Spring 1982

Spring 1982 is a pivotal time marker in Aomamé’s effort to understand a world that no longer matches her memories. Tamaru links the police’s springtime changes to a deadly clash near Lake Motosu in October 1981; later, Aomamé recognizes that the clash and an NHK-related stabbing are among the few recent events she cannot recall. The season therefore marks both an institutional turning point and the period against which she measures a possible alteration of reality.

Police Changes and the Lake Motosu Clash

Tamaru dates the clash to mid-October 1981, near Lake Motosu in Yamanashi Prefecture. Local police fought extremists armed with five AK-47s, while the police had old six-shot revolvers. Three officers were killed, and the unequal firepower exposed the police to public humiliation. Special battalions of the Self-Defense Forces were rapidly flown to the area.

In the aftermath, Prime Minister Nakasone sought to strengthen police authority. The organization underwent major changes, including the creation of special armed units, and ordinary police officers received more capable semiautomatic weapons. Tamaru identifies the Beretta 92 as one of the new models. The transition, he says, occurred in the spring two years before his conversation with Aomamé, making it a recent and conspicuous change in the police presence around her.

Tamaru’s Account and Aomamé’s Response

Tamaru explains the change through specifics: the contrast between the extremists’ rifles and the police revolvers, the deaths of three officers, and the new equipment issued afterward. He also describes his own fifteen-round Beretta, chambered for 9 mm Parabellum ammunition, and contrasts its 850-gram weight with the old revolvers’ 490 grams. His point is practical as well as historical: powerful firearms, he argues, are unsuitable for untrained officers and could have catastrophic consequences in public places.

Aomamé has never fired a firearm, not even an air rifle. She listens without recognizing the incident Tamaru describes, then repeats the timing: two years ago. When she asks whether his story is true, he replies that he tells only true stories and confirms that the uniforms and weapons were renewed in the spring. The exchange gives her a precise date against which to test her sense of what has happened.

A Gap in Aomamé’s Memory

Aomamé later compares her recollection with events reported by the Mainichi. She remembers the period clearly except for two stories: the Lake Motosu clash and an incident in which an NHK collector stabbed a student. The omissions trouble her because they are sharply limited; her memory appears intact for other events from the same period. She wonders how a failure in her brain could have caused her to miss just those reports.

Pressing her fingertips against her temples, Aomamé considers another possibility: if reality has been transformed, perhaps some function of her mind has hidden information from her, leaving it unseen and unremembered. The police’s new uniforms and weapons, a proposed American-Soviet lunar base, the NHK-related stabbing, and the Lake Motosu gunfight all belong to the set of facts she cannot retrieve. She cannot find a common thread among them, so the explanation remains a hypothesis rather than a settled answer.

The Season as a Threshold

Aomamé places the first visible signs of change several days earlier, on the day she killed an oil specialist in a Shibuya hotel room. After leaving her taxi on the Metropolitan Expressway Route 3, she used an emergency stairway, descended to National Route 246, changed her tights, and walked toward Sangenjaya Station to take the Tokyu Line. There she encountered a young police officer whose uniform differed from what she expected. On that morning, however, officers near her home had still worn the familiar uniform and carried the old revolver. The contrast makes the police changes a clue to when the world may have shifted.

Her recollection also returns to the taxi ride through traffic, when the opening of Janáček’s Sinfonietta accompanied an unsettling sense of bodily distortion. The driver told her about the emergency stairway, which she descended barefoot after removing her high heels, while the wind blew and the music continued in her ears. Looking back, she wonders whether the change began around that passage from the expressway to the streets below. Spring 1982 thus frames an unresolved threshold: public institutions have visibly changed, but for Aomamé the deeper rupture lies in the uncertain relation between those changes, her missing memories, and the altered reality she is trying to locate.