1Q84 (57 page)

“Meaning what?”

Tamaru stood facing Aomame directly. He was only an inch or two taller than she was. “Meaning, don’t bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation.”

Aomame straightened the sleeves of her dress and slung her bag over her shoulder. “And that worries you—if a pistol comes on the scene, it’s sure to be fired at some point.”

“In Chekhov’s view, yes.”

“So you’re thinking you’d rather not hand me a pistol.”

“They’re dangerous. And illegal. And Chekhov is a writer you can trust.”

“But this is not a story. We’re talking about the real world.”

Tamaru narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Aomame. Then, slowly opening his mouth, he said, “Who knows?”

He set his recording of Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
on the turntable and pressed the “auto-play” button. Seiji Ozawa conducting the Chicago Symphony. The turntable started to spin at 33 1/3
RPM
, the tonearm moved over the edge of the record, and the needle traced the groove. Following the brass introduction, the ornate timpani resounded from the speakers. It was the section that Tengo liked best.

While listening to the music, Tengo faced the screen of his word processor and typed in characters. It was a daily habit of his to listen to Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
early in the morning. The piece had retained a special significance for him ever since he performed it as an impromptu high school percussionist. It gave him a sense of personal encouragement and protection—or at least he felt that it did.

He sometimes listened to Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
with his older girlfriend. “Not bad,” she would say, but she liked old jazz records more than classical—the older the better. It was an odd taste for a woman her age. Her favorite record was a collection of W. C. Handy blues songs, performed by the young Louis Armstrong, with Barney Bigard on clarinet and Trummy Young on trombone. She gave Tengo a copy, though less for him than for herself to listen to.

After sex, they would often lie in bed listening to the record. She never tired of it. “Armstrong’s trumpet and singing are absolutely wonderful, of course, but if you ask me, the thing you should concentrate on is Barney Bigard’s clarinet,” she would say. Yet the actual number of Bigard solos on the record was small, and they tended to be limited to a single chorus. Louis Armstrong was the star of this record. But she obviously loved those few Bigard solos, the way she would quietly hum along with every memorized note.

She said she supposed there might be more talented jazz clarinetists than Barney Bigard, but you couldn’t find another one who could play with such warmth and delicacy. His best performances always gave rise to a particular mental image. Tengo could not, off the top of his head, name any other jazz clarinetists, but as he listened to this record over and over, he began to appreciate the sheer, unforced beauty of its clarinet performances—their richly nourishing and imaginative qualities. He had to listen closely and repeatedly for this to happen, and he had to have a capable guide. He would have missed the nuances on his own.

His girlfriend once said, “Barney Bigard plays beautifully, like a gifted second baseman. His solos are marvelous, but where he really shines is in the backup he gives the other musicians. That is
so hard
, but he does it like it’s nothing at all. Only an attentive listener can fully appreciate his true worth.”

Whenever the sixth tune on the flip side of the LP, “Atlanta Blues,” began, she would grab one of Tengo’s body parts and praise Bigard’s concise, exquisite solo, which was sandwiched between Armstrong’s song and his trumpet solo. “Listen to that! Amazing—that first, long wail like a little child’s cry! What is it—surprise? Overflowing joy? An appeal for happiness? It turns into a joyful sigh and weaves its way through a beautiful river of sound until it’s smoothly absorbed into some perfect, unknowable place. There! Listen! Nobody else can play such thrilling solos. Jimmy Noone, Sidney Bechet, Pee Wee Russell, Benny Goodman: they’re all great clarinetists, but none of them can create such perfectly sculptured works of art.”

“How come you know so much about old-time jazz?” Tengo once asked.

“I have lots of past lives that you don’t know anything about—past lives that no one can change in any way,” she said, gently massaging Tengo’s scrotum with the palm of her hand.

When he was finished writing for the morning, Tengo walked to the station and bought a paper at the newsstand. This he carried into a nearby cafe, where he ordered a “morning set” of buttered toast and a hard-boiled egg. He drank coffee and opened the paper while waiting for his food to come. As Komatsu had predicted, there was an article about Fuka-Eri on the human interest page. Not very large, the article appeared above an ad for Mitsubishi automobiles, under the headline “Popular High School Girl Writer Runaway?”

