Never Imagine:
Reading “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” as a Depth Psychologist―vol.58
The story is drawing toward its close. The episode recounted here may also be read as a pointer to the darkness the protagonist harbors within. In this chapter, Lieutenant Mamiya’s letter continues.
In an earlier chapter, Lieutenant Mamiya wrote of Boris, a Russian soldier he encountered again in Siberia. This was the man who had killed the lieutenant’s superior in a brutal manner. Boris proposed a bargain: if Mamiya would grant him certain favors, he would cooperate with the Japanese soldiers interned in the camp. Though torn by misgivings, Mamiya agreed to serve as an intermediary between Boris and the Japanese side. That is where the previous installment left off.
What unfolds this time is the aftermath. Before long, Boris seizes control of the Siberian camp, and his handling of the takeover is remarkably adroit. Those who defy him are consigned to oblivion, while through intimidation and bribery he skillfully multiplies his allies. By the time Mamiya realizes what is happening, the camp already lies firmly under Boris’s dominion. Gratuitous violence has vanished from it, but in its place has arisen “a new kind of cold, calculated violence.” In other words, the number of people spirited away into the dark has only grown.
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Boris offers a telling appraisal of Russia. To survive in that country, he says, “the narrower the range of what one can comprehend, the greater the power one can wield,” and above all one must refrain from imagining anything, for those who imagine are the ones who meet their ruin. Having said so, Boris himself, we are told, deliberately induces others to imagine.
Mamiya is ordered to tally Boris’s secret fortune, and he carries out the task. When the repatriation of the Japanese begins, Boris lays a curse upon him: wherever you go, you will never find happiness; you will neither love anyone nor be loved by anyone. It reads, in part, as a curse visited upon Mamiya for having lent his hand to Boris’s work.
Having come this far, one cannot help but be reminded, through Boris, of a certain figure: Noboru Wataya, the protagonist’s brother-in-law. Outwardly he is a rising star who aspires to be a fine politician, but behind that facade lies a scheme “to control people toward some end.” The nature of the scheme remains undisclosed. Even so, the protagonist senses it, that is, Wataya’s “shadow side,” although he cannot grasp its true nature.
One may read the protagonist as having perceived, without even being aware of it himself, the presence of “something” that seeks to control society, and as having attempted, all “alone,” to resist it. In the course of that struggle, his relationship with his wife was severed. This, too, may be read as though a curse had been laid upon the protagonist as well, forbidding him “to love and to be loved.”
Nonetheless, the contours of all this “remain elusive,” even though the story has entered its second half. How will the tale proceed, and to what conclusion will it lead? The answer will not reveal itself unless we read on.
