1Q84 (130 page)

“I think being in one place for so long has made me anxious, maybe, without my even realizing it. But I’m taking good care of myself. That’s my field, after all,” Aomame replied, careful with her tone of voice.

“Of course,” the dowager responded. She paused again. “A little while ago a suspicious man was hanging around our place for a couple of days. He seemed mainly interested in checking out the safe house. I asked the three women staying there to look at the pictures on our security cameras, but none of them recognized him. It might be somebody who’s after you.”

Aomame frowned slightly. “You mean they’ve figured out our connection?”

“I’m not sure about that. We’re at the point where we
need to consider
that possibility, though. This man looks quite unusual. He has a big, misshapen head. The top is flat, and he’s balding. He’s short, with stubby arms and legs, and stocky. Does that sound at all familiar?”

A misshapen head? “From the balcony I keep a close eye on the people walking down the street, but I’ve never seen anyone that fits that description. He sounds like the kind of person you couldn’t miss.”

“Exactly. He sounds like a colorful circus clown. If he’s the one
they
selected and sent to check us out, I would say it’s an odd choice.”

Aomame agreed. Sakigake wouldn’t deliberately send a person who stood out like that to reconnoiter. They couldn’t be that desperate for help. Which meant that the man probably had nothing to do with the religion, and that Sakigake still didn’t know about her relationship with the dowager. But then who was this man, and what was he doing checking out the safe house? Maybe he was the same man who pretended to be an
NHK
fee collector and kept on bothering her? She had no proof. She had just mentally linked the fee collector’s eccentric manner and the description of this other weird man.

“If you see him, please get in touch. We may have to take steps.”

“Of course I will get in touch right away,” Aomame replied.

The dowager was silent again. This was rather unusual, for usually when they talked on the phone she was quite no-nonsense, and hated to waste any time.

“Are you well?” Aomame asked casually.

“The same as always. I have no complaints,” the dowager said. But Aomame could hear a faint hesitation in her voice—something else that was unusual.

Aomame waited for her to continue.

Finally, as if resigned to it, the dowager spoke. “It’s just that recently I feel old more often than I used to. Especially after you left.”

“I never left,” Aomame said brightly. “I’m still here.”

“I know. You’re there and we can still speak on the phone. It’s just that when we were able to meet regularly and exercise together, some of your vitality rubbed off on me.”

“You have a lot of your own vitality to begin with. All I did was help bring it out. Even if I’m not there, you should be able to make it on your own.”

“To tell you the truth, I thought the same thing until a while ago,” the dowager said, giving a laugh that was best characterized as dry. “I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don’t just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they’ve received. I have only just learned that truth.”

You have to pay the price for what you’ve received
. Aomame frowned. It was the same line that the
NHK
collector had spoken.

“On that night in September, when there was the huge thunderstorm, this thought suddenly came to me,” the dowager said. “I was in my house, alone in the living room, anxious about you, watching the flashes of lightning. And a flash of lightning lit up this truth for me, right in front of my eyes. That night I lost you, I also lost something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence, the very support for who I am as a person.”

“Was anger a part of this?” Aomame ventured.

There was a silence, like after the tide had gone out. Finally the dowager spoke. “You mean was my anger among the things I lost then? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes.”

The dowager slowly breathed in. “The answer to your question is—yes. That’s what happened. In the midst of that tremendous lightning, the seething anger I had had was suddenly gone—at least, it had retreated far away. It was no longer the blazing anger I used to have. It had transformed into something more like a faintly colored sorrow. I thought such an intense anger would last forever…. But how do you know this?”

“Because the same thing happened to me,” Aomame said, “that night when there was all that thunder.”

“You’re talking about your own anger?”

“That’s right. I can’t feel the pure, intense anger I used to have anymore. It hasn’t completely disappeared, but like you said, it has withdrawn to someplace far away. For years this anger has occupied a large part of me. It’s been what has driven me.”

“Like a merciless coachman who never rests,” the dowager said. “But it has lost power, and now you are pregnant. Instead of being angry.”

Aomame calmed her breathing. “Exactly. Instead of anger, there’s a
little one
inside me. Something that has nothing to do with anger. And day by day it is growing inside me.”

“I know I don’t need to say this,” the dowager said, “but you need to take every precaution with it. That is another reason you need to move as soon as possible to a more secure location.”

“I agree, but before that happens, there’s something I need to take care of.”

After she hung up, Aomame went out to the balcony, looked down through the plastic slats at the afternoon road below, and gazed at the playground. Twilight was fast approaching.
Before 1Q84 is over
, she thought,
before they find me, I have to find Tengo
.

No matter what it takes
.

Tengo left the bar, Mugiatama, and wandered the streets, lost in thought. Eventually, he made up his mind and headed toward the small children’s playground—the place where he had first discovered two moons in the sky.
I will climb the slide like last time
, he thought,
and look up at the sky once more
. He might be able to see the moons from there again. And they might tell him something.

As he walked, he wondered when exactly he had last visited the playground. He couldn’t recall. The flow of time wasn’t uniform anymore, the sense of distance uncertain. But it probably had been in the early autumn. He remembered wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt. And now it was December.

A cold wind was blowing the mass of clouds off toward Tokyo Bay. The free-form clouds looked stiff and hard, as if made of putty. The two moons were visible, occasionally hiding behind the clouds. The familiar yellow moon, and the new, smaller green moon, both of them past full, about two-thirds size. The smaller moon was like a child hiding in its mother’s skirts. The moons were in almost the same location as the time he saw them before, as if they had been patiently waiting for Tengo’s return.

