1Q84 (80 page)

“They are watching us,” Fuka-Eri said.

“You mean the Little People?” Tengo asked.

Fuka-Eri did not answer him.

“They know we’re here,” Tengo said.

“Of course they know,” Fuka-Eri said.

“What are they trying to do to us?”

“They can’t do anything to us.”

“That’s good.”

“For now, that is.”

“They can’t touch us for now,” Tengo repeated feebly. “But there’s no telling how long that will go on.”

“No one knows,” Fuka-Eri declared with conviction.

“But even if they can’t do anything to us, they
can
, instead, do something to the people around us?” Tengo asked.

“Maybe so.”

“Maybe they can make terrible things happen to them?”

Fuka-Eri narrowed her eyes for a time with a deadly serious look, like a sailor trying to catch the song of a ship’s ghost. Then she said, “In some cases.”

“Maybe the Little People used their powers against my girlfriend. To give me a warning.”

Fuka-Eri slipped a hand out from beneath the quilt and gave her freshly made ear a scratching. Then she slipped the hand back inside. “What the Little People can do is limited.”

Tengo bit his lip for a moment. Then he said, “Exactly what kinds of things
can
they do, for example?”

Fuka-Eri started to offer an opinion on the matter but then had second thoughts and stopped. Her opinion, unvoiced, sank back into the place it had originated from—a deep, dark, unknown place.

“You said that the Little People have wisdom and power.”

Fuka-Eri nodded.

“But they have their limits.”

Fuka-Eri nodded.

“And that’s because they are people of the forest; when they leave the forest, they can’t unleash their powers so easily. And in this world, there exist something like values that make it possible to resist their wisdom and power. Is that it?”

Fuka-Eri did not answer him. Perhaps the question was too long.

“Have you ever met the Little People?” Tengo asked.

Fuka-Eri stared at him vaguely, as though she could not grasp the meaning of his question.

“Have you ever actually seen them?” Tengo rephrased his question.

“Yes,” Fuka-Eri said.

“How many of the Little People did you see?”

“I don’t know. More than I could count on my fingers.”

“But not just one.”

“Their numbers can sometimes increase and sometimes decrease, but there is never just one.”

“The way you depicted them in
Air Chrysalis
.”

Fuka-Eri nodded.

Tengo took this opportunity to ask Fuka-Eri a question he had been wanting to ask her for some time. “Tell me,” he said, “how much of
Air Chrysalis
is real? How much of it really happened?”

“What does ‘real’ mean,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark.

Tengo had no answer for this, of course.

A great clap of thunder echoed through the sky. The windowpanes rattled. But still there was no lightning, no sound of rain. Tengo recalled an old submarine movie. One depth charge after another would explode, jolting the ship, but everyone was locked inside the dark steel box, unable to see outside. For them, there was only the unbroken sound and the shaking of the sub.

“Will you read me a book or tell me a story,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“Sure,” Tengo said, “but I can’t think of a good book for reading out loud. I don’t have the book here, but I can tell you a story called ‘Town of Cats,’ if you like.”

” ‘Town of Cats.’ ”

“It’s the story of a town ruled by cats.”

“I want to hear it.”

“It might be a little too scary for a bedtime story, though.”

“That’s okay. I can sleep, whatever story you tell.”

Tengo brought a chair next to the bed, sat down, folded his hands in his lap, and started telling “Town of Cats,” with the thunder as background music. He had read the story twice on the express train and once again, aloud, to his father in the sanatorium, so he knew the plot pretty well. It was not such a complex or finely delineated story, nor had it been written in a terribly elegant style, so he felt little hesitation in altering it as he pleased, omitting the more tedious parts or adding episodes that occurred to him as he recited the story for Fuka-Eri.

The original story had not been very long, but telling it took a lot longer than he had imagined because Fuka-Eri would not hesitate to ask any questions that occurred to her. Tengo would interrupt the story each time and give her careful answers, explaining the details of the town or the cats’ behavior or the protagonist’s character. When they were things not described in the story (which was usually the case), Tengo would make them up, as he had with
Air Chrysalis
. Fuka-Eri seemed to be completely drawn in by “Town of Cats.” She no longer looked tired. She would close her eyes sometimes, imagining scenes of the town of cats. Then she would open her eyes and urge Tengo to go on with the story.

When he was through telling her the story, Fuka-Eri opened her eyes wide and stared at Tengo the way a cat widens its pupils to stare at something in the dark.

“Did you go to a town of cats,” Fuka-Eri asked Tengo, as if pressing him to reveal a truth.

“Me?!”

“You went to
your
town of cats. Then came back on a train.”

“Is that what you feel?”

With the summer quilt pulled up to her chin, Fuka-Eri gave him a quick little nod.

“You’re quite right,” Tengo said. “I went to a town of cats and came back on a train.”

“Did you do a purification afterward,” she asked.

“Purification? No, I don’t think so, not yet.”

“You have to do it.”

“What kind of purification?”

Instead of answering him, Fuka-Eri said, “If you go to a town of cats and don’t do anything about it afterward, bad stuff can happen.”

A great thunderclap seemed to crack the heavens in two. The sound was increasing in ferocity. Fuka-Eri recoiled from it in bed.

“Come here and hold me,” Fuka-Eri said. “We have to go to a town of cats together.”

“Why?”

“The Little People might find the entrance.”

“Because I haven’t done a purification?”

“Because the two of us are one,” the girl said.

“1Q84,” Aomame said. “Are you talking about the fact that I am living now in the year called 1Q84, not the
real
1984?”

