1Q84. Òûñÿ÷à Íåâåñòüñîò Âîñåìüäåñÿò ×åòûðå. Êíèãà 1. Àïðåëü–èþíü Ìóðàêàìè Õàðóêè
“Oh, yeah? I don’t remember a thing.”
“I thought you might not. I was worried about you. That’s why I’m calling,” Ayumi said. “I wanted to make sure you got home okay. I did manage to get you into a cab at Roppongi Crossing and tell the driver your address, though.”
Aomame sighed. “I don’t remember, but I guess I made it here. I woke up in my own bed.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“What are you doing now?”
“I’m working, what I’m supposed to be doing,” Ayumi said. “I’ve been riding around in a mini patrol and writing parking tickets since ten o’clock. I’m taking a break right now.”
“Very impressive,” Aomame said. She meant it.
“I’m a little sleep deprived, of course. Last night was fun, though! Best time I ever had, thanks to you.”
Aomame pressed her fingertips against her temples. “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember much of the second half. After you guys came to our room, I mean.”
“What a waste!” Ayumi said in all seriousness. “It was amazing! The four of us did everything. You wouldn’t believe it. It was like a porno movie. You and I played lesbians. And then-”
Aomame rushed to cut her off. “Never mind all that. I just want to know if I was using condoms. That’s what worries me. I can’t remember.”
“Of course you were. I’m very strict about that. I made absolutely sure, so don’t worry. I mean, when I’m not writing tickets I go around to high schools in the ward, holding assemblies for the girls and teaching them, like, the right way to put on condoms. I give very detailed instructions.”
“The right way to put on condoms?” Aomame was shocked. “What is a policewoman doing teaching stuff like that to high school kids?”
“Well, the original idea was for me to give information to prevent sex crimes, like the danger of date rape or what to do about gropers on the subway, but I figure as long as I’m at it, I can add my own personal message about condoms. A certain amount of student sex is unavoidable, so I tell them to make sure they avoid pregnancy and venereal disease. I can’t say it quite that directly, of course, with their teachers in the room. Anyhow, it’s like professional instinct with me. No matter how much I’ve been drinking, I never forget. So you don’t have to worry. You’re clean. ‘No condom, no penetration.’ That’s my motto.”
“Thank you,” Aomame said. “That’s a huge relief.”
“Hey, want to hear about all the stuff we did?”
“Maybe later,” Aomame said, expelling the congealed air that had been sitting in her lungs. “I’ll let you tell me the juicy details some other time. If you did it now, my head would split in two.”
“Okay, I get it. Next time I see you, then,” Ayumi said brightly. “You know, ever since I woke up I’ve been thinking what a great team we can make. Mind if I call you again? When I get in the mood for another night like last night, I mean.”
“Sure,” Aomame said.
“Oh, great.”
“Thanks for the call.”
“Take care of yourself,” Ayumi said, and hung up.
Her brain was much clearer by two o’clock, thanks to the black coffee and a nap. Her headache was gone, too, thankfully. All that was left of her hangover was a slight heavy feeling in her muscles. She left the apartment carrying her gym bag-without the special ice pick, of course, just a change of clothes and a towel. Tamaru met her at the front door as usual.
He showed her to a long, narrow sunroom. A large open window faced the garden, but it was covered by a lace curtain for privacy. A row of potted plants stood on the windowsill. Tranquil baroque music played from a small ceiling speaker-a sonata for recorder and harpsichord. In the middle of the room stood a massage table. The dowager was already lying facedown on top of it, wearing a white robe.
When Tamaru left the room, Aomame changed into looser clothing. The dowager turned her head to watch Aomame change from her perch on the massage table. Aomame was not concerned about being seen naked by a member of the same sex. It was an everyday occurrence for team athletes, and the dowager herself was nearly naked during a massage, which made checking the condition of her muscles that much easier. Aomame took off her cotton pants and blouse, putting on a matching jersey top and bottom. She folded her street clothing and set them down in a corner.
“You’re so firm and well toned,” the dowager said. Sitting up, she took off her robe, leaving only thin silk on top and bottom.
“Thank you,” Aomame said.
“I used to be built like you.”
“I can tell that,” Aomame said. Even now, in her seventies, the dowager retained physical traces of youth. Her body shape had not disintegrated, and even her breasts had a degree of firmness. Moderate eating and daily exercise had preserved her natural beauty. Aomame guessed that this had been supplemented with a touch of plastic surgery-some periodic wrinkle removal, and some lifting around the eyes and mouth.
“Your body is still quite lovely,” Aomame said.
The dowager’s lips curled slightly. “Thank you, but it’s nothing like it used to be.”
Aomame did not reply to this.
“I gained great pleasure from my body back then. I gave great pleasure with it, too, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Aomame said.
“And are you enjoying yours?”
“Now and then,” Aomame said.
“Now and then may not be enough,” the dowager said, lying facedown again. “You have to enjoy it while you’re still young. Enjoy it to the fullest. You can use the memories of what you did to warm your body after you get old and can’t do it anymore.”
Aomame recalled the night before. Her anus still retained a slight feeling of having been penetrated. Would memories of this actually warm her body in old age?
Aomame placed her hands on the dowager’s body and concentrated on stretching one set of muscles after another. Now the earlier remaining dullness in her own body was gone. Once she had changed her clothes and touched the dowager’s flesh, her nerves had sharpened into clarity.
