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

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.

Lexington Ghosts By Haruki Murakami

 Translated by Christopher Allison

This is something that actually happened several years ago. I have altered the names on account of
certain circumstances, but other than that it's entirely true.

I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for about 2 years. At that time, I got to know this architect--a
handsome guy, just past fifty, about half of his hair was white. He wasn't very tall. He enjoyed
swimming a lot, swam everyday, and consequently was in very good shape. He played tennis once in
a while as well. As for his name--let's call him Casey. He was single, and lived in this old mansion in
Lexington, a suburb of Boston, together with an extremely reticent, sallow-faced piano tuner. His
name was Jeremy: probably mid-thirties, tall, slender as a willow, hair thinning a little. In addition to
being a piano tuner he also played tolerably.

A few of my stories had been translated into English, and then had appeared in a magazine. Casey had read these and sent me a letter through my publisher.

"I'm very interested in your work, and curious what kind of person you are," he wrote. I don't usually
meet people who send me fan mail (in my experience, these kinds of meetings are never very fun or
interesting), but I thought that meeting this guy Casey would probably be OK. His letter was really
interesting, and imbued with a his rich sense of humor. I also had the optimism that comes with living
overseas. We lived quite close to each other. Still, all of these circumstances didn't match up to one
other, peripheral reason. The single biggest reason I wanted to meet this guy Casey was that he was
the owner of a magnificent collection of old jazz records.

"If you searched the whole country over, you probably wouldn't find a single private collection that is
so complete. I understand that you like jazz a lot, or are at least interested in it," he wrote. Just so. I
am certainly interested in it. After reading his letter, I wanted to see this record collection so badly I
couldn't stand it. When I get ensnared by a collection of old jazz records, all my psychological powers of resistance disappear, like a horse bewitched by the scent of some special tree.

Casey's house was in Lexington. That's about 30 minutes by car from where I lived. When I called
him, he faxed me a detailed map with directions. One afternoon in April, I got in my green
Volkswagen and drove to his house alone. I quickly picked it out. It's was a huge, old three-story
house. It had probably been standing there for at least 100 years. Even in Boston's swank residential
neighborhoods, where stately mansions stand side-by-side and all have long histories, this splendid
house particularly stuck out. It was good enough for a postcard.

The garden was like a vast forest, and blue jays jumped from branch to branch, raising their sharp,
merry voices all the while. There was a new BMW parked in the driveway. When I parked the car
behind the BMW, a large mastiff who had been sleeping on the welcome mat on the front porch slowly got to his feet and barked dutifully two or three times. His bark seemed to suggest "It's not that I really want to bark, so I'll do it sort of halfway."

Casey came out and shook my hand. He had a firm handshake that seemed to confirm something.
While he was shaking my hand, he patted my shoulder gently with his other hand. This was a frequent mannerism of his. "Hi. I'm glad you came. It's really nice to meet you," he said. He was wearing a fashionable white Italian shirt buttoned all the way to the top, a light brown cashmere cardigan, and soft cotton pants. He also had on a pair of small Georgio Armani-style glasses. All very smart.
1

Casey took me inside, sat me down on a sofa in the living room, and brought out a freshly-made pot of excellent coffee.

Casey wasn't overly forward; he'd had a good upbringing and was well-educated. Having traveled all
over the world when he was young, he was a great conversationalist. We got to be good friends, and I
went over to his house to hang out about once a month. And he shared the blessing of that splendid
record collection with me. When I was there, I was able to listen to incredibly rare and valuable music as much as I liked, which I otherwise never would have heard. Compared to that record collection, the stereo system wasn't so great, but the old vacuum-tube amp produced a warm, nostalgic sound.

Casey used the house's study as his office, and drew up building plans on a big computer there. But he didn't tell me very much about his work. "It's not particularly important," he said with a laugh, as if making an excuse. I have no idea what kind of buildings he designed. He never appeared to be
particularly busy. The Casey I knew was always sitting on the sofa in the living room, his wine glass
tilted elegantly, reading a book or straining to hear Jeremy's piano. Or perhaps sitting in his garden
chair playing with the dog. It's just a feeling I have, but I think that he didn't work that hard.

His deceased father had been a nationally famous psychologist, and had written five or six books, all
of which were well on their way to becoming classics. Also a devoted jazz fan, he was a close friend
of Prestige Records founder and producer Bob Weinstock, and on account of that his collection of jazz vinyl from the 1940's to the 1960's was, as Casey 's letter had said, astonishingly complete.