“What the real world is: that is a very difficult problem,” the man called Leader said as he lay on his stomach. “What it is, is a metaphysical proposition. But
this
is the real world, there is no doubt about that. The pain one feels in this world is real pain. Deaths caused in this world are real deaths. Blood shed in this world is real blood. This is no imitation world, no imaginary world, no metaphysical world. I guarantee you that. But this is not the 1984 you know.”

“Like a parallel world?”

The man’s shoulders trembled with laughter. “You’ve been reading too much science fiction. No, this is no parallel world. You don’t have 1984 over there and 1Q84 branching off over here and the two worlds running along parallel tracks. The year 1984 no longer exists
anywhere
. For you and for me, the only time that exists anymore is this year of 1Q84.”

“We have entered into its time flow once and for all.”

“Exactly. We have entered into this place where we are now. Or the time flow has entered us once and for all. And as far as I understand it, the door only opens in one direction. There is no way back.”

“I suppose it happened when I climbed down the Metropolitan Expressway’s emergency stairway.”

“Metropolitan Expressway?”

“Near Sangenjaya,” Aomame said.

“The place is irrelevant,” the man said. “For you, it was Sangenjaya. But the specific place is not the question. The question here, in the end, is the time. The track, as it were, was switched there, and the world was transformed into 1Q84.”

Aomame imagined a number of Little People joining forces to move the device that switches the tracks. In the middle of the night. Under the pale light of the moon.

“And in this year of 1Q84, there are two moons in the sky, aren’t there?”

“Correct: two moons. That is the
sign
that the track has been switched. That is how you can tell the two worlds apart. Not that all of the people here can see two moons. In fact, most people are not aware of it. In other words, the number of people who know that this is 1Q84 is quite limited.”

“Most people in this world are not aware that the time flow has been switched?”

“Correct. To most people, this is just the plain old everyday world they’ve always known. This is what I mean when I say, ‘This is the real world.’ ”

“So the track has been switched,” Aomame said. “If it had
not
been switched, we would not be meeting here like this. Could that be what you are saying?”

“That is the one thing that no one knows. It’s a question of probability. But that is probably the case.”

“Is what you are saying an objective fact, or just a hypothesis?”

“Good question. But distinguishing between the two is virtually impossible. Remember how the old song goes, ‘Without your love, it’s a honky-tonk parade’?” He hummed the melody. “Do you know it?”

” ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon.’ ”

“That’s it. 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what
kind
of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

“Who switched the tracks?”

“Who switched the tracks? That is another difficult question. The logic of cause and effect has little power here.”

“In any case,
some
kind of will transported me into this world of 1Q84,” Aomame said. “A will other than my own.”

“That is true. You were carried into this world when the train you were on had its tracks switched.”

“Do the Little People have anything to do with that?”

“In this world there are the so-called Little People. Or at least, that is what they are called in this world. But they do not always have a shape or a name.”

Aomame bit her lip in thought. Then she said, “What you are saying sounds contradictory to me. Let’s assume it was these ‘Little People’ who switched the track and carried me into this world of 1Q84. Why would they do such a thing if they don’t want me to do what I am about to do to you? It would be far more advantageous to get rid of me.”

“That is not easy to explain,” the man said, his voice lacking all intonation. “But you are a very quick thinker. You might be able to grasp, however vaguely, what I am trying to tell you. As I said before, the most important thing with regard to this world in which we live is for there to be a balance maintained between good and evil. The so-called Little People—or some kind of manifestations of will—certainly do have great power. But the more they use their power, the more another power automatically arises to resist it. In that way, the world maintains a delicate balance. This fundamental principle is the same in any world. Precisely the same thing can be said in this world of 1Q84 that now contains us. When the Little People began to manifest their enormous power, a power opposing the Little People also automatically came into being. And this opposing momentum must have drawn you into the year 1Q84.”

Lying like a beached whale on his blue yoga mat, the giant man released a huge breath.

“To continue with the train analogy: it is possible for them to switch tracks, as a result of which the train has entered its current line—the 1Q84 line. One thing they are not able to do, however, is to distinguish one passenger on the train from another—to choose among them. Which means that there may be passengers aboard who, to them, are undesirable.”

“Uninvited passengers.”

“Exactly.”

Again there was a rumble of thunder. This one was much louder than before. But there was no lightning. Just the sound.
Strange
, Aomame thought.
The thunder is so close, but the lightning doesn’t flash. And no rain is falling
.

“Have I managed to make myself clear thus far?”

“I’m listening,” she said, having already moved the needle away from the spot on his neck. Now she had it pointed cautiously toward empty space. She had to concentrate all her attention on what he was saying.

Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow. Karl Jung said this about ‘the Shadow’ in one of his books: ‘It is as evil as we are positive … the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive…. The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil. For it is just as sinful from the standpoint of nature and of truth to be above oneself as to be below oneself.’

“We do not know if the so-called Little People are good or evil. This is, in a sense, something that surpasses our understanding and our definitions. We have lived with them since long, long ago—from a time before good and evil even existed, when people’s minds were still benighted. But the important thing is that, whether they are good or evil, light or shadow, whenever they begin to exert their power, a compensatory force comes into being. In my case, when I became an ‘agent’ of the so-called Little People, my daughter became something like an agent for those forces opposed to the Little People. In this way, the balance was maintained.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes, the first one to usher in the so-called Little People was my daughter. She was ten years old at the time. Now she is seventeen. The Little People emerged from the darkness at some point, coming here through her, and they made me their agent. My daughter became a Perceiver and I became a Receiver. Apparently we were suited to such roles by nature. In any case,
they
found
us
. We did not find them.”