Parrots

Parrots are among the birds kept in the sanatorium aviary where Naoko and Reiko work together. One parrot’s shouted words and comic sensitivity to cats enliven a scene of cage-cleaning and feeding; later, Watanabe remembers Naoko tending the aviary as one image in the flood of memories that returns after her death. The bird’s role is small but telling: it belongs to the shared, recurring world of care and routine that grief preserves in vivid fragments.

The Parrot in the Aviary

The aviary stands in a small park behind the tennis courts, among flowerbeds, shrubs, and benches. Its inhabitants include chickens, pigeons, peacocks, and parrots. When Naoko and Reiko approach, the birds begin chattering and flying about inside the enclosure. The women enter a shed for feed and a hose, then carefully slip into the cage to prevent any bird from escaping. Naoko hoses the dirt while Reiko scrubs the floor with a deck brush; the peacocks flap away from the spray, and a turkey makes for its feeder once the cleaning is done.

The parrot adds a distinct voice to this shared labor. From a perch above them it screeches and beats its wings, then calls, “Thank you!” Reiko meows at it, and it retreats to the far corner before calling again. Its spoken phrases—“Crazy!” and “Shithead!”—prompt Naoko to wonder who taught it such language. Reiko denies teaching it and explains that the bird once had a run-in with a cat and is now terrified of them. The explanation turns its performance from mere noise into a glimpse of a particular learned fear, while Reiko’s playful imitation shows how comfortably she and Naoko fold the birds into their everyday routine.

Care, Routine, and Humor

The parrot appears within a task carried out with attention rather than spectacle. Naoko and Reiko take care not to let the birds escape, wash the enclosure, scrub its floor, and fill each feeder. Reiko’s meowing is at once a joke and a practical response to the parrot’s agitation: the bird quiets, then resumes calling. Its fright of cats sits beside the women’s affectionate amusement, giving the aviary’s work a small, unruly life of its own.

That ordinary intimacy matters to the scene’s wider emotional register. Watanabe has volunteered to accompany the women after breakfast; he watches them work among the birds and asks Naoko whether she does this every morning. The answer belongs to a routine of care at the sanatorium, where cleaning and feeding recur amid the less visible strain of recovery. The parrot does not explain the residents’ condition or stand in for it. Rather, its chatter, retreat, and renewed calls make the setting feel inhabited by distinct living creatures, not just by the human drama unfolding there.

The Aviary in Watanabe’s Memory

After Naoko’s death, the aviary returns to Watanabe not as an abstract symbol but as a specific remembered scene: Naoko in a yellow raincape, cleaning the aviary and carrying the feed bag on a rainy morning. The image comes amid others—her camel-hair coat in winter, the hairslide she touches, her clear eyes, and the blue nightdress in which she sits curled on a sofa. Each detail belongs to a different moment, but together they arrive as an uncontrollable stream of recollection.

The remembered work links the parrot’s setting to the life Naoko shared with Reiko at the sanatorium. In the present of the aviary scene, Watanabe watches Naoko and Reiko handle practical tasks and trade jokes; in the later passage, the same place survives as one of the images through which Naoko remains near him. The parrot itself is not named in that later recollection, so its significance is indirect: it is part of the aviary world whose feeding and cleaning have become inseparable from his memory of Naoko.

Narrative Significance

The parrot’s brief appearance contrasts the concrete and the remembered. In the aviary, it is a noisy animal with a particular history of fear, reacting to Reiko’s imitation and calling out from its perch while the women work. In Watanabe’s grief, the scene is folded into the recurring images that bring Naoko imaginatively close, even as he knows she is gone. The passage does not make memory a remedy. Its force lies in how ordinary particulars—rain, a feed bag, the aviary—return with the person who once moved among them.

That recurrence also lends weight to the novel’s distinction between understanding death and enduring loss. Watanabe has learned to think of death as part of life, yet no truth can cure the sorrow of losing someone. The aviary memory offers no resolution; it is one of the vivid fragments that rise involuntarily and briefly restore Naoko’s presence to him. The parrot’s chatter therefore remains modest in scale but resonant in placement: first a detail of daily life among the sanatorium’s birds, later part of a remembered world that grief keeps bringing back.