The man drew a strong breath in through his nose and held it in his lungs for a time before releasing it slowly. “I am no king. I became one who listens to the voices.”
“And now you are seeking to be slaughtered.”
“No, it need not be a slaughter. This is 1984, and we are in the middle of the big city. There is no need for a brutal, bloody killing. All you have to do is take my life. It can be neat and simple.”
Aomame shook her head and relaxed the muscles of her body. The point of the needle was still pressed against the spot on the back of his neck, but she found it impossible to summon the will to kill this man.
Aomame said, “You have raped many young girls—girls barely ten years old, some perhaps even younger.”
“That is true,” the man said. “There are aspects to what I did, I must admit, that can be viewed that way in the light of commonly held concepts. In the eyes of earthly law, I am a criminal. I did have physical relations with girls who had still not reached maturity—even if it was something that I myself did not seek.”
All that Aomame could do was inhale and exhale deeply. She had no idea how to go about quieting the intense emotional currents streaming through her body. Her face was greatly distorted, and her right and left hands seemed to be longing for entirely different things.
“I would like you to take my life,” the man said. “It makes no sense for me to go on living in this world. I should be obliterated in order to maintain the world’s balance.”
“What would happen after I killed you?”
“The Little People would lose one who listens to their voices. I still have no successor.”
“How is it possible to believe this?” Aomame practically spit the words out between her taut lips. “You may just be a sexual pervert trying to justify your despicable actions with convenient rationalizations. There never were any ‘Little People,’ no voices of the gods, no heavenly grace. You may be just another phony claiming to be a prophet or religious leader.”
“See the clock over there?” the man said without lifting his head. “On the right-hand chest of drawers.”
Aomame looked to the right. There was a rounded, waist-high chest, on top of which sat a clock embedded in a marble frame—obviously, a heavy object.
“Keep your eyes on it. Don’t look away.”
As instructed, Aomame kept her neck turned in that direction and fixed her eyes on the clock. Beneath her fingers, she could feel every muscle in the man’s body turning to stone and filling with an incredibly intense power. As if in response to that power, the marble clock rose slowly from the surface of the chest. She watched it begin to tremble, as if hesitating, come to rest at a point some three inches in the air, and stay there for a full ten seconds. Then the man’s muscles lost their strength, and the clock dropped back to the chest with a dull thud, as if it had just remembered the earth’s gravity.
The man took a long time to release a deep, exhausted-sounding breath.
“Even a little thing like that takes a huge amount of energy,” he said once he had expelled every last breath in his body. “Enough to shorten my life. But I hope you see it now: at least I am no phony.”
Aomame did not answer him. The man took time bringing his strength back with a series of deep breaths. The clock went on silently displaying the time as though nothing had happened. Only its position on top of the chest had shifted slightly on a diagonal. Aomame stared hard at the clock while the second hand made a circuit.
“You do have special powers,” Aomame said drily.
“As you have now seen.”
“There is an episode involving the devil and Christ in The Brothers Karamazov, I recall. The Christ is undergoing harsh austerities in the wilderness when the devil challenges him to perform a miracle—to change a stone into bread. But the Christ ignores him. Miracles are the devil’s temptation.”
“Yes, I know that. I, too, have read The Brothers Karamazov. And what you say is true: this kind of showing off doesn’t solve a thing. But I had to convince you in the limited amount of time we have, so I went ahead and performed for you.”
Aomame remained silent.
“In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil,” the man said. “Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good. This is what I mean when I say that I must die in order to keep things in balance.”
“I don’t feel any need to kill you at this point,” Aomame declared. “As you probably know, that is what I came here to do. I can’t permit a person like you to exist. I was determined to obliterate you from this world. But I no longer feel that determination. You are suffering terribly, I can tell. You deserve to die slowly, going to pieces bit by bit, in terrible pain. I can’t find it in me to grant you an easy death.”
Still lying facedown, the man responded with a small nod. “If you were to kill me, my people would be sure to track you down. They are absolute fanatics, and they are powerful and persistent. With me gone, the religion would lose its centripetal force. But once it is formed, a system takes on a life of its own.”
Aomame listened to him speak as he lay there facedown.
“What I did to your friend was very bad.”
“My friend?”
“Your girlfriend with the handcuffs. Now, what was her name again …?”
A sudden calm filled Aomame. The inner conflict was gone. A heavy silence hung over her now.
“Ayumi Nakano,” Aomame said.
“Poor girl.”
“Did you do that?” Aomame asked coldly. “Are you the one who killed Ayumi?”
“No, not at all. I didn’t kill her.”
“But for some reason you know—that someone killed her.”
“Our researcher found out,” the man said. “We don’t know who killed her. All we know is that your friend, the policewoman, was strangled to death in a hotel.”
Aomame’s right hand became tightly clenched again. “But you said, ‘What I did to your friend was very bad.’ ”
“That I was unable to prevent it. Whoever may have killed her, the fact is that they always go after your weakest point—the way wolves chase down the weakest sheep in the herd.”
“You’re saying that Ayumi was a weak point of mine?”
The man did not answer.
Aomame closed her eyes. “But why did they have to kill her? She was such a good person! She would never hurt anyone. Why? Because I am involved in this? If so, wouldn’t it have been enough just to destroy me?”
The man said, “They can’t destroy you.”
“Why not?” Aomame asked. “Why can’t they destroy me?”
“Because you have long since become a special being.”
“Special being?” Aomame asked. “In what way ‘special’?”
“You will discover that eventually.”
“Eventually?”
“When the time comes.”
Aomame screwed up her face again. “I can’t understand what you are saying.”
“You will at some point.”
Aomame shook her head. “In any case, they can’t attack me for now. And so they aimed at a weak point near me. In order to give me a warning. To keep me from taking your life.”
The man remained silent. It was a silence of affirmation.
“It’s too terrible,” Aomame said. She shook her head. “What real difference could it possibly have made for them to murder her?”
“No, they are not murderers. They never destroy anyone with their own hands. What killed your friend, surely, was something she had inside of her. The same kind of tragedy would have happened sooner or later. Her life wa
s filled with risk. All they did was to provide the stimulus. Like changing the setting on a timer.”
Setting on a timer?
“She was no electric oven! She was a living human being! So what if her life was full of risk? She was a dear friend of mine. You people took that from me like nothing at all. Meaninglessly. Callously.”
“Your anger is entirely justified,” the man said. “You should direct it at me.”
Aomame shook her head. “Even if I take your life here, that won’t bring Ayumi back.”
“No, but it would provide some degree of retaliation against the Little People. You could have your revenge, as it were. They don’t want me to die yet. If I die now, it will open up a vacuum—at least a temporary vacuum, until a successor comes into being. It would be a strike against them. At the same time, it would be a benefit to you.”
“Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said.
“Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.”
“Never mind about morals. You are going to die in agony while some strange thing eats you up whether I raise a hand against you or not. I have no reason to sympathize with you for that. Even if the world were to lose all morals and go to pieces, it wouldn’t be my fault.”
The man took another deep breath. “All right, I see what you are saying. How about this, then? Let’s make a deal. If you will take my life, I will spare the life of Tengo Kawana. I still have that much power left.”
“Tengo,” Aomame said. The strength went out of her body. “So you know about that, too.”
“I know everything about you. Or perhaps I should say almost everything.”
“But you can’t possibly tell that much. Tengo’s name has never taken a step outside my heart.”
“Please, Miss Aomame,” the man said. Then he released a brief sigh. “There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person’s heart. And it just so happens—should I say?—that Tengo Kawana has become a figure of no little significance to us at the moment.”
Aomame was at a loss for words.
The man said, “But then again, chance has nothing to do with it. Your two fates did not cross through mere happenstance. The two of you set foot in this world because you were meant to enter it. And now that you have entered it, like it or not, each of you will be assigned your proper role here.”
“Set foot in this world?”
“Yes, in this year of 1Q84.”
“1Q84?” Aomame said, her face greatly distorting. I made that word up!
“True, it is a word you made up,” the man said, as if reading her mind. “I am just borrowing it from you.”
Aomame formed the word 1Q84 in her mouth.
“There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person’s heart,” Leader repeated softly.
CHAPTER 12
Tengo
MORE THAN I COULD COUNT
ON MY FINGERS
Tengo managed to return to his apartment before the rains came. He hurried on foot from the station to his building. There was not a cloud to be seen in the evening sky, no sign that rain was on its way, no suggestion of coming thunder. None of the people around him was carrying an umbrella. It was the kind of pleasant late-summer evening that called for a draft beer at a baseball game. But he had recently entered a new frame of mind, and that was to assume that anything Fuka-Eri said might be true. Better to believe than not to believe, Tengo thought, basing it not so much on logic as experience.
He peeked into his mailbox to find a business envelope with no return address. He tore it open on the spot. Inside was a notice that 1,627,534 yen had been electronically transferred into his bank account. The payer was listed as “Office ERI,” which was almost certainly Komatsu’s fabricated company. Or possibly Professor Ebisuno had made the transfer. Komatsu had informed Tengo that he would be paid a part of the Air Chrysalis royalties as an honorarium, and perhaps this was that “part.” No doubt the payment had been listed as an “assistance fee” or “research fee.” After checking the figure again, Tengo returned the notice to the envelope and stuffed it into his pocket.
1.6 million yen was a lot of money to Tengo (in fact, he had never received such a lump sum in his life), but he felt neither happy nor surprised. Money was not a major problem for him at this point in time. He had his regular income, which enabled him to get by without undue strain, and for the moment, at least, he had no anxiety about his future. In spite of that, everyone wanted to give him large chunks of money. It was a strange world.
Where the rewriting of Air Chrysalis was concerned, however, Tengo had a sneaking suspicion that 1.6 million yen was not sufficient recompense for his having been drawn into this much trouble. If, on the other hand, someone were to ask him straight out, “All right, then, how much would be a fair amount?,” he would have been hard-pressed to come up with a figure. First of all, he did not know if there was such a thing as a fair price for trouble. There must surely be many different kinds of trouble in the world for which there was no way to attach a price or for which there was no one willing to pay. Air Chrysalis was still selling well, apparently, which meant that there might be further payments into his account, but the more the deposits increased, the more problems they would give rise to. Each increase in compensation only served to increase the extent of Tengo’s involvement with Air Chrysalis as an established fact.
He thought about sending the money back to Komatsu first thing tomorrow morning. That would enable him to evade some sort of responsibility. It might also provide some psychological relief. In any case it would establish the fact that he had rejected compensation. Not that it would expunge his moral responsibility or justify the actions he had taken. All it would give him was “possible extenuating circumstances,” though it might end up doing just the opposite by making his actions appear all the more suspicious, as though he had returned the money because he felt guilty about it.
As he went on agonizing about the money, his head started to hurt, so he decided to stop. He could think about it again later, when he had time to spare. Money was not a living thing. It wouldn’t run off anywhere if he left it alone. Probably.
The problem I have to deal with now is how to give my life a new start, Tengo thought as he climbed the three flights of stairs to his apartment. Having gone to see his father at the southern tip of the Boso Peninsula, he had become generally convinced that the man was not his real father. He felt he had also succeeded in reaching a turning point in his life. It might be the perfect opportunity. Now might be a good time to make a break with all his troubles and start his life over again: a new job, a new place, new relationships. Though not yet entirely confident, he had a kind of presentiment that he might be able to lead a somewhat more coherent life than he had so far.
Before he could do that, however, there were things he had to take care of. He couldn’t simply shrug off Fuka-Eri and Komatsu and Professor Ebisuno and disappear somewhere. Of course, he had no obligations toward them, no ethical responsibilities. As Ushikawa had said, where this current matter was concerned, Tengo was the one being put upon by them. Still, though he could claim to have been all but dragged into the situation and to have been ignorant of its underlying plot, the fact was that he had still been involved. He couldn’t simply announce that he would have nothing more to do with it and that the others could do as they pleased. Wherever he might go from here on out, he wanted first to bring things to some sort of conclusion and clean up his personal affairs. Otherwise, his fresh new life might be tainted from the outset.
“Tainted” reminded Tengo of Ushikawa. Ushikawa, huh? Tengo thought with a sigh. Ushikawa had his hands on some information regarding Tengo’s mother, information that he said he could share with Tengo.
If you ever want to learn about that, I can hand you all the materials on your mother as is. However, there might b
e some not-very-pleasant information included in the file.
Tengo had not even bothered to reply to this. He had no wish to hear news about his mother from Ushikawa’s mouth. Any kind of information would be sullied the moment it emerged from that orifice. No, Tengo had no desire to hear such information from anyone’s mouth. If he was going to be given news about his mother, it had to come not in bits and pieces but as a comprehensive “revelation.” It had to be, as it were, a vivid cosmic landscape, the full vast expanse of which could be seen in a split second.
Tengo did not know, of course, if he would be granted such a dramatic revelation sometime in the future. It might never come. But what he needed was something so enormous, on such an overwhelming scale, that it could rival and even surpass the striking images of the “waking dream” that had disoriented and jolted and tormented him over these many years. He needed something that would totally purge him of this image. Fragmentary information would do him no good at all.
These were the thoughts that ran through Tengo’s mind as he climbed three flights of stairs.
Tengo stood in front of his apartment door, pulled his key from his pocket, inserted the key in the lock, and turned it. Then, before opening the door, he knocked three times, paused, and knocked twice more. Finally, he eased the door open.
Fuka-Eri was sitting at the table, drinking tomato juice from a tall glass. She was dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing when she arrived—a striped men’s shirt and slim blue jeans. But the impression she made on Tengo was very different from the one she had given him that morning. It took Tengo a while to realize why: she had her hair tied up, revealing her ears and the back of her neck. Those small, pink ears of hers looked as though they had been daubed with powder using a soft brush and had just been made a short time ago for purely aesthetic reasons, not for the practical purpose of hearing sounds. Or at least they looked that way to Tengo. The slim, well-shaped neck below the ears had a lustrous glow, like vegetables raised in abundant sunshine, immaculate and well suited to morning dew and ladybugs. This was the first time he had seen her with her hair up, and it was a miraculously intimate and beautiful sight.
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