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

regularity. This was a truly loathsome experience, situated at the precise midpoint between a meaningless mortification of the flesh and brutal torture. Throughout the meal, I had the sense that their dining room table was as long as a railway station. They would be eating and talking about something way down at the other end, and I was too far away for them to see. This went on for a year, until Kumiko’s father and I had a violent argument, after which we never saw each other again. The relief this gave me bordered on ecstasy. Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.
    For a time after our marriage, though, I did exert myself to keep relations between us on a good footing. And without a doubt, the least painful of my exertions were those monthly meetings with Mr. Honda.
    All payments to Mr. Honda were made by Kumiko’s father. We merely had to visit Mr. Honda’s home in Meguro once a month with a big bottle of sake, listen to what he had to tell us, and go home. Simple.
    We took to Mr. Honda immediately. He was a nice old man, whose face would light up whenever he saw the sake we had brought him. We liked everything about him—except perhaps for the way he left his television on full blast because he was so hard of hearing.
    We always went to his house in the morning. Winter and summer, he sat with his legs down in the sunken hearth. In winter he would have a quilt wrapped around his waist to hold in the heat of the charcoal fire. In summer he used neither quilt nor fire. He was apparently a rather famous fortune-teller, but he lived very simply—even ascetically. His house was small, with a tiny entrance hall barely big enough for one person at a time to tie or untie a pair of shoes. The tatami mats on his floors were badly worn, and cracked windowpanes were patched with tape. Across the lane stood an auto repair shop, where there was always someone yelling at the top of his lungs. Mr. Honda wore a kimono styled midway between a sleeping robe and a traditional workman’s jacket. It gave no evidence of having been washed in the recent past. He lived alone and had a woman come in to do the cooking and cleaning. For some reason, though, he never let her launder his robe. Scraggly white whiskers hung on his sunken cheeks.
    If there was anything in Mr. Honda’s house that could be called impressive,it was the huge color television set. In such a tiny house, its gigantic presence was overwhelming. It was always tuned to the government-supported NHK network. Whether this was because he loved NHK, or he couldn’t be bothered to change the channel, or this was a special set that received only NHK, I had no way of telling, but NHK was all he ever watched.
    Instead of a flower arrangement or a calligraphic scroll, the living room’s ceremonial alcove was filled with this huge television set, and Mr. Honda always sat facing it, stirring the divining sticks on the table atop his sunken hearth while NHK continued to blast out cooking shows, bonsai care instructions, news updates, and political discussions.
    “Legal work might be the wrong thing for you, sonny,” said Mr. Honda one day, either to me or to someone standing twenty yards behind me.
    “It might?”
    “Yep, it might. The law presides over things of this world, finally. The world where shadow is shadow and light is light, yin is yin and yang is yang, I’m me and he’s him. ‘I am me and / He is him: / Autumn eve.’ But
you
don’t belong to that world, sonny. The world you belong to is above that or below that.”
    “Which is better?” I asked, out of simple curiosity. “Above or below?”
    “It’s not that either one is better,” he said. After a brief coughing fit, he spat a glob of phlegm onto a tissue and studied it closely before crumpling the tissue and throwing it into a wastebasket. “It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re