Aomame’s fingers traced the dowager’s muscles as though following roads on a map. She remembered in detail the degree of each muscle’s tension and stiffness and resistance the way a pianist memorizes a long score. In matters concerning the body, Aomame possessed minute powers of memory. And if she should forget, her fingers remembered. If a muscle felt the slightest bit different than usual, she would stimulate it from various angles using varying degrees of strength, checking to see what kind of response she got from it, whether pain or pleasure or numbness. She would not simply loosen the knots in a pulled muscle but direct the dowager to move it using her own strength. Of course there were parts of the body that could not be relieved merely by her own strength, and for those parts, Aomame concentrated on stretching. What muscles most appreciated and welcomed, however, was daily self-help efforts.
“Does this hurt?” Aomame asked. The dowager’s groin muscles were far stiffer than usual-nastily so. Placing her hand in the hollow of the dowager’s pelvis, Aomame very slightly bent her thigh at a special angle.
“A lot,” the dowager said, grimacing.
“Good,” Aomame said. “It’s good that you feel pain. If it stopped hurting, you’d have something seriously wrong with you. This is going to hurt a little more. Can you stand it?”
“Yes, of course,” the dowager said. There was no need to ask her each time. She could tolerate a great deal of pain. Most of the time, she bore it in silence. She might grimace but she would never cry out. Aomame had often made big, strong men cry out in pain from her massages. She had to admire the dowager’s strength of will.
Setting her right elbow against the dowager like a fulcrum, Aomame bent her thigh still farther. The joint moved with a dull snap. The dowager gasped, but she made no sound with her voice.
“That should do it for you,” Aomame said. “You’ll feel a lot better.”
The dowager released a great sigh. Sweat glistened on her forehead. “Thank you,” she murmured.
Aomame spent a full hour unknotting muscles all over the dowager’s body, stimulating them, stretching them, and loosening joints. The process involved a good deal of pain, but without such pain nothing would be resolved. Both Aomame and the dowager knew this perfectly well, and so they spent the hour almost wordlessly. The recorder sonata ended at some point, and the CD player fell silent. All that could be heard was the calls of birds in the garden.
“My whole body feels so light now!” the dowager said after some time had passed. She was slumped facedown on the massage table, the large towel spread beneath her dark with sweat.
“I’m glad,” Aomame said.
“It’s such a help to have you with me! I’d hate for you to leave.”
“Don’t worry, I have no plans to go anywhere just yet.”
The dowager seemed to hesitate for a moment, and only after a brief silence she asked, “I don’t mean to get too personal, but do you have someone you’re in love with?”
“I do,” Aomame said.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Unfortunately, though, he’s not in love with me.”
“This may be an odd thing to ask, but why do you think he doesn’t love you? Objectively speaking, I think you are a fascinating young woman.”
“He doesn’t even know I exist.”
The dowager took a few minutes to think about what Aomame had said.
“Don’t you have any desire to convey to him the fact that you do exist?”
“Not at this point,” Aomame said.
“Is there something standing in the way-something preventing you from taking the initiative?”
“There are a few things, most of which have to do with my own feelings.”
The dowager looked at Aomame with apparent admiration. “I’ve met lots of odd people in my lifetime, but you may be one of the oddest.”
Aomame relaxed the muscles around her mouth somewhat. “There’s nothing odd about me. I’m just honest about my own feelings.”
“You mean that once you’ve decided on a rule, you follow it?”
“That’s it.”
“So you’re a little stubborn, and you tend to be short-tempered.”
“That may be true.”
“But last night you went kind of wild.”
Aomame blushed. “How do you know that?”
“Looking at your skin. And I can smell it. Your body still has traces of it. Getting old teaches you a lot.”
Aomame frowned momentarily. “I need that kind of thing. Now and then. I know it’s nothing to brag about.”
The dowager reached out and gently placed her hand on Aomame’s.
“Of course you need that kind of thing once in a while. Don’t worry, I’m not blaming you. It’s just that I feel you ought to have a more ordinary kind of happiness-marry someone you love, happy ending.”
“I wouldn’t mind that myself. But it won’t be so easy.”
“Why not?”
Aomame did not answer this. She had no simple explanation.
“If you ever feel like talking to someone about these personal matters, please talk to me,” the dowager said, withdrawing her hand from Aomame’s and toweling the sweat from her face. “About anything at all. I might have something I can do for you.”
“Thanks very much,” Aomame said.
“Some things can’t be solved just by going wild every now and then.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
“You are not doing anything that will destroy you?” the dowager said. “Nothing at all? You’re sure of that, are you?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Aomame said. She’s right. I’m not doing anything that is going to destroy me. Still, there is something quiet left behind. Like sediment in a bottle of wine.
Even now, Aomame still recalled the events surrounding the death of Tamaki Otsuka. It tore her apart to think that she could no longer see and talk to Tamaki. Tamaki was the first real friend she ever had. They could tell each other everything. Aomame had had no one like that before Tamaki, and no one since. Nor could anyone take her place. Had she never met Tamaki, Aomame would have led a far more miserable and gloomy life.
She and Tamaki were the same age. They had been teammates in the softball club of their public high school. From middle school into high school, Aomame had been passionately devoted to the game of softball. She had joined reluctantly at first when begged to help fill out a shorthanded team, and her early efforts were halfhearted at best, but eventually softball became her reason for living. She clung to the game the way a person clings to a post when a storm threatens to blow him away. And though she had never realized it before, Aomame was a born athlete. She became a central member of both her middle and high school teams and helped them breeze through one tournament after another. This gave her something very close to self-confidence (but only close: it was not, strictly speaking, self-confidence). Her greatest joy in life was knowing that her importance to the team was by no means small and that, as narrow as that world might be, she had been granted a definite place in it. Someone needed her.
