he Little People?” Aomame asked gently, peering at the girl. “Tell us, who are these ‘Little People’?”

But having pronounced only those few words, Tsubasa’s mouth clamped shut again. As before, her eyes had lost all depth, as though the effort of speaking the words had exhausted most of her energy.

“Somebody you know?” Aomame asked.

Again no answer.

“She has mentioned those words several times before,” the dowager said. “‘The Little People.’ I don’t know what she means.”

The words had an ominous ring, a subtle overtone that Aomame sensed like the sound of distant thunder.

She asked the dowager, “Could these ‘Little People’ have been the ones who injured her?”

The dowager shook her head. “I don’t know. But whatever they are, the ‘Little People’ undoubtedly carry great significance for her.”

Hands resting side by side atop the table, the girl sat utterly still, her opaque eyes staring at a fixed point in space.

“What in the world could have happened to her?” Aomame asked.

The dowager replied almost coolly, “There is observable evidence of rape. Repeated rape. Terrible lacerations on the outer lips of her vagina, and injury to the uterus. An engorged adult male sex organ penetrated her small uterus, which is still not fully mature, largely destroying the area where a fertilized egg would become implanted. The doctor thinks she will probably never be able to become pregnant.”

The dowager appeared almost intentionally to be discussing these graphic details in the girl’s presence. Tsubasa listened without comment and without any perceptible change of expression. Her mouth showed slight movements now and then but emitted no sound. She almost seemed to be listening out of sheer politeness to a conversation about a stranger far away.

“And that is not all,” the dowager continued quietly. “Even if some procedure managed to restore the function of her uterus, the girl will probably never want to have sex with anyone. A good deal of pain must have accompanied any penetration that could cause such terrible damage, and it was done to her repeatedly. The memory of that much pain won’t simply fade away. Do you see what I mean?”

Aomame nodded. Her fingers were tightly intertwined atop her knees.

“In other words, the eggs prepared inside her have nowhere to go. They—” the dowager glanced at Tsubasa and went on, “have already been rendered infertile.”

Aomame could not tell how much of this Tsubasa understood. Whatever her mind was able to grasp, her living emotions appeared to be somewhere else. They were not here, at least. Her heart seemed to have been shut up inside a small, dark room with a locked door, a room located in another place.

The dowager went on, “I am not saying that a woman’s only purpose in life is to bear children. Each individual is free to choose the kind of life she wants to lead. It is simply not permissible for someone to rob her by force of her innate right as a woman before she has the opportunity to exercise it.”

Aomame nodded in silence.

“Of course it is not permissible,” the dowager repeated. Aomame noticed a slight quaver in her voice. She was obviously finding it difficult to keep her emotions in check. “This child ran away, alone, from a certain place. How she was able to manage it, I do not know. But she has nowhere else to go but here. Nowhere else is safe for her.”

“Where are her parents?”

The dowager scowled and tapped the tabletop with her fingernails. “We know where her parents are. But they are the ones who allowed this terrible thing to happen. They are the ones she ran away from.”

“You’re saying that the parents approved of having their own daughter raped?”

“They not only approved of it, they encouraged it.”

“But why would anyone …?” Aomame could not find the words to go on.

The dowager shook her head. “I know, it’s terrible. Such things should never be allowed to happen. But the situation is a difficult one. This is not a simple case of domestic violence. The doctor said we have to report it to the police, but I asked him not to. He’s a good friend, so I managed to convince him to hold off.”

“But why didn’t you want to report it to the police?” Aomame asked.

“This child was clearly the victim of a savage, inhuman act. Moreover, it was a heinous crime that society should punish with severe criminal penalties,” the dowager said. “But even if we were to report it to the police, what could they do? As you see, the child herself can hardly speak. She can’t properly explain what happened or what was done to her. And even if she were able to, we have no way to prove it. If we handed her over to the police, she might just be sent back to her parents. There is no place else for her to go, and they do have parental rights. Once she was back with them, the same thing would probably be done to her again. We cannot let that happen.”

Aomame nodded.

“I am going to raise her myself,” the dowager declared. “I will not send her anywhere. I don’t care who comes for her—her parents or anyone—I will not give her up. I will hide her somewhere else and take charge of her upbringing.”

Aomame sat for a while, looking back and forth between the dowager and the girl.

“So, then, can we identify the man who committed such sexual violence against this child? Was it one man?” Aomame asked.

“We can identify him. He was the only one.”

“But there’s no way to take him to court?”

