Aomame

Aomame spends most of the day on Sunday at a library, where she carefully reads through a series of old newspapers from the final months of 1981. She remembers many of the news stories she reads, but she finds two which she does not recall. One describes an NHK fee collector who murdered a college student after the student refused to pay his NHK fees. The other describes a shootout between police and residents of a commune at a place called Lake Motosu. Reading the details, she learns that the residents of the commune, a group of radical revolutionaries, killed several officers with automatic rifles. The story is clearly the same one Tamaru described.

Flipping through the newspapers, Aomame follows both of these unfamiliar news stories throughout their coverage. It is a strange experience for her to read news that is so recent yet so unfamiliar. She reads the paper faithfully every day, and it is not possible that she would have missed big events like these. Briefly, she considers the possibility that she is going insane and somehow eliminating her own memories. However, this explanation does not work for her. The gaps in her memory are too precise to be the product of accident or illness.

Aomame thinks hard and tries to come up with some other explanation for the strange phenomenon she has experienced. Only one idea occurs to her:

At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place.

She thinks back to the moment when she first noticed a change. Just before she saw that first police officer with the new uniform, she climbed down that staircase from the Metropolitan Expressway Number 3. Before that, she was in the back of a taxi, and she got a “wrenching” sensation while listening to Janáček’s Sinfonietta. She guesses that a change happened in the world around that time.

Aomame reads more articles on the Lake Motosu shootout, and she takes careful notes. She learns about the revolutionaries’ organic farm and about the officers’ poor performance during the standoff. She also reads up on the life of the composer Janáček and the insights that led him to compose the Sinfonietta.

After leaving the library, she goes out for a walk. She does not know what to do except watch for more signs of change in the world. In the meantime, she renames this new reality in her head. She is no longer in the year 1984. Rather, she is in 1Q84. The Q is for the question that is buried beneath this strange new world.