« Que Votre Royaume advienne pour nous »

The expression « Que Votre Royaume advienne pour nous » (“May Your Kingdom come to us”) begins as part of a schoolgirl’s required prayer and becomes a phrase Tengo remembers from childhood. Its decisive significance lies in its later transformation: Aomamé uses the idea of bringing the Kingdom to a man she has decided to kill, then recites a prayer of her own. Across these moments, the same religious language shifts from an isolating ritual, to a child’s private joke, to a chilling description of deliberate violence.

The school prayer and Tengo’s memory

At school, Tengo’s classmate is known to belong to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Her beliefs keep her apart from the ordinary calendar and ceremonies of school life: she does not join the Christmas celebration, excursions to Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines, the sports festival, or the singing of the national and school anthems. Before lunch, she must recite a prayer aloud, where the other children can hear. The ritual makes her isolation visible, even though the narration suggests that she may not want to pray in public. She believes she cannot evade the obligation because Jehovah sees everything.

The remembered prayer asks that Jehovah’s name be sanctified, that His Kingdom come, and that the speaker be forgiven and blessed along the way. The phrase about the Kingdom is the part that stays with Tengo. Even twenty years later, he remembers its wording. As a schoolboy, he wonders what kind of Kingdom it could be and jokes privately that there would surely be no NHK there—and, consequently, no license fee. Its arrival therefore sounds to him like a welcome escape from the Sunday collections he must accompany his father to make.

Tengo has never spoken to the girl, but he feels sympathy for her because their childhoods share a painful circumstance. Both children are made to go door to door with their parents on Sundays and holidays: she to proselytize, he to collect NHK fees. Tengo understands these as different duties imposed on children whose hearts are hurt by them. In his view, Sundays should belong to children playing with other children, not to children delivering warnings of the end of the world or demanding fees. The remembered phrase thus joins religious expectation to Tengo’s early awareness of adult obligations and the powerlessness they impose on children.

A phrase turned into an action

Years later, Aomamé decides that a man who has abused a woman must be punished so that he will not repeat his acts against someone else. She spends a long time making a meticulous plan. Using tools, she fashions a very small, exceptionally fine ice pick, then trains herself to use it with the precision required to pierce a specific point at the back of his neck. Her planned killing is a deliberate act, not a spontaneous blow.

After carrying out the killing with composure and precision, Aomamé describes what she has done as bringing the Kingdom upon the man’s head. The expression that once belonged to a schoolgirl’s prayer is recast as a dark, almost literal account of death. The narration immediately notes that Aomamé then says a prayer, its words coming almost by reflex. It asks Jehovah to sanctify His name and bring His Kingdom, seeks forgiveness for “our” many sins, and asks for happiness along the speakers’ modest way. The familiar appeal returns, but its setting has changed irrevocably: prayer follows the killing rather than preceding a school lunch.

Repetition, irony, and moral tension

The expression’s force comes from its recurrence with altered implications. In the classroom it is part of an enforced religious observance, heard by children who find the girl’s behavior unsettling. In Tengo’s memory, its promise becomes the occasion for a joke about escaping NHK fees and the weekly duty that binds him to his father. In Aomamé’s account of her killing, the Kingdom is no longer only a future hope: the wording is made to describe an act she believes will prevent further abuse.

That transformation does not settle the moral tension in the scene. Aomamé frames the killing as punishment and as a way to stop the man from harming someone else; the prayer that follows also carries a request for forgiveness. The word “our” places the speaker within the field of sin even as she has acted against a perpetrator. The expression therefore holds together judgment, self-justification, and a residual appeal for mercy without explaining them away. Its repeated appearance makes a child’s remembered language reverberate through an adult act, linking the novel’s ordinary routines of obligation with its starkest violence.