Aomame slipped out of bed after Ayumi was sound asleep. She would be the one sleeping on the sofa tonight, it seemed. She took a bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator and drank two glasses from it. Then she stepped out onto her small balcony and sat in an aluminum chair, looking at the neighborhood stretched out below. It was a soft spring night. The breeze carried the roar of distant streets like a man-made ocean. The glitter of neon had diminished somewhat now that midnight had passed.

I’m fond of this girl Ayumi, no doubt about it. I want to be as good to her as I can. After Tamaki died, I made up my mind to live without deep ties to anyone. I never once felt that I wanted a new friend. But for some reason I feel my heart opening to Ayumi. I can even confess my true feelings to her with a certain degree of honesty. She is totally different from you, of course, Aomame said to the Tamaki inside. You are special. I grew up with you. No one else can compare.

Aomame leaned her head back and looked up at the sky for a time. Even as her eyes took in the sky, her mind wandered through distant memories. The time she spent with Tamaki, the talking they did, and the touching.… Soon, she began to sense that the night sky she saw above her was somehow different from the sky she was used to seeing. The strangeness of it was subtle but undeniable.

Some time had to pass before she was able to grasp what the difference was. And even after she had grasped it, she had to work hard to accept it. What her vision had seized upon, her mind could not easily confirm.

There were two moons in the sky—a small moon and a large one. They were floating there side by side. The large one was the usual moon that she had always seen. It was nearly full, and yellow. But there was another moon right next to it. It had an unfamiliar shape. It was somewhat lopsided, and greenish, as though thinly covered with moss. This was what her vision had seized upon.

Aomame stared at the two moons with narrowed eyes. Then she closed her eyes, let a moment pass, took a deep breath, and opened her eyes again, expecting to find that everything had returned to normal and there was only one moon. But nothing had changed. The light was not playing tricks on her, nor had her eyesight gone strange. There could be no doubt that two moons were clearly floating in the sky side by side—a yellow one and a green one.

She thought of waking Ayumi to ask if there really were two moons up there, but she decided against it. Ayumi might say, “Of course there are two moons in the sky. They increased in number last year.” Or then again, she might say, “What are you talking about? There’s only one moon up there. Something must be wrong with your eyes.” Neither response would solve the problem now facing her. Both would only deepen it.

Aomame raised her hands to cover the lower half of her face, and she continued staring at the two moons. Something is happening, for sure, she thought. Her heartbeat sped up. Something’s wrong with the world, or something’s wrong with me: one or the other. The bottle and the cap don’t fit: is the problem with the bottle or the cap?

She went back inside, locked the balcony door, and drew the curtain. She took a bottle of brandy from the cabinet and poured herself a glassful. Ayumi was sleeping nicely in bed, her breathing deep and even. Aomame kept watch over her and took a sip of brandy now and then. Planting her elbows on the kitchen table, she struggled not to think about what lay beyond the curtain.

Maybe the world really is ending, she thought.

“And the kingdom is coming,” Aomame muttered to herself.

“I can hardly wait,” somebody said somewhere.

CHAPTER 16

Tengo

I’M GLAD YOU LIKED IT

Tengo had spent ten days reworking Air Chrysalis before handing it over to Komatsu as a newly finished work, following which he was visited by a string of calm, tranquil days. He taught three days a week at the cram school, and got together once a week with his married girlfriend. The rest of his time he spent doing housework, taking walks, and writing his own novel. April passed like this. The cherry blossoms scattered, new buds appeared on the trees, the magnolias reached full bloom, and the seasons moved along in stages. The days flowed by smoothly, regularly, uneventfully. This was the life that Tengo most wanted, each week linking automatically and seamlessly with the next.

Amid all the sameness, however, one change became evident. A good change. Tengo was aware that, as he went on writing his novel, a new wellspring was forming inside him. Not that its water was gushing forth: it was more like a tiny spring among the rocks. The flow may have been limited, but it was continuous, welling up drop by drop. He was in no hurry. He felt no pressure. All he had to do was wait patiently for the water to collect in the rocky basin until he could scoop it up. Then he would sit at his desk, turning what he had scooped into words, and the story would advance quite naturally.

The concentrated work of rewriting Air Chrysalis might have dislodged a rock that had been blocking his wellspring until now. Tengo had no idea why that should be so, but he had a definite sense that a heavy lid had finally come off. He felt as though his body had become lighter, that he had emerged from a cramped space and could now stretch his arms and legs freely. Air Chrysalis had probably stimulated something that had been deep inside him all along.

Tengo sensed, too, that something very like desire was growing inside him. This was the first time in his life he had ever experienced such a feeling. All through high school and college, his judo coach and older teammates would often say to him, “You have the talent and the strength, and you practice enough, but you just don’t have the desire.” They were probably right. He lacked that drive to win at all costs, which is why he would often make it to the semifinals and the finals but lose the all-important championship match. He exhibited these tendencies in everything, not just judo. He was more placid than determined. It was the same with his fiction. He could write with some style and make up reasonably interesting stories, but his work lacked the strength to grab the reader by the throat. Something was missing. And so he would always make it to the short list but never take the new writers’ prize, as Komatsu had said.

After he finished rewriting Air Chrysalis, however, Tengo was truly chagrined for the first time in his life. While engaged in the rewrite, he had been totally absorbed in the process, moving his hands without thinking. Once he had completed the work and handed it to Komatsu, however, Tengo was assaulted by a profound sense of powerlessness. Once the powerlessness began to abate, a kind of rage surged up from deep inside him. The rage was directed at Tengo himself. I used another person’s story to create a rewrite that amounts to a literary fraud, and I did it with far more passion than I bring to my own work. Isn’t a writer someone who finds the story hidden inside and uses the proper words to express it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You should be able to write something as good as Air Chrysalis if you make up your mind to do it. Isn’t that true?

But he had to prove it to himself.

Tengo decided to discard the manuscript he had written thus far and start a brand-new story from scratch. He closed his eyes and, for a long time, listened closely to the dripping of the little spring inside him. Eventually the words began to come naturally to him. Little by little, taking all the time he needed, he began to form them into sentences.