1Q84 (142 page)

After Tengo had looked at all the windows in the condo, he turned his gaze once more to the sky. Ushikawa followed suit. From where he was hidden, the branches of the zelkova tree, the electric lines, and the other buildings got in the way. He could only see half the sky. What particular point in the sky Tengo was looking at wasn’t at all clear. Countless clouds ceaselessly scudded across the sky like some overwhelming army bearing down on them.

Eventually, Tengo stood up and silently climbed down from the slide, like a pilot having just landed after a rough solo flight at night. He cut across the playground and left. Ushikawa hesitated, then decided not to follow him. Most likely Tengo was on his way back to his place. Plus Ushikawa had to pee like crazy. After he saw Tengo disappear, he went into the playground, hustled behind the public toilet, and in the darkness where no one could see him, he peed into a bush. His bladder was ready to burst.

He finally finished peeing—the operation taking as long as it would take a long freight train to cross a bridge—zipped up his pants, shut his eyes, and gave a deep sigh of relief. His watch showed 8:17. Tengo had been on top of the slide for about fifteen minutes. Ushikawa checked again that Tengo wasn’t around and headed toward the slide. He clambered up the ladder with his short, bandy legs, sat down on the very top of the freezing slide, and looked up. What could he have been staring at so intently?

Ushikawa had pretty good eyesight. Astigmatism made his eyes a bit out of balance, but generally he could get by every day without glasses. Still, no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t make out a single star. What caught his attention instead was the large moon in the sky, about two-thirds full. Its dark, bruised exterior was clearly exposed between the clouds. Your typical winter moon. Cold, pale, full of ancient mysteries and inklings. Unblinking like the eyes of the dead, it hung there, silent, in the sky.

Ushikawa gulped. For a while, he forgot to breathe. Through a break in the clouds, there was another moon, a little way apart from the first one. This was much smaller than the original moon, slightly warped in shape, and green, like it had moss growing on it. But it was undoubtedly a moon. No star was that big. And it couldn’t be a satellite. Yet there it was, pasted onto the night sky.

Ushikawa shut his eyes, then a few seconds later opened them again. This must be an illusion.
That kind of thing can’t be there
. But no matter how many times he opened and closed his eyes, the little moon was still in the sky. Passing clouds hid it occasionally, but once they passed by, there it was, in the same exact spot.

This is what Tengo was looking at
. Tengo Kawana had come to this playground to see this scene, or perhaps to check that it still existed. He has known for some time that there are two moons. No doubt about it. He didn’t look at all surprised to see it. On top of the slide, Ushikawa sighed deeply.
What kind of crazy world is this?
he asked himself.
What sort of world have I gotten
myself into?
But no answer came. Swept by countless clouds racing by, the two moons—one big, one small—hung in the sky like a riddle.

There’s one thing I can say for sure
, he decided.
This isn’t the world I came from. The earth I know has only one moon. That is an undeniable fact. And now it has increased to two
.

Ushikawa began to have a sense of deja vu.
I’ve seen the same thing before somewhere
, he thought. He focused, desperately searching his memory. He frowned, grit his teeth, dredging the dark sea bottom of his mind. And it finally hit him.
Air Chrysalis
.

He looked around, but all he saw was the same world as always. White lace curtains were drawn in windows in the condo across the street, peaceful lights on behind them. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Only the number of moons was different
.

He carefully climbed down from the slide, and hurriedly left the playground as if running from the eyes of the moons.
Am I going nuts?
he wondered.
No, that can’t be it. I’m not going crazy. My mind is like a brand-new steel nail—hard, sober, straight. Hammered at just the right angle, into the core of reality. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m completely sane
.

It’s the world around me that’s gone crazy
.

And I have to find out why
.

On Sunday the wind had died down. It was a warm, calm day, totally different from the night before. People took off their heavy coats and enjoyed the sunshine. Aomame, however, did not enjoy the nice weather—she spent the day as always, shut away in her room, the curtains closed.

