1Q84 (139 page)

“So the
dohta
that Fuka-Eri left behind was the main
dohta
, the one who functions properly?”

“That seems possible. Throughout everything that has happened, Fuka-Eri has always been at the center, like the eye of a hurricane.”

Komatsu narrowed his eyes and folded his hands together on the table. When he wanted to, he could really focus on an issue.

“You know, Tengo, I was thinking about this. Couldn’t you hypothesize that the Fuka-Eri we met is actually the
dohta
and what was left behind at Sakigake was the
maza
?”

This came as a bit of a shock. The idea had never occurred to Tengo. For him, Fuka-Eri was an actual person. But put it that way, and it started to sound possible. I have no
periods
. So there’s no chance I’ll get
pregnant
. Fuka-Eri had announced this, after they had had intercourse that night. If she was nothing more than an alter ego, her inability to get pregnant would make sense. An alter ego can’t reproduce itself—only the
maza
can do it. Still, Tengo couldn’t accept that hypothesis—that it was possible he had had intercourse with her alter ego, not the real Fuka-Eri.

“Fuka-Eri has a distinct personality. And her own code of conduct. I sort of doubt an alter ego could have those.”

“Exactly,” Komatsu agreed. “If she has nothing else, Fuka-Eri does have her own distinct personality and code of conduct. I would have to agree with you on that one.”

Still, Fuka-Eri was hiding a secret, a critical code hidden away inside this lovely girl, a code he had to crack. Tengo sensed this. Which one was the real person and which one the alter ego? Or was the whole notion of classifying into “real” and “alter ego” a mistake? Maybe Fuka-Eri was able, depending on the situation, to manipulate both her real self and her alter ego?

“There are several things I still don’t understand,” Komatsu said, resting his hands on the table and staring at them. For a middle-aged man, his fingers were long and slender.

“The voice has stopped speaking, the water in the well has dried up, the prophet has died. What will happen to the
dohta
after that? She won’t follow him in death like widows do in India.”

“When there’s no more Receiver, there’s no need for a Perceiver.”

“If we take your hypothesis a step further, that is,” Komatsu said. “Did Fuka-Eri know that would be the result when she wrote
Air Chrysalis
? That Sakigake man told me it wasn’t intentional. At least it wasn’t
her
intention. But how could he know this?”

“I don’t know,” Tengo said. “But I just can’t see Fuka-Eri intentionally driving her father to his death. I think her father was facing death for some other reason. Maybe that’s why she left in the first place. Or maybe she was hoping that her father would be freed from the voice. I’m just speculating, though, and I have nothing to back it up.”

Komatsu considered this for a long time, wrinkles forming on either side of his nose. Finally he sighed and glanced around. “What a strange world. With each passing day, it’s getting harder to know how much is just hypothetical and how much is real. Tell me, Tengo, as a novelist, what is your definition of reality?”

“When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out—that’s the real world,” Tengo replied.

“Then this is most definitely the real world,” Komatsu said, and he rubbed his inner forearm. Pale veins rose to the surface. They were not very healthy-looking blood vessels—blood vessels damaged by years of drinking, smoking, an unhealthy lifestyle, and various literary intrigues. Komatsu drained the last of his highball and clinked the ice around in the empty glass.

“Could you go on with your hypothesis? It’s getting more interesting.”

“They are looking for a successor to the
one who hears the voice
,” Tengo said. “But they also have to find a new,
properly functional dohta
. A new Receiver will need a new Perceiver.”

“In other words, they need to find a new
maza
as well. And in order to do so, they have to make a new air chrysalis. That sounds like a pretty large-scale operation.”

“Which is why they’re so deadly serious.”

“Exactly.”

“But they can’t be going about this blind,” Tengo said. “They’ve got to have somebody in mind.”

Komatsu nodded. “I got that impression, too. That’s why they wanted to get rid of us as fast as they could—so we don’t bother them anymore. I think we were quite a blot on their personal landscape.”

“How so?”

Komatsu shook his head. He didn’t know either.

