1Q84 (62 page)

I’m not afraid to die
, Aomame reassured herself.
What I’m afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind
.

She had gotten everything ready. She was emotionally prepared as well. She could leave her apartment at any time, as soon as Tamaru contacted her. But she heard nothing from him. The end of August was approaching. Soon summer would begin to wind down, and the cicadas outside would wring out their final cries. How could a whole month have shot by like this even though each day felt horribly long?

Aomame came home from work at the sports club, threw her sweat-soaked clothes into the hamper, and changed into a tank top and shorts. A violent downpour broke out after noon. The sky turned dark. Pebble-sized raindrops smacked down on the streets, and thunder rumbled. The streets were left soaking wet, but then the sun came out again and used all its energy to evaporate the standing water, shrouding the city in a shimmering curtain of steam. Clouds appeared as the sun was going down, covering the sky in a thick veil and hiding the moons.

She felt the need to relax a bit before preparing her supper. Drinking a cold cup of barley tea and nibbling on some edamame she had steamed earlier, she spread the evening paper on the kitchen table and proceeded to skim it in order, first page to last. Nothing piqued her interest. It was just an ordinary evening paper. When she opened to the human interest pages, however, the first thing to attract her attention was a photo of Ayumi. Aomame caught her breath and frowned.

No, it can’t be Ayumi
, she thought at first. Aomame assumed she must be mistaken: it was someone who looked a lot like her young policewoman friend. Ayumi would never be so prominently featured in the newspaper, complete with a photo. The more she looked, though, the more certain she became that this was her erstwhile partner in those little sex feasts. In the close-up photo, Ayumi had the hint of a smile on her face—an artificial, uncomfortable smile. The real Ayumi always smiled in a natural, open way with her whole face. This photo looked like one that had been taken for some kind of public album. There was something unnerving in her apparent discomfort.

Aomame did not want to read the article, if possible. If she read the big headline next to the picture, she would be able to guess what had happened. But not reading the article was out of the question. This was reality. Whatever it might be, she could not pass reality by. Aomame took a deep breath and started reading.

Ayumi Nakano (26). Single. Resident of Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo.

The article reported that Ayumi had been found dead in a Shibuya hotel room. She had been strangled with a bathrobe sash. Stark naked, she was handcuffed to the bed, a piece of clothing stuffed in her mouth. A hotel staff person had found the body when inspecting the room before noon. Ayumi and a man had taken the room before eleven o’clock the night before, and the man had left alone at dawn. The charges had been paid in advance. This was not a terribly unusual occurrence in the big city, where the commingling of people gave off heat, often in the form of violence. The newspapers were full of such events. This one, however, had unusual aspects. The victim was a policewoman, and the handcuffs that appeared to have been used as a sex toy were the authentic government-issue type, not the cheap kind sold in porno shops. Quite naturally, this was news that attracted people’s attention.

Where is she now, and what could she be doing? Does she still belong to the Society of Witnesses?

I sure hope not
, Tengo thought. Of course, religious faith was a matter of individual freedom. He shouldn’t be weighing in on it. But as he recalled, she gave no indication as a young girl that she enjoyed being a believer in the Society of Witnesses.

In college, Tengo worked part-time in a liquor wholesaler’s warehouse. The pay wasn’t bad, but moving heavy cases around was hard work, even for the sturdy Tengo, whose every joint would ache at the end of the day. By coincidence, two young fellows who had grown up as “second-generation” members of the Society of Witnesses worked alongside him. Both were polite young men, nice guys. They were the same age as Tengo, and serious workers. They worked without complaint and without cutting corners. Once after work the three of them went to a bar and had a pint of beer together. The two of them had been friends since childhood, they said, but a few years earlier they had abandoned the faith. On separating from the religion, they had set foot in the real world. As far as Tengo could see, however, neither of them had fully adapted to their new world. Because they had been raised in a narrow, close-knit community, they found it hard to understand and accept the rules of the broader world. Often they would lose what confidence they had in their own judgments and end up perplexed. They felt liberated by their abandonment of the faith, but they simultaneously retained a nagging suspicion that their decision had been a mistake.

Tengo could not help but sympathize with them. If they had separated from that world while they were still children, before their egos had been firmly established, they would have had a much better chance of adapting to the social mainstream, but once they missed that chance, they had no choice but to live in the Witness community, conforming with its values. Or else, with considerable sacrifice, and depending entirely on their own strength, they had to remake their customs and attitudes from the ground up. When he spoke with them, Tengo would recall the girl and hope that she had not experienced the same pain as these two young men.

After the girl finally let go of his hand and dashed out of the classroom without looking back, Tengo could only stand there, unable to do a thing. She had gripped his left hand with considerable strength, and a vivid sense of her touch remained in that hand for several days. Even after more time went by and the direct sensation began to fade, his heart retained the deep impression she had made there.

Shortly after that, Tengo experienced his first ejaculation. A very small amount of liquid emerged from the tip of his erect penis. It was somewhat thicker than urine and was accompanied by a faintly painful throbbing. Tengo did not realize that this was the precursor of full-fledged semen. He had never seen such a thing before, and it worried him. Something scary might be happening to him. It was not something he could discuss with his father, however, nor could he ask his classmates about it. That night, he woke from a dream (the contents of which he could not remember) to find his underpants slightly damp. It seemed to Tengo as if, by squeezing his hand, the girl had drawn something out of him.

He had no contact with her after that. Aomame maintained the same isolated position in the class, spoke with no one, and recited the usual prayer before lunch in the same clear voice. Even if they happened to pass each other somewhere, her expression exhibited not the slightest change, as if there had been nothing between them—as if she had not even seen Tengo.

Tengo, for his part, took to observing Aomame closely and covertly whenever he had the chance. He realized now, on closer inspection, that she had a nice face—nice enough for him to feel he could like her. She was long and thin, and she always wore faded clothing that was too big for her. When she put on gym clothes, he could tell that her chest had not yet begun to develop. Her face displayed virtually no expression, she hardly ever talked, and her eyes, which always seemed to be focused on something far away, had no sign of life in them. Tengo found this strange, because, on that day when her eyes had looked straight into his, they had been so clear and luminous.

After she squeezed his hand like that, Tengo came to see that this skinny little girl was far tougher inside than the average person. Her grip itself was impressive, but it was more than that. She seemed to possess an even greater strength of mind. Ordinarily she kept this energy hidden where the other students couldn’t see it. When the teacher called on her in class, she would say no more than minimally necessary to answer the question (and sometimes not even that much), but her posted test scores were never bad. Tengo guessed that she could earn still better grades if she wanted to, but she might be deliberately holding back on exams so as not to attract attention. Perhaps this was the wisdom with which a child in her position survived: by minimizing her wounds—staying as small as possible, as nearly transparent as possible.

How great it would be, Tengo thought, if only she were a totally ordinary girl with whom he could have a lighthearted conversation! Maybe they could have been good friends. For a ten-year-old boy and girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world. But while they ought to have managed the occasional friendly chat, such an opportunity never presented itself to Tengo and Aomame. So rather than make the effort to forge a real relationship with the flesh-and-blood Aomame, Tengo chose to relate to her through the silent realm of imagination and memory.

The ten-year-old Tengo had no concrete image of sex. All he wanted from the girl was for her to hold his hand again if possible. He wanted her to squeeze his hand again someplace where the two of them could be alone. And he wanted her to tell him something—anything—about herself, to whisper some secret about what it meant to be Aomame, what it meant to be a ten-year-old girl. He would try hard to understand it, and that would be the beginning of something, though even now, Tengo still had no idea what that “something” might be.

April came, and the new school year began. Now they were fifth graders, but Tengo and the girl were put into separate classes. Sometimes they would pass each other in the hall or wait at the same bus stop, but the girl continued to act as if she were unaware of Tengo’s existence—or at least it appeared that way to Tengo. He could be right next to her and she wouldn’t move an eyebrow. She wouldn’t even bother to look away from him. As before, all depth and brightness were gone from her eyes. Tengo wondered what that incident in the classroom could have meant. Often it seemed to him like something that had happened in a dream. And yet his hand still retained the vivid feel of Aomame’s extraordinary grip. This world was far too full of riddles for Tengo.

Then at some point he realized that the girl named Aomame was no longer in school. She had transferred to another school, but that was all he found out. No one knew where she had moved to. He was probably the only one in the entire elementary school even slightly bothered by the fact that she had ceased to exist among them.

For a very long time after that, Tengo continued to regret his actions—or, more precisely, his
lack
of action. Now, finally, he could think of the words that he should have spoken to her. Inside him at last were the things that he wanted to tell her, the things he should have told her. It would not have been so hard. He should have stopped her on the street and said something. If only he had found a good opportunity and whipped up a tiny bit of courage! But that had been impossible for Tengo. And now the chance was lost forever.

Tengo often thought about Aomame after he graduated from the elementary school and advanced to a public middle school. He started having erections more often and masturbated while thinking of her. He always used his left hand—the hand that retained the touch of her grasp. In his memory, Aomame remained a skinny little girl without breasts, but he was able to bring himself to ejaculation with the thought of her in gym clothes.

In high school, he started dating girls his own age. Their brand-new breasts showed clearly through their clothes, and the sight made it hard for Tengo to breathe. But even so, in bed, before he fell asleep at night, Tengo would move his left hand while thinking of Aomame’s flat chest, which lacked even a hint of swelling. There must be something wrong with him, something perverted, Tengo thought.

Once he entered college, though, Tengo no longer thought about Aomame all the time. The main reason for this was that he started dating real women, actually having sex with some of them. Physically, at least, he was a mature man, for whom the image of a skinny little ten-year-old girl in gym clothes had, naturally enough, grown removed from the objects of his desire.

Still, Tengo never again experienced the same intense shuddering of the heart that he had felt when Aomame gripped his hand in the elementary school classroom. None of the women he met in college or after leaving college to the present day made as distinct an impression on his heart as Aomame. He could not find what he was really looking for in any of them. There had been beautiful ones and warmhearted ones and ones who truly cared for him, but they had come and gone, like vividly colored birds perching momentarily on a branch before flying off somewhere. They could not satisfy him, and he could not satisfy them.

Even now, on the verge of turning thirty, Tengo was surprised to find his thoughts drifting back to the ten-year-old Aomame. There she was, in the deserted classroom, staring straight at him with her crystal-clear eyes, her hand tightly gripping his. Sometimes her skinny frame was draped in gym clothes. Or she was walking behind her mother down the Ichikawa shopping mall on a Sunday morning, her lips clamped shut, her eyes staring at a place that was no place.

At such times, Tengo would think,
I guess I’ll never be able to detach myself
from her
. And he would kick himself again, now that it was too late, for never having spoken to her in the hallway.
If only I had made myself do it! If only I had said something to her, my life might be very different
.

What reminded him of Aomame was buying edamame in the supermarket. He was choosing among the branches of fresh edamame in the refrigerator case when the thought of Aomame came to him quite naturally. Before he knew it, he was standing there, lost in a daydream. How long this went on, he had no idea, but a woman’s voice saying, “Excuse me” brought him back. He was blocking access to the edamame section with his large frame.