Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

How has Malta Kano been since I last saw her? I asked.

Creta Kano did not reply to this. Instead, she gave me a sad look, and then she disappeared.

On the morning of the third day, I was finally able to get out of bed by myself. Walking was still too hard for me, but I slowly regained the ability to speak. Nutmeg made me rice gruel. I ate that and a little fruit.

How is the cat doing? I asked her. This had been a matter of concern to me for some time.

Don't worry, Cinnamon is looking after him. He goes to your house every day to feed him and change his water. The only thing you have to worry about is yourself.

When are you going to get rid of this place?

As soon as we can. Probably sometime next month. I think you'll be seeing a little money out of it too. Well probably have to let it go for something less than we paid for it, so you wont get much, but your share should be a good percentage of what you paid on the mortgage. That should support you for a while. So you don't have to worry too much about money. You deserve it, after all: you worked hard here.

Is this house going to be torn down?

Probably. And they'll probably fill in the well again. Which seems like a waste now that its producing water again, but nobody wants a big, old-fashioned well like that these days. They usually just put in a pipe and an electric pump. That's a lot more convenient, and it takes up less space.

I don't suppose this place is jinxed anymore, I said. Its probably just an ordinary piece of property again, not the hanging house.

You may be right, said Nutmeg. She hesitated, then bit her lip. But that has nothing to do with me or with you anymore. Right? In any case, the important thing is for you to rest now and not bother with things that don't really matter. It will take a while until you're fully recovered.

Nutmeg showed me the article on Noboru Wataya in the morning paper she had brought with her. It was a small piece. Still unconscious, Noboru Wataya had been transported from Nagasaki to a large university hospital in Tokyo, where he was in intensive care, his condition unchanged. The report said nothing more than that. What crossed my mind at that point, of course, was Kumiko. Where could she be? I had to get back home. But I still lacked the strength to walk such a distance.

I made it as far as the bathroom sink late the next morning and saw myself in the mirror for the first time in three days. I looked terrible- less like a tired living being than a well- preserved corpse. As Nutmeg had said, the cut on my cheek had been sewn together with professional-looking stitches, the edges of the wound held in good alignment by white thread.

It was at least an inch in length but not very deep. It pulled somewhat if I tried to make a face, but there was little pain. I brushed my teeth and used an electric shaver on my beard. I couldn't trust myself to handle a razor yet. As the whiskers came off, I could hardly believe what I was seeing in the mirror. I set the shaver down and took a good look. The mark was gone. The man had cut my right cheek. Exactly where the mark had been. The cut was certainly there, but the mark was gone. It had disappeared from my cheek without a trace.

During the night of the fifth day, I heard the faint sound of sleigh bells again. It was a little after two in the morning. I got up from the sofa, slipped a cardigan over my pajamas, and left the fitting room. Passing through the kitchen, I went to Cinnamon's small office and peeked inside. Cinnamon was calling to me again from inside the computer. I sat down at the desk and read the message on the screen.

You have now gained access to the program The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Choose a document (1-17).

I clicked on #17, and a document opened up before me.

There are many things I have to tell you. To tell them all would probably take a very long time-maybe years. I should have opened up to you long ago, confessed everything to you honestly, but unfortunately, I lacked the courage to do so. And I still harbored the groundless hope that things would not turn out so badly. The result has been this nightmare for us both.

Its all my fault. But it is also too late for explanations. We don't have enough time for that.

So what I want to do here is tell you the most important thing first.

And that is, I have to kill my brother, Noboru Wataya. I am going to go now to the hospital room where he is sleeping, to pull the plug on his life-support system. As his sister, I will be allowed to stay the night with him in place of a nurse. It will take a while before any- one notices that he has been disconnected. I had the doctor show me yesterday how it works. I intend to wait until I am sure he is dead, and then I will give myself up to the police. I will tell them I did what I thought was right but offer no more explanation than that. I will probably be arrested on the spot and tried for murder. The media will leap in, and people will offer opinions on death with dignity and other such matters. But I will keep silent. I will offer no explanation or defense. There is only one truth in all this, and that is that I wanted to end the life of a single human being, Noboru Wataya. They will probably lock me up, but the prospect doesn't frighten me. I have already been through the worst.

If it hadn't been for you, I would have lost my mind long ago. I would have handed myself over, vacant, to someone else and fallen to a point beyond hope of recovery. My brother, Noboru Wataya, did exactly that to my sister many years ago, and she ended up killing herself. He defiled us both. Strictly speaking, he did not defile our bodies. What he did was even worse than that.

The freedom to do anything at all was taken from me, and I shut myself up in a dark room, alone. No one chained me down or set a guard to watch over me, but I could not have escaped. My brother held me with yet stronger chains and guards- chains and guards that were myself. I was the chain that bit into my ankle, and I was the ruthless guard that never slept. Inside me, of course, there was a self that wanted to escape, but at the same time there was a cowardly, debauched self that had given up all hope of ever being able to flee from there, and the first self could never dominate the second because I had been so defiled in mind and body. I had lost the right to go back to you-not just because I had been defiled by my brother, Noboru Wataya, but because, even before that, I had defiled myself irreparably.

I told you in my letter that I had slept with a man, but in that letter I was not telling the truth. I must confess the truth to you here. I did not sleep with just one man. I slept with many other men. Too many to count. I myself have no idea what caused me to do such a thing. Looking back upon it now, I think it may have been my brothers influence. He may have opened some kind of drawer inside me, taken out some kind of incomprehensible something, and made me give myself to one man after another. My brother had that kind of power, and as much as I hate to acknowledge it, the two of us were surely tied together in some dark place.

In any case, by the time my brother came to me, I had already defiled myself beyond all cleansing. In the end, I even contracted a venereal disease. In spite of all this, as I mentioned in my letter, I was never able to feel at the time that I was wronging you in any way. What I was doing seemed entirely natural to me-though I can only imagine that it was not the real me that felt that way. Could this be true, though? Is the answer really so simple? And if so, what, then, is the real me? Do I have any sound basis for concluding that the me who is now writing this letter is the real me? I was never able to believe that firmly in my self, nor am I able to today.