26



The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8
(or, A Second Clumsy Massacre)

*


The veterinarian woke before 6:00 a.m. After washing his face in cold water, he made
himself breakfast. Daybreak came at an early hour in summer, and most of the animals in
the zoo were already awake. The open window let in their cries and the breeze that
carried their smells, which told him the weather without his having to look outside. This
was part of his routine. He would first listen, then inhale the morning air, and so ready
himself for each new day.
Today, however, should have been different from the day before. It had to be
different. So many voices and smells had been lost! The tigers, the leopards, the wolves,
the bears: all had been liquidated- eliminated- by soldiers the previous afternoon. Now,
after a night of sleep, those events seemed like pa rt of a sluggish nightmare he had had
long ago. But he knew they had actually happened. His ears still felt a dull ache from the
roar of the soldiers' rifles. That could not be a dream. It was August now, the year was
1945, and he was here in the city of Hsin- ching, where the Soviet troops that had burst
across the border were pressing closer every hour. This was reality- as real as the sink
and toothbrush he saw in front of him.
The sound of the elephants' trumpeting gave him some sense of relief. Ah, yes- the
elephants had survived. Fortunately, the young lieutenant in charge of the platoon had

had enough normal human sensitivity to remove the elephants from the list, thought the
veterinarian as he washed his face. Since coming to Manchuria, he had met any number
of stiff- necked, fanatical young officers from his homeland, and the experience always
left him shaken. Most of them were farmers' sons who had spent their youthful years in
the depressed thirties, steeped in the tragedies of poverty, while a megalomaniac
nationalism was hammered into their skulls. They would follow without a second thought
the orders of a superior, no matter how outlandish. Commanded in the name of the
emperor to dig a hole through the earth to Brazil, they would grab a shovel and set to
work. Some people called this "purity," but the veterinarian had other words for it. An
urban doctor's son, educated in the relatively liberal atmosphere of the twenties, the
veterinarian could never understand those young officers. Shooting a couple of elephants
with small arms should have been far easier than digging through the earth to Brazil, but
the lieutenant in charge of the firing squad, though he spoke with a slight country accent,
seemed to be a more normal human being than the other young officers the veterinarian
had met-better educated and more reasonable. The veterinarian could sense this from the
way the young man spoke and handled himself.
In any case, the elephants had not been killed, and the veterinarian told himself he
should probably be grateful. The soldiers, too, must have been glad to be spared the task.
The Chinese workers may have regretted the omission-they had missed out on a lot of
meat and ivory.
The veterinarian boiled water in a kettle, soaked his beard in a hot to wel, and shaved.
Then he ate breakfast alone: tea, toast and butter. The food rations in Manchuria were far
from sufficient, but compared with those elsewhere, they were still fairly generous. This
was good news both for him and for the animals. The animals showed resentment at their
reduced allotments of feed, but the situation here was far better than in Japanese
homeland zoos, where foodstuffs had already bottomed out. No one could predict the
future, but for now, at least, both animals and humans were being spared the pain of
extreme hunger.
He wondered how his wife and daughter were doing. If all went according to plan,
their train should have arrived in Pusan by now. There his cousin lived who worked for
the railway company, and until the veterinar ian's wife and daughter were able to board
the transport ship that would carry them to Japan, they would stay with the cousin's
family. The doctor missed seeing them when he woke up in the morning. He missed
hearing their lively voices as they prepared breakfast. A hollow quiet ruled the house.
This was no longer the home he loved, the place where he belonged. And yet, at the same
time, he could not help feeling a cer tain strange joy at being left alone in this empty
official residence; now he was able to sense the implacable power of fate in his very
bones and flesh.
Fate itself was the doctor's own fatal disease. From his youngest days, he had had a
weirdly lucid awareness that "I, as an individual, am living under the control of some
outside force." This may have been owing to the vivid blue mark on his right cheek.
While still a child, he hated this mark, this imprint that only he, and no one else, had to
bear upon his flesh. He wanted to die whenever the other children taunted him or
strangers stared at him. If only he could have cut away that part of his body with a knife!
But as he matured, he gradually came to a quiet acceptance of the mark on his face that
would never go away. And this may have been a factor that helped form his attitude of

