1Q84. Òûñÿ÷à Íåâåñòüñîò Âîñåìüäåñÿò ×åòûðå. Êíèãà 1. Àïðåëü–èþíü Ìóðàêàìè Õàðóêè
I shall go wherever His Majesty goes.
All you women whose hearts are with him,
Follow us without delay.” So saying,
She strode to the gunwale.
His Majesty had turned but eight that year,
Yet he exhibited a maturity far beyond his age.
His handsome countenance radiated an Imperial glow,
And his glossy black hair could cascade down his back past the waist.
Confused by all the commotion, he asked,
“Grandmother, where are you taking me?”
She turned to the innocent young Sovereign and,
Fighting back her tears, she said,
“Do you not know yet what is happening?
For having followed the Ten Precepts in your previous life,
You were born to be a Lord commanding
Ten thousand charioteers,
But now, dragged down by an evil karma,
Your good fortune has exhausted itself.
Turn first now to the east,
And say your farewell to the Grand Shrine of Ise.
Then turn toward the west and call upon Amida Buddha
That his heavenly hosts may guide you to the Western Pure Land.
This country is no better than a scattering of millet,
A place where hearts know only sadness.
I am taking you, therefore, to a wonderful pure land called ‘Paradise.’ ”
Her tears escaped as she spoke thus to him.
His Majesty wore a robe of olive-tinged gray,
And his hair was bound on either side in boyish loops.
Tears streaming from his eyes, he joined his darling hands.
First, he bowed toward the east
And spoke his farewell to the Grand Shrine of Ise.
Then he turned to the west and, once he had called upon Amida Buddha,
The Nun of Second Rank clasped him to her breast and,
Comforting him with the words,
“There is another capital beneath the waves,”
She plunged ten thousand fathoms beneath the sea.
Listening to her recite the story with his eyes closed, Tengo felt as though he were hearing it the traditional way, chanted by a blind priest accompanying himself on the lute, and he was reminded anew that The Tale of the Heike was a narrative poem handed down through an oral tradition. Fuka-Eri’s normal style of speaking was extremely flat, lacking almost all accent and intonation, but when she launched into the tale, her voice became startlingly strong, rich, and colorful, as if something had taken possession of her. The magnificent sea battle fought in 1185 on the swirling currents between Honshu and Kyushu came vividly to life. The Heike side was doomed to defeat, and Kiyomori’s wife Tokiko, the “Nun of Second Rank,” plunged into the waves holding her grandson, the child emperor Antoku, in her arms. Her ladies-in-waiting followed her in death rather than fall into the hands of the rough eastern warriors. Tomomori, concealing his grief, jokingly urged the ladies to kill themselves. You’ll have nothing but a living hell if you go on like this, he had told them. You had best end your lives here and now.
“Want me to go on,” Fuka-Eri asked.
“No, that’s fine. Thank you,” Tengo answered, stunned. He understood how those news reporters, at a loss for words, must have felt. “How did you manage to memorize such a long passage?”
“Listening to the tape over and over.”
“Listening to the tape over and over, an ordinary person still wouldn’t be able to memorize it.”
It suddenly dawned on Tengo that precisely to the degree she could not read a book, the girl’s ability to memorize what she had heard might be extraordinarily well developed, just as certain children with savant syndrome can absorb and remember huge amounts of visual information in a split second.
“I want you to read me a book,” Fuka-Eri said.
“What kind of book would you like?”
“Do you have the book you were talking about with the Professor,” Fuka-Eri asked. “The one with Big Brother.”
“1984? I don’t have that one.”
“What kind of story is it.”
Tengo tried to recall the plot. “I read it once a long time ago in the school library, so I don’t remember the details too well. It was published in 1949, when 1984 seemed like a time far in the future.”
“That’s this year.”
“Yes, by coincidence. At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past. In his novel, George Orwell depicted the future as a dark society dominated by totalitarianism. People are rigidly controlled by a dictator named Big Brother. Information is restricted, and history is constantly being rewritten. The protagonist works in a government office, and I’m pretty sure his job is to rewrite words. Whenever a new history is written, the old histories all have to be thrown out. In the process, words are remade, and the meanings of current words are changed. What with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true anymore. They lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally. It’s that kind of story.”
“They rewrite history.”
“Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime.”
Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.
Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us-is rewritten-we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
“You rewrite stuff.”
