1Q84 (107 page)

There were three brand-new sweaters in a large department-store shopping bag, in different thicknesses. There were two thick flannel shirts, and four long-sleeved T-shirts. All of them were in plain fabric and simple designs. They were all the perfect size. There were also some thick socks and tights. If she was going to be here until December, she would need them. Her handlers knew what they were doing.

She took the clothes into the bedroom and folded them to store in drawers or hung them on hangers in the closet. She had gone back to the kitchen and was drinking coffee when the phone rang. It rang three times, stopped, then rang again.

“Did you get everything?” Tamaru asked.

“Yes, thank you. I think I have everything I need now. The exercise equipment is more than enough. Now I just have to crack open Proust.”

“If there is anything that we’ve overlooked, don’t hesitate to tell me.”

“I won’t,” Aomame said. “Though I don’t think it would be easy to find anything you have overlooked.”

Tamaru cleared his throat. “This might not be my business, but do you mind if I give you a warning?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Unless you have experienced it, being shut up in a small place by yourself, unable to see or talk to anyone else, is not the easiest thing in the world. No matter how tough a person might be, eventually he is going to make a sound. Especially when someone is after you.”

“I haven’t been living in very spacious places up till now.”

“That could be an advantage,” Tamaru said. “Still, I want you to be very careful. If a person remains tense for a long time he might not notice it himself, but it’s like his nerves are a piece of rubber that has been stretched out. It’s hard to go back to the original shape.”

“I’ll be careful,” Aomame said.

“As I said before, you are a very cautious person. You’re practical and patient, not overconfident. But no matter how careful a person might be, once your concentration slips, you will definitely make one or two mistakes. Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”

“I don’t think I’m lonely,” Aomame declared. She said this half to Tamaru, and half to herself. “I’m all alone, but I’m not lonely.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone, as if Tamaru were giving serious thought to the difference between being alone and being lonely.

“At any rate I’ll be more cautious than I have been,” Aomame said. “Thank you for the advice.”

“There is one thing I’d like you to understand,” Tamaru said. “We will do whatever we can to protect you. But if some emergency situation arises—what that might be, I don’t know—you may have to deal with it yourself. I can run over there as fast as possible and still might not make it in time. Depending on the situation, I may not be able to get there at all. For instance, if it is no longer desirable for us to have a connection with you.”

“I understand completely. I plan to protect myself. With the bat, and with the
thing you gave me.
”

“It’s a tough world.”

“Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial,” Aomame said.

Tamaru was silent again for a moment, and then spoke. “Have you heard about the final tests given to candidates to become interrogators for Stalin’s secret police?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“A candidate would be put in a square room. The only thing in the room is an ordinary small wooden chair. And the interrogator’s boss gives him an order. He says, ‘Get this chair to confess and write up a report on it. Until you do this, you can’t leave this room.’ ”

“Sounds pretty surreal.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s not surreal at all. It’s a real story. Stalin actually did create that kind of paranoia, and some ten million people died on his watch—most of them his fellow countrymen. And we
actually
live in that kind of world. Don’t ever forget that.”

“You’re full of heartwarming stories, aren’t you.”

“Not really. I just have a few set aside, just in case. I never received a formal education. I just learned whatever looked useful, as I experienced it.
Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial
. You’re exactly right. Absolutely. Hope, however, is limited, and generally abstract, while there are countless trials, and they tend to be concrete. That is also something I had to learn on my own.”

“So what kind of confession did the interrogator candidates extract from the chairs?”

“That is a question definitely worth considering,” Tamaru said. “Sort of like a Zen koan.”

“Stalinist Zen,” Aomame said.

After a short pause, Tamaru hung up.

That afternoon she worked out on the stationary bike and the bench press. Aomame enjoyed the moderate workout, her first in a while. Afterward she showered, then made dinner while listening to an FM station. In the evening she checked the TV news (though not a single item caught her interest). After the sun had set she went out to the balcony to watch the playground, with her usual blanket, binoculars, and pistol. And her shiny brand-new bat.

