9



Culverts and an Absolute
Insufficiency of Electricity



May Kasahara's Inquiry into
the Nature of Hairpieces



After seeing Kumiko off the next morning, I went to the ward pool for a swim.
Mornings were best, to avoid the crowds. Back home again, I brewed myself some coffee
and sat drinking it in the kitchen, going over Creta Kano's weird, unfinished story, trying
to recall each event of her life in chronological order. The more I recalled, the weirder the
story seemed, but soon the revolutions of my brain slowed down and I began to drift into
sleep. I went to the living room, lay down on the sofa, and closed my eyes. In a moment,
I was asleep and dreaming.
I dreamed about Creta Kano. Before she appeared, though, I dreamed about Malta
Kano. She was wearing a Tyrolean hat with a big, brightly colored feather. The place was

crowded (it was some kind of large hall), but Malta Kano's hat caught my attention
immediately. She was sitting alone at the bar. She had a big tropical drink kind of thing in
front of her, but I couldn't tell whether she was actually drinking it.
I wore my suit and the polka-dot tie. As soon as I spotted Malta Kano, I tried to walk
in her direction, but the crowd kept getting in my way. By the time I reached the bar, she
was gone. The tropical drink stood there on the bar, in front of her now empty stool. I
took the next seat at the bar and ordered a scotch on the rocks. The bartender asked me
what kind of scotch I'd like, and I answered Cutty Sark. I really didn't care which brand
of scotch he served me, but Cutty Sark was the first thing that came to mind.
Before he could give me my drink, I felt a hand take my arm from behind, the touch
as soft as if the person were grasping something that might fall apart at any moment. I
turned. There stood a man without a face. Whether or not he actually had no face, I could
not tell, but the place where his face was supposed to be was wrapped in a dark shadow,
and I could not see what lay beyond it. "This way, Mr. Okada," he said. I tried to speak,
but before I could open my mouth, he said to me, "Please, come with me. We have so
little time. Hurry." Hand still on my arm, he guided me with rapid steps through the
crowd and out into a corridor. I followed him down the corridor, unresisting. He did
know my name, after all. It wasn't as if I were letting a total stranger take me anywhere
he liked. There was some kind of reason and purpose to all this.
After continuing down the corridor for some time, the faceless man came to a stop in
front of a door. The number on the doorplate was 208. "It isn't locked. You should be the
one to open it." I did as I was told and opened the door. Beyond it lay a large room. It
seemed to be part of a suite of rooms in an old -fashioned hotel. The ceiling was high, and
from it hung an old -fashioned chandelier. The chandelier was not lit. A small wall lamp
gave off a gloomy light, the only source of illumination in the room. The curtains were
closed tight.
"If it's whiskey you want, Mr. Okada," said the faceless man, "we have plenty. Cutty
Sark, wasn't it? Drink as much as you'd like." He pointed to a cabinet beside the door,
then closed the door silently, leaving me alone. I stood in the middle of the room for a
long time, wondering what to do.
A large oil painting hung on the wall. It was a picture of a river. I looked at it for a
while, hoping to calm myself down. The moon was up over the river. Its light fell faintly
on the opposite shore, but so very faintly that I could not make out the scenery there. It
was all vague outlines, running together.
Soon I felt a strong craving for whiskey. I thought I would open the cabinet and take a
drink, as suggested by the faceless man, but the cabinet would not open. What looked like
doors were actually well- made imitations of doors. I tried pushing and pulling on the
various protruding parts, but the cabinet remained firmly shut.
"It's not easy to open, Mr. Okada," said Kano. I realized she was standing there-and
in her early- sixties outfit. "Some time must go by before it will open. Today is out of the
question. You might as well give up."
As I watched, she shed her clothes as easily as opening a pea pod and stood before me
naked, without warning or explanation. "We have so lit tle time, Mr. Okada, let's finish
this as quickly as possible. I am sorry for the rush, but I have my reasons. Just getting
here was hard enough." Then she came up to me, opened my fly, and, as if it were the
most natural thing in the world, took out my penis. Lowering her eyes, with their false

