1Q84 (46 page)

“
1984
? I don’t have that one.”

“What kind of story is it.”

Tengo tried to recall the plot. “I read it once a
long
time ago in the school library, so I don’t remember the details too well. It was published in 1949, when 1984 seemed like a time far in the future.”

“That’s this year.”

“Yes, by coincidence. At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past. In his novel, George Orwell depicted the future as a dark society dominated by totalitarianism. People are rigidly controlled by a dictator named Big Brother. Information is restricted, and history is constantly being rewritten. The protagonist works in a government office, and I’m pretty sure his job is to rewrite words. Whenever a new history is written, the old histories all have to be thrown out. In the process, words are remade, and the meanings of current words are changed. What with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true anymore. They lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally. It’s that kind of story.”

“They rewrite history.”

“Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime.”

Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.

Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”

“You rewrite stuff.”

Tengo laughed and took a sip of wine. “All I did was touch up your story, for the sake of expedience. That’s totally different from rewriting history.”

“But that Big Brother book is not here now,” she asked.

“Unfortunately, no. So I can’t read it to you.”

“I don’t mind another book.”

Tengo went to his bookcase and scanned the spines of his books. He had read many books over the years, but he owned few. He tended to dislike filling his home with a lot of possessions. When he finished a book, unless it was something quite special, he would take it to a used-book store. He bought only books he knew he was going to read right away, and he would read the ones he cared about very closely, until they were ingrained in his mind. When he needed other books he would borrow them from the neighborhood library.

Choosing a book to read to Fuka-Eri took Tengo a long time. He was not used to reading aloud, and had almost no clue which might be best for that. After a good deal of indecision, he pulled out Anton Chekhov’s
Sakhalin Island
, which he had just finished reading the week before. He had marked the more interesting spots with paper tags and figured this would make it easy to choose suitable passages to read.

Tengo prefaced his reading with a brief explanation of the book—that Chekhov was only thirty years old when he traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1890; that no one really knew why the urbane Chekhov, who had been praised as one of the most promising young writers of the generation after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and who was living a cosmopolitan life in Moscow, would have made up his mind to go off to live on Sakhalin Island, which was like the end of the earth. Sakhalin had been developed primarily as a penal colony, and to most people it symbolized only bad luck and misery. Furthermore, the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built, which meant that Chekhov had to make more than 2,500 miles of his trip in a horse-drawn cart across frozen earth, an act of self-denial that subjected the young man in poor health to merciless suffering. And finally, when he ended his eight-month-long journey to the Far East and published
Sakhalin
as the fruit of his labor, the work did little more than bewilder most readers, who found that it more closely resembled a dry investigative report or gazetteer than a work of literature. People whispered amongst themselves, “Why did Chekhov do such a wasteful, pointless thing at such an important stage in his literary career?” One critic answered scathingly, “It was just a publicity stunt.” Another view was that Chekhov had gone there looking for a new subject because he had run out of things to write about. Tengo showed Fuka-Eri the location of Sakhalin on the map included in the book.

“Why did Chekhov go to Sakhalin,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“You mean, why do
I
think he went?”

“Uh-huh. Did you read the book.”

“I sure did.”

“What did you think.”

“Chekhov himself might not have understood exactly why he went,” Tengo said. “Or maybe he didn’t really have a reason. He just suddenly felt like going—say, he was looking at the shape of Sakhalin Island on a map and the desire to go just bubbled up out of nowhere. I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what.’ And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what people are doing there. It’s like measles—you can’t show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration. Of course, traveling from Moscow to Sakhalin in those days involved almost unimaginable hardships, so I suspect that wasn’t Chekhov’s only reason for going.”

“Name another one.”

“Well, Chekhov was both a novelist and a doctor. It could be that, as a scientist, he wanted to examine something like a diseased part of the vast Russian nation with his own eyes. Chekhov felt uncomfortable living as a literary star in the city. He was fed up with the atmosphere of the literary world and was put off by the affectations of other writers, who were mainly interested in tripping each other up. He was disgusted by the malicious critics of the day. His journey to Sakhalin may have been an act of pilgrimage designed to cleanse him of such literary impurities. Sakhalin Island overwhelmed him in many ways. I think it was precisely for this reason that Chekhov never wrote a single literary work based on his trip to Sakhalin. It was not the kind of half-baked experience that could be easily made into material for a novel. The diseased part of the country became, so to speak, a physical part of him, which may have been the very thing he was looking for.”

“Is the book interesting,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“I found it very interesting. It’s full of dry figures and statistics and, as I said earlier, not much in the way of literary color. The scientist side of Chekhov is on full display. But that is the very quality of the book that makes me feel I can sense the purity of the decision reached by Anton Chekhov the individual. Mixed in with the dry records are some very impressive examples of observation of character and scenic description. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the dry passages that relate only facts. Some of them are quite marvelous. For example, the sections on the Gilyaks.”

“The Gilyaks,” Fuka-Eri said.

“The Gilyaks were the indigenous people of Sakhalin long before the Russians arrived to colonize it. They originally lived at the southern end of the island, but they moved up to the center when they were displaced by the Ainu, who moved north from Hokkaido. Of course, the Ainu themselves had also been pushed northward—by the Japanese. Chekhov struggled to observe at close hand and to record as accurately as possible the rapidly disappearing Gilyak culture.”

Tengo opened to a passage on the Gilyaks. At some points he would introduce suitable omissions and changes to the text in order to make it easily understandable to his listener.

