Still sitting on the floor, Aomame closed her eyes. She pressed her nose against the pages of the book, inhaling its smells—the smell of the paper, the smell of the ink. She quietly gave herself up to its flow, listening hard for the sound of Tengo’s heart.

This is the kingdom, she thought.

I am ready to die, anytime at all.

CHAPTER 20

Tengo

THE WALRUS AND THE MAD HATTER

No doubt about it: there were two moons.

One was the moon that had always been there, and the other was a far smaller, greenish moon, somewhat lopsided in shape, and much less bright. It looked like a poor, ugly, distantly related child that had been foisted on the family by unfortunate events and was welcomed by no one. But it was undeniably there, neither a phantom nor an optical illusion, hanging in space like other heavenly bodies, a solid mass with a clear-cut outline. Not a plane, not a blimp, not an artificial satellite, not a papier-mâché moon that someone made for fun. It was without a doubt a chunk of rock, having quietly, stubbornly settled on a position in the night sky, like a punctuation mark placed only after long deliberation or a mole bestowed by destiny.

Tengo stared at the new moon for a long time as if to challenge it, never averting his gaze, hardly even blinking. But no matter how long he kept his eyes locked on it, it refused to budge. It stayed hunkered down in its spot in the sky with silent, stonehearted tenacity.

Tengo unclenched his right fist and, almost unconsciously, gave his head a slight shake. Damn, it’s the same as in Air Chrysalis!A world with two moons hanging in the sky side by side. When a dohta is born, a second moon appears.

“That will be a sign. Watch the sky with great care,” one of the Little People said to the girl.

Tengo was the one who wrote those words. Following Komatsu’s advice, he had made his description of the new moon as concrete and detailed as possible. It was the part on which he had worked the hardest. The look of the new moon was almost entirely Tengo’s creation.

Komatsu had said, “Think of it this way, Tengo. Your readers have seen the sky with one moon in it any number of times, right? But I doubt they’ve seen a sky with two moons in it side by side. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precise detail as possible.”

It made a lot of sense.

Still looking up at the sky, Tengo shook his head again. The newly added moon was absolutely the same size and shape as the one for which he had invented a description. Even the figurative language that he had used fit this one almost perfectly.

This can’t be, Tengo thought. What kind of reality mimics fictional creations? “No, this can’t be,” he actually said aloud. Or tried to. His voice barely worked. His throat was parched, as if he had just run a very long distance. There’s no way this can be. That’s a fictional world, a world that does not exist in reality. It was a world in a fantastic story that Fuka-Eri had told Azami night after night and that Tengo himself had fleshed out.

Could this mean, then—Tengo asked himself—that this is the world of the novel? Could I have somehow left the real world and entered the world of Air Chrysalis like Alice falling down the rabbit hole? Or could the real world have been made over so as to match exactly the story of Air Chrysalis? Does this mean that the world that used to be—the familiar world with only one moon—no longer exists anywhere? And could the power of the Little People have something to do with this in one way or another?

He looked around, hoping for answers, but all that appeared before his eyes was the perfectly ordinary urban residential neighborhood. He could find nothing about it that seemed odd or unusual—no Queen of Hearts, no walrus, no Mad Hatter. There was nothing in his surroundings but an empty sandbox and swings, a mercury-vapor lamp emitting its sterile light, the spreading branches of a zelkova tree, a locked public toilet, a new six-story condo (only four units of which had lighted windows), a ward notice board, a red vending machine with a Coca-Cola logo, an illegally parked old-model green Volkswagen Golf, telephone poles and electric lines, and primary-color neon signs in the distance. The usual city noise, the usual lights. Tengo had been living here in Koenji for seven years. Not because he particularly liked it, but because he had just happened to find a cheap apartment that was not too far from the station. It was convenient for commuting, and moving somewhere else would have been too much trouble, so he had stayed on. But he at least knew the neighborhood inside and out and would have noticed any change immediately.

How long had there been more than one moon? Tengo could not be sure. Perhaps there had been two moons for years now and he simply hadn’t noticed. He had missed lots of things that way. He wasn’t much of a newspaper reader, and he never watched television. There were countless things that everybody knew but him. Perhaps something had occurred just recently to increase the number of moons to two. He wanted to ask someone, “Excuse me, this is a strange question, but how long have there been two moons? I just thought you might know.” But there was nobody there to ask—literally, not even a cat.

No, there was someone there. Nearby, someone was using a hammer to pound a nail into a wall. Bang bang bang. The sound kept up without a break, a very hard nail going into a very hard wall. Who could be pounding nails at a time like this? Puzzled, Tengo looked around, but he could see no wall, nor was there anyone pounding nails.

A moment later, Tengo realized that he was hearing the sound of his own heart. Spurred on by adrenaline, his heart was pumping surges of blood through his body. It pounded in his ears.

The sight of the two moons gave Tengo a slight dizzy feeling, as if it had put his nervous system out of balance. He sat down on top of the slide, leaning against the handrail, and closed his eyes, fighting the dizziness. He felt as if the force of gravity around him had subtly changed. Somewhere the tide was rising, and somewhere else the tide was receding. Their faces devoid of expression, people were moving back and forth between “insane” and “lunatic.”

In his dizziness, it suddenly occurred to Tengo that the image of his mother wearing a white slip had not attacked him for a very long time. He had almost forgotten that he had been tormented by that illusion for years. When could he have last seen it? He could not recall exactly, but it was probably around the time he started writing his new novel. For some unfathomable reason, his mother’s ghost had stopped haunting him from that point onward.

Instead, Tengo now sat on top of a slide in a playground in Koenji, looking at a pair of moons in the sky. An inscrutable new world silently surrounded him like lapping dark water. Perhaps a new trouble had chased out the old one. Perhaps the old, familiar riddle had been replaced by a fresh, new one. The thought came to Tengo without irony. Nor did he feel any need to complain about it. Whatever the composition of this new world might be, I surely have no choice but to accept it in silence. There’s no way to pick and choose. Even in the world that existed until now, there was no choice. It’s the same thing. And besides, he asked himself, even if I wanted to lodge a complaint, who is there for me to complain to?