Free The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

boring. And that’s a good thing. I mean, the world’s full of things we can’t explain, and somebody’s got to fill that vacuum. Better to have somebody who isn’t boring than somebody who is. Right? Like Mr. Honda, for example.”
    Kumiko laughed out loud at the mention of Mr. Honda. “He was a wonderful old man, don’t you think? I liked him a lot.”
    “Me too,” I said.
    •
    For about a year after we were married, Kumiko and I used to visit the home of old Mr. Honda once a month. A practitioner of spirit possession, he was one of the Wataya family’s favorite channeler types, but he was terrifically hard of hearing. Even with his hearing aid, he could barely make out what we said to him. We had to shout so loud our voices would rattle the shoji paper. I used to wonder if he could hear what the spirits said to him if he was so hard of hearing. But maybe it worked the other way: the worse your ears, the better you could hear the words of the spirits. He hadlost his hearing in the war. A noncommissioned officer with Japan’s Manchurian garrison, the Kwantung Army, he had suffered burst eardrums when an artillery shell or a hand grenade or something exploded nearby during a battle with a combined Soviet-Outer Mongolian unit at Nomonhan on the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchuria.
    Our visits to Mr. Honda’s place were not prompted by a belief on our part in his spiritual powers. I had never been interested in these things, and Kumiko placed far less trust in such supernatural matters than either her parents or her brother. She did have a touch of superstition, and she could be upset by an ominous prognostication, but she never went out of her way to involve herself in spiritual affairs.
    The only reason we went to see Mr. Honda was because her father ordered us to. It was the one condition he set for us to marry. True, it was a rather bizarre condition, but we went along with it to avoid complications. Neither of us had expected an easy time from her family. Her father was a government official. The younger son of a not very well-to-do farm family in Niigata, he had attended prestigious Tokyo University on scholarship, graduated with honors, and become an elite member of the Ministry of Transport. This was all very admirable, as far as I was concerned. But as is so often the case with men who have made it like this, he was arrogant and self-righteous. Accustomed to giving orders, he harbored not the slightest doubt concerning the values of the world to which he belonged. For him, hierarchy was everything. He bowed to superior authority without question, and he trampled those beneath him without hesitation. Neither Kumiko nor I believed that a man like that would accept a poor, twenty-four-year-old nobody like me, without position or pedigree or even decent grades or future promise, as a marriage partner for his daughter. We figured that after her parents turned us down, we’d get married on our own and live without having anything to do with them.
    Still, I did the right thing. I formally went to ask Kumiko’s parents for her hand in marriage. To say that their reception of me was cool would be an understatement. The doors of all the world’s refrigerators seemed to have been thrown open at once.
    That they gave us their permission in the end—with reluctance, but in a near-miraculous turn of events—was thanks entirely to Mr. Honda. He asked them everything they had learned about me, and in the end he declared that if their daughter was going to get married, I was the best possible partner for her; that if she wanted to marry me, they could only invite terrible consequences by opposing the match. Kumiko’s parentshad absolute faith in Mr. Honda at the time, and so there was nothing they could do but accept me as their daughter’s husband.
    Finally, though, I was always the outsider, the uninvited guest. Kumiko and I would visit their home and have dinner with them twice a month with mechanical