May Kasahara Leaves Boarding School

May Kasahara’s departure from boarding school is an act of escape and self-definition: unable to bear returning to the institution her parents chose for her, she leaves home life temporarily behind and finds a more permissive mountain residence where she can come and go. In her letter to Mr. Wind-Up Bird, the move also marks her effort to distinguish her own life from the world she has come to associate with him.

The Boarding School

The school is a private girls’ boarding institution far from home, presented as an expensive, refined country school for wealthy students with serious problems. Its comfortable amenities—large clean rooms, a cafeteria with a broad choice of food, new tennis courts, and a swimming pool—stand in sharp contrast to its coercive arrangement. A high wall topped with barbed wire, a massive iron gate, and guards on constant patrol make the place seem designed less to keep outsiders out than to prevent its residents from leaving.

May says she had little choice about attending. After the trouble she had caused, this was the only school willing to take her as a transfer student, and her main aim was to get away from home. She tries to endure the school, but describes it as worse than a nightmare: she has recurring nightmares there and wakes in a state of distress, yet would rather remain in the dream than face the institution’s reality. Her account establishes that the school’s polished surroundings do not make it a safe or suitable place for her.

Leaving and Returning Home

May stays only one semester. During spring vacation, she tells her parents that she will kill herself if they send her back. The threat is specific and, as she emphasizes, meant seriously; her parents know from prior experience that such statements from her are not empty. She does not return to the school.

From March into April, May remains at home, reading, watching television, and spending time without a fixed activity. She often wants to visit Mr. Wind-Up Bird by slipping down the alley and over the fence, but decides that doing so would repeat the previous summer. Instead, she watches the alley from her room and wonders about his life: whether Kumiko has returned, what has become of Malta Kano and Creta Kano, whether the cat Noboru Wataya has come back, and whether the mark on Mr. Wind-Up Bird’s cheek has disappeared. These questions show how closely she follows his circumstances even while she holds herself apart from them.

Finding a Place of Her Own

After about a month, May concludes that she cannot continue living as she has. She explains that the neighborhood has become, for her, “Mr. Wind-Up Bird’s world,” and that she feels reduced to the version of herself contained within it. She does not blame him, but recognizes that remaining there has made it difficult to experience the neighborhood—and herself—as independent of his world. Finding another place becomes a necessary separation.

May says that, after thinking it over for a long time, she realizes where she has to go. She withholds the destination’s identity from Mr. Wind-Up Bird, describing it as a special, distant place that is neither a school, hotel, hospital, jail, nor house, and calling it a secret for the time being. The withholding is part of the account: she shares the fact of her departure while keeping control over what she reveals about her new life.

The New Residence

May is again in the mountains, but the new place differs from the boarding school in a decisive way. It has a wall and a gate, and an older man guards the entrance, yet residents may go in and out whenever they wish. The grounds include a small wood and a pond, and May describes seeing animals such as badgers and pheasants during morning walks. She lives in a dormitory on the estate.

Her description contrasts the new residence’s bounded grounds with its freedom of movement. Both institutions stand apart from ordinary home life, but this one is not governed by the school’s locked-in arrangement. The contrast makes May’s move more than a change of scenery: she has found a setting whose boundaries do not prevent her from leaving.

The Letter and Its Significance

May writes from a tiny, minimally furnished room, with a small desk, bed, bookcase, and closet. The room’s practical, undecorated character gives her new situation a modest, provisional quality; it is a place to live and write rather than a richly furnished retreat. She addresses her letter to Mr. Wind-Up Bird, recounting both the distress that drove her away from school and the deliberate choice that brought her to this residence.

The departure shifts May from a placement chosen by her parents to a place she identifies and chooses for herself. It also establishes a limit in her relationship with Mr. Wind-Up Bird: she can remain deeply interested in his life while recognizing the need to leave the neighborhood that has come to define her through him. Her new residence offers no grand resolution, but it gives her room to make that separation on her own terms.