38



The W i n d - U p Bird Chronicle #17
(K u m i k o ' s Letter)

*


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. It's 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 anyone 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 brother's influence.
He may have opened some kind of drawer inside me, taken out some kind of in-
comprehensible 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 dis ease. 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-tho ugh 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.
I often used to dream of you- vivid dreams with clear-cut stories. In these dreams,
you were always searching desperately for me. We were in a kind of labyrinth, and you
would come almost up to where I was standing "Take one more step! I'm right here!" I
wanted to shout, and if only you would find me and take me in your arms, the nightmare
would end and everything would go back to the way it was. But I was never able to pro-
duce that shout. And you would miss me in the darkness and go straight ahead past me
and disappear. It was always like that. But still, those dreams helped and encouraged me.
At least I still had the power to dream, I knew. My brother couldn't prevent me from
doing that. I was able to sense that you were doing everything in your power to draw
nearer to me. Maybe someday you would find me, and hold me, and sweep away the filth
that was clinging to me, and take me away from that place forever. Maybe you would
smash the curse and set the seal so that the real me would never have to leave again. That
was how I was able to keep a tiny flame of hope alive in that cold, dark place with no
exit - how I was able to preserve the slightest remnant of my own voice.
I received the password for access to this computer this afternoon. Someone sent it to
me special delivery. I am sending you this message from the machine in my brother's
office. I hope it reaches you.



I have run out of time. The taxi is waiting for me outside. I have to leave for the
hospital now, to kill my brother and take my punishment. Strange, I no longer hate my
brother. I am calm with the thought that I will have to obliterate his life from this world. I
have to do it for his sake too. And to give my own life meaning.
Take good care of the cat. I can't tell you how happy I am that he is back. You say his
name is Mackerel? I like that. He was always a symbol of something good that grew up
between us. We should not have lost him when we did.

I can't write anymore now. Goodbye.