If Tengo doesn’t show up by then
, she thought,
I guess I will see out this enigmatic year of 1Q84 in this corner of Koenji, one monotonous day after another. I’ll cook, exercise, check the news, and work my way through Proust—and wait for Tengo to show up at the playground. Waiting for him is the central task of my life. Right now that slender thread is what is barely keeping me alive. It’s like that spider I saw when I was climbing down the emergency stairway on the Metropolitan Expressway No. 3. A tiny black spider that had spun a pathetic little web in a corner of the grimy steel frame and was silently lying in wait. The wind from under the bridge had blown the spider web, which hung there precariously, tattered and full of dust. When I first saw it, I thought it was pitiful. But right now I’m in the same situation
.

I have to get ahold of a recording of Janacek’s
Sinfonietta.
I need it when I’m working out. It makes me feel connected. It’s as if that music is leading me to something. To what, though, I can’t say
. She made a mental note to add that to the next list of supplies.

It was October now. There were less than three months left of her reprieve. The clock kept ticking away, ceaselessly. Aomame sank down into her garden chair and continued to watch the slide in the playground through the plastic blinds. The little children’s playground looked pale under the mercury-vapor lamp. The scene made Aomame think of deserted hallways in an aquarium at night. Invisible, imaginary fish were swimming noiselessly through the trees, never halting their silent movements. And two moons hung in the sky, waiting for Aomame’s acknowledgment.

“Tengo,” she whispered. “Where are you?”

In the afternoons Tengo would visit his father in the hospital, sit next to his bed, open the book he brought, and read aloud. After reading five pages he would take a short break, then read five more pages. He read whatever book he happened to be reading on his own at the time. Sometimes it was a novel, or a biography, or a book on the natural sciences. What was most important was the act of reading the sentences aloud, not the contents.

Tengo didn’t know if his father actually heard his voice. His face never showed any reaction. This thin, shabby-looking old man had his eyes closed, and he was asleep. He didn’t move at all, and his breathing wasn’t audible. He was breathing, but unless you brought your ear very close, or held a mirror up to his nose to see if it clouded, you couldn’t really tell. The liquid in the IV drip went into his body, and a tiny amount of urine oozed out the catheter. The only thing that revealed that he was alive was this silent, slow movement in and out. Occasionally a nurse would shave his beard with an electric razor and use a tiny pair of scissors with rounded-off tips to clip the white hairs growing out of his ears and nose. She would trim his eyebrows as well. Even though he was unconscious, these continued to grow. As he watched his father, Tengo started to have doubts about the difference between a person being alive and being dead.
Maybe there really wasn’t much of a difference to begin with
, he thought.
Maybe we just decided, for convenience’s sake, to insist on a difference
.

At three the doctor came and gave Tengo an update on his father’s condition. The explanation was always concise, and it was nearly the same from one day to the next. There was no change. The old man was simply asleep, his life gradually fading away. In other words, death was approaching, slowly but certainly, and there was nothing medically speaking that could be done. Just let him lie here, quietly sleeping. That’s about all the doctor could say.

In the evenings two male nurses would come and take his father to an examination room. The male nurses differed depending on the day, but both of them were taciturn. Perhaps the masks they wore had something to do with it, but they never said a word. One of them looked foreign. He was short and dark skinned, and was always smiling at Tengo through his mask. Tengo could tell he was smiling by his eyes. Tengo smiled back and nodded.

Anywhere from a half hour to an hour later, his father would be brought back to his room. Tengo had no idea what kind of examinations they were conducting. While his father was gone he would go to the cafeteria, have some hot green tea, and stay about fifteen minutes before going back to the hospital room. All the while he held on to the hope that when he returned an air chrysalis would once again materialize, with Aomame as a young girl lying inside. But all that greeted him in the gloomy hospital room was the smell of a sick person and the depressions left behind in the empty bed.