While it's sheer volume was particularly impressive, one couldn't complain about the outstanding quality of the records either. Almost all the records were first editions and in perfect condition. Neither the jackets nor the disks themselves had the slightest blemish. It was very close to miraculous. Casey took great care with their preservation, and he handled each one as if he were bathing an infant.

Casey had no siblings, and his mother died when he was young. His father had never remarried.
Hence, when his father had succumbed to pancreatic cancer 15 years before, he alone had inherited the house and all it's various heirlooms, including the complete record collection. Because Casey
respected his father more than anyone, and loved him too, he didn't get rid of a single record, and
preserved the whole collection with great care, just as it was. Casey liked to listen to jazz, but he
wasn't as ardent a fan as his father. He really preferred classical music, and whenever Seiji Ozawa
was conducting the Boston Symphony, he and Jeremy never failed to attend.

After I had known him for about a year, Casey asked me to take care of his house while we was away.
Although it happened very rarely, he had to go to London for about a week on business. When Casey
went away on trips, Jeremy usually looked after the house, but this time he couldn't. Jeremy's mother,
who lived in West Virginia, was in declining health, and a short time before he had gone back home.
So Casey called me.

"Sorry to do this to you, but I couldn't think of anyone else," he said. "And while I say ‘house-sitter,'
aside from giving Miles (that was the dog's name) his food twice a day, there's not really anything else to do. You can listen to whatever records you like. And there's plenty of food and drink, so help
yourself."

It didn't sound like a bad proposition. I was living alone at that time on account of certain
circumstances, and the house next to my apartment in Cambridge was under construction, so there was an unbearable racket everyday. I got some extra clothes, my MacIntosh Powerbook, and a couple of books and went to Casey's house early in the afternoon one Friday. Casey had just finished packing
and was about to call a taxi.

Have a good time in London, I said

2

"Yeah, of course," Casey said smiling. "Enjoy the house and the records. It's not a bad place."

After Casey had gone, I went to the kitchen and fixed a cup of coffee. Then I set up my computer on a table in the music room, which adjoined the living room and, listening to some of the records Casey's father had left behind, I worked for about an hour. It seemed like I should be able to get a lot of work done during the coming week.

The desk, a huge mahogany affair, had drawers on either side. It was from quite an ancient time. It
was by far the oldest thing in the room, and beside anything from a different era, like the MacIntosh I
had brought with me, it seemed as if it had remained there unmoved for an unimaginably long period
of time. After his father had died, Casey hadn't added so much as a postage stamp to the music room-- it was as if he regarded it as some holy shrine or reliquary. While the whole house was prone to dust on account of it's age, in the music room it was as if the flow of time had stopped until moments before. It was in perfect order. There wasn't a speck of dust on the shelves, and the desk was polished to sparkling.

Miles came in and lay down at my feet. I patted his head a few times. He was a terribly lonely dog,
and couldn't stand to be alone for very long. He'd been trained to sleep on his own bed in the kitchen,
but the rest of the time he was always at someone's side, unaffectedly attaching himself to some part of his companion's body.

The living room and the music room were separated by a high door-less doorway. In the living room
there was a large brick fireplace, and a very comfortable three-person leather sofa. There were four
mismatched arm-chairs, and three coffee tables, also all distinct. A fancy, but now somewhat faded,
Persian carpet had been laid on the floor, and from the high ceiling dangled a chandelier of ancient
origin. I went in and sat down on the sofa, taking in my surroundings. The clock above the fireplace
chopped up the minutes with a tick-tock that sounded like someone smashing a window on tip-toes.

The tall wooden bookshelves against the wall were lined art books and volumes on all sorts of
specialties. A couple of oil paintings of some unknown coastline hung on three walls, kind of
haphazardly. The general impression created by this scenery was somehow fitting. No human form
could be seen in any of these pictures, just lonely sea-scapes. They looked as though, if you brought
your ear up close enough, you'd be able to hear the sound of the chill wind and the rough seas.
Splendid pieces, all, but not a one that particularly stood out. There wafted from each one the smell of
moderate, New England-style, but still quite detached, Old Money.

The record shelf was against one broad wall of the music room, and all of those old records were lined up neatly, in alphabetical order according to the performers' names. Even Casey didn't know exactly how many there were. It's probably around six or seven thousand, he had said. But there are the same number again, packed in cardboard boxes and stored in the attic. "I wouldn't be surprised if the whole place sank into the ground someday on account of the weight of all those old records, like the House of Usher."