lashes, she enclosed my penis with her mouth. Her mouth was far larger than I had
imagined. Inside, I immediately came erect. When she moved her tongue, the curled ends
of her hair trembled as in a gentle breeze, caressing my thighs. All I could see was her
hair and her false eyelashes. I sat on the bed, and she went down on her knees, her face
buried in my crotch. "Stop it," I said. "Noboru Wataya will be here any minute. I don't
want to see him here."
Kano took her mouth from my penis and said, "Don't worry. We have plenty of time
for this, at least."
She ran the tip of her tongue over my penis. I didn't want to come, but there was no
way of stopping it. I felt as if it were being sucked out of me. Her lips and tongue held on
to me like slippery life forms. I came. I opened my eyes.
Terrific. I went to the bathroom, washed my soiled underpants, and took a hot
shower, washing myself with care to get rid of the sticky sensations of the dream. How
many years had it been since my last wet dream? I tried to recall exactly but couldn't, it
had been so long.
I stepped out of the shower and was still drying myself when the phone rang. It was
Kumiko. Having just had a wet dream over another woman, I felt a little tense speaking
with her.
"Your voice is strange," she said. "What's wrong?" Her sensitivity to such things was
frightening.
"Nothing," I said. "I was dozing. You woke me up."
"Oh, really?" she said. I could feel her suspicions coming through the earpiece, which
made me all the more tense.
"Anyway, sorry, but I'm going to be a little late today," Kumiko said. "Maybe as late
as nine. So I'll eat out."
"That's OK," I said. "I'll find something for myself. Don't worry."
"I really am sorry," she said. It had the sound of an afterthought. There was a pause,
and then she hung up.
I looked at the receiver for a few seconds. Then I went to the kitchen and peeled an
apple.
In the six years since I had married Kumiko, I had never slept with another woman.
Which is not to say that I never felt the desire for another woman or never had the
chance. Just that I never pursued it when the op portunity arose. I can't explain why,
exactly, but it probably has something to do with life's priorities.
I did once happen to spend the night with another woman. She was someone I liked,
and I knew she would have slept with me. But finally, I didn't do it.
We had been working together at the law firm for several years. She was probably
two or three years younger than I. Her job was to take calls and coordinate everyone's
schedules, and she was very good at it. She was quick, and she had an outstanding
memory. You could ask her anything and she would know the answer: who was working
where at what, which files were in which cabinet, that kind of thing. She handled all ap-
pointments. Everybody liked her and depended on her. On an individual basis, too, she
and I were fairly close. We had gone drinking together several times. She was not exactly
what you would call a beauty, but I liked her looks.
When it came time for he r to quit her job to get married (she would have to move to
Kyushu in connection with her husband's work), several colleagues and I invited her out

for a last drink together. Afterward, she and I had to take the same train home, and
because it was late, I saw her to her apartment. At the front door, she invited me in for a
cup of coffee. I was worried about missing the last train, but I knew we might never see
each other again, and I also liked the idea of sobering up with coffee, so I decided to go
in. The place was a typical single girl's apartment. It had a refrigerator that was just a
little too grand for one person, and a bookshelf stereo. A friend had given her the
refrigerator. She changed into something comfortable in the next room and made coffee
in the kitchen. We sat on the floor, talking.
At one point when we had run out of things to say, she asked me, as if it had suddenly
occurred to her, "Can you name something- some concrete thing-that you're especially
afraid of?"
"Not really," I said, after a moment's thought. I was afraid of all kinds of things, but
no one thing in particular. "How about you?"
"I'm scared of culverts," she said, hugging her knees. "You know what a culvert is,
don't you?"
"Some kind of ditch, isn't it?" I didn't have a very precise definition of the word in
mind.
"Yeah, but it's underground. An underground waterway. A drainage ditch with a lid
on. A pitch- dark flow."
"I see," I said. "A culvert."
"I was born and raised in the country. In Fukushima. There was a stream right near
my house -a little stream, just the runoff from the fields. It flowed underground at one
point into a culvert. I guess I was playing with some of the older kids when it happened. I
was just two or three. The others put me in a little boat and launched it into the stream. It
was probably something they did all the time, but that day it had been raining, and the
water was high. The boat got away from them and car ried me straight for the opening of
the culvert. I would have been sucked right in if one of the local farmers hadn't happened
by. I'm sure they never would have found me."
She ran her left index finger over her mouth as if to check that she was still alive.
"I can still picture everything that happened. I'm lying on my back and being swept
along by the water. The sides of the stream tower over me like high stone walls, and
overhead is the blue sky. Sharp, clear blue. I'm being swept along in the flow. Swish,
swish, faster and faster. But I can't understand what it means. And then all of a sudden I
do understand- that there's darkness lying ahead. Real darkness. Soon it comes and tries
to drink me down. I can feel a cold shadow beginning to wrap itself around me. That's
my earliest memory."
She took a sip of coffee.
"I'm scared to death," she said. "I'm so scared I can hardly stand it. I feel like I did
back then, like I'm being swept along toward it and I can't get away."
She took a cigarette from her handbag, put it in her mouth, and lit it with a match,
exhaling in one long, slow breath. This was the first time I had ever seen her smoke.
"Are you talking about your marriage?" I asked.
"That's right," she said. "My marriage."
"Is there some particular problem?" I asked. "Something concrete?"
She shook her head. "I don't think so," she said. "Not really. Just a lot of little
things."