Aomame was pitcher and cleanup batter-literally the central player of the team, both on offense and defense. Tamaki Otsuka played second base, the linchpin of the team, and she also served as captain. Tamaki was small but had great reflexes and knew how to use her brain. She could read all the complications of a situation instantaneously. With each pitch, she knew toward which side to incline her center of gravity, and as soon as the batter connected with the ball, she could gauge the direction of the hit and move to cover the proper position. Not a lot of infielders could do that. Her powers of judgment had saved the team from many a tight spot. She was not a distance hitter like Aomame, but her batting was sharp and precise, and she was quick on her feet. She was also an outstanding leader. She brought the team together as a unit, planned strategy, gave everyone valuable advice, and fired them up on the field. Her coaching was tough, but she won the other players’ confidence, as a result of which the team grew stronger day by day. They went as far as the championship game in the Tokyo regional playoffs and even made it to the national interscholastic tournament. Both Aomame and Tamaki were chosen to be on the Kanto area all-star team.
Aomame and Tamaki recognized each other’s talents and-without either taking the initiative-naturally drew close until each had become the other’s best friend. They spent long hours together on team trips to away games. They told each other about their backgrounds, concealing nothing. When she was a fifth grader, Aomame had made up her mind to break with her parents and had gone to live with an uncle on her mother’s side. The uncle’s family understood her situation and welcomed her warmly as a member of the household, but it was, ultimately, not her family. She felt lonely and hungry for love. Unsure where she was to find a purpose or meaning to her life, she passed one formless day after another. Tamaki came from a wealthy household of some social standing, but her parents’ terrible relationship had turned the home into a wasteland. Her father almost never came home, and her mother often fell into states of mental confusion. She would suffer from terrible headaches, and was unable to leave her bed sometimes for days at a time. Tamaki and her younger brother were all but ignored. They often ate at neighborhood restaurants or fast-food places or made do with ready-made boxed lunches. Each girl, then, had her reasons for becoming obsessed with softball.
Given all their problems, the two lonely girls had a mountain of things to tell each other. When they took a trip together one summer, they touched each other’s naked bodies in the hotel bed. It happened just that one time, spontaneously, and neither of them ever talked about it. But because it had happened, their relationship grew all the deeper and all the more conspiratorial.
Aomame kept playing softball after her graduation from high school when she went on to a private college of physical education. Having won a national reputation as an outstanding softball player, she was recruited and given a special scholarship. In college, too, she was a key member of the team. While devoting much energy to softball, she was also interested in sports medicine and started studying it in earnest, along with martial arts.
Tamaki entered the law program in a first-rank private university. She stopped playing softball upon graduating from high school. For an outstanding student like Tamaki, softball was merely a phase. She intended to take the bar exam and become a lawyer. Though their paths in life diverged, Aomame and Tamaki remained best friends. Aomame lived in a college dormitory with free room and board while Tamaki continued commuting from her family home. The place was as much of an emotional wasteland as ever, but at least it gave her economic freedom. The two would meet once a week to share a meal and catch up. They never ran out of things to talk about.
Tamaki lost her virginity in the autumn of her first year in college. The man was one year older than Tamaki, a fellow member of the college tennis club. He invited her to his room after a club party, and there he forced her to have sex with him. Tamaki had liked this man, which was why she had accepted the invitation to his room, but the violence with which he forced her into having sex and his narcissistic, self-centered manner came as a terrible shock. She quit the tennis club and went into a period of depression. The experience left her with a profound feeling of powerlessness. Her appetite disappeared, and she lost fifteen pounds. All she had wanted from the man was a degree of understanding and sympathy. If he had shown a trace of it and had taken the time to prepare her, the mere physical giving of herself to him would have been no great problem. She found it impossible to understand his actions. Why did he have to become so violent? It had been absolutely unnecessary!
Aomame comforted Tamaki and advised her to find a way to punish him, but Tamaki could not agree. Her own carelessness had been a part of it, she said, and it was too late now to lodge any complaints. “I bear some responsibility for going to his room alone,” she said. “All I can do now is forget about it.” But it was painfully clear to Aomame how deeply her friend had been wounded by the incident. This was not about the mere loss of her virginity but rather the sanctity of an individual human being’s soul. No one had the right to invade such sacred precincts with muddy feet. And once it happened, that sense of powerlessness could only keep gnawing away at a person.
Aomame decided to take it upon herself to punish the man. She got his address from Tamaki and went to his apartment carrying a softball bat in a plastic blueprint tube. Tamaki was away for the day in Kanazawa, attending a relative’s memorial service or some such thing, which was a perfect alibi. Aomame checked to be sure the man was not at home. She used a screwdriver and hammer to break the lock on his door. Then she wrapped a towel around the bat several times to dampen the noise and proceeded to smash everything in the apartment that was smashable-the television, the lamps, the clocks, the records, the toaster, the vases: she left nothing whole. She cut the telephone cord with scissors, cracked the spines of all the books and scattered their pages, spread the entire contents of a toothpaste tube and shaving cream canister on the rug, poured Worcestershire sauce on the bed, took notebooks from a drawer and ripped them to pieces, broke every pen and pencil in two, shattered every lightbulb, slashed all the curtains and cushions with a kitchen knife, took scissors to every shirt in the dresser, poured a bottle of ketchup into the underwear and sock drawers, pulled out the refrigerator fuse and threw it out a window, ripped the flapper out of the toilet tank and tore it apart, and crushed the bathtub’s showerhead. The destruction was utterly deliberate and complete. The room looked very much like the recent news photos she had seen of the streets of Beirut after the shelling.