“He is a very powerful man,” the dowager said. “He can exert his influence on people directly. This girl’s parents were under his influence. And they still are. They do whatever he orders them to do. They have no individual character, no powers of judgment of their own. They take his word as the absolute truth. So when he tells them they must give him their daughter, they cannot refuse. Far from it, they do his bidding without question and hand her over gladly, knowing full well what he plans to do to her.”

It took Aomame some time to comprehend what the dowager was telling her. She set her mind to work on the problem and put things in order.

“Is this a special group you are talking about?”

“Yes, indeed, a special group that shares a sick and narrow spirit.”

“A kind of cult, you mean?” Aomame asked.

The dowager nodded. “Yes, a particularly vicious and dangerous cult.”

Of course. It could only be a cult. People who do whatever they are ordered to do. People without individual character or powers of judgment. The same thing could have happened to me, Aomame thought, biting her lip.

Of course, people were not embroiled in rape in the Society of Witnesses. In her case at least, it never came to a sexual threat. The “brothers and sisters” around her were all mild-mannered, sincere people. They thought seriously about their faith, and they lived with reverence for their doctrines—to the point of staking their lives on them. But decent motives don’t always produce decent results. And the body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.

Seeing Tsubasa reminded Aomame of herself at that age. My own will made it possible for me to escape back then. But when you’re as seriously wounded as this girl, it may not be possible to bring yourself back. You might never be able to return your heart to its normal condition again. The thought sent a stab of pain through Aomame’s chest. What she had discovered in Tsubasa was herself as she might have been.

“I have to confess something to you,” the dowager said softly to Aomame. “I can tell you this now, but the fact is, though I knew it was a disrespectful thing to do, I ran a background check on you.”

The remark brought Aomame back to the present. She looked at the dowager.

“It was right after the first time I invited you to the house and we talked. I hope you’re not offended.”

“No, not at all,” Aomame said. “In your situation, it was a natural thing to do. The work we are engaged in is by no means ordinary.”

“Exactly. We are walking a very delicate, fine line. We have to be able to trust each other. No matter who the other person is, though, you can’t have trust if you don’t know what you need to know. So I had them look up everything about you. From the present all the way back into the past. I suppose I should say ‘almost everything,’ of course. No one can know everything about another person. Not even God, probably.”

“Or the devil,” Aomame said.

“Or the devil,” the dowager repeated with a faint smile. “I know that you carry cult-connected psychological scars from when you were a girl. Your parents were—and still are—ardent believers in the Society of Witnesses, and they have never forgiven you for abandoning the faith. That causes you pain even now.”

Aomame nodded silently.

“To give you my honest opinion,” the dowager went on, “the Society of Witnesses is not a proper religion. If you had been badly injured or come down with an illness that required surgery, you might have lost your life then and there. Any religion that would prohibit life-saving surgery simply because it goes against the literal word of the Bible can be nothing other than a cult. This is an abuse of dogma that crosses the line.”

Aomame nodded. The rejection of blood transfusion is the first thing pounded into the heads of Witness children. They are taught that it is far better to die and go to heaven with an immaculate body and soul than to receive a transfusion in violation of God’s teaching and go to hell. There is no room for compromise. It’s one road or the other: you go either to hell or to heaven. Children have no critical powers. They have no way of knowing whether such a doctrine is correct, either as an idea widely accepted by society or as a scientific concept. All they can do is believe what their parents teach them. If I had been caught in the position of needing a transfusion when I was little, I’m sure I would have followed my parents’ orders and chosen to reject the transfusion and die. Then I supposedly would have been transported to heaven or someplace who-knows-where.

“Is this cult you’re talking about well known?” Aomame asked.

“It’s called ‘Sakigake.’ I’m sure you’ve heard of it. At one point it was being mentioned in the paper almost every day.”

Aomame could not recall having heard the name ‘Sakigake,’ but rather than say so, she nodded vaguely to the dowager. She felt she had better just leave it at that, aware that she was no longer living in 1984 but in the changed world of 1Q84. That was still just a hypothesis, but one that was steadily increasing in reality with each passing day. There seemed to be a great deal of information in this new world of which she knew nothing. She would have to pay closer attention.

The dowager went on, “Sakigake originally started out as a small agricultural commune run by a core new-left group who had fled from the city, but it suddenly changed direction at one point and turned into a religion. How and why this came about is not well understood.”

The dowager paused for breath and then continued speaking.

“Very few people know this, but the group has a guru they call ‘Leader.’ They view him as having special powers, which he supposedly uses to cure serious illnesses, to predict the future, to bring about paranormal phenomena, and such. They’re all elaborate ruses, I’m sure, but they are another reason that many people are drawn to him.”

