Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

This should give you a pretty good idea of what this place is like. OK? So now the next question for you is this: What do they make in this factory? Hint: You and I once went out on a job connected with it. Remember? We went to the Ginza and did a survey.

Oh, come on. Even you must have figured it out by now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird! That's it! I'm working in a wig factory! Surprised?

I told you before how I got out of that high-class hotel/jail/country school after six months and just hung around at home, like a dog with a broken leg. Then, all of a sudden, the thought of the wig company's factory popped into my head. I remembered something my boss at the company had once said to me, more as a joke than anything, about how they never had enough girls for the factory and they'd hire me anytime I wanted to go work there. He even showed me a pamphlet from the place, and I remember sort of thinking it looked like a really cool factory and I wouldn't mind working there. My boss said the girls all did hand labor, implanting hairs into the toupees. A hairpiece is a very delicately made product, not like some aluminum pot you can stamp out one two three. You have to plant little bunches of real hair very very very carefully, one bunch at a time, to make a quality hairpiece. Doesn't it make you faint, just thinking about it? I mean, how many hairs do you think there are on a human head? You have to count them in the hundreds of thousands! And to make a wig you have to plant them all by hand, the way they plant seedlings in a rice field. None of the girls here complain about the work, though. They don't mind because this region is in the snow country, where it has always been the custom for the farm women to do detailed handiwork to make money during the long winters. That's supposedly why the company chose this area for its factory.

To tell you the truth, I've never minded doing this kind of hand labor. I know I don't look it, but I'm actually pretty good at sewing. I always impressed my teachers. You still don't believe me? Its true, though! That's why it ever occurred to me that I might enjoy spending part of my life in a factory in the mountains, keeping my hands busy from morning to night and never thinking about anything upsetting. I was sick of school, but I hated the thought of just hanging around and letting my parents take care of me (and I'm sure they hated the thought of that too), but I didn't have any one thing that I was dying to do, so the more I thought of it, the more it seemed that the only thing I could do was go to work in this factory.

I got my parents to act as my sponsors and my boss to give me a recommendation (they liked my survey work), I passed my interview at company headquarters, and the very next week I was all packed (not that I took anything more than my clothes and my boom box). I got on the bullet train by myself, transferred to a cute little train that goes up into the hills, and made it all the way to this nothing little town. But it was like I came to the other side of the earth. I was sooo bummed out when I got off the train! I figured I had made a terrible mistake. But finally, no: I've been here six months now without any special problems, and I feel settled in.

I don't know what it is, but I've always been interested in wigs. Or maybe I should say I've always been attracted to them, the way some guys are attracted to motorcycles. You know, I hadn't really been aware of it before, but when I went out to do that market research and I had a chance to see all those bald men (or what the company calls men with a thinning problem), it really struck me what a lot of guys like that there are in the world! Not that I have personal feelings one way or another toward men who are bald (or have a thinning problem). I don't especially like them or dislike them. Take you, for example, Mr. Wind- Up Bird. Even if your hair were thinner than it is now (and it will be before too long), my feelings toward you would absolutely not change in any way. The only strong feeling I have when I see a man with a thinning problem is that sense I think I mentioned to you before of life being worn away. Now, that is something I'm really interested in!

I once heard that people reach the peak of their growth at a certain age (I forget whether it was nineteen or twenty or what), after which the body starts to wear out. If thats the case, then its just one part of the wearing away of the body for the hair to fall out and grow thinner. Theres nothing strange about it at all. Maybe its normal and natural. If theres any problem in all this, its the fact that some guys go bald young and others never go bald, even when they're old. I know if I were bald, Id think it was unfair. I mean, its a part of the body that really sticks out! Even I understand how they feel, and the problem of thinning hair has nothing to do with me.

In most cases, the person losing his hair is in no way responsible for whether the volume of hair he loses is greater or less than anybody else's. When I was working part time, my boss told me that the genes determine ninety percent of whether a person is going to go bald or not. A man who has inherited a gene for thinning hair from his grandfather and father is going to lose his hair sooner or later, no matter what he does to prevent it. Where theres a will theres a way just doesn't apply to baldness. When the time comes for the gene to stand up and say, All right, now, lets get this show on the road (that is, if genes can stand up and say Lets get this show on the road), the hair has no choice but to start falling out. It is unfair, don't you think? I know I think it is.

So now you know I'm out here in this factory, far away from where you are, working hard every day. And you know about my deep personal interest in the toupee and its manufacture.

Next I'm going to go into somewhat greater detail on my life and work here.

Nah, forget it. Bye-bye.

After he fell into his deep sleep, the boy had a vivid dream. He knew it was a dream, though, which came as some comfort to him. I know this is a dream, so what happened before was not a dream. It really, really happened. I can tell the difference between the two.

In his dream, the boy had gone out to the garden. It was still the middle of the night, and he was alone. He picked up the shovel and started digging out the hole that the tall man had filled in. The man had left the shovel leaning against the trunk of the tree. Freshly filled in, the hole was not that hard to dig, but just picking up the heavy shovel was enough to take the boys breath away. And he had no shoes on. The soles of his feet were freezing cold. Even so, he went on panting and digging until he had uncovered the cloth bundle that the man had buried.

The wind-up bird no longer cried. The man who had climbed the tree never came down.

The night was so silent it almost hurt the boys ears. The man had just disappeared, it seemed.

But finally, this is a dream, the boy thought. It was not a dream that the wind-up bird had cried and the man who looked like his father had climbed the tree. Those things had really happened. So there must not be any connection between this and that. Strange, though: here he was, in a dream, digging out the real hole. So how was he to distinguish between what was a dream and what was not a dream? Was this shovel a real shovel? Or was it a dream shovel?

The more he thought, the less he understood. And so the boy stopped thinking and put all his energy into digging the hole. Finally, the shovel came up against the cloth bundle.

The boy took great care after that to remove the surrounding dirt so as not to damage the cloth bundle. Then he went down on his knees and lifted the bundle from the hole. There was not a cloud in the sky, and there was no one there to block the moist light of the full moon that poured down on the ground. In the dream, he was strangely free of fear. Curiosity was the feeling that dominated him with its power. He opened the bundle, to find a human heart inside. He recognized its shape and color from the picture he had seen in his encyclopedia. The heart was still fresh and alive and moving, like a newly abandoned infant. True, it was sending no blood out through its severed artery, but it continued to beat with a strong pulse. The boy heard a loud throbbing in his ears, but it was the sound of his own heart. The buried heart and the boys own heart went on pounding in perfect unison, as if communicating with each other.