Emergency Stairway on the Metropolitan Expressway Route 3
1Q84The Emergency Stairway on the Metropolitan Expressway Route 3 is a little-known evacuation route that offers Aomamé a way off the expressway when a traffic jam makes continuing by car impossible. What sounds like a simple emergency exit becomes a difficult, exposed descent: she climbs a locked gate in front of watching drivers, negotiates a narrow metal staircase in the wind, and emerges into a fenced storage lot with no immediately usable exit. The stairway is both a practical route through the city and a threshold whose promise of escape proves incomplete.
Purpose and Access
The route begins beside a small emergency parking area on the expressway, where disabled vehicles can pull over. A yellow roadside column contains an emergency telephone, and an Esso billboard with a smiling tiger marks the area from across the opposing lanes. The driver explains that the stairway leads down to the national highway below, where travelers can reach a Tokyu Line station and continue to Shibuya.
The stairway is intended for emergencies such as a fire or major earthquake, when drivers might abandon their cars and descend from the expressway. Road-repair workers also use it. Yet its existence is not common knowledge: Aomamé says she did not know there was an emergency stairway, and the driver replies that almost nobody does. His account makes the route seem usable but unofficially obscure, an infrastructure feature hidden in plain sight rather than an ordinary pedestrian passage.
The access point is closed by a metal gate with a lock, but the driver describes it as low enough to climb. He compares the stairs to the exterior fire escapes attached to old buildings and estimates their total height at roughly that of a two-story building. The route is therefore physically modest, but it is not arranged for convenient everyday access. Its design assumes an emergency or a worker’s need, not a woman in street clothes trying to leave a traffic jam quickly.
Aomamé’s Entry
After leaving the car with her large leather bag, Aomamé walks along the expressway edge toward the emergency parking area. Trucks passing on the opposite roadway make the ground tremble beneath her high heels. Drivers stare at her as she moves between the wall and the stopped cars; a child in a red Suzuki Alto asks her mother why the young woman is walking and begs to get out too. The mother says nothing, but looks reproachfully toward Aomamé. The stairway’s hidden route has become a public spectacle before Aomamé even reaches it.
At the gate, she finds that its door is locked. To climb it, she removes her high heels and puts them into her bag, accepting that her tights may be ruined. She also takes off her coat while the watching motorists remain silent. From a nearby black Toyota Celica, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” plays through an open window. Aomamé thinks of the scene as resembling a striptease, but decides she will remove only her shoes and coat. Her movement through the barrier is thus made uncomfortably visible, even as she refuses to let the spectators’ attention determine her next step.
Once over the gate, Aomamé straightens her skirt, brushes her hands, puts her coat back on, adjusts her sunglasses, and takes up her bag. The stairway is a plainly functional gray metal structure, not a passage designed for someone in tights and a tight miniskirt. A truck shakes it as it passes, and wind rushes through the bars. Still, it is a stairway, and the ground is below. That practical certainty is enough to set her moving.
The Descent
Aomamé turns once more toward the silent line of drivers. They watch from cars that have not advanced, their attention a shifting mixture of interest, indifference, envy, and contempt. She imagines them as prisoners of the jam, unable even to move backward, while she has work to finish and a mission to carry out. She chooses not to make one of her frightening facial grimaces for the crowd; it would waste time and leave her needing a moment to recover her ordinary expression. Then she turns her back on them and begins to descend.
The stairs are narrow and exposed. Aomamé wears only her tights on her feet, grips the metal bars with bare hands, and descends backward, one step at a time. Strong gusts inflate her miniskirt like a sail and threaten her balance. She pauses to push hair away from her face and check that her bag is secure. The physical work of descent, rather than any abstract sense of danger, defines the route: she must hold on, keep her footing, and continue despite the wind.
Below the expressway, the National Route 246 fills the air with a layered urban din: engines, horns, car alarms, and loudspeakers on far-right vehicles broadcasting old nationalist songs, with the sound of concrete being broken somewhere nearby. The noise seems to come from every direction and, together with the wind, makes Aomamé feel almost seasick. She sees a catwalk that would lead back toward the expressway but continues downward. The stairway offers a choice of direction, and she presses on toward the ground rather than returning to the road she has left.
The Exit That Does Not Open
At the foot of the stairs, nobody stops Aomamé or asks her what she is doing. She takes her shoes from her bag and puts them on, only to find that the stairway has brought her into a fenced storage area between the two carriageways of National Route 246. It is a vacant, utilitarian lot used to store materials: rusting metal posts lie on bare ground, while a plastic roof shelters three cloth sacks of unknown contents and several crushed cardboard boxes. Plastic bottles, manga, and windblown bags are scattered nearby.
The enclosure has a door, but chains are wound around it and secured with a large padlock. The gate is tall, its upper edge bristling with barbed wire. Aomamé judges that she cannot climb it without ruining her suit. She tries to push and pull the door, but it will not budge; not even a gap wide enough for a cat is left open. The route that seemed to promise a direct way out has deposited her in another confined space.
Aomamé is irritated: there is nothing in the lot worth stealing, yet its exit has been secured so thoroughly. She grimaces, swears, and spits on the ground. Checking her watch, she sees that she still has time, but she cannot afford to linger. The stairway has succeeded in getting her off the expressway and down to the level of the city, but it has not delivered her freely into it. Its function as an escape route is real, and its limitations are equally concrete: access requires a climb, the descent demands care, and the landing ends at a locked perimeter.
Narrative Significance
The sequence makes an overlooked piece of emergency infrastructure carry the weight of a decision. Aomamé learns of the stairway from a driver, discovers that it is almost unknown, and uses it because her journey cannot wait for traffic to move. The details that make it serviceable in an emergency—the low gate, exposed metal steps, and direct descent—also make it awkward and precarious for her particular passage.
The stairway’s promise is not a clean transition from obstruction to freedom. The route leads away from the immobilized cars, but the locked storage-lot gate creates a second obstacle at ground level. In this way, the episode distinguishes movement from arrival: Aomamé can choose to leave the jam and undertake the descent, yet the city below is not immediately open to her. The stairs are a passage forward, not a guarantee that the way out will be clear.
