Zoo Attack By Haruki Murakami

THE ZOO ATTACK by MURAKAMI Haruki
translated by Jay Rubin


Her tone calm and steady, Nutmeg Akasaka told me the story of the tigers, the leopards, the wolves, and the bears that were shot by soldiers on a miserably hot afternoon in August 1945. She narrated with such order and clarity that I felt as if I were watching a documentary film of the events. She left nothing vague. Yet she herself had not actually witnessed the spectacle. While it was happening, she was standing on the deck of a transport ship carrying refugee settlers home to Japan from Manchuria. What she had actually witnessed was the surfacing of an American submarine.

Like everyone else, she and the other children had come up from the unbearable steam bath of the ship's hold to lean against the deck rail and enjoy the gentle breezes that moved across the calm, unbroken sea, when, all at once, the submarine came floating to the surface as if it were part of a dream. First the radio and radar antennas and the periscope broke the surface. Then the conning tower came up, raising a wake as it cut through the water. And finally the entire dripping mass of steel exposed its graceful nakedness to the summer sun.

The submarine ran parallel to the ship for a while, as if stalking its prey. Soon a hatch opened, and one crew member, then another and another climbed onto the deck, moving slowly, almost sluggishly. From the conning-tower deck, the officers examined every detail of the transport ship through huge binoculars, whose lenses would flash every now and then in the sunlight. The transport ship was full of civilians heading back to Japan, their destination the port of Sasebo. The majority were women and children, the families of Japanese officials in the puppet Manchukuo government and of high-ranking personnel of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway, fleeing to the homeland from the chaos that would follow the Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Rather than face the inevitable horror, they had been willing to accept the risk of attack by an American submarine on the open sea-until now, at least.

The submarine officers were checking to see if the transport ship was unarmed and without a naval escort. They had nothing to fear. The Americans now had command of the air, too. Okinawa had fallen, and Japan had pulled in its fighter planes to defend the home islands. No need for the Americans to panic: time was on their side. A petty officer barked orders, and three sailors spun the cranks that turned the deck gun until it was aimed at the transport ship. Two other crewmen opened the rear-deck hatch and hauled up heavy shells to feed the gun. Yet another squad of crewmen, with practiced movements, were loading a machine gun they had set on a raised part of the deck near the conning tower.

That and the deck gun were more than enough to sink the rotting old freighter that had been refitted as a transport ship. The submarine carried only a limited number of torpedoes, and these had to be reserved for encounters with armed convoys.

The crew all wore combat helmets, though a few of the men were naked from the waist up and nearly half were wearing short pants. If she stared hard at them, Nutmeg could see brilliant tattoos inscribed on their arms. If she stared hard, she could see lots of things. She dung to the deck rail and watched as the gun's black barrel pivoted in her direction. Dripping wet only moments earlier, it had been baked dry in the summer sun. At home in Hsin-ching, she had never seen such an enormous gun.

The submarine flashed a signal lamp at the freighter: "Heave to. Attack to commence. Immediately evacuate all passengers to lifeboats." (Nutmeg could not read the signal lamp, of course, but in retrospect she understood it perfectly.) But there were not enough lifeboats aboard the transport ship. In fact, there were only two small boats for more than five hundred passengers and crew members. There were hardly any life vests or life buoys aboard.

Gripping the deck rail, holding her breath, Nutmeg stared transfixed at the streamlined submarine. It shone as if brand-new, without a speck of rust. She saw the white-painted numerals on the conning tower. She saw the radar antenna rotating above it. She saw the sandy-haired officer with dark glasses.

This submarine has come up-from the bottom of the ocean to kill us all, she thought, but there's nothing strange about that, it could happen anytime. It has nothing to do with the war; it could happen to anyone anywhere. Everybody thinks it's happening because of the war. But that's not true. The war is just one of the things that could happen.

Face to face with the submarine and its huge gun, Nutmeg felt no trace of fear. Her mother was shouting at her, but the words made no sense. Then the felt something grab her wrists and pull on them. But her hands stayed locked on the deck rail. The roar of voices all around her began to move far away, as if someone were turning down the volume on a radio. I m so sleepy, she thought. So sleepy. Why am I so sleepy? She closed her eyes, and her consciousness rushed away, leaving the deck far behind.

Nutmeg was seeing Japanese soldiers as they moved through the extensive zoo, shooting any animal that could attack human beings. The officer gave his order, and the bullets from the Model 38 rifles ripped through the smooth hide of a tiger, tearing at the animal's guts. The summer sky was blue, and from the surrounding trees the screams of cicadas rained down like a sudden shower.

The soldiers never spoke. The blood was gone from their sunburned faces. They looked like pictures painted on ancient urns. A few days from now—at most, a week—the main force of the Soviet Far East Command would arrive in Hsin-ching. There was no way to stop the advance. Ever since the war began, the crack troops and once abundant equipment of the Kwantung Army had been drained away to support the widening southern front, and now the greater part of both had sunk to the bottom of the sea or was rotting in the depths of the jungle. The tanks were gone. The anti-tank guns were gone. All but a handful of the troop transport trucks had broken down, and there were no spare parts. Large numbers of troops remained, but there were not enough rifles left to arm every man, nor bullets enough to load every rifle. The great Kwantung Army, Bulwark of the North, had been reduced to a paper tiger. The proud Soviet mechanized units that had crushed the German Army were completing their transfer by rail to the Far Eastern front, with plenty of equipment and with spirits high. The collapse of Manchukuo was imminent.

Everyone knew this to be the truth, the Kwantung Army command most of all. And so the generals evacuated their main force to the rear, in effect abandoning both the small border garrisons and the Japanese civilian homesteaders. These unarmed farmers were slaughtered by the Soviet Army, which was advancing too rapidly to take prisoners. Many women chose—or were forced to choose—mass suicide over rape. Members of the general staff and other high-ranking officers arranged to have themselves "transferred" to new headquarters in Tonghua, near the Korean border, and the puppet emperor Henry Pu-yi and his family threw everything they could get their hands on into trunks and left Hsin-ching by private train. Most of the Chinese soldiers in the Manchukuo Army units assigned to defend the capital deserted as soon as they heard the Soviets were invading, or else they staged revolts and shot their Japanese commanding officers. They had no intention of laying down their lives for Japan in a struggle against superior Soviet troops.

The eight soldiers dispatched to the zoo had resigned themselves to their fate. A few days hence, they assumed, they would die fighting the Soviet Army. All they could do was pray that their deaths would not be too painful. None of them wanted to be crushed under the treads of a slow-moving tank or roasted in a trench by flamethrowers or die by degrees with a bullet in the stomach. Better to be shot in the head or the heart. But first they had to kill these animals in the zoo.

If possible, they were to kill the animals with poison in order to conserve what few bullets they had left.

The young lieutenant in charge of the operation had been so instructed by his superior officer and told that the zoo had been given enough poison to do the job.

The zoo's director confirmed that he indeed had orders to "liquidate" the fiercer animals in case of an emergency and to use poison, but the shipment of poison, he said, had never arrived. When the lieutenant heard this, he became confused. He was an accountant assigned to the paymaster's office, and until he was dragged away from his desk at headquarters for this emergency detail he had never once been put in charge of a detachment of men.

"Bureaucratic work is always like this, Lieutenant," said the zoo director, a man several years his senior, who looked at him with a touch of pity. "The things you need are never there."

To check further into the matter, the director called in the zoo's chief veterinarian, a tall, handsome man in his late thirties. The veterinarian told the lieutenant that the zoo had only a very small amount of poison, probably not enough to kill a horse.

The lieutenant telephoned headquarters for instructions, but since the Soviet Army had crossed the border several days earlier, most of the high-ranking officers had disappeared. The few remaining had their hands full burning documents or leading troops out to dig and-tank trenches. The major who had given the lieutenant his orders was nowhere to be found. The call was transferred from one office to another until a medial-corps colonel got on the line, only to scream at the lieutenant, "You stupid son of a bitch! The whole goddam country's going down the drain and you're asking me about a goddam fucking zoo? Who gives a shit?"

Who indeed? thought the lieutenant. Certainly not he. Now he was faced with two options. He could forget about killing any animals and lead his men out of there, or they could use bullets to do the job.

Either would be a violation of the orders he had been given, but in the end he decided to do the shooting.

That way, he might later be reprimanded for having wasted valuable ammunition, but at least the goal of liquidating the more dangerous animals would have been met. If, on the other hand, he chose not to kill the animals, he might be court-martialled for having failed to carry out orders. There was some doubt whether there would even be any courts-martial at this late stage of the war, but, after all, orders were orders. So long as the Army continued to exist, its orders had to be carried out.

If possible, I'd rather not kill any animals, the lieutenant told himself in all honesty. But the zoo was running out of things to feed them, and most of the animals (especially the big ones) were already suffering from starvation. Shooting might even be easier for the animals themselves—a quick, clean death. And if starving animals were to escape to the city streets during intense fighting or air strikes, a disaster would be unavoidable.

The director then handed the lieutenant a list of animals for "emergency liquidation" that he had been instructed to compile, along with a map of the zoo. The handsome veterinarian and two Chinese workers were assigned to accompany the firing squad. The lieutenant glanced at the list and was relieved to find it shorter than he had imagined. Among the animals slated for liquidation, though, were two Indian elephants.

"Elephants?" the lieutenant gasped. How in the hell are we supposed to kill elephants? he thought. We'd need a tank for that.

Given the layout of the zoo, the first animals to be liquidated were the tigers. The elephants would be left for last, in any case. The plaque on the tiger cage explained that the pair had been captured in Manchuria in the Greater Khingan mountains. The lieutenant assigned four men to each tiger and told them to aim for the heart—the where-abouts of which was just another mystery to him. Oh, well, at least one bullet was bound to hit home. When eight men together pulled back on the levers of their Model 38s and loaded cartridge into each chamber, the ominous, dry clicks transformed the whole atmosphere of the place. The tigers stood up at the sound. Glaring at the soldiers through the iron bars, they let out huge roars. As an extra precaution, the lieutenant drew his own automatic pistol and released the safety.

To calm himself, he cleared his throat. This is nothing, he tried to tell himself. Everybody does stuff like this all the time.

