1Q84 (66 page)

I think some of them will be of special interest to you, and a few will make you laugh—if you’re in the mood for laughing, that is.

In any case, it makes sense for you to have nothing to do with that organization.

Tengo returned Komatsu’s letter to the envelope. Why would Komatsu have bothered to write him a letter? It could simply be that, as long as he was sending the reviews, he put a letter in with them, but that was not like Komatsu. If he had something to tell Tengo, he would have done it on the phone as usual. A letter like this could remain as evidence in the future. Cautious Komatsu could not have failed to think about that. Or possibly Komatsu was less worried about evidence remaining than the possibility of a wiretap.

Tengo looked over at his phone. A wiretap? It had never occurred to him that anyone might be tapping his phone. Though, come to think of it, no one had called him in the past week. Maybe it was common knowledge that this phone was being tapped. He had not even heard from his older girlfriend, who liked talking on the phone. That was very unusual.

Even more unusual was the fact that she had not come to his apartment last Friday. She always called if something came up to prevent her from visiting him—say, her child was home from school with a cold, or her period had started all of a sudden. That Friday, however, she had not contacted him; she simply never showed up. Tengo had prepared a simple lunch for them in anticipation of her arrival, but ended up spending the day alone. Perhaps she was stuck dealing with some emergency, but it was not normal not to have had the slightest word from her. Meanwhile, he was not able to contact her from his end.

Tengo stopped thinking about both his girlfriend and the telephone. He sat at the kitchen table to read the book reviews in order. They had been assembled chronologically, the title of the newspaper or magazine and date of publication written in ballpoint pen in the upper left-hand corner. Komatsu must have had his part-time female assistant do it; he would never have undertaken such drudgery himself. Most of the reviews were positive. Many of the reviewers praised the story’s depth and boldness and acknowledged the precision of the style, several of them finding it “incredible” that the work had been written by a seventeen-year-old girl.

Not a bad guess
, Tengo thought.

One article called the author “a Francoise Sagan who has absorbed the air of magical realism.” This piece, though vague and filled with reservations, generally seemed to be in praise of the work.

More than a few of the reviewers seemed perplexed by—or simply undecided about—the meaning of the air chrysalis and the Little People. One reviewer concluded his piece, “As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what
is
an air chrysalis, or who
are
the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author’s intention, but many readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of ‘authorial laziness.’ While this may be fine for a debut work, if the author intends to have a long career as a writer, in the near future she may well need to explain her deliberately cryptic posture.”

Tengo cocked his head in puzzlement. If an author succeeded in writing a story “put together in an exceptionally interesting way” that “carries the reader along to the very end,” who could possibly call such a writer “lazy”?

But Tengo, in all honesty, had nothing clear to say to this. Maybe his thoughts on the matter were mistaken and the critic was right. He had immersed himself so deeply in the rewriting of
Air Chrysalis
that he was practically incapable of any kind of objectivity. He now saw the air chrysalis and the Little People as things that existed inside himself. Not even he could honestly say he knew what they meant. Nor was this so very important to him. The most meaningful thing was whether or not one could accept their existence as a fact, and Tengo was able to do this quite readily, which was precisely why he had been able to immerse his heart and soul in rewriting
Air Chrysalis
. Had he not been able to accept the story on its own terms, he would never have participated in the fraud, even if tempted with a fortune or faced with threats.

Still, Tengo’s reading of the story was his and his alone. He could not help feeling a certain sympathy for the trusting men and women who were “left in a pool of mysterious question marks” after reading
Air Chrysalis
. He pictured a bunch of dismayed-looking people clutching at colorful flotation rings as they drifted aimlessly in a large pool full of question marks. In the sky above them shone an utterly unrealistic sun. Tengo felt a certain sense of responsibility for having foisted such a state of affairs upon the public.

But who can possibly save all the people of the world?
Tengo thought.
You could bring all the gods of the world into one place, and still they couldn’t abolish nuclear weapons or eradicate terrorism. They couldn’t end the drought in
Africa or bring John Lennon back to life. Far from it—the gods would just break into factions and start fighting among themselves, and the world would probably become even more chaotic than it is now. Considering the sense of powerlessness that such a state of affairs would bring about, to have people floating in a pool of mysterious question marks seems like a minor sin
.

Tengo read about half of the
Air Chrysalis
reviews that Komatsu had sent before stuffing them back into the envelope. He could pretty well imagine what the rest were like. As a story,
Air Chrysalis
was fascinating to many people. It had fascinated Tengo and Komatsu and Professor Ebisuno and an amazing number of readers. What more did it have to do?

The phone rang just after nine o’clock Tuesday night. Tengo was listening to music and reading a book. This was his favorite time of day, reading to his heart’s content before going to sleep. When he tired of reading, he would fall asleep.

This was the first time he had heard the phone ring in quite a while, and there was something ominous about it. This was not Komatsu calling. The phone had a different ring when it was from Komatsu. Tengo hesitated, wondering whether he should pick it up at all. He let it ring five times. Then he lifted the needle from the record groove and picked up the receiver. It might be his girlfriend.

“Mr. Kawana?” a man said. It was the voice of a middle-aged man, soft and deep. Tengo did not recognize it.

“Yes,” Tengo said cautiously.

“I’m sorry to call so late at night. My name is Yasuda,” the man said in a neutral voice, neither friendly nor hostile, neither impersonal nor intimate.

Yasuda? The name was ordinary enough, but he couldn’t think of any Yasudas he knew.

“I’m calling to give you a message,” the man said. He then inserted a slight pause, rather like putting a bookmark in between the pages of a book. “My wife will not be able to visit your home anymore, I believe. That is all I wanted to tell you.”