But bread, which they were acquainted with by the Russians, they eat with pleasure, as a delicacy, and it is not a rarity these days in Alexandrovsk or Rykovo to meet a Gilyak carrying a round loaf under his arm.

Tengo stopped reading at that point for a short breather. Fuka-Eri was listening intently, but he could not read any reaction from her expression.

“What do you think? Do you want me to keep reading? Or do you want to switch to another book?” he asked.

“I want to know more about the Gilyaks.”

“Okay, I’ll keep going.”

“Is it okay if I get in bed?” Fuka-Eri asked.

“Sure,” Tengo said.

They moved into the bedroom. Fuka-Eri crawled into bed, and Tengo brought a chair next to the bed and sat in it. He continued with his reading.

Around these drying grounds Kruzenshtern saw a vast number of maggots covering the ground to the depth of an inch.

“Kruzenshtern.”

“I think he was an early explorer. Chekhov was a very studious person. He had read every book ever written about Sakhalin.”

“Let’s keep going.”

Possibly it is to this they owe their small stature, the puffiness of their faces, and a certain sluggishness and laziness of movement.

“The poor Gilyaks!” Fuka-Eri said.

Every sort of lie and bragging in the sphere of everyday life and not in the line of business is repugnant to them.

“The wonderful Gilyaks!” Fuka-Eri said.

The Swedish writer Strindberg, a renowned misogynist, who desired that women should be merely slaves and should serve men’s whims, is in essence of one and the same mind as the Gilyaks; if he ever chanced to come to northern Sakhalin, they would spend ages embracing each other.

Tengo took a break at that point, but Fuka-Eri remained silent, offering no opinion on the reading. Tengo continued.

One often sees them, their families and their dogs, picking their way in Indian file across a quagmire right by the roadway.

Fuka-Eri had her eyes closed and was breathing very softly. Tengo studied her face for a while but could not tell whether she was sleeping or not. He decided to turn the page and keep reading. If she was sleeping, he wanted to give her as sound a sleep as possible, and he also felt like reading more Chekhov aloud.

One correspondent who visited Naibuchi in 1871 wrote that there were twenty soldiers there under the command of a cadet-officer; in one of the cabins he was entertained with fresh eggs and black bread by a tall and beautiful female soldier, who eulogized her life here and complained only that sugar was very expensive.

It is a sinister sensation, and yet at the very same time you feel the desire to stand for ever looking at the monotonous movement of the waves and listening to their threatening roar.

It appeared that Fuka-Eri was now sound asleep. He listened for her quiet breathing. He closed the book and set it on the little table by the bed. Then he stood up and turned the light off, taking one final look at Fuka-Eri. She was sleeping peacefully on her back, her mouth a tight, straight line. Tengo closed the bedroom door and went back to the kitchen.

It was impossible for him to continue with his own writing, though. His mind was now fully occupied by Chekhov’s desolate Sakhalin coastal scenes. He could hear the sound of the waves. When he closed his eyes, Tengo was standing alone on the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk, a prisoner of his own meditations, sharing in Chekhov’s inconsolable melancholy. What Chekhov must have felt there at the end of the earth was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to flee from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.

After rinsing his wineglass and brushing his teeth, Tengo turned off the kitchen light, stretched out on the sofa, pulled a blanket over himself, and tried to sleep. The roar of the ocean still echoed in his ears, but eventually he began to lose consciousness and was drawn into a deep sleep.

He awoke at eight thirty in the morning. There was no sign of Fuka-Eri in his bed. The pajamas he had lent her were balled up and tossed into the bathroom washing machine, the cuffs and legs still rolled up. He found a note on the kitchen table: “How are the Gilyaks doing now? I’m going home.” Written in ballpoint pen on notepaper, the characters were small, square, and indefinably strange, like an aerial view of characters written on a beach in seashells. He folded the paper and put it in his desk drawer. If his girlfriend found something like this when she arrived at eleven, she would make a terrible fuss.

Tengo straightened the bed and returned the fruits of Chekhov’s labor to the bookcase. Then he made himself coffee and toast. While eating breakfast, he noticed that some kind of heavy object had settled itself in his chest. Some time had to go by before he figured out what it was. Fuka-Eri’s tranquil sleeping face.

Could I be in love with her? No, impossible
, Tengo told himself.
It just so happens that something inside her has physically shaken my heart. So, then, why am I so concerned about the pajamas she had on her body? Why did I (almost unconsciously) pick them up and smell them?

There were too many questions. It was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them. It was a memorable phrase, but Chekhov applied this attitude not only to his works but to his life as well. His life presented many questions but answered none. Although he knew quite well that he was suffering from an incurable lung disease (as a doctor, he could not help but know), he tried hard to ignore the fact, and refused to believe he was dying until he was actually on his deathbed. He died young, violently coughing up blood.

Tengo left the kitchen table, shaking his head.
My girlfriend is coming today. I have to do laundry and clean the place up now. Thinking is something I can save for later
.

Aomame went to the ward library and, following the same procedures as before, opened the compact edition of the newspaper on a desk. She was there to read once again about the gun battle between the radical faction and the police that had taken place in Yamanashi Prefecture in the autumn three years earlier. The headquarters of Sakigake, the religious group that the dowager had mentioned, was located in the mountains of Yamanashi, and the gun battle had also occurred in the mountains of Yamanashi. This might have been a mere coincidence, but Aomame was not quite ready to accept that. There might well have been some link between the two. And the expression that the dowager had used—”such a major incident”—also seemed to suggest a connection.