Thirty-Two-Year-Old Day Tripper

Thirty-year old Aomame is grid-locked in a cab at the book's opening, on an elevated section of the Tokyo Expressway. She's listening to Janácek's Sinfonietta on the car's stereo and daydreaming about how that particular piece of music, written in 1926 in Czechoslovakia, represented the ultimate calm before the storm, a brief peaceful respite in central Europe that served to prove "the most important proposition in history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.'"