15



The 0 n I Y Bad Thing That Ever Happened
in May K a s a h a r a' s House



May Kasahara on the Gooshy Source of Heat



"Hello, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said the woman's voice. Pressing the receiver against my ear,
I looked at my watch. Four o'clock in the afternoon. When the phone rang, I had been asleep
on the sofa, drenched in sweat. It had been a short, unpleasant nap. And now there remained
with me the physical sensation of someone's having been sitting on top of me the whole time
I was asleep. Whoever it was had waited until I was asleep, come to sit on top of me, and
gotten up and gone away just before I woke.
"Hel-looo," cooed the woman's voice in a near whisper. The sound seemed to have to
pass through some extra-thin air to reach me. "This is May Kasahara calling...."
"Hey," I tried to say, but my mouth still wasn't moving the way I wanted it to. The word
may have come out sounding to her like some kind of groan.
"What are you doing now?" she asked, in an insinuating tone.
"Nothing," I said, moving the mouthpiece away to clear my throat. "Nothing. Napping."
"Did I wake you?"


"Sure you did. But that's OK. It was just a nap."
May Kasahara seemed to hesitate a moment. Then she said, "How about it, Mr. Wind-Up
Bird: would you come over to my house?"
I closed my eyes. In the darkness hovered lights of different colors and shapes.
"I don't mind," I said.
"I'm sunbathing in the yard, so just let yourself in from the back."
"OK."
"Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, are you mad at me?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "Anyhow, I'm going to take a shower and change, and then I'll
come over. I've got something I want to talk to you about."
I took a quick cold shower to clear my head, turned on the hot water to wash, and finished
off cold again. This did manage to wake me up, but my body still felt dull and heavy. My legs
would begin trembling, and at several points during my shower I had to grab the towel bar or
sit on the edge of the tub. Maybe I was more fatigued than I had thought.
After I stepped out of the shower and wiped myself down, I brushed my teeth and looked
at myself in the mirror. The dark-blue mark was still there on my right cheek, neither darker
nor lighter than before. My eyeballs had a network of tiny red lines, and there were dark
circles under my eyes. My cheeks looked sunken, and my hair was in need of a trim. I looked
like a fresh corpse that had just come back to life and dug its way out of the grave.
I put on a T-shirt and short pants, a hat and dark glasses. Out in the alley, I found that the
hot day was far from over. Everything alive above-ground-everything visible-was gasping in
hopes of a sudden shower, but there was no hint of a cloud in the sky. A blanket of hot,
stagnant air enveloped the alley. The place was deserted, as always. Good. On a hot day like
this, and with my face looking so awful, I didn't want to meet anyone.
In the yard of the empty house, the bird sculpture was glaring at the sky, as usual, its beak
held aloft. It looked far more grimy than when I had last seen it, more worn down. And there
was something more strained in its gaze. It seemed to be staring hard at some extraordinarily
depressing sight that was floating in the sky. If only it could have done so, the bird would
have liked to avert its gaze, but with its eyes locked in place the way they were, it had no
choice except to look. The tall weeds surrounding the sculpture remained motionless, like a
chorus in a Greek tragedy waiting breathlessly for an oracle to be handed down. The TV
antenna on the roof apathetically thrust its silver feelers into the suffocating heat. Under the
harsh summer light, everything was dried out and exhausted.
After I had surveyed the yard of the vacant house, I walked into May Kasahara's yard.
The oak tree cast a cool-looking shadow over the lawn, but May Kasahara had obviously
avoided that, to stretch out in the harsh sunlight. She lay on her back in a deck chair, wearing
an incredibly tiny chocolate-colored bikini, its little cloth patches held in place by bits of
string. I couldn't help wondering if a person could actually swim in a thing like that. She wore
the same sunglasses she had on when we first met, and large beads of sweat dotted her face.
Under her deck chair she had a white beach towel, a container of suntan cream, and a few
magazines. Two empty Sprite cans lay nearby, one apparently serving as an ashtray. A plastic
hose with a sprinkler lay out on the lawn, where no one had bothered to reel it in after its last
use.
When I drew near, May Kasahara sat up and reached out to turn off her radio. She had a
far deeper tan than last time. This was no ordinary tan from a weekend at the beach. Every bit
of her body-literally from head to toe-had been beautifully roasted. Sunning was all she did
here all day, it seemed-including the whole time I was in the well, no doubt. I took a moment
to glance at the yard. It looked pretty much as it had before, the broad lawn well manicured,
the pond still unfilled and looking parched enough to make you thirsty.
I sat on the deck chair next to hers and took a lemon drop from my pocket. The heat had
caused the paper wrapper to stick to the candy.