I set an old Lee Connitz 10" on the turntable, and as I sat at the desk writing, time passed comfortably
and tranquilly. I had a very pleasant sensation, like I had buried myself in a perfectly-fitting mould.
As time passed, I felt like I developed a special, carefully-constructed intimacy with this room. The
reverberation of the music permeated everything: every nook of the room, every tiny cavity in the
walls, right down to the creases in the curtains.

That evening I opened a bottle of Montepulciano that Casey had left specially for me, poured it into a
crystal wine glass, and drank several glasses, sitting on the sofa reading a new-release novel I had just
bought. Even disregarding Casey's recommendation, the wine was great. I got a wedge of Brie out of
the refrigerator and ate about a quarter of it with crackers. All the while, it was quiet as a mouse.

3

Apart from the tick-tock of the aforementioned clock, the only sound that could be heard was the
occasional car passing on the street out front. The street closest to the house was just a cul-de-sac,
though, so traffic was limited just to people in the neighborhood. When evening came, it dropped off
to almost nothing. Coming from Cambridge, with it's noisy student crowds, it felt like I was at the
bottom of the ocean. As per my usual, when the clock struck 11 I began to feel a little tired. Putting
the book aside, I set my wine glass in the kitchen sink and said goodnight to Miles. The dog curled up
on top of his bed with resignation and, after a slight groan, shut his eyes. I turned out the lights and
went up to the guest bedroom on the second floor. I changed into my pajamas and was soon fast
asleep.

When I woke up, I was in a formless void. I didn't know where I was. For a little while I was
senseless, like a wilted vegetable. Like a vegetable that's forgotten and left forgotten in a dark
cupboard for a long time. At length I finally remembered that I was house-sitting for Casey. Oh,
yeah. I'm in Lexington. I fumbled around for the wristwatch I had left on the pillow. When I pushed
the button, the time appeared with a blue glow. It was 1:15.

I quietly raised myself from the bed and turned on a small reading lamp. It took me a minute to find
the switch. The lamp was made of polished glass in the shape of a lily, and produced a yellow light. I
rubbed my temples strongly with the palms of both hands, heaved a big sigh, and looked around the
inside of the brightened room. I inspected the walls, gazed across the carpet, and looked up at the
ceiling. Then, like collecting beans that had spilled out on the floor, I gathered up the fragments of my consciousness one-by-one, and got reacquainted with the reality of my body. Gradually, I became
aware of something: there was a sound. A low rumble, like waves crashing against the shore--that
sound is what had roused me from my deep sleep.

Someone is downstairs.

I tip-toed to the door and held my breath. Soon, I could hear the sound of my own heartbeat. There
was no mistaking that there was someone in the house besides me. And it wasn't just one or two
people. A sound like music could also be faintly heard. I had no idea why. A cold sweat began to
trickle from my armpits. What in the world had gone on while I was asleep?

The first thing that popped into my head was that this was some kind of elaborate practical joke.
Casey had only pretended to go to London, but in reality had stayed behind, and had organized a party in the middle of the night just to scare me. No matter how I thought it about it though, I couldn't
convince myself that Casey was the type to play such a childish prank. His sense of humor was more
refined, more elegant.

Or perhaps--I thought, as I stood there still leaning on the door--the people down there were
acquaintances of Casey's whom I didn't know. They knew that Casey was going out of town (but not
that I was house-sitting for him), and had decided to stop by his house in his absence. At any rate, I
was pretty sure that they weren't burglars. When burglars break into someone's house, they usually
don't play their music so loud.

I took off my pajamas and picked up my pants. I put on my sneakers and pulled a sweater over my Tshirt.

But I was only one person. I wanted something in my hands. Glancing around the room,
nothing suitable presented itself. There wasn't a baseball bat or a set of fire tongs. The only things I
could see were the bed, the dresser, a small book shelf, and a framed picture.

When I went out into the hall, I could hear the noise more clearly. The sound of cheerful old-time
music floated up like steam into the hallway from the bottom of the stairs. The melody was quite
familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the tune.

4

I could hear voices, too. Since there were a lot of people's voices mixed up together, I couldn't make
out what they were talking about. Occasionally there was a laugh. It was a pleasant, airy laugh. It
seemed like there was a party going on downstairs, and by the sound of it, it was just getting good. As
if coloring the whole scene, the clinking of champagne glasses and wine glasses resounded merrily.
There were probably people dancing, too; I could hear what sounded like the rhythmical creaking of
leather on the wood floor.

