« La réalité n’est toujours qu’une. »

The remembered assertion that appearances must not mislead because reality remains one is both a warning and a source of uncertainty for Aomamé. Recalling the taxi driver’s words after her descent from the expressway, she can no longer treat them as incidental: they seem to anticipate the altered landscape she now inhabits, even as their claim of a single reality sits uneasily beside what she has experienced.

The warning in retrospect

The driver had told Aomamé that if she took the unusual route, the landscape might afterward look somewhat different from the everyday one. He cautioned her not to be deceived by appearances and insisted that reality was still only one. At the time, she thought he was talking nonsense. She was in a hurry to move forward and had no time to make sense of his confusing remarks.

Later, she repeats his final words to herself as precisely as she can. Their unexpected timing now matters: she wonders whether they were advice or a coded message, and what the driver meant to convey. The maxim has shifted from apparently irrelevant talk into a possible key to the change she is trying to understand, though the recollection does not resolve its meaning.

The experience behind the maxim

Aomamé connects the warning with the taxi ride during which she first heard the opening of Janáček’s Sinfonietta amid a traffic jam. She remembers a strange sensation of bodily distortion, as if the components of her body had been twisted like a wrung-out cloth. The taxi driver then told her about the emergency stairway. She removed her high heels and descended its perilous steps barefoot while a strong wind blew and the fanfare of the Sinfonietta continued to sound in her ears. In retrospect, she considers that everything may have begun there.

The music deepens the strangeness of the memory. Aomamé questions how she recognized the piece immediately and knew it had been written in 1926, despite not being especially interested in classical music or able to distinguish Haydn from Beethoven. She also wonders why the music shook her. The remembered maxim gathers these unexplained details into a single moment of transition without explaining them away.

One reality, altered appearances

The statement offers reassurance only on its surface. If reality remains one, a changed landscape need not mean that reality itself has multiplied; yet for Aomamé, the warning makes the difference between appearance and reality newly difficult to judge. The driver’s words are not confirmed as an explanation, and she cannot decide whether they were a message or a coincidence. Their force lies in that unresolved gap: the claim sounds certain, while the experience that prompts her to recall it remains disturbing and unexplained.