1Q84

Initial media coverage of Fuka-Eri’s disappearance is measured. Tengo assumes this is because news outlets do not want to look foolish if the writer reemerges in a day or two. He further believes that Ebisuno arranged for Fuka-Eri’s false disappearance to encourage the media to dig into her personal history and to uncover information about the whereabouts of her parents.

During lunch at the school where Tengo teaches, an unpleasant-looking man in a rumpled suit named Mr. Ushikawa arrives and asks to speak with Tengo. Tengo has never seen this man in his life. Ushikawa introduces himself as “Full-time Director, New Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Arts” (331). He tells Tengo that he has been selected as one of five young artists to receive a grant of three million yen with no strings attached. This confuses Tengo because nobody knows he is writing a novel except Komatsu and his girlfriend. Furthermore, most of his work is published under a pseudonym, so Ushikawa’s organization would have no idea whether Tengo is worthy of a grant or not.

Tengo declines the offer, explaining that he does not like to take money from people he doesn’t know. In an internal monologue, Tengo thinks, “[N]o matter how you look at it, there’s something fishy about this grant” (336). At first, Ushikawa resigns himself to Tengo’s decision, but he goes on to suggest that Tengo is connected to Fuka-Eri and that he would be best served by not becoming “embroiled in extraneous matters” (336). He ends with a vaguely threatening remark about what will happen if his connection to Fuka-Eri is made public.

At Willow House, the dowager explains how Aomame will kill Leader. Leader’s only weakness is that he suffers from bizarre physical ailments that he keeps a secret from most of the rest of the organization. A spy in Sakigake arranged for Aomame to be alone in a hotel room with Leader where she will perform physical therapy on him.

After her meeting with the dowager, Tamaru gives Aomame a small black pistol and teaches her to use it.

Once a day over the next two weeks, Aomame stands in the mirror and puts the gun in her mouth to acclimate herself to the possibility of suicide. She thinks, “I could do it now if I wanted to [...]. No, it’s too soon for that. There’s something I have to do first” (354).

One night, Aomame opens the newspaper and sees that Ayumi was found strangled to death in a hotel room, handcuffed naked to the bed.

Tengo reminisces about Aomame. Although he admits that it is difficult for boys and girls to become close friends at that age, he still regrets not making a stronger effort to connect with her. The following year she moved to a different school after leaving the Society of Witnesses and moving in with relatives. He realizes that reworking Air Chrysalis is related to the reemergence of a strong desire to see Aomame: “The act of rewriting Fuka-Eri’s story in his own words had produced in Tengo a strong new desire to give literary form to the story inside himself. And part of that strong new desire was a need for Aomame” (363).

After learning of Ayumi’s murder, Aomame cries uncontrollably, the first time she’s done so since Tamaki’s death. As an assassin, Aomame worried about getting too close to an officer of the law. Yet now she deeply regrets pulling away every time Ayumi tried to deepen their friendship. Had they been closer, Aomame might have been by Ayumi’s side that night, and she would still be alive. Aomame lays some of the blame for Ayumi’s death on her uncle and brother who sexually abused her, creating in her heart “an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it” (369).

Five days later, Tamaru contacts Aomame on a pager. Through a payphone, he tells her that she will carry out the assassination that evening at the Hotel Okura. As she waits for the appointed time, Aomame thinks about how after she leaves Tokyo and gets plastic surgery there will be nothing left of her except her love for Tengo.

Tengo’s girlfriend misses her usual Friday visit, and Tengo has not heard from her over the phone in a week, which is uncharacteristic. One evening, his girlfriend’s husband calls and in a voice devoid of emotion says she will not be visiting his apartment anymore. “One thing should be perfectly clear,” he adds. “My wife is irretrievably lost” (382). The phrase “irretrievably lost,” combined with the man’s affectless voice, deeply unnerves Tengo. After the husband hangs up, Tengo feels enormous anxiety over the safety of his girlfriend—whom he now refers to in his mind by her full name, Kyoko Yasuda. He is also haunted by the notion that the memory of his mother and the man who isn’t his father is a representation of Kyoko and Tengo.

A couple hours later, Ushikawa calls, though Tengo never gave him his phone number. He continues to pressure Tengo into accepting the grant and to make increasingly threatening comments about what will happen if he refuses. Tengo even begins to expect that Ushikawa has something to do with Kyoko becoming “irretrievably lost.” Although Ushikawa refuses to divulge any specifics, he boasts of the immense power of his employers, whose “long arms could, when extended, have certain undesirable—though unintended—effects on you” (388). Finally, he labels Air Chrysalis a “thought crime,” echoing the phrase from George Orwell’s 1984.

Aomame waits in a hotel lobby for agents of Sakigake to bring her to Leader’s hotel room. She’s hidden the pistol and the deadly needle ice pick in a change of underwear in her gym bag. Although she generally feels cool and calm before carrying out an assassination, she is full of anxiety and anticipation. Two bodyguards—whom Aomame refers to as “Buzzcut” and “Ponytail,” based on their hair styles—approach and walk her to the elevator.

Before she enters the bedroom where Leader awaits, Buzzcut tells her she is sworn to secrecy about what she sees and experiences in there, adding, “Where you are about to set foot is, so to speak, a sacred space” (396).

Tengo remains deeply perturbed by the phone calls from Mr. Yasuda and Ushikawa. In turn, he feels intensely alienated from everyone in his life, including Komatsu, Kyoko, and Fuka-Eri. With no one else to talk to and nowhere else to go, Tengo travels to the seaside town of Chikura, where his father lives in a sanatorium for individuals with cognitive disorders.

On the train to Chikura, Tengo reads a short story called “Town of Cats.” In it, a traveler gets off his train at a station in a quaint riverside town. It appears to be abandoned, yet once night falls large anthropomorphic cats enter the town to conduct business, working in shops and other establishments until dawn when they return to wherever they came from. When the cats are present, the traveler hides in the bell tower. Meanwhile, trains continue to stop frequently at the station, but nobody ever gets on or off.

One night, the cats smell a human and go searching for the traveler. They track him to the top of the bell tower, but the traveler is inexplicably invisible to them. Having narrowly and mysteriously escaped the cats’ wrath, the traveler decides it is time to move on. Yet the following day, none of the trains stop at the station as they normally do; he is as invisible to the passing trains as he is to the cats: “He knows he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats [...] It is the place where he is meant to be lost” (405).

At the sanatorium in Chikura, Tengo is told that his father is physically healthy but his mind is slipping. Although his father is cordial to Tengo, he does not recognize him as his son. The father goes so far as to call his son “nothing,” which makes Tengo feel like he is in the town of cats. Tengo wonders if his father is being literal, as if to suggest that Tengo is the product of his mother’s extramarital relationship. Yet when Tengo probes him on this point, his father merely discusses his work as an NHK fee collector, as if he is still employed by the company. Tengo refuses to let go of his questions, but his father simply repeats the mantra, “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation” (413).