We hope that she reappears in good health as soon as possible.” The police investigation is proceeding with several possible leads in view.==

That was probably about as much as the newspapers could say at this stage, Tengo concluded. If they gave it a more sensational treatment and Fuka-Eri showed up at home two days later as if nothing had happened, the reporter who wrote the article would be embarrassed and the newspaper itself would lose face. The same was true for the police. Both issued brief, neutral statements like weather balloons to see what would happen. The story would turn big once the weekly magazines got ahold of it and the TV news shows turned up the volume. That would not happen for a few more days.

Sooner or later, though, things would heat up, that was for certain. A sensation was inevitable. There were probably only four people in the world who knew that she had not been abducted but was lying low somewhere, alone. Fuka-Eri herself knew it, of course, and Tengo knew it. Professor Ebisuno and his daughter Azami also knew it. No one else knew that the fuss over her disappearance was a hoax meant to attract broad attention.

Tengo could not decide whether his knowledge of the truth was something he should be pleased or upset about. Pleased, probably: at least he didn’t have to worry about Fuka-Eri’s welfare. She was in a safe place. At the same time it was also clear that Tengo was complicit in this complicated plot. Professor Ebisuno was using it as a lever, in order to pry up an ominous boulder and let the sunlight in. Then he would wait to see what crawled out from under the rock, and Tengo was being forced to stand right next to him. Tengo did not want to know what would crawl out from under the rock. He would prefer not to see it. It was bound to be a huge source of trouble. But he sensed he would have no choice but to look.

After he had drunk his coffee and eaten his toast and eggs, Tengo exited the cafe, leaving his rumpled newspaper behind. He went back to his apartment, brushed his teeth, showered, and prepared to leave for school.

During the noon break at the cram school, Tengo had a strange visitor. He had just finished his morning class and was reading a few of the day’s newspapers in the teachers’ lounge when the school director’s secretary approached him and said there was someone who wanted to see him. The secretary was a capable woman one year older than Tengo who, in spite of her title, handled virtually all of the school’s administrative business. Her facial features were a bit too irregular for her to be considered beautiful, but she had a nice figure and marvelous taste in clothes.

“He says his name is Mr. Ushikawa.”

Tengo did not recognize the name.

For some reason, a slight frown crossed her face. “He says he has ‘something important’ to discuss with you and wants to see you alone if possible.”

“Something important?” Tengo asked, taken aback. No one
ever
brought him “something important” to discuss at the cram school.

“The reception room was empty, so I showed him in there. Teachers aren’t supposed to use that room without permission, but I figured …”

“Thanks very much,” Tengo said, and gave her his best smile.

Unimpressed, she hurried off somewhere, the hem of her new agnes b. summer jacket flapping in the breeze.

Ushikawa was a short man, probably in his mid-forties. His trunk had already filled out so that it had lost all sign of a waist, and excess flesh was gathering at his throat. But Tengo could not be sure of his age. Owing to the peculiarity (or the uncommonness) of his appearance, the clues necessary for guessing his age were difficult to find. He could have been older than that, or he could have been younger—anywhere between, say, thirty-two and fifty-six. His teeth were crooked, and his spine was strangely curved. The large crown of his head formed an abnormally flat bald area with lopsided edges. It was reminiscent of a military heliport that had been made by cutting away the peak of a small, strategically important hill. Tengo had seen such a heliport in a Vietnam War documentary. Around the borders of the flat, lopsided area of his head clung thick, black, curly hair that had been allowed to grow too long, hanging down shaggily over the man’s ears. Ninety-eight people out of a hundred would probably be reminded by it of pubic hair. Tengo had no idea what the other two would think.

