1Q84 (94 page)

The one with the screechy voice says, “But the chrysalis is almost finished. It will be ready once we add just a little bit more.”

The Little People stand in a row, staring at the air chrysalis as if to measure the size of what they have made so far.

“Just a tiny bit more!” the hoarse-voiced one says as if leading the chorus in a monotonous boatman’s song.

“Ho ho,” intones the keeper of the beat.

“Ho ho,” the other six join in.

The girl’s ten days of isolation end and she returns to the Gathering. Her communal life starts again, and she is so busy following all the rules that she has no more time to be alone. She can, of course, no longer work on the air chrysalis with the Little People. Every night before she goes to bed, she imagines to herself the seven Little People continuing to sit around the air chrysalis and make it bigger. It is all she can think about. It even feels as if the whole air chrysalis has actually slipped inside her head.

The girl is dying to know what could possibly be inside the air chrysalis. What will appear when the chrysalis ripens and pops open? She is filled with regret to think that she cannot witness the scene with her own eyes.
I worked so hard helping them to make it, I should be allowed to be there when it opens
. She even thinks seriously of committing another offense so that she can be punished with another period of isolation in the storehouse. But even if she were to go to all that trouble, the Little People might not appear. The dead goat has been carried away and buried somewhere. Its eye will not sparkle in the starlight again.

The story goes on to describe the girl’s daily life in the community—the disciplined schedule, the fixed tasks, the guidance and care she provides the other children as the oldest child in the community, her simple meals, the stories her parents read her before bedtime, the classical music she listens to whenever she can find a spare moment. A life without “po-loo-shun.”

The Little People visit her in dreams. They can enter people’s dreams whenever they like. They tell her that the air chrysalis is about to break open, and they urge her to come and see it. “Come to the storehouse with a candle after sunset. Don’t let anyone see you.”

The girl cannot suppress her curiosity. She slips out of bed and pads her way to the storehouse carrying the candle she has prepared. No one is there. All she finds is the air chrysalis sitting quietly where it has been left on the storehouse floor. It is twice as big as it was when she last saw it, well over four feet long. Its entire surface radiates a soft glow, and its beautifully curved shape has a waist-like narrowed area in the middle that was not there before, when it was smaller. The Little People have obviously been working hard. The chrysalis is already breaking open. A vertical crack has formed in its side. The girl bends over and peers in through the opening.

She discovers that she herself is inside the chrysalis. She stares at this other self of hers lying naked on her back, eyes closed, apparently unconscious, not breathing, like a doll.

One of the Little People speaks to her—the one with the hoarse voice: “That is your
dohta
,” he says, and then clears his throat.

The girl turns to find the seven Little People fanned out behind her in a row.

“
Dohta
,” she says, mechanically repeating the word.

“And what you are called is ‘
maza
,’ ” the bass says.

“
Maza
and
dohta
,” the girl says.

“The
dohta
serves as a stand-in for the
maza
,” the screechy-voiced one says.

“Do I get split in two?” the girl asks.

“Not at all,” the tenor says. “This does not mean that you are split in two. You are the same you in every way. Don’t worry. A
dohta
is just the shadow of the
maza
‘s heart and mind in the shape of the
maza
.”

“When will
she
wake up?”

“Very soon. When the time comes,” the baritone says.

“What will this
dohta
do as the shadow of my heart and mind?” the girl asks.

“She will act as a Perceiver,” the small-voiced one says furtively.

“Perceiver,” the girl says.

“Yes,” says the hoarse one. “She who perceives.”

“She conveys what she perceives to the Receiver,” the screechy one says.

“In other words, the
dohta
becomes our passageway,” the tenor says.

“Instead of the goat?” the girl asks.

“The dead goat was only a temporary passageway,” the bass says. “We must have a living
dohta
as a Perceiver to link the place we live with this place.”

“What does the
maza
do?” the girl asks.

“The
maza
stays close to the
dohta
,” the screechy one says.

“When will the
dohta
wake up?” the girl asks.

“Two days from now, or maybe three,” the tenor says.

“One or the other,” says the one with the small voice.

“Make sure you take good care of this
dohta
,” the baritone says. “She is
your dohta
.”

“Without the
maza
‘s care, the
dohta
cannot be complete. She cannot live long without it,” the screechy one says.

“If she loses her
dohta
, the
maza
will lose the shadow of her heart and mind,” the tenor says.

“What happens to a
maza
when she loses the shadow of her heart and mind?” the girl asks.

The Little People look at each other. None of them will answer the question.

“When the
dohta
wakes up, there will be two moons in the sky,” the hoarse one says.

“The two moons cast the shadow of her heart and mind,” the baritone says.

“There will be two moons,” the girl repeats mechanically.

“That will be a sign. Watch the sky with great care,” the small-voiced one says furtively. “Watch the sky with great care,” he says again. “Count the moons.”

“Ho ho,” says the keeper of the beat.

“Ho ho,” the other six join in.

The girl runs away.

There was something mistaken there. Something wrong. Something greatly misshapen. Something opposed to nature. The girl knows this. She does not know what the Little People want, but the image of herself inside the air chrysalis sends shivers through her. She cannot possibly live with her living, moving other self. She has to run away from here. As soon as she possibly can. Before her
dohta
wakes up. Before that second moon appears in the sky.

In the Gathering it is forbidden for individuals to own money. But the girl’s father once secretly gave her a ten-thousand-yen bill and some coins. “Hide this so that no one can find it,” he told her. He also gave her a piece of paper with someone’s name, address, and telephone number written on it. “If you ever have to run away from this place, use the money to buy a train ticket and go there.”

