No doubt about it: there were two moons.

One was the moon that had always been there, and the other was a far smaller, greenish moon, somewhat lopsided in shape, and much less bright. It looked like a poor, ugly, distantly related child that had been foisted on the family by unfortunate events and was welcomed by no one. But it was undeniably there, neither a phantom nor an optical illusion, hanging in space like other heavenly bodies, a solid mass with a clear-cut outline. Not a plane, not a blimp, not an artificial satellite, not a papier-mâché moon that someone made for fun. It was without a doubt a chunk of rock, having quietly, stubbornly settled on a position in the night sky, like a punctuation mark placed only after long deliberation or a mole bestowed by destiny.

Tengo stared at the new moon for a long time as if to challenge it, never averting his gaze, hardly even blinking. But no matter how long he kept his eyes locked on it, it refused to budge. It stayed hunkered down in its spot in the sky with silent, stonehearted tenacity.

Tengo unclenched his right fist and, almost unconsciously, gave his head a slight shake. Damn, it’s the same as in Air Chrysalis! A world with two moons hanging in the sky side by side. When a dohta is born, a second moon appears.

“That will be a sign. Watch the sky with great care,” one of the Little People said to the girl.

Tengo was the one who wrote those words. Following Komatsu’s advice, he had made his description of the new moon as concrete and detailed as possible. It was the part on which he had worked the hardest. The look of the new moon was almost entirely Tengo’s creation.

Komatsu had said, “Think of it this way, Tengo. Your readers have seen the sky with one moon in it any number of times, right? But I doubt they’ve seen a sky with two moons in it side by side. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precise detail as possible.”

It made a lot of sense.

Still looking up at the sky, Tengo shook his head again. The newly added moon was absolutely the same size and shape as the one for which he had invented a description. Even the figurative language that he had used fit this one almost perfectly.

This can’t be, Tengo thought. What kind of reality mimics fictional creations? “No, this can’t be,” he actually said aloud. Or tried to. His voice barely worked. His throat was parched, as if he had just run a very long distance. There’s no way this can be. That’s a fictional world, a world that does not exist in reality. It was a world in a fantastic story that Fuka-Eri had told Azami night after night and that Tengo himself had fleshed out.

Could this mean, then—Tengo asked himself—that this is the world of the novel? Could I have somehow left the real world and entered the world of Air Chrysalis like Alice falling down the rabbit hole? Or could the real world have been made over so as to match exactly the story of Air Chrysalis? Does this mean that the world that used to be—the familiar world with only one moon—no longer exists anywhere? And could the power of the Little People have something to do with this in one way or another?

He looked around, hoping for answers, but all that appeared before his eyes was the perfectly ordinary urban residential neighborhood. He could find nothing about it that seemed odd or unusual—no Queen of Hearts, no walrus, no Mad Hatter. There was nothing in his surroundings but an empty sandbox and swings, a mercury-vapor lamp emitting its sterile light, the spreading branches of a zelkova tree, a locked public toilet, a new six-story condo (only four units of which had lighted windows), a ward notice board, a red vending machine with a Coca-Cola logo, an illegally parked old-model green Volkswagen Golf, telephone poles and electric lines, and primary-color neon signs in the distance. The usual city noise, the usual lights. Tengo had been living here in Koenji for seven years. Not because he particularly liked it, but because he had just happened to find a cheap apartment that was not too far from the station. It was convenient for commuting, and moving somewhere else would have been too much trouble, so he had stayed on. But he at least knew the neighborhood inside and out and would have noticed any change immediately.

How long had there been more than one moon? Tengo could not be sure. Perhaps there had been two moons for years now and he simply hadn’t noticed. He had missed lots of things that way. He wasn’t much of a newspaper reader, and he never watched television. There were countless things that everybody knew but him. Perhaps something had occurred just recently to increase the number of moons to two. He wanted to ask someone, “Excuse me, this is a strange question, but how long have there been two moons? I just thought you might know.” But there was nobody there to ask—literally, not even a cat.

