The End of the World and the Coming of the Kingdom

The End of the World and the Coming of the Kingdom is a recurring apocalyptic motif that binds together a late-night film, Tengo’s childhood memories, and Aomamé’s response to violence. Its force lies in the contrast between the promised arrival of a blessed Kingdom and the helplessness of people facing a world they believe is about to end: across these contexts, the same language can express doctrine, private irony, vengeance, and companionship.

Apocalyptic expectation and helplessness

Aomamé’s reflection on the end of the world takes shape around a blunt image: she asks whether its approach would feel like a severe kick in the testicles. The man she speaks with cannot claim experience of the world’s end, but answers that it might; what he can describe is a feeling of total powerlessness, darkness, and the absence of rescue. The exchange gives apocalypse a bodily, unsparing register rather than treating it as an abstract theological proposition.

Not long afterward, Aomamé watches the American film The Last Shore alone late at night. In the film, a full-scale war between America and the Soviet Union sends atomic missiles across the continents; radioactive ash destroys humanity almost everywhere, while Australia is spared only temporarily because of the wind. The survivors there know that the ash will eventually reach them. Their extinction is certain, and they live through their final days in different ways, unable to change the outcome.

The film leaves Aomamé with a renewed conviction that everyone, deep down, awaits the end of the world. Watching people face inevitable destruction helps her recognize the helplessness described in her earlier conversation. The motif thus joins an imagined global catastrophe to a feeling that can exist inside ordinary life: the end is not only a future event but also a name for the point at which a person sees no help coming.

A child’s faith and the promised Kingdom

Tengo’s childhood recollection supplies a sharply different version of apocalypse. The quiet girl in his class is raised by parents who belong to Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian dissident group that preaches the end of the present world and takes biblical teaching literally. Its adherents refuse blood transfusions and major operations, accepting severe risks in the belief that they will be among God’s chosen survivors when the end arrives and will live for a thousand years in a blessed world.

The girl’s religious obligations set her apart from her classmates. She does not join Christmas celebrations, school trips to Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines, the Gymnastics Festival, or the singing of the national and school anthems. Before lunch she must recite a prayer aloud, even though the public ritual makes the other children uneasy and she appears to have little wish to speak. Her mother takes her door to door on missionary rounds, carrying a cloth bag filled with copies of the pamphlet Before the Flood and, often, an umbrella. The girl follows several paces behind, silent and expressionless.

The family’s faith insists that the present world will end and that salvation belongs to a chosen few. Its missionary work continues despite rejection: most householders close the door, but the believers keep trying for the rare listener who might attend a meeting. They understand this persistence as a sacred obligation, and take the hostility it meets as part of the promise of future blessedness. In this setting, the Kingdom is both a distant reward and the justification for a demanding life imposed on a child.

The prayer remembered and reworked

The prayer Tengo remembers begins by addressing Jehovah in heaven and asking that his name be sanctified and his Kingdom come. Its formal cadence stays with him for twenty years. As a schoolboy, he turns its promise into a small, private joke: he wonders whether the coming Kingdom would have NHK, and concludes that without NHK there would be no license fee either. His response does not erase the girl’s religious isolation, but it reveals how his own childhood experience of accompanying his father on NHK fee-collection rounds gives him a point of sympathy with her.

The two children never speak. They recognize each other on Sundays as they trail their parents from door to door: one household pursues missionary work, the other collects the NHK fee. Tengo notices a fleeting light in the girl’s eyes, and understands that both children are made to perform adult duties that wound their childhood. His memory places the Kingdom’s promise alongside the mundane pressure of the fee collection, making the sacred formula available to irony without making the girl’s experience trivial.

Later, Aomamé’s prayer after an act of lethal vengeance echoes the same words. She has decided that she must punish a man so he cannot repeat his abuse against someone else, and painstakingly prepares a specialized, finely sharpened instrument for a precise fatal strike at the back of his neck. After carrying out the killing with composure, she recites the prayer almost by reflex. The remembered appeal for the Kingdom has entered a radically different scene: a religious formula once tied to a child’s compulsory public observance now accompanies Aomamé’s own judgment and violence.

From doctrine to shared language

The motif’s transformations do not settle into a single meaning. The religious promise imagines chosen survivors living in a blessed world; The Last Shore presents survivors who know that no escape is possible; Aomamé’s prayer follows a killing committed to prevent further abuse. Each version turns on a different relation to powerlessness: faith offers a future deliverance, the film makes helplessness absolute, and Aomamé answers anticipated repetition with decisive action.

When Aomamé tells Ayumi that this world will end in an instant and the Kingdom will come, Ayumi answers that she will be happy and cannot wait any longer. Their exchange makes the apocalyptic phrase a shared expression of longing. It carries the weight of Aomamé’s earlier reflections and its religious history, yet in this conversation it also gives the two women a way to voice their readiness for an end and the arrival of something beyond the present. The repeated phrase gathers these incompatible hopes and fears without resolving them into certainty.