Tamaki was an intelligent girl (with grades in school that Aomame could never hope to match), and in softball she had always been on her toes. Whenever Aomame got herself into a difficult situation on the mound, Tamaki would run over to her, offer her a few quick words of advice, flash her a smile, pat her on the butt with her glove, and go back to her position in the infield. Her view of things was broad, her heart was warm, and she had a good sense of humor. She put a great deal of effort into her schoolwork and could speak with real eloquence. Had she continued with her studies, she would undoubtedly have made a fine lawyer.
In the presence of men, however, Tamaki’s powers of judgment fell totally to pieces. Tamaki liked handsome men. She was a sucker for good looks. As Aomame saw it, this tendency of her friend’s ranked as a sickness. Tamaki could meet men of marvelous character or with superior talents who were eager to woo her, but if their looks did not meet her standards, she was utterly unmoved. For some reason, the ones who aroused her interest were always sweet-faced men with nothing inside. And when it came to men, she would stubbornly resist anything Aomame might have to say. Tamaki was always ready to accept-and even respect-Aomame’s opinions on other matters, but if Aomame criticized her choice of boyfriend, Tamaki simply refused to listen. Aomame eventually gave up trying to advise her. She didn’t want to quarrel with Tamaki and destroy their friendship. Ultimately, it was Tamaki’s life. All Aomame could do was let her live it. Tamaki became involved with many men during her college years, and each one led to trouble. They would always betray her, wound her, and abandon her, leaving Tamaki each time in a state close to madness. Twice she resorted to abortions. Where relations with the opposite sex were concerned, Tamaki was truly a born victim.
Aomame never had a steady boyfriend. She was asked out on dates now and then, and she thought that a few of the men were not at all bad, but she never let herself become deeply involved.
Tamaki asked her, “Are you going to stay a virgin the rest of your life?”
“I’m too busy for that,” Aomame would say. “I can barely keep my life going day to day. I don’t have time to be fooling around with a boyfriend.”
After graduation, Tamaki stayed on in graduate school to prepare for the bar exam. Aomame went to work for a company that made sports drinks and health food, and she played for the company’s softball team. Tamaki continued to commute from home, while Aomame went to live in the company dorm in Yoyogi Hachiman. As in their student days, they would meet for a meal on weekends and talk.
When she was twenty-four, Tamaki married a man two years her senior. As soon as they became engaged, she left graduate school and gave up on continuing her legal studies. He insisted that she do so. Aomame met Tamaki’s fianc only once. He came from a wealthy family, and, just as she had suspected, his features were handsome but utterly lacking in depth. His hobby was sailing. He was a smooth talker and clever in his own way, but there was no substance to his personality, and his words carried no weight. He was, in other words, a typical Tamaki-type boyfriend. But there was more about him, something ominous, that Aomame sensed. She disliked him from the start. And he probably didn’t like her much, either.
“This marriage will never work,” Aomame said to Tamaki. She hated to offer unwanted advice again, but this was marriage, not playing house. As Tamaki’s best and oldest friend, Aomame could not keep silent. This led to their first violent argument. Aomame’s opposition to her marriage made Tamaki hysterical, and she screamed harsh words at Aomame, among them words that Aomame least wanted to hear. Aomame did not attend the wedding.
The two of them made up before long. As soon as she came back from her honeymoon, Tamaki showed up at Aomame’s without warning and apologized for her behavior. “I want you to forget everything I said that time,” she pleaded. “I wasn’t myself. I was thinking about you all during my honeymoon.” Aomame told her not to worry, that she had already forgotten everything. They held each other close. Soon they were joking and laughing.
But still, after the wedding, there was a sudden decline in the number of occasions when Aomame and Tamaki could meet face-to-face. They exchanged frequent letters and talked on the telephone, but Tamaki seemed to find it difficult to arrange times when the two of them could get together. Her excuse was that she had so much to do at home. “Being a full-time housewife is hard work,” she would say, but there was something in her tone of voice suggesting that her husband did not want her meeting people outside the house. Also, Tamaki and her husband were living in the same compound as his parents, which seemed to make it difficult for her to go out. Aomame was never invited to Tamaki’s new home.
Her married life was going well, Tamaki would tell Aomame whenever she had the chance. “My husband is gentle with me, and his parents are very kind. We’re quite comfortable. We often take the yacht out of Enoshima on weekends. I’m not sorry I stopped studying law. I was feeling a lot of pressure over the bar exam. Maybe this ordinary kind of life was the right thing for me all along. I’ll probably have a child soon, and then I’ll really be just a typical boring mother. I might not have any time for you!” Tamaki’s voice was always cheery, and Aomame could find no reason to doubt her words. “That’s great,” she would say, and she really did think it was great. She would certainly prefer to have her premonitions miss the mark than to be on target. Something inside Tamaki had finally settled down where it belonged, she guessed. Or so she tried to believe.