No, there was someone there. Nearby, someone was using a hammer to pound a nail into a wall. Bang bang bang. The sound kept up without a break, a very hard nail going into a very hard wall. Who could be pounding nails at a time like this? Puzzled, Tengo looked around, but he could see no wall, nor was there anyone pounding nails.

A moment later, Tengo realized that he was hearing the sound of his own heart. Spurred on by adrenaline, his heart was pumping surges of blood through his body. It pounded in his ears.

The sight of the two moons gave Tengo a slight dizzy feeling, as if it had put his nervous system out of balance. He sat down on top of the slide, leaning against the handrail, and closed his eyes, fighting the dizziness. He felt as if the force of gravity around him had subtly changed. Somewhere the tide was rising, and somewhere else the tide was receding. Their faces devoid of expression, people were moving back and forth between “insane” and “lunatic.”

In his dizziness, it suddenly occurred to Tengo that the image of his mother wearing a white slip had not attacked him for a very long time. He had almost forgotten that he had been tormented by that illusion for years. When could he have last seen it? He could not recall exactly, but it was probably around the time he started writing his new novel. For some unfathomable reason, his mother’s ghost had stopped haunting him from that point onward.

Instead, Tengo now sat on top of a slide in a playground in Koenji, looking at a pair of moons in the sky. An inscrutable new world silently surrounded him like lapping dark water. Perhaps a new trouble had chased out the old one. Perhaps the old, familiar riddle had been replaced by a fresh, new one. The thought came to Tengo without irony. Nor did he feel any need to complain about it. Whatever the composition of this new world might be, I surely have no choice but to accept it in silence. There’s no way to pick and choose. Even in the world that existed until now, there was no choice. It’s the same thing. And besides, he asked himself, even if I wanted to lodge a complaint, who is there for me to complain to?

The hard, dry sound of his heart continued, but the dizzy sensation was gradually subsiding. With his heart pounding in his ears, Tengo leaned his head against the handrail of the slide and looked at the two moons hanging in the Koenji sky. What a strange sight it was—a new world with a new moon. Everything was uncertain, and ultimately ambiguous. But there is one thing I can declare with certainty, Tengo thought: No matter what happens to me in the future, this view with two moons hanging up there side by side will never—ever—seem ordinary and obvious to me.

What kind of secret pact had Aomame concluded with the moon that time, Tengo wondered. And he recalled the deadly serious look in her eye as she stared at the moon in broad daylight. What could she have offered the moon?

And what is going to happen to me from now on?

At ten years old, as a frightened boy standing before the room’s big door, Tengo had wondered this again and again while Aomame continued to grip his hand in the empty classroom. Even now Tengo continued to wonder that same thing. He felt the same anxiety, the same fear, the same trembling. The door now was new and bigger. The moon was hanging there again, but this time there were two moons, not one.

Where could Aomame be?

Tengo scanned the area again from his perch on the slide, but nowhere could he find what he was hoping to discover. He spread out his left hand and struggled to find some clue, but there was nothing in his palm besides its natural deeply carved lines. In the flat light of the mercury-vapor lamp they looked like the canals on the surface of Mars, but they told him absolutely nothing. The most he could glean from this big hand was the fact that he had come a very long way since the age of ten—all the way to the top of this slide in a little Koenji playground where two moons were hanging in the sky.

Where could Aomame be? Tengo asked himself again. Where is she hiding?

“She might be very close by,” Fuka-Eri had said. “Within walking distance.”

Supposedly somewhere close by, could Aomame also see the two moons?

Yes, I’m sure she can, Tengo thought. He had no proof, of course, but he had a mysterious conviction that it must be true. She could see what he could see, without a doubt. He balled his left hand into a tight fist and pounded on the surface of the slide hard enough to hurt.

That is why it has to happen: we have to run into each other somewhere within walking distance of this place. Someone is after Aomame, and she’s hiding like a wounded cat. I don’t have much time to find her. But where could she be? Tengo had no idea.

“Ho ho,” called the keeper of the beat.

“Ho ho,” the other six joined in.