1Q84 (95 page)

Still, Aomame felt she could understand why this novella had gained such a wide readership. Although it was a story about the fantastical experiences of a girl placed in unusual circumstances, it also had something that called forth people’s natural sympathies. It probably aroused some subconscious something, which was why readers were pulled in and kept turning pages.

Tengo undoubtedly had contributed much to the book’s literary qualities, its vivid, precise descriptions, but she could not confine her admiration to that fact alone. She had to focus on the parts of the story where the Little People enter the action. For Aomame, this was a highly
practical
story—a virtual instruction manual—upon which hinged the life and death of actual people. She needed to gain concrete knowledge from it, to add whatever solidity and detail she could to her understanding of the world into which she had strayed.

Air Chrysalis
was not just a wild fantasy dreamed up by a seventeen-year-old girl. The names may have been changed, but Aomame firmly believed that the majority of things depicted in it were unmistakable reality as experienced firsthand by the girl herself. Fuka-Eri had recorded those events from her own life as accurately as possible in order to reveal those hidden secrets to the world at large, to inform large numbers of people of the existence and the deeds of the Little People.

The
dohta
that the girl had left behind must have become a passageway for the Little People and guided them to Leader, the girl’s father, who was then transformed by them into a Receiver. They then drove the Akebono members, who were of no use to them, into a suicidal bloodbath, and transformed the remaining Sakigake group into a smart, militant, and xenophobic religious organization, which was probably the most comfortable and convenient environment for the Little People.

Aomame wondered if Fuka-Eri’s
dohta
had been able to survive for long without her
maza
. The Little People had said that it was virtually impossible for a
dohta
to go on living without her
maza
. And what about a
maza
? What was it like for her to live after having lost the shadow of her heart and mind?

After the girl escaped from Sakigake, the Little People had probably used the same process to make more new
dohtas
, their purpose being to widen and stabilize the passageway by which they came and went, like adding new lanes to a highway. This was how the
dohtas
became Perceivers for the Little People and played the role of shrine maidens. Tsubasa had been one of them. If Leader had sexual relations not with the girls’ actual
mazas
but with their other selves, their
dohtas
, then Leader’s expression—”ambiguous congress”—made sense. It also explained Tsubasa’s flat, depthless eyes and her near inability to speak. Aomame had no idea how or why the
dohta
, Tsubasa, had escaped from the religious organization, but she had almost certainly been put into an air chrysalis and “retrieved” to be taken back to her
maza
. The bloody killing of the dog had been a warning from the Little People, like what was done to Toru in the story.

The
dohtas
wanted to become pregnant with Leader’s child, but, lacking substance themselves, they were not menstruating. Still, according to Leader, their desire to become pregnant was intense. Why should that have been?

Aomame shook her head. There was still much that she did not understand.

Aomame wished that she could tell this to the dowager as soon as possible—that the man might actually have raped nothing more than the girls’ shadows; that they might not have had to kill him after all.

But even if she explained these things, it would not be easy for her to get the dowager to believe her. Aomame knew how the dowager would feel. The dowager—or any sane person—would have trouble accepting as fact this stuff about the Little People,
mazas, dohtas
, or air chrysalises. To sane people, these things would seem like nothing more than the kinds of fabrications that appear in fiction, no more real than the Queen of Hearts or the white rabbit with the watch in
Alice in Wonderland
.

But Aomame herself had
actually
seen two moons—the old one and the new one—hanging in the sky. She had actually been living under their light. She had felt their lopsided gravity in her skin. And with her own hands she had killed the man called Leader in a dark hotel room.

Aomame did not know what the Little People were hoping to accomplish by taking control of Sakigake. Perhaps they wanted things that transcended good and evil, but the young protagonist of
Air Chrysalis
intuitively recognized those things as
not right
, and she tried to strike back in her own way. Her vehicle was her story. Tengo became her partner to help get the story going. Tengo himself probably did not understand the meaning of what he was doing at that point, and he might not understand it even now.

In any case, the story called
Air Chrysalis
was the important key.

Everything started from this story
.

But where do I fit into it?

From the moment I heard Janacek’s
Sinfonietta
and climbed down the escape stairs from the traffic jam on the Metropolitan Expressway, I was drawn into this world with two moons in the sky, into this enigma-filled world of 1Q84. What could it mean?

She closed her eyes and continued to think.

I have probably been drawn into the passageway of the “force opposed to the Little People” created by Fuka-Eri and Tengo. That force carried me into this side. What other explanation could there be? And the role I am playing in this story is by no means small. I may even be one of the central characters
.

Aomame looked at her surroundings.
In other words, I am in the story that Tengo set in motion. In a sense, I am inside him—inside his body
, she realized.
I am inside that shrine, so to speak
.

I saw an old science fiction movie on television long ago. It was the story of a small group of scientists who shrank their bodies down to microscopic size, boarded a submarine-like vehicle (which had also been shrunk down), and entered their patient’s blood vessels, through which they gained entry to his brain in order to perform a complex operation that would have been impossible under ordinary circumstances. Maybe my situation is like that. I’m in Tengo’s blood and circulating through his body. I battled the white blood cells that attacked the
invading foreign body (me) as I headed for the root cause of the disease, and I must have succeeded in “deleting” that cause when I killed Leader at the Hotel Okura
.

Aomame was able to warm herself somewhat with such thoughts.
I carried out my assigned mission. It was a difficult mission, that is for sure, and I was afraid, but I carried it off coolly and flawlessly in the midst of all that thunder—and perhaps with Tengo looking on
. She felt proud of what she had accomplished.