Aomame had no other real friends; as her contact with Tamaki diminished, she became increasingly unsure what to do with each passing day. She could no longer concentrate on softball as she used to. Her very feeling for the game seemed to wane as Tamaki grew more distant from her life. Aomame was twenty-five but still a virgin. Now and then, when she felt unsettled, she would masturbate, but she didn’t find this life especially lonely. Deep personal relationships with people were a source of pain for Aomame. Better to keep to herself.
Tamaki committed suicide on a windy late-autumn day three days before her twenty-sixth birthday. She hanged herself at home. Her husband found her the next evening when he returned from a business trip.
“We had no domestic problems, and I never heard of any dissatisfaction on her part. I can’t imagine what would have caused her to take her own life,” the husband told the police. His parents said much the same thing.
But they were lying. The husband’s constant sadistic violence had left Tamaki covered with scars both physical and mental. His actions toward her had verged on the monomaniacal, and his parents generally knew the truth. The police could also tell what had happened from the autopsy, but their suspicions never became public. They called the husband in and questioned him, but the case was clearly a suicide, and at the time of death the husband was hundreds of miles away in Hokkaido. He was never charged with a crime. Tamaki’s younger brother subsequently revealed all this to Aomame in confidence.
The violence had been there from the beginning, he said, and it only grew more insistent and more gruesome with the passage of time. But Tamaki had been unable to escape from her nightmare. She had not said a word about it to Aomame because she knew what the answer would be if she asked for advice: Get out of that house now. But that was the one thing she could not do.
At the very end, just before she killed herself, Tamaki wrote a long letterto Aomame. It started by saying that she had been wrong and Aomame had been right from the start. She closed the letter this way:
I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don’t know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prison. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key. This marriage was of course a mistake, just as you said. But the deepest problem is not in my husband or in my married life. It is inside me. I deserve all the pain I am feeling. I can’t blame anyone else. You are my only friend, the only person in the world I can trust. But I am beyond saving now. Please remember me always if you can. If only we could have gone on playing softball together forever!
Aomame felt horribly sick as she read Tamaki’s letter. Her body would not stop trembling. She called Tamaki’s house several times, but no one took the call. All she got was the machine. She took the train to Setagaya and walked to Tamaki’s house in Okusawa. It was on a large plot of land behind a high wall. Aomame rang the intercom bell, but no one answered this, either. There was only the sound of a dog barking inside. All she could do was give up and go home. She had no way of knowing it, but Tamaki had already drawn her last breath. She was hanging alone from a rope she had tied to the stairway handrail. Inside the hushed house, the telephone’s bell and the front-door chime had been ringing in emptiness.
Aomame received the news of Tamaki’s death with little sense of surprise. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she must have been expecting it. She felt no sadness welling up. She gave the caller a perfunctory answer, hung up, and settled into a chair. After she had been sitting there for a considerable length of time, she felt all the liquids in her body pouring out of her. She could not get out of the chair for a very long time. She telephoned her company to say she felt sick and would not be in for several days. She stayed in her apartment, not eating, not sleeping, hardly drinking even water. She did not attend the funeral. She felt as if, with a distinct click, something had switched places inside her. This marks a borderline, she felt strongly. From now on, I will no longer be the person I was.
Aomame resolved in her heart to punish the man for what he had done. Whatever happens, I must be sure to present him with the end of the world. Otherwise, he will do the same thing to someone else.
Aomame spent a great deal of time formulating a meticulous plan. She had already learned that a needle thrust into a certain point on the back of the neck at a certain angle could kill a person instantly. It was not something that just anyone could do, of course. But she could do it. First, she would have to train herself to find the extremely subtle point by touch in the shortest possible time. Next she would have to have an instrument suited to such a task. She obtained the necessary tools and, over time, fashioned for herself a special implement that looked like a small, slender ice pick. Its needle was as sharp and cold and pointed as a merciless idea. She found many ways to undertake the necessary training, and she did so with great dedication. When she was satisfied with her preparation, she put her plan into action. Unhesitatingly, coolly, and precisely, she brought the kingdom down upon the man. And when she was finished she even intoned a prayer, its phrases falling from her lips almost as a matter of reflex:
O Lord in Heaven, may Thy name be praised in utmost purity for ever and ever, and may Thy kingdom come to us. Please forgive our many sins, and bestow Thy blessings upon our humble pathways. Amen.
It was after this that Aomame came to feel an intense periodic craving for men’s bodies.
CHAPTER 14
Komatsu and Tengo had arranged to meet in the usual place, the caf near Shinjuku Station. Komatsu arrived twenty minutes late as always. Komatsu never came on time, and Tengo was never late. This was standard practice for them. Komatsu was carrying his leather briefcase and wearing his usual tweed jacket over a navy-blue polo shirt.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Komatsu said, but he didn’t seem at all sorry. He appeared to be in an especially good mood, his smile like a crescent moon at dawn.
Tengo merely nodded without answering.
Komatsu took the chair across from him and said, “Sorry to hurry you. I’m sure it was tough.”
“I don’t mean to exaggerate, but I didn’t know whether I was alive or dead these past ten days,” Tengo said.
“You did great, though. You got permission from Fuka-Eri’s guardian, and you finished rewriting the story. It’s an amazing accomplishment for somebody who lives in his own little world. Now I see you in a whole new light.”
Tengo ignored Komatsu’s praise. “Did you read the report-thing I wrote on Fuka-Eri’s background? The long one.”
“I sure did. Of course. Every word. Thanks for writing it. She’s got a-what should I say?-a complicated history. It could be part of a roman-fleuve. But what really surprised me was to learn that Professor Ebisuno is her guardian. What a small world! Did he say anything about me?”
