“Thank you,” the dowager said, squeezing Aomame’s hand in return. “You’re right: I should probably get some sleep.”
“I’ll be leaving, then,” Aomame said. “I will be waiting to hear from you. I’ll put my things in order—not that I own so many ‘things’ to put in order.”
“Prepare yourself to travel light. If there’s anything you need, we’ll take care of it.”
Aomame released the dowager’s hand and stood up. “Good night. I’m sure everything is going to go well.”
The dowager nodded. Still cradled in her chair, she closed her eyes. Aomame took one last glance at the goldfish bowl and one last whiff of the lilies before she left the high-ceilinged living room.
. . .
Tamaru was waiting for her at the front door. Five o’clock had come, but the sun was still high in the sky, its intensity undiminished. The glare of its light reflected off Tamaru’s black cordovan shoes, which were perfectly polished as usual. A few white summer clouds appeared in the sky, but they gathered at its corners, where they could not block the sun. The end of the rainy season was not yet near, but there had been several days in a row of midsummer-like weather, complete with the cries of cicadas, which now sounded from the garden’s trees. The cries were not very strong. If anything, they seemed somewhat restrained. But they were a positive sign of the season to come. The world was still working as it always did. The cicadas cried, the clouds moved along, Tamaru’s shoes were spotless. But all of this seemed fresh and new to Aomame: that the world should continue along as usual.
Aomame asked Tamaru, “Can we talk a little? Do you have time?”
“Fine,” Tamaru said. His expression did not change. “I have time. Killing time is part of what I do for a living.” He lowered himself into one of the garden chairs by the front door. Aomame sat in the chair next to his. The overhanging eaves blocked the sunlight. The two of them sat in their cool shadow. There was the smell of fresh grass.
“Summer’s here already,” Tamaru said.
“The cicadas have started crying,” Aomame replied.
“They seem a little early this year. This area’s going to get very noisy again for a while. That piercing cry hurts your ears. I heard exactly the same sound when I stayed in the town of Niagara Falls. It just kept going from morning to night without a letup, like a million cicadas.”
“So you’ve been to Niagara Falls.”
Tamaru nodded. “It was the most boring town in the world. I stayed there alone for three days and there was nothing to do but listen to the sound of the falls. It was too noisy to read.”
“What were you doing alone in Niagara Falls for three days?”
Instead of answering, Tamaru just shook his head.
Tamaru and Aomame went on listening to the faint cries of the cicadas, saying nothing.
“I’ve got a favor to ask of you,” Aomame said.
This seemed to pique Tamaru’s interest. Aomame was not in the habit of asking people for favors.
She said, “It’s kind of unusual. I hope it doesn’t annoy you.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to accommodate you, but I’ll be glad at least to listen. It’s not polite to be annoyed when a lady asks a favor.”
“I need a gun,” Aomame said flatly. “One that would fit in a handbag. Something with a small recoil but still fairly powerful and dependable. Not a modified fake or one of those Filipino copies. I’ll only need to use it once. And one bullet should be enough.”
Silence. Tamaru kept his eyes on Aomame the whole time, unwavering.
Then, speaking slowly and carefully, Tamaru said, “You do know that it is illegal in this country for an ordinary citizen to own a handgun, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“And just so you know, let me say this,” Tamaru continued. “I have never once been charged with a crime. That is to say, I have no police record. Now, this may be owing to some oversights on the part of the justice system, I don’t deny that. But at least as far as the written record is concerned, I’m a good citizen. Honest, upright, pure. I’m gay, but that’s not against the law. I pay my taxes as ordered, and I vote in elections—though no candidate I voted for was ever elected. I’ve even paid all my parking tickets before the due date. I haven’t been stopped for speeding in the past ten years. I’m enrolled in the National Health Insurance system. I pay my NHK licensing fee automatically from my bank account, and I carry both an American Express card and a MasterCard. Although I have no intention of doing so now, I could qualify for a thirty-year mortgage if I wanted one, and it always pleases me immensely to think that I am in such a position. In other words, I could be called a pillar of society without the least bit of irony. Do you realize that you are asking such a person to provide you with a gun?”
“Which is why I said I hoped you wouldn’t be annoyed.”
“Yes, I heard you say that.”
“Sorry, but I couldn’t think of anyone besides you I could ask.”
Tamaru made a small, strangled sound in the back of his throat that could well have been the suppression of a sigh. “Now, just supposing that I were in a position to provide you with what you are asking for, common sense tells me that I would probably want to ask you this: Whom do you intend to shoot?”
Aomame pointed her index finger toward her own temple. “Right here, probably.”
Tamaru stared at the finger expressionlessly for a moment. “My next question would probably be, ‘Why?’ ”
“Because I don’t want to be captured,” Aomame said. “I’m not afraid to die. And although I probably wouldn’t like it, I could tolerate going to prison. But I refuse to be held hostage and tortured by some unknown bunch of people. I just don’t want to give away anybody’s name. Do you see what I am saying?”
“I think I do.”
“I don’t plan to shoot anybody or to rob a bank. So I don’t need some big, twenty-shot semiautomatic. I want something compact without much kick.”
“A drug would be another option. It’s more practical than trying to get ahold of a gun.”
“Taking out a drug and swallowing it would take time. Before I could crush a capsule in my teeth, somebody might stick a hand in my mouth and stop me. With a gun, I could hold the other person off while I took care of things.”
Tamaru thought about this for a moment, his right eyebrow slightly raised.
“I’d rather not lose you, if I can help it,” he said. “I kind of like you. Personally, that is.”
Aomame gave him a little smile. “For a human female, you mean?”
Without changing his expression, Tamaru said, “Male, female, human, dog—I don’t have that many individuals I’m fond of.”
“No, of course not,” Aomame said.
“At the same time, my single most important duty is protecting Madame’s health and safety. And I’m—what should I say?—kind of a pro.”
“That goes without saying.”
“So let me see what I can do. I can’t guarantee anything, but I might be able to find somebody I know who can respond to your request. This is a very delicate business, though. It’s not like buying an electric blanket by mail order. It might take a week before I can get back to you.”
“That would be fine,” Aomame said.
Tamaru squinted up at the trees where the cicadas were buzzing. “I hope everything goes well. I’ll do whatever I can, within reason.”
“Thanks, Tamaru. This next job will probably be my last. I might never see you again.”
Tamaru spread his arms, palms up, as if he were standing in a desert, waiting for the rain to fall, but he said nothing. He had big, fleshy palms marked with scars. His hands looked more like parts of a giant machine than of a human body.
“I don’t like good-byes,” Tamaru said. “I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye to my parents.”
“Are they dead?”
“I don’t know whether they’re alive or dead. I was born on Sakhalin Island
the year before the war ended. The south end of Sakhalin was a Japanese territory called Karafuto, but the Soviets occupied it, and my parents were taken prisoner. My father apparently had some kind of job with the harbor facilities. Most of the Japanese civilian prisoners were returned to Japan soon enough, but my parents couldn’t go to Japan because they were Koreans who had been sent to Sakhalin as laborers. The Japanese government refused to take them. Once Japan lost the war, Koreans were no longer subjects of the empire of Japan. It was terrible. The government didn’t have a shred of sympathy for them. They could have gone to North Korea if they wanted to, but not to the South, because the Soviet Union at the time didn’t recognize the existence of South Korea. My parents came from a fishing village near Pusan and had no desire to go to the North. They had no relatives or friends up there. I was still a baby. They put me in the hands of a couple being repatriated to Japan, and those people took me across the straits to Hokkaido. The food situation in Sakhalin at the time was horrendous, and the Soviet army’s treatment of their prisoners was terrible. My parents had other small children and must have figured it would be hard to bring me up there. They probably figured they would send me over to Hokkaido first and join me later. Or maybe it was just an excuse to get rid of me. I don’t know the details. In any case, we were never reunited. They’re probably still in Sakhalin to this day—assuming they haven’t died yet.”
“You don’t remember them?”
“Not a thing. I was just a little over a year old when we separated. The couple kept me for a while and then sent me to a facility for orphans in the mountains near Hakodate, way down near the southern tip of Hokkaido, about as far as you could go from Sakhalin and still be on Hokkaido. They probably couldn’t afford to keep me. Some Catholic organization ran the orphanage, which was a very tough place. There were tons of orphans after the war, and not enough food or heat for them all. I had to do all kinds of things to survive.” Tamaru glanced down at the back of his right hand. “So an adoption was arranged for form’s sake, I became a Japanese citizen, and got a Japanese name: Ken’ichi Tamaru. All I know about my original name is the surname: Park—and there are as many Koreans named ‘Park’ as there are stars in the sky.”
Sitting side by side with Tamaru, Aomame listened to the cries of the cicadas.
“You should get another dog,” Aomame said.
“Madame says so too. The safe house needs another guard dog, at least. But I just don’t feel like it yet.”
“I understand. But you should get one. Not that I’m in any position to be advising people.”
“I will,” Tamaru said. “We do need a trained guard dog, in the end. I’ll get in touch with a breeder right away.”
Aomame looked at her watch and stood up. There was still some time left until sunset, but already a hint of evening marked the sky—a different blue mixed in with the blue of the afternoon. She could feel some of the lingering effects of the sherry. Could the dowager still be sleeping?
“According to Chekhov,” Tamaru said, rising from his chair, “once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.”
“Meaning what?”
Tamaru stood facing Aomame directly. He was only an inch or two taller than she was. “Meaning, don’t bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation.”
Aomame straightened the sleeves of her dress and slung her bag over her shoulder. “And that worries you—if a pistol comes on the scene, it’s sure to be fired at some point.”
“In Chekhov’s view, yes.”
“So you’re thinking you’d rather not hand me a pistol.”
“They’re dangerous. And illegal. And Chekhov is a writer you can trust.”
“But this is not a story. We’re talking about the real world.”
Tamaru narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Aomame. Then, slowly opening his mouth, he said, “Who knows?”
CHAPTER 2
Tengo
I DON’T HAVE A THING EXCEPT MY SOUL
He set his recording of Janáček’s Sinfonietta on the turntable and pressed the “auto-play” button. Seiji Ozawa conducting the Chicago Symphony. The turntable started to spin at 33⅓ RPM, the tonearm moved over the edge of the record, and the needle traced the groove. Following the brass introduction, the ornate timpani resounded from the speakers. It was the section that Tengo liked best.
While listening to the music, Tengo faced the screen of his word processor and typed in characters. It was a daily habit of his to listen to Janáček’s Sinfonietta early in the morning. The piece had retained a special significance for him ever since he performed it as an impromptu high school percussionist. It gave him a sense of personal encouragement and protection—or at least he felt that it did.
He sometimes listened to Janáček’s Sinfonietta with his older girlfriend. “Not bad,” she would say, but she liked old jazz records more than classical—the older the better. It was an odd taste for a woman her age. Her favorite record was a collection of W. C. Handy blues songs, performed by the young Louis Armstrong, with Barney Bigard on clarinet and Trummy Young on trombone. She gave Tengo a copy, though less for him than for herself to listen to.
After sex, they would often lie in bed listening to the record. She never tired of it. “Armstrong’s trumpet and singing are absolutely wonderful, of course, but if you ask me, the thing you should concentrate on is Barney Bigard’s clarinet,” she would say. Yet the actual number of Bigard solos on the record was small, and they tended to be limited to a single chorus. Louis Armstrong was the star of this record. But she obviously loved those few Bigard solos, the way she would quietly hum along with every memorized note.
She said she supposed there might be more talented jazz clarinetists than Barney Bigard, but you couldn’t find another one who could play with such warmth and delicacy. His best performances always gave rise to a particular mental image. Tengo could not, off the top of his head, name any other jazz clarinetists, but as he listened to this record over and over, he began to appreciate the sheer, unforced beauty of its clarinet performances—their richly nourishing and imaginative qualities. He had to listen closely and repeatedly for this to happen, and he had to have a capable guide. He would have missed the nuances on his own.
His girlfriend once said, “Barney Bigard plays beautifully, like a gifted second baseman. His solos are marvelous, but where he really shines is in the backup he gives the other musicians. That is so hard, but he does it like it’s nothing at all. Only an attentive listener can fully appreciate his true worth.”
Whenever the sixth tune on the flip side of the LP, “Atlanta Blues,” began, she would grab one of Tengo’s body parts and praise Bigard’s concise, exquisite solo, which was sandwiched between Armstrong’s song and his trumpet solo. “Listen to that! Amazing—that first, long wail like a little child’s cry! What is it—surprise? Overflowing joy? An appeal for happiness? It turns into a joyful sigh and weaves its way through a beautiful river of sound until it’s smoothly absorbed into some perfect, unknowable place. There! Listen! Nobody else can play such thrilling solos. Jimmy Noone, Sidney Bechet, Pee Wee Russell, Benny Goodman: they’re all great clarinetists, but none of them can create such perfectly sculptured works of art.”
“How come you know so much about old-time jazz?” Tengo once asked.
“I have lots of past lives that you don’t know anything about—past lives that no one can change in any way,” she said, gently massaging Tengo’s scrotum with the palm of her hand.
When he was finished writing for the morning, Tengo walked to the station and bought a paper at the newsstand. This he carried into a nearby café, where he ordered a “morning set” of buttered toast and a hard-boiled egg. He drank coffee and opened the paper while waiting for his food to come. As Komatsu had predicted, there was an article about Fuka-Eri on the human interest page. Not very large, the article appeared above an ad fo
r Mitsubishi automobiles, under the headline “Popular High School Girl Writer Runaway?”
Fuka-Eri (penname of Eriko Fukada, 17), author of the current bestseller Air Chrysalis, has been listed as missing, it was revealed yesterday afternoon. According to her guardian, cultural anthropologist Takayuki Ebisuno (63), who filed the search request with the Oume police station, Eriko has failed to return either to her home in Oume City or to her Tokyo apartment since the night of June 27, and there has been no word from her since then. In response to this newspaper’s telephone inquiry, Mr. Ebisuno said that Eriko was in her usual good spirits when he last saw her, that he could think of no reason she would want to go into hiding, that she had never once failed to come home without permission, and that he is worried something might have happened to her. The editor in charge of Air Chrysalis at the ** publishing company, Yuji Komatsu, said, “The book has been at the top of the bestseller list for six straight weeks and has garnered a great deal of attention, but Miss Fukada herself has not wanted to make public appearances. We at the company have been unable to determine whether her current disappearance might have something to do with her attitude toward such matters. While young, Miss Fukada is an author with abundant talent from whom much can be expected in the future. We hope that she reappears in good health as soon as possible.” The police investigation is proceeding with several possible leads in view.
That was probably about as much as the newspapers could say at this stage, Tengo concluded. If they gave it a more sensational treatment and Fuka-Eri showed up at home two days later as if nothing had happened, the reporter who wrote the article would be embarrassed and the newspaper itself would lose face. The same was true for the police. Both issued brief, neutral statements like weather balloons to see what would happen. The story would turn big once the weekly magazines got ahold of it and the TV news shows turned up the volume. That would not happen for a few more days.
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