Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Cinnamon was stylishly dressed, as always, in a suit. All his suits were of the finest quality, tailored to fit him perfectly. They tended to be rather conservative in cut, but on him they looked youthful, as if magically transformed into the latest fashion.

He wore a new tie, of course, one to match that days suit. His shirt and shoes were different as well. His mother, Nutmeg, had probably picked everything out for him, in her usual way. His outfit was as spotless, top to bottom, as the Mercedes he drove. Each time he showed up in the morning, I found myself admiring him-or, I might even say, moved by him. What kind of being could possibly lie hidden beneath that perfect exterior?

Cinnamon took two paper shopping bags full of food and other necessities out of the trunk and held them in his arms as he entered the Residence. Embraced by him, even these ordinary paper bags from the supermarket looked elegant and artistic. Maybe he had some special way of holding them. Or possibly it was something more basic than that. His whole face lit up when he saw me. It was a marvelous smile, as if he had just come out into a bright opening after a long walk in a deep woods. Good morning, I said to him. Good morning, he did not say to me, though his lips moved. He proceeded to take the groceries out of the bags and arrange them in the refrigerator like a bright child committing newly acquired knowledge to memory. The other supplies he arranged in the cupboards. Then he had a cup of coffee with me. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, just as Kumiko and I had done every morning long before.

Cinnamon never spent a day in school, finally, said Nutmeg. Ordinary schools wouldn't accept a child who didn't speak, and I felt it would be wrong to send him to a school with nothing but handicapped children. The reason for his being unable to speak-whatever it was- I knew was different from other children's reasons. And besides, he never showed any sign of wanting to go to school. He seemed to like it best to stay home alone, reading or listening to classical music or playing in the yard with the dog we had then. He would go out for walks too, sometimes, but not with much enthusiasm, because he didn't like to see children his own age.

Nutmeg studied sign language and used that to talk with Cinnamon. When sign language was not enough, they would converse in writing. One day, though, she realized that she and her son were able to convey their feelings to each other perfectly well without resorting to such indirect methods. She knew exactly what he was thinking or requesting with only the slightest gesture or change of expression. From that point on, she ceased to be overly concerned about Cinnamon's inability to speak. It certainly wasn't obstructing any mental exchange between mother and son. The absence of spoken language did, of course, give her an occasional sense of physical inconvenience, but it never went beyond the level of inconvenience, and in a sense it was this very inconvenience that purified the quality of the communication between the two.

During lulls between jobs, Nutmeg would teach Cinnamon how to read and write and do arithmetic. But in fact, there was not that much that she had to teach him. He liked books, and he would use them to teach himself what he needed to know. She was less a teacher for him than the one who chose the books he needed. He liked music and wanted to play the piano, but after learning the basic finger movements in a few months with a professional piano teacher, he used only manuals and recorded tapes to bring himself to a high level of technical accomplishment for one so young. He loved to play Bach and Mozart, and aside from Poulenc and Bartok, he showed little inclination to play anything beyond the Romantics. During his first six years of study, his interests were concentrated on music and reading, but from the time he reached middle school age, he turned to the acquisition of languages, beginning with English and then French. In both cases, he taught himself enough to read simple books after six months of study. He had no intention of learning to converse in either language, of course; he wanted only to be able to read books. Another activity he loved was tinkering with complicated machinery. He bought a complete collection of professional tools, with which he was able to build radios and tube amplifiers, and he enjoyed taking clocks apart and fixing them.

Everyone around him-which is to say, his mother, his father, and his grandmother (Nutmeg's mother)-became accustomed to the fact that he never spoke, and ceased to think of it as unnatural or abnormal. After a few years, Nutmeg stopped taking her son to the psychiatrist. The weekly consultations were doing nothing for his symptoms, and as the doctors had noted in the beginning, aside from his not speaking, there was nothing wrong with him. Indeed, he was a virtually perfect child. Nutmeg could not recall ever having had to force him to do anything or to scold him for doing anything he shouldn't have done. He would decide for himself what he had to do and then he would do it, flawlessly, in his own way. He was so different from other children- ordinary children- that even comparing him with them was all but meaningless. He was twelve when his grandmother died (an event that caused him to go on crying, soundlessly, for several days), after which he took it upon himself to do the cooking, laundry, and cleaning while his mother was at work. Nutmeg wanted to hire a housekeeper when her mother died, but Cinnamon would not hear of it. He refused to have a stranger come in and disrupt the order of the household. It was Cinnamon, then, who ran the house, and he did so with a high degree of precision and discipline.

Cinnamon spoke to me with his hands. He had inherited his mothers slender, well-shaped fingers. They were long, but not too long. He held them up near his face and moved them without hesitation, and like some kind of sensible, living creatures they communicated his messages to me.

As Nutmeg had said, I had no trouble understanding the words that his fingers conveyed. I was unacquainted with sign language, but it was easy for me to follow his complex, fluid movements. It may have been Cinnamon's skill that brought his meaning out so naturally, just as a play performed in a foreign language can be moving. Or then again, perhaps it only seemed to me that I was watching his fingers move but was not actually doing so. The moving fingers were perhaps no more than a decorative facade, and I was half-consciously watching some other aspect of the building behind it. I would try to catch sight of the boundary between the facade and the background whenever we chatted across the breakfast table, but I could never quite manage to see it, as if any line that might have marked the border between the two kept moving and changing its shape.

After our short conversations-or communications-Cinnamon would take his suit jacket off, put it on a hanger, tuck his necktie inside the front of his shirt, and then do the cleaning or cooking. As he worked, he would listen to music on a compact stereo. One week he would listen to nothing but Rossini's sacred music, and another week Vivaldi's concertos for wind instruments, repeating them so often that I ended up memorizing the melodies.

Cinnamon worked with marvelous dexterity and no wasted motion. I used to offer to lend him a hand at first, but he would only smile and shake his head. Watching how he went about his chores, I became convinced that things would progress far more smoothly if I left everything to him. It became my habit after that to avoid getting in his way. I would read a book on the fitting room sofa while he was doing his morning chores.

The Residence was not a big house, and it was minimally furnished. No one actually lived there, so it never got particularly dirty or untidy. Still, every day Cinnamon would vacuum every inch of the place, dust the furniture and shelves, clean the windowpanes, wax the table, wipe the light fixtures, and put everything in the house back where it belonged. He would arrange the dishes in the china cabinet and line up the pots according to size, align the edges of the linens and towels, point all coffee cup handles in the same direction, reposition the bar of soap on the bathroom sink, and change the towels even if they showed no sign of having been used. Then he would gather the trash into a single bag, cinch it closed, and take it out. He would adjust the time on the clocks according to his watch (which, I would have been willing to bet, was no more than three seconds off). If, in the course of his cleaning, he found anything the slightest bit out of place, he would put it back where it belonged with precise and elegant movements. I might test him by shifting a clock a half inch to the left on its shelf, and the next morning he would be sure to move it a half inch back to the right.