I am 14 mini-chapters into Part 3, just over 100 pages … Part 3: October 1984 to December 1985. What time of year is it? March? I haven’t noticed the month for a while … (Editor’s update: It appears it’s already November 1985!) The first several months all go by in the first chapter—in it, MWB forms his intention to buy the property containing the well. In the second chapter (I think), the means by which he’s able to do this manifests: it is in the person of this lady he met at the end of Part Two, when he was people-watching in a park. She had asked him if he needed any money. Now, he tells her, he does! She tells him to come to a certain building; when he does, this quiet character who is (we ultimately learn) her son ushers him into a room where this female “client” character enters and—with MWB blindfolded—massages his blue mark, first with her fingers, then with her tongue. She makes him come … but he’s the prostitute; not the mark. Only one such client is seen in this house … we then flash-forward months later, when he owns the property and has re-built the well. It now has a fancy metal ladder in it. He keeps a bat at the bottom for his own security; he once used it to beat (practically to death) a ghost-like character he met at the end of Part Two.
In Part Three, the chapters are shorter overall, in part because a few other threads have been weaved in, mini-chapters that advance the story in odd ways. The first are letters from what’s-her-name … May Kasahara! She’s working at a factory out in the country, a wig factory if you can believe it (is what she would say). She seems to be a device through which Murakami can deliver the odd epiphany here or there. Then, in a more inventive device, there are these newspaper clippings from “The _____ Monthly,” … While May’s letters are in italics, the ___ monthly is formatted into two columns. Using this, we get the update that “the hanging house” has been purchased by a mysterious corporation (with a name we know is related to the mysterious woman and her silent son) … And then we get a glimpse at how it’s being used: an actress, identified only as “M”, has had her career in show business revitalized due to the treatments she is getting at the mysterious house. The newspaper reporter who delivers these reports using the objective third person is not a character; we know our hero tries to do things in secret, and indeed he still lives in his apartment and walks back and forth, up and down the alley to “The Residence” (that’s what he calls the property with the well in it) everyday. But in Chapter 13 (I think), his secret is discovered—as there is an agent of Noboru Wataya waiting to speak to him in the house. The guy is a rumpled creep, a weird apologetic, nasty little man. What’s nasty about him? Aside from his generally disgusting appearance (the very opposite of the completely stylish mother-son duo that MWB runs with), there is his recounting how his wife left him because he beat her all the time, and their children as well; she left him when he broke one of their arms. What a creep.
Anyway. A third tangent is the story of “What Happened In The Night,” told in Chapters 3 and 11. In this story, a boy is woken at night by the sound of the Wind-Up Bird. Then, at 2 in the morning, seeing some men with a shovel burying something outside, he goes out to investigate. The men have buried an actual human heart; it is alive and beating, he intuits that it is actually his own. He reburies it and goes back inside, and there is another version of him in the bed. He pushes this other version aside to make room for himself in the bed. When he wakes up, he has lost his voice. This seems to indicate—although this is not stated explicitly—that the boy is the stylish woman’s son.
The stylish woman and her son will be known as Nutmeg and Cinnamon, respectively, from now on. The woman gives this as their names, although only after a bizarre philosophical pause as to whether names are necessary and why … A recent epiphany of mine own is that this hesitation is a bit of a writer’s technique where the writer nakedly puts himself into one of the characters, sort-of obliquely tears down the fourth wall. This character will openly wonder at what her name should be, not as a real person would (real people don’t usually wonder such things) but more as an author would when he invents a character. In this sense Murakami seems to be shrugging or winking at us, as if to say, I know these characters are implausible. They will simply do what I want them to do to service my characters and my plot. Never mind their oddities!
But then, what services do they provide? Well, this fascinating bit about a young child who was as talkative as can be until one night, when he heard the Wind-Up Bird, and then he woke up and would not, could not, say a word. This little story was so beautiful I kind of wanted to read it out loud to my students; I might still do so. But then, also randomly, another side-story: a story that Nutmeg tells about being on a transport ship filled with wives and children of Japanese soldiers, on its way back to Japan from Manchukuo, around the time when the Japanese were abandoning the mainland, having lost the war. It sounds like a disastrous time, matched only in disastrous-ness by the story of Lieutenant Mamiya from Part One. I remember from then how the stories of the war informed the whole novel, but Nutmeg was an unexpected source of these stories. This American submarine rose up from the water next to the transport ship and trained their guns on it; they were preparing to fire, they would have (and could have easily) sunk the ship and left its passengers for dead. However, in the middle of preparations, they were interrupted—apparently by the news that the war had ended. They stop preparing to fire and submerge themselves back into the ocean to head off to some other … place. However, while Nutmeg was there for that event (although she says she fainted on the deck), she intersperses that story with another story that she couldn’t have been present for. It is the story of her father, the veterinarian, and his last day at the zoo that is being abandoned in Manchukuo as the Japanese forfeit that city, whatever city, I don’t remember if it had a name. Some lieutenant who’s only experience is desk duty is leading a bunch of soldiers and their assignment is to kill all the large animals at the zoo, simply to stop them from escaping and causing mayhem. So these soldiers experience this torture of having to shoot and kill bears, tigers, every big animal except the elephants, which are deemed simply too big to kill. Chinese laborers show up to take away the bodies; they will use them in various ways, the veterinarian is assured.
It’s like, Murakami just wants to fill Part Three with a bunch of other short stories—that is one thought that I had. I mean, the main plot isn’t advancing. Our hero has the well, and he will continue to spend time in it until he confronts Noboru Wataya in that other world, that other place. But in the meantime, let’s have a bunch of other short stories! Is that it? But then, there are a couple of fun details that would seem to indicate that something else is afoot. One detail is that the veterinarian just happens to have a blue mark on his face. I’m pretty sure—the detail is not lingered on much—that it’s Nutmeg’s dad who has the blue mark. That’s one detail. The second detail is that some other character, one of the soldiers, not Nutmeg’s dad, again, I’m pretty sure—some other character keeps hearing the Wind-Up Bird during that whole episode.
I don’t remember when I first found myself looking at the time and seeing it was 4:44 … but I think it was during my last time volunteering at a Sterling weekend, which would have been in October. I noticed it was 4:44 p.m.; and then I noticed it was
4:44 a.m. The three digits have seemed to me significant, and I like to think that they have virtuous connotation, since they are sort-of a complement to 666. So when I count my strokes in swimming (counting always in hexadecimal) I notice stroke number 444 (which would equate to 1,092, I suppose, in regular decimal). Well, on page 444, Nutmeg tells how these stories of hers acquired a greater level of detail over the years. She says that she told them to her son when he was young, and he would ask her to re-tell them, and re-tell them. But each re-telling, he would ask for new details. New characters were investigated; 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 …” So there is this notion of fiction and fact and a blurred line between them. This blur can be found back in the story of “What Happened in the Night.” When the little kid sees men outside burying something in the back yard, he knows it is real and not a dream. However, when he goes outside to exhume what was buried, on the other hand, he is quite sure that he is dreaming. In any case, the impact of the event is so significant that I sort of denied the validity of his claim he was dreaming … But there is nothing else to make it seem invalid. Perhaps he was dreaming—but dreams may have consequences. Anyway, I know this will be a theme that Murakami returns to. However, here, Nutmeg puts a pretty fine point on it. She says that one day, the “myth-making” that took place between her and her son ended—that February morning when he stopped speaking. “I know now what happened,” she said. “His words were lost in the labryinth, swallowed up by the world of the stories. Something that came out of those stories snatched his tongue away. And a few years later, the same thing killed my husband.”
I thought at first that the death of her husband was the death of the veterinarian … but now I realize that’s not the case. Her father was the veterinarian. So while there was a Wind-Up Bird present on the day those animals were massacred, that wasn’t the death she was referring to when she said something killed her husband. I suspect then that we haven’t heard that story, but I suppose that maybe we will. But then we are left with this kinda-scary tip of the cap to the power of fiction. The things we create and invent may take on power. It’s deadly, in this case. Fucking bloody dangerous. But … pretty cool, haha. The Wind-Up Bird came out of her story to her son; it was in her story about the zoo massacre. And then he heard that Wind-Up Bird in his own life. And now, Toru Okada (Mr. Wind-Up Bird himself) hears the Wind-Up Bird in his own neighborhood. But by writing stories within stories and taking down the fourth wall, writing about the very act of writing, Murakami consigns us to live with our own wind-up birds, doesn’t he? Hide the women and children—we’re all in danger! No, I’m joking, but I don’t want to trivialize it. I do love stories. And if this contains (as I think it does) some hints about how to write powerful stories, true stories, well I’m grateful for that. And if it contains a warning about what such stories can do, well, I’m grateful for that, too.