Everything about the man—his face, his body—seemed to have been formed asymmetrically. Tengo noticed this right away. Of course, all people’s bodies are asymmetrical to some extent: that in itself was not contrary to the laws of nature. Tengo himself was aware that his own two eyelids had slightly different shapes, and his left testicle hung slightly lower than the right one. Our bodies are not mass-produced in a factory according to fixed standards. But in this man’s case, the differences between right and left went far beyond the bounds of common sense. This imbalance, obvious to any observer, could not help but annoy those in his presence and cause them the same kind of discomfort they would feel in front of a funhouse mirror.

The man’s gray suit had countless tiny wrinkles, which made it look like an expanse of earth that had been ground down by a glacier. One flap of his white dress shirt’s collar was sticking out, and the knot of his tie was contorted, as if it had twisted itself from the sheer discomfort of having to exist in that place. The suit, the shirt, and the tie were all slightly wrong in size. The pattern on his tie might have been an inept art student’s impressionistic rendering of a bowl of tangled, soggy noodles. Each piece of clothing looked like something he had bought at a discount store to fill an immediate need. But the longer Tengo studied them, the sorrier he felt for the clothes themselves, for having to be worn by this man. Tengo paid little attention to his own clothing, but he was strangely concerned about the clothing worn by others. If he had to compile a list of the worst dressers he had met in the past ten years, this man would be somewhere near the top. It was not just that he had terrible style: he also gave the impression that he was deliberately desecrating the very idea of wearing clothes.

When Tengo entered the reception room, the man stood and produced a business card from his card case, handing it to Tengo with a bow. “Toshiharu Ushikawa,” it said in both Japanese characters and Roman script. An ordinary enough first name, but “Ushikawa”? “Bull River”? Tengo had never seen that one before. The card further identified the man as “Full-time Director, New Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Arts,” located downtown in Kojimachi, Chiyoda Ward, and gave the foundation’s telephone number. Tengo had no idea what kind of organization the New Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Arts might be, nor what it meant to be a “full-time director” of anything. The business card, though, was a handsome one, with an embossed logo, not a makeshift item. Tengo studied it for several moments before looking at the man again. He felt sure there could not be many people in the world whose appearance was so out of keeping with the grandiose title “Full-time Director, New Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Arts.”

They sat in easy chairs on opposite sides of a low table and looked at each other. The man gave his sweaty forehead a few vigorous rubs with a handkerchief and returned the pitiful cloth to his jacket pocket. The receptionist brought in two cups of green tea on a tray. Tengo thanked her as she left.

Ushikawa said nothing to her, but to Tengo he said, “Please forgive me for interrupting your break and for arriving without having first made an appointment.” The words themselves were polite and formal enough, but his tone was strangely colloquial, and Tengo found it almost offensive. “Have you finished lunch? If you like, we could go out and talk over a meal.”

“I don’t eat lunch when I’m working,” Tengo said. “I’ll have something light after my afternoon class, so don’t worry.”

“I see. Well, then, with your permission, I’ll tell you what I have in mind and we can discuss it here. This seems like a nice, quiet place where we can talk without interruption.” He surveyed the reception room as though appraising its value. There was nothing special about the room. It had one big oil painting hanging on the wall—a picture of some mountain, more impressive for the weight of its paint than anything else. A vase had an arrangement of flowers resembling dahlias—dull blossoms reminiscent of a slow-witted matron. Tengo wondered why a cram school would keep such a gloomy reception room.

“Let me belatedly introduce myself. As you can see from the card, my name is Ushikawa. My friends all call me ‘Ushi,’ never ‘Ushikawa.’ Just plain, old ‘Ushi,’ as if I were a bull,” Ushikawa said, smiling.

Friends? Tengo wondered—out of pure curiosity—what kind of person would ever want to be this man’s friend.

On first impression, Ushikawa honestly made Tengo think of some creepy
thing
that had crawled out of a hole in the earth—a slimy thing of uncertain shape that in fact was not
supposed
to come out into the light. He might conceivably be one of the things that Professor Ebisuno had lured out from under a rock. Tengo unconsciously wrinkled his brow and placed the business card, which was still in his hand, on the table. Toshiharu Ushikawa. That was this man’s name.