What Happens in Cat Town: 1Q84 Book Three

If Book One of 1Q84 presented a crooked reality, and Book Two revealed the existence of two moons hanging over that crookedness, then Book Three leaves us with a difficult but pressing question. What happens when old patterns return? The issue isn’t whether old patterns actually return, they do. This novel is completely saturated with recurrence. Conversations echo each other, and images resurface in altered forms. People disappear and reappear. Structures previously hidden find themselves being shoved back into visibility. By the final book, it becomes impossible to read 1Q84 as a story about escaping distortion altogether. Instead, it forces us to reckon with our response to distortion, inheritance, and recurrence as they inevitably reemerge. 

One of the clearest symbols of this appears at the end of the novel through the image of the tiger on a billboard for a gas company. The happy tiger beckons drivers to “put a tiger in your tank”. Earlier on in the book, it showed one side of its face. Now, it reveals the other. Though the image returns, it isn’t identical. It’s reversed. The novel itself doesn’t seem interested in whether old structures disappear forever, but whether they can return differently depending on how we encounter them. Aomame’s trajectory fits this perfectly. We see her entering 1Q84 alone, isolated, and hyper-controlled, thoroughly convinced that her survival depends on maintaining emotional distance. Yet, she doesn’t leave 1Q84 that way. This reversal matters deeply. The world itself remains strange, unresolved, and partially concealed, but her relationship to it changes through connection. The recurrence remains, but the response transforms.

This stands in stark contrast to Ushikawa. Throughout the novel, Ushikawa understands identity through inevitability. He believes hidden “ugliness” already exists within him and will eventually manifest itself in his daughters as well. In his worldview, the second moon was always there. It may not always be visible, but it inevitably emerges. Distortion is not created but revealed. We see this same logic appearing again with the NHK collector. He is especially unsettling because he never fully materializes. The characters describe him, fear him, react to his words, yet he remains oddly elusive. Even Ushikawa, the stealthy investigator that he is, fails to locate him. Earlier in the novel, I began thinking about the collector through a Freudian lens, almost as though he represented an externalized psychic force. Not necessarily moral judgment, but intrusive recurrence itself. He continually demands acknowledgment from those attempting concealment. His hatred for people who “pretend not to be home” feels psychologically disproportionate to the situation, as though hidden things themselves offend him.

What interested me most, however, was the fact that he seems drawn towards those who perceive this hidden reality, the two moons. In my reading, the collector almost functions like the return of suppressed structures demanding recognition. Once the characters begin noticing the second moon, concealment becomes unstable. This awareness itself seems to invite pressure. And Tengo’s father complicates this further. If the NHK collector truly represents some extension of his father, as Tengo suspects, then collecting itself transforms into something existential rather than bureaucratic. Tengo’s father spends his life moving door to door, endlessly repeating the same procedural demand until the role itself appears to consume his individuality. He resembles the characters in the novella Tengo references throughout the novel, Cat Town, by Hagiwara Sakutarō. In the story, a man accidentally steps off a train into a strange town inhabited entirely by cats. At first, the town appears ordinary enough, but he gradually realizes something deeply unsettling: if he remains there too long, he may never be able to leave. The danger of Cat Town is not immediate violence, but absorption. The man risks becoming irretrievably lost within a world whose logic slowly replaces his own. Tengo’s father was not physically trapped, but absorbed so fully into a system’s logic that they cease existing outside it. His death shortly after ceasing collection feels deeply symbolic in this sense, as though the repetitive structure sustaining his identity collapses once the role disappears. This is where I find it reminiscent of Cat Town. The danger of Cat Town is not merely that it is another world. The danger is absorption. The man in the story becomes irretrievably lost because he no longer maintains enough individuality to resist the town’s internal logic. In this sense, it also heavily mirrors 1Q84. The world exerts pressure toward assimilation, toward accepting its distortions completely and reorganizing oneself around them, and this is exactly what distinguishes Tengo and Aomame. They don’t deny the existence of 1Q84, but they do refuse to get lost within it. They continually recognize each other through the fracture of the reality around them. 

This is also why Aomame’s pregnancy especially struck me. At one point, she tells the Dowager, her boss, that anger has receded within her, replaced by the awareness of a little one growing inside her that exists outside of anger altogether. Throughout the novel, we observe fatalistic recurrence. Yet this moment gestures toward another possibility entirely. Something genuinely novel and not merely inherited can still emerge from within distorted circumstances. There may not be freedom from recurrence, or escape from that second moon. Instead, there becomes a possibility that recurring structures do not have to produce identical responses forever. By the end of 1Q84, I no longer felt that the novel was asking whether hidden realities exist. Rather, it seemed to ask whether we can remain human within them without becoming irretrievably lost ourselves.