End of the World

The End of the World in 1Q84 is not a single prophecy with a settled meaning: it is an approaching catastrophe, a religious promise of survival, and an image for the helplessness of people who can only wait. A late-night film gives Aomamé a stark vision of extinction, while Tengo’s memories of a classmate reveal how an apocalyptic creed organizes children’s lives around the promise of a coming kingdom. The idea returns in Aomamé’s conversation with a wish that the present world might end and that the Kingdom might follow.

Catastrophe and powerlessness

Aomamé watches the American film On the Beach, made in the 1960s, late at night. Its premise is planetary annihilation: war between the United States and the Soviet Union sends atomic missiles across the continents, and radioactive fallout makes humanity’s destruction inevitable. Australia escapes the fallout only temporarily, because the direction of the wind delays rather than prevents its arrival. The survivors there know that the end is coming and spend their final days in different ways.

The film’s force lies in the absence of a possible rescue. Its survivors are not confronting a danger they can defeat or escape; they are waiting for extinction. Aomamé recognizes in this bleak situation a feeling she associates with the end of the world: people, deep down, await its arrival. The film therefore gives shape to an expectation that is at once collective and inward, not merely a distant disaster imagined on screen.

The scene also connects the cosmic scale of the catastrophe to bodily helplessness. Aomamé’s thought about the film recalls a man’s description of the end as a feeling of total powerlessness, with darkness and oppression and no help to hope for. Her response to the film is not to make extinction abstract or sublime: it makes that powerlessness legible as an experience people might recognize in themselves.

A doctrine lived in childhood

Tengo’s memories introduce another meaning of the end through his silent female classmate, whose parents belong to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their faith teaches that the world’s end will leave them as God’s chosen survivors, who will live for a thousand years in a blessed world. The expectation of destruction thus also promises deliverance, dividing the present from a future in which the faithful alone endure.

The doctrine shapes ordinary conduct. The Witnesses take biblical writing literally, preach their faith, and refuse blood transfusions and major surgery. The refusal of transfusions can leave adherents with little chance of surviving a serious injury. Their belief in survival at the end of the world therefore stands alongside practices that can make survival in the present more precarious.

The classmate participates in her mother’s door-to-door mission from a very young age. Her mother carries a cloth bag full of copies of the pamphlet Before the Flood and usually holds an umbrella in her other hand; the girl follows a few steps behind, lips tightly closed and expressionless. Their work is to explain the signs of the imminent end of the contemporary world and call people to wake up. Most households shut the door on them, but the believers continue in pursuit of the small possibility that someone will listen and later attend a meeting. Rejection is not a reason to abandon the mission: the faith holds that the more unwelcome the obligation, the brighter the felicity to come.

Two children on Sunday rounds

Tengo sees the girl repeatedly while accompanying his father on NHK fee-collection rounds. Their Sunday tasks are different, but both children are made to go from house to house with a parent: she to preach an approaching end, he to help collect a fee. They do not speak or greet one another. Their connection consists of brief looks, and Tengo notices a fleeting light in her eyes when they recognize each other.

He remembers her eyes as beautiful and striking, but her face seems veiled, as if any sign of existence had been extinguished. She speaks to others only when necessary and stays apart from her classmates. Tengo feels sympathy because he understands, as a child accompanying his father, that an imposed adult role can wound a child’s heart. Sunday, in his view, should belong to children playing with other children, not to frightening strangers with the end of the world or confronting them over a fee.

The memory makes the apocalyptic belief more than a set of claims about the future. For the girl, the end is bound to a demanding religious community and to the repeated labor of evangelism; for Tengo, it is part of a childhood in which an adult’s collection rounds likewise commandeer Sundays. Their shared predicament does not erase the difference between the two duties, but it gives Tengo a basis for recognizing the burden they place on children.

The Kingdom after the end

The phrase “Que Votre Royaume advienne pour nous” remains in Tengo’s memory long after the events of his childhood. He recalls the prayer’s wording from roughly twenty years earlier and wonders what kind of kingdom it describes. As a boy, he connects the promise to the NHK collections accompanying his father: if there were no NHK in that Kingdom, there would be no fee to collect, so its arrival would be welcome. The thought brings a child’s practical irony to religious language without removing its promise of a world beyond the present one.

The phrase resurfaces in Aomamé’s conversation about the world ending in the blink of an eye. Her companion responds that she would be happy, and Aomamé adds that the Kingdom will come. In this exchange, the end is not only the terrible extinction depicted in the film or the expected divine turning point of the Witnesses’ faith. It becomes a possibility that can be welcomed, even as the conversation leaves the promised Kingdom’s nature open.

The recurring idea holds these meanings in tension rather than resolving them. The film’s doomed survivors face a future from which there is no rescue; the Witnesses imagine chosen survival and a thousand years of happiness; Tengo remembers the Kingdom through the small relief of escaping Sunday fee collection; and Aomamé joins the end to an anticipated arrival. Across these scenes, the End of the World exposes the distance between a future people fear, one they believe will save them, and one they may simply wish would release them from the present.