“Paranormal phenomena?”

The dowager’s beautifully shaped eyebrows drew together. “I don’t have any concrete information on what that is supposed to mean. I’ve never had the slightest interest in matters of the occult. People have been repeating the same kinds of fraud throughout the world since the beginning of time, using the same old tricks, and still these despicable fakes continue to thrive. That is because most people believe not so much in truth as in things they wish were the truth. Their eyes may be wide open, but they don’t see a thing. Tricking them is as easy as twisting a baby’s arm.”

“Sakigake.” Aomame tried out the word. What did it mean, anyway? Forerunner? Precursor? Pioneer? It sounded more like the kind of name that would be attached to a Japanese super-express train than to a religion.

Tsubasa lowered her eyes momentarily when she heard the word “Sakigake,” as though reacting to a special sound concealed within it. When she raised her eyes again, her face was as expressionless as before, as if a small eddy had suddenly begun to swirl inside her and had immediately quieted down.

“Sakigake’s guru is the one who raped Tsubasa,” the dowager said. “He took her by force on the pretext of granting her a spiritual awakening. The parents were informed that the ritual had to be completed before the girl experienced her first period. Only such an undefiled girl could be granted a pure spiritual awakening. The excruciating pain caused by the ritual would be an ordeal she would have to undergo in order to ascend to a higher spiritual level. The parents took him at his word with complete faith. It is truly astounding how stupid people can be. Nor is Tsubasa’s the only such case. According to our intelligence, the same thing has been done to other girls in the cult. The guru is a degenerate with perverted sexual tastes. There can be no doubt. The organization and the doctrines are nothing but a convenient guise for masking his individual desires.”

“Does this ‘guru’ have a name?”

“Unfortunately, we haven’t learned that yet. He’s just called ‘Leader.’ We don’t know what sort of person he is, what he looks like, or anything about his background. No matter how much we dig, the information is not forthcoming. It has been totally blocked. He stays shut up in cult headquarters in the mountains of Yamanashi, and almost never appears in public. Even inside the cult, the number of individuals allowed to see him is highly restricted. He is said to be always in the dark, meditating.”

“And we can’t allow him to continue unchecked.”

The dowager glanced at Tsubasa and nodded slowly. “We can’t let there be any more victims, don’t you agree?”

“In other words, we have to take steps.”

The dowager reached over and laid her hand atop Tsubasa’s, steeping herself in a moment of silence. Then she said, “Exactly”

“It is quite certain, then, that he repeatedly engages in these perverted acts?” Aomame asked.

The dowager nodded. “We have proof that he is systematically raping girls.”

“If it’s true, it’s unforgivable,” Aomame said softly. “You are right: we can’t let there be any more victims.”

Several different thoughts seemed to be intertwined and competing for space in the dowager’s mind. Then she said, “We must learn a great deal more about this ‘Leader’ person. We must leave no ambiguities. After all, a human life hangs in the balance.”

“This person almost never comes out in public, you say?”

“Correct. And he probably has extremely tight security”

Aomame narrowed her eyes and pictured to herself the specially made ice pick in the back of her dresser drawer, the sharp point of its needle. “This sounds like a very tough job.”

“Yes, unusually difficult,” the dowager said. She drew her hand back from Tsubasa’s and pressed the tip of her middle finger against her eyebrow. This was a sign—not one she displayed very often—that the dowager had run out of ideas.

Aomame said, “Realistically speaking, it would be next to impossible for me to go out to the Yamanashi hills on my own, sneak into this heavily guarded cult, dispatch their Leader, and come out unscathed. It might work in a ninja movie, but …”

“I am not expecting you to do any such thing, of course,” the dowager said earnestly before realizing that Aomame’s last remark had been a joke. “It is out of the question,” she added with a wan smile.

“One other thing concerns me,” Aomame said, looking into the dowager’s eyes. “The Little People. Who—or what—are they? What did they do to Tsubasa? We need more information about them.”

Finger still pressed against her brow, the dowager said, “Yes, they concern me, too. Tsubasa here hardly speaks at all, but the words ‘Little People’ have come out of her mouth a number of times, as you heard earlier. They probably mean a lot to her, but she won’t tell us a thing about them. She clams up as soon as the topic arises. Give me a little more time. I’ll look into this matter, too.”

“Do you have some idea how we can learn more about Sakigake?”

