that particular event. But the moment I found myself scaling the wall wearing a knapsack, the feeling came back to me—the indescribable loneliness I had felt, standing by myself amid unfamiliar streets and unfamiliar people and unfamiliar houses, watching the afternoon sun lose its light bit by bit. And then I thought of Kumiko: Kumiko, who had disappeared somewhere, taking with her only her shoulder bag and her blouse and skirt from the cleaner’s. She had passed her last chance to turn back. And now she was probably standing
by herself in some strange and distant town. I could hardly bear to think of her that way.

But no, she couldn’t be by herself. She had to be with a man. That was the only way this made sense.

I stopped thinking about Kumiko.

•

I made my way down the alley.

The grass underfoot had lost the living, breathing greenness it had seemed to possess during the spring rains, and now it wore the frankly dull look typical of summer grass. From among these blades a green grasshopper would leap out now and then as I walked along. Sometimes even frogs would jump away. The alley had become the world of these little creatures, and I was simply an intruder come to upset the prevailing order.

When I reached the Miyawakis’ vacant house, I opened the gate and walked in without hesitation. I pressed on through the tall grass to the middle of the yard, passed the dingy bird statue, which continued to stare at the sky, and walked around to the side of the house, hoping that May Kasahara had not seen me come in.

The first thing I did when I got to the well was to remove the stones that held the cap on, then take off one of the two wooden half-circles. To make sure there was still no water at the bottom, I threw in a pebble, as I had done before. And as before, the pebble hit with a dry thud. There was no water. I set down the knapsack, took the rope ladder out, and tied one end of it to the trunk of the nearby tree. I pulled on it as hard as I could to be sure it would hold. This was something on which it was impossible to lavish too much care. If, by some chance, the ladder somehow got loose or came undone, I would probably never make it back to the surface.

Holding the mass of rope in my arms, I began to lower the ladder into the well. The whole, long thing went in, but I never felt it hit bottom. It couldn’t possibly be too short: I had bought the longest rope ladder they made. But the well was a deep one. I shone the flashlight straight down inside, but I couldn’t see whether or not the ladder had reached bottom. The rays of light penetrated only so far, and then they were swallowed up by the darkness.

I sat on the edge of the well curb and listened. A few cicadas were screaming in the trees, as if competing to see which had the loudest voice or the greatest lung capacity. I couldn’t hear any birds; though. I recalled
the wind-up bird with some fondness. Maybe it didn’t like competing with the cicadas and had moved off somewhere to avoid them.

I turned my palms upward in the sunlight. In an instant, they felt warm, as though the light were seeping into the skin, soaking into the very lines of my fingerprints. The light ruled over everything out here. Bathed in light, each object glowed with the brilliant color of summer. Even intangibles such as time and memory shared the goodness of the summer light. I popped a lemon drop in my mouth and went on sitting there until the candy had melted away. Then I pulled hard on the ladder one more time to be sure it was firmly anchored.

Making my way down the soft rope ladder into the well was much harder work than I had imagined it would be. A blend of cotton and nylon, the ladder was unquestionably sturdy, but my footing on the thing was unstable. The rubber bottoms of my tennis shoes would slip whenever I tried to lower my weight onto either leg. My hands had to keep such a tight grip on the rope that my palms started to hurt. I let myself down slowly and carefully, one rung at a time. No matter how far I went, though, there was no bottom. My descent seemed to take forever. I reminded myself of the sound of the pebble hitting bottom. The well
did
have a bottom! Working my way down this damned ladder was what took so much time.

When I had counted twenty rungs, a wave of terror overtook me. It came suddenly, like an electric shock, and froze me in place. My muscles turned to stone. Every pore of my body gushed sweat, and my legs began to tremble. There was no way this well could be so deep. This was the middle of Tokyo. It was right behind
the house I lived in
. I held my breath and listened, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The pounding of my own heart reverberated in my ears with such force I couldn’t even hear the cicadas screaming up above. I took a deep breath. Here I was on the twentieth rung, unable either to proceed farther down or to climb back up. The air in the well was chilling and smelled of the earth. It was a separate world down here, one cut off from the surface, where the sun shone so unstintingly. I looked up to the mouth of the well above me, tiny now. The well’s circular opening was cut exactly in half by the half of the wooden cover I had left in place. From below, it looked like a half-moon floating in the night sky. “A half-moon will last for several days,” Malta Kano had said. She had
predicted
it on the telephone.

Terrific. And when the thought crossed my mind, I felt some strength leave my body. My muscles relaxed, and the solid block of breath inside me released and came out.

Squeezing out one last spurt of strength, I started down the ladder again. Just a little farther down, I told myself. Just a little more. Don’t worry, there
is
a bottom. And at the twenty-third rung, I reached it. My foot came in contact with the earth in the bottom of the well.

•

The first thing I did in the darkness was to feel around the surface of the well bottom with the tip of my shoe, still holding on to the ladder in case there was something down there I had to get away from. After making sure there was no water and nothing of a suspicious nature, I stepped down to the ground. Setting my pack down, I felt for the zipper and took out my flashlight. The glow of the light gave me my first clear view of the place. The surface of the ground was neither very hard nor very soft. And fortunately, the earth was dry. A few rocks lay scattered there, where people must have thrown them. The one other thing that had fallen to the bottom was an old potato chip bag. Illuminated by the flashlight, the well bottom reminded me of the surface of the moon as I had seen it on television so long before.