I didn't know what to say to her, but the situation demanded that I say something.
"Everybody experiences this feeling to some extent when they're about to get
married, I think. 'Oh, no, I'm making this terrible mistake!'
You'd probably be abnormal if you didn't feel it. It's a big decision, picking
somebody to spend your life with. So it's natural to be scared, but you don't have to be
that scared."
"That's easy to say-'Everybody feels like that. Everybody's the same,' " she said.
Eleven o'clock had come and gone. I had to find a way to bring this conversation to a
successful conclusion and get out of there. But before I could say anything, she suddenly
asked me to hold her. "Why?" I asked, caught off guard. "To charge my batteries," she
said. "Charge your batteries?"
"My body has run out of electricity. I haven't been able to sleep for days now. The
minute I get to sleep I wake up, and then I can't get back to sleep. I can't think. When I
get like that, somebody has to charge my batteries. Otherwise, I can't go on living. It's
true."
I peered into her eyes, wondering if she was still drunk, but they were once again her
usual cool, intelligent eyes. She was far from drunk.
"But you're getting married next week. You can have him hold you all you want.
Every night. That's what marriage is for. You'll never run out of electricity again."
"The problem is now," she said. "Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month. I'm
out of electricity now."
Lips clamped shut, she stared at her feet. They were in perfect align ment. Small and
white, they had ten pretty toenails. She really, truly wanted somebody to hold her, it
seemed, and so I took her in my arms. It was all very weird. To me, she was just a
capable, pleasant colleague. We worked in the same office, told each other jokes, and had
gone out for drinks now and then. But here, away from work, in her apartment, with my
arms around her, we were nothing but warm lumps of flesh. We had been playing our
assigned roles on the office stage, but stepping down from the stage, abandoning the
provisional images that we had been exchanging there, we were both just unstable,
awkward lumps of flesh, warm pieces of meat outfitted with digestive tracts and hearts
and brains and reproductive organs. I had my arms wrapped around her back, and she had
her breasts pressed hard against my chest. They were larger and softer than I had
imagined them to be. I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, and she
was slumped against me. We stayed in that position for a long time, holding each other
without a word.
"Is this all right?" I asked, in a voice that did not sound like my own. It was as if
someone else were speaking for me.
She said nothing, but I could feel her nod.
She was wearing a sweatshirt and a thin skirt that came down to her knees, but soon I
realized that she had nothing on underneath. Almost automatically, this gave me an
erection, and she seemed to be aware of it. I could feel her warm breath on my neck.
In the end, I didn't sleep with her. But I did have to go on "charging" her "batteries"
until two in the morning. She pleaded with me to stay with her until she was asleep. I
took her to her bed and tucked her in. But she remained awake for a long time. She
changed into pajamas, and I went on holding and "recharging" her. In my arms, I felt her
cheeks grow hot and her heart pound. I couldn't be sure I was doing the right thing, but I