“About you?”
“Yes, did the Professor say anything about me?”
“No, nothing special.”
“That’s strange,” Komatsu said, evidently quite puzzled by this. “Professor Ebisuno and I once worked together. I used to go to his university office to pick up his manuscripts. It was a really long time ago, of course, when I was just getting started as an editor.”
“Maybe he forgot, if it was such a long time ago. He asked me to tell him about you-what sort of person you are.”
“No way,” Komatsu said with a frown and a shake of the head. “That’s impossible. He never forgets a thing. His memory is so good it’s almost frightening. He and I talked about all kinds of stuff, I’m sure he remembers… Anyway, he’s not an easy guy to deal with. And according to your report, the situation surrounding Fuka-Eri is not going to be easy to deal with, either.”
“That’s putting it mildly. It’s like we’re holding a time bomb. Fuka-Eri is in no way ordinary. She’s not just another pretty seventeen-year-old. If the novella makes a big splash, the media are going to pounce on this and reveal all kinds of tasty facts. It’ll be terrible.”
“True, it could be a real Pandora’s box,” Komatsu said, but he was still smiling.
“So should we cancel the plan?”
“Cancel the plan?!”
“Yes, it’ll be too big a deal, and too dangerous. Let’s put the original manuscript back in the pile.”
“It’s not that easy, I’m afraid. Your Air Chrysalis rewrite has already gone out to the printers. They’re making the galleys. As soon as it’s printed it’ll go to the editor in chief and the head of publications and the four members of the selection committee. It’s too late to say, ‘Excuse me, that was a mistake. Please give it back and pretend you never saw it.’ ”
Tengo sighed.
“What’s done is done. We can’t turn the clock back,” Komatsu said. He put a Marlboro between his lips, narrowed his eyes, and lit the cigarette with the caf’s matches. “I’ll think about what to do next. You don’t have to think about anything, Tengo. Even if Air Chrysalis takes the prize, we’ll keep Fuka-Eri under wraps. She’ll be the enigmatic girl writer who doesn’t want to appear in public. I can pull it off. As the editor in charge of the story, I’ll be her spokesman. Don’t worry, I’ve got it all figured out.”
“I don’t doubt your abilities, but Fuka-Eri is no ordinary girl. She’s not the type to shut up and do as she’s told. If she makes up her mind to do something, she’ll do it. She doesn’t hear what she doesn’t want to hear. That’s how she’s made. It’s not going to be as easy as you seem to think.”
omatsu kept silent and went on turning over the matchbox in his hand. Then he said, “In any case, Tengo, we’ve come this far. All we can do now is make up our minds to keep going. First of all, your rewrite of Air Chrysalis is marvelous, really wonderful, far exceeding my expectations. It’s almost perfect. I have no doubt that it’s going to take the new writers’ prize and cause a big sensation. It’s too late now for us to bury it. If you ask me, burying a work like that would be a crime. And as I said before, things are moving full speed ahead.”
“A crime?!” Tengo exclaimed, looking straight at Komatsu.
“Well, take these words, for example,” Komatsu said. “ ‘Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.’ ”
“What is that?”
“Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Have you ever read Aristotle?”
“Almost nothing.”
“You ought to. I’m sure you’d like it. Whenever I run out of things to read, I read Greek philosophy. I never get tired of the stuff. There’s always something new to learn.”
“So what’s the point of the quotation?”
“The conclusion of things is the good. The good is, in other words, the conclusion at which all things arrive. Let’s leave doubt for tomorrow,” Komatsu said. “That is the point.”
“What does Aristotle have to say about the Holocaust?”
Komatsu’s crescent-moon smile further deepened. “Here, Aristotle is mainly talking about things like art and scholarship and crafts.”
Tengo had far more than a passing acquaintance with Komatsu. He knew the man’s public face, and he had seen his private face as well. Komatsu appeared to be a lone wolf in the literary industry who had always survived by doing as he pleased. Most people were taken in by that i. But if you observed him closely, taking into account the full context of his actions, you could tell that his moves were highly calculated. He was like a player of chess or shogi who could see several moves ahead. It was true that he liked to plot outlandish schemes, but he was also careful to draw a line beyond which he would not stray. He was, if anything, a high-strung man whose more outrageous gestures were mostly for show.
Komatsu was careful to protect himself with various kinds of insurance. For example, he wrote a literary column once a week in the evening edition of a major newspaper. In it, he would shower writers with praise or blame. The blame was always expressed in highly acerbic prose, which was a specialty of his. The column appeared under a made-up name, but everyone in the industry knew who was writing it. No one liked being criticized in the newspaper, of course, so writers tried their best not to ruffle his feathers. When asked by him to write something, they avoided turning him down whenever possible. Otherwise, there was no telling what might be said about them in the column.
Tengo was not fond of Komatsu’s more calculating side, the way he displayed contempt for the literary world while exploiting its system to his best advantage. Komatsu possessed outstanding editorial instincts, and he had been enormously helpful to Tengo. His advice on the writing of fiction was almost always valuable. But Tengo was careful to keep a certain distance between them. He was determined not to draw too close to Komatsu and then have the ladder pulled out from under him for overstepping certain boundaries. In that sense, Tengo, too, was a cautious individual.
