6



Nutmeg and C i n n a m o n

*


The cat was covered from nose to tailtip with clumps of dried mud his fur stuck together
in little balls, as if he had been rolling around on a filthy patch of ground for a long time. He
purred with excitement as I picked him up and examined him all over. He might have been
somewhat emaciated, but aside from that, he looked little different from when I had last seen
him: face, body, fur. His eyes were clear, and he had no wounds He certainly didn't seem like
a cat that had been missing for a year. It was more as if he had come home after a single night
of carousing.
I fed him on the veranda: a plateful of sliced mackerel that I had bought at the
supermarket. He was obviously starved. He polished off the fish slices so quickly he would
gag now and then and spit pieces back into the plate. I found the cat's water dish under the
sink and filled it to the brim. He came close to emptying it. Having accomplished this much,
he started licking his mud-caked fur, but then, as if suddenly recalling that I was there, he
climbed into my lap, curled up, and went to sleep
The cat slept with his forelegs tucked under his body, his face buried in his tail. He purred
loudly at first, but that grew quieter, until he entered a state of complete and silent sleep, all
defenses down. I sat in a sunny spot on the veranda, petting him gently so as not to wake him.
I had not thought about the cat's special soft, warm touch for a very long time. So much had
been happening to me that I had all but forgotten that the cat had disappeared. Holding this
soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete
trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart
beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted
to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.
Where had this cat been for a year? What had he been doing? Why had he chosen to come
back now, all of a sudden? And where were the traces of the time he had lost? I wished I
could ask him these questions. If only he could have answered me!



I brought an old cushion out to the veranda and set the cat down on top of it. He was as
limp as a load of wash. When I picked him up, the slits of his eyes opened, and he opened his
mouth, but he made no sound. He settled himself onto the cushion, gave a yawn, and fell back
asleep. Once I was satisfied he was resting, 1 went to the kitchen to put away the groceries I
had brought home. I placed the tofu and vegetables and fish in their compartments in the
refrigerator, then glanced out to the veranda again. The cat was sleeping in the same position.
We had always called him Noboru Wataya because the look in his eyes resembled that of
Kumiko's brother, but that had just been our little joke, not the cat's real name. In fact, we
had let six years go by without giving him a name.
Even as a joke, though, Noboru Wataya was no name for a cat of ours. The real Noboru
Wataya had simply become too great a presence in the course of those six years-especially


now that he had been elected to the House of Representatives. Saddling the cat with that name
forever was out of the question. As long as he remained in this house, it would be necessary to
give him a new name, a name of his own-and the sooner the better. It should be a simple,
tangible, realistic name, something you could see with your eyes and feel with your hands,
something that could erase the sound and memory and meaning of the name Noboru Wataya.
I brought in the plate that had held the fish. It looked as clean as if it had just been washed
and wiped. The cat must have enjoyed his meal. I was glad I had happened to buy some
mackerel just at the time the cat had chosen to come home. It seemed like a good omen,
fortunate for both me and the cat. Yes, that was it: I would call him Mackerel. Rubbing him
behind the ears, I informed him of the change: "You're not Noboru Wataya anymore," I said.
"From now on, your name is Mackerel." I wanted to shout it to the world.
I sat on the veranda next to Mackerel the cat, reading a book until the sun began to set.
The cat slept as soundly as if he had been knocked unconscious, his quiet breathing like a
distant bellows, his body rising and falling with the sound. I would reach out now and then to
feel his warmth and make sure the cat was really there. It was wonderful to be able to do that:
to reach out and touch something, to feel something warm. I had been missing that kind of
experience.



Mackerel was still there the next morning. He had not disappeared. When I woke up, I
found him sleeping next to me, on his side, legs stretched straight out. He must have wakened
during the night and licked himself clean. The mud and hair balls were gone. He looked
almost like his old self. He had always had a handsome coat of fur. I held him for a while,
then fed him his breakfast and changed his water. Then I moved away from him and tried
calling him by name: "Mackerel." Finally, on the third try, he turned toward me and gave a
little meow.
Now it was time for me to begin my new day. The cat had come back to me, and I had to
begin to move forward to some extent. I took a shower and ironed a freshly laundered shirt. I
put on a pair of cotton pants and my new sneakers. A hazy overcast filled the sky, but the
weather was not especially cold. I decided to wear a thickish sweater without a coat. I took the
train to Shinjuku, as usual, went through the underground passageway to the west exit plaza,
and took a seat on my usual bench.



