Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I stood up from the sofa and went to Cinnamon's small office once again. There I sat at the desk, elbows resting on the table, and stared at the computer screen. Cinnamon was probably inside there. In there, his silent words lived and breathed as stories. They could think and seek and grow and give off heat. But the screen before me remained as deep in death as the moon, hiding Cinnamon's words in a labyrinthine forest. Neither the monitors screen nor Cinnamon himself, behind it, tried to tell me any more than I had already been told.

How are you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?

I said at the end of my last letter that I had said just about everything I wanted to say to you- pretty much as if that were going to be it. Remember? I did some more thinking after that, though, and I started to get the feeling that I ought to write a little more. So here I am, creeping around in the middle of the night like a cockroach, sitting at my desk and writing to you again.

I don't know why, but I think about the Miyawaki family a lot these days- the poor Miyawaki's who used to live in that vacant house, and then the bill collectors came after them, and they all went off and killed themselves. I'm pretty sure I saw something about how only the eldest daughter didn't die and now nobody knows where she is.... Whether I'm working, or in the dining hall, or in my room listening to music and reading a book, the image of that family pops into my head. Not that I'm haunted by it or anything, but whenever theres an opening (and my head has lots of openings!) it comes creeping in and sticks around for a while, the way smoke from a bonfire can come in through the window. Its been happening all the time this past week or so.

I lived in our house on the alley from the time I was born, and I grew up looking at the house on the other side. My window looks right at it. They gave me my own room when I started primary school. By then, the Miyawaki's had already built their new house and were living in it. I could always see some member of the family in the house or yard, tons of clothes drying out back on nice days, the two girls there, yelling out the name of their big, black German shepherd (what was his name?). And when the sun went down, the lights would come on inside the house, looking warm and cozy, and then later the lights would go out one at a time. The older girl took piano lessons, the younger one violin (the older one was older than me, the younger one younger). They'd have, like, parties and things on birthdays and Christmas, and lots of friends would come over, and it was happy and lively there. People who have seen the place only when it was a vacant ruin couldn't imagine what it was like before.

I used to see Mr. Miyawaki pruning trees and things on weekends. He seemed to enjoy doing all kinds of chores himself, things that took time, like cleaning the gutters or walking the dog or waxing his car. I'll never understand why some people enjoy those things, they're such a pain, but everybody's different, I guess, and I suppose every family ought to have at least one person like that. The whole family used to ski, so every winter they'd strap their skis to the roof of this big car and go off somewhere, looking like they were going to have the greatest time (I hate skiing myself, but anyhow).

This makes them sound like a typical, ordinary happy family, I suppose, but thats really just what they were: a typical, ordinary happy family. There was absolutely nothing about them that would make you raise your eyebrows and say, Yeah, OK, but how about that?

People in the neighborhood used to whisper, I wouldn't live in a creepy place like that if you gave it to me free, but the Miyawaki's lived such a peaceful life there, it could have been a picture in a frame without a speck of dust on it. They were the ones in the fairy tale who got to live happily ever after. At least compared to my family, they seemed to be living ten times as happily ever after. And the two girls seemed really nice whenever I met them outside. I used to wish that I had sisters like them. The whole family always seemed to be laughing- including the dog.

I could never have imagined that you could blink one day and all of this would be gone. But thats just what happened. One day I noticed that the whole family- the German shepherd with them-had disappeared as if a gust of wind had just blown them away, leaving only the house behind. For a while-maybe a week-no one in the neighborhood noticed that the Miyawaki's had disappeared. It did cross my mind at first that it was strange the lights weren't going on at night, but I figured they must be off on one of their family trips. Then my mother heard people saying that the Miyawaki's seemed to have absconded. I remember asking her to explain to me what the word meant. Nowadays we just say run away, I guess.

Whatever you call it, once the people who lived there had disappeared, the whole look of the house changed. It was almost creepy. I had never seen a vacant house before, so I didn't know what an ordinary vacant house looked like, but I guess I figured it would have a sad, beaten sort of look, like an abandoned dog or a cicadas cast-off shell. The Miyawaki's house, though, was nothing like that. It didn't look beaten at all. The minute the Miyawaki's left, it got this know-nothing look on its face, like, I never heard of anybody called Miyawaki. At least thats how it looked to me. It was like some stupid, ungrateful dog. As soon as they were gone, it turned into this totally self-sufficient vacant house that had nothing at all to do with the Miyawaki family's happiness. It really made me mad! I mean, the house must have been just as happy as the rest of the family when the Miyawaki's were there. I'm sure it enjoyed being cleaned so nicely and taken care of, and it wouldn't have existed at all if Mr. Miyawaki hadn't been nice enough to build it in the first place. Don't you agree? You just cant trust a house.

You know as well as I do what the place was like after that, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The house was abandoned, with no one to live in it, and all smeared with bird shit and stuff. That was all I had to look at from my window for years when I was at my desk, studying-or pretending to be studying. On clear days, rainy days, snowy days, or in typhoons, it was right there, outside my window, so I couldn't help but see it when I looked out. And strangely enough, as the years went by, I tried less and less not to notice it. I could-and often did-spend whole half hours at a time with my elbow on my desk, doing nothing but look at that vacant house. I don't know-not very long ago the place had been overflowing with laughter, and clean white clothes had been flapping in the wind like in a commercial for laundry detergent (I wouldn't say Mrs. Miyawaki was abnormal or anything, but she liked to do laundry-way more than most ordinary people). All of that was gone in a flash, the yard was covered with weeds, and there was nobody left to remember the happy days of the Miyawaki family. To me that seemed sooo strange!

Let me just say this: I wasn't especially friendly with the Miyawaki family. In fact, I hardly ever talked to any of them, except to say Hi on the street. But because I spent so much time and energy watching them from my window every day, I felt as if the family's happy doings had become a part of me. You know how in the corner of a family photo there'll be a glimpse of this person who has nothing to do with them. So sometimes I get this feeling like part of me absconded with the Miyawaki's and just disappeared. I guess thats pretty weird, huh, to feel like part of you is gone because it absconded with people you hardly know?

As long as I've started telling you one weird thing, I might as well tell you another one.