The young soldier went on standing where he was, stupefied, gripping the bat. He couldn't seem to make his hands let go. The lieutenant and the corporal left him alone. He had seemed to be watching the whole bizarre series of events-the dead Chinese suddenly grabbing the veterinarian by the wrist, their falling into the grave, the lieutenants leaping in and finishing him off, and now the other soldiers filling in the hole. But in fact, he had not been watching any of it. He had been listening to the wind-up bird. As it had been the previous afternoon, the bird was in a tree somewhere, making that creeeak, creeeak sound as if winding a spring. The soldier looked up, trying to pinpoint the direction of the cries, but he could see no sign of the bird. He felt a slight sense of nausea at the back of his throat, though nothing as violent as yesterdays.
As he listened to the winding of the spring, the young soldier saw one fragmentary image after another rise up before him and fade away. After they were disarmed by the Soviets, the young paymaster lieutenant would be handed over to the Chinese and hanged for his responsibility in these executions. The corporal would die of the plague in a Siberian con- centration camp: he would be thrown into a quarantine shed and left there until dead, though in fact he had merely collapsed from malnutrition and had not contracted the plague-not, at least, until he was thrown into the shed. The veterinarian with the mark on his face would die in an accident a year later. A civilian, he would be taken by the Soviets for cooperating with the military and sent to another Siberian camp to do hard labor. He would be working in a deep shaft of a Siberian coal mine when a flood would drown him, along with many soldiers.
And I..., thought the young soldier with the bat in his hands, but he could not see his own future. He could not even see the events that were transpiring before his very eyes. He now closed his eyes and listened to the call of the wind-up bird.
Then, all at once, he thought of the ocean-the ocean he had seen from the deck of the ship that brought him from Japan to Manchuria. He had never seen the ocean before, nor had he seen it since. That had happened eight years ago. He could still remember the smell of the salt air. The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life- bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort. Would he ever see it again? He loosened his grip and let the bat fall to the ground. It made a dry sound as it struck the earth. After the bat left his hands, he felt a slight increase in his nausea.
The wind-up bird went on crying, but no one else could hear its call.
Here ended The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8.
27 Cinnamon's Missing Links
Here ended The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8.
I exited the document to the original menu and clicked on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #9. I wanted to read the continuation of the story. But instead of a new document, I saw this message: Access denied to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #9 based on Code R24.
Choose another document.
I chose #10, but with the same results.
Access denied to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #10 based on Code R24.
Choose another document.
The same thing happened with #11-and with all the other documents, including #8. I had no idea what this Code R24 was, but it was obviously blocking access to everything now.
At the moment I had opened The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8, I probably could have had access to any one of them, but #8 having been opened and closed, the doors were locked to all of them now. Maybe this program did not permit access to more than one document at a time.
I sat in front of the computer, wondering what to do next. But there was nothing I could do next. This was a precisely articulated world, which had been conceived in Cinnamon's mind and which functioned according to his principles. I did not know the rules of the game. I gave up trying and shut down the computer.
Without a doubt, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8 was a story told by Cinnamon. He had put sixteen stories into the computer under the title The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and it just so happened that I had chosen and read #8. Judging from the length of the one story, sixteen such stories would have made a fairly thick book if set in type.
What could #8 signify? The word chronicle in the title probably meant that the stories were related in chronological order, #8 following #7, #9 following #8, and so on. That was a reasonable assumption, if not necessarily true. They could just as well have been arranged in a different order. They might even run backward, from the present to the past. A bolder hypothesis might make them sixteen different versions of the same story told in parallel. In any case, the one I had chosen was a sequel to the story that Cinnamon's mother, Nutmeg, had told me about soldiers killing animals in the Hsinching zoo in August 1945. It was set in the same zoo on the following day, and again the central character was Nutmeg's father, Cinnamon's grandfather, the nameless veterinarian.
I had no way of telling how much of the story was true. Was every bit of it Cinnamon's creation, or were parts of it based on actual events? Nutmeg had told me that absolutely nothing was known about what happened to her father after she saw him last. Which meant that the story could not be entirely true. Still, it was conceivable that some of the details were based on historical fact. It was possible that during such a time of chaos, a number of cadets from the Manchukuo Army officer candidate school were executed and buried in a hole in the Hsinching zoo and that the Japanese officer in charge of the operation had been executed after the war. Incidents of desertion and rebellion by Manchukuo Army troops were by no means rare at the time, and although it was rather strange to have the murdered Chinese cadets dressed in baseball uniforms, this could have happened as well. Knowing such facts, Cinnamon might have combined them with the image he had of his grandfather and made up its own story.
But why, finally, had Cinnamon written such stories? And why stories? Why not some other form? And why had he found it necessary to use the word chronicle in the title? I thought about these things while seated on the fitting room sofa, turning a colored design pencil over and over in my hand.
I probably would have had to read all sixteen stories to find the answers to my questions, but even after a single reading of #8, I had some idea, however vague, of what Cinnamon was looking for in his writing. He was engaged in a serious search for the meaning of his own existence. And he was hoping to find it by looking into the events that had preceded his birth.
To do that, Cinnamon had to fill in those blank spots in the past that he could not reach with his own hands. By using those hands to make a story, he was trying to supply the missing links. From the stories he had heard repeatedly from his mother, he derived further stories in an attempt to re-create the enigmatic figure of his grandfather in a new setting. He inherited from his mothers stories the fundamental style 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 parts were not was probably not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.
His stories used wind-up bird as a key phrase, and they almost certainly brought the narrative up to the present day in the form of a chronicle (or perhaps not in the form of a chronicle). But wind-up bird was not a term invented by Cinnamon. It was a phrase spoken unconsciously by his mother, Nutmeg, in a story she told me in the Aoyama restaurant where we ate together. Nutmeg almost certainly did not know at that time that I had been given the name Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Which meant that I was connected with their story through some chance conjunction.