knew of no other way to deal with the situation. The simplest thing would have been to
sleep with her, but I managed to sweep that possibility from my mind. My instincts told
me not to do it.
"Please don't hate me for this," she said. "My electricity is just so low I can't help it."
"Don't worry," I said. "I understand."
I knew I should call home, but what could I have said to Kumiko? I didn't want to lie,
but I knew it would be impossible for me to explain to her what was happening. And after
a while, it didn't seem to matter anymore. Whatever happened would happen. I left her
apartment at two o'clock and didn't get home until three. It was tough finding a cab.
Kumiko was furious, of course. She was sitting at the kitchen table, wide awake,
waiting for me. I said I had been out drinking and playing mah-jongg with the guys from
the office. Why couldn't I have made a simple phone call? she demanded. It had never
crossed my mind, I said. She was not convinced, and the lie became apparent almost
immediately. I hadn't played mah-jongg in years, and I just wasn't cut out for lying in
any case. I ended up confessing the truth. I told her the entire story from beginning to
end- without the erection part, of course- maintaining that I had done nothing with the
woman.
Kumiko refused to speak to me for three days. Literally. Not a word. She slept in the
other room, and she ate her meals alone. This was the greatest crisis our marriage had
faced. She was genuinely angry with me, and I understood exactly how she felt.
After her three days of silence, Kumiko asked me, "What would you think if you
were in my position?" These were the very first words she spoke. "What if I had come
home at three o'clock Sunday morning without so much as a telephone call? 'I've been in
bed with a man all this time, but don't worry, I didn't do anything, please believe me. I
was just recharging his batteries. OK, great, let's have breakfast and go to sleep.' You
mean to say you wouldn't get angry, you'd just believe me?"
I kept quiet.
"And what you did was even worse than that," Kumiko continued. "You lied to me!
You said you were drinking and playing mah-jongg. A total lie! How do you expect me
to believe you didn't sleep with her?"
"I'm sorry I lied," I said. "I should never have done that. But the only reason I lied
was because the truth was so difficult to explain. I want you to believe me: I really didn't
do anything wrong."
Kumiko put her head down on the table. I felt as if the air in the room were gradually
thinning out.
"I don't know what to say," I said. "I can't explain it other than to ask you to believe
me."
"All right. If you want me to believe you, I will," she said. "But I want you to
remember this: I'm probably going to do the same thing to you someday. And when that
time comes, I want you to believe me. I have that right."
Kumiko had never exercised that right. Every once in a while, I imagined how I
would feel if she did exercise it. I would probably believe her, but my reaction would no
doubt be as complex and as difficult to deal with as Kumiko's. To think that she had
made a point of doin g such a thing- and for what? Which was exactly how she must have
felt about me back then.




"Mr. Wind - Up Bird!" came a voice from the garden. It was May Kasahara.
Still toweling my hair, I went out to the veranda. She was sitting on the edge, biting a
thumbnail. She wore the same dark sunglasses as when I had first met her, plus cream-
colored cotton pants and a black polo shirt. In her hand was a clipboard.
"I climbed it," she said, pointing to the cinder- block wall. Then she brushed away the
dirt clinging to her pants. "I kinda figured I had the right place. I'm glad it was yours!
Think if I had come over the wall into the wrong house!"
She took a pack of Hope regulars from her pocket and lit up.
"Anyhow, Mr. Wind -Up Bird, how are you?"
"OK, I guess."
"I'm going to work now," she said. "Why don't you come along? We work in teams
of two, and it'd be sooo much better for me to have somebody I know. Some new guy'd
ask me all kinds of questions - 'How old are you? Why aren't you in school?' It's such a
pain! Or maybe he'd turn out to be a pervert. It happens, you know! Do it for me, will
you, Mr. Wind -Up Bird?"
"Is it that job you told me about- some kind of survey for a toupee maker?"
"That's it," she said. "All you have to do is count bald heads on the Ginza from one to
four. It's easy! And it'll be good for you. You'll be bald someday too, the way you're
going, so you better check it out now while you still have hair."
"Yeah, but how about you? Isn't the truant officer going to get you if they see you
doing this stuff on the Ginza in the middle of the day?"
"Nah. I just tell 'em it's fieldwork for social studies. It always works."
With no plans for the afternoon, I decided to tag along. May Kasahara phoned her
company to say we would be coming in. On the telephone, she turned into a very proper
young woman: Yes, sir, I would like to team up with him, yes, that is correct, thank you
very much, yes, I understand, yes, we can be there after noon. I left a note for Kumiko
saying I would be back by six, in case she got home early, then I left the house with May
Kasahara.
The toupee company was in Shimbashi. On the subway, May Kasahara explained
how the survey worked. We were to stand on a street corner and count all the bald men
(or those with thinning hair) who walked by. We were to classify them according to the
degree of their baldness: C, those whose hair might have thinned somewhat; B, those who
had lost a lot; and A, those who were really bald. May took a pamphlet from her folder
and showed me examples of the three stages.
"You get the idea pretty much, right, which heads fit which categories? I won't go
into detail. It'd take all day. But you get it pretty much, right, which is which?"
"Pretty much," I said, without exuding a great deal of confidence.
On May Kasahara's other side sat an overweight company type-a very definite B -who
kept glancing uneasily at the pamphlet, but she seemed not to notice how nervous this
was making him.
"I'll be in charge of putting them into categories, and you stand next to me with a
survey sheet. You put them in A, B, or C, depending on what I tell you. That's all there is
to it. Easy, right?"
"I guess so," I said. "But what's the point of taking a survey like this?"