“I wonder what message the voice told them until now. And what connection there is between the voice and the Little People.”

Komatsu shook his head listlessly again. This, too, went beyond anything the two of them could imagine.

“Did you see the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey?
”

“I did,” Tengo said.

“We’re like the apes in the movie,” Komatsu said. “The ones with shaggy black fur, screeching out some nonsense as they dance around the monolith.”

A new pair of customers came into the bar, sat down at the counter like they were regulars, and ordered cocktails.

“There’s one thing we can say for sure,” Komatsu said, sounding like he wanted to wind things down. “Your hypothesis is convincing. It makes sense. I always really enjoy having these talks with you. But we’re going to back out of this scary minefield, and probably never see Fuka-Eri or Professor Ebisuno again.
Air Chrysalis
is nothing more than a harmless fantasy novel, with not a single piece of concrete information in it. And what that voice is, and what message it’s transmitting, have nothing to do with us. We need to leave it that way.”

“Get off the boat and get back to life onshore.”

Komatsu nodded. “You got it. I’ll go to work every day, gathering manuscripts that don’t make a difference one way or another in order to publish them in a literary journal. You will go to cram school and teach math to promising young people, and in between teaching, you’ll write novels. We’ll each go back to our own peaceful, mundane lives. No rapids, no waterfalls. We’ll quietly grow old. Any objection?”

“We don’t have any other choice, do we?”

Komatsu stretched out the wrinkles next to his nose with his finger. “That’s right. We have no other choice. I can tell you this—I don’t want to ever be kidnapped again. Being locked up in that room once is more than enough. If there were a next time, I might not see the light of day. Just the thought of meeting that duo again makes my heart quake. They only need to glare at you and you would keel over.”

Komatsu turned to face the bar and signaled with his glass for a third highball. He stuck a fresh cigarette in his mouth.

“But why haven’t you told me this until now? It has been quite some time since the kidnapping, over two months. You should have told me earlier.”

“I don’t know,” Komatsu said, slightly inclining his head. “You’re right. I was thinking I should tell you, but I kept putting it off. I’m not sure why. Maybe I had a guilty conscience.”

“Guilty conscience?” Tengo said, surprised. He had never expected to hear Komatsu say that.

“Even I can have a guilty conscience,” Komatsu said.

“About what?”

Komatsu didn’t reply. He narrowed his eyes and rolled the unlit cigarette around between his lips.

“Does Fuka-Eri know her parents have died?” Tengo asked.

“I think she probably does. I imagine at some point Professor Ebisuno told her about it.”

Tengo nodded. Fuka-Eri must have known about it a long time ago. He had a distinct feeling she did. He was the only one who hadn’t been told.

“So we get out of the boat and return to our lives onshore,” Tengo repeated.

“That’s right. We edge away from the minefield.”

“But even if we want to do that, do you think we can go back to our old lives that easily?”

“All we can do is try,” Komatsu said. He struck a match and lit the cigarette. “What specifically bothers you?”

“Lots of things around us are already starting to fall into strange patterns. Some things have already been transformed, and it may not be easy for them to go back the way they were.”

“Even if our lives are on the line?”

Tengo gave an ambiguous shake of his head. He had been feeling for some time that he was caught up in a strong current, one that never wavered. And that current was dragging him off to some unknown place. But he couldn’t really explain it to Komatsu.

Tengo didn’t reveal to Komatsu that the novel he was writing now carried on the world in
Air Chrysalis
. Komatsu probably wouldn’t welcome the news. And Sakigake would certainly be less than pleased. If he wasn’t careful, he might step into a different minefield, or get the people around him mixed up in it. But a narrative takes its own direction, and continues on, almost automatically. And whether he liked it or not, Tengo was a part of that world. To him, this was no longer a fictional world. This was the real world, where red blood spurts out when you slice open your skin with a knife. And in the sky in this world, there were two moons, side by side.

