Aomame

Alone in the sterile apartment, Aomame reads Air Chrysalis carefully. From the beginning, she can tell that the person who crafted this story—Tengo Kawana, if Leader is to be believed—has excellent control of language and emotion. It is a simple story told from the perspective of a little girl who describes what happens without stopping to analyze what it all means. Readers simply go along with her until suddenly, the girl’s world is “not this world,” but rather a fantastical place filled with Little People and air chrysalises.

Air Chrysalis takes place in a commune called the Gathering. The adults of the commune have left the outside world, and they often speak of modern life using strange words the girl does not understand. These words are rendered in phonetic text: “cap-i-tal-izum” for “capitalism,” for example.

The girl is the eldest of the few children at the commune, and thus she is a leader among them. She has little free time, and she has many duties. One week she is entrusted with the care of an old, blind goat. She gets distracted and forgets about it, and it dies. As punishment, the girl is locked up for ten days in an old building with the goat’s corpse.

One night during this confinement, the goat’s mouth opens, and six Little People come out. They explain that the goat’s mouth is a portal that allows them to come out of their world and into this one. They have plain clothing and features, but they have remarkable powers. They can read the girl’s mind. When she thinks that they are a bit like the seven dwarves, the Little People cheerfully transform themselves from six into seven.

The Little People teach the girl to make an air chrysalis. They do this by plucking white threads out of the air and weaving them together. The girl helps them, and every night they come back and work on the chrysalis more. When the term of punishment is over, the girl is almost sorry. She wants to see what will come out of the chrysalis when it is finished.

The Little People warn the girl not to tell anyone about them, and she obeys. A few days pass, and then one night they wake her up and tell her to come with them. The chrysalis is opening, and she needs to come and see. Bursting with curiosity, the girl follows them. When the chrysalis opens, she sees her own sleeping face. The Little People explain that it is her dohta, and that she is now a maza. A dohta is “the shadow of the maza’s heart and mind.” It is also a new portal for the Little People, a permanent one to replace the decaying goat. The Little People explain that the girl must stay close to her dohta forever once it awakes, and that she will know it is awake when two moons appear in the sky.

In the story, the girl feels that something is very wrong. She has some money which her father gave her a long time ago in case of emergency. She takes it and runs away to the home of a friend of her father’s. There she is welcomed, but the world still feels wrong. The girl watches the sky, and one night two moons appear, a small green one “like a slightly shriveled green pea” next to the ordinary one. When she sees that, she knows that her dohta is awake.

As the girl grows up, she realizes that the Little People find ways to harm anyone weak who grows...