“As I said a minute ago, your rewrite of Air Chrysalis is close to perfect. A great job,” Komatsu continued. “There’s just one part-really, just one-that I’d like to have you redo if possible. Not now, of course. It’s fine at the ‘new writer’ level. But after the committee picks it to win the prize and just before the magazine prints it, at that stage I’d like you to fix it.”
“What part?” Tengo asked.
“When the Little People finish making the air chrysalis, there are two moons. The girl looks up to find two moons in the sky. Remember that part?”
“Of course I remember it.”
“In my opinion, you haven’t written enough about the two moons. I’d like you to give it more concrete detail. That’s my only request.”
“It is a little terse, maybe. I just didn’t want to overdo it with detail and destroy the flow of Fuka-Eri’s original.”
Komatsu raised the hand that had a cigarette tucked between the fingers. “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 precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.”
“I get it,” Tengo said. Komatsu’s request made a lot of sense. “I’ll fill out the part where the two moons appear.”
“Good. Then it will be perfect,” Komatsu said. He crushed out his cigarette.
“I’m always glad to have you praise my work,” Tengo said, “but it’s not so simple for me this time.”
“You have suddenly matured,” Komatsu said slowly, as if pausing for em. “You have matured both as a manipulator of language and as an author. It should be simple enough for you to be glad about that. I’m sure rewriting Air Chrysalis taught you a lot about the writing of fiction. It should be a big help the next time you write your own work.”
“If there is a next time,” Tengo said.
A big grin crossed Komatsu’s face. “Don’t worry. You did your job. Now it’s my turn. You can go back to the bench and take it easy, just watch the game unfold.”
The waitress arrived and poured cold water into their glasses. Tengo drank half of his before realizing that he had absolutely no desire for water. He asked Komatsu, “Was it Aristotle who said the human soul is composed of reason, will, and desire?”
“No, that was Plato. Aristotle and Plato were as different as Mel Torm and Bing Crosby. In any case, things were a lot simpler in the old days,” Komatsu said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to imagine reason, will, and desire engaged in a fierce debate around a table?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea who would lose that one.”
“What I like about you,” Komatsu said, raising an index finger, “is your sense of humor.”
This is not humor, Tengo thought, but he kept it to himself.
After leaving Komatsu, Tengo walked to Kinokuniya, bought several books, and started reading them over a beer in a nearby bar. This was the sort of moment in which he should have been able to relax most completely.
On this particular night, though, he could not seem to concentrate on his books. The recurring i of his mother floated vaguely before his eyes and would not go away. She had lowered the straps of her white slip from her shoulders, revealing her well-shaped breasts, and was letting a man suck on them. The man was not his father. He was larger and more youthful, and had better features. The infant Tengo was asleep in his crib, eyes closed, his breathing regular. A look of ecstasy suffused his mother’s face while the man sucked on her breasts, a look very much like his older girlfriend’s when she was having an orgasm.
Once, out of curiosity, Tengo had asked his girlfriend to try wearing a white slip for him. “Glad to,” she replied with a smile. “I’ll wear one next time if you’d like that. Do you have any other requests? I’ll do anything you want. Just ask. Don’t be embarrassed.”
“Can you wear a white blouse, too? A very simple one.”
She showed up the following week wearing a white blouse over a white slip. He took her blouse off, lowered the shoulder straps of the slip, and sucked on her breasts. He adopted the same position and angle as the man in his vision, and when he did this he felt a slightdizziness. His mind misted over, and he lost track of the order of things. In his lower body there was a heavy sensation that rapidly swelled, and no sooner was he aware of it than he shuddered with a violent ejaculation.
“Tengo, what’s wrong? Did you come already?” she asked, astounded.
He himself was not sure what had just happened, but then he realized that he had gotten semen on the lower part of her slip.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t planning to do that.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said cheerily. “I can rinse it right off. It’s just the usual stuff. I’m glad it’s not soy sauce or red wine!”
She took the slip off, scrubbed the semen-smeared part at the bathroom sink, and hung it over the shower rod to dry.
“Was that too strong?” she asked with a gentle smile, rubbing Tengo’s belly with the palm of her hand. “You like white slips, huh, Tengo?”
“Not exactly,” Tengo said, but he could not explain to her his real reason for having made the request.
“Just let big sister know any time you’ve got a fantasy you want to play out, honey. I’ll go along with anything. I just love fantasies! Everybody needs some kind of fantasy to go on living, don’t you think? You want me to wear a white slip next time, too?”
Tengo shook his head. “No, thanks, once was enough.”
Tengo often wondered if the young man sucking on his mother’s breasts in his vision might be his biological father. This was because Tengo in no way resembled the man who was supposed to be his father-the stellar NHK collections agent. Tengo was a tall, strapping man with a broad forehead, narrow nose, and tightly balled ears. His father was short and squat and utterly unimpressive. He had a narrow forehead, flat nose, and pointed ears like a horse’s. Virtually every facial feature of his contrasted with Tengo’s. Where Tengo had a generally relaxed and generous look, his father appeared nervous and tightfisted. Comparing the two of them, people often openly remarked that they did not look like father and son.
Still, it was not their different facial features that made it difficult for Tengo to identify with his father; rather, it was their psychological makeup and tendencies. His father showed no sign at all of what might be called intellectual curiosity. True, his father had not had a decent education. Having been born in poverty, he had not had the opportunity to establish in himself an orderly intellectual system. Tengo felt a degree of pity regarding his father’s circumstances. But still, a basic desire to obtain knowledge at a universal level-which Tengo assumed to be a more or less natural urge in people-was lacking in the man. There was a certain practical wisdom at work in him that enabled him to survive, but Tengo could discover no hint of a willingness in his father to raise himself up, to deepen himself, to view a wider, larger world.