Tengo laughed and took a sip of wine. “All I did was touch up your story, for the sake of expedience. That’s totally different from rewriting history.”
“But that Big Brother book is not here now,” she asked.
“Unfortunately, no. So I can’t read it to you.”
“I don’t mind another book.”
Tengo went to his bookcase and scanned the spines of his books. He had read many books over the years, but he owned few. He tended to dislike filling his home with a lot of possessions. When he finished a book, unless it was something quite special, he would take it to a used-book store. He bought only books he knew he was going to read right away, and he would read the ones he cared about very closely, until they were ingrained in his mind. When he needed other books he would borrow them from the neighborhood library.
Choosing a book to read to Fuka-Eri took Tengo a long time. He was not used to reading aloud, and had almost no clue which might be best for that. After a good deal of indecision, he pulled out Anton Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, which he had just finished reading the week before. He had marked the more interesting spots with paper tags and figured this would make it easy to choose suitable passages to read.
Tengo prefaced his reading with a brief explanation of the book-that Chekhov was only thirty years old when he traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1890; that no one really knew why the urbane Chekhov, who had been praised as one of the most promising young writers of the generation after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and who was living a cosmopolitan life in Moscow, would have made up his mind to go off to live on Sakhalin Island, which was like the end of the earth. Sakhalin had been developed primarily as a penal colony, and to most people it symbolized only bad luck and misery. Furthermore, the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built, which meant that Chekhov had to make more than 2,500 miles of his trip in a horse-drawn cart across frozen earth, an act of self-denial that subjected the young man in poor health to merciless suffering. And finally, when he ended his eight-month-long journey to the Far East and published Sakhalin as the fruit of his labor, the work did little more than bewilder most readers, who found that it more closely resembled a dry investigative report or gazetteer than a work of literature. People whispered amongst themselves, “Why did Chekhov do such a wasteful, pointless thing at such an important stage in his literary career?” One critic answered scathingly, “It was just a publicity stunt.” Another view was that Chekhov had gone there looking for a new subject because he had run out of things to write about. Tengo showed Fuka-Eri the location of Sakhalin on the map included in the book.
“Why did Chekhov go to Sakhalin,” Fuka-Eri asked.
“You mean, why do I think he went?”
“Uh-huh. Did you read the book.”
“I sure did.”
“What did you think.”
“Chekhov himself might not have understood exactly why he went,” Tengo said. “Or maybe he didn’t really have a reason. He just suddenly felt like going-say, he was looking at the shape of Sakhalin Island on a map and the desire to go just bubbled up out of nowhere. I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what.’ And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what people are doing there. It’s like measles-you can’t show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration. Of course, traveling from Moscow to Sakhalin in those days involved almost unimaginable hardships, so I suspect that wasn’t Chekhov’s only reason for going.”
“Name another one.”
“Well, Chekhov was both a novelist and a doctor. It could be that, as a scientist, he wanted to examine something like a diseased part of the vast Russian nation with his own eyes. Chekhov felt uncomfortable living as a literary star in the city. He was fed up with the atmosphere of the literary world and was put off by the affectations of other writers, who were mainly interested in tripping each other up. He was disgusted by the malicious critics of the day. His journey to Sakhalin may have been an act of pilgrimage designed to cleanse him of such literary impurities. Sakhalin Island overwhelmed him in many ways. I think it was precisely for this reason that Chekhov never wrote a single literary work based on his trip to Sakhalin. It was not the kind of half-baked experience that could be easily made into material for a novel. The diseased part of the country became, so to speak, a physical part of him, which may have been the very thing he was looking for.”
“Is the book interesting,” Fuka-Eri asked.
“I found it very interesting. It’s full of dry figures and statistics and, as I said earlier, not much in the way of literary color. The scientist side of Chekhov is on full display. But that is the very quality of the book that makes me feel I can sense the purity of the decision reached by Anton Chekhov the individual. Mixed in with the dry records are some very impressive examples of observation of character and scenic description. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the dry passages that relate only facts. Some of them are quite marvelous. For example, the sections on the Gilyaks.”
“The Gilyaks,” Fuka-Eri said.
“The Gilyaks were the indigenous people of Sakhalin long before the Russians arrived to colonize it. They originally lived at the southern end of the island, but they moved up to the center when they were displaced by the Ainu, who moved north from Hokkaido. Of course, the Ainu themselves had also been pushed northward-by the Japanese. Chekhov struggled to observe at close hand and to record as accurately as possible the rapidly disappearing Gilyak culture.”