There was no one else in the playground. The mercury-vapor lamp shone brighter than before, a cold, harsh light. The bare branches of the zelkova tree reminded him of ancient white bones. It was the sort of night when you would expect to hear an owl. But there were no owls to be found in the city’s parks. Tengo tugged the hood of his yacht parka over his head and stuck his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. He climbed up the slide, leaned against the handrail, and gazed up at the two moons as they appeared, then disappeared, among the clouds. Beyond that, the stars twinkled silently. The amorphous filth that hangs over the city was blown away in the wind, leaving the air pure and clear.

Right now, how many people besides me have noticed these two moons?
Tengo considered this. Fuka-Eri knew about it, because this was something that she initiated. Most likely. Other than her, though, nobody he knew had mentioned that the number of moons had increased. Have people not noticed? Or they don’t dare to bring it up in conversation? Is it just common knowledge? Either way, other than the friend who filled in for him at the cram school, Tengo hadn’t asked anybody about the moons. Actually, he had been careful not to bring it up in conversation, like it was some morally inappropriate subject.

Why?

Perhaps the moons wanted it that way
, Tengo thought.
Maybe these two moons are a special message meant just for me, and I am not permitted to share this information with anyone else
.

But this was a strange way to see it. Why would the number of moons be a personal message? And what could they be trying to tell him? To Tengo it seemed less a message than a kind of complicated riddle. And if it’s a riddle, then who made it? Who’s
not permitting
things?

The wind rushed between the branches of the zelkova tree, making a piercing howl, like the coldhearted breath leaking out between the teeth of a person who has lost all hope. Tengo gazed at the moons, not paying much attention to the sound of the wind, sitting there until his whole body was chilled to the bone. It must have been around fifteen minutes. No, maybe more. His sense of time had left him. His body, initially warmed by the whiskey, now felt hard and cold, like a lonely boulder at the bottom of the sea.

The clouds continued to scud off toward the south. No matter how many were blown away, others appeared to take their place. There was an inexhaustible source of clouds in some land far to the north. Decisive people, minds fixed on the task, clothed in thick, gray uniforms, working silently from morning to night to make clouds, like bees make honey, spiders make webs, and war makes widows.

Tengo looked at his watch. It was almost eight. The playground was still deserted. Occasionally people would walk by quickly on the street in front. People who have finished work and are on the way home all walk the same way. In the new six-story apartment building on the other side of the street the lights were on in half the units. On windy winter nights, a window with a light shining in it acquires a gentle warmth. Tengo looked from one lit window to the next, in order, like looking up at a huge luxury cruise liner from a tiny fishing boat bobbing in the night sea. As if by prearrangement, all the curtains at the windows were closed. Seen from a freezing-cold slide in a park at night, they looked like a totally different world—a world founded on different principles, a world that ran by different rules. Beyond those curtains there must be people living their quite ordinary lives, peaceful and content.

Quite ordinary lives?

The only image that Tengo had of
quite ordinary lives
was stereotypical, lacking depth and color. A married couple, probably with two kids. The mother has on an apron. Steam rising from a bubbling pot, voices around the dining table—that’s as far as his imagination took him before plowing into a solid wall. What would a
quite ordinary
family talk about around the dinner table? He had no memory himself of ever talking with his father at the dinner table. They each just stuffed food into their mouths, silently, whenever they felt like it. And what they ate was hard to call a real meal.

After checking out all the illuminated windows in the building, Tengo again looked up at the pair of moons. But no matter how long he waited, neither moon said anything to him. Their faces were expressionless as they floated in the sky beside each other, like a precarious couplet in need of reworking. Today there was no message. That was the only thing they conveyed to Tengo.

The clouds swept tirelessly toward the south. All sizes and shapes of clouds appeared, then disappeared. Some of them had very unusual shapes, as if they had their own unique thoughts—small, hard, clearly etched thoughts. But Tengo wanted to know what the moons were thinking, not the clouds.

He finally gave up and stood, stretching his arms and legs, then climbed down from the slide.
That’s all I can do. I was able to see that the number of moons hasn’t changed, and I will leave it at that for now
. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, left the playground, and strode back to his apartment. As he walked he suddenly thought of Komatsu. It was about time for them to talk. He had to sort out, even if just barely, what had transpired between them. And Komatsu, too, had some things he must need to talk to Tengo about. Tengo had left the number of the sanatorium in Chikura with Komatsu’s office, but he had never heard from him. He would give Komatsu a call tomorrow. Before that, though, he needed to go to the cram school and read the letter that Fuka-Eri had left for him.

Fuka-Eri’s letter was in his desk drawer, unopened. For such a tightly sealed envelope, it was a short letter. On a page and a half of notebook paper, in blue ink, was her writing, that distinctive cuneiform-like script, the kind of writing that would be more appropriate on a clay tablet than notebook paper. Tengo knew it must have taken her a long time to write like that.

Tengo read the letter over and over. She
had to get out of
his place.
Right this minute
, she had written, because they were being
watched
. She had underlined these three places with a soft, thick pencil. Terribly eloquent underlining.

Who
was watching us, and
how
she knew this—about this she said nothing. In the world that Fuka-Eri lived in, it seemed that facts were not conveyed directly. Like a map showing buried pirate treasure, things had to be connected through hints and riddles, ellipses and variations. He had grown used to it and, for the time being, provisionally, accepted whatever Fuka-Eri announced. When she said that they were being
watched
, no doubt they actually were being watched. When she felt that she
had to get out
, that meant the time had come for her to leave. The first thing to do was to accept all those statements as one comprehensive fact. Later on he could discover, or surmise, the background, the details, the basis for these hypotheses—or else just give up on it from the very beginning.