The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (9 page)

“Legal work might be the wrong thing for you, sonny,” said Mr. Honda one day, either to me or to someone standing twenty yards behind me.

“It might?”

“Yep, it might. The law presides over things of this world, finally. The world where shadow is shadow and light is light, yin is yin and yang is yang, I’m me and he’s him. ‘I am me and / He is him: / Autumn eve.’ But
you
don’t belong to that world, sonny. The world you belong to is above that or below that.”

“Which is better?” I asked, out of simple curiosity. “Above or below?”

“It’s not that either one is better,” he said. After a brief coughing fit, he spat a glob of phlegm onto a tissue and studied it closely before crumpling the tissue and throwing it into a wastebasket. “It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness. ‘I am he and / He is me: / Spring nightfall.’ Abandon the self, and there you are.”

“Is this one of those times when there’s no flow?” Kumiko asked.

“How’s that?”

“IS THIS ONE OF THOSE TIMES WHEN THERE’S NO FLOW?” Kumiko shouted.

“No flow now,” Mr. Honda said, nodding to himself. “Now’s the time to stay still. Don’t do anything. Just be careful of water. Sometime in the future, this young fellow could experience real suffering in connection with water. Water that’s missing from where it’s supposed to be. Water that’s present where it’s not supposed to be. In any case, be very, very careful of water.”

Kumiko, beside me, was nodding with the utmost gravity, but I could see she was struggling not to laugh.

“What kind of water?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Honda. “Water.”

On the TV, some university professor was saying that people’s chaotic use of Japanese grammar corresponded precisely to the chaos in their lifestyles. “Properly speaking, of course, we cannot call it chaos. Grammar is like the air: someone higher up might try to set rules for using it, but people won’t necessarily follow them.” It sounded interesting, but Mr. Honda just went on talking about water.

“Tell you the truth, I suffered over water,” he said. “There was no water in Nomonhan. The front line was a mess, and supplies were cut off. No water. No rations. No bandages. No bullets. It was awful. The big boys in the rear were interested in only one thing: occupying territory as fast as possible. Nobody was thinking about supplies. For three days, I had almost no water. If you left a washrag out, it’d be wet with dew in the morning. You could wring out a few drops to drink, but that was it. There was just no other water at all. I wanted to die, it was so bad. Being thirsty like that is the worst thing in the world. I was ready to run out and take a bullet. Men who got shot in the stomach would scream for water. Some of them went crazy with the thirst. It was a living hell. We could see a big river flowing right in front of us, with all the water anybody could ever drink. But we couldn’t get to it. Between us and the river was a line of huge Soviet tanks with flamethrowers. Machine gun emplacements bristled like pincushions. Sharpshooters lined the high ground. They sent up flares at night. All we had was Model 38 infantry rifles and twenty-five bullets each. Still, most of my buddies went to the river. They couldn’t take it. Not one of them made it back. They were all killed. So you see, when you’re supposed to stay still, stay still.”

He pulled out a tissue, blew his nose loudly, and examined the results before crumpling the tissue and throwing it into the wastebasket.

“It can be hard to wait for the flow to start,” he said, “but when you have to wait, you have to wait. In the meantime, assume you’re dead.”

“You mean I should stay dead for now?” I asked.

“How’s that?”

“YOU MEAN I SHOULD STAY DEAD FOR NOW?”

“That’s it, sonny. ‘Dying is the only way / For you to float free: / Nomonhan.’ ”

He went on talking about Nomonhan for another hour. We just sat
there and listened. We had been ordered to “receive his teaching,” but in a year of monthly visits to his place, he almost never had a “teaching” for us to “receive.” He rarely performed divination. The one thing he talked about was the Nomonhan Incident: how a cannon shell blew off half the skull of the lieutenant next to him, how he leaped on a Soviet tank and burned it with a Molotov cocktail, how they cornered and shot a downed Soviet pilot. All his stories were interesting, even thrilling, but as with anything else, you hear them seven or eight times and they tend to lose some of their luster. Nor did he simply “tell” his stories. He screamed them. He could have been standing on a cliff edge on a windy day, shouting to us across a chasm. It was like watching an old Kurosawa movie from the very front row of a run-down theater. Neither of us could hear much of anything for a while after we left his house.

Still, we—or at least I—enjoyed listening to Mr. Honda’s stories. Most of them were bloody, but coming from the mouth of a dying old man in a dirty old robe, the details of battle lost the ring of reality. They sounded more like fairy tales. Almost half a century earlier, Mr. Honda’s unit had fought a ferocious battle over a barren patch of wilderness on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. Until I heard about it from Mr. Honda, I knew almost nothing about the battle of Nomonhan. And yet it had been a magnificent battle. Almost bare-handed, they had defied the superior Soviet mechanized forces, and they had been crushed. One unit after another had been smashed, annihilated. Some officers had, on their own initiative, ordered their troops to retreat to avoid annihilation; their superiors forced them to commit suicide. Most of the troops captured by the Soviets refused to participate in the postwar exchange of prisoners, because they were afraid of being tried for desertion in the face of the enemy. These men ended up contributing their bones to the Mongolian earth. Sent home with an honorable discharge after he lost his hearing, Mr. Honda became a practitioner of divination.

“It was probably all to the good,” he said. “If my hearing hadn’t been ruined, I probably would have died in the South Pacific. That’s what happened to most of the troops who survived Nomonhan. Nomonhan was a great embarrassment for the Imperial Army, so they sent the survivors where they were most likely to be killed. The commanding officers who made such a mess of Nomonhan went on to have distinguished careers in central command. Some of the bastards even became politicians after the war. But the guys who fought their hearts out for them were almost all snuffed out.”

