The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Read Online Free PDF

had been out sick.
    “Sorry,” she said. “The work just wouldn’t end, and that part-time girl is useless.”
    I went to the kitchen and cooked: fish sautéed in butter, salad, and miso soup. Kumiko sat at the kitchen table and vegged out.
    “Where were you at five-thirty?” she asked. “I tried to call to say I’d be late.”
    “The butter ran out. I went to the store,” I lied.
    “Did you go to the bank?”
    “Sure.”
    “And the cat?”
    “Couldn’t find it. I went to the vacant house, like you said, but there was no trace of it. I bet it went farther away than that.”
    She said nothing.
    When I finished bathing after dinner, Kumiko was sitting in the living room with the lights out. Hunched down in the dark with her gray shirt on, she looked like a piece of luggage that had been left in the wrong place.
    Drying my hair with a bath towel, I sat on the sofa opposite Kumiko.
    In a voice I could barely catch, she said, “I’m sure the cat’s dead.”
    “Don’t be silly,” I replied. “I’m sure it’s having a grand old time somewhere. It’ll get hungry and come home soon. The same thing happened once before, remember? When we lived in Koenji …”
    “This time’s different,” she said. “This time you’re wrong. I know it. The cat’s dead. It’s rotting in a clump of grass. Did you look in the grass in the vacant house?”
    “No, I didn’t. The house may be vacant, but it does belong to somebody. I can’t just go barging in there.”
    “Then where
did
you look for the cat? I’ll bet you didn’t even try. That’s why you didn’t find it.”
    I sighed and wiped my hair again with the towel. I started to speak but gave up when I realized that Kumiko was crying. It was understandable: Kumiko loved the cat. It had been with us since shortly after our wedding. I threw my towel in the bathroom hamper and went to the kitchen for a cold beer. What a stupid day it had been: a stupid day of a stupid month of a stupid year.
    Noboru Wataya, where are you? Did the wind-up bird forget to wind your spring?
    The words came to me like lines of poetry.
    Noboru Wataya,
Where are you?
Did the wind-up bird
Forget to wind your spring?
    When I was halfway through my beer, the phone started to ring.
    “Get it, will you?” I shouted into the darkness of the living room.
    “Not me,” she said. “You get it.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    The phone kept on ringing, stirring up the dust that floated in the darkness. Neither of us said a word. I drank my beer, and Kumiko went on crying soundlessly. I counted twenty rings and gave up. There was no point in counting forever.

Full Moon and Eclipse of the Sun
•
On Horses Dying in the Stables
    Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
    We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
    I started thinking seriously about such things a week after I quit my job at the law firm. Never until then—never in the whole course of my life—had I grappled with questions like this. And why not? Probably because my hands had been full just living. I had simply been too busy to think about myself.
    Something trivial got me started, just as most important things in the world have small beginnings. One morning after Kumiko rushed through breakfast and left for work, I threw the laundry into the washing machine, made the bed, washed the dishes, and vacuumed. Then, with the cat beside me, I sat on the veranda, checking the want ads and the sales. At noon I had lunch and went to the supermarket. There I bought food for dinner and, from a sale table, bought detergent, tissues, and toilet paper. At home again, I made preparations for dinner and lay down on the sofa with a book, waiting for Kumiko to come home.
    Newly