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.

Still, Aomame felt she could understand why this novella had gained such a wide readership. Although it was a story about the fantastical experiences of a girl placed in unusual circumstances, it also had something that called forth people’s natural sympathies. It probably aroused some subconscious something, which was why readers were pulled in and kept turning pages.

Tengo undoubtedly had contributed much to the book’s literary qualities, its vivid, precise descriptions, but she could not confine her admiration to that fact alone. She had to focus on the parts of the story where the Little People enter the action. For Aomame, this was a highly practical story—a virtual instruction manual—upon which hinged the life and death of actual people. She needed to gain concrete knowledge from it, to add whatever solidity and detail she could to her understanding of the world into which she had strayed.

Air Chrysalis was not just a wild fantasy dreamed up by a seventeen-year-old girl. The names may have been changed, but Aomame firmly believed that the majority of things depicted in it were unmistakable reality as experienced firsthand by the girl herself. Fuka-Eri had recorded those events from her own life as accurately as possible in order to reveal those hidden secrets to the world at large, to inform large numbers of people of the existence and the deeds of the Little People.

The dohta that the girl had left behind must have become a passageway for the Little People and guided them to Leader, the girl’s father, who was then transformed by them into a Receiver. They then drove the Akebono members, who were of no use to them, into a suicidal bloodbath, and transformed the remaining Sakigake group into a smart, militant, and xenophobic religious organization, which was probably the most comfortable and convenient environment for the Little People.

Aomame wondered if Fuka-Eri’s dohta had been able to survive for long without her maza. The Little People had said that it was virtually impossible for a dohta to go on living without her maza. And what about a maza? What was it like for her to live after having lost the shadow of her heart and mind?

After the girl escaped from Sakigake, the Little People had probably used the same process to make more new dohtas, their purpose being to widen and stabilize the passageway by which they came and went, like adding new lanes to a highway. This was how the dohtas became Perceivers for the Little People and played the role of shrine maidens. Tsubasa had been one of them. If Leader had sexual relations not with the girls’ actual mazas but with their other selves, their dohtas, then Leader’s expression—“ambiguous congress”—made sense. It also explained Tsubasa’s flat, depthless eyes and her near inability to speak. Aomame had no idea how or why the dohta, Tsubasa, had escaped from the religious organization, but she had almost certainly been put into an air chrysalis and “retrieved” to be taken back to her maza. The bloody killing of the dog had been a warning from the Little People, like what was done to Toru in the story.

The dohtas wanted to become pregnant with Leader’s child, but, lacking substance themselves, they were not menstruating. Still, according to Leader, their desire to become pregnant was intense. Why should that have been?

Aomame shook her head. There was still much that she did not understand.

Aomame wished that she could tell this to the dowager as soon as possible—that the man might actually have raped nothing more than the girls’ shadows; that they might not have had to kill him after all.

But even if she explained these things, it would not be easy for her to get the dowager to believe her. Aomame knew how the dowager would feel. The dowager—or any sane person—would have trouble accepting as fact this stuff about the Little People, mazas, dohtas, or air chrysalises. To sane people, these things would seem 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 Janáček’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 theinvading 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 logic and his rules, and perhaps by the very language he is writing. How marvelous to be inside him like this!