As she listened to Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
, the sound down low, she stretched and then turned to her exercise machine to do some resistance training. She was gradually adding routines to her training workout and it now took nearly two hours to complete. Afterward she cooked, cleaned the apartment, and lay on the sofa to read
In Search of Lost Time
. She had finally begun volume three,
The Guermantes Way
. She tried her best to keep busy. She only watched TV twice a day—the
NHK
news broadcasts at noon and seven p.m. As always, nothing big was going on—no, actually, lots of big events were happening in the world. People all around the world had lost their lives, many of them in tragic ways—train wrecks, ferry boats sinking, plane crashes. A civil war went on with no end in sight, an assassination, a terrible ethnic massacre. Weather shifts had brought on drought, floods, famine. Aomame deeply sympathized with the people caught up in these tragedies and disasters, but even so, not a single thing had occurred that had a direct bearing on her.

Neighborhood children were playing in the playground across the street, shouting something. She could hear the crows gathered on the roof, cawing out the latest gossip. The air had that early-winter city smell.

It suddenly hit her that ever since she had been living in this condo she had never once felt any sexual desire. Not once had she felt like having sex. She hadn’t even masturbated. Maybe it was due to her pregnancy and her body’s hormonal changes. Still, Aomame was relieved. This wasn’t exactly the place to find a sexual outlet, should she decide she had to sleep with someone. She was happy, too, to not have any more periods. Her periods had never been heavy, but still she felt as if she had set down a load she had been carrying forever. It was one less thing to have to think about.

In the three months that she had been here, her hair had grown long. In September it had barely touched her shoulders, but now it was down to her shoulder blades. When she was a child her mother had always trimmed it short, and from junior high onward, because sports had been her life, she had never let it grow out. It felt a bit too long now, but she couldn’t very well cut it herself. She trimmed her bangs, but that was all. She kept her hair up during the day and let it down at night. And then, while listening to music, she brushed it a hundred strokes, something you can only do if you have plenty of time on your hands.

Normally she wore almost no makeup, and now especially there was no need for it. But she wanted to keep a set daily routine as much as she could, so she made sure to take good care of her skin. She massaged her skin with creams and lotions, put on a face mask before bedtime. She was basically a very healthy person, and just a little extra care was all it took for her skin to be beautiful and lustrous. Or maybe this, too, was a by-product of being pregnant? She had heard that pregnant women had beautiful skin. Either way, when she sat at her mirror, let down her hair, and examined her face, she did feel she looked prettier than ever before. Or at least she was taking on the composure of a mature woman. Probably.

Aomame had never once felt beautiful. No one had ever told her that she was. Her mother treated her like she was an ugly child. “If only you were prettier,” her mother always said—meaning if she were prettier, a cuter child, they could recruit more converts. So Aomame had always avoided looking at herself in mirrors. When she absolutely had to, she quickly, efficiently, checked out her reflection.

Tamaki Otsuka had told her she liked her features.
Not bad at all
, she had said.
They are actually very nice. You should have more confidence
. That had made Aomame happy. She was just entering puberty, and her friend’s warm words calmed her.
Maybe I’m not as ugly as my mother said I was
, she began to think. But even Tamaki had never called her
beautiful
.

Now, however, for the first time in her life, Aomame saw something beautiful in her face. She was able to sit in front of the mirror longer than ever before and examine her face more thoroughly. She wasn’t being narcissistic. She inspected her face from a number of angles, as if it were somebody else’s. Had she really become beautiful? Or was it her way of appreciating everything that had changed, not her face itself? Aomame couldn’t decide.

Occasionally she would put on a big frown in the mirror. Her frowning face looked the same as it always had. The muscles in her face stretched in all directions, her features unraveled, each distinct from the other. All possible emotions in the world gushed out from her face. It was neither beautiful nor ugly. From one angle she looked demonic, from a different angle comic. And from yet another angle her face was a chaotic jumble. When she stopped frowning her facial muscles gradually relaxed, like ripples vanishing on the surface of water, and her usual features returned. And then Aomame discovered a new, slightly different version of herself.

