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.
Tengo stopped daydreaming, apologized to the woman, dropped the edamame branch into his shopping basket, and brought it to the cashier along with his other groceries—shrimp, milk, tofu, lettuce, and crackers. There, he waited in line with the housewives of the neighborhood. It was the crowded evening shopping hour and the cashier was a slow-moving trainee, which made for a long line, but this didn’t bother Tengo.
Assuming she was in this line at the cash register, would I know it was Aomame just by looking at her? I wonder. We haven’t seen each other in twenty years. The possibility of our recognizing each other must be pretty slim. Or, say we pass on the street and I think, “Could that be Aomame?,” would I be able to call out to her on the spot? I can’t be sure of that, either. I might just lose heart and let her go without doing a thing. And then I’d be filled with regret again—“Why couldn’t I have said something to her—just one word?”
Komatsu often said to Tengo, “What’s missing in you is desire and a positive attitude.” And maybe he was right. When Tengo had trouble making up his mind, he would think, Oh well, and resign himself. That was his nature.
But if, by chance, we were to come face-to-face and were fortunate enough to recognize each other, I would probably open up and tell her everything honestly. We’d go into some nearby café (assuming she had the time and accepted my invitation) and sit across from each other, drinking something, while I told her everything.
There were so many things he wanted to tell her! “I still remember when you squeezed my hand in that classroom. After that, I wanted to be your friend. I wanted to get to know you better. But I just couldn’t do it. There were lots of reasons for that, but the main problem was that I was a coward. I regretted it for years. I still regret it. And I think of you all the time.” Of course he would not tell her that he had masturbate
d while picturing her. That would be in a whole different dimension than sheer honesty.
It might be better not to wish for such a thing, though. It might be better never to see her again. I might be disappointed if I actually met her, Tengo thought. Maybe she had turned into some boring, tired-looking office worker. Maybe she had become a frustrated mother shrieking at her kids. Maybe the two of them would have nothing in common to talk about. Yes, that was a very real possibility. Then Tengo would lose something precious that he had cherished all these years. It would be gone forever. But no, Tengo felt almost certain it wouldn’t be like that. In that ten-year-old girl’s resolute eyes and strong-willed profile he had discovered a decisiveness that time could not have worn down.
By comparison, what about Tengo himself?
Such thoughts made him uneasy.
Wasn’t Aomame the one who would be disappointed if they met again? In elementary school, Tengo had been recognized by everyone as a math prodigy and received the top grades in almost every subject. He was also an outstanding athlete. Even the teachers treated him with respect and expected great things from him in the future. Aomame might have idolized him. Now, though, he was just a part-time cram school instructor. True, it was an easy job that put no constraints on his solitary lifestyle, but he was far from being a pillar of society. While teaching at the cram school, he wrote fiction on the side, but he was still unpublished. For extra income, he wrote a made-up astrology column for a women’s magazine. It was popular, but it was, quite simply, a pack of lies. He had no friends worth mentioning, nor anyone he was in love with. His weekly trysts with a married woman ten years his senior were virtually his sole human contact. So far, the only accomplishment of which he could be proud was his role as the ghostwriter who turned Air Chrysalis into a bestseller, but that was something he could never mention to anyone.
Tengo’s thoughts had reached this point when the cashier picked up his grocery basket.
He went back to his apartment with a bag of groceries in his arms. Changing into shorts, he took a cold can of beer from the refrigerator and drank it, standing, while he heated a large pot of water. Before the water boiled, he stripped all the leathery edamame pods from the branch, spread them on a cutting board, and rubbed them all over with salt. When the water boiled, he threw them into the pot.
Tengo wondered, Why has that skinny little ten-year-old girl stayed in my heart all these years? She came over to me after class and squeezed my hand without saying a word. That was all. But in that time, Aomame seemed to have taken part of him with her—part of his heart or body. And in its place, she had left part of her heart or body inside him. This important exchange had taken place in a matter of seconds.
Tengo chopped a lot of ginger to a fine consistency. Then he sliced some celery and mushrooms into nice-sized pieces. The Chinese parsley, too, he chopped up finely. He peeled the shrimp and washed them at the sink. Spreading a paper towel, he laid the shrimp out in neat rows, like troops in formation. When the edamame were finished boiling, he drained them in a colander and left them to cool. Next he warmed a large frying pan and dribbled in some sesame oil and spread it over the bottom. He slowly fried the chopped ginger over a low flame.
I wish I could meet Aomame right now, Tengo started thinking again. Even if she turned out to be disappointed in him or he was a little disappointed in her, he didn’t care. He wanted to see her in any case. All he wanted was to find out what kind of life she had led since then, what kind of place she was in now, what kinds of things gave her joy, and what kinds of things made her sad. No matter how much the two of them had changed, or whether all possibility of their getting together had already been lost, this in no way altered the fact that they had exchanged something important in that empty elementary school classroom so long ago.
He put the sliced celery and mushrooms into the frying pan. Turning the gas flame up to high and lightly jogging the pan, he carefully stirred the contents with a bamboo spatula, adding a sprinkle of salt and pepper. When the vegetables were just beginning to cook, he tossed the drained shrimp into the pan. After adding another dose of salt and pepper to the whole thing, he poured in a small glass of sake. Then a dash of soy sauce and finally a scattering of Chinese parsley. Tengo performed all these operations on automatic pilot. This was not a dish that required complicated procedures: his hands moved on their own with precision, but his mind stayed focused on Aomame the whole time.
When the stir-fried shrimp and vegetables were ready, Tengo transferred the food from the frying pan to a large platter along with the edamame. He took a fresh beer from the refrigerator, sat at the kitchen table, and, still lost in thought, proceeded to eat the steaming food.
I’ve obviously been changing a lot over the past several months. Maybe you could say I’m growing up mentally and emotionally … at last … on the verge of turning thirty. Well, isn’t that something! With his partially drunk beer in hand, Tengo shook his head in self-derision. Really, isn’t that something! How many years will it take me to reach full maturity at this rate?
In any case, though, it seemed clear that Air Chrysalis had been the catalyst for the changes going on inside him. The act of rewriting Fuka-Eri’s story in his own words had produced in Tengo a strong new desire to give literary form to the story inside himself. And part of that strong new desire was a need for Aomame. Something was making him think about Aomame all the time now. At every opportunity, his thoughts would be drawn back to that classroom on an afternoon twenty years earlier the way a strong riptide could sweep the feet out from under a person standing on the shore.
Tengo drank only half his beer and ate only half his shrimp and vegetables. He poured the leftover beer into the sink, and the food he transferred to a small plate, covered it with plastic wrap, and put it in the refrigerator.
After the meal, Tengo sat at his desk, switched on his word processor, and opened his partially written document.
True, rewriting the past probably had almost no meaning, Tengo felt. His older girlfriend had been right about that. No matter how passionately or minutely he might attempt to rewrite the past, the present circumstances in which he found himself would remain generally unchanged. Time had the power to cancel all changes wrought by human artifice, overwriting all new revisions with further revisions, returning the flow to its original course. A few minor facts might be changed, but Tengo would still be Tengo.
What Tengo would have to do, it seemed, was take a hard, honest look at the past while standing at the crossroads of the present. Then he could create a future, as though he were rewriting the past. It was the only way.
Contrition and repentance
Tear the sinful heart in two.
O that my teardrops may be
A sweet balm unto thee,
Faithful Jesus.
This was the meaning of the aria from the St. Matthew Passion that Fuka-Eri had sung the other day. He had wondered about it and listened again to his recording at home, looking up the words in translation. It was an aria near the beginning of the Passion concerned with the so-called Anointing in Bethany. When Jesus visits the home of a leper in the town of Bethany, a woman pours “very costly fragrant oil” on his head. The disciples around him scold her for wasting the precious ointment, saying that she could have sold it and used the money to help the poor. But Jesus quiets the angry disciples and says that the woman has done a good deed. “For in pouring this fragrant oil on my body, she did it for my burial.”
The woman knew that Jesus would have to die soon. And so, as though bathing him in her tears, she could do no less than pour the valuable, fragrant oil on his head. Jesus also knew that he would soon have to tread the road to death, and he told his disciples, “Wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her.”
None of them, of course, was able to change the future.
Tengo closed his eyes again, took a deep breath, found the words he needed and set them in a
row. Then he rearranged them to give the image greater clarity and precision. Finally, he improved the rhythm.
Like Vladimir Horowitz seated before eighty-eight brand-new keys, Tengo curved his ten fingers suspended in space. Then, when he was ready, he began typing characters to fill the word processor’s screen.
He depicted a world in which two moons hung side by side in the evening eastern sky, the people living in that world, and the time flowing through it.
“Wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her.”
CHAPTER 5
Aomame
THE VEGETARIAN CAT
MEETS UP WITH THE RAT
Once she had managed to comprehend the sheer fact that Ayumi had died, Aomame went through a brief period involving a certain process of mental adjustment. Eventually, when the first phase of the process ended, she began to cry. She cried quietly, even silently, burying her face in her hands, her shoulders quivering, as if she wanted to be sure that no one else in the world could tell that she was crying.
The window curtains were shut tight, but still, someone might be watching. That night Aomame spread the newspaper on the kitchen table, and, in its presence, she cried without interruption. Now and then a sob escaped her, but the rest of the time she cried soundlessly. Her tears ran down her hands and onto the paper.
Aomame did not cry easily in this world. Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears. Once they started pouring out of her, though, she couldn’t stop them. She hadn’t had such a long cry since Tamaki Otsuka killed herself. How many years ago had that been? She could not remember. In any case, it had been a long time before, and she had cried forever. It went on for days. She ate nothing the whole time, and stayed shut up indoors. Now and then she would replenish the water that she had cried out in tears, and then she would collapse and doze. That was all. The rest of the time she went on weeping. That was the last time she did anything like this.
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