resignation in all matters having to do with fate.
Most of the time, the power of fate played on like a quiet and monotonous ground
bass, coloring only the edges of his life. Rarely was he reminded of its existence. But
every once in a while, when the balance would shift (and what controlled the balance he
never knew: he could discover no regularity in those shifts), the force would increase,
plunging him into a state of near-paralytic resignation. At such times, he had no choice
but to abandon everything and giv e himself up to the flow. He knew from experience that
nothing he could do or think would ever change the situation. Fate would demand its
portion, and until it received that portion, it would never go away. He believed this with
his whole heart.
Not that he was a passive creature; indeed, he was more decisive than most, and he
always saw his decisions through. In his profession, he was outstanding: a veterinarian of
exceptional skill, a tireless educator. He may have lacked a certain creative spark, but in
school he always had superior grades and was chosen to be the leader of the class. In the
work place, too, others acknowledged his superiority, and his juniors always looked up to
him. He was certainly no "fatalist," as most people use the word. And yet never once in
his life had he experienced the unshakable certainty that he and he alone had arrived at a
decision. He always had the sense that fate had forced him to decide things to suit its own
conve nience. On occasion, after the momentary satisfaction of having decided something
of his own free will, he would see that things had been decided beforehand by an external
power cleverly camouflaged as free will, mere bait thrown in his path to lure him into
behaving as he was meant to. The only things that he had decided for himself with
complete inde pendence were the kind of trivial matters which, on closer inspection, re-
vealed themselves to require no decision making at all. He felt like a titular head of state
who did nothing more than impress the roya l seal on documents at the behest of a regent
who wielded all true power in the realm- like the emperor of this puppet empire of
Manchukuo.
The doctor loved his wife and child. They were the most wonderful thing that had
ever happened to him in his life-especially his daughter, for whom his love bordered on
obsession. For them, he would have gladly given up his life. Indeed, he had often
imagined doing so, and the deaths he had endured for them in his mind seemed the
sweetest deaths imaginable. At the same time, however, he would often come home from
work and, seeing his wife and daughter there, think to himself, These people are, finally,
separate human beings, with whom I have no connection. They were something other,
something of which he had no true knowledge, something that existed in a place far away
from the doctor himself. And whenever he felt this way, the thought would cross his
mind that he himself had chosen neither of these people on his own-which did not
prevent him from loving them unconditionally, without the slightest reservation. This
was, for the doctor, a great paradox, an insoluble contradiction, a gigantic trap that had
been set for him in his life.
The world he belonged to became far simpler, far easier to understand, though, once
he was left alone in his residence at the zoo. All he had to think about was taking care of
the animals. His wife and daughter were gone. There was no need to think about them for
now. The veterinarian and his fate could be alone together.
And it was fate above all, the gigantic power of fate, that held sway over the city of
Hsin-ching in August of 1945 - not the Kwantung Army, not the Soviet Army, not the

troops of the Communists or of the Kuo -mintang. Anyone could see that fate was the
ruler here and that ind ivid ual will counted for nothing. It was fate that had spared the
elephants and buried the tigers and leopards and wolves and bears the day before. What
would it bury now, and what would it spare? These were questions that no one could
answer.
The doctor left his residence to prepare for the morning feeding. He assumed that no
one would show up for work anymore, but he found two Chinese boys waiting for him in
his office. He did not know them. They were thirteen or fourteen years old, dark-
complected and skinny, with roving animal eyes. "They told us to help you," said one
boy. The doctor nodded. He asked their names, but they made no reply. Their faces re-
mained blank, as if they had not heard the question. These boys had ob viously been sent
by the Chinese people who had worked here until the day before. Those people had
probably ended all contact with Japanese now, in anticipation of changes to come, but
assumed that children would not be held accountable. The boys had been sent as a sign of
goodwill. The workers knew that he could not care for the animals alone.
The veterinarian gave each boy two cookies, then put them to work helping him feed
the animals. They led a mule- drawn cart from cage to cage, providing each animal with
its particular feed and cha nging its water. Cleaning the cages was out of the question. The
best they could manage was a quick hose-down to wash away the droppings. The zoo was
closed, after all: no one would complain if it stank a little.
As it turned out, the absence of the tigers, leopards, bears, and wolves made the job
far easier. Caring for big carnivores was a major effort- and dangerous. As bad as the
doctor felt when passing their empty cages, he could not suppress a sense of relief to have
been spared that job.
They started the work at eight o'clock and finished after ten. The boys then
disappeared without a word. The veterinarian felt exhausted from the hard physical labor.
He went back to the office and reported to the zoo director that the animals had been fed.



