1Q84

Aomame stands on the expressway with a gun in her mouth. As she begins to squeeze the trigger, a voice calls her name and she knows the voice belongs to Tengo. In that moment, she thinks to herself, “Living—not dying—means the possibility of seeing Tengo again. I want to live. [...] Had she ever experienced that feeling before in her life?” (610).

The next day when Tamaru calls her, she tells him she needs to stay in the safehouse for a bit longer, refusing to explain why. After speaking with the dowager, Tamaru says that Aomame may stay until the end of the year, assuming her decision does not jeopardize the dowager’s safety or the safety of the women who stay at Willow House. Tamaru will have groceries and anything else Aomame requests delivered once a week.

Each night, Aomame sits on her balcony staring at the playground, hoping for Tengo to return. Although she can think of countless reasons why he would never come back to this spot again—maybe he was passing through, or maybe he found a better spot to view the moon—she sees no other option but to wait.

After seeing the air chrysalis materialize and dematerialize in his father’s room, Tengo decides to stay in Chikura indefinitely, checking into a seaside inn and reading to his father every day. He uses his accumulated vacation time and convinces a colleague to cover his classes. Moreover, he tells Fuka-Eri to hide out in his apartment while he visits “the cat town.” At the sanatorium, the nurses assume Tengo is a model son, though his primary motivation is waiting to see the air chrysalis again. Tengo also begins to write a new novel set in the same world as Air Chrysalis, where there are two moons in the sky.

On one of his regular check-in calls with Fuka-Eri, she tells Tengo that an NHK fee collector knocked on the door to demand payment, even though Tengo does not own a TV. Most troublingly, Fuka-Eri reports that the collector knows a lot about Tengo.

Although it is difficult for Ushikawa to logically believe that the dowager had Leader assassinated, he has no other leads. Moreover, he finds it suspicious that a free safe house for domestic abuse survivors has the kind of security one would expect organized criminals to employ. Ushikawa also learns that the dowager’s daughter died at 36, supposedly of an undisclosed illness, and that her husband disappeared not long after that. Although he has no evidence, Ushikawa finds it plausible that the daughter was a domestic violence survivor who took her own life, and that the dowager carried out retribution against the husband. Even still, there is nothing he can think of to connect the dowager to Leader.

Aomame falls into a monotonous but comfortable routine. She exercises on a stationary bike, listens to classical music, reads Proust, and sits on the balcony for hours every night. She also reads some of Air Chrysalis before bed and has now read it many times over.

The days pass without incident until one afternoon an NHK fee collector starts banging on the door asking to speak to a Ms. Takai. Although Aomame stays silent, the fee collector possesses an almost-supernatural sense of when a person is hiding in an apartment. His relentless persistence causes her to wonder if the man is a secret agent working for Sakigake.

Every day, Tengo calls Fuka-Eri, who stays inside all day doing little else but thinking. Tengo also contacts Komatsu, who has been away from work for weeks. Reserved and curt, Komatsu seems like a completely different person to Tengo.

Given the heavy security around Willow House, not to mention the fact that there is no concrete evidence implicating the dowager, Ushikawa pivots his investigation toward Aomame’s past. He theorizes that something significant happened to Aomame around the age of ten to cause her to leave the Society of Witnesses. He pulls her school records and is surprised to learn that she attended the same elementary school as Tengo.

Aomame’s period is three weeks late. Although she has not had sex in months, she suspects she may be pregnant. Moreover, Aomame believes her egg was somehow fertilized the night she killed Leader during the storm. Over the phone, Tamaru agrees to procures a pregnancy test for Aomame, even as he starts to worry about her mental and emotional wellbeing.

After her phone call, the NHK fee collector returns to harass Aomame.

Tengo befriends three nurses at the sanatorium: Adachi, Omura, and Tamura. One night, the nurses invite him to join them for dinner, drinks, and karaoke. At the end of the evening, Tengo walks Nurse Adachi home. She asks Tengo if he wants to go to her apartment and smoke hashish, which he has never tried before. Tengo is about to refuse, but then Adachi likens the experience to being a dohta inside an air chrysalis staring out at one’s maza; this convinces him to try it.

After smoking the hashish, Tengo envisions himself back in the classroom with ten-year-old Aomame. She tells him he can still find her, because she found him.

The next thing he knows, Tengo is next to Adachi in bed, though neither seems to have any sexual desire for the other. She tells him, “When morning comes you will be leaving here, Tengo. Before the exit is blocked” (692).

The next morning, with that line stuck in Tengo’s head, he decides to leave Chikura.

After visiting Aomame and Tengo’s old elementary school, Ushikawa theorizes that the two joined forces against Sakigake, with Aomame going after Leader and Tengo attacking the organization’s religious dogma by writing Air Chrysalis.

Two pregnancy tests indicate that Aomame is pregnant. With no logical explanation for the pregnancy, she talks herself into the notion that the baby may be Tengo’s.

Tengo checks out of the inn in Chikura and visits his father one last time. Sitting down next to the hospital bed, Tengo says he believes his father has escaped his physical body and his consciousness is living another life back in Tokyo as an NHK fee collector. Tengo asks him to stop knocking on people’s doors because he is not a fee collector anymore.

When he returns to his apartment, Fuka-Eri is gone.