The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami Read Free Book Online Page A

woman—”
    “Just do what she tells you, will you, please? Understand? This is serious business. I want you to stay home and wait for her call. Gotta go.”
    And she went.
    •
    When the phone rang at two-thirty, I was napping on the couch. At first I thought I was hearing the alarm clock. I reached out to push the button, but the clock was not there. I wasn’t in bed but was on the couch, and it wasn’t morning but afternoon. I got up and went to the phone.
    “Hello,” I said.
    “Hello,” said a woman’s voice. It was the woman who had called in the morning. “Mr. Toru Okada?”
    “That’s me. Toru Okada.”
    “Sir, my name is Kano,” she said.
    “The lady who called before.”
    “That is correct. I am afraid I was terribly rude. But tell me, Mr. Okada, would you by any chance be free this afternoon?”
    “You might say that.”
    “Well, in that case, I know this is terribly sudden, but do you think it might be possible for us to meet?”
    “When? Today? Now?”
    “Yes.”
    I looked at my watch. Not that I really had to—I had looked at it thirty seconds earlier—but just to make sure. And it was still two-thirty.
    “Will it take long?” I asked.
    “Not so very long, I think. I could be wrong, though. At this moment in time, it is difficult for me to say with complete accuracy. I am sorry.”
    No matter how long it might take, I had no choice. Kumiko had told me to do as the woman said: that it was serious business. If she said it was serious business, then it was serious business, and I had better do as I was told.
    “I see,” I said. “Where should we meet?”
    “Would you by any chance be acquainted with the Pacific Hotel, across from Shinagawa Station?”
    “I would.”
    “There is a tearoom on the first floor. I shall be waiting there for you at four o’clock if that would be all right with you, sir.”
    “Fine,” I said.
    “I am thirty-one years old, and I shall be wearing a red vinyl hat.”
    Terrific. There was something weird about the way this woman talked, something that confused me momentarily. But I could not have said exactly what made it so weird. Nor was there any law against a thirty-one-year-old woman’s wearing a red vinyl hat.
    “I see,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll find you.”
    “I wonder, Mr. Okada, if you would be so kind as to tell me of any external distinguishing characteristics in your own case.”
    I tried to think of any “external distinguishing characteristics” I might have. Did I in fact have any?
    “I’m thirty, I’m five foot nine, a hundred and forty pounds, short hair, no glasses.” It occurred to me as I listed these for her that they hardly constituted external distinguishing characteristics. There could be fifty such men in the Pacific Hotel tearoom. I had been there before, and it was a big place. She needed something more noticeable. But I couldn’t think of anything. Which is not to say that I didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics. I owned a signed copy of Miles Davis’s
Sketches of Spain
. I had a slow resting pulse rate: forty-seven normally, and no higher than seventy with a high fever. I was out of work. I knew the names of all the brothers Karamazov. But none of these distinguishing characteristics was external.
    “What might you be wearing?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t decided yet. This is so sudden.”
    “Then please wear a polka-dot necktie,” she said decisively. “Do you think you might have a polka-dot necktie, sir?”
    “I think I do,” I said. I had a navy-blue tie with tiny cream polka dots. Kumiko had given it to me for my birthday a few years earlier.
    “Please be so kind as to wear it, then,” she said. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me at four o’clock.” And she hung up.
    •
    I opened the wardrobe and looked for my polka-dot tie. There was no sign of it on the tie rack. I looked in all the drawers. I looked in all the clothes storage boxes in the closet. No