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by Haruki Murakami

  Now, as to our funding: like most other religious organizations, we depend in part on the spontaneous contributions of our believers. Our ultimate goal, however, is to establish a frugal, self-sufficient lifestyle through our farming, rather than depending on contributions. For us, “less is more”: we aim to achieve spiritual peace through the purification of the body and the discipline of the mind. One after another, people who have sensed the emptiness of competitive society’s materialism have entered our gates in search of a different and deeper spiritual axis. Many of them are highly educated professionals with social standing. We are not trying to be one of those “fast food,” “new” religions that pretend to take on people’s worldly suffering and save anyone and everyone. Salvation of the weak is of course an important task, but it may be best to think of us as a kind of “graduate school,” providing a suitable place and appropriate support to people who are strongly motivated to save themselves.

  Major differences of opinion arose at one point between us and the people of the Akebono commune concerning matters of administrative policy, and we were at odds with them for a time, but talks between us led to an amicable meeting of the minds. We then separated, each of us following a different path. Akebono pursued its ideals in its own pure-minded and ascetic way, but with those disastrous—and genuinely tragic—results. The single greatest cause was that they had become too doctrinaire and lost touch with actual, living society. For us, too, the event has driven home the message that we must continue to be an organization that keeps a window open to the outside even as we impose ever stricter discipline upon ourselves. We believe that violence solves nothing. We hope you understand that we do not force religion on anyone. We do not proselytize, nor do we attack other religions. All we do is offer an appropriate and effective communal environment to people in search of spiritual awakening.

  . . .

  Most of the journalists present left with a favorable impression of the organization. All of the believers, both men and women, were slim, relatively young (though older people had been spotted on occasion), and beautifully clear-eyed. They were courteous in speech and behavior. None of them evidenced an inclination to speak extensively about their pasts, but most did indeed appear to be highly educated. The lunch served to the journalists had been simple fare (much the same sort of food eaten by believers, supposedly) but delicious in its own way, all ingredients having been freshly harvested on the organization’s land.

  Subsequently, the media defined Akebono as a mutant offspring that Sakigake had had to shake off. A revolutionary ideology based on Marxism had become outmoded and useless in 1980s Japan. The youth with radical political aspirations in 1970 were now working for corporations, engaged in the forefront of fierce fighting on an economic battlefield. Or else they had put distance between themselves and the battle and clamor of real society, each in search of personal values in a place apart. In any case, the times had changed, and the season for politics was now a thing of the distant past. Sakigake was one hopeful option for a new world; Akebono had no future.

  Aomame set down her pen and took a deep breath. She pictured to herself the eyes of Tsubasa, so utterly lacking in expression or depth. Those eyes had been looking at Aomame, but at the same time they had been looking at nothing. Something important was missing.

  It’s not as simple as all that, Aomame thought. Sakigake can’t be this clean. It has a hidden dark side. The dowager says this “Leader” person is raping preteen girls and calling it a religious act. The media didn’t seem to know anything about that. They were only there half a day. They were guided through the orderly facilities for religious practice, they were fed a lunch made with fresh ingredients, they were treated to beautiful explanations of spiritual awakening, and they went home satisfied. They never had a glimpse of what was really going on inside.

  Aomame went straight from the library to a café, where she ordered a cup of coffee and used the phone to call Ayumi at her office, on the number that Ayumi had told her she could call anytime. A colleague picked up the phone. Ayumi was out making rounds but should be back at the station in about two hours, he said. “I’ll call again later,” Aomame said without giving her name.

  She went back to her apartment and dialed the number again two hours later. This time Ayumi answered the phone herself.

  “Hi, Aomame, how are you?”

  “Fine, how are you?”

  “Nothing wrong with me that a good man wouldn’t fix. How about you?”

  “Same here,” Aomame said.

  “Too bad,” Ayumi said. “There must be something wrong with the world if women like us have to complain to each other about overly healthy sex drives. We’ll have to do something about that.”

  “True, but … uh, is it okay for you to be saying stuff like that out loud? You’re on duty, right? Isn’t anybody else around?”

  “Don’t worry, you can talk to me about anything.”

  “Well, I’ve got a favor to ask if it’s something you can do for me. I can’t think of anyone else I can go to for this.”

  “Sure,” Ayumi said. “I don’t know if I can help or not, but give it a try.”

  “Do you know of a religious group called Sakigake? It’s headquartered in Yamanashi Prefecture, in the hills.”

  “Sakigake? Hmm.” Ayumi took some ten seconds to search her memory. “I think I know it. It’s a kind of religious commune, isn’t it? The Akebono radicals that started the gun battle in Yamanashi used to belong to it. Three prefectural policemen died in the shootout. It was a real shame. But Sakigake had nothing to do with it. Their compound was searched after the shootout and came up clean. So …?”

  “I’d like to know if Sakigake was involved in any kind of incident after the shootout—criminal, civil, anything. But I don’t know how to go about looking into such things. I can’t read all the compact editions of all the newspapers, but I figured the police probably had some way of finding out.”