Tengo opened to a passage on the Gilyaks. At some points he would introduce suitable omissions and changes to the text in order to make it easily understandable to his listener.
The Gilyak is of strong, thick-set build, and average, even small, in height. Tall stature would hamper him in the taiga. [“That’s a Russian forest,” Tengo added.] His bones are thick and are distinctive for the powerful development of all the appendages and protuberances to which the muscles are attached, and this leads one to assume firm, powerful muscles and a constant strenuous battle with nature. His body is lean and wiry, without a layer of fat; you do not come across obese, plump Gilyaks. Obviously all the fat is expended in warmth, of which the body of a Sakhalin inhabitant needs to produce such a great deal in order to compensate for the loss engendered by the low temperature and the excessive dampness of the air. It’s clear why the Gilyak consumes such a lot of fat in his food. He eats rich seal, salmon, sturgeon and whale fat, meat and blood, all in large quantities, in a raw, dry, often frozen state, and because he eats coarse, unrefined food, the places to which his masticatory muscles are attached are singularly well developed and his teeth are heavily worn. His diet is made up exclusively of animal products, and rarely, only when he happens to have his dinner at home or if he eats out at a celebration, will he add Manchurian garlic or berries. According to Nevelskoy’s testimony, the Gilyaks consider working the soil a great sin; anybody who begins to dig the earth or who plants anything will infallibly die. But bread, which they were acquainted with by the Russians, they eat with pleasure, as a delicacy, and it is not a rarity these days in Alexandrovsk or Rykovo to meet a Gilyak carrying a round loaf under his arm.
Tengo stopped reading at that point for a short breather. Fuka-Eri was listening intently, but he could not read any reaction from her expression.
“What do you think? Do you want me to keep reading? Or do you want to switch to another book?” he asked.
“I want to know more about the Gilyaks.”
“Okay, I’ll keep going.”
“Is it okay if I get in bed?” Fuka-Eri asked.
“Sure,” Tengo said.
They moved into the bedroom. Fuka-Eri crawled into bed, and Tengo brought a chair next to the bed and sat in it. He continued with his reading.
The Gilyaks never wash, so that even ethnographers find it difficult to put a name to the real colour of their faces; they do not wash their linen, and their fur clothing looks as if it has just been stripped off a dead dog. The Gilyaks themselves give off a heavy, acid smell, and you know you are near their dwellings from the repulsive, sometimes hardly bearable odour of dried fish and rotting fish offal. By each yurt usually lies a drying ground filled to the brim with split fish, which from a distance, especially when the sun is shining on them, look like filaments of coral. Around these drying grounds Kruzenshtern saw a vast number of maggots covering the ground to the depth of an inch.
“Kruzenshtern.”
“I think he was an early explorer. Chekhov was a very studious person. He had read every book ever written about Sakhalin.”
“Let’s keep going.”
In winter the yurts are full of acrid smoke which comes from the open fireplace, and on top of all this the Gilyaks, their wives and even the children smoke tobacco. Nothing is known about the morbidity and mortality of the Gilyaks, but one must form the conclusion that these unhealthy hygienic arrangements must inevitably have a bad effect on their health. Possibly it is to this they owe their small stature, the puffiness of their faces, and a certain sluggishness and laziness of movement.
“The poor Gilyaks!” Fuka-Eri said.
Writers give varying accounts of the Gilyaks’ character, but all agree on one thing-that they are not a warlike race, they do not like quarrels or fights, and they get along peacefully with their neighbours. They have always treated the arrival of new people with suspicion, with apprehension about their future, but have met them every time amiably, without the slightest protest, and the worst thing they would do would be to tell lies at people’s arrival, painting Sakhalin in gloomy colours and thinking by so doing to frighten foreigners away from the island. They embraced Kruzenshtern’s travelling companions, and when Shrenk fell ill this news quickly spread among the Gilyaks and aroused genuine sorrow. They tell lies only when trading or talking to a suspicious and, in their opinion, dangerous person, but, before telling a lie, they exchange glances with each other in an utterly childlike manner. Every sort of lie and bragging in the sphere of everyday life and not in the line of business is repugnant to them.
“The wonderful Gilyaks!” Fuka-Eri said.