Just before noon, the young lieutenant came back to the zoo, leading the same eight
soldiers he had brought with him the day before. Fully armed again, they walked with a
metallic clinking that could be heard far in ad vance of their arrival. Again their shirts
were blackened with sweat, and again the cicadas were screaming in the trees. Today,
however, they had not come to kill animals. The lieutenant saluted the director and said,
"We need to know the current status of the zoo's usable carts and draft animals." The
director informed him that they had exactly one mule and one wagon. "We contributed
our only truck and two horses two weeks ago," he noted. The lieutenant nodded and
announced that he would immediately commandeer the mule and wagon, as per orders of
Kwantung Army Headquarters.
"Wait just a minute," the veterinarian interjected. "We need those to feed the animals
twice a day. All our local people have disappeared. Without that mule and wagon, our
animals will starve to death. Even with them, we can barely keep up."
"We're all just barely keeping up, sir," said the lieutenant, whose eyes were red and
whose face was covered with stubble. "Our first priority is to defend the city. You can
always let the animals out of their cages if need be. We've taken care of the dangerous

meat- eaters. The others pose no security risk. These are military orders, sir. You'll just
have to manage as you see fit."
Cutting the discussion short, the lieutenant had his men take the mule and wagon.
When they were gone, the veterinarian and the director looked at each other. The director
sipped his tea, shook his head, and said nothing.
Four hours later, the soldiers were back with the mule and wagon, a filthy canvas
tarpaulin covering the mounded contents of the wagon. The mule was panting, its hide
foaming with the afternoon heat and the weight of the load. The eight soldiers marched
four Chinese men ahead of them at bayonet point- young men, perhaps twenty years old,
wearing baseball uniforms and with their hands tied behind their backs. The black-and-
blue marks on their faces made it obvious that they had been severely beaten. The right
eye of one man was swollen almost shut, and the bleeding lips of another had stained his
baseball shirt bright red. The shirtfronts had nothing written on them, but there were
small rectangles where the name patches had been torn off. The numbers on their backs
were 1, 4, 7, and 9. The veterinarian could not begin to imagine why, at such a time of
crisis, four young Chinese men would be wearing baseball uniforms, or why they had
been so badly beaten and dragged here by Japanese troops. The scene looked like
something not of this world -a painting by a mental patient.
The lieutenant asked the zoo director if he had any picks and shovels he could let
them use. The young officer looked even more pale and haggard than he had before. The
veterinarian led him and his men to a tool- shed behind the office. The lieutenant chose
two picks and two shovels for his men. Then he asked the veterinarian to come with him,
and leaving his men there, walked into a thicket beyond the road. The veterinarian
followed. Wherever the lieutenant walked, huge grasshoppers scattered. The smell of
summer grass hung in the air. Mixed in with the deafening screams of cicadas, the sharp
trumpeting of elephants now and then seemed to sound a distant warning.
The lieutenant went on among the trees without speaking, until he found a kind of
opening in the woods. The area had been slated for construction of a plaza for small
animals that children could play with. The plan had been postponed indefinitely,
however, when the worsening mil itary situation caused a shortage of construction
materials. The trees had been cleared away to make a circle of bare ground, and the sun
illuminated this one part of the woods like stage lighting. The lieutenant stood in the
center of the circle and scanned the area. Then he dug at the ground with the heel of his
boot.
"We're going to bivouac here for a while," he said, kneeling down and scooping up a
handful of dirt.
The veterinarian nodded in response. He had no idea why they had to bivouac in a
zoo, but he decided not to ask. Here in Hsin- ching, exper ience had taught him never to
question military men. Questions did nothing but make them angry, and they never gave
you a straight answer in any case.
"First we dig a big hole here," the lieutenant said, speaking as if to himself. He stood
up and took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Putting a cigarette between his lips,
he offered one to the doctor, then lit both with a match. The two concentrated on their
smoking to fill the silence. Again the lieutenant began digging at the ground with his
boot. He drew a kind of diagram in the earth, then rubbed it out. Finally, he asked the
veterinarian, "Where were you born?"

"In Kanagawa," the doctor said. "In a town called Ofuna, near the sea."
The lieutenant nodded.
"And where were you born?" the veter inarian asked.
Instead of answering, the lieutenant narrowed his eyes and watched the smoke rising
from between his fingers. No, it never pays to ask a military man questions, the
veterinarian told himself again. They like to ask questions, but they'll never give you an
answer. They wouldn't give you the time of day- literally.
"There's a movie studio there," said the lieutenant.
It took the doctor a few seconds to realize the lieutenant was talking about Ofuna.
"That's right. A big studio. I've never been inside, though."
The lieutenant dropped what was left of his cigarette on the ground and crushed it out.
"I hope you make it back there," he said. "Of course, there's an ocean to cross between
here and Japan. We'll probably all die over here." He kept his eyes on the ground as he
spoke. "Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?"
"I guess it depends on how you die," said the veterinarian, after a mo ment's thought.
The lieutenant raised his eyes and looked at the veterinarian as if his curiosity had
been aroused. He had apparently been expecting another answer. "You're right," he said.
"It does depend on how you die."
The two remained silent for a time. The lieutenant looked as if he might just fall
asleep there, standing up. He was obviously exhausted. An especially large grasshopper
flew over them like a bird and disappeared into a distant clump of grass with a noisy
beating of wings. The lieutenant looked at his watch.
"Time to get started," he said to no one in particular. Then he spoke to the
veterinarian. "I'd like you to stay around for a while. I might have to ask you to do me a
favor."
The veterinarian nodded.



The soldiers led the Chinese prisoners to the opening in the woods and untied their
hands. The corporal drew a large circle on the ground, using a baseball bat- though why a
soldier would have a bat the veterinarian found another mystery-and ordered the
prisoners in Japanese to dig a deep hole the size of the circle. With the picks and shovels,
the four men in baseball uniforms started digging in silence. Half the squad stood guard
over them, while the other half stretched out beneath the trees. They seemed to be in
desperate need of sleep; no sooner had they hit the ground in full gear than they began
snoring. The four soldiers who remained awake kept watch over the digging nearby,
rifles resting on their hips, bayonets fixed, ready for immediate use. The lieutenant and
the corporal took turns overseeing the work and napping under the trees.
It took less than an hour for the four Chinese prisoners to dig a hole some twelve feet
across and deep enough to come up to their necks. One of the men asked for water,
speaking in Japanese. The lieutenant nodded, and a soldier brought a bucket full of water.
The four Chinese took turns ladling water from the bucket and gulping it down. They
drank almost the entire bucketful. Their uniforms were smeared black with blood, mud,
and sweat.
The lieutenant had two of the soldiers pull the wagon over to the hole. The corporal

yanked the tarpaulin off, to reveal four dead men piled in the wagon. They wore the same
baseball uniforms as the prisoners, and they, too, were obviously Chinese. They appeared
to have been shot, and their uniforms were covered with black bloodstains. Large flies
were beginning to swarm ove r the corpses. Judging from the way the blood had dried, the
doctor guessed they had been dead for close to twenty- four hours.
The lieutenant ordered the four Chinese who had dug the hole to throw the bodies
into it. Without a word, faces blank, the men to ok the bodies out of the wagon and threw
them, one at a time, into the hole. Each corpse landed with a dull thud. The numbers on
the dead men's uniforms were 2, 5, 6, and 8. The veterinarian committed them to
memory.
When the four Chinese had finished thr owing the bodies into the hole, the soldiers
tied each man to a nearby tree. The lieutenant held up his wrist and studied his watch
with a grim expression. Then he looked up toward a spot in the sky for a while, as if
searching for something there. He looked like a stationmaster standing on the platform
and wait ing for a hopelessly overdue train. But in fact he was looking at nothing at all.
He was just allowing a certain amount of time to go by. Once he had accomplished that,
he turned to the corporal and gave him curt orders to bayonet three of the four prisoners
(numbers 1, 7, and 9).
Three soldiers were chosen and took up their positions in front of the three Chinese.
The soldiers looked paler than the men they were about to kill. The Chinese looked too
tired to hope for anything. The corporal offered each of them a smoke, but they refused.
He put his cigarettes back into his shirt pocket.
Taking the veterinarian with him, the lieutenant went to stand somewhat apart from
the other soldiers. "You'd better watch this," he said. "This is another way to die."
The veterinarian nodded. The lieutenant is not saying this to me, he thought. He's
saying it to himself.
In a gentle voice, the lieutenant explained, "Shooting them would be the simplest and
most efficient way to kill them, but we have orders not to waste a single bullet-and
certainly not to waste bullets killing Chinese. We're supposed to save our ammunition for
the Russians. We'll just bayonet them, I suppose, but that's not as easy as it sounds. By
the way, Doctor, did they teach you how to use a bayonet in the army?"
The doctor explained that as a cavalry veterinarian, he had not been trained to use a
bayonet.
"Well, the proper way to kill a man with a bayonet is this: First you thrust it in under
the ribs-here." The lieutenant pointed to his own torso just above the stomach. "Then you
drag the point in a big, deep cir cle inside him, to scramble the organs. Then you thrust
upward to puncture the heart. You can't just stick it in and expect him to die. We soldiers
have this drummed into us. Hand- to-hand combat using bayonets ranks right up there
along with night assaults as the pride of the Imperial Army-though mainly , it's a lot
cheaper than tanks and planes and cannons. Of course, you can train all you want, but
finally what you're stabbing is a straw doll, not a live human being. It doesn't bleed or
scream or spill its guts on the ground. These soldiers have never actually killed a human
being that way. And neither have I."
The lieutenant looked at the corporal and gave him a nod. The corporal barked his
order to the three soldiers, who snapped to attention. Then they took a half- step back and
thrust out their bayonets, each man aiming his blade at his prisoner. One of the young

men (number 7) growled something in Chinese that sounded like a curse and gave a
defiant spit- which never reached the ground but dribbled down the front of his baseball
uniform.
At the sound of the next order, the three soldiers thrust their bayo nets into the Chinese
men with tremendous force. Then, as the lieutenant had said, they twisted the blades so as
to rip the men's internal organs, and thrust the tips upward. The cries of the Chinese men
were not very loud- more like deep sobs than screams, as if they were heaving out the
breath left in their bodies all at once through a single opening. The soldiers pulled out
their bayonets and stepped back. The corporal barked his order again, and the men
repeated the procedure exactly as before- stabbing, twisting, thrusting upward,
withdrawing. The veterinarian watched in numbed silence, overtaken by the sense that he
was beginning to split in two. He became simultaneously the stabber and the stabbed. He
could feel both the impact of the bayonet as it entered his victim's body and the pain of
having his internal organs slashed to bits.
It took much longer than he would have imagined for the Chinese men to die. Their
sliced- up bodies poured prodigio us amounts of blood on the ground, but even with their
organs shredded, they went on twitching slightly for quite some time. The corporal used
his own bayonet to cut the ropes that bound the men to the trees, and then he had the sol-
diers who had not participated in the killing help drag the fallen bodies to the hole and
throw them in. These corpses also made a dull thud on impact, but the doctor couldn't
help feeling that the sound was different from that made by the earlier corpses-probably
because they were not entirely dead yet.
Now only the young Chinese prisoner with the number 4 on his shirt was left. The
three pale-faced soldiers tore broad leaves from plants at their feet and proceeded to wipe
their bloody bayonets. Not only blood but strange -colored body fluids and chunks of
flesh adhered to the blades. The men had to use many leaves to return the bayonets to
their original bare- metal shine.
The veterinarian wondered why only the one man, number 4, had been left alive, but
he was not going to ask questions. The lieutenant took out another cigarette and lit up. He
then offered a smoke to the veterinarian, who accepted it in silence and, after putting it
between his lips, struck his own match. His hand did not tremble, but it seemed to have
lost all feeling, as if he were wearing thick gloves.
"These men were cadets in the Manchukuo Army officer candidate school," said the
lieutenant. "They refused to participate in the defense of Hsin- ching. They killed two of
their Japanese instructors last night and tried to run away. We caught them during night
patrol, killed four of them on the spot and captured the other four. Two more escaped in
the dark." The lieutenant rubbed his beard with the palm of his hand. "They were trying
to make their getaway in baseball uniforms. I guess they fig ured they'd be arrested as
deserters if they wore their military uniforms. Or maybe they were afraid of what
communist troops would do to them if they were caught in their Manchukuo uniforms.
Anyway, all they had in their barracks to wear besides their cadet outfits were uniforms
of the officer candidate school baseball team. So they tore off the names and tried to get
away wearing these. I don't know if you know, but the school had a great team. They
used to go to Taiwan and Korea for friendship games. That guy"-and here the lieutenant
motioned toward the man tied to the tree-"was captain of the team and batted cleanup.
We think he was the one who organized the getaway. He killed the two instructors with a

