I sat at the kitchen table, setting my cup down and surveying the room upon which Cinnamon's hands had imposed such a beautiful sense of order. It looked like a large, three- dimensional still life, disturbed only by the quiet ticking of the clock. The clocks hands showed ten-twenty. Looking at the chair that Cinnamon had occupied earlier, I asked myself once again whether I had done the right thing by not telling them about Ushikawa's visit the night before. Might it not impair whatever sense of trust there might be between Cinnamon and me or Nutmeg and me?
I preferred, though, to watch for a while to see how things would develop. What was it about my activities here that disturbed Noboru Wataya so? Which of his tails was I stepping on? And what kind of countermeasures would he adopt? If I could find the answers to these questions, I might be able to draw a little closer to his secret. And as a result, I might be able to draw closer to where Kumiko was.
As the hands of the clock were verging on eleven (the clock that Cinnamon had slid a half inch to the right, back to its proper place), I went out to the yard to climb down into the well.
I told Cinnamon the story of the submarine and the zoo when he was little-about what I had seen from the deck of the transport ship in August of 1945 and how the Japanese soldiers shot the animals in my fathers zoo all the while an American submarine was training its cannon on us and preparing to sink our ship. I had kept that story to myself for a very long time and never told it to anyone. I had wandered in silence through the gloomy labyrinth that spread out between illusion and truth. When Cinnamon was born, though, it occurred to me that he was the only one I could tell my story to. And so, even before he could understand words, I began telling it to him over and over again, in a near whisper, telling him everything I could remember, and as I spoke, the scenes would come alive to me, in vivid colors, as if I had pried off a lid and let them out.
As he began to understand language, Cinnamon asked me to tell him the story again and again. I must have told it to him a hundred, two hundred, five hundred times, but not just repeating the same thing every time. Whenever I told it to him, Cinnamon would ask me to tell him some other little story contained in the main story. He wanted to know about a different branch of the same tree. I would follow the branch he asked for and tell him that part of the story. And so the story grew and grew.
In this way, the two of us went on to create our own interlocking system of myths. Do you see what I mean? We would get carried away telling each other the story every day. We would talk for hours about the names of the animals in the zoo, about the sheen of their fur or the color of their eyes, about the different smells that hung in the air, about the names and faces of the individual soldiers, about their birth and childhood, about their rifles and the weight of their ammunition, about the fears they felt and their thirst, about the shapes of the clouds floating in the sky....
I could see all the colors and shapes with perfect clarity as I told the story to Cinnamon, and I was able to put what I saw into words-the exact words I needed-and convey them all to him. There was no end to any of this. There were always more details that could be filled in, and the story kept growing deeper and deeper and bigger and bigger.
Nutmeg smiled as she spoke of those days long ago. I had never seen such a natural smile on her face before.
But then one day it ended, she said. Cinnamon stopped sharing stories with me that February morning when he stopped talking.
Nutmeg paused to light a cigarette.
I know now what happened. His words were lost in the labyrinth, swallowed up by the world of the stories. Something that came out of those stones snatched his tongue away. And a few years later, the same thing killed my husband.
The wind grew stronger than it had been in the morning, sending one heavy gray cloud after another on a straight line east. The clouds looked like silent travelers headed for the edge of the earth. In the bare branches of the trees in the yard, the wind would give a short, wordless moan now and then. I stood by the well, looking up at the sky. Kumiko was probably somewhere looking at them too. The thought crossed my mind for no reason. It was just a feeling I had.
I climbed down the ladder to the bottom of the well and pulled the rope to close the lid. After taking two or three deep breaths, I gripped the bat and gently lowered myself to a sitting position in the darkness. The total darkness. Yes, that was the most important thing. This unsullied darkness held the key. It was kind of like a TV cooking program. Everybody got that now? The secret to this recipe is total darkness. Make sure you use the thickest kind you can buy. And the strongest bat you can put your hands on, I added, smiling for a moment in the darkness.
I could feel a certain warmth in the mark on my cheek. It told me that I was drawing a little closer to the core of things. I closed my eyes. Still echoing in my ears were the strains of the music that Cinnamon had been listening to repeatedly as he worked that morning. It was Bach's Musical Offering, still there in my head like the lingering murmur of a crowd in a high-ceilinged auditorium. Eventually, though, silence descended and began to burrow its way into the folds of my brain, one after another, like an insect laying eggs. I opened my eyes, then closed them again. The darknesses inside and out began to blend, and I began to move outside of my self, the container that held me.
As always.
15 This Could Be the End of the Line (May Kasahara's Point of View: 3)
Hi, again, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.
Last time, I got as far as telling you about how I'm working in this wig factory in the mountains far away with a lot of local girls. This is the continuation of that letter.
Lately, its really been bothering me that, I don't know, the way people work like this every day from morning to night is kind of weird. Hasn't it ever struck you as strange? I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don't have to think at all. Its like I just put my brain in a locker before I start work and pick it up on the way home. I spend seven hours a day at a workbench, planting hairs into wig bases, then I eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course I have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time I have is like nothing. And be- cause I'm so tired from work, the free time I have I mostly spend lying around in a fog. I don't have any time to sit and think about anything. Of course, I don't have to work on weekends, but then I have to do the laundry and cleaning I've let go, and sometimes I go into town, and before I know it the weekend is over. I once made up my mind to keep a diary, but I had nothing to write, so I quit after a week. I mean, I just do the same thing over and over again, day in, day out.
But still- but still- it absolutely does not bother me that I'm now just a part of the work I do. I don't feel the least bit alienated from my life. If anything, I sometimes feel that by concentrating on my work like this, with all the mindless determination of an ant, I'm getting closer to the real me. I don't know how to put it, but its kind of like by not thinking about myself I can get closer to the core of my self. That's what I mean by kind of weird.