The Gilyaks conscientiously fulfil commissions they have undertaken, and there has not yet been a single case of a Gilyak abandoning mail halfway or embezzling other people’s belongings. They are perky, intelligent, cheerful, and feel no stand-offishness or uneasiness whatever in the company of the rich and powerful. They do not recognize that anybody has power over them, and, it seems, they do not possess even the concept of “senior” and “junior.” People say and write that the Gilyaks do not respect family seniority either. A father does not think he is superior to his son, and a son does not look up to his father but lives just as he wishes; an elderly mother has no greater power in a yurt than an adolescent girl. Boshnyak writes that he chanced more than once to see a son striking his own mother and driving her out, and nobody daring to say a word to him. The male members of the family are equal among themselves; if you entertain them with vodka, then you also have to treat the very smallest of them to it as well. But the female members are all equal in their lack of rights; be it grandmother, mother or baby girl still being nursed, they are ill treated in the same way as domestic animals, like an object which can be thrown out, sold or shoved with one’s foot like a dog. However, the Gilyaks at least fondle their dogs, but their womenfolk-never. Marriage is considered a mere trifle, of less importance, for instance, than a drinking spree, and it is not surrounded by any kind of religious or superstitious ceremony. A Gilyak exchanges a spear, a boat or a dog for a girl, takes her back to his own yurt and lies with her on a bearskin-and that is all there is to it. Polygamy is allowed, but it has not become widespread, although to all appearances there are more women than men. Contempt toward women, as if for a lower creature or object, reaches such an extreme in the Gilyak that, in the field of the question of women’s rights, he does not consider reprehensible even slavery in the literal and crude sense of the word. Evidently with them a woman represents the same sort of trading object as tobacco or nankeen. The Swedish writer Strindberg, a renowned misogynist, who desired that women should be merely slaves and should serve men’s whims, is in essence of one and the same mind as the Gilyaks; if he ever chanced to come to northern Sakhalin, they would spend ages embracing each other.
Tengo took a break at that point, but Fuka-Eri remained silent, offering no opinion on the reading. Tengo continued.
They have no courts, and they do not know the meaning of “justice.” How hard it is for them to understand us may be seen merely from the fact that up till the present day they still do not fully understand the purpose of roads. Even where a road has already been laid, they will still journey through the taiga. One often sees them, their families and their dogs, picking their way in Indian file across a quagmire right by the roadway.
Fuka-Eri had her eyes closed and was breathing very softly. Tengo studied her face for a while but could not tell whether she was sleeping or not. He decided to turn the page and keep reading. If she was sleeping, he wanted to give her as sound a sleep as possible, and he also felt like reading more Chekhov aloud.
Formerly the Naibuchi Post stood at the river mouth. It was founded in 1866. Mitzul found eighteen buildings here, both dwellings and non-residential premises, plus a chapel and a shop for provisions. One correspondent who visited Naibuchi in 1871 wrote that there were twenty soldiers there under the command of a cadet-officer; in one of the cabins he was entertained with fresh eggs and black bread by a tall and beautiful female soldier, who eulogized her life here and complained only that sugar was very expensive.
Now there are not even traces left of those cabins, and, gazing round at the wilderness, the tall, beautiful female soldier seems like some kind of myth. They are building a new house here, for overseers’ offices or possibly a weather center, and that is all. The roaring sea is cold and colourless in appearance, and the tall grey waves pound upon the sand, as if wishing to say in despair: “Oh God, why did you create us?” This is the Great, or, as it is otherwise known, the Pacific, Ocean. On this shore of the Naibuchi river the convicts can be heard rapping away with axes on the building work, while on the other, far distant, imagined shore, lies America… to the left the capes of Sakhalin are visible in the mist, and to the right are more capes… while all around there is not a single living soul, not a bird, not a fly, and it is beyond comprehension who the waves are roaring for, who listens to them at nights here, what they want, and, finally, who they would roar for when I was gone. There on the shore one is overcome not by connected, logical thoughts, but by reflections and reveries. It is a sinister sensation, and yet at the very same time you feel the desire to stand for ever looking at the monotonous movement of the waves and listening to their threatening roar.
It appeared that Fuka-Eri was now sound asleep. He listened for her quiet breathing. He closed the book and set it on the little table by the bed. Then he stood up and turned the light off, taking one final look at Fuka-Eri. She was sleeping peacefully on her back, her mouth a tight, straight line. Tengo closed the bedroom door and went back to the kitchen.