The soldiers knelt, took careful aim, and, at the lieutenant's command, pulled their triggers. The recoil shook their shoulders, and for a moment their minds went empty, as if flicked away. The roar of the simultaneous shots reverberated through the deserted zoo, echoing from building to building, wall to wall, slicing through wooded areas, crossing water surfaces, a stab to the hearts of all who heard it, like distant thunder. The animals held their breath. Even the cicadas stopped crying. Long after the echo of gunfire faded into the distance, there was not a sound to be heard. As if they had been whacked with a huge club by an invisible giant, the tigers shot up into the air for a moment, then landed on the floor of the cage with a great thud, writhing in agony, vomiting blood. The soldiers
had failed to finish the tigers off with a single volley. They snapped out of their trance and pulled back on their rifle levers, ejecting spent shells and taking aim again.

The lieutenant sent one of his men into the cage to verify that both tigers were dead. They were certainly looked dead—eyes closed, teeth bared, all movement gone. The veterinarian unlocked the cage, and the young soldier (he had just turned twenty) stepped inside fearfully, thrusting his bayonet ahead of him. It was an odd performance, but no one laughed. He gave a slight hick to one tiger's hindquarters with the heel of his boot. The tiger remained motionless. He kicked the same spot again, this time a little harder.

The tiger was dead without a doubt. The other tiger, the female, lay equally still. The young soldier had never visited a zoo in his life, nor had he ever seen a real tiger before. He felt only that he had been dragged into a place that had nothing to do with him and had been forced to perform an act there that had nothing to do with him. Standing in an ocean of black blood, he stared down at the tigers' corpses, entranced. They looked much bigger dead than they had alive. Why should that be? he asked himself, mystified.

The cage's concrete floor was suffused with the piercing smell of the big cats' urine, and mixed with it was the warm odor of blood. Blood was still gushing from the holes tom in the tigers bodies, forming a sticky black pond around his feet. All of a sudden, the rifle in his hands felt heavy and cold. He wanted to fling it away, bend down, and vomit the entire contents of his stomach onto the floor. What a relief it would have been! But vomiting was out of the question—the squad leader would beat his face out of shape. (Of course, this soldier had no idea that he would die seventeen months later when a Soviet guard in a mine near Irkutsk split his skull open with a shovel.) He wiped the
sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. His helmet was weighing down upon him. One cicada, then another began to cry again, as if finally revived. Soon their cries were joined by those of a bird—strangely distinctive cries, like the winding of a spring: Creeeak. Creeeak. When he was twelve, the young soldier had moved with his parents from a mountain village in Hokkaido across the sea to China, and together they had tilled the soil of a frontier village in Bei'an until a year ago, when he was drafted into the Army.

Thus he knew all the bird, of Manchuria, but, strangely, he had never heard a bird with that particular cry. Perhaps it was a bird imported from a distant land crying in its cage in another part of the zoo. Yet the sound seemed to come from the upper branches of a nearby tree.

He looked toward the lieutenant as if requesting instructions. The lieutenant nodded, ordered him out of the cage, and spread open the zoo map again. So much for the tigers, he thought. Next, we'll do the leopards. Then, maybe, the wolves. We've got bears to deal with, too. We'll think about the elephants when the others are done. And then he realized how hot it was. "Take a breather," he said to his men.

"Have some water." They drank from their canteens. Then they shouldered their rifles, took their places in formation, and headed for the leopard cage. The unknown bird with the insistent call went on winding its spring. The chests and backs of the men's short-sleeved military shirts were stained black with sweat.

As this formation of fully armed soldiers strode along, the clanking of all kinds of metallic objects sent hollow echoes throughout the deserted zoo. The monkeys clinging to the bars of their cages rent the air with their screams, sending frantic warnings to all the other animals, who joined the chores in their own distinctive way. The wolves sent long howls skyward, the birds contributed a wild flapping of wings, a large animal somewhere was slamming itself against its cage as if to send out a threat. A chunk of cloud shaped like a fist appeared out of nowhere and hid the sun for a short time. On that August afternoon, people, animals, everyone was thinking about death. Today, the men would be killing the animals tomorrow, Soviet troops would be killing the men. Probably.

The woman and I always sat across from each other at the same table in the same restaurant, talking. She was a regular there, and, of course, she always picked up the tab. With the kind of money I had, I probably couldn't have afforded an appetizer in such a place. The back part of the restaurant was divided into private compartments, so that the conversation at any one table could not be heard at another. There was only one seating per evening there, which meant that we could talk at leisure, right up to dosing time, without interference from anyone—including the waiters, who approached the table only to bring or clear a dish. She would always order a bottle of Burgundy of one particular vintage and always leave half the bottle unconsumed.

"A bird that winds a spring?" I asked, looking up from my food.

"A bird that winds a spring?" said the woman, who called herself Nutmeg. She repeated the words exactly as I had said them, then curled her lips just a little. "I don't understand what you're saying. What are you talking about?"

I took a sip of wine and wiped my mouth. "Wait a minute, didn't you just say something about a bird winding a spring?

"She shook her head slowly. "Hmm, now I can't remember. I don't think I said anything about a bird. A bird winding a spring? You mean some kind of toy bird?"

I could see it was hopeless. She always told her stories like this.

"So you were born in Manchuria, then?" I asked.

She shook her head again. "1 was born here, in Yokohama. My parents took me to Manchuria when I was three. My father was teaching at a school of veterinary medicine, but when the Hsin-ching city administrators wanted someone sent over from Japan a. chief veterinarian for the new zoo they were going to build, he volunteered for the job. My mother didn't want to abandon the settled life they had in Japan and go off to the ends of the earth, but my father insisted. Maybe he wanted to test himself in some place bigger and more open than Japan. I was so young it didn't matter where I was, but I really enjoyed living at the zoo. It was a wonderful life. My father always smelled like the animals. All
the different animal smells would mix together into one, and it would be a little different each day, like changing the blend of ingredients in a perfume. I'd climb onto his lap when he came home and make him sit still while I smelled him. If only that life could have gone on forever—how happy I would have been!

"But then the war turned bad, and things got threatening, so my father decided to send my mother and me back to Japan before it was too late. We went with a lot of other people, taking the train from Hsin-ching to Korea, where a special boat was waiting for us. My father stayed behind in Hsin-ching. The last time I ever saw him, he was standing in the station, waving to us. I stuck my head out the window and watched him getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the crowd on the platform. No one knows what happened to him after that. He just evaporated, like smoke. We tried asking friends from Hsin-ching who escaped to Japan after us, but it was a1most weird how no one knew anything about him. I think he must have been taken prisoner by the Soviets and sent to Siberia to do forced labor and, like so many others, died over there. He's probably buried in some cold, lonely patch of earth without anything to mark his grave. He was just an ordinary civilian—there was no reason for him to be hauled away like that, but it was a confusing time. Lots of mistakes were made.

"I still remember everything about the Hsin-ching zoo in perfect detail. I can bring it all back inside my head—every pathway, every animal. We lived in the chief veterinarian's official residence, in a corner of the zoo. All the zoo workers knew me, and they let me go anywhere I wanted—even on holidays, when the zoo was closed. On those days, the whole place belonged to me alone. You can't imagine what wonderful feeling that was! It was my universe. To me, the zoo was reality—just the opposite of how it is for ordinary people."

Nutmeg closed her eyes to bring back the scene inside her mind. I waited, without speaking, for her to continue her story.

"Still, though, I cant be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I pat it? I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it is an effect of my imagination. I feel as if I've wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you? "

It had not. "Do you know if the zoo is still there in Hsin-ching?" I asked.

"I wonder," said Nutmeg, touching the tip of her earring. "I heard that the place was dosed up after the war, but l have no idea if it's still closed. The city isn't called Hsin-ching anymore, though. Now it's Changchun. But if the zoo is still there I'd like to go and see how much of what I remember is real and how much I've made up in my head. I'd like to know if there really were elephants there. And leopards and tigers and beam. And whether they were really killed by soldiers in the summer of 1945. But, I don't know, maybe nobody really knows the truth."

They killed the leopards. They killed the wolves. They killed the bears. Shooting the bears took the most time. Even
after the two gigantic animals had taken dozens of rifle slugs, they continued to crash against the bars of their cage,
roaring at the men and slobbering, fangs bared. Unlike the cats, who were more willing to accept their fate (or who
at least appeared to accept it), the bears seemed unable to comprehend the fact that they were being killed. When, at
long last, the soldiers finally succeeded in extinguishing all signs of life in the beam, they were so exhausted they
were ready to collapse on the spot. The lieutenant reset his pistol's safety catch and used his hat to wipe the sweat
dripping from his brow. In the deep silence that followed the killing, several of the soldiers seemed to be trying to mask their feelings of shame by spitting loudly on the ground. Spent shells were scattered about their feet like so many cigarette butts. Their ears still rang with the crackling of their rifles. The young soldier who would be beaten to death by a Soviet soldier seventeen months later in a coal mine near Irkutsk took several deep breaths in succession, averting his gaze from the bears' corpses. He was engaged in a fierce struggle to force back the nausea that had worked its way up to his throat.

In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them, it became obvious that the beasts were simply too large, that the soldiers' rifles looked like silly toys in their presence. The lieutenant considered, and then decided to leave the elephants alone. Hearing this, the men breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it may seem—or perhaps it does not seem so strange—they all had the same thought: it was much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.

Those animals that were now nothing but corpses were dragged out of their cages by the Chinese workers, loaded onto carts, and hauled to an empty warehouse. There the animals, which came in so many shapes and sizes, were lined up on the floor. Once he had seen the operation through to its end, the lieutenant returned to the zoo director's office and had the man sign the necessary documents. Then the soldiers lined up and marched away in formation, with the same metallic clanking they had made when they came. The Chinese workers used hoses to wash off the black stains of blood on
the floors of the cages, and with brushes they scrubbed away the occasional chunk of animal flesh that dung to the walls.

