Read "1Q84 Book 1: April - June" by Haruki Murakami online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Aomame went to the ward library and, following the same procedures as before, opened the compact edition of the newspaper on a desk. She was there to read once again about the gun battle between the radical faction and the police that had taken place in Yamanashi Prefecture in the autumn three years earlier. The headquarters of Sakigake, the religious group that the dowager had mentioned, was located in the mountains of Yamanashi, and the gun battle had also occurred in the mountains of Yamanashi. This might have been a mere coincidence, but Aomame was not quite ready to accept that. There might well have been some link between the two. And the expression that the dowager had used-"such a major incident"-also seemed to suggest a connection.
The gunfight had occurred three years earlier, in 1981 (or, according to Aomame's hypothesis, three years prior to 1Q84), on October 19. Having read the news reports during her previous trip to the library, Aomame had fairly detailed knowledge of the facts. This enabled her to skim through that material and concentrate instead on subsequent related articles and analyses that viewed the affair from different angles.