It was impossible for him to continue with his own writing, though. His mind was now fully occupied by Chekhov’s desolate Sakhalin coastal scenes. He could hear the sound of the waves. When he closed his eyes, Tengo was standing alone on the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk, a prisoner of his own meditations, sharing in Chekhov’s inconsolable melancholy. What Chekhov must have felt there at the end of the earth was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to flee from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.
After rinsing his wineglass and brushing his teeth, Tengo turned off the kitchen light, stretched out on the sofa, pulled a blanket over himself, and tried to sleep. The roar of the ocean still echoed in his ears, but eventually he began to lose consciousness and was drawn into a deep sleep.
He awoke at eight thirty in the morning. There was no sign of Fuka-Eri in his bed. The pajamas he had lent her were balled up and tossed into the bathroom washing machine, the cuffs and legs still rolled up. He found a note on the kitchen table: “How are the Gilyaks doing now? I’m going home.” Written in ballpoint pen on notepaper, the characters were small, square, and indefinably strange, like an aerial view of characters written on a beach in seashells. He folded the paper and put it in his desk drawer. If his girlfriend found something like this when she arrived at eleven, she would make a terrible fuss.
Tengo straightened the bed and returned the fruits of Chekhov’s labor to the bookcase. Then he made himself coffee and toast. While eating breakfast, he noticed that some kind of heavy object had settled itself in his chest. Some time had to go by before he figured out what it was. Fuka-Eri’s tranquil sleeping face.
Could I be in love with her? No, impossible, Tengo told himself. It just so happens that something inside her has physically shaken my heart. So, then, why am I so concerned about the pajamas she had on her body? Why did I (almost unconsciously) pick them up and smell them?
There were too many questions. It was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them. It was a memorable phrase, but Chekhov applied this attitude not only to his works but to his life as well. His life presented many questions but answered none. Although he knew quite well that he was suffering from an incurable lung disease (as a doctor, he could not help but know), he tried hard to ignore the fact, and refused to believe he was dying until he was actually on his deathbed. He died young, violently coughing up blood.
Tengo left the kitchen table, shaking his head. My girlfriend is coming today. I have to do laundry and clean the place up now. Thinking is something I can save for later.
CHAPTER 21
Aomame
NO MATTER HOW FAR AWAY I TRY TO GO
Aomame went to the ward library and, following the same procedures as before, opened the compact edition of the newspaper on a desk. She was there to read once again about the gun battle between the radical faction and the police that had taken place in Yamanashi Prefecture in the autumn three years earlier. The headquarters of Sakigake, the religious group that the dowager had mentioned, was located in the mountains of Yamanashi, and the gun battle had also occurred in the mountains of Yamanashi. This might have been a mere coincidence, but Aomame was not quite ready to accept that. There might well have been some link between the two. And the expression that the dowager had used-“such a major incident”-also seemed to suggest a connection.
The gunfight had occurred three years earlier, in 1981 (or, according to Aomame’s hypothesis, three years prior to 1Q84), on October 19. Having read the news reports during her previous trip to the library, Aomame had fairly detailed knowledge of the facts. This enabled her to skim through that material and concentrate instead on subsequent related articles and analyses that viewed the affair from different angles.
In the first battle, three officers had been killed and two badly wounded by Chinese-made Kalashnikov automatic rifles. After that, the radical group fled into the mountains with their weapons and the police staged a major manhunt. Fully armed Self-Defense Force paratroopers were also sent in by helicopter. Three radicals who resisted the onslaught were shot to death, two were gravely wounded (one of those died in the hospital three days later, but the fate of the other was not clearly stated in the article), and four others were arrested unharmed or slightly wounded. Wearing high-performance bulletproof vests, the police and Self-Defense troops suffered no further casualties except for one policeman’s broken leg when he fell off a cliff in pursuit of the radicals. Only one of the radicals was listed as whereabouts unknown. He had apparently managed to disappear in spite of the extensive search.
Once the initial shock of the gun battle wore off, the newspaper started carrying detailed reports on the origins of the radical group, which was seen as the fallout from the university campus uprisings that occurred around 1970. More than half of the members were veterans of the takeover of Yasuda Hall at the University of Tokyo or the sit-in at Nihon University. After their “fortresses” had fallen to the riot police, these students (and a few faculty members) had been expelled from their universities or become disillusioned with urban political action centered on the university campuses. They overcame their factional differences and started a communal farm in Yamanashi Prefecture. At first they participated in the agricultural commune known as the Takashima Academy, but they were not satisfied with the life there. They reorganized, went independent, bought an abandoned village deep in the mountains at an exceptionally low price, and started farming there. They experienced many hardships at first, but they eventually succeeded in the mail order sale of vegetables when the use of organically grown produce began a quiet boom in the cities. Their farm grew. They were, ultimately, serious, hardworking people whose leader had organized them well. The name of the commune was Sakigake.
