1q84

by Haruki Murakami

  As indicated on the paper, the girl gets off the train at Takao Station on the Chuo Line, and she uses a public telephone to call the number her father gave her. The man who answers is an old friend of her father’s, an artist who paints in the traditional Japanese style. He is ten years older than her father and he lives in the hills with his daughter near Mount Takao. His wife died a short time before. The daughter is named Kurumi and she is one year younger than the girl. As soon as he hears from the girl, the man comes to get her at the station, and he warmly welcomes this young escapee into his home.

  The day after she is taken into the painter’s home, the girl looks at the sky from her room and discovers that the number of moons up there has increased to two. Near the usual moon a smaller second moon hangs like a slightly shriveled green pea. My dohta must have awakened, the girl thinks. The two moons cast the shadow of her heart and mind. Her heart gives a shudder. The world has changed. And something is beginning to happen.

  The girl hears nothing from her parents. Perhaps no one in the Gathering has noticed her disappearance. That is because her other self, her dohta, has remained behind. The two of them look exactly alike, so most people can’t tell the difference. Her parents, of course, should be able to tell that the dohta is not the actual girl, that she is nothing but the girl’s other self, that their actual daughter has run away from the Gathering, leaving the dohta behind in her place. There is only one place where the girl might have gone, but still her parents never try to contact her. This in itself might be a wordless message to the girl to stay away.

  The girl goes to school irregularly. The new outside world is simply too different from the world of the Gathering where she grew up. The rules are different, the aims are different, the words they use are different. For this reason, she has trouble making friends in this new world. She can’t get used to life in the school.

  In middle school, however, she befriends a boy. His name is Toru. He is small and skinny, and his face has several deep wrinkles like that of a monkey. He seems to have suffered from a serious illness when little and can’t participate in strenuous activities. His backbone is somewhat curved. At recess time, he always stays by himself, reading a book. Like the girl, he has no friends. He is too small and too ugly. During one lunch break, the girl sits next to him and starts to talk to him. She asks about the book he is reading. He reads it aloud to her. She likes his voice, which is small and hoarse but very clear to her. The stories he tells with that voice all but carry her away. He reads prose so beautifully that it sounds as if he is reciting poetry. Soon she is spending every lunchtime with him, sitting very still and listening with deep attention to the stories he reads her.

  Before long, however, Toru is lost to the girl. The Little People snatch him away from her.

  One night an air chrysalis appears in Toru’s room. The Little People make it bigger and bigger each night while he sleeps, and they show the scene to the girl through her dreams. The girl can do nothing to stop them. Eventually the chrysalis reaches full size and a vertical split appears in its side, just as it happened with the girl. But inside this chrysalis are three big, black snakes. The three snakes are tightly intertwined, so tightly that no one—including themselves—can pull them apart. They look like a shiny perpetual tangle with three heads. The snakes are terribly angry that they cannot pull free. They writhe in a frantic effort to separate themselves from each other, but the more they writhe, the more entangled they become. The Little People show these creatures to the girl. The boy called Toru sleeps on beside them, unaware. Only the girl can see all this.

  The boy suddenly falls ill a few days later and is sent to a distant sanatorium. The nature of his illness is not disclosed. In any case, Toru will surely never return to the school. He has been irretrievably lost.

  The girl realizes that this is a message from the Little People. Apparently they cannot do anything to the girl, a maza, directly. What they can do instead is harm and even destroy the people around her. But they cannot do this to just anyone—they cannot touch her guardian, the painter, or his daughter, Kurumi. Instead they choose the weakest ones for their prey. They dragged the three black snakes from the depths of the boy’s mind and woke them from their slumber. By destroying the boy, they have sent a warning to the girl and are trying their best to bring her back to her dohta. “You, finally, are the one who caused this to happen,” they are telling her.

  The girl returns to her loneliness. She stops going to school. Making friends with someone can only expose that person to danger. That is what it means to live beneath two moons. That is what she has learned.

  The girl eventually makes up her mind and begins fashioning her own air chrysalis. She is able to do this. The Little People said that they had come to her world down a passageway from the place they belong. If that is the case, she herself should be able to go to that place down a passageway in the opposite direction. If she goes there, she can learn the secrets regarding why she is here and what the meaning of “maza” and “dohta” could be. She might also succeed in saving the lost Toru. The girl begins making a passageway. All she has to do is pluck threads from the air and weave a chrysalis. This will take time, but if she does take the time, she can do it.

  Sometimes, however, she becomes unsure and confusion overtakes her. Am I really a maza? Couldn’t I have switched places somewhere with my dohta? The more she thinks about it, the less certain she becomes. How can I prove that I am the real me?

  The story ends symbolically when the girl is opening the door of her passageway. It says nothing about what will happen beyond the door—probably because it has not happened yet.

  Dohta, Aomame thought. Leader used that word before he died. He said that his own daughter had run away, leaving her dohta behind, in order to establish a force opposed to the Little People. It might have actually happened. And I am not the only one to see two moons.

  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 h
ad 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 Janáček’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.

  CHAPTER 20

  Tengo

  THE WALRUS AND THE MAD HATTER

  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-mâché 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 worl
d 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.