Her father must have known back then that something bad might happen in the Gathering. The girl does not hesitate. Her actions are swift. She has no time to say good-bye to her parents.

From a jar she buried in the earth, she takes out the ten-thousand-yen bill and the coins and the paper. During class, she tells the teacher she is not feeling well and gets permission to go to the nurse’s office. Instead she leaves the school and takes a bus to the station. She presents her ten-thousand-yen bill at the window and buys a ticket to Takao, west of Tokyo. The man at the window gives her change. This is the first time in her life she has ever bought a ticket or received change or gotten on a train, but her father gave her detailed instructions, and she has memorized what she must do.

As indicated on the paper, the girl gets off the train at Takao Station on the Chuo Line, and she uses a public telephone to call the number her father gave her. The man who answers is an old friend of her father’s, an artist who paints in the traditional Japanese style. He is ten years older than her father and he lives in the hills with his daughter near Mount Takao. His wife died a short time before. The daughter is named Kurumi and she is one year younger than the girl. As soon as he hears from the girl, the man comes to get her at the station, and he warmly welcomes this young escapee into his home.

The day after she is taken into the painter’s home, the girl looks at the sky from her room and discovers that the number of moons up there has increased to two. Near the usual moon a smaller second moon hangs like a slightly shriveled green pea.
My
dohta
must have awakened
, the girl thinks. The two moons cast the shadow of her heart and mind. Her heart gives a shudder.
The world has changed. And something is beginning to happen
.

The girl hears nothing from her parents. Perhaps no one in the Gathering has noticed her disappearance. That is because her other self, her
dohta
, has remained behind. The two of them look exactly alike, so most people can’t tell the difference. Her parents, of course, should be able to tell that the
dohta
is not the actual girl, that she is nothing but the girl’s other self, that their actual daughter has run away from the Gathering, leaving the
dohta
behind in her place. There is only one place where the girl might have gone, but still her parents never try to contact her. This in itself might be a wordless message to the girl to stay away.

The girl goes to school irregularly. The new outside world is simply too different from the world of the Gathering where she grew up. The rules are different, the aims are different, the words they use are different. For this reason, she has trouble making friends in this new world. She can’t get used to life in the school.

In middle school, however, she befriends a boy. His name is Toru. He is small and skinny, and his face has several deep wrinkles like that of a monkey. He seems to have suffered from a serious illness when little and can’t participate in strenuous activities. His backbone is somewhat curved. At recess time, he always stays by himself, reading a book. Like the girl, he has no friends. He is too small and too ugly. During one lunch break, the girl sits next to him and starts to talk to him. She asks about the book he is reading. He reads it aloud to her. She likes his voice, which is small and hoarse but very clear to her. The stories he tells with that voice all but carry her away. He reads prose so beautifully that it sounds as if he is reciting poetry. Soon she is spending every lunchtime with him, sitting very still and listening with deep attention to the stories he reads her.

Before long, however, Toru is lost to the girl. The Little People snatch him away from her.

One night an air chrysalis appears in Toru’s room. The Little People make it bigger and bigger each night while he sleeps, and they show the scene to the girl through her dreams. The girl can do nothing to stop them. Eventually the chrysalis reaches full size and a vertical split appears in its side, just as it happened with the girl. But inside this chrysalis are three big, black snakes. The three snakes are tightly intertwined, so tightly that no one—including themselves—can pull them apart. They look like a shiny perpetual
tangle
with three heads. The snakes are terribly angry that they cannot pull free. They writhe in a frantic effort to separate themselves from each other, but the more they writhe, the more entangled they become. The Little People show these creatures to the girl. The boy called Toru sleeps on beside them, unaware. Only the girl can see all this.

The boy suddenly falls ill a few days later and is sent to a distant sanatorium. The nature of his illness is not disclosed. In any case, Toru will surely never return to the school. He has been irretrievably lost.

The girl realizes that this is a message from the Little People. Apparently they cannot do anything to the girl, a
maza
, directly. What they can do instead is harm and even destroy the people around her. But they cannot do this to just anyone—they cannot touch her guardian, the painter, or his daughter, Kurumi. Instead they choose the weakest ones for their prey. They dragged the three black snakes from the depths of the boy’s mind and woke them from their slumber. By destroying the boy, they have sent a warning to the girl and are trying their best to bring her back to her
dohta.
“
You
, finally, are the one who caused this to happen,” they are telling her.

The girl returns to her loneliness. She stops going to school. Making friends with someone can only expose that person to danger. That is what it means to live beneath two moons. That is what she has learned.

The girl eventually makes up her mind and begins fashioning her own air chrysalis. She is able to do this. The Little People said that they had come to her world down a passageway from the place they belong. If that is the case, she herself should be able to go to that place down a passageway in the opposite direction. If she goes there, she can learn the secrets regarding why she is here and what the meaning of “
maza
” and “
dohta
” could be. She might also succeed in saving the lost Toru. The girl begins making a passageway. All she has to do is pluck threads from the air and weave a chrysalis. This will take time, but if she does take the time, she can do it.

Sometimes, however, she becomes unsure and confusion overtakes her.
Am I really a
maza
? Couldn’t I have switched places somewhere with my
dohta
?
The more she thinks about it, the less certain she becomes.
How can I prove that I am the real me?

The story ends symbolically when the girl is opening the door of her passageway. It says nothing about what will happen beyond the door—probably because it has not happened yet.

Dohta, Aomame thought.
Leader used that word before he died. He said that his own daughter had run away, leaving her
dohta
behind, in order to establish a force opposed to the Little People. It might have actually happened. And I am not the only one to see two moons
.