Tengo stood by the window and looked at the scene outside. Beyond the garden and lawn was the dark line of the pine windbreak, through which came the sound of waves. The rough waves of the Pacific. It was a thick, darkish sound, as if many souls were gathered, each whispering his story. They seemed to be seeking more souls to join them, seeking even more stories to be told.

Before this, in October, Tengo had twice taken day trips, on his days off, to the sanatorium in Chikura. He would take the early-morning express train. Once there, he would sit beside his father’s bed, and talk to him sometimes. There was nothing even close to a response. His father just lay there, faceup, sound asleep. Tengo spent most of his time gazing out the window. As evening approached he waited for something to happen, but nothing ever did. The sun would silently sink, and the room would be wrapped in the gathering gloom. He would ultimately give up, leave, and take the last express train back to Tokyo.

Maybe I should be more patient, stay with him longer
, Tengo thought once.
Maybe visiting him for the day and then leaving isn’t enough. What’s needed, perhaps, is a deeper commitment
. He had no concrete evidence that this was true. He just felt that way.

After the middle of November he took the vacation leave he had accumulated, telling the cram school that his father was in critical condition and he needed to look after him. This in itself wasn’t a lie. He asked a classmate from college to take over his classes. He was one of the relatively few people with whom Tengo had kept in touch, albeit just once or twice a year. Even in the math department, which had more than its share of oddballs, this guy was particularly odd, as well as smart beyond compare. After graduating, though, he didn’t get a job or go on to grad school. Instead, when he felt like it, he taught math at a private cram school for junior high students. Other than that, he read, went fly fishing, and did whatever he wanted. Tengo happened to know, however, that he was a very capable teacher. The thing was, he was tired of being so capable. Plus, he was from a wealthy family and there was no need for him to force himself to work. He had substituted for Tengo once before and the students had liked him. Tengo called him and explained the situation, and he immediately agreed to step in.

There was also the question of what to do about Fuka-Eri. Tengo couldn’t decide if leaving this naive girl behind in his apartment for a long time was the right thing to do. And besides, she was trying to hide out, to stay out of sight. So he asked her directly. “Are you okay on your own here for a while? Or would you like to go someplace else, temporarily?”

“Where are you going,” Fuka-Eri asked, a serious look in her eyes.

“To the cat town,” Tengo explained. “My father won’t regain consciousness. He’s been in a deep sleep for a while. They say he might not last long.”

He didn’t say a word about the air chrysalis appearing in the hospital room bed one evening. Or how Aomame appeared inside as a young girl, asleep. Or how the air chrysalis was exactly as Fuka-Eri had described it in her novel, down to the last detail. Or how he was secretly hoping that it would again appear before him.

Fuka-Eri narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips, and stared straight at Tengo, as if trying to make out a message written in tiny letters. Almost unconsciously he touched his face, but it didn’t feel as though something was written on it.

“That’s fine,” Fuka-Eri said after a while, and she nodded several times. “Do not worry about me. I will stay at home.” After thinking for a moment she added, “Right now there is no danger.”

“Right now there is no danger,” Tengo repeated.

“Do not worry about me,” she said again.

“I’ll call you every day.”

“Do not get abandoned in the cat town.”

“I’ll be careful,” Tengo said.

Tengo went to the supermarket and bought enough food so Fuka-Eri wouldn’t have to go shopping, all things that would be simple to prepare. Tengo was well aware that she had neither the ability nor the desire to do much cooking. He wanted to avoid coming back in two weeks to a fridge full of mushy, spoiled food.

He stuffed a vinyl bag full of clothes and toiletries, a few books, pens, and paper. As usual he took the express train from Tokyo Station, changed to a local train at Tateyama, and got off at Chikura. He went to the tourist information booth in front of the station to look for a fairly inexpensive hotel. It was the off-season, so he had no trouble finding a room in a simple Japanese-style inn that catered mainly to people coming to fish. The cramped but clean room smelled of fresh tatami. The fishing harbor was visible from the second-floor window. The charge for the room, which included breakfast, was cheaper than he had expected.