The dowager gave her a gentle smile. “There is nothing tangible in this world you can’t buy if you pay enough, and I am prepared to pay a lot—especially where this matter is concerned. It may take a little while, but I will obtain the necessary information without fail.”

There are some things you can’t buy no matter how much you pay, Aomame thought. For example, the moon.

Aomame changed the subject. “Are you really planning to raise Tsubasa yourself?”

“Of course, I am quite serious about that. I intend to adopt her legally.”

“I’m sure you are aware that the formalities will not be simple, especially given the situation.”

“Yes, I am prepared for that,” the dowager said. “I will use every means at my disposal, do everything I can. I will not give her up to anyone.”

The dowager’s voice trembled with emotion. This was the very first time she had displayed such feeling in Aomame’s presence. Aomame found this somewhat worrisome, and the dowager seemed to read this in her expression.

“I have never told this to anyone,” the dowager said, lowering her voice as if preparing to reveal a long-hidden truth. “I have kept it to myself because it was too painful to speak about. The fact is, when my daughter committed suicide, she was pregnant. Six months pregnant. She probably did not want to give birth to the boy she was carrying. And so she took him with her when she ended her own life. If she had delivered the child, he would have been about the same age as Tsubasa here. I lost two precious lives at the same time.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Aomame said.

“Don’t worry, though. I am not allowing such personal matters to cloud my judgment. I will not expose you to needless danger. You, too, are a precious daughter to me. We are already part of the same family”

Aomame nodded silently.

“We have ties more important than blood,” the dowager said softly.

Aomame nodded again.

“Whatever it takes, we must liquidate that man,” the dowager said, as if trying to convince herself. Then she looked at Aomame. “At the earliest possible opportunity, we must move him to another world—before he injures someone else.”

Aomame looked across the table at Tsubasa. The girl’s eyes had no focus. She was staring at nothing more than an imaginary point in space. To Aomame, the girl looked like an empty cicada shell.

“But at the same time, we mustn’t rush things along,” the dowager said. “We have to be careful and patient.”

Aomame left the dowager and the girl Tsubasa behind in the apartment when she walked out of the safe house. The dowager had said she would stay with Tsubasa until the girl fell asleep. The four women in the first-floor common room were gathered around a circular table, leaning in closely, engaged in a hushed conversation. To Aomame, the scene did not look real. The women seemed to be part of an imaginary painting, perhaps with the title Women Sharing a Secret. The composition exhibited no change when Aomame passed by.

Outside, Aomame knelt down to pet the German shepherd for a while. The dog wagged her tail with happy abandon. Whenever she encountered a dog, Aomame would wonder how dogs could become so unconditionally happy. She had never once in her life had a pet—neither dog nor cat nor bird. She had never even bought herself a potted plant. Aomame suddenly remembered to look up at the sky, which was covered by a featureless gray layer of clouds that hinted at the coming of the rainy season. She could not see the moon. The night was quiet and windless. There was a hint of moonlight filtering through the overcast, but no way to tell how many moons were up there.

Walking to the subway, Aomame kept thinking about the strangeness of the world. If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose—to transmit DNA—be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

A man who finds joy in raping prepubescent girls, a powerfully built gay bodyguard, people who choose death over transfusion, a woman who kills herself with sleeping pills while six months pregnant, a woman who kills problematic men with a needle thrust to the back of the neck, men who hate women, women who hate men: how could it possibly profit the genes to have such people existing in this world? Did the genes merely enjoy such deformed episodes as colorful entertainment, or were these episodes utilized by them for some greater purpose?

Aomame didn’t know the answers to these questions. All she knew was that it was too late to choose any other life for herself. All I can do is live the life I have. I can’t trade it in for a new one. However strange and misshapen it might be, this is it for the gene carrier that is me.

I hope the dowager and Tsubasa will be happy, Aomame thought as she walked along. If they can become truly happy, I don’t mind sacrificing myself to make it happen. I myself probably have no future to speak of. But I can’t honestly believe that the two of them are going to have tranquil, fulfilled lives—or even ordinary lives. The three of us are more or less the same. Each of us has borne too great a burden in the course of our lives. As the dowager said, we are like a single family—but an extended family engaged in an endless battle, united by deep wounds to the heart, each bearing some undefined absence.

