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father. Had his father been a part of a murder? Again, use your own imagination to decide.

As for the stories on Cinnamon's computer, it's made clear by Toru that Cinnamon wrote them. Cinnamon also monitored the computer he kept in the "Residence" from the computer he had at home: he knew everything Toru did on his computer, and so toward the end of the story when Kumiko sent her last letter, Cinnamon was sitting at home at his other computer and he saw the letter being sent. He added Kumiko's letter as the last installment of his "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and sent the letter to Toru.

Why couldn't Lt. Mamiya kill Boris the Manskinner? It's my belief that Boris was involved in some sort of ancient magical practices that could keep him alive unless a man was "qualified" to kill him. In other words, his killer would have to know about these ancient magical practices as well. And thus, when Mamiya failed to killed Boris (as he knew he would), the Manskinner put a curse on him: he would return to Japan and he would never love anyone and no one would ever love him.

There are many examples throughout history of ancient peoples using magic to curse others. There's a story about a Native American tribe who put a curse on American presidents and if you look at American history, the curse was bizarrely effective: several of our presidents have been assassinated, and each after a certain amount of years had passed. The curse wasn't broken until someone attempted to kill Regan and failed (it was Regan, wasn't it? I can't recall). Anyway, I think my theory explains the whole "Boris the Manskinner" thing.

Why didn't May Kasahara's letters get to Toru? I think May Kasahara realized toward the end of the novel that she'd been putting the wrong address on her letters. She says in her last letter that the address she's been using is a "kind of" thing, which probably means she could not remember his address and had therefore guessed what it was. She also didn't put down a return address, so none of them came back to her.

And finally, what is the Wind-Up Bird? It's explained in the book that the "wind-up bird" really isn't a bird. It's the hand of fate winding up the spring of a person's life when that person is heading for disaster or doom. The soldier in "the clumsy zoo massacre" heard the hand of fate winding his spring: he would later die from a shovel to the head in a mine. Toru and Kumiko heard the hand of fate winding the spring because their marriage was in trouble. Cinnamon

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