Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

After the soldiers had finished their killing and returned to headquarters, and after the last two Chinese workers had disappeared somewhere, dragging their cart loaded with animal corpses, the zoo took on the hollow quality of a house emptied of furniture. The veterinarian sat on the rim of a waterless fountain, looked up at the sky, and watched the group of hard- edged clouds that were floating there. Then he listened to the cicadas crying. The wind-up bird was no longer calling, but the veterinarian did not notice that. He had never heard the wind-up bird to begin with. The only one who had heard it was the poor young soldier who would be beaten to death in a Siberian coal mine.

The veterinarian took a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match. As he lit up, he realized that his hand was trembling-so much that it took him three matches to light the cigarette. Not that he had experienced an emotional trauma. A large number of animals had been liquidated in a mo- ment before his eyes, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, he felt no particular shock or sadness or anger. In fact, he felt almost nothing. He was just terribly puzzled.

He sat there for a while, watching the smoke curl upward from his cigarette and trying to sort out his feelings. He stared at his hands resting on his lap, then looked once again at the clouds in the sky. The world he saw before him looked as it always had. He could find in it no signs of change. And yet it ought to have been a world distinctly different from the one he had known until then. After all, the world that held him now was a world in which bears and tigers and leopards and wolves had been liquidated. Those animals had existed this morning, but now, at four o'clock in the afternoon, they had ceased to exist. They had been massacred by soldiers, and even their dead bodies were gone.

There should have been a decisive gap separating those two different worlds. There had to be a gap. But he could not find it. The world looked the same to him as it always had. What most puzzled the veterinarian was the unfamiliar lack of feeling inside himself.

Suddenly he realized that he was exhausted. Come to think of it, he had hardly slept at all the night before. How wonderful it would be, he thought, if I could find the cool shade of a tree somewhere, to stretch out and sleep, if only for a little while-to stop thinking, to sink into the silent darkness of unconsciousness. He glanced at his watch. He had to secure food for the surviving animals. He had to treat the baboon that was running a high fever. There were a thousand things he had to do. But now, more than anything, he had to sleep. What came afterward he could think about afterward.

The veterinarian walked into the neighboring wooded area and stretched out on the grass where no one would notice him. The shaded grass felt cool and good. The smell was something he remembered fondly from childhood. Several large Manchurian grasshoppers bounded over his face with a nice strong hum. He lit another cigarette as he lay there, and he was pleased to see that his hands were no longer trembling so badly. Inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs, he pictured the Chinese men stripping the hides off all those freshly killed animals somewhere and cutting up the meat. He had often seen Chinese doing work like that, and he knew they were anything but clumsy. In a matter of moments, an animal would be reduced to hide, meat, organs, and bones, as if those elements had originally been quite separate and had just happened to come together for a little while. By the time I wake from my nap, I'm sure, those pieces of meat will be out there in the marketplace. That's reality for you: quick and efficient. He tore off a handful of grass and toyed with its softness awhile. Then he crushed his cigarette and, with a deep sigh, expelled all the smoke left in his lungs. When he closed his eyes, the grasshoppers wings sounded much louder in the darkness. The veterinarian was overtaken by the illusion that huge grasshoppers the size of bullfrogs were leaping all around him.

Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall. There were tigers in one section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was as simple as that. And there was no logical continuity from one section to another. And it was precisely because of this lack of logical continuity that choices really didn't mean very much. Wasn't that why he couldn't feel the gap between one world and another? But that was as far as his thoughts would go. He wasn't able to think more deeply than that. The fatigue in his body was as heavy and suffocating as a sodden blanket. No more thoughts came to him, and he just lay there, inhaling the aroma of the grass, listening to the grasshoppers wings, and feeling through his skin the dense membrane of shadow that covered him.

And in the end his mind was sucked into the deep sleep of afternoon.

The transport ship cut its engines as ordered, and soon it had come to a standstill on the surface of the ocean. There was less than one chance in ten thousand that it could have outrun such a swift, modern submarine. The submarines deck gun and machine gun were still trained on the transport ship, its crew in a state of readiness to attack. Yet a strange sense of tranquillity hovered between the two ships. The submarines crew stood in full view on deck, lined up and watching the transport ship with an air of having time to kill. Many of them had not even bothered to strap on battle helmets. There was hardly any wind that summer after- noon, and now, with both engines cut, the only sound was the languid slap of waves against the two ships hulls. The transport ship signaled to the submarine: We are a transport ship carrying unarmed civilians. We have neither munitions nor military personnel on board. We have few lifeboats. To this the submarine responded brusquely: That is not our problem. Evacuation or no, we commence firing in precisely ten minutes. This ended the exchange of signal messages between the two ships. The captain of the transport ship decided not to convey the communication to his passengers. What good would it do? A few of them might be lucky enough to survive, but most would be dragged to the bottom of the sea with this miserable old washtub. The captain longed for one last drink, but the whiskey bottle- some fine old scotch he had been saving-was in a desk drawer in his cabin, and there was no time to get it now. He took off his hat and looked up at the sky, hoping that, through some miracle, a squadron of Japanese fighter planes might suddenly appear there. But this was not to be a day for miracles. The captain had done all he could. He thought about his whiskey again.

As the ten-minute grace period was running out, strange movement began on the deck of the submarine. There were hurried exchanges among the officers lined up on the conning- tower deck, and one of the officers scrambled down to the main deck and ran among the crew, shouting some kind of order. Wherever he went, ripples of movement spread among the men at their battle stations. One sailor shook his head from side to side and punched the barrel of the deck gun with a clenched fist. Another took his helmet off and stared up at the sky. The mens actions might have been expressing anger or joy or disappointment or excitement. The passengers on the transport ship found it impossible to tell what was happening or what this was leading up to. Like an audience watching a pantomime for which there was no program (but which contained a very important message), they held their breaths and kept their eyes locked on the sailors every movement, hoping to find some small hint of meaning. Eventually, the waves of confusion that had spread among the sailors began to subside, and in response to an order from the bridge, the shells were removed from the deck gun with great dispatch. The men turned cranks and swung the barrel away from the transport ship until the gun was pointing straight ahead again, then they plugged the horrid black hole of the muzzle. The gun shells were returned below decks, and the crew ran for the hatches. In contrast to their earlier movements, they did everything now with speed and efficiency. There was no chatting or wasted motion.