In the course of pursuing these thoughts, Aomame became aware of her own intense urge for male flesh. Why, of all things, should I start wanting a man at a time like this? She shook her head as she walked along, unable to judge whether this increased sexual desire had been brought about by psychological tension or was the natural cry of the eggs stored inside her or just a product of her own genes’ warped machinations. The desire seemed to have very deep roots—or, as Ayumi might say, “I want to fuck like crazy.” What should I do now? Aomame wondered. I could go to one of my usual bars and look for the right kind of guy. It’s just one subway stop to Roppongi. But she was too tired for that. Nor was she dressed for seduction: no makeup, only sneakers and a vinyl gym bag. Why don’t I just go home, open a bottle of red wine, masturbate, and go to sleep? That’s it. And let me stop thinking about the moon.

One glance was all it took for Aomame to realize that the man sitting across from her on the subway home from Hiroo to Jiyugaoka was her type—mid-forties, oval face, hairline beginning to recede. Head shape not bad. Healthy complexion. Slim, stylish black-framed glasses. Smartly dressed: light cotton sport coat, white polo shirt, leather briefcase on lap. Brown loafers. A salaried working man from the look of him, but not at some straitlaced corporation. Maybe an editor at a publishing company, or an architect at a small firm, or something to do with apparel, that was probably it. He was deeply absorbed in a paperback, its title obscured by a bookstore’s plain wrapper.

Aomame thought she would like to go somewhere and have hot sex with him. She imagined herself touching his erect penis. She wanted to squeeze it so tightly that the flow of blood nearly stopped. Her other hand would gently massage his testicles. The hands now resting in her lap began to twitch. She opened and closed her fingers unconsciously. Her shoulders rose and fell with each breath. Slowly, she ran the tip of her tongue over her lips.

But her stop was coming up soon. She had to get off at Jiyugaoka. She had no idea how far the man would be going, unaware that he was the object of her sexual fantasies. He just kept sitting there, reading his book, obviously unconcerned about the kind of woman who was sitting across from him. When she left the train, Aomame felt like ripping his damned paperback to shreds, but of course she stopped herself.

Aomame was sound asleep in bed at one o’clock in the morning, having an intensely sexual dream. In the dream, her breasts were large and beautiful, like two grapefruits. Her nipples were hard and big. She was pressing them against the lower half of a man. Her clothes lay at her feet, where she had cast them off. Aomame was sleeping with her legs spread. As she slept, Aomame had no way of knowing that two moons were hanging in the sky side by side. One of them was the big moon that had always hung there, and the other was a new, smallish moon.

Tsubasa and the dowager were also asleep, in Tsubasa’s room. Tsubasa wore new checked pajamas and slept curled into a tight little ball in bed. The dowager, still wearing her street clothes, was stretched out in a long chair, a blanket over her knees. She had been planning to leave after Tsubasa fell asleep, but had fallen asleep there. Set back from the street in its hilltop location, the apartment house was hushed, its grounds silent but for the occasional distant scream of an accelerating motorcycle or the siren of an ambulance. The German shepherd also slept, curled up outside the front door. The curtains had been drawn across the window, but they glowed white in the light of a mercury-vapor lamp. The clouds began to part, and from the rift, now and then two moons peeked through. The world’s oceans were adjusting their tides.

Tsubasa slept with her cheek pressed against the pillow, her mouth slightly open. Her breathing could not have been any quieter, and aside from the occasional tiny twitch of one shoulder, she barely moved. Her bangs hung over her eyes.

Soon her mouth began to open wider, and from it emerged, one after another, a small troupe of Little People. Each one carefully scanned the room before emerging. Had the dowager awakened at that point, she might have been able to see them, but she remained fast asleep. She would not be waking anytime soon. The Little People knew this. There were five of them altogether. When they first emerged, they were the size of Tsubasa’s little finger, but once they were fully on the outside, they would give themselves a twist, as though unfolding a tool, and stretch themselves to their full one-foot height. They all wore the same clothing without distinguishing features, and their facial features were equally undistinguished, making it impossible to tell them apart.

They climbed down from the bed to the floor, and from under the bed they pulled out an object about the size of a Chinese pork bun. Then they sat in a circle around the object and started feverishly working on it. It was white and highly elastic. They would stretch their arms out and, with practiced movements, pluck white, translucent threads out of the air, applying them to the fluffy, white object, making it bigger and bigger. The threads appeared to have a suitably sticky quality. Before long, the Little People themselves had grown to nearly two feet in height. They were able to change their height freely as needed.

Several hours of concentrated work followed, during which time the Little People said nothing at all. Their teamwork was tight and flawless. Tsubasa and the dowager remained sound asleep the whole time, never moving a muscle. All the other women in the safe house enjoyed deeper sleeps than usual. Stretched out on the front lawn, perhaps dreaming, the German shepherd let out a soft moan from the depths of its unconscious.

Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.