A Note on Peaking
I don’t mean peaking ahead. I mean peaking like reaching your peak. Like a basketball player usually peaks around age 28. Some of the best can sustain their peak into their 30s. With tennis it’s a little younger. Pulp Fiction was Tarantino’s peak as a director, although he’s made a lot of good films. You get the picture. Anyway, as I was watching a few YouTube book reviews of A Wind-Up Bird Chronicles as seen in the screen grabs above, it’s no surprise that I stumbled upon the opinion that WUB is Murakami’s magnum opus, his artistic peak. This made my mind wander on to his later novel that came out once I’d already read WUB, a novel titled 1Q84, so lengthy that it was sometimes published as three separate books. In any case, though I read it all the way through, all thousand pages, I’m sure at various points the thought crossed my mind that Murakami had kept writing past his peak; he would never recapture what he’d done with WUB. Indeed, this had been a conviction of mine at some point previous to the publication of 1Q84—I’d gone so far as to think that not only had he peaked but the entire artistic form of the novel had peaked; that perhaps there was no need to go on reading novels, what with WUB having been written. This was perhaps a self-important thought; to think that I would be able to identify the peak of an entire art form, without having read such a large percentage of the many that existed.
But I am writing this today because it was also a godless thought. I mean, in a finite world, then we should find peaks. In math we might say that we can find local maxima, but we should not claim to have found an absolute maximum. Unless we’ve discovered that life is a parabola. The infinite time scale in which we operate renders a lot of these ideas about peaks — it’s linear thinking. And therefore faulty. I should not be trying to identify the peak of the novel. And similarly, back when I was 24 years old, I should not have been trying to identify my own personal peak. Because that was a thing that I did; that was a thought that crossed my mind when I was 24. That I might as well jump off a cliff because damn it, it seemed clear I had peaked. A ridiculous thought, the thought of someone who had analyzed too many athletic events, been privy to too many stupid discussions about which players had peaked, and which players had stayed around too long beyond their peak. What the hell did I know about it? I was just a kid.
A kid with a god might not have made that mistake. But with no god, my thinking seemed perfectly reasonable. Thank god I survived. Now I’ve just got to spread that good news. What a beautiful world!
On prostitution, or “sex work”
I notice that I’m rushing, now. And I must have rushed the first time I read this book, too. Because I remember his going through the well—as he did in Part Two, with May Kasahara pulling up the ladder and leaving him wondering if he’ll die down there. But I thought that was closer to the end. Now, most of these events taking place in Part Three were not so much in my memory. I mean, I remembered the daughter-and-son characters, and that the son didn’t speak. And maybe I vaguely remembered ‘What Happened in the Night,’ where the son loses his voice when two mysterious men show up and climb a tree where the Wind-Up bird is … calling. (Although I feel like I was much more enchanted by that this time.) But there’s more going on in this Part Three … and it’s just, a long part! I mean, it’s 39 chapters or something. I’m on Chapter 20. Perhaps I forgot all of these “periodical” articles about the mysterious “Hanging House” that he purchased and now lives in, written by a meticulous reporter who’s apparently looking for a sensational story but is not so irresponsible as to invent one. Perhaps (no not perhaps—for sure) I forgot all of May Kasahara’s letters that she writes to MWUB from her country factory where she’s getting good at making wigs. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I forgot all those. I forgot that the ugly Ushikawa was Noboru Wataya’s henchman, and that he engaged MWUB in conversation and negotiation. I forgot that he enrolled MWUB into sneakily logging on to Cinnamon’s computer, in order to arrange a conversation on a screen between MWUB and Kumiko. And the tension of that, it throws a little bit of fear into me. Like, I think perhaps I just remembered that, as a result of MWUB doing this secret thing and violating the sanctity of Cinnamon’s computer, the latter is going to abandon MWUB. And so he will be without help or protection when he goes down to the bottom of the well the final time. Will this be the end of his relationship with both Cinnamon and Nutmeg, his mother? Well, if so … I forgot what a fruitful relationship it was—not in terms of money, which I’ll get to in a minute, but in terms of stories. The Zoo story and the submarine story, which are central stories for those two characters … Well, those stories are kind of memorable—maybe they stuck with me in the dimmest possible way. But I certainly forgot Nutmeg’s life story, which I just read. A lot of it was simply what you would expect it to be, filling out details that sort of fit everything else we know about her. I mean, she became a talented fashion designer when she grew up in Japan. Okay. She met another fashion designer and they married and had Cinnamon. Okay. Interesting. He seems to have been a nice enough guy. She had stopped making love to him, had lost interest in sex, and so didn’t mind that he was having affairs, although it seemed sad that they were drifting apart. And then: he was brutally murdered! That was unexpected. I forgot that. An unsolved murder. It was interesting because the thing in the previous chapter set the table for it. Her saying that something they invented in their stories had taken her son’s voice, and it had taken her husband. What had they invented? There were no horrific gruesome killers in the sub or the zoo stories, were there? The killer of her husband seems to have come from a worse story than any of the ones we’ve been told. On the other hand, the two men who showed up on the night Cinnamon lost his voice, they did bury a burlap sack of some kind in the dirt, and Cinnamon went and found it, and it did appear to contain a still-beating human heart. One of the gruesome details of this killing of Cinnamon’s dad was that the killer took a saw to the man’s ribs and then removed his organs. Why would he do such a thing? Where does evil like this come from? Okay, so that’s a mystery, and it’s hard to see how that mystery came out of the stories mother and son told each other, about the sub, and the zoo. The boy seeing the two men digging in his back yard said one of the men did appear, he had to admit, to look like his father. His father had climbed the tree, while the tall man dug the hole. Was the tall man the villain? The father-husband had seemingly been with a woman the night he was murdered. Was she the killer? Who was she? There was no mysterious woman in the sub or the zoo stories. Okay … so those are all things I forgot—and I forgot that Ushikawa created this tension by dangling to MWUB the possibility of communicating with Kumiko. I forgot this communication. I can’t imagine what they’ll communicate about. But meanwhile, it does resolve something for me around the story. It had seemed, in my memory, that Noboru Wataya was not even paying any attention to MWUB, that he was simply out there being a member of the Diet, being a celebrity, vaguely unaware of his brother-in-law who was, in the world he enters through the well, about to upset his whole plan, his whole life, completely. It’s like, they’re bitter enemies, but it seemed that Noboru Wataya had no strategy, no game in place whatsoever to combat the long game MWUB is playing. But he did have a game in place. Ushikawa was his agent, and he was closing in on MWUB by going after his big fancy connections. His plan was to isolate MWUB, perhaps. To make him desperate enough to do something foolish.
Okay, so those are all the things I forgot about Part Three. What I remembered was that MWUB became a prostitute. Not a traditional prostitute; like, these people weren’t paying him to have sex with him. But what he does is compared to prostitution—by Murakami, at some point. These women need something, and they get it from him, from the blue mark on his face. And Murakami has something to say about prostitution here. At first, and it comes up in Part Two, through Creta Kano, who calls herself a prostitute of the mind—she visits MWUB in his dreams and has sex with him there, and she does so on her sister’s orders; they are sleeping with MWUB for some reason, possibly a reason approved by and created by Noboru Wataya. But I digress. Point is, she is doing it for money. Anyway. Anyway now, the first idea we get about what Murakami imagines prostitution is like comes from MWUB’s first experience with a “client.” He just … when the client is touching his mark or licking it or whatever, he just goes somewhere else with his mind. He becomes an empty house. He basically tries to go far away; to vacate his body so that someone else can use it, for their purposes. This is interesting. Like, it’s unpleasant; you want to keep control over your own body, ideally. But when they’re paying you a lot of money, and you need money, then you do it this other way.
