Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The submarines engines started with a definite growl, and at almost the same moment the siren screeched to signal All hands belowdecks! The submarine began to move forward, and a moment later it was plunging downward, churning up a great white patch of foam, as if it had hardly been able to wait for the men to get below and fasten the hatches. A membrane of seawater swallowed the long, narrow deck from front to rear, the gun sank below the surface, the conning tower slipped downward, cutting through the dark-blue water, and finally the antenna and the periscope plunged out of sight, as if to rip the air clean of any evidence they had ever been there. Ripples disturbed the surface of the ocean for a short while, but soon they also subsided, leaving only the weirdly calm afternoon sea.

Even after the submarine had plunged beneath the surface, with the same amazing suddenness that had marked its appearance, the passengers stood frozen on the deck, staring at the watery expanse. Not a throat was cleared among them. The captain recovered his presence of mind and gave his order to the navigator, who passed it on to the engine room, and eventually, after a long fit of grinding, the antique engine started up like a sleeping dog kicked by its master.

The crew of the transport ship held their breaths, waiting for a torpedo attack. The Americans might have simply changed their plans, deciding that sinking the ship with a torpedo would be faster and easier than a time-consuming volley from the gun. The ship ran in short zigzags, the captain and navigator scanning the oceans surface with their binoculars, searching for the deadly white wake of a torpedo. But there was no torpedo. Twenty minutes after the submarine had disappeared beneath the waves, people at last began to break free of the death curse that had hung over them. They could only half believe it at first, but little by little they came to feel that it was true: they had come back alive from the verge of death. Not even the captain knew why the Americans had suddenly abandoned their attack. What could have changed their minds? (Only later did it become clear that instructions had arrived from headquarters just moments before the attack was to have begun, advising them to suspend all hostilities unless attacked by the enemy. The Japanese government had telegraphed the Allied powers that they were prepared to accept the Potsdam Declaration and surrender unconditionally.) Released now from the unbearable tension, several passengers plopped down on the deck where they stood and began to wail, but most of them could neither cry nor laugh. For several hours-and, in the case of some, for several days-they remained in a state of total abstraction, the spike of a long and twisted nightmare thrust unmercifully into their lungs, their hearts, their spines, their brains, their wombs.

Little Nutmeg Akasaka remained sound asleep in her mothers arms all the while this was happening. She slept for a solid twenty hours, as if she had been knocked unconscious. Her mother shouted and slapped her cheeks to no avail. She might as well have sunk to the bottom of the sea. The intervals between her breaths grew longer and longer, and her pulse slowed.

Her breathing was all but inaudible. But when the ship arrived in Sasebo, she woke without warning, as if some great power had dragged her back into this world. And so Nutmeg did not herself witness the events surrounding the aborted attack and disappearance of the American submarine. She heard everything much later, from her mother.

The freighter finally limped into the port of Sasebo a little past ten in the morning on August 16, the day after the nonattack. The port was weirdly silent, and no one came out to greet the ship. Not even at the antiaircraft emplacement by the harbor mouth were there signs of humanity. The summer sunlight baked the ground with dumb intensity. The whole world seemed caught in a deep paralysis, and some on board felt as if they had stumbled by accident into the land of the dead. After years spent abroad, they could only stare in silence at the country of their ancestors. At noon on August 15, the radio had broadcast the Emperors announcement of the wars end. Six days before that, the nearby city of Nagasaki had been incinerated by a single atomic bomb. The phantom empire of Manchukuo was disappearing into history. And caught unawares in the wrong section of the revolving door, the veterinarian with the mark on his cheek would share the fate of Manchukuo.

Hi, again, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.

Have you thought about where I am and what I'm doing, the way I told you to at the end of my last letter? Were you able to imagine anything at all?

Oh, well, I guess I'll just go on under the assumption that you couldn't figure out a thing- which I'm sure is true.

So let me just get it over with and tell you right from the start.

I'm working in- lets say-a certain factory. A big factory. Its in a certain provincial city- or, should I say, in the mountains on the outskirts of a certain provincial city that faces the Sea of Japan. Don't let the word factory fool you, though. Its not what you'd imagine: one of those macho places full of big, high-tech machines grinding away and conveyor belts running and smoke pouring out of smokestacks. Its big, all right, but the grounds are spread out over a wide area and its bright and quiet. It doesn't produce any smoke at all. I never imagined the world had such widely spread-out factories. The only other factory I've ever seen was the Tokyo caramel factory our class visited on afield trip in elementary school, and all I remember is how noisy and cramped it was and how people were just slaving away with gloomy expressions on their faces. So to me, a factory was always like some illustration you'd see in a textbook under Industrial Revolution.

The people working here are almost all girls. Theres a separate building nearby, a laboratory, where men in white coats work on product development, wearing very serious looks on their faces, but they make up a very small proportion of the whole. All the rest are girls in their late teens or early twenties, and maybe seventy percent of those live in the dorms inside the company compound, like me. Commuting to this place from the town every day by bus or car is a real pain, and the dorms are nice. The buildings are new, the rooms are all singles, the food is good and they let you choose what you want, the facilities are complete, and room and board is cheap for all that. Theres a heated pool and a library, and you can do things like tea ceremony and flower arranging if you want (but I don't want), and they even have an active program of sports teams, so a lot of girls who start out commuting end up moving into a dorm. All of them return home on weekends to eat with their families or go to the movies or go on dates with their boyfriends and stuff, so on Saturday the place turns into an empty ruin. There aren't too many people like me, without a family to go home to on weekends. But like I said before, I like the big, hollow, empty feeling of the place on weekends. I can spend the day reading, or listening to music with the volume turned up, or walking in the hills, or, like now, sitting at my desk and writing to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.

The girls who work here are all locals-which means farmers daughters. Well, maybe not every single one, but they're mostly happy, healthy, optimistic, hardworking girls. There aren't many big industries in this district, so before, girls would go to the city to find jobs when they graduated from high school. That meant the guys left in town couldn't find anybody to marry, which only added to the depopulation problem. So then the town got together and offered businesses this big tract of land to set up a factory, and the girls didn't have to leave. I think it was a great idea. I mean, look, they got somebody like me to come all the way out here. So now, when they graduate from high school (or drop out, like me), the girls all go to work at the factory and save their pay and get married when they're old enough and quit their jobs and have a couple of kids and turn into fat walruses that all look alike. Of course, there are a few who go on working here after they get married, but most of them quit.