It all began when the cat disappeared. My wife, Kumiko, named him Noboru Wataya, after her brother, a man I could never stand. One morning, while I was boiling spaghetti and listening to Rossini, the phone rang. It was a woman I didn't know, asking for ten minutes of my time so that we could “understand each other.” Then Kumiko called, asking me to look for the cat, certain it was in the alley behind our house. And so, with nothing better to do since quitting my job at a law firm, I climbed over the cinder-block wall into a strange, forgotten passage that ran between the neighborhood gardens. Every day, from a nearby treetop, I'd hear the cry of a bird we called the wind-up bird, a sound like a spring being wound, cranking up the gears of our quiet little world. But now, it seemed, the spring was beginning to unwind.
The alley led me to a vacant house with a stone bird statue in its overgrown yard, and to a girl named May Kasahara. She was sixteen, with a slight limp and a scar near her eye from a motorcycle accident. She sat in her yard, watching the world with a detached curiosity, asking me strange questions. “If you were in love with a girl and she turned out to have six fingers, what would you do?” she asked. “What if she had four breasts?” She spoke of death as a small, hard core inside the body that she wanted to cut open and examine. In the heat of the afternoon, I dozed in a deck chair in her yard, and she whispered in my ear about the squishy texture of death, her voice weaving into the oppressive silence of the neighborhood. The cat was nowhere to be found, but I had found something else: a dry well in the vacant house's yard, a dark, waterless hole that seemed to be waiting for something.
My ordinary life was slipping away, replaced by a series of bizarre encounters. A woman named Malta Kano, summoned by my brother-in-law to find the cat, met me in a hotel tearoom. She wore a red vinyl hat and spoke of mystical waters on the island of Malta and the “elements of the body.” She told me her younger sister, Creta, had been defiled by Noboru Wataya. “We live in a violent and chaotic world,” she said, her eyes lacking all depth. “And within this world, there are places that are still more violent, still more chaotic.” She held my palm and told me the disappearance of the cat was only the beginning. Soon after, Kumiko vanished. She left without a word, taking only a blouse and skirt she'd picked up from the cleaner's on her way to work.
A letter arrived from an old soldier named Lieutenant Mamiya, an acquaintance of a fortune-teller I once knew. He came to my house to deliver a keepsake from the deceased man - an empty box - and stayed to tell me a story. He spoke of his time as a young officer in Manchuria before the war, of a secret mission across the border into Outer Mongolia. He told me of being captured by Soviet troops and watching his commander being skinned alive by a Mongolian officer. “They do a small area at a time,” the Russian officer had explained. “They have to work slowly if they want to remove the skin cleanly.” Thrown into a dry well and left for dead, Mamiya had survived, but he spoke of a brilliant light that flooded the bottom of the well for a few seconds each day, a light in which he felt he had burned away the very core of his life.
To find Kumiko, or perhaps to find myself, I began to descend into the dry well in the vacant house's yard. I bought a rope ladder and lowered myself into the cool, silent darkness. Down there, cut off from the world, time seemed to warp and memories grew vivid. I thought of the first time I met Kumiko, our first date at an aquarium where she stared, mesmerized, at the jellyfish. “The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this,” she had told me, “and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.” In the well, I began to have strange, vivid dreams of a hotel room, numbered 208, where I would meet Creta Kano. And one morning, after a night spent in the well, I woke to find a strange, bluish mark on my right cheek, like a bruise the size of a baby's palm.
My brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, began to close in. Now a popular politician, his face was everywhere. He sent a grotesque, misshapen man named Ushikawa to see me, offering a deal: if I gave up my connection to the vacant house and its well, he would help me find Kumiko. I refused. My search had become a quiet war against him, a man who seemed to be a creature of pure corruption, a hollow man who thrived on defiling others. The well was now my only territory, my only weapon. I bought the land with money given to me by a mysterious, elegant woman named Nutmeg Akasaka, who seemed to see the mark on my face as a sign of a special power.
Night after night, I descended into the well. In the total darkness, I would try to pass through the wall into that other world, into Room 208. I knew Kumiko, or some part of her, was trapped there. One night, I finally broke through. I found myself in the dark hotel room, a baseball bat in my hand. Someone else was there, a man with a knife. We fought in the pitch blackness. I felt the blade slice my cheek, right where the mark was. I swung the bat and felt it connect with his skull, a sound like a watermelon splitting open. I had killed him, this shadow creature, this embodiment of Noboru Wataya's defilement. The spell seemed to be broken, but when I called out for Kumiko, she was gone.
The well began to fill with water, its long silence broken. As the water rose around me, I felt my strength leave me, the world fading to black. It was Cinnamon, Nutmeg's silent, graceful son, who pulled me out. When I recovered, I learned that Noboru Wataya had collapsed from a stroke at the exact moment of our struggle in the other world. He was left in a coma, a man trapped inside his own darkness. The mark on my face had vanished, healed by the knife's cut. And then, a final message from Kumiko appeared on Cinnamon's computer. She was going to the hospital to unplug her brother's life support. “I have to kill my brother, Noboru Wataya,” she wrote. “I have to do it for his sake too. And to give my own life meaning.”
After she killed him, Kumiko went to prison. She refused to see me, wanting to serve her time in peace. The world slowly settled back into a kind of quiet normalcy. The strange women - Malta, Creta, Nutmeg - disappeared from my life. May Kasahara went back to school. One day, the cat came home, his tail just as I remembered it. I sit on my veranda, waiting. The wind-up bird has not returned, but I listen for it. Its spring is wound, and the world, for now, continues to turn.