May Kasahara looked at me for some time without saying anything. "What happened to
you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? What's that mark on your face? It is a mark, isn't it?"
"I think it is. Probably. But I don't know how it happened. I looked- and there it was."
May Kasahara raised herself on one elbow and stared at my face. She brushed away the
drops of sweat beside her nose and gave her sunglasses a little push up to where they
belonged. The dark lenses all but hid her eyes.
"You have no idea at all? No clue where it happened or how it happened?"
"None at all."
"None?" I got out of the well, and a little while later I looked in the mirror, and there it
was. Really. That's all."
"Does it hurt?"
"It doesn't hurt, it doesn't itch. It is a little warm, though."
"Did you go to the doctor?"
I shook my head. "It'd probably be a waste of time."
"Probably," said May Kasahara. "I hate doctors too."
I took off my hat and sunglasses and used my handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my
forehead. The armpits of my gray T-shirt were already black with sweat.
"Great bikini," I said.
"Thanks."
"Looks like they put it together from scraps-making the maximum use of our limited
natural resources."
"I take off the top when everybody's out."
"Well, well," I said.
"Not that there's all that much underneath to uncover," she said, as if by way of excuse.
True, the breasts inside her bikini top were still small and undeveloped. "Have you ever
swum in that thing?" I asked.
"Never. I don't know how to swim. How about you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?"
"Yeah, I can swim."
"How far?"
"Far."
"Ten kilometers?"
"Probably.... Nobody home now?"
"They left yesterday, for our summer house in Izu. They all want to go swimming for the
weekend. 'All' is my parents and my little brother."
"Not you?"
She gave a tiny shrug. Then she took her Hope regulars and matches from the folds of her
beach towel and lit up.
"You look terrible, Mr. Wind-Up Bird."
"Of course I look terrible- after days in the bottom of a well with almost nothing to eat or
drink, who wouldn't look terrible?"
May Kasahara took off her sunglasses and turned to face me. She still had that deep cut
next to her eye. "Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Are you mad at me?"
"I'm not sure. I've got tons of things I have to think about before I start getting mad at
you."
"Did your wife come back?"
I shook my head. "She sent me a letter. Says she's never coming back."
"Poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. She sat up and reached out to place her
hand lightly on my knee. "Poor, poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you
may not believe this, but I was planning to save you from the well at the very end. I just
wanted to frighten you a little, torment you a little. I wanted to see if I could make you
scream. I wanted to see how much it would take until you were so mixed up you kinda lost


your world."
I didn't know how to reply to this, so I just nodded.
"Did you think I was serious when I said I was going to let you die down there?"
Instead of answering right away, I rolled the lemon drop wrapper into a ball. Then I said,
"I really wasn't sure. You sounded serious, but you sounded like you were just trying to scare
me too. When you're down in a well, talking to somebody up top, something weird happens
to the sound: you can't really catch the expression in the other person's voice. But finally, it's
not a question of which is right. I mean, reality is kind of made up of these different layers. So
maybe in that reality you were serious about trying to kill me, but in this reality you weren't.
It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take." I pushed my rolled-up candy
wrapper into the hole of a Sprite can.
"Say, could you do me a favor, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?" said May Kasahara, pointing at the
hose on the lawn. "Would you spray me with that? It's sooo hot! My brain's gonna fry if I
don't wet myself down."
I left my deck chair and walked over to pick up the blue plastic hose on the lawn. It was
warm and limp. I reached behind the bushes and turned on the spigot. At first only hot water
that had been warmed inside the hose came out, but it cooled down until it was spraying cold
water. May Kasahara stretched out on the lawn, and I aimed a good, strong spray at her.
She closed her eyes and let the water wash over her body. "Oh, that feels so good! You
should do it too, Mr. Wind-Up Bird."
"This isn't a bathing suit," I said, but May Kasahara looked as if she was enjoying the
water a lot, and the heat was just too intense for me to keep resisting. I took off my sweat-
soaked T-shirt, bent forward, and let the cold water run over my head. While I was at it, I took
a swallow of the water: it was cold and delicious.
"Hey, is this well water?" I asked.
"Sure is! It comes up through a pump. Feels great, doesn't it? It's so cold. You can drink
it too. We had a guy from the health department do a water quality inspection, and he said
there's nothing wrong with it, you almost never get water this clean in Tokyo. He was
amazed. But still, we're kind of afraid to drink it. With all these houses packed together like
this, you never know what's going to get into it."
"But don't you think it's weird? The Miyawakis' well is bone dry, but yours has all this
nice, fresh water. They're just across the alley. Why should they be so different?"
"Yeah, really," said May Kasahara, cocking her head. "Maybe something caused the
underground water flow to change just a little bit, so their well dried up and ours didn't. Of
course, I don't know what the exact reason would be."
"Has anything bad happened in your house?" I asked.
May Kasahara wrinkled up her face and shook her head. "The only bad thing that's
happened in this house in the last ten years is that it's so damned boring!"
May Kasahara wiped herself down and asked if I wanted a beer. I said I did. She brought
two cold cans of Heineken from the house. She drank one, and I drank the other.
"So tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, what's your plan from now on?"
"I haven't really decided," I said. "But I'll probably get out of here. I might even get out
of Japan."
"Get out of Japan? Where would you go?"
"To Crete."
"Crete? Does this have something to do with that What's-her-name woman?"
"Something, yeah."
May Kasahara thought this over for a moment.
"And was it What's-her-name that saved you from the well?"
"Creta Kano," I said. "Yeah, she's the one."
"You've got a lot of friends, don't you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?"


