Noma Azuki

Nutmeg Akasaka is a businesswoman and the mother of Cinnamon Akasaka whose family history connects Toru Okada’s search for Kumiko Okada with the wartime stories of Hsin-ching and the later Siberian prison camps. She is at once a capable organizer, a caretaker who acts when Okada is in danger, and a witness to a past she cannot fully explain. Her father’s disappearance remains an open question: Cinnamon’s story about him may draw on history, but cannot be treated as a factual account of what happened.

Identity and Family History

Nutmeg’s father was a veterinarian in Hsin-ching who bore a blue-black mark on his cheek. In August 1945, as the city faced the Soviet advance, Japanese soldiers killed animals at the zoo; afterward Chinese workers offered to remove the bodies in exchange for the hides and meat. The veterinarian accepted because the city’s disorder left him with no practical alternative. The workers called the episode a “clumsy massacre,” a phrase that captures both the botched violence and the ordinary negotiations that followed it.

The veterinarian’s later fate is not known. Nutmeg had told Okada that absolutely nothing was known about what happened to her father after she last saw him. This uncertainty matters when Okada reads “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8,” one of sixteen stories Cinnamon stored under that title. The eighth story follows Nutmeg’s account of the zoo killings and returns to the same place the next day, again centering on the veterinarian. Okada considers whether some details might reflect real events, including the possibility that Manchukuo Army cadets were executed and buried in the zoo, but recognizes that Cinnamon could also have combined historical fragments with his own image of his grandfather. The story preserves a possible family memory without resolving it into verified biography.

Work and Withdrawal

In the present-day narrative, Nutmeg works with Cinnamon in a business that brings clients to the Residence. When Okada’s work there is interrupted and he fears losing access to the well, he tries to find her: he waits at his usual bench by the Shinjuku west exit plaza and goes to her Akasaka office, but she does not appear or answer. He concludes that Nutmeg and Cinnamon have cut ties and left him behind. The withdrawal wounds him precisely because he has come to think of them as a kind of family; their absence turns a practical loss of access into a personal sense of abandonment.

Rescue and Care

That apparent severance is followed by an abrupt reversal. After Okada is brought out of the well, Nutmeg tells him that Cinnamon carried him to the fitting room. She describes the immediate state of his injuries in practical terms: Cinnamon had sewn up the deeper wounds, and the cuts on Okada’s face were superficial. Nutmeg says she knows little about what happened before she received a call in the middle of the night, took a taxi, and hurried over. The rescue itself is therefore associated with Cinnamon, while Nutmeg becomes the person who explains what can be known and stays to care for Okada.

Nutmeg remains with him through two days of recovery. He is unable to rise or speak and can take only small amounts of orange juice and canned peaches; she returns each morning after going home at night. Cinnamon, by contrast, delivers food or clothing and picks Nutmeg up without coming inside. His distance does not undo his decisive role in the rescue, but it leaves Nutmeg as Okada’s only direct companion during recovery. She tells him the business will soon be closed and that she will have to look after the women herself again, presenting this return to work as something she must continue until she is used up. She also expects Okada to have no further connection with them once he is well, while beginning to tell him about his brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya.

Relationships and Narrative Role

Nutmeg’s relationship with Cinnamon is marked by close coordination and an important difference in how they act. He anticipates possibilities and makes decisions behind the scenes; she manages the business, responds to emergencies, and speaks with Okada. In the well crisis, even Cinnamon’s careful anticipation proves insufficient: he had not expected the water to return so quickly, and Nutmeg says it was the first time she had seen him panic. Her account recognizes his foresight without making him invulnerable, while her own actions give that crisis a human aftermath.

With Okada, Nutmeg’s role shifts from elusive business partner to caretaker, but she does not offer complete explanations or promise an enduring relationship. She helps him survive and recover, yet asks him to forget her and Cinnamon when the episode is over. This combination of practical loyalty and emotional reserve makes her more than a source of information: her departures and returns shape Okada’s sense of whether he has been abandoned, and her care temporarily answers that fear without settling what will happen next.

Nutmeg also stands at the boundary between private family history and public history. The zoo story, the failing Manchukuo regime, the Japanese withdrawal, and the violence that followed appear in a narrative where records and recollections are incomplete. Wider wartime and postwar accounts show the costs of military and political systems in concrete terms: civilians left behind during the Soviet advance, Chinese laborers killed to protect the secrecy of a Japanese base, and prisoners treated as expendable labor in Siberia. Nutmeg’s own evidence about her father does not establish every connection between these histories. Instead, her family’s uncertainty, and the story Cinnamon creates from it, make the limits of what can be recovered part of the novel’s subject.