He awoke at eight thirty in the morning. There was no sign of Fuka-Eri in his bed. The pajamas he had lent her were balled up and tossed into the bathroom washing machine, the cuffs and legs still rolled up. He found a note on the kitchen table: “How are the Gilyaks doing now? I’m going home.” Written in ballpoint pen on notepaper, the characters were small, square, and indefinably strange, like an aerial view of characters written on a beach in seashells. He folded the paper and put it in his desk drawer. If his girlfriend found something like this when she arrived at eleven, she would make a terrible fuss.

Tengo straightened the bed and returned the fruits of Chekhov’s labor to the bookcase. Then he made himself coffee and toast. While eating breakfast, he noticed that some kind of heavy object had settled itself in his chest. Some time had to go by before he figured out what it was. Fuka-Eri’s tranquil sleeping face.

Could I be in love with her? No, impossible, Tengo told himself. It just so happens that something inside her has physically shaken my heart. So, then, why am I so concerned about the pajamas she had on her body? Why did I (almost unconsciously) pick them up and smell them?

There were too many questions. It was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them. It was a memorable phrase, but Chekhov applied this attitude not only to his works but to his life as well. His life presented many questions but answered none. Although he knew quite well that he was suffering from an incurable lung disease (as a doctor, he could not help but know), he tried hard to ignore the fact, and refused to believe he was dying until he was actually on his deathbed. He died young, violently coughing up blood.

Tengo left the kitchen table, shaking his head. My girlfriend is coming today. I have to do laundry and clean the place up now. Thinking is something I can save for later.

CHAPTER 21

Aomame

NO MATTER HOW FAR AWAY I TRY TO GO

Aomame went to the ward library and, following the same procedures as before, opened the compact edition of the newspaper on a desk. She was there to read once again about the gun battle between the radical faction and the police that had taken place in Yamanashi Prefecture in the autumn three years earlier. The headquarters of Sakigake, the religious group that the dowager had mentioned, was located in the mountains of Yamanashi, and the gun battle had also occurred in the mountains of Yamanashi. This might have been a mere coincidence, but Aomame was not quite ready to accept that. There might well have been some link between the two. And the expression that the dowager had used—“such a major incident”—also seemed to suggest a connection.

The gunfight had occurred three years earlier, in 1981 (or, according to Aomame’s hypothesis, three years prior to 1Q84), on October 19. Having read the news reports during her previous trip to the library, Aomame had fairly detailed knowledge of the facts. This enabled her to skim through that material and concentrate instead on subsequent related articles and analyses that viewed the affair from different angles.

In the first battle, three officers had been killed and two badly wounded by Chinese-made Kalashnikov automatic rifles. After that, the radical group fled into the mountains with their weapons and the police staged a major manhunt. Fully armed Self-Defense Force paratroopers were also sent in by helicopter. Three radicals who resisted the onslaught were shot to death, two were gravely wounded (one of those died in the hospital three days later, but the fate of the other was not clearly stated in the article), and four others were arrested unharmed or slightly wounded. Wearing high-performance bulletproof vests, the police and Self-Defense troops suffered no further casualties except for one policeman’s broken leg when he fell off a cliff in pursuit of the radicals. Only one of the radicals was listed as whereabouts unknown. He had apparently managed to disappear in spite of the extensive search.

Once the initial shock of the gun battle wore off, the newspaper started carrying detailed reports on the origins of the radical group, which was seen as the fallout from the university campus uprisings that occurred around 1970. More than half of the members were veterans of the takeover of Yasuda Hall at the University of Tokyo or the sit-in at Nihon University. After their “fortresses” had fallen to the riot police, these students (and a few faculty members) had been expelled from their universities or become disillusioned with urban political action centered on the university campuses. They overcame their factional differences and started a communal farm in Yamanashi Prefecture. At first they participated in the agricultural commune known as the Takashima Academy, but they were not satisfied with the life there. They reorganized, went independent, bought an abandoned village deep in the mountains at an exceptionally low price, and started farming there. They experienced many hardships at first, but they eventually succeeded in the mail order sale of vegetables when the use of organically grown produce began a quiet boom in the cities. Their farm grew. They were, ultimately, serious, hardworking people whose leader had organized them well. The name of the commune was Sakigake.

Aomame twisted her face into a major grimace and swallowed hard. She let out a deep groan and started tapping the surface of the desk with her ballpoint pen.

She continued reading. She read through the news reports that explained how a deep split grew within the ranks of Sakigake between a moderate group that rejected a violent revolution as acceptable for contemporary Japan, and a radical faction that eventually founded a nearby commune and took the name Akebono. She learned how they were granted religious status by the government in 1979.

After the radical group moved to their own property, they underwent secret military training even as they continued to farm, which gave rise to several clashes with neighboring farmers. One such clash involved water rights over a stream that flowed through Akebono’s land. The stream had always been used as a common source of water by farms in the area, but Akebono denied neighboring residents entry. The dispute went on for a number of years, until several Akebono members severely beat a resident who had complained about the barbed wire fence surrounding their land. The Yamanashi Prefectural Police obtained a search warrant and headed for Akebono to question the suspects, only to become involved in a wholly unanticipated shootout.

After Akebono was all but obliterated by the intense gun battle in the mountains, the religious organization Sakigake lost no time in issuing a formal statement. A handsome, young spokesman in a business suit read the document to the media at a press conference. The point of the statement was quite clear. Whatever their relationship might have been in the past, Sakigake and Akebono now had no connection at all. After the two groups parted ways, there had been hardly any contact aside from certain operational matters. They had separated amicably after concluding that, as a community devoted to farming, respect for the law, and longing for a peaceful spiritual world, Sakigake could no longer work with the members of Akebono, who pursued a radical revolutionary ideology. After that, Sakigake had become a religious organization and had been legally certified as a Religious Juridical Person. That such an incident involving bloodshed had occurred was truly unfortunate, and Sakigake wished to express its deep sympathy for the families of the officers who had lost their lives in the course of their duties, but Sakigake was in no way involved. Still, it was an undeniable fact that Sakigake had been the parent organization of Akebono. Consequently, if the authorities deemed it necessary to conduct some sort of investigation in connection with the present incident, Sakigake was fully prepared to comply so as to avoid pointless misunderstanding.