So that’s from the part that I kind of almost remembered. It’s a pretty gentle and kind attitude toward prostitution, which makes sense. Like Jesus says, judge not … I don’t remember exactly what he says, but I get it. Prostitution may not be ideal, but it’s not the end of a person, in any case. A person is more than what they do for a living. But so, anyway. Anyway, in Nutmeg’s life story there’s another bit about prostitution, because it turns out that before she finds MWUB, Nutmeg is herself this kind of prostitute. She doesn’t use the word ‘prostitute’ to describe it. But here is what happens. She has a rich lady friend who is almost knocked over by a sudden sharp headache. Instinctually Nutmeg reaches out to her and feels her temple. And she can feel these things moving inside the woman’s head. A week later, the friend wants to see if she can do what she did at the sudden outbreak again on request, and she can. This time the movements she feels in the person scare her; and in her fear, she basically makes herself unconscious. She just calls up memories of the zoo, not the day when the animals were killed, but the zoo on the good days, before the war forced them to leave, on the days when she was allowed to visit the animals by herself, when she had the zoo to herself. Those were good days, and those good memories sustain her while her hands are in contact with the woman’s temples, and somehow, the power of those good memories are a balm to the clients. So this becomes her calling, and she is paid quite a bit to do this work for a time. Until she finds MWUB, and she knows that he’ll be able to do what she does. For some reason. But anyway. To project her experience into this ‘prostitution’ analogy, the thought could mean that anyone who wants to use the body of a prostitute is someone with an affliction of some kind. Just as this woman with a headache had some evil energy inside her that was kind of taking her apart, so perhaps do the horny men who need to borrow a vagina; perhaps they have some evil energy in them as well. And the prostitutes then have to allow these men to use them, and to accept these men’s scary energy, they have to depart, they have to become unconscious in the moment; they have to go to a separate place, they have to take leave of their bodies, which they are donating to someone or something else. I mean, that makes sense. Prostitutes probably do have to do that. And it makes sense, too, that parents don’t want their children to have to do that particular kind of work. They don’t want them to have to ever sell or rent their bodies. Still, I guess that Murakami sanitizes the whole experience for us; he makes it seem like it’s simply a transaction. It helps that the prostitutes he portrays are of the high-end variety.
I thought this was a catchy headline because I’ve seen some interesting opinions about prostitution recently. Some people think it should be entirely legalized; others, quite the opposite. It’s like what the Big Book says about people’s opinions about sex generally. Some people think it’s the cause of all our problems. Others think we don’t have enough of it, and we need to be on a straight pepper diet. In the Big Book, the authors try to stay out of that controversy. I suppose this is one area where my own behavior departs very much from the Christian ethics. The Christians are not proponents of any sort of pepper diets. Now Christians do believe that we are all sinners. But we can’t sin without remorse and expect any forgiveness. On the other hand, our secular culture of today is very much against Christianity in this regard and much has been and continues to be liberalized when it comes to sex. The straight pepper diet appears to be winning out. But to take prostitution specifically: where ought we to stand on that particular issue? How different is prohibition of this institution with prohibition of drugs, or alcohol? Hey! I know how to get out of answering this! I can say that this is neither the time nor the place. I’m trying to talk about Murakami here. Yeah, okay. I like Christians; I think they’re probably right that we as a culture ought to be less permissive. And so making prostitution illegal, I don’t have a big problem with that. But I haven’t thought about it much. I’m not a single-issue voter with this being my single issue. And if I get a blue mark on my face by going through a wall at the bottom of a well, and then people want to pay me many thousands of dollars to spend time in a room with me just so they can touch my mark, well, then I’ll probably do what MWUB did and become a prostitute—especially if I need the money.
But in the end, this is getting kind of frivolous, isn’t it? After all, MWUB becomes a prostitute because he has no job, no good way of making money. And that’s because he is impractical, as impractical as an author or a storyteller. Cinnamon is, we know, kind of a storyteller—since he and his mom collaborated on this intricate fiction that she at one point says caused these terrible events to occur. Later, in this latest chapter, we received a hint that perhaps he is writing fiction or inventing worlds on the computer that MWUB is sneaking onto and starting to use. Anyway. It’ll be sad when they “abandon” MWUB; I wonder how they’ll leave it, if he’ll never see them again or what. And then I wonder how much tension that’ll add to the well situation; if he’ll know that Noboru Wataya is coming for him in real life, or something. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. I’ve still got over 100 pages to go, but I am more than halfway done with Part Three. And my cat is sprawled out on my lap, and his paw is extended onto the laptop, and he’s pretty funny I’ll grant him that.
Facts May Not Be Truth …
The “clumsy massacre” at the zoo described by Nutmeg — is it fact or fiction? It came toward the beginning of Part 3, not long after MWUB had made her acquaintance and had extracted from her this name, Nutmeg.
A couple chapters later, we have: “Nutmeg Akasaka told the story of the tigers, the leopards, the wolves, and the bears that were shot by soldiers on a miserably hot afternoon in August 1945. She narrated with the order and clarity of a documentary film projected on a stark white screen. She left nothing vague. Yet she herself had not actually witnessed the spectacle. While it was happening, she was standing on the deck of a transport ship carrying refugee settlers home to Japan from Manchuria. What she had actually witnessed was the surfacing of an American submarine.” That paragraph is kind of essential; it’s like, the rest of what Murakami does is to keep up with that paragraph, to keep it absolutely essential. Both stories, what happened at the zoo and what happened on the sub. Or what allegedly happened. A hundred pages later, he is still servicing that uncertainty—did it really happen at all? This mystery is enhanced by this excerpt
As if anticipating your reaction (if you read the above), Murakami puts you into the story, with all your uncertainty or skepticism or whatever you want to call it:
So Nutmeg is an odd story-teller, and yet at the same time, she narrates with “the order and clarity of a documentary film projected on a stark white screen.” This is, in a way, foreshadowing what we read 100 pages later—a sequel to her “zoo,” story, apparently written by Cinnamon. I say this as if it’s my insight, but it’s clearly not. Murakami wrote it directly into the book: “He inherited from his mother’s 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.”
Oddly, over the space of 10-15 years, I forgot mostly about the zoo massacre, both of them really. Or my memories of them were vague; certainly, I’d forgotten Nutmeg and Cinnamon and their intimate connection to that story, the note that the veterinarian at the zoo was Nutmeg’s father and Cinnamon’s grandfather. I’d also forgotten that he carried a blue mark on his cheek seemingly identical to MWUB’s. The gruesome details of the second massacre; the same soldiers who massacred the large predator animals the first time around, coming back the next day carrying prisoners dressed in baseball uniforms and massacre-ing them with bayonets—more disgusting still, killing three of them with bayonets and then killing the last with a baseball bat. The explanation for this atrocity was that the baseball-uniform-wearing men were enlisted at an officer-training skill and had attempted a mutiny, killing two of their superior officers with baseball bats. The young soldier who never speaks but who is the one who can hear the wind-up bird, he is the one forced to wield the bat in the final execution. His lieutenant, who MWUB associates in his mind with Lieutenant Mamiya (perhaps it really was Lieutenant Mamiya, he thinks), trains the soldier on how to use the bat. The fact that all these characters will die in Siberian prisons or by execution within the year is mentioned, as if to emphasize the futility of all of it. It’s a horrible scene. The veterinarian, Cinnamon’s grandfather, is tasked with verifying the death of the man who is hit with the bat. He stoops into the open grave where he was killed and checks his pulse—it’s not there. No pulse. But then the dead man inexplicably surges to life; he sits up and grabs the veterinarian by the wrist. The lieutenant who had ordered the veterinarian into the grave rushes to the rescue, shooting the would-be zombie twice in the head, and then working furiously to loosen the corpse’s tight grip on the veterinarian’s wrist. What a horror story!
And yet we feel sympathy for the grandson who wrote it, and MWUB is our companion, reading what Cinnamon wrote and wondering about it just as we wonder about Murakami. Whether there is truth in any of it or whether it is all invented, this is also what we are left to wonder. The fact that it is horrible could make us disgusted, but it might also make us admit that it sounds realistic. “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 this story.”
I’m going to exit my own narration of this in writing about it, I feel like one of those influencers who makes YouTube “react” videos. Since there is a character reacting to a story within the story, I become another layer and it really starts to get ridiculous. So I’ll sign off early, noting as I go that I am cutting off (as I did in the last image, above), a discussion of what the phrase ‘wind-up bird’ might mean amidst all this. “The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin.” Goodness gracious, what a dark generalization! Perhaps I am buoyed by having read the end of this story, knowing that MWUB himself may escape such a fate, at least for a little while.
Literal hell on earth
“Nutmeg and Cinnamon had obviously decided to cut all ties with me. This strange mother and son had deserted the sinking ship for someplace safer. The intensity of the sorrow this aroused in me took me by surprise (emphasis added). I felt as if I had been betrayed in the end by my own family.”
So ends a two-page chapter called “A Vacant House is Born.” This could have various double meanings. A vacant house was what MWUB visualized whenever he allowed paying-customer middle-aged women to caress his mark—whenever he acted, in some way, as a prostitute. “I was now a vacant house, just as the Miyawaki house had once been.” The Miyawaki house, as it turns out, had just been mentioned extensively in Mai Kasahara’s letter number five, write before this two-page chapter. The Miyawaki house has since been bulldozed and replaced by The Residence, and so the disappearance of Nutmeg and Cinnamon is for MWUB similar to what the Miyawakis absconding was for the Miyawaki house. So now the whole property takes on the characteristic that MWUB himself employed to do that work. Maybe he became a vacant house to help resist the spirits that these people had to tame within themselves, or they needed the spirit of a vacant house to explore. But now, this vacant house being born, maybe it’s the place he needs to accomplish … something. Of course, the vacant house is alongside the well, and the well is what’s important.
