Décalage entre le monde d’Aomamé et ses souvenirs

The mismatch between Aomamé’s memories and the world around her is the first accumulating evidence that the reality she inhabits no longer matches the one she remembers. Its signs are both inward and public: dates scatter in her mind, and familiar institutions carry histories she cannot recall. Her difficulty is not simply forgetting; other people’s confident accounts and the news itself contradict what she believes she has recently seen.

Time and Memory

As Aomamé tries to place her memories of Tamaki, the sequence of time breaks down. She knows that the present is April 1984 and that she was born in 1954, but these dates soon lose their solidity. In her mind, years appear as white cards carried off by a violent wind: 1954 and 1984 mingle with 1645, 1881, 2006, 771, and 2041. She tries to gather them, but too many disappear. Ordered succession gives way to disorder, knowledge drains away, and even the mental staircase on which she stands seems at risk of collapse.

The contrast between what Aomamé can still state and what she can no longer trust makes the disturbance precise. She has not lost every point of orientation: April 1984 and her 1954 birth remain briefly legible. What fails is their authority as dates that reliably organize experience. The windblown cards render that failure as an image of a present in which past and future can no longer be confidently sorted.

An Altered Police Uniform

Aomamé encounters a second kind of contradiction at Sangenjaya station. A young police officer passes her, and she notices that his uniform differs from the one she knows: the jacket is looser and more comfortable, its collar shorter, and its color slightly lighter. More strikingly, he carries a large automatic pistol rather than the old revolver she expects Japanese officers to carry. She remembers seeing a policeman in the familiar uniform with the familiar weapon only hours earlier.

She initially treats the difference as a fact she should be able to verify. Aomamé follows the news and pays close attention to police appearance, so a nationwide change of uniform and weapon ought to have been publicly announced. Yet she cannot stop to investigate at length: she has work to do. The discrepancy follows her as an unresolved test of her own memory against the world’s apparent new normal.

Other People’s Version of the Past

When Aomamé later asks an older man about the police equipment, he first confirms that uniforms and weapons changed, but places the change years earlier. He recalls that the police received more comfortable jackets and small automatic pistols, and says he knows of no more recent major alteration. Pressed on the details, he becomes uncertain about his own memory, though he recalls newspaper reports and public objections that the new weapons were too powerful.

The hotel barman supplies a more specific date: the change took place in the spring two years earlier. He remembers it because his younger brother is a police officer who disliked his new uniform and complained that his weapon was too heavy. The barman identifies it as a nine-millimeter Beretta automatic, made under license in Japan, and explains that the old revolvers were collected and destroyed. He recalls seeing their destruction reported on television. His account gives the change a public history, practical details, and a remembered personal connection—precisely the sort of shared evidence that makes Aomamé doubt herself rather than dismiss the men as mistaken.

Aomamé asks the barman to confirm that Japanese police have not used their old revolvers for two years. When he agrees, she grimaces: she is certain she saw an officer with the old weapon that very morning, but cannot imagine that both men are wrong or lying in the same way. She concludes, at least for the moment, that she must be mistaken. The exchange does not resolve the contradiction; it establishes that her memory and the mutually reinforced memories of others cannot both describe the same recent past.

A Wider Divergence

The evening news extends the mismatch beyond Aomamé’s personal recollections. It reports that a permanent observation base is being established on the Moon through unusual cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Aomamé has never heard of it and is perplexed. The report places a startling technological development among ordinary current-affairs items, making the altered world appear not as a private hallucination but as a society with a different public record.

The broadcast also carries news of the continuing Iran–Iraq war, political competition in the United States, a fatal mine fire in Kyushu, and pressure on Japan to open its financial markets. None of these reports answers Aomamé’s questions about the changed reality. She does not pursue the lunar base for long because more immediate problems demand her attention. The disjunction therefore remains active rather than solved: time is unreliable in her memory, the police change has a history she does not recognize, and the news treats an unfamiliar world as established fact.