"Not really. If anything, I'm famous for having so few friends."
"Still, I wonder how Creta Kano found out you were down in the well. You didn't tell
anybody you were going down there, right? So how did she figure out where you were?"
"I don't know," I said.
"But anyhow, you're going to Crete, right?"
"I haven't really decided I'm going to go. It's just one possibility. I have to settle things
with Kumiko first."
May Kasahara put a cigarette in her mouth and lit up. Then she touched the cut next to her
eye with the tip of her little finger.
"You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, just about the whole time you were down in the well, I
was out here sunbathing. I was watching the garden of the vacant house, and baking myself,
and thinking about you in the well, that you were starving and moving closer to death little by
little. I was the only one who knew you were down there and couldn't get out. And when I
thought about that, I had this incredibly clear sense of what you were feeling: the pain and
anxiety and fear. Do you see what I mean? By doing that, I was able to get sooo close to you!
I really wasn't gonna let you die. This is true. Really. But I wanted to keep going. Right down
to the wire. Right down to where you would start to fall apart and be scared out of your mind
and you couldn't take it anymore. I really felt that that would be the best thing-for me and for
you."
"Well, I'll tell you what," I said. "I think that if you really had gone down to the wire, you
might have wanted to go all the way. It might have been a lot easier than you think. If you
went that far, all it would have taken was one last push. And then afterward you would have
told yourself that it was the best thing-for me and for you." I took a swig of beer.
May Kasahara thought about that for a time, biting her lip. "You may be right," she said.
"Not even I know for sure."
I took my last swallow of beer and stood up. I put on my sunglasses and slipped into my
sweat-soaked T-shirt. "Thanks for the beer."
"You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara, "last night, after my family left for
the summer house, I went down into the well. I stayed there five or maybe six hours
altogether, just sitting still."
"So you're the one who took the rope ladder away."
"Yeah," said May Kasahara, with a little frown. "I'm the one." I turned my eyes to the
broad lawn. The moisture-laden earth was giving off vapor that looked like heat shimmer.
May Kasahara pushed the butt of her cigarette into an empty Sprite can.
"I didn't feel anything special for the first few hours. Of course, it bothered me a little bit
to be in such a totally dark place, but I wasn't terrified or scared or anything. I'm not one of
those ordinary girls that scream their heads off over every little thing. But I knew it wasn't
just dark. You were down there for days, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You know there's nothing down
there to be afraid of. But after a few hours, I knew less and less who I was. Sitting still down
there in the darkness, I could tell that something inside me-inside my body-was getting bigger
and bigger. It felt like this thing inside me was growing, like the roots of a tree in a pot, and
when it got big enough it would break me apart. That would be the end of me, like the pot
splitting into a million pieces. Whatever this thing was, it stayed put inside me when I was
under the sun, but it, like, sucked up some special kind of nourishment in the darkness and
started growing sooo fast it was scary. I tried to hold it down, but I couldn't. And that's when
I really got scared. It was the scaredest I've ever been in my life. This thing inside me, this
gooshy white thing like a lump of fat, was taking over, taking me over, eating me up. This
gooshy thing was really small at first, Mr. Wind-Up Bird."
May Kasahara stopped talking for a little while and stared at her hands, as if she were
recalling what had happened to her that day. "I was really scared," she said. "I guess that's
what I wanted you to feel. I guess I wanted you to hear the sound of the thing chewing you


