Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Author:Haruki Murakami [Murakami, Haruki & Rubin, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Romance, Man-Woman Relationships, Literary, Psychological, Political, Psychological Fiction, Japan, Political Fiction
ISBN: 9781860465819
Google: A_mQPAqfte8C
Amazon: 0679775439
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1994-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

The W i n d - U p Bird in Winter

*

Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. It rained a lot in September. October had several warm, sweaty days. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.

·

And yet there were a few people who wouldn’t leave me alone-people from Kumiko’s family, who wrote me letters. Kumiko could not go on being married to me, they said, and so I should immediately agree to a divorce. That would supposedly solve all the problems. The first few letters tried to exert pressure on me in a businesslike manner. When I failed to answer, they resorted to threats and, in the end, turned to pleading. All were looking for the same thing.

Eventually, Kumiko’s father called.

“I am not saying that I am absolutely opposed to a divorce,” I said. “But first I want to see Kumiko and talk to her, alone. If she can convince me it’s what she wants, then I will give her a divorce. That is the only way I will agree to it.”

I turned toward the kitchen window and looked at the dark, rain-filled sky stretching away into the distance. It had been raining for four straight days, into a wet, black world.

“Kumiko and I talked everything over before we decided to get married, and if we are going to end that marriage, I want to do it the same way.”

Kumiko’s father and I went on making parallel statements, arriving nowhere- or nowhere fruitful, at least.

·

Several questions remained unanswered. Did Kumiko really want to divorce me? And had she asked her parents to try to convince me to go along with that?

“Kumiko says she doesn’t want to see you,” her father had told me, exactly as her brother, Noboru Wataya, had said. This was probably not an out-and-out lie. Kumiko’s parents were not above interpreting things in a manner convenient to themselves, but as far as I knew, they were not the sort to manufacture facts out of nothing. They were, for better or worse, realistic people. If what her father had said was true, then, was Kumiko now being “sheltered” by them?

But that I found impossible to believe. Love was simply not an emotion that Kumiko had felt for her parents and brother from the time she was a little girl.

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