When this job was finished, the workers asked the veterinarian how he intended to dispose of the corpses. The doctor was at a loss for an answer. Ordinarily, when an animal died at the zoo, he would call a professional to do the job. But with the capital now bracing for a bloody baffle, with people now struggling to be the first to leave this doomed city, you couldn't just make a phone call and get someone to run over to dispose of an animal corpse for you. Summer was at its height, though, and the corpses would begin to decompose quickly. Even now, black swarms
of flies were massing. The best thing would be to bury them—an enormous job even if the zoo had access to heavy
equipment, but with the limited help available to them now it would obviously be impossible to dig holes large
enough to take all the corpses.
The Chinese workers said to the veterinarian, "Doctor, if you will let us take the corpses whole, we will dispose of
them for you. We have plenty of friends to help us, and we know exactly where to do the job. We will haul them
outside the city and get rid of every last speck. We will not cause you any problems. But, in exchange, we want the
hides and meat.


Especially the bear meat—every-body will want that. Parts of bear and tiger are good for medicine—they will
command a high price. And though it's too late now to say this, we wish you had aimed only at their heads. Then the
hides would have been worth a good deal more. The soldiers were such amateurs! If only you had let us take care of
it from the beginning, we wouldn't have done such a clumsy job." The veterinarian agreed to the bargain. He had no
choice. After all, it was their country.
Before long, ten Chinese appeared, pulling several empty carts behind them. They dragged the animals' corpses out
of the warehouse, piled them onto the carts, tied them down, and covered them with straw mats. They hardly said a
word to one another the whole time. Their faces were expressionless. When they had finished loading the carts, they
dragged them off somewhere. The old carts creaked with the strain of supporting the animals' weight. All that was
left in the zoo was several clean—and empty—cages. Still in an agitated state, the monkeys kept calling out to one
another in their incomprehensible language. The badgers rushed back and forth in their narrow cage. The birds
flapped their wings in desperation, scattering feathers all around. And the cicadas kept up their grating cry.



After the soldiers had finished their killing and returned to headquarters, and after the last two Chinese workers had
disappeared somewhere, dragging their cart loaded with animal corpses, the zoo took on the hollow quality of a
house emptied of furniture. The veterinarian sat on the rim of a waterless fountain, looked up at the sky, and
watched the group of hard-edged clouds that were floating there. He took a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes from
his breast pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match. As he lit up, he realized that his hand was
trembling—so much that it took him three matches to light the cigarette. Not that he had experienced an emotional
trauma. A large number of animals had been liquidated in a moment before his eyes, and yet, for some inexplicable
reason, he felt no particular shock or sadness or anger. In fact, he felt almost nothing. He was just terribly puzzled.
He sat there for a while, watching the smoke curl upward from his cigarette, trying to sort out his feelings. He stared
at his hands resting on his lap, then looked once again at the clouds in the sky. The world he saw before him looked
the way it always had. And yet it ought to have been a world distinctly different from the one he had known until
then. After all, the world that held him now was a world in which bears and tigers and leopards and wolves had been
liquidated. Those animals had existed this morning, but now, at four, o'clock in the afternoon, they had ceased to
exist. They had been massacred by soldiers, and even their dead bodies were nowhere—as if a light switch had been
flipped