“Why was Nomonhan such an embarrassment for the army?” I asked. “The troops all fought bravely, and a lot of them died, right? Why did the survivors have to be treated so badly?”

But Mr. Honda seemed not to hear my question. He stirred and rattled his divining sticks. “You’d better be careful of water,” he said.

And so ended the day’s session.

•

After my fight with Kumiko’s father, we stopped going to Mr. Honda’s. It was impossible for me to continue visiting him, knowing it was being paid for by my father-in-law, and we were not in any position to pay him ourselves. We could barely hold our heads above water in those days. Eventually, we forgot about Mr. Honda, just as most busy young people tend to forget about most old people.

•

In bed that night, I went on thinking about Mr. Honda. Both he and Malta Kano had spoken to me about water. Mr. Honda had warned me to be careful. Malta Kano had undergone austerities on the island of Malta in connection with her research on water. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but both of them had been deeply concerned about water. Now it was starting to worry me. I turned my thoughts to images of the battlefield at Nomonhan: the Soviet tanks and machine gun emplacements, and the river flowing beyond them. The unbearable thirst. In the darkness, I could hear the sound of the river.

“Toru,” Kumiko said to me in a tiny voice, “are you awake?”

“Uh-huh.”

“About the necktie. I just remembered. I took it to the cleaner’s in December. It needed pressing. I guess I just forgot.”

“December? Kumiko, that’s over six months ago!”

“I know. And you know I never do anything like that, forgetting things. It was such a lovely necktie, too.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “I took it to the cleaner’s by the station. Do you think they still have it?”

“I’ll go tomorrow. It’s probably there.”

“What makes you think so? Six months is a long time. Most cleaners will get rid of things that aren’t claimed in three months. They can do that. It’s the law. What makes you think it’s still there?”

“Malta Kano said I’d find it. Somewhere outside the house.”

I could feel her looking at me in the dark.

“You mean you believe in what she says?”

“I’m starting to.”

“Pretty soon you and my brother might start seeing eye-to-eye,” she said, a note of pleasure in her voice.

“We just might,” I said.

I kept thinking about the Nomonhan battlefield after Kumiko fell asleep. The soldiers were all asleep there. The sky overhead was filled with stars, and millions of crickets were chirping. I could hear the river. I fell asleep listening to it flow.

After doing the breakfast dishes, I rode my bike to the cleaner’s by the station. The owner—a thin man in his late forties, with deep wrinkles in his forehead—was listening to a tape of the Percy Faith orchestra on a boom box that had been set on a shelf. It was a large JVC, with some kind of extra woofers attached and a mound of cassette tapes standing by. The orchestra was performing “Tara’s Theme,” making the most of its lush string section. The owner himself was in the back of the shop, whistling along with the music as he ran a steam iron over a shirt, his movements sharp and energetic. I approached the counter and announced with suitable apologies that I had brought a necktie in late last year and forgotten to pick it up. To his peaceful little world at nine-thirty in the morning, this must have been tantamount to the arrival of a messenger bearing terrible news in a Greek tragedy.

“No ticket, either, I suppose,” he said, in a strangely distant voice. He was talking not to me but to the calendar on the wall by the counter. The photo for June showed the Alps—a green valley, cows grazing, a hard-edged white cloud floating against Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn or something. Then he looked at me with an expression on his face that all but said, If you were going to forget the damned thing, you should have
forgotten
it! It was a direct and eloquent look.

“End of the year, huh? That’s a toughie. We’re talkin’ more than six months ago. All right, I’ll have a look, but don’t expect me to find it.”

He switched off his iron, set it on the ironing board, and, whistling along with the theme from
A Summer Place
, started to rummage through the shelves in the back room.

Back in high school, I had taken my girlfriend to see
A Summer Place
. It starred Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee. We saw it in a revival theater on a double bill with Connie Francis’s
Follow the Boys
. It had been pretty bad, as far as I could remember, but hearing the music now in a cleaner’s, thirteen years later, I could bring back only good memories from that time.

“That was a blue polka-dot necktie?” asked the owner. “Name Okada?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“You’re in luck.”

•

As soon as I got home, I phoned Kumiko at work. “They had the tie,” I said.

“Incredible,” she said. “Good for you!”

It sounded artificial, like praise for a son bringing home good grades. This made me feel uneasy. I should have waited until her lunch break to phone.

“I’m so relieved,” she said. “But I’ve got someone on hold right now. Sorry. Could you call me back at noon?”

“That I will,” I said.

After hanging up, I went out to the veranda with the morning paper. As always, I lay on my stomach with the want ads spread out before me, taking all the time I needed to read them from one end to the other, the columns filled with incomprehensible codes and clues. The variety of professions in this world was amazing, each assigned its place amid the paper’s neat rows, as on a new graveyard map.

As happened each morning, I heard the wind-up bird winding its spring in a treetop somewhere. I closed the paper, sat up with my back against a post, and looked at the garden. Soon the bird gave its rasping cry once more, a long creaking sort of sound that came from the top of the neighbor’s pine tree. I strained to see through the branches, but there was no sign of the bird, only its cry. As always. And so the world had its spring wound for the day.

Just before ten, it started to rain. Not a heavy rain. You couldn’t really be sure it was raining, the drops were so fine, but if you looked hard, you
could tell. The world existed in two states, raining and nonraining, and there should be a line of demarcation between the two. I remained seated on the veranda for a while, staring at the line that was supposed to be there.