“Poor Tengo!” she said, caressing his testicles with the palm of the ringless hand. “Are you having nightmares?”
“I almost never dream,” Tengo said, which was true.
“I dream a lot. Some dreams I have over and over—so much so that I realize in the dream, ‘Hey, I’ve had this one before.’ Strange, huh?”
“What kind of dreams do you have? Tell me one.”
“Well, there’s my dream of a cottage in a forest.”
“A cottage in a forest,” Tengo said. He thought about people in forests: the Gilyaks, the Little People, and Fuka-Eri. “What kind of cottage?”
“You really want to know? Don’t you find other people’s dreams boring?”
“No, not at all. Tell me, if you don’t mind,” Tengo said honestly.
“I’m walking alone in the forest—not the thick, ominous forest that Hansel and Gretel got lost in, but more of a brightish, lightweight sort of forest. It’s a nice, warm afternoon, and I’m walking along without a care in the world. So then, up ahead, I see this little house. It’s got a chimney and a little porch, and gingham-check curtains in the windows. It’s friendly looking. I knock on the door and say, ‘Hello.’ There’s no answer. I try knocking again a little harder and the door opens by itself. It wasn’t completely closed, you see. I walk in yelling, ‘Hello! Is anybody home? I’m coming in!’ ”
She looked at Tengo, gently stroking his testicles. “Do you get the mood so far?”
“Sure, I do.”
“It’s just a one-room cottage. Very simply built. It has a little kitchen, beds, and a dining area. There’s a woodstove in the middle, and dinner for four has been neatly set out on the table. Steam is rising from the dishes. But there’s nobody inside. It’s as if they were all set to start eating when something strange happened—like, a monster showed up or something, and everybody ran out. But the chairs are not in disarray. Everything is peaceful and almost strangely ordinary. There just aren’t any people there.”
“What kind of food is on the table?”
She had to think about that for a moment, cocking her head to one side. “I can’t remember. Good question: what kind of food is it? I guess the question isn’t so much what they’re eating as that it’s freshly cooked and still hot. So anyhow, I sit in one of the chairs and wait for the family that lives there to come back. That’s what I’m supposed to do: just wait for them to come home. I don’t know why I’m supposed to. I mean, it’s a dream, so not everything is clearly explained. Maybe I want them to tell me the way home, or maybe I have to get something: that kind of thing. So I’m just sitting there, waiting for them to come home, but no matter how long I wait, nobody comes. The meal is still steaming. I look at the hot food and get tremendously hungry. But just because I’m starved, I have no right to touch the food on the table without them there. It would be natural to think that, don’t you think?”
“Sure, I’d probably think that,” Tengo said. “Of course, it’s a dream, so I can’t be sure what I would think.”
“But soon the sun goes down. The cottage grows dark inside. The surrounding forest gets deeper and deeper. I want to turn the light on, but I don’t know how. I start to feel uneasy. Then at some point I realize something strange: the amount of steam rising from the food hasn’t decreased at all. Hours have gone by, but it’s still nice and hot. Then I start to think that something odd is going on. Something is wrong. That’s where the dream ends.”
“You don’t know what happens after that?”
“I’m sure something must happen after that,” she said. “The sun goes down, I don’t know how to go home, and I’m all alone in this weird cottage. Something is about to happen—and I get the feeling it’s not very good. But the dream always ends there, and I keep having the same dream over and over.”
She stopped caressing his testicles and pressed her cheek against his chest. “My dream might be suggesting something,” she said.
“Like what?”
She did not answer Tengo’s question. Instead, she asked her own question. “Would you like to know what the scariest part of the dream is?”
“Yes, tell me.”
She let out a long breath that grazed Tengo’s nipple like a hot wind blowing across a narrow channel. “It’s that I might be the monster. The possibility struck me once. Wasn’t it because they had seen me approaching that the people had abandoned their dinner and run out of the house? And as long as I stayed there, they couldn’t come back. In spite of that, I had to keep sitting in the cottage, waiting for them to come home. The thought of that is what scares me so much. It seems so hopeless, don’t you think?”
“Or else,” Tengo said, “maybe it’s your own house, and your self ran away and you’re waiting for it to come back.”
After the words left his mouth, Tengo realized he should not have spoken them. But it was too late to take them back. She remained silent for a long time, and then she squeezed his testicles hard—so hard he could barely breathe.
“How could you say such a terrible thing?”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Tengo managed to groan. “It just popped into my head.”
She softened her grip on his testicles and released a sigh. Then she said, “Now tell me one of your dreams, Tengo.”
Breathing normally again, he said, “Like I said before, I almost never dream. Especially these days.”
“You must have some dreams. Everybody in the world dreams to some extent. Dr. Freud’s gonna feel bad if you say you don’t dream at all.”
“I may be dreaming, but I don’t remember my dreams after I wake up. I might have a lingering sensation that I was having a dream, but I can never remember what it was about.”
She slipped her open palm under Tengo’s limp penis, carefully noting its weight, as if the weight had an important story to tell her. “Okay, never mind the dreams. Tell me about the novel you’re writing instead.”
“I prefer not to talk about a piece of fiction while I’m writing it.”
“Hey, I’m not asking you to tell me every last detail from beginning to end. Not even I would ask for that. I know you’re a much more sensitive young man than your build would suggest. Just tell me a little something—a part of the setting, or some minor episode, anything at all. I want you to tell me something that nobody else in the world knows—to make up for the terrible thing you said to me. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I think I might,” Tengo said uncertainly.
“Okay, go!”
With his penis still resting on the palm of her hand, Tengo began to speak. “The story is about me—or about somebody modeled on me.”
“I’m sure it is,” she said. “Am I in it?”
“No, you’re not. I’m in a world that isn’t here.”
“So I’m not in the world that isn’t here.”
“And not just you. The people who are in this world are not in the world that isn’t here.”
“How is the world that isn’t here different from this world? Can you tell which world you’re in now?”
“Of course I can. I’m the one who’s writing it.”
“What I mean is, for people other than you. Say, if I just happened to wander into that world now, could I tell?”
“I think you could,” Tengo said. “For example, in the world that isn’t here, there are two moons. So you can tell the difference.”
The setting of a world with two moons in the sky was something he had taken from Air Chrysalis. Tengo was in the process of writing a longer and more complicated story about that same world—and about himself. The fact that the setting was the same might later prove to be a problem, but for now, his overwhelming desire was to write a story about a world with two moons. Any problems that came up later he would deal with then.
“In other words,” she said, “if there are two moons up there when night comes and you look at the sky, you can tell, ‘Aha! This is the world that isn’t here!’ ”
“Right, th
at’s the sign.”
“Do the two moons ever overlap or anything?” she asked.
Tengo shook his head. “I don’t know why, but the distance between the two moons always stays the same.”
His girlfriend thought about that world for a while. Her finger traced some kind of diagram on Tengo’s bare chest.
“Hey, Tengo, do you know the difference between the English words ‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’?” she asked.
“They’re both adjectives describing mental abnormality. I’m not quite sure how they differ.”
“ ‘Insane’ probably means to have an innate mental problem, something that calls for professional treatment, while ‘lunatic’ means to have your sanity temporarily seized by the luna, which is ‘moon’ in Latin. In nineteenth-century England, if you were a certified lunatic and you committed a crime, the severity of the crime would be reduced a notch. The idea was that the crime was not so much the responsibility of the person himself as that he was led astray by the moonlight. Believe it or not, laws like that actually existed. In other words, the fact that the moon can drive people crazy was actually recognized in law.”
“How do you know stuff like that?” Tengo asked, amazed.
“It shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise to you. I’ve been living ten years longer than you, so I ought to know a lot more than you do.”
Tengo had to admit that she was right.
“As a matter of fact, I learned it in an English literature course at Japan Women’s University, in a lecture on Dickens. We had an odd professor. He’d never talk about the story itself but go off on all sorts of tangents. But all I wanted to say to you was that one moon is enough to drive people crazy, so if you had two moons hanging in the sky, it would probably just make them that much crazier. The tides would be thrown off, and more women would have irregular periods. I bet all kinds of funny stuff would happen.”
“You may be right,” Tengo said, after giving it some thought.
“Is that what happens in the world you’re writing about? Do people go crazy all the time?”
“No, not really. They do pretty much the same things we do in this world.”
She squeezed Tengo’s penis softly. “So in the world that isn’t here, people do pretty much the same things as those of us who are in this world. If that’s the case, then, what’s the point of its being a world that isn’t here?”
“The point of its being a world that isn’t here is in being able to rewrite the past of the world that is here,” Tengo said.
“So you can rewrite the past any way you like, as much as you like?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you want to rewrite the past?”
“Don’t you want to rewrite the past?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t have the slightest desire to rewrite the past or history or whatever. What I’d like to rewrite is the present, here and now.”
“But if you rewrote the past, obviously, the present would change, too. What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”
She released another deep sigh. Then, as if testing the operation of an elevator, she raised and lowered the hand on which Tengo’s penis lay. “I can only say one thing. You used to be a math prodigy and a judo belt holder and you’re even writing a long novel. In spite of all that, you don’t understand anything at all about this world. Not one thing.”
Tengo felt no particular shock at this sweeping judgment. These days, not understanding anything had more or less become the normal state of affairs for him. This was not a new discovery.
“It doesn’t matter, though, even if you don’t understand anything,” his older girlfriend said, turning to press her breasts against him. “You’re a dreaming math teacher who keeps writing his long novel day after day, and I want you to stay just like that. I love your wonderful penis—the shape, the size, the feel. I love it when it’s hard and when it’s soft, when you’re sick and when you’re well. And for the time being, at least, it belongs only to me. It does, doesn’t it?”
“That is correct,” Tengo assured her.
“I have told you that I’m a terribly jealous person, haven’t I?”
“You certainly have—jealous beyond reason.”
“All reason. I’ve been very consistent that way for many years now.” She slowly began moving her fingers in three dimensions. “I’ll get you hard again right away. You wouldn’t have any objection to that, would you?”
Tengo said that he would have no objection.
“What are you thinking about now?”
“You as a student, listening to a lecture at Japan Women’s University.”
“The text was Martin Chuzzlewit. I was eighteen and wearing a cute pleated dress. My hair was in a ponytail. I was a very serious student, and still a virgin. I feel like I’m talking about something from an earlier life. Anyhow, the difference between ‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’ was the first bit of knowledge I ever learned at the university. What do you think? Does it get you excited to imagine that?”
“Of course it does,” he said, closing his eyes, imagining her pleated dress and her ponytail. A very serious student, a virgin. But jealous beyond all reason. The moon illuminating Dickens’s London. The insane people and the lunatics wandering around London. They wore similar hats and similar beards. How was it possible to distinguish one from the other? With his eyes closed, Tengo could not be sure which world he now belonged to.
BOOK 2 JULY-SEPTEMBER
CHAPTER 1
Aomame
IT WAS THE MOST BORING TOWN IN THE WORLD
Although the rainy season had not been declared officially over, the Tokyo sky was intensely blue and the midsummer sun beat down on the earth. With their newly thickened burden of green leaves, the willows once again cast dense, trembling shadows on the street.
Tamaru met Aomame at the front door, wearing a dark summer suit, white shirt, and solid-color tie. There was not a drop of sweat on him. Aomame always found it mysterious that such a big man did not sweat on even the hottest summer days.
He gave her a slight nod, and, after uttering a short greeting that she found barely audible, he said nothing further. Today there was none of their usual banter. He walked ahead of her down a long corridor and did not look back, instead guiding her to where the dowager waited. Aomame guessed that he was in no mood for small talk. Maybe the death of the dog was still bothering him. “We need a new guard dog,” he had said on the phone, as if commenting on the weather, though Aomame knew this was no indication of how he actually felt. The female German shepherd had been important to him: they had been close for many years. He had taken her sudden, baffling death as both a personal insult and a challenge. As she looked at silent Tamaru’s back, as broad as a classroom blackboard, Aomame could imagine the quiet anger he was feeling.
Tamaru opened the living-room door to let Aomame in, and stood in the doorway awaiting instructions from the dowager.
“We won’t be needing anything to drink now,” she said.
Tamaru gave her a silent nod and quietly closed the door, leaving the two women alone. A round goldfish bowl, with two goldfish inside, had been placed on the table beside the armchair in which the dowager was sitting—an utterly ordinary goldfish bowl with utterly ordinary goldfish and the requisite green strip of seaweed. Aomame had been in this large, handsome living room any number of times, but had never seen the goldfish before. She felt an occasional puff of cool air against her skin and guessed that the air conditioner must be running on low. On a table behind the dowager stood a vase containing three white lilies. The flowers were large and fleshy white, like little animals from an alien land that were deep in meditation.
The dowager waved Aomame over to the sofa beside her. White lace curtains covered the windows facing the garden, but still the summer afternoon sun was strong. In its light the dowager looked tired, which was unusual for her. Slumped in the big chair, she rested her chin on her hand, eyes sunken,
neck more wrinkled than before, lips drained of color. The outer tips of her long eyebrows had dropped a notch, as if they had given up the struggle against gravity. Perhaps the efficiency of her circulatory system had declined: her skin appeared to have white, powdery blotches. She had aged at least five or six years since their last meeting. And today, for a change, it didn’t seem to bother her to show such obvious fatigue. This was not normal for her. As far as Aomame had observed, the dowager always tried—with much success—to keep her appearance smart, her inner strength fully mobilized, her posture perfectly erect, her expression focused, and all signs of aging hidden.
Aomame noticed that many things in the house were different today. Even the light had taken on a different color. And the bowl of goldfish, such a common object, did not fit in with the elegant high-ceilinged room full of antique furniture.
The dowager remained silent for a time, chin in hand, staring into the space adjacent to Aomame, where, Aomame knew, there was nothing special to be seen. The dowager simply needed a spot where she could temporarily park her vision.
“Do you need something to drink?” the dowager asked softly.
“No, thanks, I’m not thirsty,” Aomame answered.
“There’s iced tea over there. Pour yourself a glass if you like.”
The dowager pointed toward a side table set next to the door. On it was a pitcher of tea containing ice and lemon slices, and, next to that, three cut-glass tumblers of different colors.
“Thank you,” Aomame said, remaining seated and waiting for the dowager’s next words.
For a time, however, the dowager maintained her silence. She had something she needed to talk to Aomame about, but if she actually put it into words, the facts contained in the “something” might irretrievably become more definite as facts, so she wanted to postpone that moment, if only briefly. Such was the apparent significance of her silence. She glanced at the goldfish bowl next to her chair. Then, as if resigning herself to the inevitable, she finally focused her gaze directly on Aomame. Her lips were clenched in a straight line, the ends of which she had deliberately turned up.
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