The well’s cylindrical concrete wall was blank and smooth, with few irregularities other than some clumps of mosslike stuff growing here and there. It shot straight upward like a chimney, with the little half-moon of light at the opening far above. Looking directly up, I now could grasp how very deep the well was. I gave the rope ladder another hard tug. In my hands, it felt firm and reassuring. As long as it remained in place, I could go back to the surface anytime I wanted. Next I took a deep breath. Aside from a slight smell of mold, there was nothing wrong with the air. My greatest worry had been the air. The air at the bottom of a well tends to stagnate, and dry wells can have poison gases that seep from the earth. Long before, I had read in the paper about a well digger who lost his life from methane gas at the bottom of a well.

Taking a breath, I sat on the floor of the well, with my back against the wall. I closed my eyes and let my body become accustomed to the place. All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

I sat in the dark. Far above me, like a sign of something, floated the perfect half-moon of light given shape by the well cap. And yet none of the light from up there managed to find its way to the bottom.

As time passed, my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness. Before long, I could just barely make out the shape of my hand if I brought it close to my face. Other things around me began slowly to take on their own dim shapes, like timid little animals letting down their guard in the most gradual stages imaginable. As much as my eyes became used to it, though, the darkness never ceased to be darkness. Anything I tried to focus on would lose its shape and burrow its way soundlessly into the surrounding obscurity. Perhaps this could be called “pale darkness,” but pale as it might be, it had its own particular kind of density, which in some cases contained a more deeply meaningful darkness than perfect pitch darkness. In it, you could see something. And at the same time, you could see nothing at all.

Here in this darkness, with its strange sense of significance, my memories began to take on a power they had never had before. The fragmentary images they called up inside me were mysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could grasp them in my hands. I closed my eyes and brought back the time eight years earlier when I had first met Kumiko.

•

It happened in the family members’ waiting room of the university hospital in Kanda. I had to be in the hospital almost every day back then, to see a wealthy client concerning the inheritance of his property. She was coming to the hospital every day between classes in order to tend to her mother, who was there for a duodenal ulcer. Kumiko would wear jeans or a short skirt and a sweater, her hair in a ponytail. Sometimes she would wear a coat, sometimes not, depending on the early-November weather. She had a shoulder bag and always carried a few books that looked like university texts, plus some kind of sketch pad.

The afternoon of the very first day I went to the hospital, Kumiko was there, sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed, wearing black low-heeled shoes and concentrating on a book. I sat opposite her, checking my watch every five minutes until the time for the interview with my client, which had been moved back an hour and a half for some reason that had not been shared with me. Kumiko never raised her eyes from the book. She had very nice legs. Looking at her helped to brighten my spirits somewhat. I found myself wondering what it must feel like to have such a nice (or at least extremely intelligent) face and great legs.

After we had seen each other in the waiting room several times, Kumiko and I began to share small talk—exchanging magazines we had finished reading, or eating fruit from a gift basket someone had brought her mother. We were incredibly bored, after all, and we needed someone our own age to talk to.

Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend.

Soon I found myself dissatisfied with the choppy little conversations we were fitting in between other things in the hospital area. I kept wishing I could meet her somewhere else, so that we could really talk to each other for a change. Finally, one day, I decided to ask her for a date.

“I think both of us could use a change of air,” I said. “Let’s get out of here and go someplace else—where there aren’t any patients or clients.”

Kumiko gave it some thought and said, “The aquarium?”

And so the aquarium is where we had our first date. Kumiko brought her mother a change of clothes that Sunday morning and met me in the
hospital waiting room. It was a warm, clear day, and Kumiko was wearing a simple white dress under a pale-blue cardigan. I was always struck by how well she dressed even then. She could wear the plainest article of clothing and manage, with the roll of a sleeve or the curl of a collar, to transform it into something spectacular. It was a knack she had. And I could see that she took care of her clothing with an attention bordering on love. Whenever I was with her, walking beside her, I would find myself staring in admiration at her clothes. Her blouses never had a wrinkle. Her pleats hung in perfect alignment. Anything white she wore looked brand-new. Her shoes were never scuffed or smudged. Looking at what she wore, I could imagine her blouses and sweaters neatly folded and lined up in her dresser drawers, her skirts and dresses in vinyl wrappers hanging in the closet (which is exactly what I found to be the case after we were married).

We spent that first afternoon together in the aquarium of the Ueno Zoo. The weather was so nice that day, I thought it might be more fun to stroll around the zoo itself, and I hinted as much to Kumiko on the train to Ueno, but she had obviously made up her mind to go to the aquarium. If that was what she wanted, it was perfectly all right with me. The aquarium was having a special display of jellyfish, and we went through them from beginning to end, viewing the rare specimens gathered from all parts of the world. They floated, trembling, in their tanks, everything from a tiny cotton puff the size of a fingertip to monsters more than three feet in diameter. For a Sunday, the aquarium was relatively uncrowded. In fact, it was on the empty side. On such a lovely day, anybody would have preferred the elephants and giraffes to jellyfish.