October 1981

October 1981 marks a violent episode whose public prominence makes its disappearance from Aomamé’s memory a measure of how far her reality has shifted. The clash near Lake Motosu between police and the Dawn was reported for days, reshaped policing, and entered the novel through separate conversations with Tamaru and Professor Ébisuno; yet both Aomamé and Tengo confront gaps in their recollection of it.

The clash near Lake Motosu

In mid-October 1981, local police fought extremists in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture, near Lake Motosu. Tamaru describes the encounter as a bloodbath and emphasizes the imbalance in weapons: the extremists had five AK-47s, while the police carried old six-shot revolvers. Three officers were killed. Their deaths prompted the rapid airlift of special units of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, and the police were left publicly humiliated.

The confrontation had consequences beyond the immediate casualties. In the following year, Prime Minister Nakasone sought to strengthen police powers. The police organization underwent major changes, special armed units were established, and ordinary officers received more capable semi-automatic weapons, including Beretta Model 92 pistols. Tamaru’s account connects a remote mountain battle to a national change in the state’s capacity for armed force.

A public event and a private blank

For Aomamé, the disturbing fact is not simply that she cannot recall the battle. She has not forgotten an obscure incident: the fighting dominated the news, and the account later describes it as a front-page story with a large headline and an aerial photograph of the scene. The newspaper also showed the three dead officers and the camouflaged troops who arrived by helicopter, carrying automatic weapons and rifles fitted with scopes.

The report’s prominence makes Aomamé’s ignorance feel impossible by her own standards. She reads the newspaper carefully every day and trusts the meticulous memory that, in her work, has allowed her to detect errors of less than a millimeter and carry out killings without mistakes. When she discovers that this consequential story has escaped her, she stretches her facial muscles into an exaggerated grimace, breathes deeply, and taps her pen against her front teeth as she tries to organize her thoughts. The mismatch between her reliable habits and the missing event makes a change in reality more plausible to her than a lapse in attention.

Her puzzlement is sharpened by another missing story: the incident in which an NHK collector injured a student. In Aomamé’s experience, the Motosu clash overwhelmed coverage of that assault. The chase for the surviving extremists filled newspapers for days: three were killed, two seriously wounded, four arrested, including a woman, and one remained unaccounted for. The saturation of the news explains how one story displaced another, but not why Aomamé remembers neither event.

News, politics, and competing accounts

The events of October 1981 also sit within a wider struggle over public information. The later account notes that NHK had faced criticism over a special program on the Lockheed corruption scandal after the ruling Liberal Democratic Party objected to its content. NHK had disclosed the planned program to politicians and sought their approval before broadcast, in part because its funding depended on the Diet. Once the affair became known, many citizens questioned the broadcaster’s political independence, and refusal to pay the viewing fee gained momentum.

The Lake Motosu story took up so much media attention that criticism of NHK’s collection system and political dependence was pushed aside. The episode thus links a violent confrontation in the mountains to a quieter contest over who controls public narratives. It does not establish that the battle was engineered to suppress criticism; rather, the account identifies the practical effect of one major story eclipsing another, and the relief that this offered NHK.

The Dawn named

A later conversation identifies the extremists at Motosu as members of the Dawn. Professor Ébisuno explains that the Pioneers had split in 1976, and that Eri escaped the group and sought refuge with him the following year; the breakaway faction took the name Dawn around that time. When Tengo asks whether the group had recently been involved in a serious incident, Ébisuno confirms that the armed fighting against police near Lake Motosu was its work.

This identification gives Tengo a connection between the group’s history and the event he half-remembers. He knows that the clash was a major affair, but cannot retrieve its details. As he strains to remember, his body seems to twist in opposing directions; pain pulses at the back of his skull, the air feels thin, and sounds recede as if he were underwater. Professor Ébisuno asks what is wrong, and Tengo says he will be all right, recognizing the onset of one of his crises.

Memory as a measure of altered reality

The two characters’ encounters with October 1981 differ in form but converge in effect. Aomamé has no recollection of a story that should have been unavoidable in her daily reading; Tengo recognizes the battle but finds its particulars inaccessible, and the effort to recover them triggers a physical episode. The public record is emphatic—deaths, weapons, arrests, searches, and political consequences—while personal memory remains blank or fragmented.

That contrast makes the date more than a marker for a historical incident within the novel. The Motosu battle tests the stability of each character’s remembered world: the event is too conspicuous to dismiss as trivia, yet neither character can possess it as ordinary memory. Through newspaper coverage, political aftermath, and Tengo’s bodily crisis, October 1981 becomes a point where collective history and private recollection fail to align.