1Q84

Tengo is a math teacher and aspiring novelist just shy of his 30th birthday. In the middle of a meeting with Komatsu, an editor at a prominent Tokyo publishing house, Tengo is gripped by a vision, possibly a memory, of his mother letting a man who is not Tengo’s father suck on her breasts. This is a recurring vision for Tengo, who trembles and sweats for a few intense moments every time the vision intrudes on his mental space.

When Tengo recovers, Komatsu continues his discussion of a 17-year-old writer named Eriko Fukada. Writing under the penname “Fuka-Eri,” the young woman wrote a slim novella called Air Chrysalis and submitted it to a new writers’ competition held by Komatsu’s publishing house. Although he calls the writing “incredibly bad,” Komatsu is nevertheless intrigued by the manuscript. He offers to pay Tengo handsomely to rework Fuka-Eri’s amateurish writing while preserving the beautiful and beguiling story at the heart of her novella.

Aomame walks down the emergency stairway and emerges into a storage yard at ground level. As she walks to the subway station, she sees a police officer and notices that his uniform has a more casual cut than the ones she is accustomed to seeing. His sidearm is also a large automatic pistol, even though Aomame is certain that police officers across Japan are given older revolver models.

After taking the subway to Shibuya, Aomame heads to a hotel and knocks on the door of the man she is assigned to murder. Pretending to be a member of the hotel staff, she insists on entering to inspect the circuit breaker. Aomame knows little about the man except that he is a highly paid employee of an oil corporation who regularly cracks his wife’s ribs with a golf club.

After pretending to inspect the circuit breaker, Aomame takes a tiny custom-made ice pick as thin and sharp as a needle out of her purse. At the perfect angle and using the perfect amount of force, Aomame presses the ice pick into a specific spot on the back of the man’s neck, killing him instantly, painlessly, and without leaving any evidence of foul play. She thinks to herself, “This was an easier death than you deserved” (36).

In a phone call, Komatsu says that Fuka-Eri wants to meet Tengo before agreeing to let him rewrite Air Chrysalis. Tengo is still reluctant to engage in the scheme; nevertheless, Komatsu convinces him to meet Fuka-Eri the following evening at a cafe in Shinjuku.

When Fuka-Eri arrives, Tengo thinks she is even more beautiful than in the photos Komatsu showed him. That said, he has no sexual interest in her. He is satisfied with his current relationship with a married woman ten years his senior who comes to his house once a week. Fuka-Eri speaks to Tengo in a flat voice without inflection and uses a very small vocabulary. She is clearly not invested in being a writer, and when Tengo asks if he has her permission to rewrite Air Chrysalis, she simply shrugs and answers, “You can do it. Fix it any way you like” (49).

With that out of the way, Tengo tells Fuka-Era that despite his ethical misgivings he feels “a totally natural, spontaneous desire” (50) to rewrite Air Chrysalis. When he complements Fuka-Eri’s imagination in inventing the fictional creatures in the book named the Little People, she tells him that the Little People are real. Although Tengo does not believe in the supernatural, he is strangely convinced of Fuka-Era’s sincerity.

After killing the abusive husband, Aomame goes to a hotel bar to soothe her nerves. A few seats away from her at the bar, a man sits down who fits her type, at least for a one-night tryst: He is middle-aged and slightly balding with a “well-shaped head.” In the background, a jazz duo plays the 1933 song “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” Later, the two have sex.

Tengo begins revising Air Chrysalis. In the first act of the book, a ten-year-old girl who lives in a mountain commune is assigned to take care of an old, blind goat that holds sacred significance for the community. The goat dies under her watch, and the girl is punished by being locked in a shed for ten days with no company except for the goat’s corpse. One evening, the Little People emerge from the dead goat’s mouth and teach the girl how to construct an air chrysalis.

Later, Tengo confronts Fuka-Eri about whether she based the protagonist on herself and if she was really locked in a shed for ten days with a dead goat. Fuka-Eri replies, “I don’t talk about the goat” (74) and changes the subject.

Aomame visits Willow House, the home of the dowager who hires her to kill abusive men. In addition to arranging for their husbands to be killed, the dowager allows abused women to live in a heavily-guarded safe house while they recover physically and emotionally.

While waiting to speak with the dowager, Aomame chats with the woman’s personal bodyguard, a physically imposing man named Tamaru. She asks him when the police officers changed their uniforms and sidearms. He explains that the changes were made in the wake of a shootout in October 1981 between the Yamanashi Prefectural Police and the members of a religious commune that cost the lives of three officers.

On a Sunday morning, Tengo and Fuka-Eri travel by train to meet Professor Ebisuno, her parental guardian. Neither Tengo nor Komatsu is thrilled to bring a fourth conspirator in on their scheme, but Fuka-Eri insists.

Sundays always remind Tengo of his father, a subscription fee collector for the Japanese public broadcaster NHK who always forced his son to come with him on collection runs. His father grew up destitute in Manchuria and fled to Tokyo in 1945, just before the Soviet Union invaded the territory. Having lived on the brink of starvation his entire life, he feels extraordinarily fortunate to obtain a job at NHK, performing his fee collection duties with enormous gusto. As for his deceased mother, Tengo is never told how she met his father nor how she died.

Sensing Tengo’s discomfort, Fuka-Eri holds his hand on the train.

At the library, Aomame pores over newspaper articles to determine what other major events she mysteriously missed over the past two years, including the 1981 shootout—known as the Lake Motosu Incident—described by Tamaru. The Lake Motosu Incident began when the police obtained a search warrant for a farming commune run by a religious group called Akebono or “First Light.” Akebono was suspected of stockpiling Chinese-made automatic weapons and hand grenades.

Unable to believe that she could have possibly overlooked these major developments, Aomame concludes that “the problem is not with me but with the world around me [...] At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place” (106). Remembering the taxi driver on the expressway and his odd parting words, Aomame further concludes that she likely crossed over into this new world after descending the emergency staircase. She also recalls the strong emotions she felt immediately beforehand while listening to Janáček’s Sinfonietta. Gripped by a need to distinguish this new world from the previous one, Aomame dubs it “1Q84,” with the Q symbolizing a question mark.