Maybe it’s because of the sorrow he feels in being cut off by Nutmeg and Cinnamon—because of that sorrow, he avoids The Residence for five days. During that time he has an odd dream about Malta Kano. The dream is so odd that it seems unessential. Maybe it just keeps the rhythm of the story going; it gives us a buffer between the divorce from Nutmeg-Cinnamon and the return to the Mamiya story. The dream re-asserts the tension of Noboru Wataya and Ushikawa, since the latter is literally present in the dream. And the former, Malta Kano, well she also was employed by Noboru Wataya, and so there is the fear that, for all MWUB’s good feelings toward Creta Kano, that whole connection was somewhat compromised by the fact that it had been initiated by his enemy. The tension also seems present in how the dream brings our character doubt about his cat, Mackeral. Mackeral the cat who reappeared soon after MWUB met Cinnamon and Nutmeg. Malta Kano (or his dream of her) asks him whether he’s sure this is the same cat. Maybe it isn’t the same cat! A chapter later, MWUB will start to doubt his memories about Kumiko. So the enemy is at work.
In an even smaller part, another buffer between the one buffer and the start of Mamiya, MWUB takes “a long-delayed swim in the ward pool.” I just noticed that—it was long-delayed. Delayed since when? Swimming was mentioned at the very outset of Part 3: “ … Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. … I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals.” I think it will be mentioned and described in more detail after the Mamiya story. Maybe just a tease was useful here. The wall over the pool had a large Christmas ornament. And then, the letter from Mamiya
.The darkness of the Mamiya story is not, as the first one was, focused on one horrific moment. It is, rather, a testament to man’s ability to create hell on earth. It is a historically based picture of that hell. Mamiya’s first story had ended rather sorrowfully, but the sorrowful tone seemed almost too heavy, in comparison to what he had experienced. He had seen this gruesome torture of his own superior officer, then he himself had been cast into the bottom of a deep well. And from that, he had been saved. But during that time, without hope, in the bottom of the well—he had experienced a beautiful moment that had, by his telling, deprived him of his will to live. I found this hard to accept. I liked Mamiya too much to accept his downcast claim, that his life had come to nothing, that he would have been better off dying. So for him to have this whole horrific period of his life, years spent in a Siberian labor camp, well that fits. Like, if his survival took him here, to this horrible place, with these horrible people, then I can see why he regretted having survived.
After a year-and-a-half living in the labor camp—he is of value to the Russians as an interpretor—he experiences a shock: He meets the man who inflicted the torture on his superior years earlier, the man who ordered the other man skinned alive. He asks around, and finds out that this man is indeed still a powerful man: Boris the Manskinner, is what they called him. I am reminded of how, in The Matrix, Neo’s battle with Agent Smith is not a full-throated victory, because in the sequels, Agent Smith is replicated; he is galvanized by the conflict. While Neo’s power in The Matrix has grown near-infinite, so also has the power of the forces that desire to kill him. Here, Mamiya may have survived his encounter with the torturous forces of darkness that skinned a man alive in front of him, but that event did not simply occur but it had consequences, it metastatized and became worse. Boris and his henchman made skinning alive their calling card; he used it to get promoted in the Soviet army. So that backstory is told to use because Mamiya, after seeing this Boris and being shocked, asks a friend of his who’s in the know to spill the tea about Boris. And the friend is like, oh shit, stay away from that guy. He’s trouble, and he’s got a lot of power. He’s in chains now, but it’s temporary. He was purging guys for Stalin and Stalin’s chief of secret police, a creep named Beria; they were part of this ministry called the NKVD. (Tangent: note the NKVD as an agency that preceded the KGB in the Soviet Union.) So, the connections that Boris had are the “historical basis” I alluded to earlier. In the novel, Boris the Manskinner has the “real name” of Boris Gromov. A search for the name of “Boris” on Beria’s Wikipedia page gives us Boris Rodos, on whom the former’s biography could plausibly be based. Anyway in the final pages of this first installment of Mamiya’s letter, Mamiya is approached by Boris and offered a deal of sorts. Basically, Boris gets Mamiya to put him in touch with a leader of the Japanese POWs. Though they are mostly being worked to death and outright murdered at alarming rates, they still have some social organization with leaders, and these leaders decide, indeed, to deal with Boris. He is, at the end of this bit of the letter, installed as new leader of the camp. Now, back in the novel, we take a break from the letter, with this emblem of evil having Mamiya in his sites. It’s I suppose creating an overall dark vibe, taking us to this dark point in history and then elevating a proven killer to a place of power.
<Pause>
Why, we wondered, did Mamiya’s story stop? Because MWUB needed to go down the well. Murakami staggered it and staged it so that the finale, the return to the scene where the Cutty Sark sits, where he went through the wall at the end of Part 2, helped by the mysterious woman who called him on the phone at the very beginning of the book—he staggered it so that visit, that final climax, could be interrupted by the second part of Mamiya’s story. He made it so that the evil portent of Boris the Manskinner in charge of the whole camp and with Mamiya at his mercy loomed over us as we accompanied MWUB down the well on this last time. The bat was missing when he got down there, but he waves away his lack of his security object and sits quietly. Thoughts distract him, but he overcomes the distraction by thinking about swimming. This is only a paragraph in the novel, but this is potentially the part I remembered: “Swimming is one of the best things in my life,” MWUB says, with surprising conviction. “It has never solved any problems, but it has done no harm, and nothing has ever ruined it for me. Swimming.”
Down in the room again, MWUB goes back out into the corridor. Then he gets lost. And then again he hears the waiter; he is there whistling Thieving Magpie, as before. I notice I’m rushing in my description, but this wasn’t originally meant to be a re-telling. I am, anyway, rushing to get back to Mamiya. He is dealing with Boris, and he has made horrible mistakes in his dealings with Boris. He has encountered true evil, and he has allowed it to talk him into things. He forms a desperate plan to kill Boris, but I remember that this plan is doomed. Perhaps the worst thing about Mamiya’s story, or the most insidious and devious part of Boris’ evil, is that he is able to rule by fear. Mamiya submits to it because he hasn’t admitted it and faced up to it in himself. He imagines himself plotting to kill Boris, but in fact he is acting in accordance with Boris’ wishes because he is afraid to withstand Boris, because he is afraid to die, or simply afraid of the evil Boris will do to him.
But maybe I’m wrong. I must read on.
In the … labryinth?
So the climactic final trip to the labryinth has begun; there is serious tension now. Something about being so close to the end, the resolution of all of this. And there is evil afoot, serious evil, in this strange realm. We are reminded of this by the Mamiya story, which cuts in just after we’ve adjusted to MWUB being in the other-world. The other-world, who knows what to call it?! It’s a dream world, in a sense—in a way, Creta Kano brought him there by having sex with him in that room, and then he stayed in it longer, and the mysterious woman was there. … To be more specific: the first sex dream was in Part 1, Chapter 9. Just after meeting Creta Kano in Chapter 7 and hearing the first part of her story in Chapter 8, he has a sex dream about her while having a midmorning nap on the sofa in Chapter 9. I might note here that this was after, in the first paragraph of that chapter, he “went to the ward pool for a swim.” Anyway, that first time the dream starts out in “some kind of large hall,” whwere Malta Kano’s hat gets his attention. But by the time he reaches the bar where he saw her, she was gone. The bartender takes his order: a scotch on the rocks, Cutty Sark being the brand. But then, before he could get a drink, the man without a face shows up. “This way, Mr. Okada,” he said. And then a little later: “We have so little time. Hurry.” So then he guides MWUB out of hte crowded hall and into a corridor. “How did he know my name,” MWUB wondered. Eventually, they come to Room 208. A room with an old-fashioned chandelier that was not lit. The faceless man tells MWUB to drink whiskey from the cabinet. Then he leaves. But when MWUB tries to open the cabinet, he finds it closed. That’s when Creta Kano appears and says “some time must go by before it will open.” Then she sheds her clothes, opens his fly, takes out his penis, and puts it in her mouth. He says “Stop it … Noboru Wataya will be here any minute.” She responds, “Don’t worry. We have plenty of time for this at least,” and she finishes him off. Then, he wakes up.
