The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

WHEN THE PHONE rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we 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?

“Yeah, like that,” I said, rolling a lemon drop on my tongue. “When you sneak into somebody’s backyard, it does seem that guts and curiosity are working together. Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like an amusing friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own – with whatever guts you can muster.” She thought this over for a time. “I guess so,” she said. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

In other words, I put a freeze on my emotions. Later, when I thaw them out to perform the examination, I do from time to time find my emotions still in a distressed state, but that is rare. The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless. Then, sooner or later, I forget about them.

“Crete is the Greek island closest to Africa. It’s a large island, and a great civilization flourished there long ago. My sister Malta has been to Crete as well. She says it’s a wonderful place. The wind is strong, and the honey is delicious. I love honey.”

A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to the world – this world that I had hated so passionately; this world that I had reviled for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world had ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me.

“When I know I’ve got the right guy, I put a wad of bills in his hand and let him do his thing,” he once told me. “You’ve got to spend your money on the things that money can buy, not worry about profit or loss. Save your energy for the things that money can’t buy.”

“Dying is the only way / For you to float free: / Nomonhan.”

“Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle.”

The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment – perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one’s life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.

It wasn’t easy for the two of us to build something out of nothing. I had that tendency towards solitude common to only children. When trying to accomplish something serious, I liked to do it myself. Having to check things out with other people and get them to understand seemed to me a great waste of time and energy when it was a lot easier to work alone in silence. And Kumiko, after losing her sister, had closed her heart to her family and grown up as if alone. She never went to them for advice. In that sense, the two of us were very much alike.

“And so you see, my friends,” he was saying, “everything is both complicated and simple. This is the fundamental rule that governs the world. We must never forget it. Things that appear to be complicated – and that, in fact, are complicated – are very simple where motives are concerned. It is just a matter of what we are looking for. Motive is the root of desire, so to speak. The important thing is to seek out the root. Dig beneath the complicated surface of reality. And keep on digging. Then dig even more until you come to the very tip of the root. If you will only do that” – and here he gestured towards the map – “everything will eventually become clear. That is how the world works.

I tried my best to imitate the cry of the wind-up bird in the back of my throat. It didn’t work. All I could produce was a meaningless, ugly sound like the rubbing together of two meaningless, ugly things. Only the real wind-up bird could make the sound. Only the wind-up bird could wind the world’s spring the way it was supposed to be wound.

One morning three days from now, you could be dead in the bottom of a well. See? Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That’s what I think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things.”

May Kasahara was probably right. This person, this self, this me, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me. Even I know that much, Mr Wind-up Bird. How come you don’t get it?

I had been reading a history book from the library. It was all about Japanese management of Manchuria before the war and the battle with the Soviets in Nomonhan. Lieutenant Mamiya’s story had aroused my interest in continental affairs of the period, and I had borrowed several books on the subject. Now, however, less than ten minutes into the detailed historical narrative,

“In a world where you are losing everything, Mr Okada, Noboru Wataya is gaining everything. In a world where you are rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why he hates you so intensely.”

“Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. In most cases, not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of. Please be careful, Mr Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult thing in the world to eradicate.”

These “clients” and I were linked by the mark on my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather (Nutmeg’s father) and I were also linked by the mark on my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather and Lieutenant Mamiya were linked by the city of Hsin-ching. Lieutenant Mamiya and the clairvoyant Mr Honda were linked by their special duties on the Manchurian-Mongolian border, and Kumiko and I had been introduced to Mr Honda by Noboru Wataya’s family. Lieutenant Mamiya and I were linked by our experiences in our respective wells – his in Mongolia, mine on the property where I was now sitting. Also on this property had once lived an army officer who had commanded troops in China. All of these were linked as in a circle, at the centre of which stood prewar Manchuria, continental East Asia, and the short war of 1939 in Nomonhan. But why Kumiko and I should have been drawn into this historical chain of cause and effect I could not comprehend. All of these events had occurred long before Kumiko and I were born.

He inherited from his mother’s stories the fundamental style that he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of a story were factual and which were not was not a very important one for Cinnamon.

Whether by chance or not, the “wind-up bird” was a powerful presence in Cinnamon’s story. The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it towards inevitable ruin. The will of human beings meant nothing, then, as the vet always seemed to feel.

People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose. Nearly all within range of the wind-up bird’s cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.

Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle – a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth.

The arc of the moon stayed over my head long after the train had left the station, appearing and disappearing each time the train rounded a curve. I kept my eyes on the moon, and whenever that was lost to sight, I watched the lights of the little towns as they went past the window. I thought of May Kasahara, with her blue woollen hat, alone on the bus taking her back to her factory in the hills. Then I thought of the duck people, asleep in the grassy shadows somewhere. And finally, I thought of the world that I was heading back to. “Goodbye, May Kasahara,” I said. Goodbye, May Kasahara: may there always be something watching over you. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, 2 vols (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Iwasaki Toshio, Yoshimoto Shin’ichirō, trans., Nomonhan: sōgen no Nisso-sen, 1939, 2 vols (Tokyo: Asahi shinbun sha, 1989). Ezawa Akira, Manshūkoku no shuto-keikaku: Tokyo no genzai to mirai o tou (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōron sha, 1988). Itō Keiichi, Shizuka na Nomonhan (Tokyo: Kōdansha bunko, 1986). Amy Knight, Beria, Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Kojima Jō, Manshū teikoku, 3 vols (Tokyo: Bunshun bunko, 1983). Onda Jūhō, Nomonhan sen: ningen no kiroku (Tokyo: Gendaishi shuppan kai, Tokuma shoten, 1977).