The woman showed up a little after three o'clock. She didn't seem astonished to see me,
and I reacted to her approach without surprise. Our encounter was entirely natural. We
exchanged no greetings, as if this had all been prearranged. I raised my face slightly, and she
looked at me with a flicker of the lips.
She wore a springlike orange cotton top, a tight skirt the color of topaz, and small gold
earrings. She sat down next to me and, as always, took a pack of Virginia Slims from her
purse. She put a cigarette in her mouth and lit up with a slim gold lighter. This time she knew
better than to offer me a smoke. And after taking two or three leisurely puffs herself, with an
air of deep thought, she dropped her cigarette to the ground as if testing gravity conditions for
the day. She then patted me on the knee and said, "Come with me," after which she stood to
leave. I crushed her cigarette out and did as she said. She raised her hand to stop a passing taxi
and climbed in. I climbed in beside her. She then announced very clearly an address in
Aoyama, after which she said nothing at all until the cab had threaded its way through thick
traffic to Aoyama Boulevard. I watched the sights of Tokyo passing by the window. There
were several new buildings that I had never seen before. The woman took a notebook from


her bag and wrote something in it with a small gold pen. She looked at her watch now and
then, as if checking on something. The watch was set in a gold bracelet. All the little
accessories she carried with her seemed to be made of gold. Or was it that they turned to gold
the moment she touched them?
She took me into a boutique on Omote Sando that featured designer brands. There she
picked out two suits for me, both of thin material, one blue gray, the other dark gray. These
were not suits I could have worn to the law firm: they even felt expensive. She did not offer
any explanations, and I did not ask for them. I simply did as I was told. This reminded me of
several so-called art films I had seen in college. Movies like that never explained what was
going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films'
"reality." That was one way of thought, one way to look at things, no doubt, but it felt strange
for me, as a real, live human being, to enter such a world.
I am of average build, so neither suit had to be altered other than to adjust the sleeves and
pant legs. The woman picked out three dress shirts and three ties to match each shirt, then two
belts and a half-dozen pairs of socks. She paid with a credit card and ordered them to deliver
everything to my place. She seemed to have some kind of clear image in her mind of how I
should look. It took her no time to pick out what she bought me. I would have spent more
time at a stationer's, picking out a new eraser. But I had to admit that her good taste in clothes
was nothing short of astounding. The color and style of every shirt and tie she chose
seemingly at random were perfectly coordinated, as if she had selected them after long,
careful consideration. Nor were the combinations she came up with the least bit ordinary.
Next, she took me to a shoe store and bought me two pairs of shoes to go with the suits.
This took no time, either. Again she paid with a credit card and asked for the items to be
delivered to my house. Delivery seemed hardly necessary in the case of a couple of pairs of
shoes, but this was apparently her way of doing things: pick things out fast, pay with a credit
card, and have the stuff delivered.
Next, we went to a watchmaker's and repeated the process. She bought me a stylish,
elegant watch with an alligator band to go with the suits, and again she took almost no time
picking it out. The price was somewhere up around fifty to sixty thousand yen. I had a cheap
plastic watch, but this was apparently not good enough for her. The watch, at least, she did
not have delivered. Instead, she had them wrap it and handed it to me without a word.
Next, she took me to a unisex hair salon. The place was like a dance studio, with shiny
wooden floors, and mirrors covering the walls. There were fifteen chairs, and everywhere
technicians were coming and going with shears and hairbrushes and whatnot in their hands.
Potted plants stood at various points on the floor, and from two black Bose speakers on the
ceiling came the faint sounds of one of those wandering Keith Jarrett piano solos. I was
shown to a chair immediately. The woman must have set up an appointment for me from one
of the stores we had visited. She gave detailed instructions to the thin man who would be
cutting my hair. They obviously knew each other. As he responded to each of her instructions,
he kept his eyes on my face in the mirror with an expression he might have worn studying a
bowlful of celery fibers he was expected to eat. He had a face like the young Solzhenitsyn.
The woman said to him, "I'll be back when you're through," and left the salon with quick
steps.
The man said very little as he cut my hair-"This way, please," when it was time for my
shampoo, "Excuse me," when he brushed off clippings. At times when he moved away, I
would reach out from under the barber cloth and touch the mark on my right cheek. This was
the first time I had ever seen it in mirrors other than my own at home. The wall-sized mirrors
reflected the images of many people, my image among them. And on my face shone this
bright blue mark. It didn't seem ugly or unclean to me. It was simply part of me, something I
would have to accept. I could feel people looking at it now and then-looking at its reflection
in the mirror. But there were too many images in the mirror for me to be able to tell who. I