The second sex dream was in Part 2, Chapter 2. He knows Kumiko is gone, but he hasn’t met with Noboru Wataya yet. This time the dream starts from his real memory of Kumiko, the last morning he saw her when he zipped up her dress. Except then he realizes it’s not her in the dress, it’s Creta Kano. Again she puts his penis in her mouth, but this time, before he comes, she moves away, undresses him, makes him lie down. Then she sat on top of him. His fingers were “all but sucked inside.” “Won’t Noboru Wataya be here any minute?” he asks. She says he doesn’t have to worry about it. “Leave everything to us.” “To us?” he asks. Then she mounts him and gets him good and orgasmic. In the midst of this ecstasy, he notices the room has gone dark. The voice of the woman says, “Just forget. Forget about everything. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You’re lying in nice, warm mud. We all come out of the warm mud, and we all go back to it.” It’s the mysterious woman now. She moves her hips in an erotically stimulating way. Then, right as he’s coming, the door opens, and there is a white flash in the darkness, that “might have been the glint of a sharp blade.” The tension in that room has been building for a long time!
The third visit to the hotel I think was not a sex dream. It was Part 2, Chapter 8, titled: “The Root of Desire * In Room 208 * Passing Through the Wall.” In it, he starts out in the center of a broad lobby, where Noboru Wataya’s face is being projected. NW’s quote, his bizarre, professional, nonsensical way of speaking is captured for one big solid paragraph, one block of text.
His taunting — they have nothing in their heads but garbage and rocks — infuriates MWUB, and it motivates him to push the faceless man out of his way, the faceless man, who warns him that “you don’t belong here now. … If you go any farther, you won’t be able to come back. Do you understand?” The rules of the other-place are impossible to follow. But MWUB walks past him and he meets the waiter, who is whistling Rossini. He follows him to Room 208. But this time there is no Creta Kano. It’s just the mysterious woman. “I don’t know who you are, but you hold some kind of key. Am I right?” She doesn’t answer this query. She asks him to pour her a drink. Then she sort of establishes that he came here specifically to learn her name. But she can’t tell him what it is. She doesn’t know herself. But she knows that he needs to figure it out. “That is the lever you want. You don’t have time to stay lost.” And then, when he asks more questions, she says: “You have to leave now. If he finds you here, there’ll be trouble. He’s even more dangerous than you think. He might really kill you. I wouldn’t put it past him.” And then she makes one last sexual advance at him before the knock comes to the door. Before the man with the knife could attack him, though, she brings him into the wall, and puts her tongue in his mouth.
And so now, 300 pages later, finally, he’s back for a fourth visit to the room with the Cutty Sark. This scene is being replayed, but it’s almost like someone with a video tape, needing to rewind and fast forward to get to the right part of the scene. MWUB arrives at the room, but it’s empty. A phone rings, but he picks it up and the line is dead. He’s in the wrong Room 208, somehow. But a door opens up and he is able to find his way into the corridor. At first he’s lost in the corridor, but then the whistling waiter happens by. So he follows the waiter, who again heads to Room 208 with the Cutty Sark and two glasses. We take our <pause> in the story as the waiter enters the room, setting the stage for MWUB’s fourth visit.
The prelude to this fourth visit is longer; he decides not to go straight into the room; instead, he’s going to follow the waiter, to forestall a possibly lethal visit to the room. He wanders into the hotel lobby. “This time, however, the lobby was hushed, with only a handful of people sitting in front of a large television set, watching an NHK news broadcast. … The group consisted of twelve people, nine men and three women. … (that) gave no evidence of knowing each other.” MWUB looks away from the television for a moment; when he turns back to it, it is showing a picture of NW. However, this time he’s not talking. Rather, there’s a reporter saying that NW has been rushed to the hospital after an assailant (with a description that matches MWUB, down to the peacoat he’s wearing) burst into his office and smashed him in the head with a baseball bat! This would be the third incidence of violence done in this book with a baseball bat. First there was MWUB’s encounter with the man with the guitar case at the end of Part 2. Then there was the Clumsy Massacre, Part 2, the part of Cinnamon’s grandfather’s story written by Cinnamon, where these soldiers come to the zoo to execute and bury deserters, one of whom they kill with a baseball bat. Then, MWUB always brought the baseball bat to the bottom of the well with him after he took it from the encounter with the guitar player. But before this latest trip down the well, it had disappeared. When he hears that NW has been assaulted with that bat, he asks, could he have done this somehow, without remembering it. While he was unconscious? But he doesn’t see how that’s possible. Oh, the assailant described on the television had a bruiselike mark on his right cheek. That’s MWUB, with his blue mark. But before he can come to terms with whether or not he might have actually done it, the 12 people by the TV notice him, and they start after him. He is heading out of the lobby to the corridor when all of the lights go out. While this at first seems an impediment that might lead to MWUB’s demise, he ultimately sees it was an aid to him. “Who could have turned out the lights?” he wonders. “Probably someone there had done it to rescue me from danger.” Then, as he ponders how it’s impossible that he could have assaulted NW, “unless there existed another me,” his thoughts are interrupted by the appearance of the faceless man.
It’s been 400 pages since we saw him before. As the faceless man says, “I’m on your side. We met here once before. Do you remember?” MWUB doesn’t know whether to trust the man, but he ultimately does. “You have to leave this place as soon as possible, Mr. Okada. They’ll come to find you when the lights go on. Follow me: I know a shortcut.” Later he says, “They are very dangerous people. Much more dangerous than you think.” Then there is some back-and-forth; MWUB explains he couldn’t have killed NW: he was at the bottom of a well at the time. But, he admits, he has no witnesses who know he was at the bottom of said well. “Let me tell you this, Mr. Okada. I don’t know everything that happens here. This is a big place, and my area of responsibility centers on the lobby. There is a lot that I don’t know anything about.” He knows nothing about, for example, the whistling waiter, except that there “are no waiters here, whistling or otherwise.” The whistling waiter must have been pretending to be a waiter. “… Whatever business you have, get it over with quickly and go back where you came from. This place is dangerous. You are an intruder here, and I am the only one on your side. Don’t forget that.”
The Mysterious Woman
MWUB notes it’s been a year and five months, by his calculations, since they last spoke. The mysterious woman avoids answering many questions; she doesn’t know the answer to many things. Has it been a year and five months? Or has it been a long time? She doesn’t know what he means by “time” or a “long time.” He mentions having been in the room when it was empty—she says he must have been in another Room 208, because she’s always there. He then says that “the phone was dead,” and she says, resignedly, that “They cut it. They knew how I used to like to make calls.” Are they the ones who are keeping her in this room? “Hmm, I wonder. I don’t really know.”
So then MWUB comes forward with his theory, that he’s been quietly developing all this time, without telling us about it. I remember the first time I read this, being impressed by the confidence evinced in what he says. All this time he had been going quietly here and there, never speaking at great length about his situation. But who would he have spoken to about it? He didn’t even have May Kasahara around to talk to! So I remember being impressed by his ability to piece some theory together out of the mystery. But this time around I was more impressed by other things. Like how, at the outset, when he first gets to the room and it’s empty, and then the phone rang, but the line was dead. For a moment, he was “no longer entirely certain that it had actually rung. But if I let doubts like that creep in, there would have been no end to them. I had to draw a line somewhere. Otherwise, my very existence in this place would have been open to question. The phone had rung; there could be no mistake.” I like his ability to question up to a point, but then to realize that at some point, action is necessary. Similarly, half a page later, when he realizes that the door to the corridor is open: “I pulled the knob until the ddoor swung in just enough for a blinding light to come streaming into the room. The bat. If only I had the bat, I would have felt more confident. Oh, forget the bat! I swung the door wide open.” I love that. It’s admirable that he’s able to have these moments of fear, and we see him fight through them. That caught my attention more this time, more than his impressive little theory about the mysterious woman.
Anyway, back to his theory: here it is. “I think you’re Kumiko,” he told her. She doesn’t just tell him he’s right, nor does she tell him he’s wrong. She plays with the idea. She tries on Kumiko’s voice. After some more back and forth, he states that he wanted to bring her back. He admits he needs to “solve some riddles, though, if I’m going to get you back.” She expresses skepticism. He then states that he wants her to help him. She says she’s “willing to try.” He starts by stating the incompleteness of her explanation for why she had left him. He says he’s not saying it’s a lie, but “I can’t help feeling it’s nothing but a kind of metaphor. … It doesn’t lead anywhere. It just traces the surface. The more I read your letter, the more I felt that. There must be some other reason that is more basic—more real. And it almost certainly involves Noboru Wataya.”
It’s so wild that in the world of this book, this statement seems perfectly true, but out of context just a little bit it would indeed sound crazy. You could just picture NW smirking or laughing at it. If he’d said it when they first met back in Part 2, Chapter 3, he would indeed have laughed at it; they had a conversation sort of like that. But what’s happened since, in a year and five months, makes it sound less crazy. Her total disappearance. The strange machinations of NW using Ushikawa. And using Malta Kano, for that matter. Indeed, it seems plausible that NW has lured MWUB here, that it was NW’s design to bring him here, to kill him here. And where is “here,” now that we mention it? A few chapters ago, the word “labryinth” came up to describe the inner workings of Cinnamon’s computer, and it might also have been referring to the inside of his own consciousness: “The depths of this computer were the very depths of Cinnamon himself.” Are we in a world that is inside someone else’s consciousness? Is it Noboru Wataya’s consciousness? No, ultimately, it doesn’t seem to be that exactly.
