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This may be my last job
, Aomame thought. It’s also going to be my most important
and most difficult job. Once I’ve finished this assignment, I won’t have to kill anyone
anymore.
Aomame was not opposed to losing her identity. If anything, she welcomed it. She
was not particularly attached to her name or her face and could think of nothing about
her past that she would regret losing.
A reset of my life: this may be the one thing I’ve
longed for most
.
Strangely enough, the one thing that Aomame felt she did not want to lose was her
rather sad little breasts. From the age of twelve, she had lived with an unwavering
dissatisfaction with regard to the shape and size of her breasts. It often occurred to her
that she might have been able to live a far more serene life if only her breasts had
been a little larger. And yet now, when she was being given a chance to enlarge them
(a choice that carried with it a certain necessity), she found that she had absolutely no
desire to make the change. They were fine as they were. Indeed, they were just right.
She touched her breasts through her tank top. They were the same breasts as
always, shaped like two lumps of dough that had failed to rise—because of a failure
to properly combine the ingredients—and subtly different in size. She shook her head.
But never mind. These are me
.
What will be left of me besides these breasts?
Tengo’s memory will stay with me, of course. The touch of his hand will stay. My
shuddering emotion will stay. The desire to be in his arms will stay. Even if I
become
a completely different person, my love for Tengo can never be taken from me. That’s
the biggest difference between Ayumi and me. At my core, there is not nothing.
Neither is it a parched wasteland. At my core, there is love. I’ll go on loving that ten-
year-old boy named Tengo forever—his strength, his intelligence, his kindness. He
does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises
unmade are never broken
.
The thirty-year-old Tengo inside of Aomame was not the real Tengo. That Tengo
was nothing but a hypothesis, as it were, created entirely in Aomame’s mind. Tengo
still had his strength and intelligence and kindness, and now he was a grown man with
thick arms, a broad chest, and big, strong genitals. He could be by her side whenever
she wanted him there, holding her tightly, stroking her hair, kissing her. Their room
was always dark, and Aomame couldn’t see him. All that her eyes could take in was
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his eyes. Even in the dark, she could see his warm eyes. She could look into them and
see the world as he saw it.
Aomame’s occasional overwhelming need to sleep with men came, perhaps, from
her wish to keep the Tengo she nurtured inside her as unsullied as possible. By
engaging in wild sex with unknown men, what she hoped to accomplish, surely, was
the liberation of her flesh from the desire that bound it. She wanted to spend time
alone with Tengo in the calm, quiet world that came to her after the liberation, just the
two of them together, undisturbed. Surely that was what Aomame wanted.
Aomame spent several hours that afternoon thinking about Tengo. She sat on the
aluminum chair on her narrow balcony, looking up at the sky, listening to the roar of
the traffic, occasionally holding a leaf of her sad little rubber plant between her
fingers as she thought of him. There was still no moon to be seen in the afternoon sky.
That wouldn’t happen for some hours yet.
Where will I be at this time tomorrow?
Aomame wondered.
I have no idea. But that’s a minor matter compared with the fact
that Tengo exists in this world
.
Aomame gave her rubber plant its last watering, and then she put Janá
č
ek’s
Sinfonietta
on the record player. It was the only record she had kept after getting rid
of all the others. She closed her eyes and listened to the music, imagining the
windswept fields of Bohemia. How wonderful it would be to walk with Tengo in such
a place! They would be holding hands, of course. The breeze would sweep past,
soundlessly swaying the soft green grass. Aomame could feel the warmth of Tengo’s
hand in hers. The scene would gradually fade like a movie’s happy ending.
Aomame then lay down on her bed and slept for thirty minutes, curled up in a ball.
She did not dream. It was a sleep that required no dreaming. When she woke, the
hands of the clock were pointing to four thirty. Using the food still left in the
refrigerator, she made herself some ham and eggs. She drank orange juice straight
from the carton. The silence after her nap was strangely heavy. She turned on the FM
radio to find Vivaldi’s Concerto for Woodwinds playing. The piccolo was trilling
away like the chirping of a little bird. To Aomame, this sounded like music intended
to emphasize the unreality of her present reality.
After clearing the dishes from the table, Aomame took a shower and changed into
the outfit she had prepared weeks ago for this day—simple clothes that made for easy
movement: pale blue cotton pants and a white short-sleeved blouse free of
ornamentation. She gathered her hair in a bun and put it up, holding it in place with a
comb. No accessories. Instead of putting the clothes she had been wearing into the
hamper, she stuffed them into a black plastic garbage bag for Tamaru to get rid of.
She trimmed her fingernails and took time brushing her teeth. She also cleaned her
ears. Then she trimmed her eyebrows, spread a thin layer of cream over her face, and
put a tiny dab of cologne on the back of her neck. She inspected the details of her face
from every angle in the mirror to be sure there were no problems, and then, picking
up a vinyl gym bag with a Nike logo, she left the room.
Standing by the front door, she turned for one last look, aware that she would
never be coming back. The thought made the apartment appear unbelievably shabby,
like a prison that only locked from the inside, bereft of any picture or vase. The only
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thing left was the bargain-sale rubber plant on the balcony, which she had bought
instead of goldfish. She could hardly believe she had spent years of her life in this
place without question or discontent.
“Good-bye,” she murmured, bidding farewell not so much to the apartment as to
the self that had lived here.
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