"I dunno," she said. "They're doing them all over Tokyo- in Shinjuku, Shibuya,
Aoyama. Maybe they're trying to find out which neighborhood has the most bald men?
Or they want to know the proportions of A, B, and C types in the population? Who
knows? They've got so much money, they don't know what to do with it. So they can
waste it on stuff like this. Profits are huge in the wig business. The employees get much
bigger bonuses than in just any old company. Know why?" "No. Why?"
"Wigs don't last long. Bet you didn't know: toupees are good for two, maybe three
years max. The better made they are, the faster they get used up. They're the ultimate
consumer product. It's 'cause they fit so tightly against the scalp: the ha ir underneath gets
thinner than ever. Once that happens, you have to buy a new one to get that perfect fit
again. And think about it: What if you were using a toupee and it was no good after two
years-what would go through your mind? Would you think, OK, my wig's worn out.
Can't wear it anymore. But it'll cost too much to buy a new one, so tomorrow I'll start
going to work without one? Is that what you'd think?"
I shook my head. "Probably not," I said.
"Of course not. Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It's, like, his
fate. That's why the wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they're like
drug dealers. Once they get their hooks into a guy, he's a customer for life. Have you
ever heard of a. bald guy suddenly growing a head of hair? I never have. A wig's got to
cost half a million yen at least, maybe a million for a tough one. And you need a new one
every two years! Wow! Even a car lasts longer than that- four or five years. And then you
can trade it in!"
"I see what you mean," I said.
"Plus, the wig makers run their own hairstyling salons. They wash the wigs and cut
the customers' real hair. I mean, think about it: you can't just plunk yourself down in an
ordinary barber's chair, rip off your wig, and say, 'I'd like a trim,' can you? The income
from these places alone is tremendous."
"You know all kinds of things," I said, with genuine admiration. The B-category
company type next to May was listening to our conversation with obvious fascination.
"Sure," she said. "The guys at the office like me. They tell me everything. The profits
in this business are huge. They make the wigs in Southeast Asia and places like that,
where labor is cheap. They even get the hair there- in Thailand or the Philippines. The
women sell their hair to the wig companies. That's how they earn their dowries in some
places. The whole world's so weird! The guy sitting next to you might actually be
wearing the hair of some woman in Indonesia."
By reflex, I and the B- man looked around at the others in the car.



