1q84

by Haruki Murakami

  There were only a few government offices and companies that managed information by computer. It cost too much and took too much effort. But a religious organization of national scale would have the resources to computerize. Ushikawa himself knew next to nothing about computers. He did understand, however, that computers were becoming an indispensable tool for gathering information. Earlier ways of finding information—going to the National Diet Library, sitting at a desk with piles of bound, small-sized editions of old newspapers, or almanacs—might soon become a thing of the past. The world might be reduced to a battlefield, the smell of blood everywhere, where computer managers and hackers fought it out. No, “the smell of blood” isn’t accurate, Ushikawa decided. It was a war, so there was bound to be some bloodshed. But there wouldn’t be any smell. What a weird world. Ushikawa preferred a world where smells and pain still existed, even if the smells and pain were unendurable. Still, people like Ushikawa might become out-of-date relics.

  But Ushikawa wasn’t pessimistic. He had an innate sense of intuition, and his unique olfactory organ let him sniff out and distinguish all sorts of odors. He could physically feel, in his skin, how things were trending. Computers couldn’t do this. This was the kind of ability that couldn’t be quantified or systematized. Skillfully accessing a heavily guarded computer and extracting information was the job of a hacker. But deciding which information to extract, and sifting through massive amounts of information to find what is useful, was something only a flesh-and-blood person could do.

  Maybe I am just an ugly, middle-aged, outdated man, Ushikawa thought. Nope, no maybes about it. I am, without a doubt, one ugly, middle-aged, outdated man. But I do have a couple of talents nobody else has. And as long as I have these talents, no matter what sort of weird world I find myself in, I’ll survive.

  I’m going to get you, Miss Aomame. You are quite clever, to be sure. Skilled, and cautious. But I’m going to chase after you until I catch you. So wait for me. I’m heading your way. Can you hear my footsteps? I don’t believe you can. I’m like a tortoise, hardly making a sound. But step by step, I am getting closer.

  But Ushikawa felt something else pressing on him from behind. Time. Pursuing Aomame meant simultaneously shaking off time, which was in pursuit of him. He had to track her down quickly, clarify who was backing her, and present it all, nice and neat, on a plate to the people from Sakigake. He had been given a limited amount of time. It would be too late to find out everything, say, three months from now. Up until recently he had been a very valuable person to them. Capable and accommodating, well versed in legal matters, a man they could count on to keep his mouth shut. Someone who could work off the grid. But in the end, he was simply a hired jack-of-all-trades. He wasn’t one of them, a member of their family. He was a man without a speck of religious devotion. If he became a danger to the religion, they might eliminate him with no qualms whatever.

  While he waited for Bat to return his call, Ushikawa went to the library to look into the history and activities of the Witnesses. He took notes and made copies of relevant documents. He liked doing research at a library. He liked the feeling of accumulating knowledge in his brain. It was something he had enjoyed ever since he was a child.

  Once he had finished at the library, he went to Aomame’s apartment in Jiyugaoka, to make sure once more that it was unoccupied. The mailbox still had her name on it, but no one seemed to be living there. He stopped by the office of the real estate agent who handled the rental.

  “I heard that there was a vacant apartment in the building,” Ushikawa said, “and I was wondering if I could rent it.”

  “It is vacant, yes,” the agent told him, “but no one can move in until the beginning of February. The rental contract with the present occupant doesn’t expire until the end of next January. They are going to be paying the monthly rent the same as always until then. They have moved everything out and the electricity and water have been shut off. But the lease remains intact.”

  “So until the end of January, they’re paying rent for an empty apartment?”

  “Correct,” the real estate agent said. “They said they will pay the entire amount owed on the lease so they would like us to keep the apartment as it is. As long as they pay the rent, we can’t object.”

  “It’s a strange thing—wasting money to pay for an empty apartment.”

  “Well, I was concerned myself, so I had the owner accompany me and let me in to take a look at the place. I wouldn’t want there to be a mummified body in the closet or anything. But nothing was there. The place had been nicely cleaned. It was simply empty. I have no idea, though, what the circumstances are.”

  Aomame was obviously no longer living there. But for some reason they still wanted her listed as nominally renting the place, which is why they were paying four months’ rent for an empty apartment. Whoever they were, they were cautious, and not hurting for money.

  Precisely ten days later, in the early afternoon, Bat called Ushikawa’s office in Kojimachi.

  “Mr. Ushikawa,” the hoarse voice said. In the background, there was the usual emptiness—a complete lack of any sound.

  “Speaking.”

  “Do you mind if we talk now?”

  “That would be fine,” Ushikawa said.

  “The Witnesses had very tight security. But I was expecting that. I was able to get the information related to Aomame okay.”

  “No homing missile?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Mr. Ushikawa,” the man said, and he cleared his throat a few times. “I’m really sorry, but could you put out the cigarette?”

  “Cigarette?” he asked, glancing at the Seven Stars between his fingers. Smoke silently swirled up toward the ceiling. “You’re right, I am smoking, but how can you tell?”

  “Obviously I can’t smell it. Just hearing your breathing makes it hard for me to breathe. I have terrible allergies, you see.”

  “I see. I hadn’t noticed. My apologies.”

  The man cleared his throat a few times. “I’m not blaming you, Mr. Ushikawa. I wouldn’t expect you to notice.”

  Ushikawa crushed the cigarette out in the ashtray and poured some tea he had been drinking over it. He stood up and opened the window wide.

  “I put out the cigarette, opened the window, and let in some fresh air. Not that the air outside is all that clean.”

  “Sorry for the trouble.”

  Silence continued for about ten seconds. A total, absolute quiet.

  “So, you were able to get the information from the Witnesses?” Ushikawa asked.

  “Yes. Quite a lot, actually. The Aomame family are devout, long-time members, so there was plenty of material related to them. It is probably easiest if I give you the whole file, and then at your end you decide what is important material and what isn’t.”

  Ushikawa agreed. That was what he had been hoping for.

  “The sports club wasn’t much of a problem—just open the door, go in, do your job, shut the door, that’s it. Time was kind of limited, so I grabbed everything I could. There’s a lot of material here too. I’ll send over a folder with both sets of material. As usual, in exchange for the fee.”

  Ushikawa wrote down the fee that Bat gave him. It was about twenty percent higher than the estimate. Not that he had a choice.

  “I don’t want to use the mail this time, so a messenger will bring it over to your place tomorrow. Please have the fee ready. And as usual, don’t expect a receipt.”

  “All right,” Ushikawa replied.

  “I mentioned this before, but I will repeat it just to make sure. I was able to get all the available information on the topic you asked me to look into. So even if you aren’t satisfied with it, I take no responsibility. I did everything that was technically possible. Compensation was for the time and effort involved, not the results. So please don’t ask me to give your money back if you don’t find the information you’re looking for. I would like you t
o acknowledge this point.”

  “I do,” Ushikawa replied.

  “Another thing is that I wasn’t able to obtain a photograph of Miss Aomame, no matter how much I tried,” Bat said. “All photos of her have been carefully removed.”

  “Understood. That’s okay,” Ushikawa said.

  “Her face may be different by now,” Bat commented.

  “Maybe so,” Ushikawa said.

  Bat cleared his throat several times. “Well, that’s it,” he said, and hung up.

  Ushikawa put the phone back in its cradle, sighed, and placed a new cigarette between his lips. He lit it with his lighter, and slowly exhaled smoke in the direction of the phone.

  The next afternoon, a young woman visited his office. She was probably not yet twenty. She had on a short white dress that revealed the curves of her body, matching white high heels, and pearl earrings. Her earlobes were large for her small face. She was barely five feet tall. She wore her hair long and straight, and her eyes were big and bright. She looked like a fairy in training. The woman looked straight at Ushikawa and smiled a cheerful, intimate smile, as if she were viewing something precious she would never forget. Neatly aligned white teeth peeked out happily from between her tiny lips. Perhaps it was just her business smile. Very few people did not flinch when they came face-to-face with Ushikawa for the first time.

  “I have brought the materials that you requested,” the woman said, and extracted two large, thick manila envelopes from the cloth bag hanging from her shoulders. As if she were a shamaness transporting an ancient stone lithograph, she held up the envelopes in front of her, then carefully placed them on Ushikawa’s desk.

  From a drawer Ushikawa took out the envelope he had ready and passed it over to her. She opened the envelope, extracted the sheaf of ten-thousand-yen bills, and counted them as she stood there. She was very adept at counting, her beautiful, slim fingers moving swiftly. She finished counting, returned the bills to the envelope, and put the envelope in her cloth bag. She showed Ushikawa an even bigger, warmer smile than before, as if nothing could have made her happier than to meet him.

  Ushikawa tried to imagine what connection this woman could have with Bat. Passing along the material, receiving payment. That was perhaps the only role she played.

  After the small woman had left, Ushikawa stared at the door for the longest time. She had shut the door behind her, but there was still a strong sense of her in the room. Maybe in exchange for leaving a trace of herself behind, she had taken away a part of Ushikawa’s soul. He could feel that new void within his chest. Why did this happen? he wondered, finding it odd. And what could it possibly mean?

  After about ten minutes, he finally took the materials out of the envelopes, which had been sealed with several layers of adhesive tape. The inside was stuffed with a jumble of printouts, photocopies, and original documents. Ushikawa didn’t know how Bat had accomplished it, but he had certainly come up with a lot of material in such a short time. As always, the man did an impressive job. Still, faced with that bundle of documents, Ushikawa was hit by a deep sense of impotence. No matter how much he might rustle around in it, would he ever arrive anywhere? Or would he spend a small fortune just to wind up with a stack of wastepaper? The sense of powerlessness he experienced was so deep that he could stare as much as he wanted into the well and never get a glimpse of its bottom. Everything Ushikawa could see was covered in a gloomy twilight, like an intimation of death. Perhaps this was due to something that woman left behind, he thought. Or perhaps due to something she took away with her.

  Somehow, though, Ushikawa recovered his strength. He patiently went through the stack of materials until evening, copying the information he felt was important into a notebook, organizing it under different categories. By concentrating on this, he was able to dispel the mysterious listlessness that had grabbed hold of him. And by the time it grew dark and he switched on his desk lamp, Ushikawa was thinking that the information had been worth every yen he had paid for it.

  He began by reading through the material from the sports club. Aomame was a highly skilled trainer, popular with the members. Along with teaching general classes, she was also a personal trainer. Looking through the copies of the daily schedule he could figure out when, where, and how she trained these private clients. Sometimes she trained them individually at the club, sometimes she went to their homes. Among the names of her clients was a well-known entertainer, and a politician. The dowager of the Willow House, Shizue Ogata, was her oldest client.

  Her connection with Shizue Ogata began not long after Aomame started working at the club four years earlier, and continued until just before she disappeared. This was exactly the same period during which the two-story apartment building at the Willow House became a safe house for victims of domestic violence. Maybe it was a coincidence, but maybe not. At any rate, according to the records, their relationship appeared to have deepened over time.

  Perhaps a personal bond had grown between Aomame and the old dowager. Ushikawa’s intuition sensed this. At first it started out as the relationship between a sports club instructor and a client, but at a certain point, the nature of this relationship changed. As Ushikawa went through the businesslike descriptions in chronological order, he tried to pinpoint that moment. Something happened that transformed their relationship beyond that of mere instructor and client. They formed a close personal relationship that transcended the difference in age and status. This may even have led to some secret emotional understanding between the two, a secret understanding that eventually led Aomame down the path to murder Leader at the Hotel Okura. Ushikawa’s sense of smell told him so.

  But what was that path? And what secret understanding did they have?

  That was as far as Ushikawa’s conjectures could take him.

  Most likely, domestic violence was one factor in it. At first glance this seemed to be a critical theme for the older woman. According to the records, the first time Shizue Ogata came in contact with Aomame was at a self-defense class. It wasn’t very common for a woman in her seventies to take a self-defense class. Something connected with violence must have brought the old lady and Aomame together.

  Or maybe Aomame herself had been the victim of domestic violence. And Leader had committed domestic violence. Perhaps they found out about this and decided to punish him. But these were all simply hypotheses, and these hypotheses didn’t square with the image Ushikawa had of Leader. Certainly people, no matter who they are, have something hidden deep down inside, and Leader was a deeper person than most. He was, after all, the driving force behind a major religious organization. Wise and intelligent, he also had depths no one else could access. But say he really had committed domestic violence? Would these acts have been so significant to these women that, when they learned of them, they planned out a meticulous assassination—one of them giving up her identity, the other risking her social standing?

  One thing was for sure: the murder of Leader was not carried out on a whim. Behind it stood an unwavering will, a clear-cut, unclouded motivation, and an elaborate system—a system that had been meticulously crafted using a great deal of time and money.

  The problem was that there was no concrete proof to back up his conjectures. What Ushikawa had before him was nothing more than circumstantial evidence based on theories. Something that Occam’s razor could easily prune away. At this stage he couldn’t report anything to Sakigake. Still, he knew he was on to something. There was a certain smell to it, a distinctive texture. All the elements pointed in a single direction. Something to do with domestic violence made the dowager direct Aomame to kill Leader and then hide her away. Indirectly, all the information Bat had provided him supported this conclusion.

  Plowing through the materials dealing with the Witnesses took a long time. There were an enormous number of documents, most of them useless to Ushikawa. The majority of the materials were reports on what Aomame’s family had contributed to the activities of the Witnesses. As far as these docume
nts were concerned, Aomame’s family were earnest, devout followers. They had spent the better part of their lives propagating the religion’s message. Her parents presently resided in Ichikawa, in Chiba Prefecture. In thirty-five years they had moved twice, both times within Ichikawa. Her father, Takayuki Aomame (58), worked in an engineering firm, while her mother, Yasuko (56), wasn’t employed. The couple’s eldest son, Keiichi Aomame (34), had worked in a small printing company in Tokyo after graduating from a prefectural high school in Ichikawa, but after three years he quit the company and began working at the Witnesses’ headquarters in Odawara. There he also worked in printing, making pamphlets for the religion, and was now a supervisor. Five years earlier he had married a woman who was also a member of the Witnesses. They had two children and rented an apartment in Odawara.

  The record for the eldest daughter, Masami Aomame, ended when she was eleven. That was when she abandoned the faith. And the Witnesses seemed to have no interest at all in anyone who had left the faith. To the Witnesses, it was the same as if Masami Aomame had died at age eleven. After this, there wasn’t a single detail about what sort of life she led—not even whether or not she was alive.

  In this case, Ushikawa thought, the only thing to do is visit the parents or the brother and ask them. Maybe they will provide me with some hint. From what he gathered from the documentary evidence, he didn’t imagine they would be too pleased to answer his questions. Aomame’s family—as far as Ushikawa could see it, that is—were narrow-minded in their thinking, narrow-minded in the way they lived. They were people who had no doubt whatsoever that the more narrow-minded they became, the closer they got to heaven. To them, anyone who abandoned the faith, even a relative, was traveling down a wicked, defiled path. Who knows, maybe they didn’t even think of them as relatives anymore.