just felt their eyes trained on the mark.
My haircut ended in half an hour. My hair, which had been growing longer and longer
since I left my job, was short once again. I moved to one of the chairs along the wall and sat
there listening to music and reading a magazine in which I had no interest until the woman
came back. She seemed pleased with my new hairstyle. She took a ten-thousand-yen note
from her purse, paid the bill, and led me outside. There she came to a stop and studied me
from head to toe, exactly the same way I always examined the cat, as if to see whether there
was something she had forgotten to do. Apparently, there was not. Then she glanced at her
gold watch and released a kind of sigh. It was nearly seven o'clock.
"Let's have dinner," she said. "Can you eat?"
I had had one slice of toast for breakfast and one doughnut for lunch. "Probably," I said.
She took me to a nearby Italian restaurant. They seemed to know her there. Without a
word, we were shown to a quiet table in the back. As soon as I sat down across from her, she
ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told,
saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I
hope it can find me, I thought. There was nothing special in my pockets: keys, handkerchief,
wallet. She observed them with no show of interest, then picked up the wallet and looked
inside. It contained about fifty-five hundred yen in cash, a telephone card, an ATM card, and
my ward pool ID, nothing else. Nothing unusual. Nothing to prompt anyone to smell it or
measure it or shake it or dip it in water or hold it up to the light. She handed it back to me
with no change of expression.
"I want you to go out tomorrow and buy a dozen handkerchiefs, a new wallet and key
holder," she said. "That much you can pick out yourself, I'm sure. And when was the last time
you bought yourself new underwear?"
I thought about it for a moment but couldn't remember. "I can't remember," I said. "It's
been a while, I think, but I'm a little clean-crazy, and for a man living alone, I'm good about
doing my laund-"
"Never mind. I want you to buy a dozen tops and bottoms."
I nodded without speaking.
"Just bring me a receipt. I'll pay for them. And make sure you buy the best they have. I'll
pay your cleaning bills too. Don't wear a shirt more than once without sending it to the
cleaner's. All right?"
I nodded again. The cleaner by the station would be happy to hear this. But, I thought to
myself, proceeding to extend this one, concise conjunction, clinging to the window by surface
tension, into a proper, full-length sentence: "But why are you doing all this-buying me a
whole new wardrobe, paying for my haircuts and cleaning?"
She did not answer me. Instead, she took a Virginia Slim from her pocketbook and put it
in her mouth. A tall waiter with regular features appeared from nowhere and, with practiced
movements, lit her cigarette with a match. He struck the match with a clean, dry sound-the
kind of sound that could stimulate a person's appetite. When he was through, he presented us
with menus. She did not bother to look, however, and she told the waiter not to bother with
the day's specials. "Bring me a salad and a dinner roll, and some kind of fish with white meat.
Just a few drops of dressing on the salad, and a dash of pepper. And a glass of sparkling
water, no ice."
I didn't want to bother looking at the menu. "I'll have the same," I said. The waiter
bowed and withdrew. My reality was still having trouble locating me, it seemed.
"I'm asking purely out of curiosity," I said, trying once more to elicit an explanation from
her. "I'm not turning critical after you've bought me all these things, but is it really worth all
the time and trouble and money?"
Still she would not answer.
"I'm just curious," I said again.


