Fuka-Eri said nothing, but a small wrinkle appeared between her brows. Her lips were clamped shut.
“Are ‘they’ the Little People?” Tengo asked.
Still no answer.
“Are ‘they’ somebody who might get mad at you if your story got into print and was released to the public and people started talking about them?”
Fuka-Eri did not answer this question, either. Her eyes were still not focused on any one point. He waited until he was quite sure there would be no answer, and then he asked another question.
“Can you tell me about your ‘Professor’? What’s he like?”
Fuka-Eri gave him a puzzled look, as if to say, What is this person talking about? Then she said, “You will meet the Professor.”
“Yes, of course,” Tengo said. “You’re absolutely right. I’m going to meet him in any case. I should just meet him and decide for myself.”
At Kokubunji Station, a group of elderly people dressed in hiking gear got on. There were ten of them altogether, five men and five women in their late sixties and early seventies. They carried backpacks and wore hats and were chattering away like schoolchildren. All carried water bottles, some strapped to their waists, others tucked in the pockets of their backpacks. Tengo wondered if he could possibly reach that age with such a sense of enjoyment. Then he shook his head. No way. He imagined these old folks standing proudly on some mountaintop, drinking from their water bottles.
In spite of their small size, the Little People drank prodigious amounts of water. They preferred to drink rainwater or water from the nearby stream, rather than tap water. And so the girl would scoop water from the stream during daylight hours and give it to the Little People to drink. Whenever it rained, she would collect water in a bucket because the Little People preferred rainwater to water gathered from the stream. They were therefore grateful for the girl’s kindness.
Tengo noticed he was having trouble staying focused on any one thought. This was not a good sign. He felt an internal confusion starting. An ominous sandstorm was developing somewhere on the plane of his emotions. This often happened on Sundays.
“Is something wrong,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark. She seemed able to sense the tension that Tengo was feeling.
“I wonder if I can do it.”
“Do what.”
“If I can say what I need to say.”
“Say what you need to say,” Fuka-Eri asked. She seemed to be having trouble understanding what he meant.
“To the Professor.”
“Say what you need to say to the Professor,” she repeated.
After some hesitation, Tengo confessed. “I keep thinking that things are not going to go smoothly, that everything is going to fall apart,” he said.
Fuka-Eri turned in her seat until she was looking directly at Tengo. “Afraid,” she asked.
“What am I afraid of?” Tengo rephrased her question.
She nodded silently.
“Maybe I’m just afraid of meeting new people. Especially on a Sunday morning.”
“Why Sunday,” Fuka-Eri asked.
Tengo’s armpits started sweating. He felt a suffocating tightness in the chest. Meeting new people and having new things thrust upon him. And having his present existence threatened by them.
“Why Sunday,” Fuka-Eri asked again.
Tengo recalled his boyhood Sundays. After they had walked all day, his father would take him to the restaurant across from the station and tell him to order anything he liked. It was a kind of reward for him, and virtually the only time the frugal pair would eat out. His father would even order a beer (though he almost never drank). Despite the offer, Tengo never felt the slightest bit hungry on these occasions. Ordinarily, he was hungry all the time, but he never enjoyed anything he ate on Sunday. To eat every mouthful of what he had ordered—which he was absolutely required to do—was nothing but torture for him. Sometimes he even came close to vomiting. This was what Sunday meant for Tengo as a boy.
Fuka-Eri looked into Tengo’s eyes in search of something. Then she reached out and took his hand. This startled him, but he tried not to let it show on his face.
Fuka-Eri kept her gentle grip on Tengo’s hand until the train arrived in Kunitachi Station, near the end of the line. Her hand was unexpectedly hard and smooth, neither hot nor cold. It was maybe half the size of Tengo’s hand.
“Don’t be afraid. It’s not just another Sunday,” she said, as if stating a well-known fact.
Tengo thought this might have been the first time he heard her speak two sentences at once.
CHAPTER 9
Aomame
NEW SCENERY, NEW RULES
Aomame went to the ward library closest to home. At the reference desk, she requested the compact edition of the newspaper for the three-month period from September to November, 1981. The clerk pointed out that they had such editions for four newspapers—the Asahi, the Yomiuri, the Mainichi, and the Nikkei—and asked which she preferred. The bespectacled middle-aged woman seemed less a regular librarian than a housewife doing part-time work. She was not especially fat, but her wrists were puffy, almost ham-like.
Aomame said she didn’t care which newspaper they gave her to read: they were all pretty much the same.
“That may be true, but I really need you to decide which you would like,” the woman said in a flat voice meant to repel any further argument. Aomame had no intention of arguing, so she chose the Mainichi, for no special reason. Sitting in a cubicle, she opened her notebook and, ballpoint pen in hand, started scanning one article after another.
No especially major events had occurred in the early autumn of 1981. Charles and Diana had married that July, and the aftereffects were still in evidence—reports on where they went, what they did, what she wore, what her accessories were like. Aomame of course knew about the wedding, but she had no particular interest in it, and she could not figure out why people were so deeply concerned about the fate of an English prince and princess. Charles looked less like a prince than a high school physics teacher with stomach trouble.
In Poland, Lech Walesa’s “Solidarity” movement was deepening its confrontation with the government, and the Soviet government was expressing its “concern.” More directly, the Soviets were threatening to send in tanks, just as they had prior to the 1968 “Prague Spring,” if the Polish government failed to bring things under control. Aomame generally remembered these events as well. She knew that the Soviet government eventually gave up any thought of interfering in the situation, so there was no need for her to read these articles closely. One thing did catch her attention, though. When President Reagan issued a declaration meant to discourage the Soviets from intervening in Polish internal affairs, he was quoted as saying, “We hope that the tense situation in Poland will not interfere with joint U.S.-Soviet plans to construct a moon base.” Construct a moon base? She had never heard of such a plan. Come to think of it, though, there had been some mention of that on the TV news the other day—that night when she had sex with the balding, middle-aged man from Kansai in the Akasaka hotel.
On September 20, the world’s largest kite-flying competition took place in Jakarta, with more than ten thousand participants. Aomame was unfamiliar with that particular bit of news, but there was nothing strange about it. Who would remember news about a giant kite-flying competition held in Jakarta three years ago?
On October 6, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by radical Islamic terrorists. Aomame recalled the event with renewed pity for Sadat. She had always been fond of Sadat’s bald head, and she felt only revulsion for any kind of religious fundamentalists. The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of their own superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage. Her anger was almost uncontrollable. But this had nothing to do with the problem she was now confronting. She took several deep breaths to calm her nerves, and then she turned the page.
On October 12, in a residential section of the Itabashi Ward of Tokyo, an NHK subscription fee collector (aged fifty-six) became involved in a shouting match with a college student who refused to pay. Pulling out the butcher knife he always carried in his briefcase, he stabbed the student in the abdomen, wounding him seriously. The police rushed to the scene and arrested him on the spot. The collector was standing there in a daze with the bloody knife in his hand. He offered no resistance. According to one of his fellow collectors, the man had been a full-time staff member for six years and was an extremely serious worker with an outstanding record.
Aomame had no recollection of such an event. She always took the Yomiuri newspaper and read it from cover to cover, paying close attention to the human interest stories—especially those involving crimes (which comprised fully half the human interest stories in the evening edition). There was almost no way she could have failed to read an article as long as this one. Of course, something could have come up that caused her to miss it, but this was very unlikely—unlikely, but not unthinkable.
She knit her brow and mulled over the possibility that she could have missed such a report. Then she recorded the date in her notebook, with a summary of the event.
The collector’s name was Shinnosuke Akutagawa. Impressive. Sounded like the literary giant Ryunosuke Akutagawa. There was no photograph of the collector, only of the man he stabbed, Akira Tagawa, age twenty-one. Tagawa was a third-year student in the undergraduate law program of Nihon University and a second-rank practitioner of Japanese swordsmanship. Had he been holding a bamboo practice sword at the time, the collector would not have been able to stab him so easily, but ordinary people do not hold bamboo swords in hand when they talk to NHK fee collectors. Of course, ordinary NHK fee collectors don’t walk around with butcher knives in their briefcases, either. Aomame followed the next several days’ worth of reports on the case but found nothing to indicate that the student had died. He had probably survived.
On October 16 there had been a major accident at a coal mine in Yubari, Hokkaido. A fire broke out at the extraction point one thousand meters underground, and more than fifty miners suffocated. The fire spread upward toward the surface, and another ten men died. To prevent the fire from spreading further, the company pumped the mine full of water without first ascertaining the whereabouts of the remaining miners. The final death toll rose to ninety-three. This was a heartrending event. Coal was a “dirty” energy source, and its extraction was dangerous work. Mining companies were slow to invest in safety equipment, and working conditions were terrible. Accidents were common and miners’ lungs were destroyed, but there were many people and businesses that required coal because it was cheap. Aomame had a clear memory of this accident.
The aftermath of the Yubari coal mine accident was still being reported in the paper when Aomame found the event that she was looking for. It had occurred on October 19, 1981. Not until Tamaru told her about it several hours earlier was Aomame aware that such an incident had ever happened. This was simply unimaginable. The headline appeared on the front page of the morning edition in large type:
YAMANASHI GUNFIGHT WITH RADICALS: 3 OFFICERS DIE
A large photo accompanied the article, an aerial shot of the location where the battle had occurred near Lake Motosu, in the hills of Yamanashi Prefecture. There was also a simple map of the site, which was in the mountains away from the developed area of lakeside vacation homes. There were three portrait photos of the dead officers from the Yamanashi Prefectural Police. A Self-Defense Force special paratroop unit dispatched by helicopter. Camouflage fatigues, sniper rifles with scopes, short-barreled automatics.
Aomame scowled hugely. In order to express her feelings properly, she stretched every muscle in her face as far as it would go. Thanks to the partitions on either side of her, no one else sitting at the library tables was able to witness her startling transformation. She then took a deep breath, sucking in all the surrounding air that she possibly could, and letting every bit of it out, like a whale rising to the surface to exchange all the air in its giant lungs. The sound startled the high school student studying at the table behind her, his back to hers, and he spun around to look at her. But he said nothing. He was just frightened.
After distorting her face for a while, Aomame made an effort to relax each of her facial muscles until she had resumed a normal expression. For a long time after that, she tapped at her front teeth with the top end of her ballpoint pen and tried to organize her thoughts. There ought to be a reason. There has to be a reason. How could I have overlooked such a major event, one that shook the whole of Japan?
And this incident is not the only one. I didn’t know anything about the NHK fee collector’s stabbing of the college student. It’s absolutely mystifying. I couldn’t possibly have missed one major thing after another. I’m too observant, too meticulous for that. I know when something’s off by a millimeter. And I know my memory is strong. This is why, in sending a number of men to the “other side,” I’ve never made a single mistake. This is why I’ve been able to survive. I read the newspaper carefully every day, and when I say “read the newspaper carefully,” that means never missing anything that is in any way significant.
The newspaper continued for days to devote major space to the “Lake Motosu Incident.” The Self-Defense Force and the Yamanashi Prefectural Police chased down ten escaped radicals, staging a large-scale manhunt in the surrounding hills, killing three of them, severely wounding two, and arresting four (one of whom turned out to be a woman). The last person remained unaccounted for. The paper was filled with reports on the incident, completely obliterating any follow-up reports on the NHK fee collector who stabbed the college student in Itabashi Ward.
Though no one at NHK ever said so, of course, the broadcasters must have been extremely relieved. For if something like the Lake Motosu Incident had not occurred, the media would almost certainly have been screaming about the NHK collections system or raising doubts about the very nature of NHK’s quasi-governmental status. At the beginning of that year, information on the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s objections to an NHK special on the Lockheed scandal was leaked, exposing how the NHK had, in response, changed some of the content. After these revelations, much of the nation was—quite reasonably—beginning to doubt the autonomy of NHK programming and to question its political fairness. This in turn gave added impetus to a campaign against paying NHK subscription fees.
Aside from the Lake Motosu Incident and the incident involving the NHK fee collector, Aomame clearly remembered the other events and incidents and accidents that had occurred at the time, and she clearly remembered having read all the newspaper reports about them. Only in those two cases did her powers of recall seem to fail her. Why should that be? Why should there be absolutely nothing left in her memory from those two events alone? Even supposing this is all due to some malfunction in my brain, could I possibly have erased those two matters so cleanly, leaving everything else intact?
Aomame closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against her temples—hard. Maybe such a thing is, in fact, possible. Maybe my brain is giving rise to some kind of function that is trying to remake reality, that singles out certain news stories and throws a black cloth over them to keep me from seeing or remembering them—the police department’s switch to new guns and uniforms, the construction of a joint U.S.-Soviet moon base, an NHK fee collector’s stabbing of a college student, a fierce gun battle at Lake Motosu between a radical group and a special detachment of the Self-Defense Force.
But what do any of these things have in common?
Nothing at all, as far as I can see.
Aomame continued tapping on her teeth with the top end of her ballpoint pen as her mind spun furiously.
She kept this up for a long time until finally, the thought struck her: Maybe I can look at it this way—the problem is not with me but with the world around me. It’s not that my consciousness or mind has given rise to some abnormality, but
rather that some kind of incomprehensible power has caused the world around me to change.
The more she thought about it, the more natural her second hypothesis began to feel to her because, no matter how much she searched for it, she could not find in herself a gap or distortion in her mind.
And so she carried this hypothesis forward:
It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.
Yes, that settles it.
At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place. Like the switching of a track. In other words, my mind, here and now, belongs to the world that was, but the world itself has already changed into something else. So far, the actual changes carried out in that process are limited in number. Most of the new world has been retained from the world I knew, which is why the changes have presented (virtually) no impediments to my daily life—so far. But the changes that have already taken place will almost certainly create other, greater, differences around me as time goes by. Those differences will expand little by little and will, in some cases, destroy the logicality of the actions I take. They could well cause me to commit errors that are—for me—literally fatal.
Parallel worlds.
Aomame scowled as if she had bitten into something horribly sour, though the scowl was not as extreme as the earlier one. She started tapping her ballpoint pen against her teeth again, and released a deep groan. The high school student behind her heard it rattle in her throat, but this time pretended not to hear.
This is starting to sound like science fiction.
Am I just making up a self-serving hypothesis as a form of self-defense? Maybe it’s just that I’ve gone crazy. I see my own mind as perfectly normal, as free of distortion. But don’t all mental patients insist that they are perfectly fine and it’s the world around them that is crazy? Aren’t I just proposing the wild hypothesis of parallel worlds as a way to justify my own madness?