But Tengo’s father never seemed to suffer discomfort from the narrowness and the stagnant air of his cramped little world. Tengo never once saw him pick up a book at home. They never had newspapers (watching the regular NHK news broadcasts was enough, he would say). He had absolutely no interest in music or movies, and he never took a trip. The only thing that seemed to interest him was his assigned collection route. He would make a map of the area, mark it with colored pens, and examine it whenever he had a spare moment, the way a biologist classifies chromosomes.
By contrast, Tengo was regarded as a math prodigy from early childhood. His grades in arithmetic were always outstanding. He could solve high school math problems by the time he was in the third grade. He won high marks in the other sciences as well without any apparent effort. And whenever he had a spare moment, he would devour books. Hugely curious about everything, he would absorb knowledge from a broad range of fields with all the efficiency of a power shovel scooping earth. Whenever he looked at his father, he found it inconceivable that half of the genes that made his existence possible could come from this narrow, uneducated man.
My real father must be somewhere else. This was the conclusion that Tengo reached in boyhood. Like the unfortunate children in a Dickens novel, Tengo must have been led by strange circumstances to be raised by this man. Such a possibility was both a nightmare and a great hope. He became obsessed with Dickens after reading Oliver Twist, plowing through every Dickens volume in the library. As he traveled through the world of the stories, he steeped himself in reimagined versions of his own life. The reimaginings (or obsessive fantasies) in his head grew ever longer and more complex. They followed a single pattern, but with infinite variations. In all of them, Tengo would tell himself that this was not the place where he belonged. He had been mistakenly locked in a cage. Someday his real parents, guided by sheer good fortune, would find him. They would rescue him from this cramped and ugly cage and bring him back where he belonged. Then he would have the most beautiful, peaceful, and free Sundays imaginable.
Tengo’s father exulted over the boy’s outstanding schoolwork. He prided himself on Tengo’s excellent grades, and boasted of them to people in the neighborhood. At the same time, however, he showed a certain displeasure regarding Tengo’s brightness and talent. Often when Tengo was at his desk, studying, his father would interrupt him, seemingly on purpose. He would order the boy to do chores or nag Tengo about his supposedly offensive behavior. The content of his father’s nagging was always the same: he was running himself ragged every day, covering huge distances and sometimes enduring people’s curses as a collections agent, while Tengo did nothing but take it easy all the time, living in comfort. “They had me working my tail off around the house when I was your age, and my father and older brother would beat me black and blue for anything at all. They never gave me enough food, and treated me like an animal. I don’t want you thinking you’re so special just because you got a few good grades.” His father would go on like this endlessly.
This man may be envious of me, Tengo began to think after a certain point. He’s jealous-either of me as a person or of the life I’m leading. But does a father really feel jealousy toward his own son? As a child, Tengo did not judge his father, but he could not help feeling a pathetic kind of meanness that emanated from his father’s words and deeds-and this he found almost physically unbearable. Often he felt that this man was not only envious of him, but that he actually hated something in his son. It was not that his father hated Tengo as a person but rather that he hated something inside Tengo, something that he could not forgive.
Mathematics gave Tengo an effective means of retreat. By fleeing into a world of numerical expression, he was able to escape from the troublesome cage of reality. As a little boy, he noticed that he could easily move into a mathematical world with the flick of a switch in his head. He remained free as long as he actively explored that realm of infinite consistency. He walked down the gigantic building’s twisted corridor, opening one numbered door after another. Each time a new spectacle opened up before him, the ugly traces of the real world would dissipate and then simply disappear. The world governed by numerical expression was, for him, a legitimate and always safe hiding place. As long as he stayed in that world, he could forget or ignore the rules and burdens forced upon him by the real world.
Where mathematics was a magnificent imaginary building, the world of story as represented by Dickens was like a deep, magical forest for Tengo. When mathematics stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, the forest spread out beneath his gaze in silence, its dark, sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In the forest there were no maps, no numbered doorways.
In elementary and middle school, Tengo was utterly absorbed by the world of mathematics. Its clarity and absolute freedom enthralled him, and he also needed them to survive. Once he entered adolescence, however, he began to feel increasingly that this might not be enough. There was no problem as long as he was visiting the world of math, but whenever he returned to the real world (as return he must), he found himself in the same miserable cage. Nothing had improved. Rather, his shackles felt even heavier. So then, what good was mathematics? Wasn’t it just a temporary means of escape that made his real-life situation even worse?
As his doubts increased, Tengo began deliberately to put some distance between himself and the world of mathematics, and instead the forest of story began to exert a stronger pull on his heart. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics. Why should that have been? After much deep thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear the relationships of things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution. That was how it differed from math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. Depending on the nature and direction of the problem, a solution could be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. At times it lacked coherence and served no immediate practical purpose. But it would contain a possibility. Someday he might be able to decipher the spell. That possibility would gently warm his heart from within.
The older he became, the more Tengo was drawn to this kind of narrative suggestion. Mathematics was a great joy for him even now, as an adult. When he was teaching students at the cram school, the same joy he had felt as a child would come welling up naturally. To share the joy of that conceptual freedom with someone was a wonderful thing. But Tengo was no longer able to lose himself so unreservedly in a world of numerical expression. For he knew that no amount of searching in that world would give him the solution he was really looking for.
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