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THE ZOO ATTACIt
http://web.archive.org/web/20040706083218/www.geocities.com/os...
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THE ZOO ATTACK
by MURAKAMI Haruki
translated by Jay Rubin
Her tone calm and steady, Nutmeg Akasaka told me the story of the tigers, the leopards, the wolves, and the bears
that were shot by soldiers on a miserably hot afternoon in August 1945. She narrated with such order and clarity that
I felt as if I were watching a documentary film of the events. She left nothing vague. Yet she herself had not actually
witnessed the spectacle. While it was happening, she was standing on the deck of a transport ship carrying refugee
settlers home to Japan from Manchuria. What she had actually witnessed was the surfacing of an American
submarine.
Like everyone else, she and the other children had come up from the unbearable steam bath of the ship's hold to lean
against the deck rail and enjoy the gentle breezes that moved across the calm, unbroken sea, when, all at once, the
submarine came floating to the surface as if it were part of a dream. First the radio and radar antennas and the
periscope broke the surface. Then the conning tower came up, raising a wake as it cut through the water. And finally
the entire dripping mass of steel exposed its graceful nakedness to the summer sun.
The submarine ran parallel to the ship for a while, as if stalking its prey. Soon a hatch opened, and one crew
member, then another and another climbed onto the deck, moving slowly, almost sluggishly. From the conning-
tower deck, the officers examined every detail of the transport ship through huge binoculars, whose lenses would
flash every now and then in the sunlight. The transport ship was full of civilians heading back to Japan, their
destination the port of Sasebo. The majority were women and children, the families of Japanese officials in the
puppet Manchukuo government and of high-ranking personnel of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway,
fleeing to the homeland from the chaos that would follow the Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Rather than
face the inevitable horror, they had been willing to accept the risk of attack by an American submarine on the open
sea-until now, at least.
The submarine officers were checking to see if the transport ship was unarmed and without a naval escort. They had
nothing to fear. The Americans now had command of the air, too. Okinawa had fallen, and Japan had pulled in its
fighter planes to defend the home islands. No need for the Americans to panic: time was on their side. A petty
officer barked orders, and three sailors spun the cranks that turned the deck gun until it was aimed at the transport
ship. Two other crewmen opened the rear-deck hatch and hauled up heavy shells to feed the gun. Yet another squad
of crewmen, with practiced movements, were loading a machine gun they had set on a raised part of the deck near
the conning tower.
That and the deck gun were more than enough to sink the rotting old freighter that had been refitted as a transport
ship. The submarine carried only a limited number of torpedoes, and these had to be reserved for encounters with
armed convoys.
The crew all wore combat helmets, though a few of the men were naked from the waist up and nearly half were
wearing short pants. If she stared hard at them, Nutmeg could see brilliant tattoos inscribed on their arms. If she
stared hard, she could see lots of things. She dung to the deck rail and watched as the gun's black barrel pivoted in
her direction. Dripping wet only moments earlier, it had been baked dry in the summer sun. At home in Hsin-ching, she had never seen such an enormous gun.
The submarine flashed a signal lamp at the freighter: "Heave to. Attack to commence. Immediately evacuate all passengers to lifeboats." (Nutmeg could not read the signal lamp, of course, but in retrospect she understood it
perfectly.) But there were not enough lifeboats aboard the transport ship. In fact, there were only two small boats for
more than five hundred passengers and crew members. There were hardly any life vests or life buoys aboard.
Gripping the deck rail, holding her breath, Nutmeg stared transfixed at the streamlined submarine. It shone as if
brand-new, without a speck of rust. She saw the white-painted numerals on the conning tower. She saw the radar
antenna rotating above it. She saw the sandy-haired officer with dark glasses.
This submarine has come up-from the bottom of the ocean to kill us all, she thought, but there's nothing strange
about that, it could happen anytime. It has nothing to do with the war; it could happen to anyone anywhere.
Everybody thinks it's happening because of the war. But that's not true. The war is just one of the things that could
happen.
Face to face with the submarine and its huge gun, Nutmeg felt no trace of fear. Her mother was shouting at her, but
the words made no sense. Then the felt something grab her wrists and pull on them. But her hands stayed locked on
the deck rail. The roar of voices all around her began to move far away, as if someone were turning down the
volume on a radio. I m so sleepy, she thought. So sleepy. Why am I so sleepy? She closed her eyes, and her
consciousness rushed away, leaving the deck far behind.
Nutmeg was seeing Japanese soldiers as they moved through the extensive zoo, shooting any animal that could
attack human beings. The officer gave his order, and the bullets from the Model 38 rifles ripped through the smooth
hide of a tiger, tearing at the animal's guts. The summer sky was blue, and from the surrounding trees the screams of
cicadas rained down like a sudden shower.
The soldiers never spoke. The blood was gone from their sunburned faces. They looked like pictures painted on
ancient urns. A few days from now—at most, a week—the main force of the Soviet Far East Command would arrive
in Hsin-ching. There was no way to stop the advance. Ever since the war began, the crack troops and once abundant
equipment of the Kwantung Army had been drained away to support the widening southern front, and now the
greater part of both had sunk to the bottom of the sea or was rotting in the depths of the jungle. The tanks were gone.
The anti-tank guns were gone. All but a handful of the troop transport trucks had broken down, and there were no
spare parts. Large numbers of troops remained, but there were not enough rifles left to arm every man, nor bullets
enough to load every rifle. The great Kwantung Army, Bulwark of the North, had been reduced to a paper tiger. The
proud Soviet mechanized units that had crushed the German Army were completing their transfer by rail to the Far
Eastern front, with plenty of equipment and with spirits high. The collapse of Manchukuo was imminent.
Everyone knew this to be the truth, the Kwantung Army command most of all. And so the generals evacuated their
main force to the rear, in effect abandoning both the small border garrisons and the Japanese civilian homesteaders.
These unarmed farmers were slaughtered by the Soviet Army, which was advancing too rapidly to take prisoners.
Many women chose—or were forced to choose—mass suicide over rape. Members of the general staff and other
high-ranking officers arranged to have themselves "transferred" to new headquarters in Tonghua, near the Korean
border, and the puppet emperor Henry Pu-yi and his family threw everything they could get their hands on into
trunks and left Hsin-ching by private train. Most of the Chinese soldiers in the Manchukuo Army units assigned to
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and shot their Japanese commanding officers. They had no intention of laying down their lives for Japan in a
struggle against superior Soviet troops.
The eight soldiers dispatched to the zoo had resigned themselves to their fate. A few days hence, they assumed, they
would die fighting the Soviet Army. All they could do was pray that their deaths would not be too painful. None of
them wanted to be crushed under the treads of a slow-moving tank or roasted in a trench by flamethrowers or die by
degrees with a bullet in the stomach. Better to be shot in the head or the heart. But first they had to kill these animals
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in the zoo.
If possible, they were to kill the animals with poison in order to conserve what few bullets they had left.
The young lieutenant in charge of the operation had been so instructed by his superior officer and told that the zoo
had been given enough poison to do the job.
The zoo's director confirmed that he indeed had orders to "liquidate" the fiercer animals in case of an emergency and
to use poison, but the shipment of poison, he said, had never arrived. When the lieutenant heard this, he became
confused. He was an accountant assigned to the paymaster's office, and until he was dragged away from his desk at
headquarters for this emergency detail he had never once been put in charge of a detachment of men.
"Bureaucratic work is always like this, Lieutenant," said the zoo director, a man several years his senior, who looked
at him with a touch of pity. "The things you need are never there."
To check further into the matter, the director called in the zoo's chief veterinarian, a tall, handsome man in his late
thirties. The veterinarian told the lieutenant that the zoo had only a very small amount of poison, probably not
enough to kill a horse.
The lieutenant telephoned headquarters for instructions, but since the Soviet Army had crossed the border several
days earlier, most of the high-ranking officers had disappeared. The few remaining had their hands full burning
documents or leading troops out to dig and-tank trenches. The major who had given the lieutenant his orders was
nowhere to be found. The call was transferred from one office to another until a medial-corps colonel got on the
line, only to scream at the lieutenant, "You stupid son of a bitch! The whole goddam country's going down the drain
and you're asking me about a goddam fucking zoo? Who gives a shit?"
Who indeed? thought the lieutenant. Certainly not he. Now he was faced with two options. He could forget about
killing any animals and lead his men out of there, or they could use bullets to do the job.
Either would be a violation of the orders he had been given, but in the end he decided to do the shooting.
That way, he might later be reprimanded for having wasted valuable ammunition, but at least the goal of liquidating
the more dangerous animals would have been met. If, on the other hand, he chose not to kill the animals, he might
be court-martialled for having failed to carry out orders. There was some doubt whether there would even be any
courts-martial at this late stage of the war, but, after all, orders were orders. So long as the Army continued to exist,
its orders had to be carried out.
If possible, I'd rather not kill any animals, the lieutenant told himself in all honesty. But the zoo was running out of
things to feed them, and most of the animals (especially the big ones) were already suffering from starvation.
Shooting might even be easier for the animals themselves—a quick, clean death. And if starving animals were to
escape to the city streets during intense fighting or air strikes, a disaster would be unavoidable.
The director then handed the lieutenant a list of animals for "emergency liquidation" that he had been instructed to
compile, along with a map of the zoo. The handsome veterinarian and two Chinese workers were assigned to
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it shorter than he had imagined. Among the animals slated for liquidation, though, were two Indian elephants.
"Elephants?" the lieutenant gasped. How in the hell are we supposed to kill elephants? he thought. We'd need a tank
for that.
Given the layout of the zoo, the first animals to be liquidated were the tigers. The elephants would be left for last, in
any case. The plaque on the tiger cageexplained that the pair had been captured in Manchuria in the Greater Khingan
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mountains. The lieutenant assigned four men to each tiger and told them to aim for the heart—the where-abouts of
which was just another mystery to him. Oh, well, at least one bullet was bound to hit home. When eight men
together pulled back on the levers of their Model 38s and loaded cartridge into each chamber, the ominous, dry
clicks transformed the whole atmosphere of the place. The tigers stood up at the sound. Glaring at the soldiers
through the iron bars, they let out huge roars. As an extra precaution, the lieutenant drew his own automatic pistol
and released the safety.
To calm himself, he cleared his throat. This is nothing, he tried to tell himself. Everybody does stuff like this all the
time.
The soldiers knelt, took careful aim, and, at the lieutenant's command, pulled their triggers. The recoil shook their
shoulders, and for a moment their minds went empty, as if flicked away. The roar of the simultaneous shots
reverberated through the deserted zoo, echoing from building to building, wall to wall, slicing through wooded
areas, crossing water surfaces, a stab to the hearts of all who heard it, like distant thunder. The animals held their
breath. Even the cicadas stopped crying. Long after the echo of gunfire faded into the distance, there was not a
sound to be heard. As if they had been whacked with a huge club by an invisible giant, the tigers shot up into the air
for a moment, then landed on the floor of the cage with a great thud, writhing in agony, vomiting blood. The soldiers
had failed to finish the tigers off with a single volley. They snapped out of their trance and pulled back on their rifle
levers, ejecting spent shells and taking aim again.
The lieutenant sent one of his men into the cage to verify that both tigers were dead. They were certainly looked
dead—eyes closed, teeth bared, all movement gone. The veterinarian unlocked the cage, and the young soldier (he
had just turned twenty) stepped inside fearfully, thrusting his bayonet ahead of him. It was an odd performance, but
no one laughed. He gave a slight hick to one tiger's hindquarters with the heel of his boot. The tiger remained
motionless. He kicked the same spot again, this time a little harder.
The tiger was dead without a doubt. The other tiger, the female, lay equally still. The young soldier had never visited
a zoo in his life, nor had he ever seen a real tiger before. He felt only that he had been dragged into a place that had
nothing to do with him and had been forced to perform an act there that had nothing to do with him. Standing in an
ocean of black blood, he stared down at the tigers' corpses, entranced. They looked much bigger dead than they had
alive. Why should that be? he asked himself, mystified.
The cage's concrete floor was suffused with the piercing smell of the big cats' urine, and mixed with it was the warm
odor of blood. Blood was still gushing from the holes tom in the tigers bodies, forming a sticky black pond around
his feet. All of a sudden, the rifle in his hands felt heavy and cold. He wanted to fling it away, bend down, and vomit
the entire contents of his stomach onto the floor. What a relief it would have been! But vomiting was out of the
question—the squad leader would beat his face out of shape. (Of course, this soldier had no idea that he would die
seventeen months later when a Soviet guard in a mine near Irkutsk split his skull open with a shovel.) He wiped the
sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. His helmet was weighing down upon him. One cicada, then
another began to cry again, as if finally revived. Soon their cries were joined by those of a bird—strangely
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cries, like the winding of a spring: Creeeak. Creeeak. When he was twelve, the young soldier had moved with his
parents from a mountain village in Hokkaido across the sea to China, and together they had tilled the soil of a
frontier village in Bei'an until a year ago, when he was drafted into the Army.
Thus he knew all the bird, of Manchuria, but, strangely, he had never heard a bird with that particular cry. Perhaps it
was a bird imported from a distant land crying in its cage in another part of the zoo. Yet the sound seemed to come
from the upper branches of a nearby tree.
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He looked toward the lieutenant as if requesting instructions. The lieutenant nodded, ordered him out of the cage,
and spread open the zoo map again. So much for the tigers, he thought. Next, we'll do the leopards. Then, maybe,
the wolves. We've got bears to deal with, too. We'll think about the elephants when the others are done. And then he
realized how hot it was. "Take a breather," he said to his men.
"Have some water." They drank from their canteens. Then they shouldered their rifles, took their places in
formation, and headed for the leopard cage. The unknown bird with the insistent call went on winding its spring.
The chests and backs of the men's short-sleeved military shirts were stained black with sweat.
As this formation of fully armed soldiers strode along, the clanking of all kinds of metallic objects sent hollow
echoes throughout the deserted zoo. The monkeys clinging to the bars of their cages rent the air with their screams,
sending frantic warnings to all the other animals, who joined the chores in their own distinctive way. The wolves
sent long howls skyward, the birds contributed a wild flapping of wings, a large animal somewhere was slamming
itself against its cage as if to send out a threat. A chunk of cloud shaped like a fist appeared out of nowhere and hid
the sun for a short time. On that August afternoon, people, animals, everyone was thinking about death. Today, the
men would be killing the animals tomorrow, Soviet troops would be killing the men. Probably.
The woman and I always sat across from each other at the same table in the same restaurant, talking. She was a
regular there, and, of course, she always picked up the tab. With the kind of money I had, I probably couldn't have
afforded an appetizer in such a place. The back part of the restaurant was divided into private compartments, so that
the conversation at any one table could not be heard at another. There was only one seating per evening there, which
meant that we could talk at leisure, right up to dosing time, without interference from anyone—including the
waiters, who approached the table only to bring or clear a dish. She would always order a bottle of Burgundy of one
particular vintage and always leave half the bottle unconsumed.
"A bird that winds a spring?" I asked, looking up from my food.
"A bird that winds a spring?" said the woman, who called herself Nutmeg. She repeated the words exactly as I had
said them, then curled her lips just a little. "I don't understand what you're saying. What are you talking about?"
I took a sip of wine and wiped my mouth. "Wait a minute, didn't you just say something about a bird winding a
spring?
"She shook her head slowly. "Hmm, now I can't remember. I don't think I said anything about a bird. A bird winding
a spring? You mean some kind of toy bird?"
I could see it was hopeless. She always told her stories like this.
"So you were born in Manchuria, then?" I asked.
She shook her head again. "1 was born here, in Yokohama. My parents took me to Manchuria when I was three. My
father was teaching at a school of veterinary medicine, but when the Hsin-ching city administrators wanted someone
sent over from Japan a. chief veterinarian for the new zoo they were going to build, he volunteered for the job. My
mother didn't want to abandon the settled life they had in Japan and go off to the ends of the earth, but my father
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he wanted to test himself in some place bigger and more open than Japan. I was so young it didn't matter where I
was, but I really enjoyed living at the zoo. It was a wonderful life. My father always smelled like the animals. All
the different animal smells would mix together into one, and it would be a little different each day, like changing the
blend of ingredients in a perfume. I'd climb onto his lap when he came home and make him sit still while I smelled
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him. If only that life could have gone on forever—how happy I would have been!
"But then the war turned bad, and things got threatening, so my father decided to send my mother and me back to
Japan before it was too late. We went with a lot of other people, taking the train from Hsin-ching to Korea, where a
special boat was waiting for us. My father stayed behind in Hsin-ching. The last time I ever saw him, he was
standing in the station, waving to us. I stuck my head out the window and watched him getting smaller and smaller
until he disappeared into the crowd on the platform. No one knows what happened to him after that. He just
evaporated, like smoke. We tried asking friends from Hsin-ching who escaped to Japan after us, but it was a1most
weird how no one knew anything about him. I think he must have been taken prisoner by the Soviets and sent to
Siberia to do forced labor and, like so many others, died over there. He's probably buried in some cold, lonely patch
of earth without anything to mark his grave. He was just an ordinary civilian—there was no reason for him to be
hauled away like that, but it was a confusing time. Lots of mistakes were made.
"I still remember everything about the Hsin-ching zoo in perfect detail. I can bring it all back inside my head—every
pathway, every animal. We lived in the chief veterinarian's official residence, in a corner of the zoo. All the zoo
workers knew me, and they let me go anywhere I wanted—even on holidays, when the zoo was closed. On those
days, the whole place belonged to me alone. You can't imagine what wonderful feeling that was! It was my universe.
To me, the zoo was reality—just the opposite of how it is for ordinary people."
Nutmeg closed her eyes to bring back the scene inside her mind. I waited, without speaking, for her to continue her
story.
"Still, though, I cant be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I pat it? I sometimes feel that it's
too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it the less I
can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it is an effect of my imagination. I feel as if I've
wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you? "
It had not. "Do you know if the zoo is still there in Hsin-ching?" I asked.
"I wonder," said Nutmeg, touching the tip of her earring. "I heard that the place was dosed up after the war, but l
have no idea if it's still closed. The city isn't called Hsin-ching anymore, though. Now it's Changchun. But if the zoo
is still there I'd like to go and see how much of what I remember is real and how much I've made up in my head. I'd
like to know if there really were elephants there. And leopards and tigers and beam. And whether they were really
killed by soldiers in the summer of 1945. But, I don't know, maybe nobody really knows the truth."
They killed the leopards. They killed the wolves. They killed the bears. Shooting the bears took the most time. Even
after the two gigantic animals had taken dozens of rifle slugs, they continued to crash against the bars of their cage,
roaring at the men and slobbering, fangs bared. Unlike the cats, who were more willing to accept their fate (or who
at least appeared to accept it), the bears seemed unable to comprehend the fact that they were being killed. When, at
long last, the soldiers finally succeeded in extinguishing all signs of life in the beam, they were so exhausted they
were ready to collapse on the spot. The lieutenant reset his pistol's safety catch and used his hat to wipe the sweat
dripping from his brow. In the deep silence that followed the killing, several of the soldiers seemed to be trying to
mask their feelings of shame by spitting loudly on the ground. Spent shells were scattered about their feet like so
many cigarette butts. Their ears still rang with the crackling of their rifles. The young soldier who would be beaten
to death by a Soviet soldier seventeen months later in a coal mine near Irkutsk took several deep breaths in
succession, averting his gaze from the bears' corpses. He was engaged in a fierce struggle to force back the nausea
that had worked its way up to his throat.
In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them, it became obvious that the beasts
were simply too large, that the soldiers' rifles looked like silly toys in their presence. The lieutenant considered, and
then decided to leave the elephants alone. Hearing this, the men breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it may seem—or
perhaps it does not seem so strange—they all had the same thought: it was much easier to kill humans on the
battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.
Those animals that were now nothing but corpses were dragged out of their cages by the Chinese workers, loaded
onto carts, and hauled to an empty warehouse. There the animals, which came in so many shapes and sizes, were
lined up on the floor. Once he had seen the operation through to its end, the lieutenant returned to the zoo director's
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office and had the man sign the necessary documents. Then the soldiers lined up and marched away in formation,
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clanking they had made when they came. The Chinese workers used hoses to wash off the black stains of blood on
the floors of the cages, and with brushes they scrubbed away the occasional chunk of animal flesh that dung to the
walls.
When this job was finished, the workers asked the veterinarian how he intended to dispose of the corpses. The
doctor was at a loss for an answer. Ordinarily, when an animal died at the zoo, he would call a professional to do the
job. But with the capital now bracing for a bloody baffle, with people now struggling to be the first to leave this
doomed city, you couldn't just make a phone call and get someone to run over to dispose of an animal corpse for
you. Summer was at its height, though, and the corpses would begin to decompose quickly. Even now, black swarms
of flies were massing. The best thing would be to bury them—an enormous job even if the zoo had access to heavy
equipment, but with the limited help available to them now it would obviously be impossible to dig holes large
enough to take all the corpses.
The Chinese workers said to the veterinarian, "Doctor, if you will let us take the corpses whole, we will dispose of
them for you. We have plenty of friends to help us, and we know exactly where to do the job. We will haul them
outside the city and get rid of every last speck. We will not cause you any problems. But, in exchange, we want the
hides and meat.
Especially the bear meat—every-body will want that. Parts of bear and tiger are good for medicine—they will
command a high price. And though it's too late now to say this, we wish you had aimed only at their heads. Then the
hides would have been worth a good deal more. The soldiers were such amateurs! If only you had let us take care of
it from the beginning, we wouldn't have done such a clumsy job." The veterinarian agreed to the bargain. He had no
choice. After all, it was their country.
Before long, ten Chinese appeared, pulling several empty carts behind them. They dragged the animals' corpses out
of the warehouse, piled them onto the carts, tied them down, and covered them with straw mats. They hardly said a
word to one another the whole time. Their faces were expressionless. When they had finished loading the carts, they
dragged them off somewhere. The old carts creaked with the strain of supporting the animals' weight. All that was
left in the zoo was several clean—and empty—cages. Still in an agitated state, the monkeys kept calling out to one
another in their incomprehensible language. The badgers rushed back and forth in their narrow cage. The birds
flapped their wings in desperation, scattering feathers all around. And the cicadas kept up their grating cry.
After the soldiers had finished their killing and returned to headquarters, and after the last two Chinese workers had
disappeared somewhere, dragging their cart loaded with animal corpses, the zoo took on the hollow quality of a
house emptied of furniture. The veterinarian sat on the rim of a waterless fountain, looked up at the sky, and
watched the group of hard-edged clouds that were floating there. He took a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes from
his breast pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match. As he lit up, he realized that his hand was
trembling—so much that it took him three matches to light the cigarette. Not that he had experienced an emotional
trauma. A large number of animals had been liquidated in a moment before his eyes, and yet, for some inexplicable
reason, he felt no particular shock or sadness or anger. In fact, he felt almost nothing. He was just terribly puzzled.
He sat there for a while, watching the smoke curl upward from his cigarette, trying to sort out his feelings. He stared
at his hands resting on his lap, then looked once again at the clouds in the sky. The world he saw before him looked
the way it always had. And yet it ought to have been a world distinctly different from the one he had known until
then. After all, the world that held him now was a world in which bears and tigers and leopards and wolves had been
liquidated. Those animals had existed this morning, but now, at four, o'clock in the afternoon, they had ceased to
exist. They had been massacred by soldiers, and even their dead bodies were nowhere—as if a light switch had been
flipped.
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There should have been a decisive gap separating those two different worlds. Because in that world the tigers
existed, but in this world they did not. It was a crucial difference for him, for the chief veterinarian of the Hsin-ching
zoo, for the man who had taken care of those animals ever since the zoo opened. . . . The gap should have been vast
enough to shake the very foundations of his being. What most puzzled the veterinarian was the unfamiliar absence
of feeling inside him.
Suddenly he realized that he was exhausted. Come to think of it, he had hardly slept at all the night before. How
wonderful it would be, he thought, if I could find the cool shade of a tree somewhere, to stretch out and sleep, if only
for a little while—to stop thinking, to sink into the silent darkness of unconsciousness. He glanced at his watch. He
had to secure food for the surviving animals. He had to treat the baboon that was running a high fever. There were a
thousand things he had to do. He was going to have to keep this zoo running almost single-handed from now on
(until who knew when). But now, more than anything, he had to sleep. What came afterward he could think about
afterward.
The veterinarian stood up from the rim of the fountain, walked into a neighboring wooded as~, and stretched out on
the grass where no one would notice him. The shaded grass felt cool and good. The smell was something he
remembered fondly from his childhood. Several large Manchurian grasshoppers bounded over his face with a nice,
strong hum. He lit another cigarette as he lay there, and he was pleased to see that his hands were no longer
trembling so badly. Inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs, he pictured the Chinese men stripping the hides off all
those freshly killed animals somewhere and cutting up the meat. He had often seen people here doing work like that,
and he knew they were anything but clumsy



