1Q84 (52 page)

“Sure,
they
can forget about it,” Ayumi said. “I never can.”

“Of course not,” Aomame said.

“It’s like some historic massacre.”

“Massacre?”

“The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

“True,” Aomame said, scowling slightly.
An endless battle of contrasting memories?

“To tell you the truth,” Ayumi said, “I kind of thought that you must have had the same kind of experience as me.”

“Why did you think that?”

“I don’t know, I can’t really explain it, I just sort of figured. Maybe I thought that having wild one-night stands with strange men was a result of something like that. And in your case, I thought I detected some kind of anger, too. Anyhow, you just don’t seem like someone who can do the ordinary thing, you know, like everybody else does: find a regular boyfriend, go out on a date, have a meal, and have sex in the usual way with just the one person. It’s more or less the same with me.”

“You’re saying that you couldn’t follow the normal pattern because someone messed around with you when you were little?”

“That’s how I felt,” Ayumi said. She gave a little shrug. “To tell you the truth, I’m afraid of men. Or, rather, I’m afraid of getting deeply involved with one particular man, of completely taking on another person. The very thought of it makes me cringe. But being alone can be hard sometimes. I want a man to hold me, to put his thing inside me. I want it so bad I can’t stand it sometimes. Not knowing the man at all makes it easier. A
lot
easier.”

“Because you’re afraid of men?”

“I think that’s a large part of it.”

“I don’t think I have any fear of men,” Aomame said.

“Is there anything you
are
afraid of?”

“Of course there is,” Aomame said. “The thing I’m most afraid of is
me
. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.”

“What
are
you doing right now?”

Aomame stared at the wineglass in her hand for a time. “I wish I knew.” She looked up. “But I don’t. I can’t even be sure what world I’m in now, what year I’m in.”

“It’s 1984. We’re in Tokyo, in Japan.”

“I wish I could declare that with such certainty.”

“You’re strange,” Ayumi said with a smile. “They’re just self-evident truths. ‘Declaring’ and ‘certainty’ are beside the point.”

“I can’t explain it very well, but I can’t say they’re self-evident truths to me.”

“You can’t?” Ayumi said as if deeply impressed. “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about, but I will say this: whatever time and place this might be, you do have one person you love deeply, and that’s something I can only envy. I don’t have anybody like that.”

Aomame set her wineglass down on the table and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. Then she said, “You may be right. Whatever time and place this might be, totally unrelated to that, I want to see him. I want to see him so badly I could die. That’s the only thing that seems certain. It’s the only thing I can say with confidence.”

“Want me to have a look at the police materials? If you give me the basic information, we might be able to find out where he is and what he’s doing.”

Aomame shook her head. “Please
don’t
look for him. I think I told you before, I’ll run into him sometime, somewhere, strictly by chance. I’ll just keep patiently waiting for that time to come.”

“Like a big, romantic TV series,” Ayumi said, impressed. “I love stuff like that. I get chills just thinking about it.”

“It’s tough on the one who’s actually doing it, though.”

“I know what you mean,” Ayumi said, lightly pressing her fingers against her temples. “But still, even though you’re that much in love with him, you feel like sleeping with strange men every once in a while.”

Aomame clicked her fingernails against the rim of the thin wineglass. “I
need
to do it. To keep myself in balance as a flesh-and-blood human being.”

“And it doesn’t destroy the love you have inside you.”

Aomame said, “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

“Marvelous,” Ayumi said. “The Tibetan Wheel of the Passions, huh?”

And she drank down the wine remaining in her glass.

Two days later, a little after eight o’clock at night, a call came from Tamaru. As always, he skipped the preliminary greetings and went straight to business.

“Are you free tomorrow afternoon?”

“I don’t have a thing in the afternoon. I can come over whenever you need me.”

“How about four thirty?”

Aomame said that would be fine.

“Good,” Tamaru said. She could hear his ballpoint pen scratching the time into his calendar. He was pressing down hard.

“How is Tsubasa doing?” Aomame asked.

“She’s doing well, I think. Madame is going there every day to look after her. The girl seems to be growing fond of her.”

“That’s good news.”

“Yes, it
is
good news, but something else happened that is not so good.”

“Something not so good?” Aomame knew that when Tamaru said something was “not so good,” it had to be terrible.

“The dog died,” Tamaru said.

“The dog? You mean Bun?”

“Yes, the funny German shepherd that liked spinach. She died last night.”

Aomame was shocked to hear this. The dog was maybe five or six years old, not an age for dying. “She was perfectly healthy the last time I saw her.”

“She didn’t die from illness,” Tamaru said, his voice flat. “I found her this morning in pieces.”

“In pieces?!”

“As if she had exploded. Her guts were splattered all over the place. It was pretty intense. I had to go around picking up chunks of flesh with paper towels. The force of the blast turned her body inside out. It was as if somebody had set off a small but powerful bomb inside her stomach.”

“The poor dog!”

“Oh, well, there’s nothing to be done about the dog,” Tamaru said. “She’s dead and won’t be coming back. I can find another guard dog to take her place. What worries me, though, is
what happened
. It wasn’t something that any ordinary person could do—setting off a bomb inside a dog like that. For one thing, that dog barked like crazy whenever a stranger approached. This was not an easy thing to carry off.”

“That’s for sure,” Aomame said in a dry tone of voice.