Aomame twisted her face into a major grimace and swallowed hard. She let out a deep groan and started tapping the surface of the desk with her ballpoint pen.
She continued reading. She read through the news reports that explained how a deep split grew within the ranks of Sakigake between a moderate group that rejected a violent revolution as acceptable for contemporary Japan, and a radical faction that eventually founded a nearby commune and took the name Akebono. She learned how they were granted religious status by the government in 1979.
After the radical group moved to their own property, they underwent secret military training even as they continued to farm, which gave rise to several clashes with neighboring farmers. One such clash involved water rights over a stream that flowed through Akebono’s land. The stream had always been used as a common source of water by farms in the area, but Akebono denied neighboring residents entry. The dispute went on for a number of years, until several Akebono members severely beat a resident who had complained about the barbed wire fence surrounding their land. The Yamanashi Prefectural Police obtained a search warrant and headed for Akebono to question the suspects, only to become involved in a wholly unanticipated shootout.
After Akebono was all but obliterated by the intense gun battle in the mountains, the religious organization Sakigake lost no time in issuing a formal statement. A handsome, young spokesman in a business suit read the document to the media at a press conference. The point of the statement was quite clear. Whatever their relationship might have been in the past, Sakigake and Akebono now had no connection at all. After the two groups parted ways, there had been hardly any contact aside from certain operational matters. They had separated amicably after concluding that, as a community devoted to farming, respect for the law, and longing for a peaceful spiritual world, Sakigake could no longer work with the members of Akebono, who pursued a radical revolutionary ideology. After that, Sakigake had become a religious organization and had been legally certified as a Religious Juridical Person. That such an incident involving bloodshed had occurred was truly unfortunate, and Sakigake wished to express its deep sympathy for the families of the officers who had lost their lives in the course of their duties, but Sakigake was in no way involved. Still, it was an undeniable fact that Sakigake had been the parent organization of Akebono. Consequently, if the authorities deemed it necessary to conduct some sort of investigation in connection with the present incident, Sakigake was fully prepared to comply so as to avoid pointless misunderstanding.
A few days later, as if in response to Sakigake’s formal statement, the Yamanashi Prefectural Police entered the organization’s precincts with a search warrant. They spent an entire day covering all parts of Sakigake’s extensive property and carefully examining their buildings’ interiors and their files. They also questioned several members of the group’s leadership. The police suspected that the two groups’ contacts were as active as ever and that Sakigake was surreptitiously involved in Akebono’s activities. But they found no evidence to support this view. Scattered along the trails winding through the beautiful deciduous forest were wood-frame meditation huts where many members dressed in ascetic robes were engaged in religious austerities, nothing more. Nearby, other adherents were engaged in farming. There was an array of well-maintained farming implements and heavy farm machinery. The police found no trace of weapons or anything else suggesting violence. Everything was clean and orderly. There was a nice little dining hall, a lodging house, and a simple (but adequately equipped) medical facility. The two-floored library was well stocked with Buddhist scriptures and books, among which several experts were engaged in studies and translations. Overall, the place seemed less like a religious establishment than the campus of a small private college. The police left deflated, having found almost nothing of value.
Some days later, the group welcomed television and newspaper reporters, who observed much the same scenes the police had found. They were not taken around on carefully controlled tours, as might be expected, but were allowed to wander freely throughout the property unaccompanied, to speak with anyone they wanted to interview, and to write up their discoveries as they wished. The one restriction agreed upon was that the media would use only television and photographic images approved by the group in order to protect the privacy of individual members. Several ascetic-robed members of the leadership answered reporters’ questions in a large assembly hall, explaining the organization’s origins, doctrines, and administration. Their manner of speaking was courteous but direct, eschewing any hint of the kind of propaganda often associated with religious groups. They seemed more like top employees of an advertising agency, skilled presenters, rather than leaders of a religion. The only thing different was the clothes they wore.