bat. The instructors knew there was trouble in the barracks and weren't going to
distribute weapons to the cadets until it was an absolute emergency. But they forgot about
the baseball bats. Both of them had their skulls cracked open. They probably died
instantly. Two perfect home runs. This is the bat."
The lieutenant had the corporal bring the bat to him. He passed the bat to the
veterinarian. The doctor took it in both hands and held it up in front of his face the way a
player does when stepping into the batter's box. It was just an ordinary bat, not very well
made, with a rough finish and an uneven grain. It was heavy, though, and well broken in.
The handle was black with sweat. It didn't look like a bat that had been used re cently to
kill two human beings. After getting a feel for its weight, the veterinarian handed it back
to the lieutenant, who gave it a few easy swings, handling it like an expert.
"Do you play baseball?" the lieutenant asked the veterinarian.
"All the time when I was a kid."
"Too grown up now?"
"No more baseball for me," the veterinarian said, and he was on the verge of asking,
"How about you, Lieutenant?" when he swallowed the words.
"I've been ordered to beat this guy to death with the same bat he used," the lieutenant
said in a dry voice as he tapped the ground with the tip of the bat. "An eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth. Just between you and me, I think the order stinks. What the hell good is
it going to do to kill these guys? We don't have any planes left, we don't have any war-
ships, our best troops are dead. Some kind of special new bomb wiped out the whole city
of Hiroshima in a split second. We're either going to be swept out of Manchuria or we'll
all be killed, and China will belong to the Chinese again. We've already killed a lot of
Chinese, and adding a few bodies to the count isn't going to make any difference. But
orders are orders. I'm a soldier, and I have to follow orders. We killed the tigers and
leopards yesterday, and today we have to kill these guys. So take a good look, Doctor.
This is another way for people to die. You're a doctor, so you're probably used to knives
and blood and guts, but you've probably never seen anyone beaten to death with a
baseball bat."
The lieutenant ordered the corporal to bring player number 4, the cleanup batter, to
the edge of the hole. Once again they tied his hands be hind his back, then they
blindfolded him and had him kneel down on the ground. He was a tall, strongly built
young man with massive arms the size of most people's thighs. The lieutenant called over
one young soldier and handed him the bat. "Kill him with this," he said. The young
soldier stood at attention and saluted before taking the bat, but having taken it in his
hands, he just went on standing there, as if stupefied. He seemed unable to grasp the
concept of beating a Chinese man to death with a baseball bat.
"Have you ever played baseball?" the lieutenant asked the young soldier (the one who
would eventually have his skull split open with a shovel by a Soviet guard in a mine near
Irkutsk).
"No, sir, never," replied the soldier, in a loud voice. Both the village in Hokkaido
where he was born and the village in Manchuria where he grew up had been so poor that
no family in either place could have afforded the luxury of a baseball or a bat. He had
spent his boyhood running around the fields, catching dragonflies and playing at sword
fighting with sticks. He had never in his life played baseball or even seen a game. This
was the first time he had ever held a bat.

The lieutenant showed him how to hold the bat and taught him the basics of the
swing, demonstrating himself a few times. "See? It's all in the hips," he grunted through
clenched teeth. "Starting from the back- swing, you twist from the waist down. The tip of
the bat follows through naturally. Understand? If you concentrate too much on swinging
the bat, your arms do all the work and you lose power. Swing from the hips."
The soldier didn't seem fully to comprehend the lieutenant's instructions, but he took
off his heavy gear as ordered and practiced his swing for a while. Everyone was watching
him. The lieutenant placed his hands over the soldier's to help him adjust his grip. He
was a good teacher. Before long, the soldier's swing, thoug h somewhat awkward, was
swishing through the air. What the young soldier lacked in skill he made up for in muscle
power, having spent his days working on the farm.
"That's good enough," said the lieutenant, using his hat to wipe the sweat from his
brow. "OK, now, try to do it in one good, clean swing. Don't let him suffer."
What he really wanted to say was, "I don't want to do this any more than you do.
Who the hell could have thought of anything so stupid? Killing a guy with a baseball
bat..." But an officer could never say such a thing to an enlisted man.
The soldier stepped up behind the blindfolded Chinese man where he knelt on the
ground. When the soldier raised the bat, the strong rays of the setting sun cast the bat's
long, thick shadow on the earth. This is so weird, thought the veterinarian. The lieutenant
was right: I've never seen a man killed with a baseball bat. The young soldier held the bat
aloft for a long time. The doctor saw its tip shaking.
The lieutenant nodded to the soldier. With a deep breath, the soldier took a
backswing, then smashed the bat with all his strength into the back of the Chinese cadet's
head. He did it amazingly well. He swung his hips exactly as the lieutenant had taught
him to, the brand of the bat made a direct hit behind the man's ear, and the bat followed
through per fectly. There was a dull crushing sound as the skull shattered. The man
himself made no sound. His body hung in the air for a moment in a strange pose, then
flopped forward. He lay with his cheek on the ground, blood flowing from one ear. He
did not move. The lieutenant looked at his watch. Still gripping the bat, the young soldier
stared off into space, his mouth agape.
The lieutenant was a person who did things with great care. He waited for a full
minute. When he was certain that the young Chinese man was not moving at all, he said
to the veterinarian, "Could you do me a favor and check to see that he's really dead?"
The veterinarian nodded, walked over to where the young Chinese lay, knelt down,
and removed his blindfold. The man's eyes were open wide, the pupils turned upward,
and bright- red blood was flowing from his ear. His half- opened mouth revealed the
tongue ly ing tangled inside. The impact had left his neck twisted at a strange angle. The
man's nostrils had expelled thick gobs of blood, making black stains on the dry ground.
One particularly alert-and large - fly had already burrowed its way into a nostril to lay
eggs. Just to make sure, the veterinarian took the man's wrist and felt for a pulse. There
was no pulse-certainly not where there was supposed to be one. The young soldier had
ended this burly man's life with a single swing of a bat-indeed, his first- eve r swing of a
bat. The veterinarian glanced toward the lieutenant and nodded to signal that the man
was, without a doubt, dead. Having completed his assigned task, he was beginning slowly
to rise to his full height, when it seemed to him that the sun shining on his back suddenly
increased in intensity.

At that very moment, the young Chinese batter in uniform number 4 rose up into a
sitting position, as if he had just come fully awake. Without the slightest uncertainty or
hesitation-or so it seemed to those watching-he grabbed the doctor's wrist. It all happened
in a split second. The veterinarian could not understand: this man was dead, he was sure
of it. But now, thanks to one last drop of life that seemed to well up from nowhere, the
man was gripping the doctor's wrist with the strength of a steel vise. Eyelids stretched
open to the limit, pupils still glaring upward, the man fell forward into the hole, dragging
the doctor in after him. The doctor fell in on top of him and heard one of the man's ribs
crack as his weight came down. Still the Chinese ballplayer continued to grip his wrist.
The soldiers saw all this happening, but they were too stunned to do anything more than
stand and watch. The lieutenant recovered first and leaped into the hole. He drew his
pistol from his holster, set the muz zle against the Chinese man's head, and pulled the
trigger twice. Two sharp, overlapping cracks rang out, and a large black hole opened in
the man's temple. Now his life was completely gone, but still he refused to release the
doctor's wrist. The lieutenant knelt down and, pistol in one hand, began the painstaking
process of prying open the corpse's fingers one at a time. The veterinarian lay there in the
hole, surrounded by eight silent Chinese corpses in baseball uniforms. Down in the hole,
the screeching of cicadas sounded very different from the way it sounded aboveground.
Once the veterinarian had been freed from the dead man's grasp, the soldiers pulled
him and the lieutenant out of the grave. The veterinarian sq uatted down on the grass and
took several deep breaths. Then he looked at his wrist. The man's fingers had left five
bright-red marks. On this hot August afternoon, the veterinarian felt chilled to the core of
his body. I'll never get rid of this coldness, he thought. That man was truly, seriously,
trying to take me with him wherever he was going.
The lieutenant reset the pistol's safety and carefully slipped the gun into its holster.
This was the first time he had ever fired a gun at a human being. But he tried not to think
about it. The war would continue for a little while at least, and people would continue to
die. He could leave the deep thinking for later. He wiped his sweaty right palm on his
pants, then ordered the soldiers who had not participated in the execution to fill in the
hole. A huge swarm of flies had already taken custody of the pile of corpses.
The young soldier went on standing where he was, stupefied, gripping the bat. He
couldn't seem to make his hands let go. The lieutenant and the corporal left him alone.
He had seemed to be watching the whole bizarre series of events-the "dead" Chinese
suddenly grabbing the veterinarian by the wrist, their falling into the grave, the
lieutenant's leaping in and finishing him off, and now the other soldiers' filling in the
hole. But in fact, he had not been watching any of it. He had been listening to the wind-
up bird. As it had been the previous afternoon, the bird was in a tree somewhere, making
that creeeak, creeeak sound as if winding a spring. The soldier looked up, trying to
pinpoint the direction of the cries, but he could see no sign of the bird. He felt a slight
sense of nausea at the back of his throat, though nothing as violent as yesterday's.
As he listened to the winding of the spring, the young soldier saw one fragmentary
image after another rise up before him and fade away. After they were disarmed by the
Soviets, the young paymaster lieutenant would be handed over to the Chinese and hanged
for his responsibility in these executions. The corporal would die of the plague in a
Siberian concentration camp: he would be thrown into a quarantine shed and left there
until dead, though in fact he had merely collapsed from malnutrition and had not

contracted the plague-not, at least, until he was thrown into the shed. The veterinarian
with the mark on his face would die in an accident a year later. A civilian, he would be
taken by the Soviets for cooperating with the military and sent to another Siberian camp
to do hard labor. He would be working in a deep shaft of a Siberian coal mine when a
flood would drown him, along with many soldiers. And I..., thought the young soldier
with the bat in his hands, but he could not see his own future. He could not even see the
events that were transpiring before his very eyes. He now closed his eyes and listened to
the call of the wind -up bird.
Then, all at once, he thought of the ocean-the ocean he had seen from the deck of the
ship that brought him from Japan to Manchuria. He had never seen the ocean before, nor
had he seen it since. That had happened eight years ago. He could still remember the
smell of the salt air. The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life-
bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and
expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his
heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort. Would he ever see it
again? He loosened his grip and let the bat fall to the ground. It made a dry sound as it
struck the earth. After the bat left his hands, he felt a slight increase in his nausea.
The wind- up bird went on crying, but no one else could hear its call.



Here ended "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8."