Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I glared at the coffee cup in my hand for a time. Do you mind showing me the bottoms of your feet? I asked.

No, not at all, said Creta Kano. She sat down in the chair next to mine and stretched her legs out in my direction so that I could see the soles of her feet. I took her ankles in my hands and examined her soles. They were perfectly clean. Beautifully formed, the soles had not a mark on them- no cuts, no mud, nothing at all.

No mud, no cuts, I said. I see, said Creta Kano. It was raining all day yesterday. If you lost your shoes somewhere and walked here from there, you should have some mud on your feet. And you must have come in through the garden. But your feet are clean, and theres no mud anywhere.

I see. Which means you didn't walk here barefoot from anywhere. Creta Kano inclined her head slightly to one side as if impressed. This is all logically consistent, she said. It may be logically consistent, but its not getting us anywhere, I said. Where did you lose your shoes and clothes, and how did you walk here from there? Creta Kano shook her head. I have no idea, she said.

While she stood at the sink, intently washing the dishes, I stayed at the kitchen table, thinking about these things. Of course, I had no idea, either.

Do these things happen to you often-that you cant remember where you've been? I asked.

This is not the first time that something like this has happened to me, when I cant recall where I have been or what I was doing. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen to me now and then. I once lost some clothes, too. But this is the first time I lost all my clothes and my shoes and everything.

Creta Kano turned off the water and wiped the table with a dish towel.

You know, Creta Kano, I said, you haven't told me your whole story. Last time, you were partway through when you disappeared. Remember? If you don't mind, Id like to hear the rest. You told me how the mob got hold of you and made you work as one of their prostitutes, but you didn't tell me what happened after you met Noboru Wataya and slept with him.

Creta Kano leaned against the kitchen sink and looked at me. Drops of water on her hands ran down her fingers and fell to the floor. The shape of her nipples showed clearly through the white T-shirt, a vivid reminder to me of the naked body I had seen the night before.

All right, then. I will tell you everything that happened after that. Right now. Creta Kano sat down once again in the seat opposite mine. The reason I left that day when I was in the middle of my story, Mr. Okada, is that I was not fully prepared to tell it all. I had started my story precisely because I felt I ought to tell you, as honestly as possible, what really happened to me. But I found I could not go all the way to the end. You must have been shocked when I disappeared so suddenly.

Creta Kano put her hands on the table and looked straight at me as she spoke.

Well, yes, I was shocked, though it was not the most shocking thing thats happened to me lately.

As I told you before, the very last customer I had as a prostitute of the flesh was Noboru Wataya. The second time I met him, as a client of Malta Kanos, I recognized him immediately. It would have been impossible for me to forget him. Whether he remembered me or not I cannot be certain. Mr. Wataya is not a person who shows his feelings.

But let me go back and put things in order. First I will tell you about the time I had Noboru Wataya as a customer. That would be six years ago.

As I told you before, I was in a state at that time in which I had absolutely no perception of pain. And not only pain: I had no sensations of any kind. I lived in a bottomless numbness. Of course, I don't mean to say that I was unable to feel any sensations at all-I knew when something was hot or cold or painful. But these sensations came to me as if from a distance, from a world that had nothing to do with me. Which is why I felt no resistance to the idea of having sexual relations with men for money. No matter what anyone did to me, the sensations I felt did not belong to me. My unfeeling flesh was not my flesh.

Now, lets see, I told you about how I had been recruited by the mobs prostitution ring. When they told me to sleep with men I did it, and when they paid me I took it. I left off at that point. I nodded to her.

That day they told me to go to a room on the sixteenth floor of a downtown hotel. The client had the unusual name of Wataya. I knocked on the door and went in, to find the man sitting on the sofa. He had apparently been drinking room-service coffee while reading a book. He wore a green polo shirt and brown cotton pants. His hair was short, and he wore brown-framed glasses. On the coffee table in front of him were his cup and a coffeepot and the book. He seemed to have been deeply absorbed in his reading: there was a kind of excitement still in his eyes. His features were in no way remarkable, but those eyes of his had an energy about them that was almost weird. When I first saw them, I thought for a moment that I was in the wrong room. But it was not the wrong room. The man told me to come inside and lock the door.

Still seated on the sofa, without saying a word, he ran his eyes over my body. From head to foot. That was what usually happened when I entered a clients room. Most men would look me over. Excuse me for asking, Mr. Okada, but have you ever bought a prostitute? I said that I had not.

Its as if they were looking over merchandise. It doesn't take long to get used to being looked at like that. They are paying money for flesh, after all; it makes sense for them to examine the goods. But the way that man looked at me was different. He seemed to be looking through my flesh to something on the other side. His eyes made me feel uneasy, as if I had become a half-transparent human being.

I was a little confused, I suppose: I dropped my handbag on the floor. It made a small sound, but I was in such an abstracted state that, for a time, I was almost unaware of what I had done. Then I stooped down to pick up the bag. The clasp had opened when it hit the floor, and some of my cosmetics had fallen out. I picked up my eyebrow pencil and lip cream and a small bottle of eau de cologne, returning each of them to my bag. He kept those eyes of his trained on me the whole time.

When I had finished gathering up my things from the floor and putting them back in the bag, he told me to undress. I asked him if it would be all right for me to take a shower first, because I had been perspiring quite a bit. The weather was hot that day, and I had been sweating on the subway. He didn't care about that, he said. He didn't have much time. He wanted me to undress right away.

Once I was naked, he told me to lie on the bed facedown, which I did. He ordered me to stay still, to keep my eyes closed, and not to speak until I was spoken to.

He sat down next to me with his clothes on. That was all he did: sit down. He did not lay a finger on me. He just sat and looked down at my naked body. He kept this up for some ten minutes, while I lay there, unmoving, facedown. I could feel his eyes boring into the nape of my neck, my back, my buttocks, and my legs, with almost painful intensity. It occurred to me that he might be impotent. Customers like that turn up now and then. They buy a prostitute, have her undress, and they look at her. Some will undress the woman and finish themselves off in her presence. All kinds of men buy prostitutes, for all kinds of reasons. I just assumed he was one of those.

After a while, though, he reached out and began to touch me. His ten fingers moved down my body, from my shoulders to my back, from my back to my buttocks, in search of something. This was not foreplay. Neither, of course, was it a massage. His fingers moved over my body with the utmost care, as if tracing a route on a map. And all the while he touched my flesh, he seemed to be thinking-not in any ordinary sense of the word, but seriously thinking about something with the utmost concentration.