Life as a Revolving Door (Book 3)

In the third and final section of this novel, Nutmeg tells Toru Okada about the opera The Magic Flute because she asked him where he thought he would be saving Kumiko from. All that Toru was able to answer to this was, "Somewhere far away." (page 406) It is evident that he does not know anything about Kumiko's precise situation and even less about where she is yet he is determined that his duty is to save her from wherever she finds herself. Nutmeg mentions a conflict between "the land of night" and "the land of day" in the opera which is a parallel to Toru's situation with Kumiko. She has utterly disappeared from his life as though she were now living in an unknown world. On page 411, Nutmeg is telling Toru Okada about the massacre of the animals in the zoo during the war. After the soldiers had finished all of the killings, Nutmeg's father is taken by an overwhelming calmness and an interesting thought comes to his mind, "Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall. There were tigers in one section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was as simple as taht. And there was no logical continuity from one section to another." (page 411) This passage reminds me of the two worlds that Nutmeg was discussing in the opera. I love this image of the revolving door because it is true that some revolving doors move very fast and that it is difficult to have complete control over them. This correlates with the perception section in TOK and the article entitled "In the Mind's Eye" where the author suggested that there were other dimensions that we were incapable of seeing. If one were to follow Murikami's logic in this particular case, then everything is based on pure coincidence: you are not able of predicting which world you will fall into. Will it be the one with the tigers or the one without them?