The unexpected mention of the duck people ...

The unexpected mention of the duck people at the very end of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, despite possibly done in all intentionality, somehow seems out of place. I could not help thinking that way when I first read it and I cannot help thinking that way in every subsequent reading that has followed. You reach those last pages of the book to suddenly come across May Kasahara's duck people. Ducks? A frozen pond? That rings an unambiguous bell that leaves you frowning upon. It just seems a gratuitous reference to Salinger's running issue of why ducks disappear from the pond at Central Park in winter, when the water is frozen, an issue that Holden Caulfield wonders about a few times in The Catcher in the Rye. May Kasahara talks about the duck people in the very last of her letters to Toru - letters that never reach him - and she even gets to show him those "people" when he visits her. Murakami's ducks do not leave the lake despite the water is frozen, unlike Salinger's. They stay in place and go about their daily doings, slipping and sliding on the frozen surface. May does not ask herself the question that troubles Holden either - there is no point in so doing in her case - a question that has trascended the world of literature, a delightful and puzzling concern that a most purely childlike Holden ponders - and has us readers pondering along. The funny proximity of a similar (and odd) topic in Murakami's book, the particulars of ducks in their frozen environments no less, is surely not accidental, but it always strikes me as frivolous.