Fuka-Eri did not answer him. Perhaps the question was too long.

“Have you ever met the Little People?” Tengo asked.

Fuka-Eri stared at him vaguely, as though she could not grasp the meaning of his question.

“Have you ever actually seen them?” Tengo rephrased his question.

“Yes,” Fuka-Eri said.

“How many of the Little People did you see?”

“I don’t know. More than I could count on my fingers.”

“But not just one.”

“Their numbers can sometimes increase and sometimes decrease, but there is never just one.”

“The way you depicted them in Air Chrysalis.”

Fuka-Eri nodded.

Tengo took this opportunity to ask Fuka-Eri a question he had been wanting to ask her for some time. “Tell me,” he said, “how much of Air Chrysalis is real? How much of it really happened?”

“What does ‘real’ mean,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark.

Tengo had no answer for this, of course.

A great clap of thunder echoed through the sky. The windowpanes rattled. But still there was no lightning, no sound of rain. Tengo recalled an old submarine movie. One depth charge after another would explode, jolting the ship, but everyone was locked inside the dark steel box, unable to see outside. For them, there was only the unbroken sound and the shaking of the sub.

“Will you read me a book or tell me a story,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“Sure,” Tengo said, “but I can’t think of a good book for reading out loud. I don’t have the book here, but I can tell you a story called ‘Town of Cats,’ if you like.”

“ ‘Town of Cats.’ ”

“It’s the story of a town ruled by cats.”

“I want to hear it.”

“It might be a little too scary for a bedtime story, though.”

“That’s okay. I can sleep, whatever story you tell.”

Tengo brought a chair next to the bed, sat down, folded his hands in his lap, and started telling “Town of Cats,” with the thunder as background music. He had read the story twice on the express train and once again, aloud, to his father in the sanatorium, so he knew the plot pretty well. It was not such a complex or finely delineated story, nor had it been written in a terribly elegant style, so he felt little hesitation in altering it as he pleased, omitting the more tedious parts or adding episodes that occurred to him as he recited the story for Fuka-Eri.

The original story had not been very long, but telling it took a lot longer than he had imagined because Fuka-Eri would not hesitate to ask any questions that occurred to her. Tengo would interrupt the story each time and give her careful answers, explaining the details of the town or the cats’ behavior or the protagonist’s character. When they were things not described in the story (which was usually the case), Tengo would make them up, as he had with Air Chrysalis. Fuka-Eri seemed to be completely drawn in by “Town of Cats.” She no longer looked tired. She would close her eyes sometimes, imagining scenes of the town of cats. Then she would open her eyes and urge Tengo to go on with the story.

When he was through telling her the story, Fuka-Eri opened her eyes wide and stared at Tengo the way a cat widens its pupils to stare at something in the dark.

“Did you go to a town of cats,” Fuka-Eri asked Tengo, as if pressing him to reveal a truth.

“Me?!”

“You went to your town of cats. Then came back on a train.”

“Is that what you feel?”

With the summer quilt pulled up to her chin, Fuka-Eri gave him a quick little nod.

“You’re quite right,” Tengo said. “I went to a town of cats and came back on a train.”

“Did you do a purification afterward,” she asked.

“Purification? No, I don’t think so, not yet.”

“You have to do it.”

“What kind of purification?”

Instead of answering him, Fuka-Eri said, “If you go to a town of cats and don’t do anything about it afterward, bad stuff can happen.”

A great thunderclap seemed to crack the heavens in two. The sound was increasing in ferocity. Fuka-Eri recoiled from it in bed.

“Come here and hold me,” Fuka-Eri said. “We have to go to a town of cats together.”

“Why?”

“The Little People might find the entrance.”

“Because I haven’t done a purification?”

“Because the two of us are one,” the girl said.

CHAPTER 13

Aomame

WITHOUT YOUR LOVE

“1Q84,” Aomame said. “Are you talking about the fact that I am living now in the year called 1Q84, not the real 1984?”

“What the real world is: that is a very difficult problem,” the man called Leader said as he lay on his stomach. “What it is, is a metaphysical proposition. But this is the real world, there is no doubt about that. The pain one feels in this world is real pain. Deaths caused in this world are real deaths. Blood shed in this world is real blood. This is no imitation world, no imaginary world, no metaphysical world. I guarantee you that. But this is not the 1984 you know.”

“Like a parallel world?”

The man’s shoulders trembled with laughter. “You’ve been reading too much science fiction. No, this is no parallel world. You don’t have 1984 over there and 1Q84 branching off over here and the two worlds running along parallel tracks. The year 1984 no longer exists anywhere. For you and for me, the only time that exists anymore is this year of 1Q84.”

“We have entered into its time flow once and for all.”

“Exactly. We have entered into this place where we are now. Or the time flow has entered us once and for all. And as far as I understand it, the door only opens in one direction. There is no way back.”

“I suppose it happened when I climbed down the Metropolitan Expressway’s emergency stairway.”

“Metropolitan Expressway?”

“Near Sangenjaya,” Aomame said.

“The place is irrelevant,” the man said. “For you, it was Sangenjaya. But the specific place is not the question. The question here, in the end, is the time. The track, as it were, was switched there, and the world was transformed into 1Q84.”

Aomame imagined a number of Little People joining forces to move the device that switches the tracks. In the middle of the night. Under the pale light of the moon.

“And in this year of 1Q84, there are two moons in the sky, aren’t there?”

“Correct: two moons. That is the sign that the track has been switched. That is how you can tell the two worlds apart. Not that all of the people here can see two moons. In fact, most people are not aware of it. In other words, the number of people who know that this is 1Q84 is quite limited.”

“Most people in this world are not aware that the time flow has been switched?”

“Correct. To most people, this is just the plain old everyday world they’ve always known. This is what I mean when I say, ‘This is the real world.’ ”

“So the track has been switched,” Aomame said. “If it had not been switched, we would not be meeting here like this. Could that be what you are saying?”

“That is the one thing that no one knows. It’s a question of probability. But that is probably the case.”

“Is what you are saying an objective fact, or just a hypothesis?”

“Good question. But distinguishing between the two is virtually impossible. Remember how the old song goes, ‘Without your love, it’s a honky-tonk parade’?” He hummed the melody. “Do you know it?”

“ ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon.’ ”

“That’s it. 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”