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was
someone there. Nearby, someone was using a hammer to pound a
nail into a wall.
Bang bang bang
. The sound kept up without a break, a very hard nail
going into a very hard wall. Who could be pounding nails at a time like this? Puzzled,
Tengo looked around, but he could see no wall, nor was there anyone pounding nails.
A moment later, Tengo realized that he was hearing the sound of his own heart.
Spurred on by adrenaline, his heart was pumping surges of blood through his body. It
pounded in his ears.
482
The sight of the two moons gave Tengo a slight dizzy feeling, as if it had put his
nervous system out of balance. He sat down on top of the slide, leaning against the
handrail, and closed his eyes, fighting the dizziness. He felt as if the force of gravity
around him had subtly changed. Somewhere the tide was rising, and somewhere else
the tide was receding. Their faces devoid of expression, people were moving back and
forth between “insane” and “lunatic.”
In his dizziness, it suddenly occurred to Tengo that the image of his mother
wearing a white slip had not attacked him for a very long time. He had almost
forgotten that he had been tormented by that illusion for years. When could he have
last seen it? He could not recall exactly, but it was probably around the time he started
writing his new novel. For some unfathomable reason, his mother’s ghost had stopped
haunting him from that point onward.
Instead, Tengo now sat on top of a slide in a playground in Koenji, looking at a
pair of moons in the sky. An inscrutable new world silently surrounded him like
lapping dark water. Perhaps a new trouble had chased out the old one. Perhaps the
old, familiar riddle had been replaced by a fresh, new one. The thought came to
Tengo without irony. Nor did he feel any need to complain about it.
Whatever the
composition of this new world might be, I surely have no choice but to accept it in
silence. There’s no way to pick and choose. Even in the world that existed until now,
there was no choice. It’s the same thing. And besides
, he asked himself,
even if I
wanted to lodge a complaint, who is there for me to complain to?
The hard, dry sound of his heart continued, but the dizzy sensation was gradually
subsiding. With his heart pounding in his ears, Tengo leaned his head against the
handrail of the slide and looked at the two moons hanging in the Koenji sky. What a
strange sight it was—a new world with a new moon. Everything was uncertain, and
ultimately ambiguous.
But there is one thing I can declare with certainty
, Tengo
thought:
No matter what happens to
me in the future, this view with two moons
hanging up there side by side will never—ever—seem ordinary and obvious to me
.
What kind of secret pact had Aomame concluded with the moon that time, Tengo
wondered. And he recalled the deadly serious look in her eye as she stared at the
moon in broad daylight. What could she have offered the moon?
And what is going to happen to me from now on?
At ten years old, as a frightened boy standing before the room’s big door, Tengo
had wondered this again and again while Aomame continued to grip his hand in the
empty classroom. Even now Tengo continued to wonder that same thing. He felt the
same anxiety, the same fear, the same trembling. The door now was new and bigger.
The moon was hanging there again, but this time there were two moons, not one.
Where could Aomame be?
Tengo scanned the area again from his perch on the slide, but nowhere could he
find what he was hoping to discover. He spread out his left hand and struggled to find
some clue, but there was nothing in his palm besides its natural deeply carved lines. In
the flat light of the mercury-vapor lamp they looked like the canals on the surface of
Mars, but they told him absolutely nothing. The most he could glean from this big
hand was the fact that he had come a very long way since the age of ten—all the way
to the top of this slide in a little Koenji playground where two moons were hanging in
the sky.
483
Where could Aomame be?
Tengo asked himself again.
Where is she hiding?
“She might be very close by,” Fuka-Eri had said. “Within walking distance.”
Supposedly somewhere close by, could Aomame also see the two moons?
Yes, I’m sure she can
, Tengo thought. He had no proof, of course, but he had a
mysterious conviction that it must be true. She could see what he could see, without a
doubt. He balled his left hand into a tight fist and pounded on the surface of the slide
hard enough to hurt.
That is why it has to happen: we have to run into each other somewhere within
walking distance of this place. Someone is after Aomame, and she’s hiding like a
wounded cat. I don’t have much time to find her
. But where could she be? Tengo had
no idea.
“Ho ho,” called the keeper of the beat.
“Ho ho,” the other six joined in.
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