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dohta
had been able to survive for long without
her
maza
. The Little People had said that it was virtually impossible for a
dohta
to go
on living without her
maza
. And what about a
maza
? What was it like for her to live
after having lost the shadow of her heart and mind?
After the girl escaped from Sakigake, the Little People had probably used the same
process to make more new
dohtas
, their purpose being to widen and stabilize the
passageway by which they came and went, like adding new lanes to a highway. This
was how the
dohtas
became Perceivers for the Little People and played the role of
shrine maidens. Tsubasa had been one of them. If Leader had sexual relations not
with the girls’ actual
mazas
but with their other selves, their
dohtas
, then Leader’s
expression—“ambiguous congress”—made sense. It also explained Tsubasa’s flat,
depthless eyes and her near inability to speak. Aomame had no idea how or why the
dohta
, Tsubasa, had escaped from the religious organization, but she had almost
certainly been put into an air chrysalis and “retrieved” to be taken back to her
maza
.
The bloody killing of the dog had been a warning from the Little People, like what
was done to Toru in the story.
The
dohtas
wanted to become pregnant with Leader’s child, but, lacking substance
themselves, they were not menstruating. Still, according to Leader, their desire to
become pregnant was intense. Why should that have been?
Aomame shook her head. There was still much that she did not understand.
Aomame wished that she could tell this to the dowager as soon as possible—that the
man might actually have raped nothing more than the girls’ shadows; that they might
not have had to kill him after all.
But even if she explained these things, it would not be easy for her to get the
dowager to believe her. Aomame knew how the dowager would feel. The dowager—
or any sane person—would have trouble accepting as fact this stuff about the Little
People,
mazas, dohtas
, or air chrysalises. To sane people, these things would seem
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like nothing more than the kinds of fabrications that appear in fiction, no more real
than the Queen of Hearts or the white rabbit with the watch in
Alice in Wonderland
.
But Aomame herself had
actually
seen two moons—the old one and the new
one—hanging in the sky. She had actually been living under their light. She had felt
their lopsided gravity in her skin. And with her own hands she had killed the man
called Leader in a dark hotel room.
Aomame did not know what the Little People were hoping to accomplish by taking
control of Sakigake. Perhaps they wanted things that transcended good and evil, but
the young protagonist of
Air Chrysalis
intuitively recognized those things as
not right
,
and she tried to strike back in her own way. Her vehicle was her story. Tengo became
her partner to help get the story going. Tengo himself probably did not understand the
meaning of what he was doing at that point, and he might not understand it even now.
In any case, the story called
Air Chrysalis
was the important key.
Everything started from this story
.
But where do I fit into it?
From the moment I heard Janá
č
ek’s
Sinfonietta
and climbed down the escape
stairs from the traffic jam on the Metropolitan Expressway, I was drawn into this
world with two moons in the sky, into this enigma-filled world of 1Q84. What could it
mean?
She closed her eyes and continued to think.
I have probably been drawn into the passageway of the “force opposed to the
Little People” created by Fuka-Eri and Tengo. That force carried me into this side.
What other explanation could there be? And the role I am playing in this story is by
no means small. I may even be one of the central characters
.
Aomame looked at her surroundings.
In other words, I am in the story that Tengo
set in motion. In a sense, I am inside him—inside his body
, she realized.
I am inside
that shrine, so to speak
.
I saw an old science fiction movie on television long ago. It was the story of a
small group of scientists who shrank their bodies down to microscopic size, boarded a
submarine-like vehicle (which had also been shrunk down), and entered their
patient’s blood vessels, through which they gained entry to his brain in order to
perform a complex operation that would have been impossible under ordinary
circumstances. Maybe my situation is like that. I’m in Tengo’s blood and circulating
through his body. I battled the white blood cells that attacked the
invading foreign
body (me) as I headed for the root cause of the disease, and I must have succeeded in
“deleting” that cause when I killed Leader at the Hotel Okura
.
Aomame was able to warm herself somewhat with such thoughts.
I carried out my
assigned mission. It was a difficult mission, that is for sure, and I was afraid, but I
carried it off coolly and flawlessly in the midst of all that thunder—and perhaps with
Tengo looking on
. She felt proud of what she had accomplished.
To continue with the blood analogy, I should soon be drawn into a vein, spent,
having served my purpose. Before long, I will be expelled from the body. That is the
rule by which the body’s system works—an inescapable destiny. But so what? I am
inside Tengo now, enveloped by his warmth, guided by his heartbeat, guided by his
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logic and his rules, and perhaps by the very language he is writing. How marvelous to
be inside him like this!
Still sitting on the floor, Aomame closed her eyes. She pressed her nose against the
pages of the book, inhaling its smells—the smell of the paper, the smell of the ink.
She quietly gave herself up to its flow, listening hard for the sound of Tengo’s heart.
This is the kingdom
, she thought.
I am ready to die, anytime at all
.
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