The Wind-Up Bird

It was calling for me in my sleep. The monotonous and persistent chirping patiently dragged me out of my lucid dreams. My ears perked up, trying to determine the direction from which the sound originated. As my other senses began waking up one after another, my eyes unwillingly opened last. Daylight had already broken into the room through my pink curtains. It was 6:17 in the morning.

At first, I thought it must be my neighbor whistling a ridiculous, high-pitched tune. A boring tune that was made of a repeated pitch and an occasionally lower pitch at precisely a minor third apart. Not much longer did it take me to realize that this sound was a rare bird-call rather than a hideous human-produced noise.

I gasped: it was the wind-up bird! I was convinced. A wind-up bird, that's right, the exact one that Haruki Murakami spoke of in his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

What is a wind-up bird anyway? A mechanical toy bird that needs to be winded-up ever-so-often in order to mimic a real bird for the amusement of children?

Murakami gave life to this bird. "To wind-up the spring," he said. The bird and its strange chirp was heard throughout the novel, scattered but significant, each time as a premonition of a catastrophic event.

The bird was a myth. The bird was a legend.

And it was there, just outside my window, chirping away like no one's business. It reigned over other birds, making their chirps only a rhythmical accompaniment.

I hope nothing catastrophic is going to happen. If so, I will have to shoot the wind-up bird down in resentment to its cursed prophecy.