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Maza
and
dohta
. It’s from the book
Air Chrysalis
. Do you know it?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Have you read it?”
Tengo silently nodded.
“Great. That makes things easier. I
love
that book. I bought it in the summer and
read it three times. I hardly ever read a book three times. And as I was smoking
hashish for the first time in my life I thought it felt like I was inside an air chrysalis
myself. Like I was enveloped in something and waiting to be born. With my
maza
watching over me.”
“You saw your
maza?
” Tengo asked.
“Yes, I did. From inside the air chrysalis you can see outside, to a certain extent.
Though you can’t see in from outside. That’s how it’s structured. But I couldn’t make
out her expression. She was a vague outline. But I knew it was my
maza
. I could feel
it very clearly. That this person was my
maza.
”
“So an air chrysalis is actually a kind of womb.”
“I guess you could say that. I don’t remember anything from when I was in the
womb, so I can’t make an exact comparison,” Kumi Adachi said, and giggled again.
599
It was the kind of cheaply made two-story apartment building you often find in the
suburbs of provincial cities. It looked fairly new, yet it was already starting to fall
apart. The outside stairway creaked, and the doors didn’t quite hang right. Whenever
a large truck rolled by outside, the windows rattled. The walls were thin, and if
anyone were to practice a bass guitar in one of the apartments, the whole building
would end up being one large sound box.
Tengo wasn’t all that drawn to the idea of smoking hashish. He had a sane mind,
yet he lived in a world with two moons. There was no need to distort the world any
more than that. He also didn’t have any sexual desire for Kumi Adachi. Certainly he
did feel friendly toward this young twenty-three-year-old nurse. But friendliness and
sexual desire were two different things, at least for Tengo. So if she hadn’t mentioned
maza
and
dohta
, most likely he would have made up an excuse and not gone inside.
He would have taken a bus back, or, if there weren’t any buses, he would have had
her call a cab, and then returned to the inn. This was, after all, the cat town. It was
best to avoid any dangerous spots. But once Kumi mentioned the words
maza
and
dohta
, Tengo couldn’t turn down her invitation. Maybe she could give him a hint as to
why the young Aomame had appeared in the air chrysalis in the hospital room.
The apartment was a typical place for two sisters in their twenties living together.
There were two small bedrooms, plus a combined kitchen and dining room that
connected to a tiny living room. The furniture looked thrown together from all over,
with no unifying style. Above the laminated dining table there hung a tacky imitation
Tiffany lamp, quite out of place. If you were to open the curtain, with its tiny floral
pattern, outside there was a cultivated field, and beyond that, a thick, dark grove of
various trees. The view was nice, with nothing to obstruct it, but far from
heartwarming.
Kumi sat Tengo down on the love seat in the living room—a gaudy, red love
seat—facing the TV. She took out a can of Sapporo beer from the fridge and set it
down, with a glass, in front of him.
“I’m going to change into something more comfortable, so wait here. I’ll be right
back.”
But she didn’t come back for a long time. He could hear the occasional sound from
behind the door across the narrow corridor—the sound of drawers that didn’t slide
well, opening and closing, the thud of things clunking to the ground. With each thud,
Tengo couldn’t help but look in that direction. Maybe she really was drunker than she
looked. He could hear a TV through the thin walls of the apartment. He couldn’t make
out what the people were saying, but it appeared to be a comedy show, and every ten
or fifteen seconds there was a burst of laughter from the audience. Tengo regretted not
having turned down her invitation. At the same time, though, in a corner of his mind
he felt it was inevitable that he had come here.
The love seat was cheap, and the fabric itched whenever his skin touched it.
Something bothered him, too, about the shape of it, and he couldn’t get comfortable
no matter how he shifted around. This only amplified his sense of unease. Tengo took
a sip of beer and picked up the TV remote from the table. He stared at it for a time, as
if it were some odd object, and then hit the on button. He surfed through a few
channels, finally settling on an NHK documentary about railroads in Australia. He
chose this program simply because it was quieter than the others. While an oboe piece
600
played in the background, a woman announcer was calmly introducing the elegant
sleeper cars in the line that ran across the whole of Australia.
Tengo sat there in the uncomfortable love seat, unenthusiastically following the
images on the screen, but his mind was on
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