You are not alone.

She is in hiding, Fuka-Eri had said. Like a wounded cat.

Come to think of it, this was a strange coincidence. Fuka-Eri herself was in hiding here. She wouldn’t set foot outside of Tengo’s apartment. In this same section of Tokyo, two women were lying low, running away from something. Both women had deep connections with Tengo. Could that be significant? Or was it a mere coincidence?

No answers were forthcoming, of course, just an aimless bunch of questions. Too many questions, too few answers. It was always like this.

When he finished his beer, a young waiter came over and asked him if he would like something else. Tengo hesitated a moment and then requested a bourbon on the rocks and another bowl of mixed nuts. “The only bourbon we have is Four Roses, if that’s okay.” Tengo said it would be okay. Anything at all. Then he went back to thinking about Aomame. The fragrance of a baking pizza wafted toward him from the kitchen.

From whom could Aomame possibly be hiding? The police? But Tengo could not believe that she had become a criminal. What kind of crime could she have committed? No, it could not be the police who were chasing her. Whoever or whatever it might be, the law surely had nothing to do with it.

Maybe they’re the same ones who are after Fuka-Eri, it suddenly occurred to Tengo. The Little People? Why would the Little People have to pursue Aomame?

But if they are really the ones pursuing Aomame, am I at the center of this? Tengo of course had no idea why he had to be the pivotal figure in such a chain of events, but if there was a connection between the two women, Fuka-Eri and Aomame, it could not be anyone other than Tengo himself. Without even being aware of it, I may have been using some kind of power to draw Aomame closer to me.

Some kind of power?

He stared at his hands. I don’t get it. Where could I have that kind of power?

His Four Roses on the rocks arrived along with a new bowl of nuts. He took a swallow of Four Roses, and, taking several nuts in the palm of his hand, he shook them like dice.

Anyhow, Aomame is in this neighborhood. Within walking distance. That’s what Fuka-Eri says. And I believe it. I’d be hard-pressed to explain why, but I do believe it. Still, how can I go about finding Aomame in her hiding place? It’s hard enough finding someone living a normal life, but the task obviously becomes morechallenging when someone is deliberately hiding. Should I go through the streets calling her name on a loudspeaker? Sure, like that’s going to get her to step right up. It would just alert others to her presence and expose her to added danger.

There must be something else I should recall about her, Tengo thought.

“You remember some things about her. One of them might help,” Fuka-Eri had said. But even before she said that to him, Tengo had long suspected that he might have failed to recall an important fact or two regarding Aomame. It had begun to make him feel uneasy now and then, like a pebble in his shoe. The feeling was vague but persistent.

Tengo swept his mind clean, as if erasing a blackboard, and started unearthing memories again—memories of Aomame, memories of himself, memories of the things around them, dredging the soft, muddy bottom like a fisherman dragging his net, putting the items in order and mulling them over with great care. Ultimately, though, these were things that had happened twenty years earlier. As vividly as he might recall them, there was a limit to how much he could bring back.

It occurred to him to try thinking about lines of vision. What had Aomame been looking at? And what had Tengo himself been looking at? Let me think back along our moving lines of vision and the flow of time.

The girl was holding his hand and looking straight into his eyes. Her line of vision never wavered. Tengo, initially at a loss to understand her actions, sought an explanation in her eyes. This must be some kind of misunderstanding or mistake, Tengo had thought. But there was no misunderstanding or mistake here. What he realized was that the girl’s eyes were almost shockingly deep and clear. He had never seen eyes of such absolute clarity. They were like two springs, utterly transparent, but too deep to see the bottoms. He felt he might be sucked inside if he went on looking into them. And so he had no choice but to turn away from them.

He looked first at the floorboards beneath his feet, then at the entrance to the empty classroom, and finally he bent his neck slightly to look outside through the window. All this time, Aomame’s gaze never wavered. She kept staring at Tengo’s eyes even as he looked outside the window. He could feel her line of vision stinging his skin and her fingers gripping his left hand with unwavering strength and with complete conviction. She was not afraid. There was nothing she had to fear. And she was trying to convey that feeling to Tengo through her fingertips.

Because their encounter followed the cleaning of the classroom, the window had been left wide open for fresh air, and the white curtains were softly waving in the breeze. Beyond them stretched the sky. December had come, but it was still not that cold. High up in the sky floated a cloud—a straight, white cloud that retained a vestige of autumn, like a brand-new brushstroke across the sky. And there was something else there, hanging beneath the cloud. The sun? No, it was not the sun.

Tengo held his breath, pressed his fingers to his temple and tried to peer into a still-deeper place in his memory, tracing a frail thread of consciousness that was ready to snap at any moment.

That’s it. The moon was up there.

Sunset was still some time away, but there it was—the moon—standing out against the sky, about three-quarters full. Tengo was impressed that he could see such a large, bright moon while it was still so light out. He remembered that. The unfeeling chunk of rock hung low in the sky as if, having nothing better to do, it was suspended on an invisible thread. It had a certain artificial air about it. At first glance, it looked like a fake moon used as a stage prop. But it was the actual moon, of course. Nobody would take the time and effort to hang a fake moon in a real sky.

Suddenly Tengo realized that Aomame was no longer looking at him. Her line of vision was turned in the same direction as his. Like him, Aomame was staring at the moon in broad daylight, still gripping his hand, her face deadly serious. He looked at her eyes again. They were not as clear as before. That had been a special, momentary clarity, and in its place he now could see something hard and crystalline. It was at once beguiling and severe, with a quality reminiscent of frost. Tengo could not grasp its meaning.

Eventually the girl seemed to have made up her mind. She suddenly released her grip on his hand, turned her back on him, and rushed out of the room without a word or a backward glance, leaving Tengo in a deep vacuum.

Tengo opened his eyes, relaxed his mental concentration, released a deep breath, and took a swallow of his bourbon. He felt the whiskey pass through his throat and down his gullet. He took another breath and exhaled. He could no longer see Aomame. She had turned her back on him and left the classroom, erasing herself from his life.

Twenty years went by.

It was the moon, Tengo thought.

I was looking at the moon, and so was Aomame. That gray chunk of rock hanging in the still-bright sky at three thirty in the afternoon. That lonely, taciturn satellite. We stood side by side, looking at that moon. But what does it mean? That the moon will guide me to her?

It suddenly crossed Tengo’s mind that back then, Aomame might have entrusted the moon with her feelings. She and the moon might have reached a kind of secret agreement. Her gaze at the moon contained something frighteningly serious that could stir the imagination this way.