It was a quiet, windless Thursday morning. Ushikawa woke as usual before six and washed his face with cold water. He brushed his teeth as he listened to the
NHK
news on the radio, and he shaved with the electric razor. He boiled water in a pot, made instant ramen, and, after he finished eating, drank a cup of instant coffee. He rolled up his sleeping bag, stowed it in the closet, and sat down at the window in front of his camera. The eastern sky was beginning to grow light. It looked like it was going to be a warm day.

The faces of all the people who left for work in the morning were etched in his mind. There was no need to take any more photos. From seven to eight thirty they hurried out of the apartment building to the station—the usual suspects. Ushikawa heard the lively voices of a group of elementary school pupils heading off for school. The children’s voices reminded him of when his daughters were little. His daughters had thoroughly enjoyed elementary school. They took piano and ballet lessons, and had lots of friends. To the very end, Ushikawa had found it hard to accept that he had these ordinary, happy kids. How could someone like him possibly be the father of children like these?

After the morning rush, almost no one came in or out of the building. The children’s lively voices had disappeared. Ushikawa laid aside the remote control for the shutter, leaned against the wall, smoked a cigarette, and kept an eye on the entrance through a gap in the curtain. As always, just after ten a.m., the mailman came on his small red motorcycle and adeptly sorted the mail into all the boxes. From what Ushikawa could make out, half of it was junk mail, stuff that would be tossed away, unopened. As the sun rose higher, the temperature went up, and most of the people along the street took off their coats.

It was after eleven when Fuka-Eri appeared at the entrance to the building. She wore the same black turtleneck as before, a gray short coat, jeans, sneakers, and dark sunglasses. And an oversized green shoulder bag slung diagonally across her shoulder. The bag was bulging with, no doubt, all sorts of things. Ushikawa left the wall he was leaning against, went over to the camera on the tripod, and squinted through the viewfinder.

The girl was leaving there, that much he understood. She had stuffed all her belongings in that bag and was setting off for somewhere else. She would never be back there again. He could sense it.
Maybe she decided to leave here
, he thought,
because she noticed I was staking out the place
. The thought made his heart race.

As she stepped out of the entrance, she came to a halt and stared up at the sky like she had done before, searching for something among the tangle of electric lines and the transformers. Her sunglasses caught the light and glittered. Had she found what she was looking for? Or maybe not? He couldn’t read her expression through the sunglasses. She must have stood there, frozen, for a good thirty seconds, gazing up at the sky. Then, almost as an afterthought, she turned her head and looked straight at the window behind which Ushikawa was hiding. She took off her sunglasses and stuck them in a coat pocket. She frowned and focused her gaze right on the camouflaged telephoto lens.
She knows
, Ushikawa thought once again.
The girl knows I’m hiding in here, that she’s being secretly watched
. And she was looking at him in the opposite direction, watching Ushikawa through the lens and back through the viewfinder. Like water flowing backward though a curved pipe. Ushikawa felt the flesh crawl on both his arms.

Fuka-Eri blinked every few moments. Like independent, silent living creatures, her eyelids slowly went up and down in a studied way. Nothing else moved. She stood there like some lofty bird with neck twisted, staring straight at Ushikawa. He couldn’t pull his eyes away from her. It felt as if the entire world had come to a momentary halt. There was no wind, and sounds no longer made the air vibrate.

Finally Fuka-Eri stopped looking at him. She raised her head again and gazed up at the sky, as she had done a moment before. This time, though, she stopped after a couple of seconds. Her expression was unchanged. She took the dark sunglasses out of her pocket, put them on again, and headed toward the street. She walked with a smooth, unhesitant stride.

I should go out and follow her. Tengo isn’t back yet, and I have the time to find out where she’s going. It couldn’t hurt to find out where she’s moving to
. But somehow Ushikawa couldn’t stand up from the floor. His body was numb. That sharp gaze she had sent through the viewfinder had robbed him of the strength he needed to take action.

It’s okay
, Ushikawa told himself as he sat there on the floor.
Aomame is the one I have to locate. Eriko Fukada is a fascinating girl, but she’s not my main priority here. She’s just a supporting actress. If she’s leaving, why not just let her go?