Yasuda! That was his girlfriend’s name. Kyoko Yasuda. She never had occasion to speak her name in Tengo’s presence, which accounted for the lag in recognition. This man on the phone was Kyoko’s husband. Tengo felt as if something were stuck in his throat.

“Have I managed to make myself clear?” the man asked, his voice entirely free of emotion—or none that Tengo could hear. He spoke with a slight accent, possibly from Hiroshima or Kyushu. Tengo could not be sure.

“Not be able to visit,” Tengo echoed the words.

“Yes, she will no longer be
able
to visit.”

Tengo mustered up the courage to ask, “Has something happened to her?”

Silence. Tengo’s question hung in space, unanswered. Then the man said, “So what I’m telling you, Mr. Kawana, is that you will probably never see my wife again. I just wanted to let you know that.”

The man knew that Tengo had been sleeping with his wife. Once a week. For a year. Tengo could tell that he knew. But the man’s voice was strangely lacking in either anger or resentment. It contained something else—not so much a personal emotion as an objective scene: an abandoned, overgrown garden, or a dry riverbed after a major flood—a scene like that.

“I’m not sure what you are trying to—”

“Then let’s just leave it at that,” the man said, before Tengo could finish. A trace of fatigue was discernible in his voice. “One thing should be perfectly clear. My wife is irretrievably lost. She can no longer visit your home in any form. That is what I am saying.”

“Irretrievably lost,” Tengo repeated.

“I did not want to make this call, Mr. Kawana. But I couldn’t sleep at night if I just let it go and said nothing. Do you think I like having this conversation?”

No sounds of any kind came from the other end when the man stopped talking. He seemed to be phoning from an incredibly quiet place. Either that or the emotion inside him was acting like a vacuum, absorbing all sound waves in the vicinity.

Tengo felt he ought to ask the man a question or two. Otherwise, it seemed, this whole thing would end as a collection of inscrutable hints. He mustn’t let the conversation die! But this man had no intention of informing Tengo of any situational details. What kind of question could he ask when the other person had no intention of revealing the actual state of affairs? What kind of words should he give voice to when facing a vacuum? Tengo was still struggling to discover any words that might work when, without warning, the connection was cut. The man had set down the receiver without saying anything and left Tengo’s presence. Probably forever.

Tengo kept the dead receiver pressed to his ear for a time. If anyone else was listening in to the call, he might be able to grasp that person’s presence. He held his breath and listened, but there were no telltale sounds. All he could hear was the beating of his own heart. The more he listened, the more he felt like a thief who has crept into a stranger’s house at night, hidden in the shadows, holding his breath, and waiting for the family to fall asleep.

He boiled some water in a kettle and made green tea to calm his nerves. Cradling the handleless cup in his hands, he sat at the kitchen table and mentally reviewed the telephone call.

“My wife is irretrievably lost. She can no longer visit your home in any form. That is what I am saying.”
In any form:
that phrase disturbed Tengo the most. It suggested something dark, damp, and slimy.

What this man named Yasuda wanted to convey to Tengo, it seemed, was the message that even if his wife
wanted
to visit Tengo’s apartment again, it was literally
impossible
for her to carry out that wish. Impossible in what way? In what context? And what did it mean to say that she was “irretrievably lost”? An image formed in his mind of Kyoko Yasuda with serious injuries from an accident or having come down with an incurable disease or her face horribly disfigured by violence. She was confined to a wheelchair or had lost a limb or was wrapped head to toe in bandages, unable to move. Or then again she was being held in an underground room, fastened like a dog on a thick chain. All of these possibilities, however, seemed far-fetched.

Kyoko Yasuda (as Tengo was now calling her in his mind) had hardly ever spoken of her husband. Tengo had learned nothing about him from her—his profession, his age, his looks, his personality, where they had met, when they had married, whether he was skinny or fat, tall or short, or whether or not they got along well. All Tengo knew was that she was not particularly hard-pressed economically (she appeared to be quite comfortable, in fact), and that she seemed dissatisfied with either the frequency or the quality of the sex she had with her husband, though even these were entirely matters of conjecture on his part. She and Tengo spent their afternoons in bed talking of many things, but never once had the subject of her husband come up, nor had Tengo wanted to know about him. He preferred to remain ignorant of the man whose wife he was stealing. It seemed only proper. Now that this new situation had developed, however, he was sorry that he had never asked her about her husband (she would almost certainly have responded frankly if he had asked). Was her husband jealous? Possessive? Did he have violent tendencies?

He tried to put himself in the man’s place. How would he feel if the situation were reversed? Say, he has a wife, two small children, and a tranquil home life, but he discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man once a week—a man ten years her junior, and the affair has been going on for over a year. What would he think if he found himself in such a situation? What emotions would rule his heart? Violent anger? Deep disappointment? Vague sadness? Scornful indifference? A sense of having lost touch with reality? Or an indistinguishable blend of several emotions?

No amount of thinking enabled Tengo to hit upon exactly how he would feel. What came to mind through all his hypothesizing was the image of his mother in a white slip giving her breasts to a young man he did not know.
Destiny seems to have come full circle
, Tengo thought. The enigmatic young man was perhaps Tengo himself, the woman in his arms Kyoko Yasuda. The composition was exactly the same; only the individuals had changed.
Does this mean
that my life has been nothing but a process through which I am giving concrete form to the dormant image inside me? And how much responsibility do I bear for her having become irretrievably lost?

Tengo could not get back to sleep again. He kept hearing the voice of the man who called himself Yasuda. The hints that he had left behind weighed heavily on Tengo, and the words he had spoken bore a strange reality. Tengo thought about Kyoko Yasuda. He pictured her face and body in minute detail. He had last seen her on Friday, two weeks prior. As always, they had spent a lot of time having sex. After the phone call from her husband, though, it seemed like something that had happened in the distant past, like an episode out of history.