MWUB says that all the events that have happened to him are complex, but “the thread running through them is perfectly clear. What it all boils down to is that you have gone over from my world to the world of Noboru Wataya. That shift is the important thing. Even if you did, in fact, have sex with another man or other men, that is just a secondary matter. A front.” Now … Kumiko responds to this but the voice was no longer Kumiko’s: “People don’t always send messages in order to communicate the truth, Mr. Okada,” it says, “… just as people don’t always meet others in order to reveal their true selves.” “But still, Kumiko was trying to communicate something to me. Whether or not it was the truth, she was looking to me for something, and that was the truth for me.” Then he extrapolates: he guesses that there was “some kind of inherited tendency in the Wataya family bloodline.” And when Kumiko got pregnant, she was worried the tendency would show up in their child. “Which is why you were afraid of having children … you couldn’t reveal the secret to me.” Then he goes on to connect back to Kumiko’s sister, how she chose to die bcause … NW had this power, “and he knew how to find people who were especially responsive to that power and to draw something out of them. He must have used that power in a particularly violent way on Creta Kano. She was able, one way or another, to recover, but your sister was not.”
Then MWUB follows with an expansion of his theory which I subsequently pretty much forgot: “How he managed to do it and what the occasion was I have no idea, but at some point Noboru Wataya increased his violent power geometrically. Through television and the other media, he gained the ability to train his magnified power on society at large. Now he is trying to bring out something that the great mass of people keep hidden in the darkness of their unconscious. He wants to use it for his own political advantage. It’s a tremendously dangerous thing, this thing he is trying to draw out: it’s fatally smeared with violence and blood, and it’s directly connected to the darkest depths of history, because its final effect is to destroy and obliterate people on a massive scale.” Now what the hell is all that?!
It’s like, on the one hand, it seems to blow NW up to absurd proportions, which seems inappropriate, since Murakami characters are such Everyman types, it doesn’t seem like they should be facing off against super-villains. The villains should be ordinary, like the protagonists are. The thing is, Murakami villains do often appear to be quite evil, but the evil is supernatural, temporary, fleeting, and somewhat inexplicable. The guitar player in this movie seems an example: a guy who makes a garrish display of burning himself, then oddly lures MWUB to an empty house where he attacks him with a baseball bat. But then after MWUB gets the better of him, it’s then that he appears as a true symbol of evil: beaten to a bloody pulp, he keeps laughing maniacally. There were characters who made similar disgusting performances in death in Kafka on the Shore. So this is the type of villainy I’m more accustomed to seeing. And on previous readings of the book, NW fit this understanding. His villainy was limited to some odd sexual fettishes and a seeming lust for power. But if we read that last paragraph above, he actually resembles the main villain in Kafka more than i realized. That villain was collecting the skulls of local cats in order to build a big flute that he would use to collect a lot of people’s souls. Well that sounds like what MWUB things NW is up to: he wants to bring something out of the great mass of people and use it to destroy and obliterate people. But it’s all for his own political advantage.
I guess that this could be some general description of all villainous, self-centered behavior. At our worst, lost in ego, we might try to exploit people, and use their weakness for our own small gains. But then what are we to make of how it’s “directly connected to the darkest depths of history.” Here we have an allusion to Mamiya’s story; but what does Boris the Manskinner have to do with NW? I mean yes, MWUB did read that NW’s uncle was part of the Japanese army during the war, who produced a precise and meticulous report on sheep farming and wool processing. As described in Part 3, Chapter 23 (“Counting Sheep” is one of the chapter titles), the elder Wataya is connected to another higher-up, a General Kanji Ishiwara, who believed that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, and that to win, Japan needed to rapidly industrialize Manchukuo. It was through logistical stockpiling that wars were won; not by simply practicing martial arts, but by having the best weapons, the best supply lines, and so on. This dedication to carrying out evil efficiently was ultimately shared by Boris the Manskinner; he, when he took control of the Siberian camp where Mamiya lived, used Mamiya to accomplish a lot of efficiencies. Then there was the character who Boris ordered skinned alive in the first place, a Japanese snoop named Yamamoto, who Mamiya was cursed to have to follow into Mongolia. That man might have worked for this Kanji Ishiwara fellow. In any case, the motives of these evil people, when investigated deeply, are not very interesting, are they?
Well, let’s go back to the room. MWUB tells the woman that “At some point you noticed you were being drawn, unconsciously, toward that dark force that you thought you had left behind. And when you realized what was happening, you became confused. You didn’t know what to do. Which is why you went to talk to Noboru Wataya, hoping to learn the truth … Getting pregnant may have stimulated and awakened the dormant something inside you. And that was exactly what Noboru Wataya had been waiting for. That may be the only way he is capable of sexually committing to a woman. That is why he was so determined to drag you back from my side to his, once that tendency began to surface in you. He had to have you. Noboru Wataya needed you to play the role your sister had once played for him.”
The woman responds and says his narrative is like this 1940s film, in which a woman who fell into prostitution ultimately leaves her lover because she finds herself not worthy of him—and she kills herself, in the end. But MWUB cuts her off. I’m going to take you out of here, he says. “By breaking the spell.” “What if I’m not Kumiko?” she asks him. “I’m going to take you home,” he says. “Can you say that for sure? Without a doubt?” “Yes, I can say it for sure. I’m going to take you home.”
Then, and I forgot this interesting turn, this phrase, this thing that happened. She directs him to come closer so she can give him a present. What is it? A bat. His bat. It has human hair stuck to it, seemingly stuck to it with dried blood. “I’m sure you know what’s going on,” MWUB says. “Somebody used this bat to crush Noboru Wataya’s skull. … He might die.” “He’s not going to die,” Kumiko says. “He may not regain consciousness, though. He may just continue to wander through darkness, but what kind of darkness that would be, no one knows.” Then comes the knock at the door. He declares he’s not going to run this time. He’s going to stay and fight. And then we have it: an action scene. It’s tense! It’s like an action movie. The unseen assailant comes at MWUB with a knife. But he has the bat, and he eventually gains the upper hand. He hits the bad guy three times and then, even though the other guy’s already down, MWUB takes a final kill shot. “I didn’t want to do it, but I had no choice. I had to finish him off: not out of hatred or even out of fear, but as something I simply had to do.” He then took out a flashlight—he wanted to see, but: “Don’t! Don’t look at it!” Kumiko’s voice … “But I had to look. I had to see it. I had to know what it was, this thing in the center of the darkness that I had just beaten to a pulp.” “Please, I’m begging you to stop! Don’t look at it if you want to take me home again!”
And so, he starts vomiting. And then he says, “Let’s go home,” but she didn’t answer. “There was no one in there anymore.” And so, he passes through the wall again, totally exhausted. Back in the well, there is now water. It is threatening to drown him.
Because we are careening, spiraling, falling toward the finale of the book, the scene with the water threatening his life seemed like such a small blip in my memory. Such a small little thing. I guess three to four pages describing this near-drowning are almost nothing compared to 587 pages leading up to this. But yeah: the water is slowly filling with water and MWUB cannot move; he is stuck in a sitting position on the floor of the well, unable to climb. It takes him a while to realize the water level is rising. The increase in the water level starts out very slow but then it gets faster. “Be careful of water, Mr. Honda had said to me.” Holy shit, he’s really going to die—we might allow ourselves to think. Maybe in one multiverse, he did die. This chapter certainly ends with him dying. First he hallucinates. He imagines May Kasahara opening up the well cover. He talks to his hallucination of her; of course the hallucination seems just as real as the real May Kasahara. Because dreams in fiction are as real as anything else, just about.
“It was not a bad way to die, I told myself. The world is full of much worse ways to die. … ‘I’m afraid to die, though,’ I whispered to myself. These turned out to be my last words. They were not very impressive words, but it was too late to change them. The water was over my mouth now. Then it came to my nose. I stopped breathing. My lungs fought to suck in new air. But there was no more air. There was only lukewarm water. I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.”
Denouement
In the “resurrection” phase of the book, our hero wakes up in the “fitting room” of The Residence, where he is being looked after by Nutmeg. Cinnamon, she says, saved him. He must have sensed a disturbance in the force and showed up just in time. MWUB is totally destroyed physically and still can’t move for days.
