1Q84

Without explaining how she knows, Fuka-Eri insists that Aomame is there in Koenji within walking distance. However, she also says that Aomame is in hiding and therefore it will be difficult to find her.

Tengo closes his eyes and tries to recreate in his mind the day she held his hand, hoping to remember something he missed. One new detail emerges: Outside the classroom window, the moon was visible even though it was daytime. With no other leads, Tengo walks the streets in search of a place from which he can see the moon. The only spot he can find is the top of a playground slide. From atop the slide, he is shocked to discover that there are two moons in the sky, appearing exactly as he described them in Air Chrysalis.

Aomame reads Air Chrysalis from front to back, enchanted by its fantastical story told simply and elegantly. The book’s heroine is the only child of parents who live in an agricultural commune called the “Gathering,” formed as a socialist oasis amid a sea of capitalism. A schism forms between one half of the commune which favors revolution and another half—to which the heroine’s parents belong—which favors peace.

Each week, one of the community’s ten children is charged with caring for a small goatherd. When it is the heroine’s turn, she forgets to do so amid the stresses of homework and chores, and an old, blind goat dies. The goat was a sacred symbol for the community, and the girl is forced to stay in a storehouse alone for ten days with the dead goat as punishment. One night, six Little People escape the mouth of the goat and grow to be two feet tall each. With the girl’s help, the Little People “pluck threads out of the air” (535) to create an air chrysalis. They work all night, and in the morning the Little People shrink back down and reenter the goat’s mouth. The same thing happens each night until the girl’s punishment ends, at which point the Little People continue to construct the air chrysalis without her help.

A few nights later, the Little People enter the girl’s dreams and tell her to meet them at the storehouse the next evening after dark. When she arrives, the air chrysalis is over four feet long. The chrysalis cracks open to reveal a sleeping replica of the girl herself, which the Little People call a dohta. In turn, the original girl is called a maza. The dohta, the Little People add, will serve as a Perceiver, and she will facilitate a more stable passageway between this world and the world of the Little People. Moreover, the maza and dohta must remain close by, or else the dohta will perish and the maza will “lose the shadow of her heart and mind” (540). Finally, once the dohta wakes up, a second moon will appear in the sky.

Sensing that this is unnatural, the girl runs away. At some point in the past, her father gave her ten-thousand yen and the address of a family friend, should she ever feel the need to escape. On the second day of her stay with the family friend, the second moon appears, signaling that the dohta has woken. The girl’s parents never try to track her down, probably because the dohta took her place.

Years later, the girl befriends a boy named Toru in school. But in her dreams, the girl watches the Little People build an air chrysalis in Toru’s room while he sleeps. This air chrysalis houses three massive snakes, and a few days later Toru is sent to a sanatorium with a mysterious illness: “He has been irretrievably lost” (542), the text reads. The girl begins to construct an air chrysalis herself for the purpose of entering the Little People’s world. Once it is completed, the girl enters the air chrysalis. The book ends ambiguously without revealing what happens to the girl next.

Aomame treats the novel as a true record of Fuka-Eri’s experiences. Assuming this is the case, Fuka-Eri’s dohta died soon after being born, while the original Fuka-Eri, as maza, lost “the shadow of her heart and mind” (540). Presumably, the Little People created other dohtas, and these were the girls that Leader raped.

Tengo has no rational explanation for the appearance of a second moon. He thinks to himself, “Could I have somehow left the real world and entered the world of Air Chrysalis like Alice falling down the rabbit hole?” (548).

After finishing Air Chrysalis, Aomame goes outside on her balcony and looks at the moons. Suddenly, she begins to cry, grieving over everything she has lost. Then, below her she sees another person looking up at the two moons from atop the slide. Although he is far away, instinctively she knows he sees two moons just like she does. She continues to stare at the hand until it dawns on her that it is Tengo, even though she has not seen him in 20 years.

Aomame is torn. On one hand, leaving the apartment would put both her and Tengo at risk; the whole reason she agreed to kill Leader after learning the truth about him was that doing so would save Tengo’s life. Yet more than anything in the world, she desperately wants to held in his arms. Ultimately, Aomame decides to go downstairs. After quickly wiping away her tears and straightening her hair in the bathroom mirror, Aomame leaves the apartment and runs to the playground, but it is too late: Tengo is gone.

Back at Tengo’s apartment, Fuka-Eri tells him he received a phone call from the sanatorium in Chikura. When Tengo calls back, a doctor reveals that his father is in a coma and may only have a week to live. Tengo says he will be there the next morning.

After the phone call, Tengo tells Fuka-Eri that there are now two moons in the sky. All Fuka-Eri has to say on the topic is that he is “acting as a Receiver” (563).

The morning after seeing Tengo at the playground, Aomame takes a taxi to the spot on the expressway where she descended the staircase and presumably entered 1Q84. Wearing the same clothes she wore on that day, she exits the car near an Esso billboard featuring a smiling tiger and the slogan, “Put a Tiger in your Tank.” When she searches for the emergency staircase, however, it isn’t there.

With countless people watching from their cars stuck in traffic, Aomame takes out the loaded pistol and puts it in her mouth. In her head, she hears the same Society of Witnesses prayer she was forced to say as a child—the same prayer she said to herself before every assassination. She yells “Tengo!” and starts to pull the trigger.

At the sanatorium in Chikura, a doctor tells Tengo that while there is nothing severely wrong with his father physically, the man is unresponsive. Nevertheless, the nurses tell Tengo that it may be beneficial to talk or read to his father. Left alone in the room with the man, Tengo narrates his life’s story up until the present. He reflects on his failure to capitalize on his talents as a child math prodigy and, later, his success as a judo athlete. He also points out that he never properly loved any woman; the closest he came is Aomame, when he was ten years old.

A nurse enters to take his father to another part of the sanatorium for some tests. In the meantime, Tengo grabs some lunch in the cafeteria. When he returns, his father is still gone, and in his place there is what looks to be a five foot long air chrysalis. As it begins to tear open, Tengo assumes the entity inside will be his own dohta. Yet when he peers into the opening, he sees a sleeping ten-year-old version of Aomame. Tengo says, “Aomame. I will find you, no matter what” (590). At that, the air chrysalis disappears, along with the girl inside.