Little Nutmeg Akasaka remained sound asleep in her mothers arms all the while this was happening. She slept for a solid twenty hours, as if she had been knocked unconscious. Her mother shouted and slapped her cheeks to no avail. She might as well have sunk to the bottom of the sea. The intervals between her breaths grew longer and longer, and her pulse slowed.
Her breathing was all but inaudible. But when the ship arrived in Sasebo, she woke without warning, as if some great power had dragged her back into this world. And so Nutmeg did not herself witness the events surrounding the aborted attack and disappearance of the American submarine. She heard everything much later, from her mother.
The freighter finally limped into the port of Sasebo a little past ten in the morning on August 16, the day after the nonattack. The port was weirdly silent, and no one came out to greet the ship. Not even at the antiaircraft emplacement by the harbor mouth were there signs of humanity. The summer sunlight baked the ground with dumb intensity. The whole world seemed caught in a deep paralysis, and some on board felt as if they had stumbled by accident into the land of the dead. After years spent abroad, they could only stare in silence at the country of their ancestors. At noon on August 15, the radio had broadcast the Emperors announcement of the wars end. Six days before that, the nearby city of Nagasaki had been incinerated by a single atomic bomb. The phantom empire of Manchukuo was disappearing into history. And caught unawares in the wrong section of the revolving door, the veterinarian with the mark on his cheek would share the fate of Manchukuo.
10 So, Then, the Next Problem (May Kasahara's Point of View: 2)
Hi, again, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.
Have you thought about where I am and what I'm doing, the way I told you to at the end of my last letter? Were you able to imagine anything at all?
Oh, well, I guess I'll just go on under the assumption that you couldn't figure out a thing- which I'm sure is true.
So let me just get it over with and tell you right from the start.
I'm working in- lets say-a certain factory. A big factory. Its in a certain provincial city- or, should I say, in the mountains on the outskirts of a certain provincial city that faces the Sea of Japan. Don't let the word factory fool you, though. Its not what you'd imagine: one of those macho places full of big, high-tech machines grinding away and conveyor belts running and smoke pouring out of smokestacks. Its big, all right, but the grounds are spread out over a wide area and its bright and quiet. It doesn't produce any smoke at all. I never imagined the world had such widely spread-out factories. The only other factory I've ever seen was the Tokyo caramel factory our class visited on afield trip in elementary school, and all I remember is how noisy and cramped it was and how people were just slaving away with gloomy expressions on their faces. So to me, a factory was always like some illustration you'd see in a textbook under Industrial Revolution.
The people working here are almost all girls. Theres a separate building nearby, a laboratory, where men in white coats work on product development, wearing very serious looks on their faces, but they make up a very small proportion of the whole. All the rest are girls in their late teens or early twenties, and maybe seventy percent of those live in the dorms inside the company compound, like me. Commuting to this place from the town every day by bus or car is a real pain, and the dorms are nice. The buildings are new, the rooms are all singles, the food is good and they let you choose what you want, the facilities are complete, and room and board is cheap for all that. Theres a heated pool and a library, and you can do things like tea ceremony and flower arranging if you want (but I don't want), and they even have an active program of sports teams, so a lot of girls who start out commuting end up moving into a dorm. All of them return home on weekends to eat with their families or go to the movies or go on dates with their boyfriends and stuff, so on Saturday the place turns into an empty ruin. There aren't too many people like me, without a family to go home to on weekends. But like I said before, I like the big, hollow, empty feeling of the place on weekends. I can spend the day reading, or listening to music with the volume turned up, or walking in the hills, or, like now, sitting at my desk and writing to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.
The girls who work here are all locals-which means farmers daughters. Well, maybe not every single one, but they're mostly happy, healthy, optimistic, hardworking girls. There aren't many big industries in this district, so before, girls would go to the city to find jobs when they graduated from high school. That meant the guys left in town couldn't find anybody to marry, which only added to the depopulation problem. So then the town got together and offered businesses this big tract of land to set up a factory, and the girls didn't have to leave. I think it was a great idea. I mean, look, they got somebody like me to come all the way out here. So now, when they graduate from high school (or drop out, like me), the girls all go to work at the factory and save their pay and get married when they're old enough and quit their jobs and have a couple of kids and turn into fat walruses that all look alike. Of course, there are a few who go on working here after they get married, but most of them quit.
This should give you a pretty good idea of what this place is like. OK? So now the next question for you is this: What do they make in this factory? Hint: You and I once went out on a job connected with it. Remember? We went to the Ginza and did a survey.
Oh, come on. Even you must have figured it out by now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird! That's it! I'm working in a wig factory! Surprised?
I told you before how I got out of that high-class hotel/jail/country school after six months and just hung around at home, like a dog with a broken leg. Then, all of a sudden, the thought of the wig company's factory popped into my head. I remembered something my boss at the company had once said to me, more as a joke than anything, about how they never had enough girls for the factory and they'd hire me anytime I wanted to go work there. He even showed me a pamphlet from the place, and I remember sort of thinking it looked like a really cool factory and I wouldn't mind working there. My boss said the girls all did hand labor, implanting hairs into the toupees. A hairpiece is a very delicately made product, not like some aluminum pot you can stamp out one two three. You have to plant little bunches of real hair very very very carefully, one bunch at a time, to make a quality hairpiece. Doesn't it make you faint, just thinking about it? I mean, how many hairs do you think there are on a human head? You have to count them in the hundreds of thousands! And to make a wig you have to plant them all by hand, the way they plant seedlings in a rice field. None of the girls here complain about the work, though. They don't mind because this region is in the snow country, where it has always been the custom for the farm women to do detailed handiwork to make money during the long winters. That's supposedly why the company chose this area for its factory.
To tell you the truth, I've never minded doing this kind of hand labor. I know I don't look it, but I'm actually pretty good at sewing. I always impressed my teachers. You still don't believe me? Its true, though! That's why it ever occurred to me that I might enjoy spending part of my life in a factory in the mountains, keeping my hands busy from morning to night and never thinking about anything upsetting. I was sick of school, but I hated the thought of just hanging around and letting my parents take care of me (and I'm sure they hated the thought of that too), but I didn't have any one thing that I was dying to do, so the more I thought of it, the more it seemed that the only thing I could do was go to work in this factory.