To continue with the blood analogy, I should soon be drawn into a vein, spent, having served my purpose. Before long, I will be expelled from the body. That is the rule by which the body’s system works—an inescapable destiny. But so what? I am inside Tengo now, enveloped by his warmth, guided by his heartbeat, guided by his logic and his rules, and perhaps by the very language he is writing. How marvelous to be inside him like this!

Still sitting on the floor, Aomame closed her eyes. She pressed her nose against the pages of the book, inhaling its smells—the smell of the paper, the smell of the ink. She quietly gave herself up to its flow, listening hard for the sound of Tengo’s heart.

This is the kingdom
, she thought.

I am ready to die, anytime at all
.

No doubt about it: there were two moons.

One was the moon that had always been there, and the other was a far smaller, greenish moon, somewhat lopsided in shape, and much less bright. It looked like a poor, ugly, distantly related child that had been foisted on the family by unfortunate events and was welcomed by no one. But it was undeniably there, neither a phantom nor an optical illusion, hanging in space like other heavenly bodies, a solid mass with a clear-cut outline. Not a plane, not a blimp, not an artificial satellite, not a papier-mache moon that someone made for fun. It was without a doubt a chunk of rock, having quietly, stubbornly settled on a position in the night sky, like a punctuation mark placed only after long deliberation or a mole bestowed by destiny.

Tengo stared at the new moon for a long time as if to challenge it, never averting his gaze, hardly even blinking. But no matter how long he kept his eyes locked on it, it refused to budge. It stayed hunkered down in its spot in the sky with silent, stonehearted tenacity.

Tengo unclenched his right fist and, almost unconsciously, gave his head a slight shake.
Damn, it’s the same as in
Air Chrysalis
!
A world with two moons hanging in the sky side by side. When a
dohta
is born, a second moon appears
.

“That will be a sign. Watch the sky with great care,” one of the Little People said to the girl.

Tengo was the one who wrote those words. Following Komatsu’s advice, he had made his description of the new moon as concrete and detailed as possible. It was the part on which he had worked the hardest. The look of the new moon was almost entirely Tengo’s creation.

Komatsu had said, “Think of it this way, Tengo. Your readers have seen the sky with one moon in it any number of times, right? But I doubt they’ve seen a sky with two moons in it side by side. When you introduce things that most readers have
never
seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precise detail as possible.”

It made a lot of sense.

Still looking up at the sky, Tengo shook his head again. The newly added moon was absolutely the same size and shape as the one for which he had invented a description. Even the figurative language that he had used fit this one almost perfectly.

This can’t be
, Tengo thought.
What kind of reality mimics fictional creations?
“No, this can’t be,” he actually said aloud. Or tried to. His voice barely worked. His throat was parched, as if he had just run a very long distance.
There’s no way this can be. That’s a fictional world, a world that does not exist in reality
. It was a world in a fantastic story that Fuka-Eri had told Azami night after night and that Tengo himself had fleshed out.

Could this mean, then
—Tengo asked himself
—that this is the world of the novel? Could I have somehow left the real world and entered the world of
Air Chrysalis
like Alice falling down the rabbit hole? Or could the real world have been made over so as to match exactly the story of
Air Chrysalis
? Does this mean that the world that used to be—the familiar world with only one moon—no longer exists anywhere? And could the power of the Little People have something to do with this in one way or another?

He looked around, hoping for answers, but all that appeared before his eyes was the perfectly ordinary urban residential neighborhood. He could find nothing about it that seemed odd or unusual—no Queen of Hearts, no walrus, no Mad Hatter. There was nothing in his surroundings but an empty sandbox and swings, a mercury-vapor lamp emitting its sterile light, the spreading branches of a zelkova tree, a locked public toilet, a new six-story condo (only four units of which had lighted windows), a ward notice board, a red vending machine with a Coca-Cola logo, an illegally parked old-model green Volkswagen Golf, telephone poles and electric lines, and primary-color neon signs in the distance. The usual city noise, the usual lights. Tengo had been living here in Koenji for seven years. Not because he particularly liked it, but because he had just happened to find a cheap apartment that was not too far from the station. It was convenient for commuting, and moving somewhere else would have been too much trouble, so he had stayed on. But he at least knew the neighborhood inside and out and would have noticed any change immediately.

How long had there been more than one moon? Tengo could not be sure. Perhaps there had been two moons for years now and he simply hadn’t noticed. He had missed lots of things that way. He wasn’t much of a newspaper reader, and he never watched television. There were countless things that everybody knew but him. Perhaps something had occurred just recently to increase the number of moons to two. He wanted to ask someone, “Excuse me, this is a strange question, but how long have there been two moons? I just thought you might know.” But there was nobody there to ask—literally, not even a cat.

No, there
was
someone there. Nearby, someone was using a hammer to pound a nail into a wall.
Bang bang bang
. The sound kept up without a break, a very hard nail going into a very hard wall. Who could be pounding nails at a time like this? Puzzled, Tengo looked around, but he could see no wall, nor was there anyone pounding nails.

A moment later, Tengo realized that he was hearing the sound of his own heart. Spurred on by adrenaline, his heart was pumping surges of blood through his body. It pounded in his ears.

The sight of the two moons gave Tengo a slight dizzy feeling, as if it had put his nervous system out of balance. He sat down on top of the slide, leaning against the handrail, and closed his eyes, fighting the dizziness. He felt as if the force of gravity around him had subtly changed. Somewhere the tide was rising, and somewhere else the tide was receding. Their faces devoid of expression, people were moving back and forth between “insane” and “lunatic.”