Aomamé’s descent from the expressway

Aomamé’s descent from the expressway turns an ordinary traffic delay into a precarious escape route and, ultimately, her first concrete evidence that the world around her may no longer match the one she remembers. Leaving the taxi on foot, she exchanges the familiar enclosure of the jam for an exposed emergency stairway; once she reaches the streets below, a police officer’s unfamiliar uniform and semiautomatic pistol make the detour a threshold into a changed reality.

The decision to leave the jam

The taxi driver points out an emergency stopping area beside a large Esso billboard, explaining that a stairway there leads down to the national road. Drivers might use it in a fire or major earthquake, while road-repair workers use it routinely; from below, Aomamé could reach a Tokyu station and continue to Shibuya by train. The proposed shortcut is discreet rather than officially presented as a normal way out, but it offers a way to keep her appointment when the expressway traffic has stalled.

Aomamé weighs her options while looking over the motionless cars. A young man smokes in a dusty black Pajero; a mother has spent the jam scolding her restless daughter in a red Suzuki Alto. The accumulated delay presses against Aomamé’s need to arrive on time. As Janáček’s Sinfonietta seems to enter its finale, she makes her decision, puts on her small Ray-Ban sunglasses, and hands the driver three thousand-yen notes. She tells him she is getting out because she cannot be late. The driver accepts the fare and lets her out.

Crossing the expressway on foot

With her large leather bag in hand, Aomamé walks the roughly ten metres to the emergency parking area. Trucks passing on the opposite carriageway make the ground tremble under her high heels, its movement compared to the shifting deck of an aircraft carrier in a rough sea. The danger is not abstract: she is walking beside a live expressway, in conspicuous clothes, while other drivers watch from their cars.

A little girl leans out of the Suzuki Alto and asks her mother what the young woman is doing and where she is going. She then pleads to get out and walk too. Her mother says nothing, only shakes her head and gives Aomamé a disapproving glance. The other drivers follow Aomamé with furrowed brows, apparently unsure how to make sense of a woman walking along the expressway. Their hesitation gives the scene its odd interval: the road remains trapped in the everyday routine of a traffic jam, but Aomamé’s passage on foot has not yet become ordinary enough for them to absorb.

The exposed stairway and the locked lot

Aomamé descends the narrow exterior stairway without her shoes, gripping the metal rails with bare hands. Gusts roar across the open steps and catch her tight miniskirt like a sail, threatening to lift and unbalance her. She goes down backward, one step at a time, sometimes stopping to brush hair from her face and check that her bag remains secure. Below her lies National Route 246, whose engines, horns, car alarms, amplified nationalist songs, and the blows of distant demolition work combine into a noise that seems to come from every direction. The force of wind and sound unsettles her physically, even as she tries to concentrate on the descent.

At the bottom there is no one waiting to challenge her, but neither is there an open path to the station. Aomamé puts her shoes back on and finds herself in a fenced storage lot wedged between the two sides of Route 246. Rusting metal posts, crushed cartons, plastic bottles, manga, scattered bags, and three sacks beneath a plastic shelter occupy the otherwise bare ground. The gate is chained shut with a heavy padlock, and barbed wire tops the fence. She tries the gate, but it will not move; climbing it would ruin her suit. The emergency exit has delivered her into an enclosure, forcing another small crisis into a plan meant to save time.

Reaching the station and recognizing a discrepancy

Aomamé eventually gets through the fence and, finding no one on the other side, checks her clothes and recovers her composure. She crosses Route 246 to a drugstore, buys a replacement stocking, and asks the saleswoman if she can put it on in a corner. Afterward, the queasy, seasick feeling left by the descent has passed. Rather than risk another taxi stalled in traffic, she walks to the nearest station and takes the Tokyu Shin-Tamagawa Line.

At Sangenjaya Station she passes a young, tall police officer. His clothes are still navy blue, but his jacket is looser and more comfortable than the fitted uniform she remembers; its fabric seems softer and its collar shorter. More strikingly, he carries a large semiautomatic pistol, apparently a modern weapon that can hold as many as sixteen rounds, rather than the old six-shot revolvers she expects Japanese police to carry. Aomamé reads newspapers regularly and is attentive to police dress. She is certain that only hours earlier the officers she saw still wore the old uniform and carried revolvers, so she cannot explain the difference as a change she simply overlooked.

When she later asks when the police uniforms and guns changed, a man reacts with some puzzlement and says that the change happened years ago. His answer confirms that this is not merely a new development she missed over the past week: other people remember a different chronology. The route meant to solve a practical problem has therefore brought Aomamé into contact with a more consequential one. She has reached the city by a chain of improvised steps, but the changed details of the police officer’s appearance leave the ordinary world itself in question.