The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (78 page)

•

It was late in 1975, when Nutmeg was forty and Cinnamon eleven, that her husband was killed. His body was found in an Akasaka hotel room, slashed to bits. The maid found him when she used her passkey to enter the room for cleaning at eleven in the morning. The lavatory looked as if it had been the site of a blood bath. The body itself had been virtually drained dry, and it was missing its heart and stomach and liver and both kidneys and pancreas, as if whoever had killed him had cut those organs out and taken them somewhere in plastic bags or some such containers. The head had been severed from the torso and set on the lid of the toilet, facing outward, the face chopped to mincemeat. The killer had apparently cut and chopped the head first, then set about collecting the organs.

To cut the organs out of a human being must have taken some exceptionally sharp implements and considerable technical skill. Several ribs had had to be cut out with a saw—a time-consuming and bloody operation. Nor was it clear why anyone would have gone to so much trouble.

Taken up with the holiday rush, the clerk at the front desk recalled only that Nutmeg’s husband had checked into his twelfth-floor room at ten o’clock the previous night with a woman—a pretty woman perhaps thirty years of age, wearing a red overcoat and not particularly tall. She had been carrying nothing more than a small purse. The bed showed signs of sexual activity. The hair and fluid recovered from the sheets were his pubic hair and semen. The room was full of fingerprints, but too many to be of use in the investigation. His small leather suitcase held only a change of underwear, a few toilet articles, a folder holding some work-related documents, and one magazine. More than one hundred thousand
yen in cash and several credit cards remained in his wallet, but a notebook that he should have had was missing. There were no signs of struggle in the room.

The police investigated all his known associates but could not come up with a woman who fit the hotel clerk’s description. The few women they did find had no causes for deep-seated hatred or jealousy, and all had solid alibis. There were a good number of people who disliked him in the fashion world (not a world known for its warm, friendly atmosphere, in any case), but none who seemed to have hated him enough to kill him, and no one who would have had the technical training to cut six organs out of his body.

The murder of a well-known fashion designer was of course widely reported in the press, and with some sensationalism, but the police used a number of technicalities to suppress the information about the taking of the organs, in order to avoid the glare of publicity that would surround such a bizarre murder case. The prestigious hotel seems also to have exerted some pressure to keep its association with the affair to a minimum. Little more was released than the fact that he had been stabbed to death in one of their rooms. Rumors circulated for a while that there had been “something abnormal” involved, but nothing more specific ever emerged. The police conducted a massive investigation, but the killer was never caught, nor was a motive established.

“That hotel room is probably still sealed,” said Nutmeg.

•

The spring of the year after her husband was killed, Nutmeg sold the company—complete with retail stores, inventory, and brand name—to a major fashion manufacturer. When the lawyer who had conducted the negotiations for her brought the contract, Nutmeg set her seal to it without a word and with hardly a glance at the sale price.

Once she had let the company go, Nutmeg discovered that all trace of her passion for the designing of clothes had evaporated. The intense stream of desire had dried up, where once it had been the meaning of her life. She would accept an occasional assignment and carry it off with all the skill of a first-rate professional, but without a trace of joy. It was like eating food that had no taste. She felt as if “they” had plucked out her own innards. Those who knew her former energy and skill remembered Nutmeg as a kind of legendary presence, and requests never ceased to come from such people, but aside from the very few that she could not refuse, she turned them all down. Following the advice of her accountant,
she invested her money in stocks and real estate, and her property expanded in those years of growth.

Not long after she sold the company, her mother died of heart disease. She was wetting down the pavement out front on a hot August afternoon, when suddenly she complained she “felt bad.” She lay down and slept, her snoring disturbingly loud, and soon she was dead. Nutmeg and Cinnamon were left alone in the world. Nutmeg closed herself up in the house for over a year, spending each day on the sofa, looking at the garden, as if trying to recoup all the peace and quiet that she had missed in her life thus far. Hardly eating, she would sleep ten hours a day. Cinnamon, who would normally have begun middle school, took care of the house in his mother’s stead, playing Mozart and Haydn sonatas between chores and studying several languages.

This nearly blank, quiet space in her life had gone on for one year when Nutmeg happened by chance to discover that she possessed a certain special “power,” a strange ability of which she had had no awareness. She imagined that it might have welled up inside her to replace the intense passion for design that had so wholly evaporated. And indeed, this power became her new profession, though it was not something she herself had sought out.

•

The first beneficiary of her strange power was the wife of a department store owner, a bright, energetic woman who had been an opera singer in her youth. She had recognized Nutmeg’s talent long before she became a famous designer, and she had watched over her career. Without this woman’s support, Nutmeg’s company might have failed in its infancy. Because of their special relationship, Nutmeg agreed to help the woman and her daughter choose and coordinate their outfits for the daughter’s wedding, a task that she did not find taxing.

Nutmeg and the woman were chatting as they waited for the daughter to be fitted when, without warning, the woman suddenly pressed her hands to her head and knelt down on the floor unsteadily. Nutmeg, horrified, grabbed her to keep her from falling and began stroking the woman’s right temple. She did this by reflex, without thought, but no sooner had her palm started moving than she felt “a certain something” there, as if she were feeling an object inside a cloth bag.

