I could not be certain of this, however. Nutmeg might possibly have known that I was called wind-up bird. The words might have affected her story (or, rather, their story), might have eaten their way into it on an unconscious level. This story jointly possessed by mother and son might not exist in a single fixed form but could go on taking in changes and growing as a story does in oral transmission.
Whether by chance conjunction 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 toward inescapable ruin. The will of human beings meant nothing, then, as the veterinarian 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 birds cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.
Cinnamon had almost certainly monitored my conversation with Kumiko. He probably knew everything that went on in this computer. He had probably waited until I had finished before presenting me with the story of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This had clearly not happened by chance or a sudden whim. Cinnamon had run the machine with a definite purpose in mind and shown me one story. He had also made sure I knew that there might possibly exist a whole, huge cluster of stories.
I lay down on the sofa and looked at the ceiling of the fitting room in the half-dark. The night was deep and heavy, the area almost painfully quiet. The white ceiling looked like a thick white cap of ice that had been set on top of the room.
Cinnamon's grandfather, the nameless veterinarian, and I had a number of unusual things in common-a mark on the face, a baseball bat, the cry of the wind-up bird. And then there was the lieutenant who appeared in Cinnamon's story: he reminded me of Lieutenant Mamiya. Lieutenant Mamiya had also been assigned to Kwantung Army Headquarters in Hsinching at that time. The real Lieutenant Mamiya, however, was not a paymaster officer but belonged to the mapmaking corps, and after the war he was not hanged (fate had denied him death at all) but rather returned to Japan, having lost his left hand in battle. Still, I could not shake off the impression that the officer who had directed the executions of the Chinese cadets had really been Lieutenant Mamiya. At least if it had been Lieutenant Mamiya, that would not have been the least bit strange.
Then there was the problem of the baseball bats. Cinnamon knew that I kept a bat in the bottom of the well. Which meant that the image of the bat could have eaten its way into his story the same way the words wind-up bird chronicle could have. Even if this was true, however, there was still something about the bat that could not be explained so simply: the man with the guitar case who attacked me with the bat in the entryway of the abandoned apartment house. This was the man who had made a show of burning the palm of his hand in a candle flame in a bar in Sapporo and who later hit me with the bat, only to have me beat him with it. He was the one who had surrendered the bat to me.
And finally, why did I have burned into my face a mark the same color and shape as that of Cinnamon's grandfather? Was this, too, something that came up in their story as a result of my presence having eaten its way into it? Did the actual veterinarian not have a mark on his face? Nutmeg certainly had no need to make up such a thing in describing her father to me.
The very thing that had led her to find me on the streets of Shinjuku was this mark that we possessed in common. 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.
I stood up from the sofa and went to Cinnamon's small office once again. There I sat at the desk, elbows resting on the table, and stared at the computer screen. Cinnamon was probably inside there. In there, his silent words lived and breathed as stories. They could think and seek and grow and give off heat. But the screen before me remained as deep in death as the moon, hiding Cinnamon's words in a labyrinthine forest. Neither the monitors screen nor Cinnamon himself, behind it, tried to tell me any more than I had already been told.
28 You Just Cant Trust a House (May Kasahara's Point of View: 5)
How are you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?
I said at the end of my last letter that I had said just about everything I wanted to say to you- pretty much as if that were going to be it. Remember? I did some more thinking after that, though, and I started to get the feeling that I ought to write a little more. So here I am, creeping around in the middle of the night like a cockroach, sitting at my desk and writing to you again.
I don't know why, but I think about the Miyawaki family a lot these days- the poor Miyawaki's who used to live in that vacant house, and then the bill collectors came after them, and they all went off and killed themselves. I'm pretty sure I saw something about how only the eldest daughter didn't die and now nobody knows where she is.... Whether I'm working, or in the dining hall, or in my room listening to music and reading a book, the image of that family pops into my head. Not that I'm haunted by it or anything, but whenever theres an opening (and my head has lots of openings!) it comes creeping in and sticks around for a while, the way smoke from a bonfire can come in through the window. Its been happening all the time this past week or so.
I lived in our house on the alley from the time I was born, and I grew up looking at the house on the other side. My window looks right at it. They gave me my own room when I started primary school. By then, the Miyawaki's had already built their new house and were living in it. I could always see some member of the family in the house or yard, tons of clothes drying out back on nice days, the two girls there, yelling out the name of their big, black German shepherd (what was his name?). And when the sun went down, the lights would come on inside the house, looking warm and cozy, and then later the lights would go out one at a time. The older girl took piano lessons, the younger one violin (the older one was older than me, the younger one younger). They'd have, like, parties and things on birthdays and Christmas, and lots of friends would come over, and it was happy and lively there. People who have seen the place only when it was a vacant ruin couldn't imagine what it was like before.
I used to see Mr. Miyawaki pruning trees and things on weekends. He seemed to enjoy doing all kinds of chores himself, things that took time, like cleaning the gutters or walking the dog or waxing his car. I'll never understand why some people enjoy those things, they're such a pain, but everybody's different, I guess, and I suppose every family ought to have at least one person like that. The whole family used to ski, so every winter they'd strap their skis to the roof of this big car and go off somewhere, looking like they were going to have the greatest time (I hate skiing myself, but anyhow).
This makes them sound like a typical, ordinary happy family, I suppose, but thats really just what they were: a typical, ordinary happy family. There was absolutely nothing about them that would make you raise your eyebrows and say, Yeah, OK, but how about that?
People in the neighborhood used to whisper, I wouldn't live in a creepy place like that if you gave it to me free, but the Miyawaki's lived such a peaceful life there, it could have been a picture in a frame without a speck of dust on it. They were the ones in the fairy tale who got to live happily ever after. At least compared to my family, they seemed to be living ten times as happily ever after. And the two girls seemed really nice whenever I met them outside. I used to wish that I had sisters like them. The whole family always seemed to be laughing- including the dog.