Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The lieutenant was a person who did things with great care. He waited for a full minute. When he was certain that the young Chinese man was not moving at all, he said to the veterinarian, Could you do me a favor and check to see that he's really dead?

The veterinarian nodded, walked over to where the young Chinese lay, knelt down, and removed his blindfold. The mans eyes were open wide, the pupils turned upward, and bright- red blood was flowing from his ear. His half-opened mouth revealed the tongue lying tangled inside. The impact had left his neck twisted at a strange angle. The mans nostrils had expelled thick gobs of blood, making black stains on the dry ground. One particularly alert- and large-fly had already burrowed its way into a nostril to lay eggs. Just to make sure, the veterinarian took the mans wrist and felt for a pulse. There was no pulse-certainly not where there was supposed to be one. The young soldier had ended this burly mans life with a single swing of a bat-indeed, his first-ever swing of a bat. The veterinarian glanced toward the lieutenant and nodded to signal that the man was, without a doubt, dead. Having completed his assigned task, he was beginning slowly to rise to his full height, when it seemed to him that the sun shining on his back suddenly increased in intensity.

At that very moment, the young Chinese batter in uniform number 4 rose up into a sitting position, as if he had just come fully awake. Without the slightest uncertainty or hesitation-or so it seemed to those watching-he grabbed the doctors wrist. It all happened in a split second. The veterinarian could not understand: this man was dead, he was sure of it. But now, thanks to one last drop of life that seemed to well up from nowhere, the man was gripping the doctors wrist with the strength of a steel vise. Eyelids stretched open to the limit, pupils still glaring upward, the man fell forward into the hole, dragging the doctor in after him. The doctor fell in on top of him and heard one of the mans ribs crack as his weight came down. Still the Chinese ballplayer continued to grip his wrist. The soldiers saw all this happening, but they were too stunned to do anything more than stand and watch. The lieutenant recovered first and leaped into the hole. He drew his pistol from his holster, set the muzzle against the Chinese mans head, and pulled the trigger twice. Two sharp, overlapping cracks rang out, and a large black hole opened in the mans temple. Now his life was completely gone, but still he refused to release the doctors wrist. The lieutenant knelt down and, pistol in one hand, began the painstaking process of prying open the corpses fingers one at a time. The veterinarian lay there in the hole, surrounded by eight silent Chinese corpses in baseball uniforms. Down in the hole, the screeching of cicadas sounded very different from the way it sounded aboveground.

Once the veterinarian had been freed from the dead mans grasp, the soldiers pulled him and the lieutenant out of the grave. The veterinarian squatted down on the grass and took several deep breaths. Then he looked at his wrist. The mans fingers had left five bright-red marks. On this hot August afternoon, the veterinarian felt chilled to the core of his body. I'll never get rid of this coldness, he thought. That man was truly, seriously, trying to take me with him wherever he was going.

The lieutenant reset the pistols safety and carefully slipped the gun into its holster. This was the first time he had ever fired a gun at a human being. But he tried not to think about it. The war would continue for a little while at least, and people would continue to die. He could leave the deep thinking for later. He wiped his sweaty right palm on his pants, then ordered the soldiers who had not participated in the execution to fill in the hole. A huge swarm of flies had already taken custody of the pile of corpses.

The young soldier went on standing where he was, stupefied, gripping the bat. He couldn't seem to make his hands let go. The lieutenant and the corporal left him alone. He had seemed to be watching the whole bizarre series of events-the dead Chinese suddenly grabbing the veterinarian by the wrist, their falling into the grave, the lieutenants leaping in and finishing him off, and now the other soldiers filling in the hole. But in fact, he had not been watching any of it. He had been listening to the wind-up bird. As it had been the previous afternoon, the bird was in a tree somewhere, making that creeeak, creeeak sound as if winding a spring. The soldier looked up, trying to pinpoint the direction of the cries, but he could see no sign of the bird. He felt a slight sense of nausea at the back of his throat, though nothing as violent as yesterdays.

As he listened to the winding of the spring, the young soldier saw one fragmentary image after another rise up before him and fade away. After they were disarmed by the Soviets, the young paymaster lieutenant would be handed over to the Chinese and hanged for his responsibility in these executions. The corporal would die of the plague in a Siberian con- centration camp: he would be thrown into a quarantine shed and left there until dead, though in fact he had merely collapsed from malnutrition and had not contracted the plague-not, at least, until he was thrown into the shed. The veterinarian with the mark on his face would die in an accident a year later. A civilian, he would be taken by the Soviets for cooperating with the military and sent to another Siberian camp to do hard labor. He would be working in a deep shaft of a Siberian coal mine when a flood would drown him, along with many soldiers.

And I..., thought the young soldier with the bat in his hands, but he could not see his own future. He could not even see the events that were transpiring before his very eyes. He now closed his eyes and listened to the call of the wind-up bird.

Then, all at once, he thought of the ocean-the ocean he had seen from the deck of the ship that brought him from Japan to Manchuria. He had never seen the ocean before, nor had he seen it since. That had happened eight years ago. He could still remember the smell of the salt air. The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life- bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort. Would he ever see it again? He loosened his grip and let the bat fall to the ground. It made a dry sound as it struck the earth. After the bat left his hands, he felt a slight increase in his nausea.

The wind-up bird went on crying, but no one else could hear its call.

Here ended The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8.

Here ended The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8.

I exited the document to the original menu and clicked on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #9. I wanted to read the continuation of the story. But instead of a new document, I saw this message: Access denied to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #9 based on Code R24.

Choose another document.

I chose #10, but with the same results.

Access denied to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #10 based on Code R24.

Choose another document.

The same thing happened with #11-and with all the other documents, including #8. I had no idea what this Code R24 was, but it was obviously blocking access to everything now.

At the moment I had opened The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8, I probably could have had access to any one of them, but #8 having been opened and closed, the doors were locked to all of them now. Maybe this program did not permit access to more than one document at a time.

I sat in front of the computer, wondering what to do next. But there was nothing I could do next. This was a precisely articulated world, which had been conceived in Cinnamon's mind and which functioned according to his principles. I did not know the rules of the game. I gave up trying and shut down the computer.