In a matter of moments, an animal would be reduced to hide, meat, organs, and bones, as if those elements had
originally been quite separate and had just happened to come together for a little while. He thought, By the time I
wake from my nap, I'm sure, those pieces of meat will be out there in the marketplace. That's reality for you—quick
and efficient. He tore off a handful of grass and toyed with its softness awhile. Then he crushed his cigarette and,
with a deep sigh, expelled all the smoke left in his lungs. When he closed his eyes, the grasshoppers' wings sounded
much louder. The veterinarian felt as if grasshoppers the size of bullfrogs were leaping all around him


Maybe the world was like a revolving door: this thought occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And
which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall. There were tigers in one
section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was as simple as that. And there was no logical continuity from one
section to another.
And it was precisely because of this lack of logical continuity that choices really didn't mean very much. Wasn't that
why he couldn't feel the gap between one world and another? But that was as far as his thoughts would go. The
fatigue in his body was as heavy and suffocating as a sodden blanket. No more thoughts came to him, and he just lay
there, inhaling the aroma of the grass, listening to the grasshoppers' wings, and feeling through his skin the dense
membrane of shadow that covered him.
And in the end his mind was sucked into the deep sleep of afternoon.


The transport ship cut its engines, as ordered, and soon it came to a standstill on the surface of the ocean. The
submarine's deck gun and machine gun were still trained on the transport ship, its crew in a state of readiness to
attack. Yet a strange tranquillity hovered between the two ships. The men on the submarine stood in full view on
deck, lined up and watching the transport ship with an air of having time to kill. Many of them had not even
bothered to strap on battle helmets. There was hardly any wind that summer afternoon, and now, with both engines
cut, the only sound was the languid slap of waves against the two ships' hulls. The transport ship signalled to the
submarine, "We are a transport ship carrying unarmed civilian. We have neither munitions nor military personnel on


board. We have few lifeboats." To this the submarine responded brusquely, "That is not our problem. Evacuation or
no, we commence firing in precisely ten minutes."
This ended the exchange of signal messages between the two ships. The captain of the transport ship decided not to
convey the communication to his passengers. What good would it do? A few of them might be lucky enough to
survive, but most would be dragged to the bottom of the sea with this miserable old washtub. The captain longed for
one last drink, but the whiskey bottle was in a desk drawer in his cabin, and there was no time to get it now. He took
off his hat and looked up at the sky.
He was hoping that, through some miracle, a squadron of Japanese fighter planes might suddenly appear there. But
this was not to be a day for miracles. The captain thought about his whiskey again.