“You should smile more naturally,” Tamaki had often told her. “Your features are gentle when you smile, so it’s a shame that you don’t do so more often.” But Aomame could never smile easily, or casually, in front of people. When she forced it, she ended up with a tight sneer, which made others even more tense and uncomfortable. Tamaki was different: she had a natural, cheerful smile. People meeting her for the first time immediately felt friendly toward her. In the end, though, disappointment and despair drove Tamaki to take her own life, leaving Aomame—who couldn’t manage a decent smile—behind.

It was a quiet Sunday. The warm sunshine had led many people to the playground across the road. Parents stood around, their children playing in the sandbox or on the swings. Some kids were playing on the slide. Elderly people sat on the benches, intently watching the children at play. Aomame went out on her balcony, sat on her garden chair, and half-heartedly watched through a gap in the screen. It was a peaceful scene. Time was marching on in the world. Nobody there was under threat of death, nobody there was on the trail of a killer. Nobody there had a fully loaded 9mm automatic pistol wrapped in tights in her dresser drawer.

Will I ever be able to participate in that quiet, normal world again?
Aomame asked herself.
Will there ever come a day when I can lead this
little one
by the hand, go to the park, and let it play on the swings, on the slides? Lead my daily life without thinking about who I will kill next, or who will kill me? Is that possible in this 1Q84 world? Or is it only possible in some other world? And most important of all—will Tengo be beside me?

Aomame stopped looking at the park and went back inside. She closed the sliding glass door and shut the curtains. She couldn’t hear the children’s voices now and a sadness tugged at her. She was cut off from everything, stuck in a place that was locked from the inside.
I’ll stop watching the playground during the day. Tengo won’t come in the daytime
. What he was looking for was a clear view of the two moons.

After she had a simple dinner and washed the dishes, Aomame dressed warmly and went out on the balcony once more. She lay the blanket on her lap and sank back in the chair. It was a windless night. The kind of clouds that watercolor artists like lingered faintly in the sky, a test of the artist’s delicate brushstrokes. The larger moon, which was not blocked by the clouds, was two-thirds full and shone bright, distinct light down on the earth below. At this time of evening, from where she sat Aomame couldn’t see the second, smaller moon. It was just behind a building, but Aomame knew
it was there
. She could feel its presence. No doubt it would soon appear before her.

Ever since she had gone into hiding, she had been able to intentionally shut thoughts out of her mind. Especially when she was on the balcony like this, gazing at the playground, she could make her mind a complete blank. She kept her eyes focused on the playground, especially on the slide, but she wasn’t thinking of anything—no, her mind might have been thinking of something, but this was mostly below the surface. What her mind was doing below the surface, she had no idea. At regular intervals something would float up, like sea turtles and porpoises poking their faces through the surface of the water to breathe. When that happened, she knew that indeed she
had been thinking of something
up till then. Then her consciousness, lungs full of fresh oxygen, sank back below the surface. It was gone again, and Aomame no longer thought of anything. She was a surveillance device, wrapped in a soft cocoon, her gaze absorbed in the slide.

She was seeing the park, but at the same time she was seeing nothing. If anything new came across her line of vision, her mind would react immediately. But right now nothing new was happening. There was no wind. The dark branches of the zelkova tree stuck out, unmoving, like sharp probes pointed toward the sky. The whole world was still. She looked at her watch. It was after eight. Today might end as always, with nothing out of the ordinary. A Sunday night, as quiet as could be.

The world stopped being still at exactly 8:23.

She suddenly noticed a man on top of the slide. He sat down and looked up at one part of the sky. Aomame’s heart shrunk to the size of a child’s fist, and stayed that size so long she was afraid it would never start pumping again. But it just as quickly swelled up to normal size and started beating again. With a dull sound it began furiously pumping fresh blood throughout her body. Aomame’s mind quickly broke through to the surface of the water, shook itself, and stood by, ready to take action.