I crept down the hallway to the landing of the staircase. Leaning forward over the banister, I looked
down. Light spilled out from the high vertical window in the foyer, filling it with a queer, ghastly
light. There were no shadows. The doors that separated the living room from the hall were shut tight.
I know that I had left them open when I went to bed. I am absolutely certain of that. There was no
alternative but that someone had shut them after I had gone upstairs to bed.

I was completely at a loss about what to do. One possibility was to return to my second-floor bedroom and hide. Lock the door from the inside, crawl into bed and... When I considered the matter calmly, this seemed like the most prudent course of action. And yet, standing at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of that cheery music and laughter, it was something of a shock to realize that it seemed to be growing quieter, like ripples on the surface of a pond subsiding. Judging by that atmosphere, I surmised that perhaps these were not an ordinary kind of people.

I took one long, deep breath and descended the stairs to the entrance hall. The rubber soles of my
sneakers silently passed from one of those old wooden steps to the next. When I came to the foyer, I
immediately turned left and went into the kitchen. Turning on the lights, I opened a drawer and
retrieved a heavy meat cleaver. Casey was a cooking enthusiast and had a set of expensive Germanmade kitchen knives. The finely-polished stainless steel blade gleamed voluptuous and true in my hand.

But when I tried to imagine myself walking into that rollicking party gripping an enormous meat
cleaver, I quickly realized that it was a bad idea. I poured myself a glass of water from the tap and
returned the meat cleaver to the drawer.

Wait:

What happened to the dog?

I realized for the first time that Miles was nowhere to be found. He wasn't on his usual pillow on the
floor. Where in the world could he have gone? Wasn't it his job to bark or something if someone
broke into the house in the middle of the night? Bending over, I felt the depression in the fur-covered
pillow where he usually lay. No warmth remained. It seemed he'd gotten out of his bed long before
and gone off somewhere.

I left the kitchen, went out into the foyer, and sat down on a small bench there. The music continued
without a break and the conversation continued as well. Like waves, they swelled up from time to
time, and then quieted down again, but they never stopped altogether. How many people were in
there? It seemed like there had to be at least 15. Or maybe it was more like 20. At any rate, it seemed
like that big living room was pretty nearly filled.

I thought for a second about whether I should throw open the doors and go in. That was a strange and
difficult decision. I was the caretaker of the house after all, and as such it's management was my
responsibility. On the other hand, I hadn't been invited .

I strained my ears to catch fragments of the conversation that crept through the cracks in the door, but
it was impossible. The conversation blended into one monotonous whole, and I couldn't distinguish
any individual words. While I knew that there was a conversation, it was like there was a thick plaster
wall in front of me. There was no room for me to enter there. I stuck my hand in my pocket and

5

pulled out a quarter. I twiddled it around in my fingers absently. That silver coin's solidity and reality
restored me to my senses. Then something hit me, like a blow on the head from a fluffy mallet:

They were ghosts.

The folks assembled in the living room, listening to music and amiably chatting away weren't real
people. The air pressure changed like a phase shift had taken place, and my ears were buzzing. I tried
to swallow, but my throat had gone dry and I couldn't. I put the coin back in my pocket and looked
around me. My heart began to thump heavily in my chest.

It seemed very odd that I hadn't realized this until now. How totally ridiculous to think that someone
would break into the house and have a party. The sound of so many cars parking near the house, and
the tramp of so many feet from the front gate to the house would certainly have woken me up. The
dog probably would have barked. In short, there was no way that they could have entered the house.

I wanted Miles by my side. I wanted to put my hands around his big neck, smell that smell, feel the
warmth of his skin. But the dog wasn't anywhere to be seen. I went and sat back down on the bench
in the foyer by myself, as if I were under a spell. Naturally, I was terrified. But it surpassed the fear
of any one particular thing. The fear was deep and mysterious like some vast desert.

Taking in a couple of deep breaths, I quietly replenished the air in my lungs. Little by little, my
normal senses returned. It was a feeling like many cards were being turned over deep inside my
consciousness.

Then I stood up, and muffling the sound of my footsteps exactly like before, I crept up the stairs. I
returned to the bedroom and, without changing my clothes, got into bed.

The music and conversation meandered on. I couldn't sleep well, so I had no choice but to lie there,
until almost day-break. Leaving the light on, I leaned against the headboard and stared at the ceiling,
trying to hear the sounds of the never-ending party below. Eventually, I managed to fall asleep.

When I woke up the next morning, it was raining. It was a quiet drizzle, whose sole purpose was to
soak the earth. The blue jays sang from under the eaves. The clock's hour hand showed a little before
nine. The doors between the foyer and the living room were again standing open, as I had left them
when I went to bed. The living room was not disordered. The book that I had been reading lay open
on the couch. Fine cracker crumbs were still scattered across the top of the coffee table. Just as I had
anticipated, there were no traces of the party.

Miles was curled up on the kitchen floor, sound asleep. He got up and I gave him his dog food.
Shaking his ears, he ate greedily and with relish, as if nothing had happened.

The bizarre party in the middle of the night took place the first night I stayed at Casey's house. After
that, nothing unusual transpired. Lexington's quiet, secretive nights returned without incident. But for
some reason, almost every night I was there I'd wake up in the middle of the night. It was always
between 1:00 and 2:00. I guess I was just high-strung, staying in someone else's house. Or perhaps I
was anxious about a recurrence of that strange party.

When I woke up like this, I'd hold my breath, and strain to hear anything in the darkness. But there
was never a sound. Occasionally, I'd hear the sound of leaves rustling in the garden. At those times I'd
go downstairs and get a drink of water in the kitchen. Miles was always curled up asleep on the floor,
and when he saw me he'd get up happily, wag his tail, and lay his head on my feet.

6

I'd take the dog with me into the living room, turn on the lights, and carefully look around. I never felt anything there, though. The sofa and the coffee table were always lined up silently in their places.
Those cold oil paintings of the New England coast hung on the walls as always. I'd sit down on the
couch for 10 or 15 minutes and just kill time. And when I wasn't able to discover any clue as to what
had happened, I'd close my eyes and focus on my consciousness. But I couldn't feel anything. I was
simply in the suburbs on a quiet and peaceful night. I'd open the window that looked out on the
garden and breathe in the flower-laden spring air. The curtains would flap slightly in the night breeze,
and in the woods, owls would hoot.

When Casey returned after a week in London, I decided not to say anything about what had happened
that night, for the time being. I can't really explain why. I just had a feeling that it was better that way.
Anyway.

"So, how was it? Anything happen while I was gone?" Casey asked me as we stood in the foyer.

"No, nothing special. It was really quiet and I got a lot of work done." That was totally the truth.

"That's great," Casey said with a happy look on his face. Then he pulled a bottle of expensive scotch
out of his bag that he'd gotten for me as a souvenir. We shook hands and parted, and I drove the
Volkswagen back to my apartment in Cambridge.

After that, I didn't see Casey for about six months. We talked on the phone a few times. Jeremy's
mother had died, so that reticent piano tuner had returned to West Virginia permanently. At that time, I was in the final stages of a long novel, so except for matters of utter necessity, I didn't have room to
meet anyone or go anywhere. I was spending more than twelve hours a day at my desk working, and I
don't think I was ever more that a kilometer away from my house.

The last time I met Casey was at a cafe near the Charles River boathouse. I walked there to meet him
and we had a cup of coffee together. I don't know why, but Casey had aged considerably since our last meeting. He was almost unrecognizable. He looked like he had gained ten years. The white in his
hair had increased, and he had dark bags under his eyes. The backs of his hands had also become
more wrinkled. I couldn't reconcile him with the Casey I had known before, who had always taken
such care about his appearance. Perhaps he had some kind of disease. But Casey didn't say anything
about it, so I didn't ask.

Jeremy probably won't come back to Lexington, Casey said to me with a sinking voice, gently shaking his head from left to right. I call West Virginia once in a while and talk to him on the phone.
The shock of his mother's death changed him somehow, he said. He's different from the Jeremy of the old days. He only talks about the constellations now. From beginning to end, this unfortunate astrology talk. How the constellations are positioned today, and so what it's OK to do today, what should be avoided, that kind of thing. When he was here, he never mentioned the stars even once.

"I'm really sorry," I said. But I didn't really know who in the world he was talking about.

"When my mother died, I was only ten years old," Casey began, his eyes fixed on his coffee cup. "Since I didn't have any brothers of sisters, it was just the two of, my father and I, left behind. She
died in a yachting accident in the early fall one year. We were totally unprepared psychologically for
the shock of my mother's death. She was young and vivacious; more than ten years younger than my
father. It had never occurred to either my father or myself that one day my mother would die. But
then one day she was suddenly gone from this world. Poof. Like she'd vanished into thin air. She
was clever and gorgeous and everybody liked her. She like to go out walking, and had a great stride,
with her back stretched, her chin thrust forward slightly, and both hands clasped behind her. She
walked with such an air of pleasure. She usually sang songs while she walked. I loved to go walking
with her, the two of us together. Whenever I think of my mother, I see her walking along the
boardwalk by the sea in Newport, bathed in the vivid light of a summer morning. The hem of her long

7

summer dress fluttered coolly in the breeze. It was a cotton flower-print dress. That scene is burned
into my mind like a photograph.

"She was very dear to my father, and he valued her tremendously. I think he probably loved her even
more deeply than he loved me. He was that kind of person. He loved things that he had gained by his
own hand. To him, I was something obtained by a natural string of events. This is not to say that he
didn't love me: I was his one and only son. But he never loved me as much as he loved my mother.
This is something I understood well. There was no one that my father loved like my mother. After my
mother died, he never remarried.

"For three weeks after my mother's funeral, my father slept continuously. That's not an exaggeration.
Literally, for three weeks straight.

"Occasionally, he would stagger out of bed and, without saying anything, drink a glass of water and
eat a little food. He looked like a sleepwalker or a ghost. It was always only for the shortest possible
time, and then he'd get back into bed. With the shutters shut tight, and the air stagnant in that dark
room, he slept like an enchanted princess. He hardly moved at all. He didn't roll over and his
expression remained the same. Being very uneasy about him, I went back to his side time after time to check up on him. I was afraid he would suddenly die in his sleep. When I came in to fluff his pillow and bring him food, I looked closely at his face.

"But he didn't die. He just slept deeply, like a stone buried in the ground. I think he probably didn't
dream. In that dark, quiet room, only the sound of his regular breathing could be heard. That sleep, so
long and deep, was unlike anything I had ever seen. He looked like a person departed for another
world. I remember being very afraid. Completely alone in that huge mansion, I felt like I had been
abandoned by the whole world.

"15 years ago, when my father passed away, I was obviously very sad, but frankly I wasn't that
surprised. My father looked just the same dead as he had during that deep sleep. He's just like he was
then, I thought to myself. It was deja vu. This overwhelming deja vu, like something deep inside of
me had shifted. From a distance of 30 years, I retraced the past just as it had been. Only this time, I
couldn't hear the sound of his breathing.

"I loved my father. I loved him more than anyone else in the world. I respected him, too. But even
more than that, I was strongly bound to him, both emotionally and spiritually. I know this may sound
strange, but when my father died I, too, got in bed and slept for many days, exactly like my father had
when my mother died. It was like I had succeeded to some special ritual of my bloodline.

"It probably lasted for about two weeks. During that time I slept and slept and slept... I slept until
time decayed and melted away into nothing. No matter how much I slept, it was never enough. At
that time, the world of sleep was the real world, and the everyday world became nothing more than a
vain and temporary place. It was a superficial world devoid of the color of life. I thought that I didn't
want to live anymore in such a world. Gradually, I came to understand what I imagine my father must
have felt like when my mother died. Do you get what I'm saying? Things take on a different shape all
together. Without these new shapes, they can't exist."

Casey was then silent for a moment as if he was thinking about something. It was late fall, and the
sound of acorns falling and hitting the ground with a thud occasionally reached my ears.

"There's only one thing I can say," Casey said raising his head, his familiar stylish smile returning to
his lips. "When I die, there is not one person in the world who will have to sleep that deep sleep."

Sometimes I think about the Lexington ghosts: about their unknown character and number, and about
that lively party they had in the living room of Casey's old mansion in the middle of the night. And I

8

think about Casey and his long, solitary deep sleep, as if in preparation for death, in the second floor
bedroom, with the shutters shut tight. And I think about his father. I think about Miles, the lonely
dog, and that breathtaking record collection. Jeremy playing Shubert. The blue BMW wagon parked
in front of the front door. But they all have the feeling of things that happened a terribly long time
ago in a place terribly far away. Even though they just happened recently.

I've never told these things to anyone until now. Whenever I try to think about it, although it seems
like a very strange tale indeed, perhaps on account of the distance, it doesn't seem very strange to me
at all.

9