  “It’s easy, we just have to do a quick search on our computer—or, at least, I wish I could say that, but I’m afraid computerization is not so advanced in Japan’s police forces. I suspect it’ll take a few more years to get to that stage. So for now, if I wanted to find out about something like that, I’d probably have to ask the Yamanashi Prefectural Police to send copies of the related materials in the mail. And for that I’d first have to fill out a materials request form and get my boss’s okay. Of course I’d have to give a good reason for the request. And we’re a government office, after all, so we’re getting paid to make things as complicated as possible.”

  “I see,” Aomame said with a sigh. “So that’s out.”

  “But why do you want to know something like that? Is some friend of yours mixed up in some kind of case connected to Sakigake?”

  Aomame hesitated a moment before deciding to tell Ayumi the truth. “Close. It involves rape. I can’t go into detail yet, but it’s about the rape of young girls. I’ve been informed that they’re systematically raping them in there under cover of religion.”

  Aomame could sense Ayumi wrinkling her brow at the other end. “The rape of young girls, huh? We can’t let that happen,” Ayumi said.

  “Of course we can’t,” Aomame said.

  “What do you mean by ‘young’?”

  “Maybe ten, or even younger. Girls who haven’t had their first period, at least.”

  Ayumi went silent for a while. Then, in a flat voice, she said, “I see what you mean. I’ll think of something. Can you give me two or three days?”

  “Sure. Just let me know.”

  They spent the next few minutes in unrelated chatter until Ayumi said, “Okay, I’ve got to get back to work.”

  After hanging up, Aomame sat in her reading chair by the window and stared at her right hand for a while. Long, slim fingers, closely trimmed nails. Nails well cared for but unpolished. Looking at her nails, Aomame had a strong sense of what a fragile, fleeting thing her own existence was. Something as simple as the
shape of her fingernails: it had been decided without her. Somebody else made the decision, and all I could do was go along with it, like it or not. Who could have decided that this was how my nails would be shaped?

  The dowager had recently said to her, “Your parents were—and still are—ardent believers in the Society of Witnesses.” Which meant that they were probably still devoting themselves to missionary work even now. Aomame had a brother four years her senior, a docile young man. At the time Aomame made up her mind to leave home, he was still living according to his parents’ instructions, keeping the faith. What could he be doing now? Not that Aomame had an actual desire to know what was happening with her family. To her, they were just a part of her life that had ended. The ties had snapped.

  Aomame had struggled for a long time to forget everything that had happened to her before the age of ten. My life actually started when I was ten. Everything before that was some kind of miserable dream. Let me throw those memories away somewhere. But try as she might, her heart was constantly being drawn back into that nightmarish world. It seemed to her that almost everything she possessed had its roots sunk in that dark soil and was deriving its nourishment from it. No matter how far away I try to go, I always have to come back here, she thought.

  I must send that “Leader” into the other world, Aomame told herself, for my own sake as well.

  A phone call came from Ayumi three nights later. “I’ve got some facts for you,” she said. “About Sakigake?”

  “Yes. I was mulling it over when all of a sudden I remembered that the uncle of one of my police academy classmates is on the Yamanashi Prefectural Police force—a fairly high-ranking officer. So I tried asking my old classmate. I told him a relative of mine, a young girl, ran into some trouble when she was in the process of converting to that faith, so I was collecting information on Sakigake, and if he wouldn’t mind, could he help me? I’m pretty good at making up stuff like that.”

  “Thanks, Ayumi. I appreciate it,” Aomame said.

  “So he called his uncle in Yamanashi and explained the situation, and the uncle introduced me to the officer in charge of investigating Sakigake. So I spoke to him directly.”

  “Oh, wonderful.”

  “Yup. Well, I had a long talk with him and got all kinds of information about Sakigake, but you probably know everything that was in the papers, so I’ll just tell you the stuff that wasn’t, the parts that aren’t known to the public, okay?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “First of all, Sakigake has had a number of legal problems—civil suits, mostly concerning land deals. They seem to have a lot of money, and they’re buying up all the property around them. Sure, land is cheap in the country, but still. And a lot of times they’re pretty much forcing people to sell. They hide their involvement behind fake companies and buy up everything they can get their hands on. That way they start trouble with landowners and local governments. I mean, they operate like any ordinary landshark. Up to now, though, it’s all been civil actions, so the police haven’t had to get involved. They’ve come pretty close to crossing the line into criminal territory, but so far things haven’t gone public. They might be involved with organized crime or politicians. The police back off when politicians are mixed up in it. Of course, it’ll be a whole new ball game if something blows up and the prosecutor has to step in.”

  “So Sakigake is not as clean as it looks where economic activity is concerned.”

  “I don’t know about their ordinary believers, but as far as I can tell from the records of their real estate transactions, the top people in charge of the funds are probably not that clean. Even trying to cast it in the best light, it’s almost inconceivable that they would be using their money in search of pure spirituality. And besides, these guys hold land and buildings not just in Yamanashi but in downtown Tokyo and Osaka—first-class properties! Shibuya, Minami-Aoyama, Shoto: the organization seems to be planning to expand its religious activities on a national scale—assuming it’s not going to switch from religion to the real estate business.”