As the ten minutes was running out, strange movement began on the deck of the submarine. There were hurried
exchanges among the officers lined up on the conning-tower deck, and one of the officers scrambled down to the
main deck and ran among the crew, shouting some kind of order. Wherever he went, ripples of movement spread
among the men at their battle stations. One sailor shook his head from side to side and punched the barrel of the
deck gun with a clenched fist. Another took his helmet off and stared up at the sky. The men's actions might have
been expressing anger or joy or disappointment or excitement. The passengers on the transport found it impossible
to tell what was happening or what this was leading to. Like an audience watching a pantomime for which there was
no program, they held their breath and kept their eyes locked on the sailors' every movement, hoping to find some
small hint of meaning. Eventually, the waves of confusion among the sailors began to subside, and, in response to an
order from the bridge, the shells were removed from the deck gun with great dispatch. The men turned cranks and
swung the barrel away from the transport ship until the gun was pointing straight ahead again, then they plugged the
horrid black hole of the muzzle. The shells were returned below deck and the crew ran for the hatches. In contrast to
their earlier movements, they did everything now with speed and efficiency. There was no chatting or wasted
motion.
The submarine's engines started with a definite growl, and at almost the same moment the siren screeched to signal
"Commence dive!" The submarine began to move forward, and a moment later it was plunging downward, churning
up a great white patch of foam, as if it had hardly been able to wait


for the men to get below and fasten the hatches. A membrane of seawater swallowed the long, narrow deck from
front to rear, the deck gun sank below the surface, the conning tower slipped downward, cutting through the dark-
blue water, and finally the antennas and the periscope plunged out of sight as if to rip the air clean of any evidence
that they had ever been there.
The transport passengers stood frozen on deck, staring at the watery expanse. Not a throat was cleared, not a limb
moved. The captain recovered his presence of mind and gave his order to the navigator, who passed it on to the
engine room, and, after a long fit of grinding, the antique engine started up like a sleeping dog kicked by its master.
The crew of the transport ship held their breath, waiting for a torpedo attack. Perhaps the Americans had simply
changed their plans, deciding that sinking the ship with a torpedo would be faster and easier than a time-consuming
volley from the deck gun. The ship ran in short zigzags, the captain and the navigator scanning the ocean's surface
with their binoculars, searching for the deadly white wake of a torpedo. But there was no torpedo. Twenty minutes
after the submarine had disappeared beneath the waves, people at last began to break free of the spell that had hung over them. They had come back alive from the verge of death. They could only half believe it at first, but little by little they came to feel that it was true. Not even the captain knew why the Americans had suddenly abandoned their attack. What could have changed their minds? Released now from the unbearable tension, several passengers collapsed where they stood on the deck and began to wail, but most of them could neither cry nor laugh. For several
hours—and, in the case of some, for several days—they remained in a state of total abstraction, the spike of a long.

twisted nightmare thrust unmercifully into their lungs, their hearts, their spines, their brains, their wombs.
Little Nutmeg Akasaka remained sound asleep in her mother's arms all the time this was happening. She slept for a
solid fourteen hours, as if she had been knocked unconscious. Nothing could draw her back from the world of sleep.
Her mother shouted and slapped her cheeks to no avail. So deep was her sleep that she might as well have sunk to
the bottom of the sea. The intervals between her breaths grew longer and longer, and her pulse slowed. Her breath
was all but inaudible. But when the ship arrived in Sasebo she woke without warning, as if some great power had
dragged her back into this world. And so, Nutmeg told me, she did not herself witness the events surrounding the
aborted attack and the disappearance of the American submarine. Those parts of the story she heard much later, from
her mother. Just moments before the attack was to begin, headquarters had radioed the submarine to suspend all
hostilities unless attacked by the enemy. The Japanese government had let the Allied powers know that it was
prepared to accept the Potsdam Declaration and surrender unconditionally.
The freighter finally limped into the port of Sasebo a little past ten in the morning on August 16th, the day after the
non-attack. The port was weirdly silent, and no one came out to greet the ship. Not even at the anti-aircraft
emplacement by the harbor mouth were there signs of humanity. The summer sunlight baked the ground with dumb
intensity. The whole world seemed caught in a deep paralysis, and some on board felt as if they had stumbled by
accident into the land of the dead. After years spent abroad, they could only stare in silence at the country of their
ancestors. At a few minutes past noon on August 15th, the radio had broadcast the Emperor's announcement of the
war's end. Seven days earlier, the nearby city of Nagasaki had been incinerated by a single atomic bomb. Within a
few days' time, the phantom empire of Manchukuo was disappearing into history. And, caught unawares in the
wrong section of the revolving door, the handsome veterinarian would share the fate of Manchukuo

Crab By Harukami

They ran across the little restaurant entirely by accident. It was the evening of their first night in Singapore and they were walking near a beach when, on a whim, they ducked into a side street and happened to pass the place.

The restaurant was a one-storey building surrounded by a waist-high brick wall, with a garden with low palm trees and five wooden tables. The stucco main building was painted a bright pink. Each table had its own faded umbrella opened over it. It was still early and the place was nearly deserted.

Just two old men with short hair, Chinese apparently, sat across from each other, drinking beer and eating a variety of snacks. They didn’t say a word to each other. On the ground at their feet lay a large black dog, wearily, its eyes half closed. A ghostly trail of steam streamed out of the kitchen window, and the tempting smell of something cooking. The happy voices of the cooks filtered out as well, along with the clatter of pots and pans. The palm fronds on the trees, trembling in the slight breeze, stood out in the sinking sun.
    
The woman came to a halt, taking in the scene.
   
 ‘How about having dinner here?’ she asked.
    
The young man read the name of the restaurant at the entrance and looked around for a menu.

But there wasn’t a menu posted outside. He gave it some thought. ‘Hmm. I don’t know. You know, eating at some place we’re not sure of in a foreign country.’
   
 ‘But I’ve got a sixth sense about restaurants. I can always sniff out the really good ones. And this one’s definitely great. I guarantee it. Why don’t we try it?’
      
The man closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He had no idea what kind of food they made here, but he had to admit it did smell pretty tempting. And the restaurant itself had a certain charm to it. ‘But do you think it’s clean?’
    
She tugged at his arm. ‘You’re too sensitive. Don’t worry. We’ve flown all this way here, so we should be a little more adventurous. I don’t want to eat in the restaurant in the hotel every day. That’s boring. Come on, let’s give it a try.’
                                                                                *
Once inside they realized that the place specialised in crab dishes. The menu was written in English and Chinese. Most of the customers were locals, and the prices were quite reasonable. According to the menu Singapore boasts dozens of varieties of crabs, with more than a hundred types of crab dishes.

The man and the woman ordered Singapore beer, and after looking over what was available, selected several crab dishes and shared them. The portions were generous, the ingredients all fresh, the seasoning just right.
    
‘This really is good,’ the man said, impressed.
    
‘See? What’d I tell you? I told you I have the power to find the best. Now do you believe me?’
    
‘Yup. Have to say I do,’ the young man admitted.
    
‘This kind of power really comes in handy,’ the woman said. ‘You know, eating’s much more important than most people think. There comes a time in your life when you’ve just got to have something super-delicious. And when you’re standing at that crossroads your whole life can change, depending on which one you go into—the good restaurant or the awful one. It’s like—do you fall on this side of the fence, or the other side.’
    
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Life can be pretty alarming, can’t it?’
    
‘Exactly,’ she said, and held up a mischievous finger. ‘Life is an alarming thing. More than you can ever imagine.’
   
 The young man nodded. ‘And we happened to fall on the inside of the fence, didn’t we?’
    
‘Exactly.’
    
‘That’s good,’ the young man said dispassionately. ‘Do you like crab?’
   
 ‘Mm, I’ve always loved it. How about you?’
    
‘I loved it. I wouldn’t mind eating crab every day.’
    
‘A new point we have in common,’ she beamed.
    
The man smiled, and the two of them raised their glasses in another toast.
   
 ‘We’ve got to come back tomorrow,’ she said, ‘There can’t be many places like this in the world.
I mean, it’s so delicious—and look at the prices.’
                                                                                *
For the next three days they ate at the little restaurant. In the morning they’d go to the beach to swim, and sunbathe, then stroll around the town and pick up souvenirs at local handicraft shops. Around the same time each evening they’d go to the little backstreet restaurant, try different crab dishes, then return to their hotel room for some leisurely lovemaking, then fall into a dreamless sleep.

Every day felt like paradise. The woman was twenty-six, and taught English in a private girl’s school. The man was twenty-eight and worked as an auditor at a large bank. It was almost a miracle that they were able to take a holiday at the same time, and they wanted to find a place where no one would bother them, where they could simply enjoy themselves. They tried their best to avoid any topic that would spoil the mood and their precious time together.
    
On the fourth day—the last day of their holiday—they ate crab as always in the evening. As they scooped out meat from the crab legs with metal utensils, they talked about how being here, swimming every day at the beach, eating their fill of crab at night, made life back in Tokyo begin to look unreal, and far, far away. Mostly they talked about the present. Silence fell on their meal from time to time, each of them lost in their own thoughts. But it wasn’t an unpleasant silence. Cold beer and hot crab filled in the gaps nicely.
    
They left the restaurant and walked back to their hotel, and, as always, ended their day by making love. Quiet, but fulfilling lovemaking. They both took showers and soon fell asleep.
    
But after a short while the young man woke up, feeling awful. He had a sensation that was as if he’d swallowed a hard cloud. He rushed to the bathroom, and draped over the toilet bowl he spewed out the content of his stomach. His stomach had been full of white crab meat. He hadn’t had time to switch on the light, but in the light of the moon, which lay floating over the sea, he could tell what was in the toilet. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and let time pass. His head was a blank, and he couldn’t form a single thought. All he could do was wait. Another wave of nausea hit him and again he threw up whatever was left in his stomach.
    
When he open his eyes he saw a white lump of what he’d vomited floating in the water in the toilet. A huge amount. What a hell of a lot of crab I ate! he thought, half impressed. Eating this much crab day after day—no wonder I got sick. No matter how you look at it, this was far too much crab. Two or three years’ worth of crab in four days.
    
As he stared, he noticed that the lump floating in the toilet looked as if it was moving slightly. At first he thought he must be imagining things. The faint moonlight must be producing the illusion. An occasional passing cloud would cover the moon, making everything, for a moment, darker than before. The young man closed his eyes, took a slow deep breath and opened his eyes again. It was no illusion. The lump of meat was definitely moving. Like wrinkles twisting around, the surface of the meat was wriggling.

The young man stood up and flicked on the bathroom light. He leaned closer to the lump of meat and saw that what was trembling on the surface were countless worms. Tiny worms the same colour as the crabmeat, millions of them, clinging to the surface of the meat.
    
Once more he vomited everything in his stomach. But there wasn’t anything left, and his stomach clenched into a fist-sized lump. Bitter green bile came out, wrung out of his guts. Not content with this, he gulped down mouthwash and spewed it back up. He flushed down the contents of the toilet, flushing over and over to make sure it was all gone.

Then he washed his face at the sink, using the fresh white towel to scrub hard around his mouth, and he thoroughly brushed his teeth. He rested his hands against the sink and stared at his reflection in the mirror. His face looked gaunt, wrinkled, his skin the coulour of dirt. He couldn’t believe that was really his face. He looked like some exhausted old man.
   
He left the bathroom, leaned back against the door and surveyed the bedroom. His girlfriend was in bed, fast asleep. Face sunk deep in her pillow, she was snoring peacefully, oblivious to what had transpired. Like a delicate fan, her long hair covered her cheeks, her shoulders. Just before her shoulder blades were two small moles, lined up like a pair of twins. Her back revealed a clear swimsuit line.

Light from the whitish moon tranquilly filtered in through the blinds, along with the monotonous sound of waves against the shore. On the bedside the green numbers of the alarm clock glowed. Nothing had changed. Except that now, the crab was inside her—that everything they’d shared the same dishes. Only she wasn’t aware of it.
    
The young man sank down in the rattan chair next to the window, closed his eyes and breathed, slowly and regularly. Breathing fresh air into his lungs, exhaling the old, the stale. Trying to breathe as much air as he could into his body. He wanted all the pores in his body to open wide. Like an antique alarm clock in an empty room, his heart pounded out a hard, dry beat.
    
Gazing at his girlfriend, he pictured the countless tiny worms in her stomach. Should he wake her up and tell her about it? Shouldn’t they do something? Unsure what to do, he thought for a while, and decided against it. It wouldn’t do any good. She hadn’t noticed anything. And that was the main problem.

The world felt out of kilter. He could hear as it creaked through this new orbit. Something had happened, he thought, and the world had changed. Everything was out of order, and would never get back to the way it was. Everything had changed, and all it could do was continue in this new direction.

Tomorrow I’m going back to Tokyo, he thought, back to the life I left there. On the surface nothing’s changed, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get along with her again. I’ll never feel the way I felt about her until yesterday, the young man knew. But that’s not all. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get along with myself. It’s as though we fell off a high fence, on the outside. Painlessly, without a sound. And she never ever noticed.
    
The young man sat in the rattan chair until dawn, breathing quietly. From time to time a squall came up in the night, the raindrops pounding against the window like some kind of punishment. The rain clouds would pass and the moon showed its face. Again and again. But the woman never woke up. Or even rolled over in bed. Her shoulder shook a little few times, but that was all. More than anything, he wanted to sleep, to sleep soundly and wake up to find that everything had been solved, that everything was as it had been, operating smoothly as always. The young man wanted nothing more than to fall into a deep sleep. But no matter how much he might stretch his hand out for it, sleep lay out of reach.

The young man remembered that first night, when they passed that little side-street restaurant. The two old Chinese men silently eating their food, the black dog, eyes closed, at their feet, the faded umbrellas at the tables. How she’d tugged at his arm. It all seemed years ago. But it was barely three days. Three days in which, through some strange force, he’d changed into one of those ominous, ashen old men. All in the quiet, beautiful seaside city of Singapore.

He brought his hands in front of him and gazed intently at them. He looked at the back of his hands, then the palms. Nothing could hide the fact that his hands were trembling, ever so slightly.
    
‘Mm, I’ve always loved crab,’ he could hear her say. ‘How about you?’
    
I don’t know, he thought.
   
 His heart felt enclosed by something formless, surrounded by a deep, soft mystery. He no longer had the faintest clue where his life was headed, and what might be waiting for him there. But as the eastern sky finally began to lighten he suddenly had a thought. One thing I am sure of, he thought. No matter where I go, I’m never going to eat crab again.

Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova By Haruki Murakami

Bird is back.

How fantastic that sounds! Yes indeed, the Bird you know and love has returned, his powerful wings beating the air. In every corner of this planet – from Novosibirsk to Timbuktu – people are going to gaze up at the sky, spy the shadow of that magnificent Bird and cheer. And the world will be filled once more with radiant sunlight.

The time is 1963. Years since people last heard the name Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. Where is Bird, and what is he up to? Jazz lovers around the world whisper these questions. He can’t be dead yet, can he? Because we never heard about him passing away. But you know, someone might say, I haven’t heard anything about him still being alive either.

The last news anyone had about Bird was that he had been taken into the mansion of his patron, Baroness Nica, where he was battling various ailments. Jazz fans are well aware that Bird is a junkie. Heroin – that deadly, pure white powder. Rumor had it that on top of his addiction he was struggling with acute pneumonia, a variety of internal maladies, the symptoms of diabetes and even mental illness. If he was fortunate enough to survive all this, he must have been too infirm to ever pick up his instrument again. That’s how Bird vanished from sight, transforming into a beautiful jazz legend. Around the year 1955.

Fast forward to the summer of 1963. Charlie Parker picks up his alto sax again and records an album in a studio outside of New York. And that album’s title is Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova!

Can you believe it?

You’d better. Because it happened.

It really did.

This was the opening of a piece I wrote back in college. It was the first time that anything I wrote got published, and the first time I was paid a fee for something I’d written, though it was only a pittance.

Naturally, there’s no such record as Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova. Charlie Parker passed away on 12 March 1955, and it wasn’t until 1962 that bossa nova broke through, spurred on by performances by Stan Getz and others. But if Bird had survived until the 1960s, and if he had become interested in bossa nova and performed it . . . That was the setup for the review I wrote about this imaginary record.

The editor of the literary magazine at the university who published this article never doubted it was an actual album and ran it as an ordinary piece of music criticism. The editor’s younger brother, a friend of mine, sold him on it, telling him I’d written some good stuff and that they should use my work. (The magazine folded after four issues. My review was in issue no. 3.)


A precious tape that Charlie Parker left behind had been discovered by accident in the vaults of a record company and had only recently seen the light of day – that was the premise I cooked up for the article. Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to judge, but I still think this story is plausible in all its details, and the writing has real punch. So much so that in the end I nearly came to believe that the record actually existed.

There was considerable reaction to my article when the magazine published it. This was a small, low-key college journal, generally ignored. But there seemed to be quite a few readers who still idolized Charlie Parker, and the editor received a series of letters complaining about my moronic joke and thoughtless sacrilege. Do other people lack a sense of humor? Or is my sense of humor kind of twisted? Hard to say. Some people apparently took the article at face value and even went to record shops in search of the album.

The editor kicked up a bit of a fuss about my tricking him. I didn’t actually lie to him, but merely omitted a detailed explanation. He must have been secretly pleased that the article got so much attention, even though most of it was negative. Proof of that came when he told me he’d like to see whatever else I wrote, criticism or original work. ( The magazine disappeared before I could show him another piece.)

My article went on as follows:

. . . Who would ever have imagined a lineup as unusual as this – Charlie Parker and Antônio Carlos Jobim joining forces? Jimmy Raney on guitar, Jobim on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Roy Haynes on drums – a dream rhythm section so amazing it makes your heart pound just hearing the names. And on alto sax – who else but Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker.

Here are the names of the tracks:


    Side A

    (1) Corcovado

    (2) Once I Loved (O Amor em Paz)

    (3) Just Friends

    (4) Bye Bye Blues (Chega de Saudade)


    Side B

    (1) Out of Nowhere

    (2) How Insensitive (Insensatez)

    (3) Once Again (Outra Vez)

    (4) Dindi

With the exception of ‘Just Friends’ and ‘Out of Nowhere’ these are all well-known pieces composed by Jobim. The two pieces not by Jobim are both standards familiar from Parker’s early, magnificent performances, though of course here they are done in a bossa nova rhythm, a totally new style. (And on these two pieces only the pianist wasn’t Jobim but the versatile veteran Hank Jones.)

So, lover of jazz that you are, what’s your first reaction when you hear the title Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova? A yelp of surprise, I would imagine, followed close on by feelings of curiosity and anticipation. But soon wariness must raise its head – like ominous dark clouds appearing on what had been a beautiful, sunny hillside.

Hold on just a minute. Are you telling me that Bird – Charlie Parker – is actually playing bossa nova? Seriously? Did Bird himself really want to play that kind of music? Or did he give in to commercialism, get talked into it by the record company, reaching out for what was, at the time, popular? Even if, say, he genuinely wanted to perform that kind of music, could the style of this 100 percent bebop alto sax player ever harmonize with the cool sounds of Latin American bossa nova?

Setting aside all that – after an eight-year hiatus, would Bird still be master of his instrument? Had he retained his powerful performing skills and creativity?

Truth be told, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about all that myself. I was dying to hear the music, but at the same time I felt afraid, frightened of being disappointed by what I might hear. But now, after I’ve listened intently to the disc over and over, I can state one thing for sure: I’d climb to the roof of a tall building and shout it so the whole town could hear. If you love jazz, or have any love for music at all, then you absolutely must listen to this charming record, the fruit of a passionate heart and a cool mind . . .

What’s surprising, first of all, is the indescribable interplay between Jobim’s simple, economical piano style and Bird’s eloquent, uninhibited phrasing. I know you might object that Jobim’s voice (he doesn’t sing here so I’m referring only to his instrumental voice) and Bird’s voice are totally different in quality, with contrasting, even conflicting objectives. We’re talking about two very different voices here, so different it might be hard to find any points they share. On top of that, neither seems to be making much of an effort to revamp his music to fit that of the other. But it’s exactly this sense of the divergence between the two men’s voices that is the very driving force behind this uniquely lovely music.

I’d like you to start by listening to the first track on the A side, ‘Corcovado’. Bird doesn’t play the opening theme. In fact he doesn’t take up the theme until one phrase at the end. The piece starts with Jobim quietly playing that familiar theme alone on the piano. The rhythm section is simply mute. The melody calls to mind a young girl seated at a window, gazing out at the beautiful night view. Most of it is done with single notes, with the occasional no-frills chord added, as if gently tucking a soft cushion under the girl’s shoulders.

And once that performance of the theme by the piano is over, Bird’s alto sax quietly enters, a faint twilight shadow slipping through a gap in the curtain. He’s there before you even realize it. These graceful, disjointed phrases are like lovely memories, their names hidden, slipping into your dreams. Like fine wind patterns you never want to disappear, leaving gentle traces on the sand dunes of your heart . . .

I’ll omit the rest of the article, which is simply a further description, with all the suitable embellishments. The above gives you an idea of the kind of music I was talking about. Of course it’s music that doesn’t actually exist. Or at least, music that couldn’t possibly exist.

I’ll wrap up that story there and talk about something that took place years later.

For a long time I’d totally forgotten that I’d written that article back in college. My life after school turned out to be more harried and busy than I ever could have imagined, and that review of a make-believe album was nothing more than a lighthearted, irresponsible joke I’d played when I was young. But close to fifteen years later, the article unexpectedly re-emerged into my life like a boomerang you threw whirling back at you when you least expect it.

I was in New York on business and, with time on my hands, took a walk near my hotel, ducking inside a small, secondhand-record shop I came across on East 14th Street. And in the Charlie Parker section I found, of all things, a record called Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova. It looked like a bootleg, a privately pressed recording. A white jacket with no drawing or photo on the front, just the title in sullen black letters. On the back was a list of the tracks and the musicians. Surprisingly, the list of songs and musicians was exactly as I’d invented them in college. And likewise, Hank Jones sat in for Jobim on two tracks.

I stood there, stock-still, speechless, record in hand. It felt like some small internal part of me had gone numb. I looked around again. Was this really New York? Yes, this was downtown New York – no doubt about it. And I was actually here, in a small used-record shop. I hadn’t wandered into some fantasy world. And neither was I having a super-realistic dream.

I slipped the record out of its jacket. It had a white label, with the title and names of the songs. No sign of a record company logo. I examined the vinyl itself and found four distinct tracks on each side. I went over and asked the long-haired young guy at the register if I could take a listen to the album. No, he replied. The store turntable’s broken. Sorry about that.

The price on the record was $35. I wavered for a long time about whether to buy it. In the end I left the shop empty-handed. I figured, it’s got to be somebody’s idea of a silly joke. Somebody, on a whim, had faked a record based on my long-ago description of an imaginary recording. Took a different record that had four tracks on each side, soaked it in water, peeled off the label and glued on a homemade one. Any way you looked at it, it was ridiculous to pay $35 for a bogus record like that.

I went to a Spanish restaurant near the hotel and had some beer and a simple dinner by myself. As I was strolling around aimlessly afterwards, a wave of regret suddenly welled up in me. I should have bought that record after all. Even if it was a fake, and way overpriced, I should have gotten it, at the very least as a souvenir of all the twists and turns my life had taken. I went straight back to East 14th Street. I hurried, but the record shop was closed by the time I got there. On the shutter was a sign that said the shop opened at 11.30 a.m. and closed at 7.30 p.m. on weekdays.

The next morning, just before noon, I went to the shop again. A middle-aged guy – thinning hair, in a disheveled, round-neck sweater – was sipping coffee and reading the sports section of the paper. The coffee seemed freshly brewed, for a pleasant smell wafted faintly through the shop. The shop had just opened, and I was the only customer. An old tune by Pharoah Sanders filtered through the small speaker on the ceiling. My guess was the man was the owner.

I thumbed through the Charlie Parker section, but the record was nowhere to be found. I was sure I’d returned it to this section yesterday. Thinking it might have got mixed in elsewhere, I rifled through every bin in the jazz section. But as hard as I looked, no luck. Had someone else bought it? I went over to the register and spoke to the middle-aged guy. ‘I’m looking for a jazz record I saw here yesterday.’

‘Which record?’ he asked, eyes never wavering from the New York Times.

‘Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,’ I said.

He laid down his paper, took off his thin, metal-framed reading glasses and slowly turned to face me. ‘I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?’

I did. The man said nothing and took another sip of coffee. He shook his head slightly. ‘There’s no such record.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘If you’d like Perry Como Sings Jimi Hendrix, we have that in stock.’

‘Perry Como Sings –’ I got that far before I realized he was pulling my leg. He was the type who kept a straight face. ‘But I really did see it,’ I insisted. ‘I was sure it was produced as a joke, I mean.’

‘You saw that record here?’

‘Yesterday afternoon. Right here.’ I described the record, the jacket and the songs on it. How it’d been priced at $35.

‘There’s gotta be some mistake. We’ve never had that kind of record. I do all the purchasing and pricing of jazz records myself, and if a record like that crossed my desk, I would definitely have remembered it. Whether I wanted to or not.’

He shook his head and put his reading glasses back on. He returned to the sports section, but then, as if he’d had second thoughts, he removed his glasses, smiled and gazed steadily at me. ‘But if you ever do get hold of that record,’ he said, ‘let me listen to it, okay?’

There's one more thing that came later on.

This happened long after the record-store incident (in fact, quite recently). One night I had a dream about Charlie Parker. In the dream Charlie Parker performed 'Corcovado' just for me - for me alone. Solo alto, no rhythm section.

Sunlight was shining in from some gaps

And the alto sax he held, was absurdly was covered filthy, covered in dirt and rust. One bent key he'd barely kept in place by taping the handle of a spoon to it. When I saw that, I was puzzled. Even Bird wouldn't be able to get decent sound out of that poor excuse for an instrument. 

Suddenly, right then, my nose picked up an amazingly fragrant aroma of coffee. What an entrancing smell, the aroma of hot, strong black coffee. My nostrils twitched with pleasure. For all the temptations of that scent, I never took my eyes of Bird. If I did, even for a second, he might have vanished from sight.

I'm not sure why, but I knew then it was a dream. That I was seeing Bird in a dream. That happens sometimes. As I'm dreaming I know for certain this is a dream. And I was strangely impressed in the midst of a dream could catch, so very clearly, the enticing smell of coffee.

Bird finally put his lips to the mouthpiece and tentatively blew one subdued sound, as if checking the condition of the reed. And once that sound had faded away, he quietly lined up a few more notes in the same way. They floated there for a time, then gently fell to the ground, each and every one. Once they were swallowed up by the silence, Bird sent out a series of deeper, more resilient notes into the air. That's how 'Corcovado' started.

How to describe that music? Looking back on it, what Bird played for me in my dream felt less like a stream of sound than a momentary, total irradiation. I can vividly remember the music being there. But I can't reproduce it. Over time, it's faded from memory. Like being unable to describe in words the design of a mandala. What I can say is that the music reached to the deepest recesses of my soul, the very core. That kind of  music existed in the world - I was certain of it - a sound that reconfigured, if ever so slightly, the very structure of your body.

"It was only thirty-four when I died," Bird said to me. At least I think he was saying it to me. Since we were the only two people in the room.

I didn't know how to respond. It's hard in dreams to do the right thing. So I stayed silent, waiting for him to go on.

I didn't know how to respond. It's hard in dreams to do the right thing. So I stayed silent, waiting for him to go on.

'Think about it – what it is to die at thirty-four,' Bird said. I thought about how I'd feel if I'd died at thirty-four. When I'd only just begun so many things in life.

"That's right. I'd only just begun so many things myself,' Bird said. 'Only begun to live my life. But then I looked around me and it was all over.' He silently shook his head. His entire face was still in shadow, so I couldn't see his expression. His dirty, battered saxophone dangled from the strap around his neck.

"Death always comes on suddenly," Bird said. "But it also takes its time. Like the beautiful phrases that come into your head. It lasts an instant, yet they can linger forever. As long as it takes to go from the East Coast to the West Coast – or to infinity, even. The concept of time is lost there. In that sense, I might have been dead even while I lived out my life. But still, actual death is crushing. What's existed until then suddenly, and completely vanishes. Returning to nothingness. In my case, that existence was me."

He looked down a time, staring at his instrument. And then spoke again.

"Do you know what I was thinking about when I died?" Bird asked. 'My mind had just one thought – a single melody. I kept on humming that melody over and over. It just wouldn't let go. That happens, right? A tune gets stuck in your head. That melody was a phrase from the third movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. This melody."

Bird softly hummed the melody. I recognized it. The solo piano part.

"This is the one Beethoven melody that really swings,' Bird said. 'I've always liked his Concerto No. 1. I've listened to it I don't know how many times. The 78 rpm record with Schnabel on piano. But it's strange, don't you think? That I – Charlie died while mentally replaying, of all things, a Beethoven melody, over and over. And then came darkness. Like a curtain falling.' Bird gave a little laugh, his voice hoarse.

I had no reply. What could I possibly say about the death of Charlie Parker?

"Anyway, I need to thank you " Bird said. "You gave me life again, this one time. And had me play bossa nova. Nothing could make me happier. Course being alive and actually playing would have been more exciting. But even in death this was a truly wonderful experience. Since I always love music."

So did you appear here today in order to thank me?"

"That's right," Bird said, as if reading my mind. "I stopped by to express my thanks. To say thank you. I hope you enjoyed my music." I nodded. I should have said something, but couldn't for the life of me come up with the right response.

"Perry Como Sings Jimi Hendrix, eh?" Bird murmured, as if recalling. And chuckled again in a hoarse voice.

And then he vanished. First his saxophone disappeared, next the light shining in from somewhere. And, finally, Bird himself was gone.

When I woke up from the dream the clock next to my 3.30 a.m. It was still dark out, of course. The fragrance of coffee that should have filled the room was gone. There was no fragrance at all. I went to the kitchen and gulped down a couple of glasses of water. I sat at the dining table and tried once more to recollect, even if only in part, that amazing music that Bird had played just for me. But I couldn't recall a single note. I could, though, remember what Bird had said. Before his words faded from memory, I wrote them down as accurately as I could. it came to the dream, that was the sole action I could take. Bird had visited my dream in order to thank me – that I recalled. To thank me for giving him the opportunity, so many years before, to play bossa nova. And he grabbed an instrument that happened to be around and played 'Corcovado' just for me.

Can you believe it?

You'd better. Because it happened.

It really did.

---

Translated by Philip Gabriel

source:  https://granta.com/charlie-parker-plays-bossa-nova/, together with Granta 148: Summer Fiction By Sigrid Rausing via Google Books search.