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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
.