We do not have any set, clear-cut doctrine, they explained. We perform theoretical research on early Buddhism and put into actual practice the ascetic disciplines that were engaged in back then, aiming for a more fluid religious awakening. We do not hold that doctrine gives rise to awakening but rather that the individual awakenings come first. This is our fundamental principle. In that sense, our origin differs greatly from those of established religions.
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 caf, 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 groupcalled 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.
The problem with this view was that the memory came with such a vivid sense of reality. It had such an authentic feel, and weight, and smell, and depth. It was stubbornly fastened to the walls of his mind like an oyster clinging to a sunken ship. He could never manage to shake it off, to wash it away. He found it impossible to believe that such a memory was a mere counterfeit that his mind had created in response to some need. It was too real, too solid, to be imaginary.
What if it was real, then? Tengo thought.
His infant self would certainly have been frightened to witness such a scene. Someone else, some other human being, was sucking on breasts that should have been for him-someone bigger and stronger. And it appeared that Tengo’s mother had-at least temporarily-forgotten about him, creating a situation that threatened his very survival, small and weak as he was. The primal terror of that moment may have been indelibly imprinted on the photo paper of his mind.
The memory of that terror came rushing back to him when he least expected it, attacking him with all the ferocity of a flash flood, and putting him into a near panic. This terror spoke to him, forcing him to remember: Wherever you go, whatever you do, you can never escape the pressure of this water. This memory defines who you are, shapes your life, and is trying to send you to a place that has been decided for you. You can writhe all you want, but you will never be able to escape from this power.
It suddenly occurred to Tengo: When I lifted the pajamas that Fuka-Eri wore from the washing machine and smelled them, I might have been hoping to find my mother’s smell. But why do I have to look for my departed mother’s image in, of all things, the smell of a seventeen-year-old girl? There should be a more likely place to look-in the body of my older girlfriend, for one thing.
…
Tengo’s girlfriend was ten years his senior, but for some reason he never sought his mother’s image in her. Neither did he have any particular interest in her smell. She took the lead in most of their sexual activity. Tengo simply did as she directed, hardly thinking, making neither choices nor judgments. She demanded only two things of him: good erections and well-timed ejaculations. “Don’t come yet,” she would command. “Hold on a little longer.” And he would pour all his energy into holding on. “Okay, now! Come now!” she would whisper by his ear, and he would let go at precisely that point with as intense an ejaculation as he could manage. Then she would praise him, caressing his cheek: “Oh, Tengo! You’re wonderful!” Tengo had an innate knack for precision in all realms, including correct punctuation and discovering the simplest possible formula necessary to solve a math problem.
It didn’t work this way when he had sex with younger women. He would have to think from beginning to end, making choices and judgments. This made Tengo uncomfortable. All the responsibilities fell on his shoulders. He felt like the captain of a small boat on a stormy sea, having to take the rudder, inspect the setting of the sails, keep in mind the barometric pressure and the wind direction, and modulate his own behavior so as to boost the crew’s trust in him. The slightest mistake or accident could lead to tragedy. This felt less like sex than the discharging of a duty. As a result he would tense up and miss the timing of an ejaculation or fail to become erect when necessary. This would only increase his doubts about himself.
Such mistakes never happened with his older girlfriend. She fully appreciated him. She always praised and encouraged him. After the one time he ejaculated prematurely, she was careful never to wear a white slip again. And not just slips: she stopped wearing any white lingerie at all.
That day she was wearing black lingerie-a matching top and bottom-as she performed fellatio on him, fully enjoying the hardness of his penis and the softness of his testicles. Tengo could see her breasts moving up and down, enfolded in the black lace of her bra, as she moved her mouth. To keep himself from coming too soon, he closed his eyes and thought about the Gilyaks.
They have no courts, and they do not know the meaning of “justice.” How hard it is for them to understand us may be seen merely from the fact that up till the present day they still do not fully understand the purpose of roads. Even where a road has already been laid, they will still journey through the taiga. One often sees them, their families and their dogs, picking their way in Indian file across a quagmire right by the roadway.
Tengo imagined the scene: the shabbily dressed Gilyaks walking through the thick forest in line beside the road with their dogs and women, hardly speaking. In their concepts of time, space, and possibility, roads did not exist. Rather than walk on a road, they probably gained a clearer grasp of their own raison d’tre by making their way quietly through the forest, in spite of the inconvenience.
×èòàòü áåñïëàòíî äðóãèå êíèãè:
