1Q84 (20 page)

No, I can’t go to a doctor. I have to solve this on my own
.

Let me pursue this hypothesis a little further if I can
.

If something like this has actually happened—if, that is, this world I’m standing in now has in fact taken the place of the old one—then when, where, and how did the switching of the tracks occur, in the most concrete sense?

Aomame made another concentrated effort to work her way back through her memory.

She had first become aware of the changes in the world a few days earlier, when she took care of the oil field development specialist in a hotel room in Shibuya. She had left her taxi on the elevated Metropolitan Expressway No. 3, climbed down an emergency escape stairway to Route 246, changed her stockings, and headed for Sangenjaya Station on the Tokyu Line. On the way to the station, she passed a young policeman and noticed for the first time that something about his appearance was different.
That’s when it all started. Which means the world switched tracks just before that. The policeman I saw near home that morning was wearing the same old uniform and carrying an old-fashioned revolver
.

Aomame recalled the odd sensation she had felt when she heard the opening of Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
in the taxi caught in traffic. She had experienced it as a kind of physical
wrenching
, as if the components of her body were being wrung out like a rag.
Then the driver told me about the Metropolitan Expressway’s emergency stairway. I took off my high heels and climbed down. The entire time I climbed down that precarious stairway in my stocking feet with the wind tearing at me, the opening fanfare of Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
echoed on and off in my ears. That may have been when it started
, she thought.

There had been something strange about that taxi driver, too. Aomame still remembered his parting words. She reproduced them as precisely as she could in her mind:

After you
do
something like that, the everyday
look
of things might seem to change a little. Things may look
different
to you than they did before. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality
.

At the time, Aomame had found this odd, but she had had no idea what he was trying to tell her, so she hadn’t given it much thought. She had been in too much of a hurry to puzzle over riddles. Thinking back on it now, though, his remarks had come out of nowhere, and they were truly strange. They could be taken as cautionary advice or an evocative message.
What was he trying to convey to me?

And then there was the Janacek music
.

How was I able to tell instantly that it was Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
?
And how did I know it was composed in 1926? Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
is not such popular music that anyone can recognize it on hearing the first few bars. Nor have I ever been such a passionate fan of classical music. I can’t tell Haydn from Beethoven. Yet the moment it came flowing through the car radio, I knew what it was. Why was that, and why should it have given me such an intensely physical—and intensely personal—jolt?

Yes, that jolt was utterly personal. It felt as if something had awakened a memory that had been asleep inside me for years. Something seemed to grab my shoulder and shake me. Which means I might have had a deep connection with that music at some point in my life. The music started playing, threw an automatic switch to “on,” and perhaps some kind of memory came fully awake. Janacek’s
Sinfonietta.

But though she tried to probe her memory, Aomame could come up with nothing else. She looked around, stared at her palms, inspected the shape of her fingernails, and grabbed her breasts through her shirt to check the shape.
No change. Same size and shape. I’m still the same me. The world is still the same world. But something has started to change
. She could feel it. It was like looking for differences between two identical pictures. Two pictures hang on the wall side by side. They look exactly alike, even with careful comparison. But when you examine the tiniest details, minuscule differences become apparent.

Aomame switched mental gears, turned the page of the compact-edition newspaper, and started taking detailed notes on the gun battle at Lake Motosu. There was speculation that the five Chinese-made Kalashnikov AK-47s had been smuggled in through the Korean Peninsula. They were most likely used military surplus in fairly good condition and came with lots of ammunition. The Japan Sea’s coast was a long one. Bringing in weapons and ammunition under cover of night and using a spy ship disguised as a fishing vessel was not that difficult. That was how drugs and weapons were brought into Japan in exchange for massive quantities of Japanese yen.

The Yamanashi Prefectural Police had been unaware that the radicals were so heavily armed. They obtained a search warrant on the (purely pro-forma) charge of inflicting bodily injury, and were carrying only their usual weapons when they piled into two patrol cars and a minibus and headed for the “farm.” This was the headquarters of a group that called itself Akebono, or “First Light.” On the face of it, the group members were simply operating an organic farm. They refused to allow the police to search their property. A confrontation ensued, and at some point it turned into a gun battle.

The Akebono group owned high-powered Chinese-made hand grenades, which fortunately they did not use, purely because they had obtained the grenades so recently that they had not had time to learn how to operate them. If the radicals had used hand grenades, casualties among the police and the Self-Defense Force would almost certainly have been much greater. Initially, the police did not even bring bulletproof vests with them. Critics singled out the police authorities’ poor intelligence analysis and the department’s aging weaponry. What most shocked people, however, was the very fact that there still survived in Japan such an armed radical group operating so actively beneath the surface. The late sixties’ bombastic calls for “revolution” were already a thing of the past, and everyone assumed that the remnants of the radicals had been wiped out in the police siege of the Asama Mountain Lodge in 1972.

When she had finished taking all her notes, Aomame returned the compact newspaper to the reference counter. Choosing a thick book called
Composers of the World
from the music section, she returned to her table and opened the book to “Janacek.”

Leos Janacek was born in a village in Moravia in 1854 and died in 1928. The article included a picture of him in his later years. Far from bald, his head was covered by a healthy thatch of white hair. It was so thick that Aomame couldn’t tell much about the shape of his head.
Sinfonietta
was composed in 1926. Janacek had endured a loveless marriage, but in 1917, at the age of sixty-three, he met and fell in love with a married woman named Kamila. He had been suffering through a slump, but his encounter with Kamila brought back a vigorous creative urge, and he published one late-career masterpiece after another.

He and Kamila were walking in a park one day when they came across an outdoor concert and stopped to listen. Janacek felt a surge of joy go through his entire body, and the motif for his
Sinfonietta
came to him. Something seemed to snap in his head, he recounted years later, and he felt enveloped in ecstasy. By chance, he had been asked around that time to compose a fanfare for a major athletic event. The motif that came to him in the park and the motif of the fanfare became one, and
Sinfonietta
was born. The “small symphony” label is ordinary enough, but the structure is utterly nontraditional, combining the radiant brass of the festive fanfare with the gentle central European string ensemble to produce a unique mood.

Aomame took careful notes on the commentary and the biographical factual material, but the book gave no hint as to what kind of connection there was—or could have been—between herself and this
Sinfonietta
. She left the library and wandered aimlessly through the streets as evening approached, often talking to herself or shaking her head.

Of course, it’s all just a hypothesis
, Aomame told herself as she walked.
But it’s the most compelling hypothesis I can produce at the moment. I’ll have to act according to this one, I suppose, until a more compelling hypothesis comes along. Otherwise, I could end up being thrown to the ground somewhere. If only for that reason, I’d better give an appropriate name to this new situation in which I find myself. There’s a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. Even cats and dogs need names. A newly changed world must need one, too
.

1Q84—that’s what I’ll call this new world
, Aomame decided.

Q is for “question mark.” A world that bears a question
.

Aomame nodded to herself as she walked along.

Like it or not, I’m here now, in the year 1Q84. The 1984 that I knew no longer exists. It’s 1Q84 now. The air has changed, the scene has changed. I have to adapt to this world-with-a-question-mark as soon as I can. Like an animal released into a new forest. In order to protect myself and survive, I have to learn the rules of this place and adapt myself to them
.

Aomame went to a record store near Jiyugaoka Station to look for Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
. Janacek was not a very popular composer. The Janacek section was quite small, and only one record contained
Sinfonietta
, a version with George Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra. The A side was Bartok’s
Concerto for Orchestra
. She knew nothing about these performances, but since there was no other choice, she bought the LP. She went back to her apartment, took a bottle of Chablis from the refrigerator and opened it, placed the record on the turntable, and lowered the needle into the groove. Drinking the well-chilled wine, she listened to the music. It started with the same bright fanfare. This was the music she had heard in the cab, without a doubt. She closed her eyes and gave the music her complete concentration. The performance was not bad. But nothing happened. It was just music playing. She felt no wrenching of her body. Her perceptions underwent no metamorphosis.

After listening to the piece all the way through, she returned the record to its jacket, sat down on the floor, and leaned against the wall, drinking wine. Alone and absorbed in her thoughts, she could hardly taste the wine. She went to the bathroom sink, washed her face with soap and water, trimmed her eyebrows with a small pair of scissors, and cleaned her ears with a cotton swab.

Either I’m funny or the world’s funny, I don’t know which. The bottle and lid don’t fit. It could be the bottle’s fault or the lid’s fault. In either case, there’s no denying that the fit is bad
.

Aomame opened her refrigerator and examined its contents. She hadn’t been shopping for some days, so there wasn’t much to see. She took out a ripe papaya, cut it in two, and ate it with a spoon. Next she took out three cucumbers, washed them, and ate them with mayonnaise, taking the time to chew slowly. Then she drank a glass of soy milk. That was her entire dinner. It was a simple meal, but ideal for preventing constipation. Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.

When she was through eating, Aomame got undressed and took a hot shower. Stepping out, she dried herself off and looked at her naked body in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. Flat stomach, firm muscles. Lopsided breasts, pubic hair like a poorly tended soccer field. Observing her nakedness, she suddenly recalled that she would be turning thirty in another week.
Another damn birthday. To think I’m going to have my thirtieth birthday in this incomprehensible world, of all places!
She knit her brows.

1Q84.

That was where she was now.

“Transfer,” Fuka-Eri said. Then she took Tengo’s hand again. This was just before the train pulled into Tachikawa Station.

They stepped off the train and walked down one set of stairs and up another to a different platform. Fuka-Eri never once let go of Tengo’s hand. They probably looked like a pair of fond lovers to the people around them. There was quite an age difference, but Tengo looked younger than his actual age. Their size difference also probably amused some onlookers. A happy Sunday-morning date in the spring.

Through the hand holding his, however, Tengo felt no hint of affection for the opposite sex. The strength of her grip never changed. Her fingers had something like the meticulous professionalism of a doctor taking a patient’s pulse. It suddenly occurred to Tengo:
Perhaps this girl thinks we can communicate wordlessly through the touch of fingers and palms
. But even supposing such communication had actually taken place, it was all traveling in one direction rather than back and forth. Fuka-Eri’s palm might well be absorbing what was in Tengo’s mind, but that didn’t mean that Tengo could read Fuka-Eri’s mind. This did not especially worry Tengo, however. There was nothing in his mind—no thoughts or feelings—that he would be concerned to have her know.

Even if she has no feeling for me as a member of the opposite sex, she must like me to some extent
, Tengo surmised.
Or at least she must not have a
bad
impression of me. Otherwise, whatever her purpose, she wouldn’t go on holding my hand like this for such a long time
.

Having changed now to the platform for the Oume Line, they boarded the waiting train. This station, Tachikawa, was the beginning of the Oume Line, which headed yet farther toward the hills northwest of Tokyo. The car was surprisingly crowded, full of old folks and family groups in Sunday hiking gear. Tengo and Fuka-Eri stood near the door.