Confused, Nutmeg closed her eyes and tried to think about something else. What came to her then was the zoo in Hsin-ching—the zoo on a day when it was closed and she was there all by herself, something only
she was permitted as the chief veterinarian’s daughter. That had been the happiest time of her life, when she was protected and loved and reassured. It was her earliest memory. The empty zoo. She thought of the smells and the brilliant light, and the shape of each cloud floating in the sky. She walked alone from cage to cage. The season was autumn, the sky high and clear, and flocks of Manchurian birds were winging from tree to tree. That had been her original world, a world that, in many senses, had been lost forever. She did not know how much time passed like this, but eventually the woman raised herself to her full height and apologized to Nutmeg. She was still disoriented, but her headache seemed to be gone, she said. Some days later, Nutmeg was amazed to receive a far larger payment than she had anticipated for the job she had done.

The department store owner’s wife called Nutmeg about a month after the event, inviting her out to lunch. After they had finished eating, she suggested that they go to her home, where she said to Nutmeg, “I wonder if you would mind putting your hand on my head the way you did before. There’s something I want to check.” Nutmeg had no particular reason to refuse. She sat next to the woman and placed her palm on the woman’s temple. She could feel that same “something” she had felt before. Now she concentrated all her attention on it to get a better sense of its shape, but the shape began to twist and change.
It’s alive!
Nutmeg felt a twinge of fear. She closed her eyes and thought about the Hsin-ching zoo. This was not hard for her. All she had to do was bring back the story she had told Cinnamon and the scenes she had described for him. Her consciousness left her body, wandered for a while in the spaces between memory and story, then came back. When she regained consciousness, the woman took her hand and thanked her. Nutmeg asked nothing about what had just happened, and the woman offered no explanations. As before, Nutmeg felt a mild fatigue, and a light film of sweat clung to her forehead. When she left, the woman thanked her for taking the time and trouble to visit and tried to hand her an envelope containing money, but Nutmeg refused to take it—politely, but firmly. “This is not my job,” she said, “and besides, you paid me too much last time.” The woman did not insist.

Some weeks later, the woman introduced Nutmeg to yet another woman. This one was in her mid-forties. She was small and had sharp, sunken eyes. The clothing she wore was of exceptionally high quality, but aside from a silver wedding band, she used no accessories. It was clear from the atmosphere she projected that she was no ordinary person. The
department store owner’s wife had told Nutmeg, “She wants you to do for her the same thing you did for me. Now, please don’t refuse, and when she gives you money, don’t say anything, just take it. In the long run, it will be an important thing for you—
and
for me.”

Nutmeg went to an inner room with the woman and placed her palm on the woman’s temple as she had done before. There was a different “something” inside this woman. It was stronger than the one inside the department store owner’s wife, and its movements were more rapid. Nutmeg closed her eyes, held her breath, and tried to quell the movement. She concentrated more strongly and pursued her memories more vividly. Burrowing into the tiniest folds she found there, she sent the warmth of her memories into the “something.”

“And before I knew it, that had become my work,” said Nutmeg. She realized that she had been enfolded by a great flow. And when he grew up, Cinnamon became his mother’s assistant.

SETAGAYA, TOKYO: THE PEOPLE OF THE HANGING HOUSE

Famous Politician’s Shadow:
Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Amazing, Ingenious Cloak of Invisibility—
What Secret Is It Hiding?

[From
The ——— Weekly,
November 21]
————

As first revealed in the October 7 issue of this magazine, there is a house in a quiet Setagaya residential neighborhood known to locals as the “hanging house.” All those who ever lived there have been visited by misfortune and ended their lives in suicide, the majority by hanging.

[Summary of earlier article omitted]

Our investigations have led us to only one solid fact: namely, that there is a brick wall standing at the end of every route we have taken in attempting to learn the identity of the new owner of the “hanging house.” We managed to find the construction company that built the house, but all attempts to get information from them were rejected. The dummy company through which the lot was purchased is legally 100% clean and offers no opening. The whole deal was set up with such clever
attention to detail, we can only assume there was some reason for that.

One other thing that aroused our curiosity was the accounting firm that assisted in setting up the dummy company that bought the land. Our investigations have shown us that the firm was established five years ago as a kind of shadow “subcontractor” to an accounting firm well known in political circles. The prominent accounting firm has several of these “subcontractors,” each designed to handle a particular kind of job and to be dropped like a lizard’s tail in case of trouble. The accounting firm itself has never been investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office, but according to a political reporter for a certain major newspaper, “Its name has come up in any number of political scandals, so of course the authorities have their eye on it.” It’s not hard to guess, then, that there is some kind of connection between the new resident of the “hanging house” and some powerful politician. The high walls, the tight security using the latest electronic equipment, the leased black Mercedes, the cleverly set-up dummy company: this kind of know-how suggests to us the involvement of a major political figure.

————

Our news team did a survey of the movements into and out of the “hanging house” by the black Mercedes. In one ten-day period, the car made a total of twenty-one visits to the house, or approximately two visits per day. They observed a regular pattern to these visits. First, the car would show up at nine o’clock in the morning and leave at ten-thirty. The driver was very punctual, with no more than five minutes’ variation from day to day. In contrast to the predictability of these morning visits, however, the others were highly irregular. Most were recorded to have occurred between one and three in the afternoon, but the times in and out varied considerably. There was also considerable variation in the length of time the car would remain parked in the compound, from under twenty minutes to a full hour.