up."
I lowered myself into a deck chair and looked at the body of May Kasahara, hardly
covered by her little bikini. She was sixteen years old, but she had the build of a girl of
thirteen or fourteen. Her breasts and hips were far from fully matured. Her body reminded me
of those drawings that use the absolute minimum of line yet still give an incredible sense of
reality. But still, at the same time, there was something about it that gave an impression of
extreme old age.
Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me to ask her, "Have you ever had the feeling that
you had been defiled by something?"
"Defiled?" She looked at me, her eyes slightly narrowed. "You mean physically? You
mean, like, raped?"
"Physically. Mentally. Either."
May Kasahara looked down at her own body, then returned her gaze to me. "Physically,
no. I mean, I'm still a virgin. I've let a boy feel me up. But just through my clothes."
I nodded.
"Mentally, hmm, I'm not sure. I don't really know what it means to be defiled mentally."
"Neither do I," I said. "It's just a question of whether you feel it's happened to you or not.
If you don't feel it, that probably means you haven't been defiled."
"Why are you asking me about this?"
"Because some of the people I know have that feeling. And it causes all kinds of
complicated problems. There's one thing I want to ask you, though. Why are you always
thinking about death?"
She put a cigarette between her lips and nimbly struck a match with one hand. Then she
put on her sunglasses.
"You mean you don't think much about death, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?"
"I do think about death, of course. But not all the time. Just once in a while. Like most
people."
"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with
some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like
a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody
else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up.
What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I
can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not
explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to
be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy
things."
"Crazy things?"
"Like, say, trapping you in the well, or, like, when I'm riding on the back of a motorcycle,
putting my hands over the eyes of the guy who's driving."
When she said this, she touched the wound next to her eye.
"And that's how the motorcycle accident happened?" I asked.
May Kasahara gave me a questioning look, as if she had not heard what I said to her. But
every word that I had spoken should have reached her ears. I couldn't make out the expression
in her eyes behind the dark glasses, but a kind of numbness seemed to have spread over her
face, like oil poured on still water.
"What happened to the guy?" I asked.
Cigarette between her lips, May Kasahara continued to look at me. Or rather, she
continued to look at my mark. "Do I have to answer that question, Mr. Wind-Up Bird?"
"Not if you don't want to. You're the one who brought it up. If you don't want to talk
about it, then don't."
May Kasahara grew very quiet. She seemed to be having trouble deciding what to do.


Then she drew in a chestful of cigarette smoke and let it out slowly. With heavy movements,
she dragged her sunglasses off and turned her face to the sun, eyes closed tight. Watching her,
I felt as if the flow of time were slowing down little by little-as if time's spring were be-
ginning to run down.
"He died," she said at last, in a voice with no expression, as though she had resigned
herself to something.
"He died?"
May Kasahara tapped the ashes off her cigarette. Then she picked up her towel and wiped
the sweat from her face over and over again. Finally, as if recalling a task that she had
forgotten, she said in a clipped, businesslike way, "We were going pretty fast. It happened
near Enoshima."
I looked at her without a word. She held an edge of the beach towel in each hand, pressing
the edges against her cheeks. White smoke was rising from the cigarette between her fingers.
With no wind to disturb it, the smoke rose straight up, like a miniature smoke signal. She was
apparently having trouble deciding whether to cry or to laugh. At least she looked that way to
me. She wavered atop the narrow line that divided one possibility from the other, but in the
end she fell to neither side. May Kasahara pulled her expression together, put the towel on the
ground, and took a drag on her cigarette. The time was nearly five o'clock, but the heat
showed no sign of abating.
"I killed him," she said. "Of course, I didn't mean to kill him. I just wanted to push the
limits. We did stuff like that all the time. It was like a game. I'd cover his eyes or tickle him
when we were on the bike. But nothing ever happened. Until that day ..."
May Kasahara raised her face and looked straight at me.
"Anyway, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, no, I don't feel as if I've been defiled. I just wanted to get
close to that gooshy thing if I could. I wanted to trick it into coming out of me and then crush
it to bits. You've got to really push the limits if you're going to trick it into coming out. It's
the only way. You've got to offer it good bait." She shook her head slowly. "No, I don't think
I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved, either. There's nobody who can save me right
now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me
looks fake. The only thing that isn't fake is that gooshy thing inside me."
May Kasahara sat there for a long while, taking small, regular breaths. There were no
other sounds, no bird or insect cries. A terrible quiet settled over the yard, as though the world
had in fact become empty.
May Kasahara turned to face me in her chair. She seemed to have suddenly remembered
something. Now all expression was gone from her face, as if she had been washed clean. "Tell
me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, did you sleep with that Kano person?"
I nodded.
"Will you write to me from Crete?" asked May Kasahara.
"Sure I will. If I go."
"You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," she said after some hesitation, "I think I might be going
back to school."
"Oh, so you've changed your mind about school, huh?"
She gave a little shrug. "It's a different one. I absolutely refuse to go back to my old
school. The new one's kinda far from here. So anyway, I probably won't be able to see you
for a while."
I nodded. Then I took a lemon drop from my pocket and put it into my mouth. May
Kasahara glanced around and lit up a cigarette.
"Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, is it fun to sleep with a bunch of different women?"
"That's beside the point."
"Yeah, I've heard that one already."
"Right," I said, but I didn't know what else to say.


