Creta Kano

Creta Kano, born Setsuko, is the younger sister and assistant of Malta Kano. Her life story moves through severe physical pain, a failed suicide attempt, prolonged numbness, and a later transformation she understands as the emergence of a third self. She recounts that history to Toru Okada, whose troubled search for Kumiko intersects with Creta’s efforts to live beyond the injuries of her past.

Identity and Introduction

Creta explains that Setsuko is her birth name and that she adopted the professional name Creta when she began working as Malta’s assistant. Malta chose it to match her own name; Creta says the name refers to the island of Crete, which she has never visited. When she first visits Toru Okada, she comes on Malta’s behalf to ask for water samples from his house and, if possible, a nearby well. The request draws her into the unusual events around Okada’s home, but she also asks whether she may tell him about herself. Her account becomes a sustained personal history rather than a simple explanation of her visit.

Pain, Suicide Attempt, and Numbness

Creta dates the crisis that shaped her adult life to her twentieth birthday, May 29, when she resolved to die. She describes a childhood and adolescence marked by recurring physical pain: persistent dental problems, severe menstrual cramps, headaches triggered by air-pressure changes, and sharp stomach pain for which doctors found no cause. These symptoms were not metaphors for emotional distress in her account; they governed ordinary choices, made school difficult, and left her convinced that others could not understand what she endured. After a relationship ended when the other person failed to grasp the intensity of her pain, she felt that years of waiting for a turning point had brought no relief.

On the night of her birthday, Creta borrowed her brother’s new Toyota MR2 and drove to the Tama River, where she deliberately accelerated into the outer wall of a condominium building. She survived with injuries, but afterward the pain that had structured her life receded. Her menstrual cramps and headaches disappeared, her stomach no longer regularly incapacitated her, and even a broken rib caused little discomfort. The change did not restore her to a settled sense of herself: she chose to keep living temporarily, out of curiosity about life without pain, while still thinking of death as something she might choose later.

That decision carried an immediate material consequence. Creta owed more than three million yen and needed to repay the debt, so she became a prostitute, regarding the work as a practical way to raise money quickly rather than as a new commitment to life. In time, her physical relief gave way to a more encompassing numbness. She recalls crying for long periods in Shinjuku Imperial Gardens and Yoyogi Park, wishing that her suicide attempt had succeeded; she felt neither pain nor joy and described herself as no longer herself. The apparent escape from pain had become a loss of feeling and agency.

Noboru Wataya and the Emergence of a Third Self

Creta says that Noboru Wataya became her customer during the period when she lived in profound numbness, unable to experience sensation as belonging fully to her. Years later, when she encountered him again at the home of Malta Kano, she recognized him immediately as the last man who had bought her. She distinguishes the earlier encounter from an ordinary rape: it had initially been arranged, she explains, but what followed violated her will and defiled her. In her account, the encounter was dangerous because it might have left her lost beyond recovery, even though its eventual effect was also bound up with her transformation.

Creta describes the encounter as restoring pain in a form she had not felt since her suicide attempt. The experience joined pain and pleasure, and she understood it as bringing an unfamiliar part of herself out of hiding. For days afterward, ordinary movement and sensation seemed detached from her own will: walking, eating, and sitting still all became disorienting. After three or four days, the upheaval subsided. Creta then named three successive selves: the first, formed by unremitting pain; the second, a temporary state of numbness after her failed attempt to die; and the third, a new self emerging from the transition. She could not yet be certain that this was the self that should always have existed, but she felt she was moving in the right direction.

Malta gave her the name Creta and, under her guidance, helped her learn to live with the changed self. Creta became a spiritual medium, learning to distinguish flesh from spirit and to control the self that had emerged. Malta also became her companion, guide, and protector. Creta says she eventually found a measure of peace, while recognizing that her true self remained beyond her grasp and that the defilement she associated with Noboru Wataya had not simply vanished.

Relations, Consciousness, and Later Direction

Creta Kano later tells Toru Okada that she and he had encountered one another in two dreams, both set in the same hotel suite. She recalls wearing a blue dress belonging to Kumiko and bracelets on her left wrist, details Okada recognizes. Creta distinguishes this shared experience from physical intercourse: in her account, it took place in a fabricated consciousness, yet both of them retain the consciousness of having experienced it. She describes herself as a “prostitute of the mind,” a medium through whom things pass, and tells Okada that he need not feel guilty. When she asks him to hold her, she cries silently against him; after they remain together for a long time, she thanks him and leaves. The scene gives their connection emotional reality while preserving its uncertain boundary between dream and waking life.

Creta’s own understanding of that role later changes. She says she is trying to establish herself on earth, no longer as a container or passageway. She proposes that she and Okada go to Crete together as a possible beginning, but makes the proposal conditional: Okada first needs to find Kumiko and learn face-to-face whether their marriage is over. The suggestion expresses Creta’s hope for a new life without turning that hope into a settled outcome; the evidence does not establish that she goes to Crete with him.

Her account also reaches beyond her own history through a pointed comparison with Okada. After receiving money for an encounter arranged elsewhere, Okada recognizes that his situation resembles Creta’s former work: each has offered his or her body in exchange for money, though he had not physically slept with the woman. The parallel makes Creta’s story a measure of how far Okada has moved from his former life, while leaving the circumstances distinct. Later, he remembers Malta and Creta as people who entered his life before disappearing somewhere. Creta’s disappearance closes her direct presence in his story without resolving where she goes or what becomes of her proposed journey.

Narrative Role and Significance

Creta’s life is conveyed chiefly through the story she chooses to tell Okada, and its stages do not yield a simple account of recovery. Pain gives way to temporary physical relief, then to pervasive numbness; an experience she describes as violation becomes inseparable from the emergence of a new self, while the defilement remains unresolved. Her successive names and selves give those changes narrative form: Setsuko becomes Creta, and the person shaped by pain and numbness understands herself as having entered a third state. Yet she does not claim complete knowledge of who she is. The distinction between bodily sensation, consciousness, and personal identity therefore remains central to her account, as does the possibility that a painful transformation may lead toward peace without erasing its harm.