We stopped off at the company's Shimbashi office to pick up an envelope containing
survey sheets and pencils. This company supposedly had a number two market share, but
it was utterly discreet, without even a name plaque at the entrance, so that customers
could come and go with ease. Neither the envelope nor the survey sheets bore the
company name. At the survey department, I filled out a part- time worker's registration
form with my name, address, educational background, and age. This office was an
incredibly quiet place of business. There was no one shouting into the telephone, no one

banging away at a computer keyboard with sleeves rolled up. Each individual worker was
neatly dressed and pursuing his or her own task with quiet concentration. As might be
expected at a toupee maker's office, not one man here was bald. Some might even be
wearing the company's product, but it was impossible for me to tell those who were from
those who weren't. Of all the companies I had ever visited, this had the strangest
ambience.
We took the subway to the Ginza. Early and hungry, we stopped at the Dairy Queen
for a hamburger.
"Tell me, Mr. Wind- Up Bird," said May Kasahara, "would you wear a toupee if you
were bald?"
"I wonder," I said. "I don't like things that take time and trouble. I probably wouldn't
try to fight it if I went bald."
"Good," she said, wiping the ketchup from her mouth with a paper napkin. "That's
the way. Bald men never look as bad as they think. To me, it's nothing to get so upset
about."
"I wonder," I said.



For the next three hours, we sat at the subway entrance by the Wako Building,
counting the bald -headed men who passed by. Looking down at the heads going up and
down the subway stairs was the most accurate method of determining the degree of
baldness of any one head. May Kasahara would say "A" or "B" or "C," and I would write
it down. She had obviously done this many times. She never fumbled or hesitated or cor-
rected herself, but assigned each head to its proper category with great speed and
precision, uttering the letters in low, clipped tones so as not to be noticed by the
passersby. This called for some rapid - fire naming whenever a large group of bald heads
passed by at once: "CCBABCAAC -CBBB." At one point, an elegant- looking old
ge ntleman (who himself possessed a full head of snow- white hair) stopped to watch us in
action, "Pardon me," he said to me after a while, "but might I ask what you two are
doing?"
"Survey," I said.
"What kind of survey?" he asked.
"Social studies," I said.
"C A C A B C," said May Kasahara.
The old gentleman seemed less than convinced, but he went on watching us until he
gave up and wandered off somewhere.
When the Mitsukoshi clock across the street signaled four o'clock, we ended our
survey and went back to the Dairy Queen for a cup of coffee. It had not been strenuous
work, but I found my neck and shoulders strangely stiff. Maybe it was from the covert
nature of the job, a guilty feeling I had about counting bald men in secret. All the time we
were on the subway heading back to company headquarters in Shimbashi, I found myself
automatically assigning each bald head I saw to category A or B or C, which almost
made me queasy. I tried to stop myself, but by then a kind of momentum had set in. We
handed in our survey forms and received our pay-rather good pay for the amount of time
and effort involved. I signed a receipt and put the money in my pocket. May Kasahara

and I rode the subway to Shinjuku and from there took the Odakyu Line home. The
afternoon rush hour was starting. This was my first ride on a crowded train in some time,
but it hardly filled me with nostalgia.
"Pretty good job, don't you think?" said May Kasahara, standing next to me on the
train. "It's easy, pay's not bad."
"Pretty good," I said, sucking on a lemon drop.
"Go with me next time? We can do it once a week."
"Why not?" I said.
"You know, Mr. Wind -Up Bird," May Kasahara said after a short silence, as if a
thought had suddenly come to her, "I bet the reason people are afraid of going bald is
because it makes them think of the end of life. I mean, when your hair starts to thin, it
must feel as if your life is being worn away ... as if you've taken a giant step in the
direction of death, the last Big Consumption."
I thought about it for a while. "That's one way to look at it, I'm sure," I said.
"You know, Mr. Wind -Up Bird, I sometimes wonder what it must feel like to die
little by little over a long period of time. What do you think?"
Unsure exa ctly what she was getting at, I changed my grip on the hand strap and
looked into her eyes. "Can you give me a concrete example of what you mean by that- to
die little by little?"
"Well... I don't know. You're trapped in the dark all alone, with nothing to eat,
nothing to drink, and little by little you die...."
"It must be terrible," I said. "Painful. I wouldn't want to die like that if I could help
it."
"But finally, Mr. Wind- Up Bird, isn't that just what life is? Aren't we all trapped in
the dark somewhere, and they've taken away our food and water, and we're slowly
dying, little by little ... ?"
I laughed. "You're too young to be so ... pessimistic," 1 said, using the English word.
"Pessi- what?"
"Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things."
"Pessimistic ... pessimistic ..." She repeated the English to herself over and over, and
then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. "I'm only sixteen," she said, "and I don't
know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the
adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots."