Chapter 5 – A Profession Requiring Specialized
Techniques and Training
After killing Miyami, Aomame heads to the Akasaka
District for a drink. She sits at the bar by herself, reading a book about the
South Manchurian Railway and hoping that she isn’t mistaken for a prostitute. An
older man at the bar catches her eye and she engages him in small talk,
carefully skirting around questions about her job, before suggesting they go
back to his hotel room. After sleeping with the man (and deciding that the fact
that he is boring isn’t reason enough to kill him) Aomame watches the 11 o’clock
news to check for any reports of a body found in a Shibuya hotel and slips out
of the man’s room.
Chapter 6 – Does This Mean We’re Going Pretty Far From
the City?
Tengo answers another late-night phone call from
Komatsu, who tells him to go buy a word processor to get started with the
re-write of Air Chrysalis. Tengo is
hesitant to start working on the story because he still has to meet with the
person Fuka-Eri wants him to meet to get permission. Komatsu orders Tengo to
begin the re-write anyway, and so he does. As he works through the text, Tengo
wonders at the detailed depictions of the supposedly fictional characters,
deciding that the main character must be Fuka-Eri herself. The only way she
could have written Air Chrysalis, he
decides, is if she had experienced the events in the story. Tengo’s girlfriend
cancels their weekly “date,” so he spends his evening making dinner for himself.
Fuka-Eri calls to give him details about their meeting on Sunday, instructing
him to get on a train to Tachikawa. Tengo asks her about the events in the
novel and the existence of the goat, to which Fuka-Eri simply replies, “I don’t
talk about the goat.”
Chapter 7 – Quietly, So As Not to Wake the Butterfly
Aomame visits a place called the Willow House. She
chats with a man named Tamaru, who knowingly mentions that a man was found dead
in a Shibuya hotel and speculated that an autopsy will not be performed. Tamaru
leads her to a greenhouse to meet with the mistress of the house. While
observing the butterflies in the greenhouse, the dowager praises Aomame for her
work and seems to be reassuring herself more so than Aomame that they “haven’t
done anything wrong.” She shows Aomame pictures of a woman who was severely beaten
by her husband – she is the now-widowed wife of Miyami. After being dismissed
by the dowager, Aomame asks Tamaru about the current state of Miyami’s wife and
the other women who are living at the Willow House. She also inquires about the
changes in police uniforms, which Tamaru says happened two years ago after a
shootout between police and a radical group. Aomame has no memory of the event,
and she tries to hide her concern as she leaves the property.
Chapter 8 – Meeting New People in New Places
Tengo explains why he finds Sundays depressing (over
an incredibly boring several pages). His father collected subscription fees for
NHK and would drag young Tengo all over the city all day every Sunday to guilt
people into paying their fees. Tengo was eventually seen by someone in his
school and became an outcast – the kids’ nickname for him was “NHK.” When Tengo
was a child, his father would tell him stories about himself as a child. He
never spoke about Tengo’s mother and told Tengo that she had died several months
after he was born. Tengo doesn’t believe this because of his memory of his
mother’s affair with another man. Tengo goes to meet Fuka-Eri on the train.
Tengo manages to get a few pieces of information out of Fuka-Eri – she is
dyslexic, Air Chrysalis was written by a girl named Azami as Fuka-Eri dictated
the story, and the person that they are going to meet is the Professor who is
Azami’s father/mother. Tengo is ready to give up on the re-write of Air Chrysalis now that he knows Fuka-Eri
didn’t write it herself. There are too many people involved, so it is more
likely that the truth will get out and Tengo’s career will be ruined.
Comments
At this point I am definitely more drawn to Aomame’s
storyline—she’s a pretty dynamic character and I’m interested in finding out
what motivated her to become an assassin and what the arrangement is between
her and the dowager.
Tengo lost me a bit with all of his backstory. The
passage about his father taking him on his collection route was really slow and
there was a lot of historical information which, though it may play a role in
the story, was difficult to get through. I’m also not really buying into his
internal conflict over whether or not to do the re-write of Air Chrysalis
because we KNOW he’s totally going to do it and he’s really got nothing else
going for him.
I’m still having a hard time figuring out how the
separate storylines are going to come together because at this point in the
novel Aomame and Tengo don’t seem to have any reason to cross paths.
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