“The women in the safe house are scared to death. The one in charge of feeding the dog found her like that this morning. First she puked her guts out and then she called me. I asked if anything suspicious happened during the night. Not a thing, she said. Nobody heard an explosion. If there had been such a big sound, everybody would have woken up for sure. These women live in fear even in the best of times. It must have been a soundless explosion. And nobody heard the dog bark. It was an especially quiet night, but when morning came, there was the dog, inside out. Fresh organs had been blown all over, and the neighborhood crows were having a great time. For me, though, it was nothing but worries.”

“Something weird is happening.”

“That’s for sure,” Tamaru said. “Something weird is happening. And if what I’m feeling is right, this is just the beginning of something.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Hell, no,” Tamaru said, with a contemptuous little snort. “The police are useless—looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. They’d just complicate matters.”

“What does Madame say?”

“Nothing. She just nodded when I gave her my report,” Tamaru said. “All security measures are my responsibility, from beginning to end. It’s
my
job.”

A short silence followed, a heavy silence having to do with responsibility.

“Tomorrow at four thirty,” Aomame said.

“Tomorrow at four thirty,” Tamaru repeated, and quietly hung up.

It rained all Thursday morning, not a heavy downpour, but persistent rain. There had been no letup since the previous afternoon. Whenever it seemed about to stop it would start pouring again. June was half gone without a sign the rainy season would ever end. The sky remained dark, as if covered with a lid, and the world wore a heavy dampness.

Just before noon, Tengo put on a raincoat and hat and was headed out to the local market when he noticed a brown padded envelope in his mailbox. It bore no postmark, stamps, or address, and no return address, either. His name had been written with a ballpoint pen in the middle of the front in small, stiff characters that might have been scratched into dry clay with a nail—Fuka-Eri’s writing, without question. He tore it open to find a single bare sixty-minute
TDK
audiotape cassette. No letter or memo accompanied it. It was not in a plastic case, and the cassette bore no label.

After a moment of uncertainty, Tengo decided to forget about shopping and listen to the tape. Back in his apartment, he held the cassette in the air and gave it several shakes. For all the mystery surrounding its arrival, it was obviously just an ordinary mass-produced object. There was nothing suggesting that it would explode after he played it.

Taking off his raincoat, he set a radio cassette player on the kitchen table. He removed the cassette from the padded envelope and inserted it into the player, next to which he placed memo paper and a ballpoint pen in case he wanted to take notes. After looking around to make certain there was no one else present, he pressed the “play” button.

There was no sound at first. This lasted for some time. Just as he was beginning to suspect that it was nothing but a blank tape, there were some sudden bumping sounds like the moving of a chair. Then a light clearing of the throat (it seemed). Then, without warning, Fuka-Eri began to speak.

“Tengo,” she said, as if in a sound test. As far as he could recall, this was probably the first time she had actually called him by name.

She cleared her throat again. She seemed tense.

Wait, I need water.

Tengo heard what he thought were the sounds of Fuka-Eri picking up a glass, taking a drink, and setting the glass back down on a table. Recorded on tape, her uniquely unaccented manner of speech without question marks or other punctuation sounded even stranger than in conversation. It was almost unreal. On tape, however, as opposed to conversation, she was able to speak several sentences in a row.

I really shouldn’t do this, but I felt like I ought to.

[Ten seconds of silence.]

So I will just stay still here a while.

[Fifteen seconds of silence.]

Wait, I’ll make sure it’s recording.

Another click.]

Good, it’s recording.

Children shouting in the distance. Faint sounds of music. These were probably coming through an open window. There might have been a kindergarten nearby.

Why do the Gilyaks walk through the forest swamps and not on the wide roads.

[Tengo secretly added a question mark at the end.]

I need more water.

Fuka-Eri took another drink of water. After a short silence, her glass came back to the table with a clunk. Then there was an interval while she wiped her lips with her fingertips. Didn’t this girl realize that tape recorders have pause buttons?

I’m just walking in a place away from the road.

Here Fuka-Eri inserted another pause. Tengo imagined her trudging along silently, alone, off to the side, away from a road.

If you do that, you can get through the forest safely.

Having managed to say all this in one go, Fuka-Eri paused to take a deep breath. She did this without averting her face from the microphone, thereby recording what sounded like a huge gust of wind blowing between buildings. When that quieted down, there came the deep, foghorn-like sound of a large truck honking in the distance. Two short blasts. Apparently Fuka-Eri was in a place not far from a major highway.

Bye.

There was a click, and the recording ended.

Tengo stopped the tape and rewound to the beginning. Listening to the rain dripping from the eaves, he took several deep breaths and twirled the plastic ballpoint pen in his fingers. Then he set the pen down. He had not taken a single note. He had merely listened in fascination to Fuka-Eri’s normally peculiar narrative style. Without resorting to note taking, he had grasped the three main points of her message:

1 – She had not been abducted, but was merely in temporary hiding. There was no need to worry about her.
2 – She had no intention of publishing any more books. Her story was meant for oral transmission, not print.
3 – The Little People possessed no less wisdom and power than Professor Ebisuno. Tengo should be careful.

These were the points she hoped to convey. She also spoke of the Gilyaks, the people who had to stay off broad roads when they walked.

Tengo went to the kitchen and made himself some coffee. While drinking his coffee, he stared aimlessly at the cassette tape. Then he listened to it again from the beginning. This time, just to make sure, he occasionally pushed the pause button and took brief notes. Then he let his eyes make their way through the notes. This led to no new discoveries.