Again no answer. She was too busy looking at the oil painting on the wall to answer my
question. It was a picture of what I assumed was an Italian landscape, with a well-pruned pine
tree, and several reddish farmhouses lining the hills. The houses were all somewhat small but
pleasant. I wondered what kind of people might live in such houses: probably normal people
living normal lives. None of them had inscrutable women coming out of nowhere to buy them
suits and shoes and watches. None of them had to calculate the huge funds they would need to
get possession of some dried-up well. I felt a stab of envy for people living in such a normal
world. Envy is not an emotion I feel very often, but the scene in the painting aroused that
sense in me to an almost amazing degree. If only I could have entered the picture right then
and there! If only I could have walked into one of those farmhouses, enjoyed a glass of wine,
then crawled under the covers and gone to sleep without a thought in my head!
The waiter came before long and placed glasses of sparkling water in front of the woman
and me. She crushed out her cigarette in an ashtray.
"Why don't you ask me something else?" she said.
While I was thinking about something else to ask, she took a sip of her sparkling water.
"Was that young man in the office in Akasaka your son?" I asked.
"Of course," she answered without hesitation.
"Is he unable to speak?"
The woman nodded. "He never spoke much to begin with, but all of a sudden, at the age
of six, he stopped speaking entirely. He stopped using his voice in any way."
"Was there some kind of reason for that?"
She ignored this question. I tried to think of another. "If he doesn't talk, how does he
manage to take care of business?"
She wrinkled her brow just the slightest bit. She had not ignored my question, but she
obviously had no intention of answering it.
"I'll bet you picked out everything he was wearing, from head to foot. The way you did
with me."
"I do not like it when people wear the wrong thing. That is all. It is something I simply
cannot- cannot- abide. I at least want the people around me to dress as well as possible. I want
everything about them to look right, whether or not it can actually be seen."
"I guess you don't like my appendix, then," I said, trying to make a joke.
"Do you have some problem with the shape of your appendix?" she asked, looking
straight at me with an utterly serious expression. I regretted the joke.
"Nothing at the moment," I said. "I didn't really mean anything by it. It was just a kind of
'for instance.' "
She kept her questioning stare fixed on me a while longer-she was probably thinking
about my appendix.
"So anyhow, I want the people around me to look right, even if I have to pay for it myself.
That is all there is to it. So don't let it worry you. I am doing this entirely for myself. I feel a
personal, almost physical, revulsion for messy clothing."
"The way a musician can't stand hearing music played off key?"
"Something like that."
"So do you buy clothing this way for all the people around you?"
"I guess I do. Not that I have so many people around me, to begin with. I mean, I may not
like what they wear, but I can't exactly buy clothing for all the people in the world now, can
I?"
"Everything has its limits," I said.
"Exactly."





Soon our salads came to the table, and we ate them. As the woman had specified, each
salad had no more than a few drops of dressing-so few you could have counted them on one
hand.
"Do you have anything else you want to ask me?" she asked.
"I'd like to know your name," I said. "I mean, it would be helpful if you had a name or
something I could use."
She said nothing for a few moments, as she crunched on a radish. Then she formed a deep
wrinkle between her eyebrows, as if she had just found something bitter in her mouth by
mistake. "Why would you have to use my name? You won't be writing me any letters, I'm
sure. Names are, if anything, irrelevant."
"But what if I have to call you from behind, for example? I'd need your name for that."
She laid her fork in her plate and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. "I see what you
mean," she said. "That never crossed my mind. You're right, though. You might very well
need my name in a situation like that."
She sat there thinking for a long time. While she was thinking, I ate my salad.
"Let's see, now: you need a suitable name you can use for things like calling me from
behind, correct?"
"That's pretty much it."
"So it doesn't have to be my real name, correct?"
I nodded.
"A name, a name ... what kind of name would be best?"
"Something simple, something easy to call out, I would think. If possible, something
concrete, something real, some thing you can really touch and see. That way, it would be easy
to remember."
"For example?"
"For example, I call my cat Mackerel. In fact, I just named him yesterday."
"Mackerel," she said aloud, as if to confirm the sound of the word. Then she stared at the
salt and pepper shakers on the table for a while, raised her face to me, and said, "Nutmeg."
"Nutmeg?"
"It just popped into my head. You can call me that, if you don't mind."
"No, I don't mind at all. So what should I call your son?"
"Cinnamon."
"Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme," I said, with a hint of melody.
"Nutmeg Akasaka and Cinnamon Akasaka. Not bad, don't you think?"
Nutmeg Akasaka and Cinnamon Akasaka: Wouldn't May Kasahara have been shocked if
she knew that I had made the acquaintance of such people! "For heaven's sake, Mr. Wind-Up
Bird, why can't you ever get involved with people who are a little more normal?" Indeed,
why not, May Kasahara? It was a question I could never have answered.
"Come to think of it," I said, "last year I met two women named Malta Kano and Creta
Kano. As a result of which, all kinds of things happened to me. Neither of them is around
anymore, though."
Nutmeg gave a little nod but offered no opinion in response.
"They just disappeared somewhere," I added feebly. "Like the dew on a summer
morning." Or like a star at daybreak.
She brought a forkful of something that looked like chicory to her mouth. Then, as if
suddenly recalling a promise made long before, she shot her hand out and took a drink of
water.
"Don't you want to know about that money? The money you got the day before
yesterday? Am I wrong?"
"No, you are not wrong. I would very much like to know about that."
"I don't mind telling you, but it could be a very long story."


"One that would end by dessert?"
"Probably not," said Nutmeg Akasaka.