"Oh, forget it. But you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, it's just because I met you that I finally
decided to go back to school. No kidding."
"Why's that?" I asked.
"Yeah, why is that?" May Kasahara said. Then she wrinkled up the corners of her eyes
and looked at me. "Maybe I wanted to go back to a more normal world. But really, Mr. Wind-
Up Bird, it's been a lot of fun being with you. No kidding. I mean, you're such a supernormal
guy, but you do such unnormal things. And you're so-what?-unpredictable. So hanging
around with you hasn't been boring in any way. You have no idea how much good that's done
me. Not being bored means not having to think about a lot of stupid stuff. Right? So where
that's concerned, I'm glad you've been around. But tell you the truth, it's made me nervous
too."
"In what way?"
"Well, how can I put this? Sometimes, when I'm looking at you, I get this feeling like
maybe you're fighting real hard against something for me. I know this sounds weird, but
when that happens, I feel like I'm right with you, sweating with you. See what I mean? You
always look so cool, like no matter what happens, it's got nothing to do with you, but you're
not really like that. In your own way, you're out there fighting as hard as you can, even if
other people can't tell by looking at you. If you weren't, you wouldn't have gone into the well
like that, right? But anyhow, you're not fighting for me, of course. You're falling all over
yourself, trying to wrestle with this big whatever-it-is, and the only reason you're doing it is
so you can find Kumiko. So there's no point in me getting all sweaty for you. I know all that,
but still, I can't help feeling that you are fighting for me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird-that, in a way,
you probably are fighting for a lot of other people at the same time you're fighting for
Kumiko. And that's maybe why you look like an absolute idiot sometimes. That's what I
think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. But when I see you doing this, I get all tense and nervous, and I end
up feeling just totally drained. I mean, it looks like you can't possibly win. If I had to bet on
the match, I'd bet on you to lose. Sorry, but that's just how it is. I like you a lot, but I don't
want to go broke."
"I understand completely."
"I don't want to watch you going under, and I don't want to sweat any more for you than I
already have. That's why I've decided to go back to a world that's a little more normal. But if
I hadn't met you here-here, in front of this vacant house- I don't think things would have
turned out this way. I never would have thought about going back to school. I'd still be
hanging around in some not-so-normal world. So in that sense, it's all because of you, Mr.
Wind-Up Bird. You're not totally useless."
I nodded. It was the first time in a long time anyone had said anything nice about me.
"C'mere, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. She raised herself on her deck chair.
I got out of my chair and went to hers.
"Sit down right here, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara.
I did as I was told and sat down next to her.
"Show me your face, Mr. Wind-Up Bird."
She stared directly at me for a time. Then, placing one hand on my knee, she pressed the
palm of the other against the mark on my cheek.
"Poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara, in a near whisper. "I know you're going to
take on all kinds of things. Even before you know it. And you won't have any choice in the
matter. The way rain falls in a field. And now close your eyes, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Really
tight. Like they're glued shut."
I closed my eyes tightly.
May Kasahara touched her lips to my mark-her lips small and thin, like an extremely well-
made imitation. Then she parted those lips and ran her tongue across my mark-very slowly,
covering every bit of it. The hand she had placed on my knee remained there the whole time.


Its warm, moist touch came to me from far away, from a place still farther than if it had
passed through all the fields in the world. Then she took my hand and touched it to the wound
beside her eye. I caressed the half-inch scar As I did so, the waves of her consciousness
pulsed through my fingertips and into me-a delicate resonance of longing. Probably someone
should take this girl in his arms and hold her tight, I thought. Probably someone other than
me. Someone qualified to give her something. "Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. See you again
sometime."