I wonder: once the tension is ramped up to such an extent, does the author’s ability to maneuver become limited? Like, I can’t even imagine Murakami having any freedom with these characters at this point. It’s like, he played the moment for the maximum tension he could get out of it. First, the encounter with the being in the darkness in the “other world.” Then, the near-drowning death in the well—left unresolved as we go to the country for May Kasahara’s sixth and final letter. And we’ll see her once more in our final epilogue. What to make of May Kasahara—his friendship with her? There is a lot here. In some ways, hers is the character that Murakami would be most likely cancelled for writing. This teenaged girl—she’s 16 at the start, and MWUB befriends her more than any public person would want to do in our society today. Like, an adult male’s friendship with a teenaged girl would be thought of in a certain way. Like a Humbert Humbert sort of way. Now, I’m not saying that this book is Lolita. But it dares to hint in that direction; I say more about this here in talking about Book 2, Chapter 2:
“of course no adult man should be confiding in and getting all this life help from a 16-year-old girl. The fact that they never do anything sexual is sort of beside the point. Although I suppose, to really like the narrator and the novel, one has to stay beside the point; one must take cover in the fact that nothing happens between them. He takes this older-brother type role. But the inexplicability of sexual feeling is all around them. I mean, in between his visits with May, he’s having sex dreams that he can’t explain. They’re about Creta Kano, but the point is, sexual urges arise inexplicably—that’s one of the themes here, throughout. But yet, we are (no doubt) called on to repress some of them, if we are going to be in a marriage. Perhaps the narrator would say that he trusts himself around May. Yeah she’s pretty, but she’s also a weirdo, a strange kid with a strange sorrow. So in the moral universe of this book, his friendship with her is allowed, a blessing. Why not have it be an elderly woman? To banish the spectre of his “getting off” on this friendship? Somehow, it must be more honorable this way? To make it plausible, the growth or uncertainty of May herself, her own arc? It’s not certain; what is certain is that someone out there will have managed to be offended by it.”
That is some of it. There’s more in the summary of Book 2, Chapter 15:
“The thing that goes on in this chapter is that MWUB kind of provides some space for May Kasahara; she gets to be open and vulnerable and as a result, perhaps she gets to heal from these things that haunt her. And this is in part because he treats her like such an adult. He doesn’t judge her or talk down to her. He shares a little about himself, and lets her share a little about herself. At the same time, if anybody had ever walked in on them it would have been seen as wildly inappropriate pedophilia. I mean, if this were an American story. Maybe in Japan it’s more liberal. But yeah, this chapter in particular, with her especially skimpy bikini. I skipped over it, but I wanted to mention that they take turns spraying each other with the garden hose because it’s so hot out; it’s like the Wild Things car wash scene in May Kasahara’s back yard. But in the midst of that, you have this healing; and you have May explaining her sense of what MWUB is going through; he seems to be taking on the whole world and she says let’s face it, he’s a heavy underdog. It’s inexplicable how she knows this, but she does, and he says, “I understand completely.” A kind of nice notion she has when she explains the inexplicable is that she says it feels as if he is fighting for her in his fight. One possible frame on this is: His fight is with NW, with this adult situation; but it’s important he not cut corners or do the wrong thing because as a good guy, he needs to model what’s good—for the kids. For May and … anyone else.”
Now in between Chapter 2 and Chapter 15, she almost murders him, and he is only saved by Creta Kano. In the meantime, what should I add? The discomfort over her age and his age, I guess it’s the societal knowledge that, if they hang out for long enough, they’re gonna fuck. I mean, that’s the truth, isn’t it? Like, men have to be good models for young girls up to a certain point. Those young girls need surrogate fathers or older brothers. But then those young girls became women, and that happens fast with pregnancy. If a man abuses his guardianship of a young girl and has sex with her, then she is violated indeed. A father can do this, does do this in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. But more commonly it’s not a father, it’s a man with no actual fatherly instinct to protect the young girl, but rather a man with only a selfish sexual impulse to fuck.
Yeah, so back to the story: the teenage girl has given us some relief from our fear of them consummating any of this sexual tension with actual sex, by banishing herself to the mountains, where she is a factory worker in a wig shop. But she has kept writing these letters to MWUB, and there are occasional confessions in the letters that keep the fear alive. This is especially true in the sixth letter, where May relates how she heard MWUB calling her in the darkness, we must assume at the same time he was in the well drowning. Recall, he hallucinated talking to her, and he thought if only she were there to save him. Well, when she heard this voice out in the mountains, she relates, she got out of her bed and took off all her clothes and bathed herself in moonlight. The earlier part of her letter is, or was, about “the duck people.” By this she means the actual ducks, who hang out at the pond near where she lives; she sweetly spends hours watching them. This is the letter that we read from her immediately after we hear MWUB die, and immediately before we see him resurrected (by Cinnamon, and Nutmeg). And then Nutmeg mentions, in passing, that she knows she will not be able to retain MWUB as her successor, and thus she will have to go back to seeing the clients herself. I’m not sure why; seems like MWUB was so good at it, and had no complaints about getting tired. And he still doesn’t know what he wants to do for a living. But regardless. She doesn’t dwell on it, and then she gives him the news about Noboru Wataya: he collapsed and had a stroke. No baseball bat. The baseball bat thing is what happened in the other-place. Here, he simply collapsed and is now in a coma. A big relief to MWUB, who had figured he’d be standing trial for murder. Not so!
This raises the question of what the other-place was, exactly. MWUB voiced his theory that Kumiko had slipped out of this world and into the world of Noboru Wataya. What is that world? I wonder if I read more about the devil, if I’d understand it better. Is Murakami’s idea of evil informed by theology? In any case, because he can find her there but not here, one possibility is that the other-world is in fact Noboru Wataya’s world. Recall that MWUB had no friends there, or so said the Faceless Man. The Kano sisters led him to that world, but the whole point of that may have been for him to be killed there, with a knife.
Another question: did MWUB need to be at the bottom of the well in order to get to that world? The first two times he went there, it was through Creta Kano. Recall that the most dramatic choice MWUB makes in the course of the entire novel is to descend to the bottom of that well and hang out there. That makes it seem as if only with that boost was he able to gain entry to the world without the Kano sisters’ help. If he coulda got there from his bed, it seems like that would be almost a waste. Except maybe … the well simply allowed him to center his thoughts and gather his focus. And then there’s Mamiya. It was Mamiya’s experience in the well, along with Honda’s advice about following the flow, that inspired MWUB to seek the darkness of the well. I have to re-examine Mamiya’s connection; I mentioned that MWUB said of NW that the “thing he’s trying to draw out … (is) fatally smeared with violence and blood, and it’s directly connected to the darkest depths of history … .” I wonder if the thing he’s trying to draw out could be equivalent to the thing that he and Nutmeg treated in those middle aged women. Like, these evil spirits — that she treated by summoning her good memories of the zoo; and that MWUB treated by making himself a vacant house … Well, it’s NW’s policy to defile these same women by unleashing these spirits … in this strange defilement. A little more about that coming up!
The next thing that happens is that, once MWUB gets ambulatory and can walk around The Residence, he hears bells coming from the computer and goes to see the prompt again. He can read more of the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Except now, instead of the prompt being to choose between 1 and 16, it’s from 1-17. He chooses #17, and it’s a letter, from Kumiko, to him. The implausibility of this is not really an issue in the Murakami universe, but there is this remark at the end of the letter: “I received the password for access to this computer this afternoon. Someone sent it to me special delivery. I am sending you this message from the machine in my brother’s office. I hope it reaches you.” We assume Cinnamon was somehow able to send her this password. Cinnamon, we note, never appears during this epilogue. This isn’t really explained. One possibility, I think, is that with the well now filled with water again, various things have come un-stuck—including, perhaps, Cinnamon’s voice. I think Murakami may have at least considered this outcome, and perhaps he omitted an actual appearance by Cinnamon to allow its possibility to remain … a possibility. Anyway. The letter! It is … I just re-read it. But of course I skimmed. There is something about a great writer or speaker; at the end of their speech, their performance, there is an eagerness for the end, because they have been at it for such a long time. Think of Justin Sterling, of Mitch DeArmon, as well as of Murakami. Because they’re so good, we stop our lives and listen to them for hours, for days! Somehow at the end of that, we have to be eager to stop listening to them, to stop reading them, even as we have been grateful to hear them all this time. So, what is the overall sense in this letter?
I would say the biggest dramatic note is in the sentence: “If it hadn’t been for you, I would have lost my mind long ago.” This is total vindication for MWUB; a sense that all this time, he was fighting for her and she received the benefit of his fighting. He must have thought he was crazy, that he was doing it all for nothing. How could he expect that anything he was doing was being seen or noticed? Well, it was. And it may have saved his wife’s life, although it may not save their marriage—more on that in a minute. The letter claims responsibility for everything that went wrong, although at the same time, it confirms MWUB’s conviction that Noboru Wataya was at the root of all evils, with his vile, corrupting influence. “He defiled us both,” she says. “Strictly speaking, he did not defile our bodies. What he did was even worse than that.”
