Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Choose one of the following programs.

I chose Chat Mode and clicked the mouse.

Enter password within ten seconds.

This was an important junction for Cinnamon to lock out access to his computer. And if the junction was important, the password itself ought to be important. I typed in: SUB The screen read: Incorrect password.

Input correct password within ten seconds.

The countdown began: 10,9,8. . .

I tried the combination of upper- and lowercase letters that had worked the first time: Sub A prompt flashed on the screen: Input telephone number.

I folded my arms and let my eyes take in this new message. Not bad. I had succeeded in opening two doors in Cinnamon's labyrinth. No, not bad at all. Zoo and Sub would do it.

I clicked on Exit and returned to the main menu, then chose Shutdown, which brought up the following options: Record procedures in Operations File? Y/N (Y) As instructed by Ushikawa, I chose No to avoid leaving a record of the procedures I had just executed.

The screen quietly died. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. After checking to be certain that I had left the keyboard and mouse exactly as I had found them, I moved away from the now cold monitor.

Nutmeg Akasaka took several months to tell me the story of her life. It was a long, long story, with many detours, so that what I am recording here is a very simplified (though not necessarily short) summary of the whole. I cannot honestly claim with confidence that it contains the essence of her story, but it should at least convey the outline of important events that occurred at crucial points in her life.

Nutmeg and her mother escaped from Manchuria to Japan, their only valuables the jewelry they were able to wear on their bodies. They traveled up from the port of Sasebo to Yokohama, to stay with the mothers family, which had long owned an import-export business primarily focused on Taiwan. Prosperous before the war, they had lost most of their business when Japan lost Taiwan. The father died of heart disease, and the family's second son, who had been second in command, was killed in an air raid just before the war ended. The eldest son left his teaching post to carry on the family business, but never temperamentally suited to a life of commerce, he was unable to recoup the family fortunes. They still had their comfortable house and land, but it was not a pleasant place for Nutmeg and her mother to live as extra mouths to feed during those straitened postwar years. They were always at pains to keep their presence as unobtrusive as possible, taking less than the others at mealtimes, waking earlier than the others each morning, taking on an outsize share of the household chores. Every piece of clothing the young Nutmeg wore was a hand-me- down from her older cousins-gloves, socks, even underwear. For pencils, she collected the others cast-off stubs. Just waking up in the morning was painful to her. The thought that a new day was starting was enough to make her chest hurt.

She wanted to get out of this house, to live alone with her mother someplace where they didn't always have to feel so constrained, even if it meant living in poverty. But her mother never tried to leave. My mother had always been an active person, said Nutmeg, but after we escaped from Manchuria, she was like an empty shell. It was as if the very strength to go on living had evaporated from inside her. She could no longer rouse herself for anything. All she could do was tell Nutmeg over and over about the happy times they used to have. This left to Nutmeg the task of finding for herself the resources to go on living.

Nutmeg did not dislike studying as such, but she had almost no interest in the courses they offered in high school. She couldn't believe that it would do her any good to stuff her head full of historical dates or the rules of English grammar or geometric formulas. What she wanted more than anything was to learn a useful skill and make herself independent as soon as possible. She was in a place far away from her classmates and their comfortable enjoyment of high school life.

The only thing she cared about was fashion. Her mind was filled with thoughts of clothing from morning to night. Not that she had the wherewithal to dress in style: she could only read and reread the fashion magazines she managed to find, and to fill notebooks with drawings of dresses in imitation of those she found in the magazines or clothes she had dreamed up herself. She had no idea what it was about the fancy dresses that so captivated her imagination. Perhaps, she said, it came from her habit of always playing with the huge wardrobe that her mother had in Manchuria. Her mother was a genuine clotheshorse. She had had more kimonos and dresses than room in their chests to store them, and the young Nutmeg would always pull them out and touch them whenever she had a chance. Most of those dresses and kimonos had had to remain in Manchuria when the two of them left, and whatever they had been able to stuff into rucksacks they had had to exchange along the way for food. Her mother would spread out the next dress to be traded, and sigh over it before letting it go.

Designing clothes was my secret little door to a different world, said Nutmeg, a world that belonged only to me. In that world, imagination was everything. The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality. And what I really liked about it was that it was free. It didn't cost a thing. It was wonderful! Imagining beautiful clothes in my mind and transferring the images to paper was not just a way for me to leave reality behind and steep myself in dreams, though. I needed it to go on living. It was as natural and obvious to me as breathing. So I assumed that everyone else was doing it too. When I realized that everyone else was not doing it-that they couldn't do it even if they tried- I told myself, I'm different from other people, so the life I live will have to be different from theirs.

Nutmeg quit high school and transferred to a school of dressmaking. To raise the money for her tuition, she begged her mother to sell one of her last remaining pieces of jewelry. With that, she was able to study sewing and cutting and designing and other such useful skills for two years. When she graduated, she took an apartment and started living alone. She put herself through a professional fashion design school by waiting on tables and taking odd jobs sewing and knitting. And when she had finally graduated from this school, she went to work for a manufacturer of quality ladies garments, where she succeeded in having herself assigned to the design department.

There was no question but that she had an original talent. Not only could she draw well, but her ideas and her point of view were different from those of other people. She had a clear image of precisely what she wanted to make, and it was not something she had borrowed from anyone else: it was always her own, and it always came out of her quite naturally. She pursued the tiny details of her image with all the intensity of a salmon swimming upstream through a great river to its source. She had no time for sleep. She loved her work and dreamed only of the day she could become an independent designer. She never thought about having fun outside of work: in fact, she didn't know how to do any of the things people did to have fun.

Before long, her bosses came to recognize the quality of her work and took an interest in her extravagant, free-flowing lines. Her years of apprenticeship thus came to an end, and she was given full discretion as the head of her own small section-a most unusual promotion.

Nutmeg went on to compile a magnificent record of accomplishment year after year. Her talent and energy caught the interest of people not only within the company but throughout the industry. The world of fashion design was a closed world, but at the same time it was a fair one, a society ruled by competition. A designers power was determined by one thing alone: the number of advance orders that came in for the clothing that he or she had designed. There was never any doubt about who had won and who had lost: the figures told the whole story. Nutmeg never felt that she was competing with anyone, but her record could not be denied.