  “I thought they wanted to live in natural surroundings and practice pure, stringent religious austerities. Why in the world would such an organization have to branch out to the middle of Tokyo?”

  “And where do they get the kind of cash they’re throwing around?” Ayumi added. “There’s no way they could have amassed such a fortune selling daikon radishes and carrots.”

  “Squeezing donations out of their believers.”

  “That’s part of it, I’m sure, but nowhere near enough. They must have some other major source of funds. I also discovered another fact of some concern, something you might be interested in. There are a fair number of believers’ children in the compound. They generally attend the local public elementary school, but most of them drop out before long. The school insists that the children follow the standard education program, but the organization won’t cooperate. They tell the school that some of their children simply don’t want to go there, that they themselves are providing an education for those children, so there is no need to worry about their studies.”

  Aomame recalled her own experience in elementary school. She could well understand why children from the religion wouldn’t want to go to school, where they would be bullied as outsiders or ignored. “The kids probably feel out of place in a public school,” she said. “Besides, it’s not that unusual for children not to go to school.”

  “Yes, but according to the teachers who had those kids in their classes, most of them—boys and girls alike—appear to have some kind of emotional problems. They show up normal in first grade, just bright, outgoing children, but year by year they grow less talkative, their faces lose any hint of expression. Eventually they become utterly apathetic and stop coming to school. Almost all of the Sakigake kids seem to go through the same stages and exhibit the same symptoms. The teachers are puzzled and worried about the kids who have stopped coming and stay shut up inside the compound. They want to know if the kids are okay, but they can’t get in to see them. Nobody is allowed inside.”

  These were the same symptoms Tsubasa had, Aomame thought. Extreme apathy, lack of expression, barely talking.

  Ayumi said to Aomame, “You imagine the kids in Sakigake are being abused. Systematically. Maybe including rape.”

  “But the police can’t make a move based on unconfirmed accusations by an ordinary citizen.”

  “Of course not. The police department’s just another bureaucratic government agency, after all. The top brass don’t think of anything but their own careers. Some are not like that, but most of them have worked their way up playing it safe, and their goal is to find a cushy job in a related organization or private industry after they retire. So they don’t want to touch anything the least bit risky or hot. They probably don’t even eat pizza without letting it cool off. It would be an entirely different story if you could bring us a real victim who could prove something in court, but I’m guessing that would be hard for you to do.”

  “True, it might be hard,” Aomame said. “But anyhow, thanks. This is really useful information. I’ll have to find a way to thank you.”

  “Never mind that. Let’s just have another night out in Roppongi sometime soon and forget about our problems.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Aomame said.

  “Now you’re talking!” Ayumi said. “By the way, are you at all interested in playing with handcuffs?”

  “Probably not,” Aomame said. Playing with handcuffs?

  “No? Too bad,” Ayumi said, sounding genuinely disappointed.

  CHAPTER 22

  Tengo

  THAT TIME COULD TAKE ON

  DEFORMED SHAPES AS IT MOVED AHEAD

  Tengo thought about his brain. Lots of things made him do this.

  The size of the human brain had increased four times over the past two and a half million years. In terms of weight, the brain occupied only two percent of the human body, but it consumed some forty percent of the body�
��s total energy (according to a book he had recently read). Owing to the dramatic expansion of the brain, human beings had been able to acquire the concepts of time, space, and possibility.

  The concepts of time, space, and possibility.

  Tengo knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward. Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One period of time might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short. Occasionally the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely. Sometimes things that should not be there at all might be added onto time. By adjusting time this way to suit their own purposes, people probably adjusted the meaning of their existences. In other words, by adding such operations to time, they were able—but just barely—to preserve their own sanity. Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain. Such a life, Tengo felt, would be sheer torture.

  Through the expansion of the brain, people had acquired the concept of temporality, but they simultaneously learned ways in which to change and adjust time. In parallel with their ceaseless consumption of time, people would ceaselessly reproduce time that they had mentally adjusted. This was no ordinary feat. No wonder the brain was said to consume forty percent of the body’s total energy!

  Tengo often wondered whether he had actually witnessed the memory he retained from the age of one and a half or, at most, two—the scene in which his mother in underclothes let a man who was not his father suck on her breasts. Her arms were wrapped around the man. Could a one- or two-year-old infant distinguish such details and remember them so vividly? Wasn’t this a false memory that he had later conveniently fashioned to protect himself?

  That was entirely conceivable. At some point Tengo’s brain might have subconsciously created the memory of another man (his possibly “real” father) in order to “prove” that he was not the biological child of the man who was supposed to be his father. This was how he tried to eliminate “the man who was supposed to be his father” from the tight circle of blood. By establishing inside himself the hypothetical existence of a mother who must be alive somewhere and a “real” father, he was trying to create a portal leading out of his limited, suffocating life.