Then this addition to her previous confession about another man. It wasn’t just another man—it was other men. Too many to count! What a horrific thing; I can’t believe I forgot having read it the first time. “I myself have no idea what caused me to do such a thing. Looking back upon it now, I think it may have been my brother’s influence.” Understatement! “He may have opened some kind of drawer inside me, taken out some kind of incomprehensible something, and made me give myself to one man after another. My brother had that kind of power, and as much as I hate to acknowledge it, the two of us were surely tied together in some dark place.”
Holy toledo … That reminds me of how there is a moment, in the Other-Place, when the mysterious woman he’s talking to, who for a moment was able to take on the Kumiko voice, changed voices again. “The voice was no longer Kumiko’s. Neither was it the original girlish voice. This was a new voice, which belonged to someone else. It had a poised, intelligent ring to it.” It seems that maybe in the Other-Place, which I have speculated is Noboru Wataya’s world, NW can actually share a body with Kumiko, or he is present right there inside her mind.
So she defiled herself irreparably before he defiled her; although, from her description, it’s hard to measure where her actions stop and where his actions start. She defiled herself first, with the sleeping with many men. But was it not him that potentially made her do this? If his defiling didn’t begin until she was complete with defiling herself, then what did this terrible defilement look like? We are left to imagine the horror of it. Again, a villain is at once intriguing and horrifying, and at the same time mundane. Like, try hard enough to walk in anybody’s shoes, and they become just another man. To retain his evil, we avoid getting too close to him. Because when we do get close to him, we find that he is harvesting power somehow. He is using and exploiting others.
There was a thirst for power at the heart of her debauchery. If she’d never truly let go sexually with MWUB, and she finally did with this man at her work, her pursuit of the hedonistic pleasure she found was like a search for power. A drunken, mad search that she pursued at all costs, without even thinking about it. This is addiction. Isn’t it!? “Its final effect is to destroy and obliterate people on a massive scale.” What is that—the ego?
I guess I’ll dare to ask: What is so bad about NW’s sexual proclivities? Like, the characterization of what he did to Creta Kano as a horrible defilement was seemingly unfair back in Book 2, Chapter 13 when she tells that story. In the end, he ended some blockage within her, just as MWUB ended some blockage in the well. He moved his fingers over Creta Kano’s body, in a way not that much different than the way Nutmeg moved her fingers over her clients’ bodies. Was it a defilement because “he put something inside me from behind,” and what it was, she has no idea? Or because at the end something “came crawling” out of her, a “thing that (she) had never seen or touched before … wet and slippery as a newborn baby,” and she was too caught up in pleasure and in pain to actually see the thing—is that what makes it a defilement? Or because she was the prostitute and not the paying client, and therefore he acted out of protocol, giving her this “service” without her consent—maybe this is consent theory! I’m teasing; a prostitute clearly does consent to sexual acts, but unlike Nutmeg’s clients, she did not enter the sexual transaction with this in mind. Maybe consent really is the ultimate thing.
I wrote when describing the Creta Kano encounter that “Murakami is the king of unresolved mysteries.” This is a bug and a feature that is especially apparent at the ending, which is typically when resolution takes place in stories. I guess that The Sopranos ending could be described as Murakami-esque. Leaving stuff unresolved. As we wind down we see strands toward a resolution, we see additional jigsaw puzzle pieces, but certainly not enough to solve the puzzle. But we can imagine that MWUB has enough additional pieces to live his life going forward.
The letter also puts Kumiko in play on the chessboard—it states that she is about to take an action. She is going to kill her brother, NW. She has the means. She is allowed into the room with him as his sister. She will do it during the night when the nurses won’t notice. She will then turn herself in. She will offer no explanation; she expects to be punished and is willing to accept punishment.
Another Epilogue
This final epilogue is set out in the mountains, at May Kasahara’s camp, where MWUB has visited her, having talked May’s parents into letting him. In their conversation, a few details can be divulged. Kumiko is in jail. The trial starts some time in the spring. Kumiko is pleading guilty … there’s a possibility of a suspended sentence, or at worst, a light sentence. He says he’ll wait for Kumiko back at their house. It is a very small epilogue, this meeting between MWUB and the girl who almost murdered him, but seems sort of infatuated with him. As they walk through the woods, she puts her hand in his pocket, and this reminded him of his wife. He held her hand in his pocket, and she said, “everybody’s going to think we’re lovers.” The awkwardness of this moment is interrupted by the news that MWUB hasn’t been getting any of May’s letters. “Oh, no! Where’d they all go!”
She kisses him on the cheek at the station. He doesn’t know what to say. “Goodbye, May Kasahara,” he says. Then, when the train has gathered momentum and her town is out of site, he says, “Goodbye, May Kasahara: may there always be something watching over you.”
This is obviously a sweet sentence, as it relieves some of the tension over whether he’s going to abuse his position with her and try to fuck her. Seems like he isn’t. Seems like his heart is in the right place. Oh: she kisses him on the cheek where the mark used to be! It disappeared. Another detail I forgot to mention. Although, going back to my summary of Parts 1 and 2, there were a lot of details I intentionally didn’t mention. It’s only in this frenzy to finish that I’v decided, for some reason, that I ought to include every single detail. A questionable decision, I suppose. Oh, here’s another detail from the epilogue to the epilogue. MWUB tells May that “If Kumiko and I have a child, I’m thinking of naming it Corsica.” This is an idea that sprouted in MWUB’s head because he had several dreams in which he was told that Creta Kano now has a child named Corsica. But they haven’t ever been verified, and this makes it seem like we might doubt they are reflective of actual truth. In any case, we never heard from Creta Kano in all of Book Three, and her sister Malta only showed up in one of MWUB’s dreams, so we don’t know if that was her doing or not.
What else don’t we know? We don’t know what NW’s big evil plan was, and what the sexual energies of Kumiko or Creta Kano had to do with it. Nor do we know what it had to do with what Boris the Manskinner was doing back in that Siberian camp. That’s surprising; it seems that Cinnamon and Nutmeg have a more direct link to MWUB’s story than does Mamiya. Which is surprising because I remembered Mamiya, but I forgot all about the zoo incidents—although they are pretty memorable. We don’t know why Cinnamon decided that Kumiko’s letter ought to be the 17th of his Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Oh you know what else? Mr. Wind-Up Bird does not hear the Wind-up bird in all of Book 3, I’m pretty sure. I wonder when the last time he heard it was, in the book! What a crazy bird—and it leads so many people to ruin. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t hear it. Of course, the little boy hears it, and then he loses his voice to it. Something escaped from those stories and took his voice, and later it took his father, Nutmeg’s husband—it brutally killed him and took out all his organs. We don’t know who or what was at the bottom of that. We don’t know why Nutmeg felt this sudden impulse to design fashion items for much of her life, only to have it stop after the death of her husband, when it was replaced by this calling to soothe the strange pains and anxieties of middle-aged women. We don’t know why Mamiya wasn’t qualified to kill Boris, but MWUB was somehow qualified to kill the creepy thing in the darkness that had a knife. Was that thing a mix of Kumiko and Noboru Wataya, joined together? Is that why she didn’t want him to look at it?
We don’t know whether Murakami himself has answers in his own mind for all of these questions. I mean, we can imagine a perfectly solved puzzle in his mind, which he leaves only clues toward but doesn’t want to hit us over the head with the whole thing. Maybe that’s just how life is: full of holes, not all of which get filled. And yet I sit here at my own computer console, wanting to stay up always a little later in order to solve it a little more, a little better. Of course, the easiest thing to do is to impose my own worldview upon it. The bad evil thing that NW is feeding and attempting to draw out of everyone is the ego, small-s selfishness. Meanwhile, the good thing or things that MWUB and Nutmeg try to spread in the world is some kind of reverence, or love. Some healing. There is no discussion of a Higher Power. But I want to impose one here, because that’s what’s valuable to me. Because without one, what else is there besides the ego to unleash on the world? Indeed, without a Higher Power, that lights us toward good, we cannot ever judge Noboru Wataya or Boris to be evil.
We must see in the end that Murakami finds the war to have been a great evil; certainly, Japan’s participation in it. The greed that went into reaching for always greater power, and how that greed left so much death, destruction, and ill feeling in its wake.
Mamiya, though, after he tells his story to MWUB in a letter, feels some small relief, even if his story ended pretty darkly. And in reading about his mistakes, MWUB may have been informed and better-prepared for his own big showdown.