hen she woke, she realized what a serious hangover she was going to have. Aomame never had hangovers. No matter how much she drank, the next morning her head would be clear and she could go straight into her next activity. This was a point of pride for her. But today was different. She felt a dull throbbing in her temples and she saw everything through a thin haze. It felt as if she had an iron ring tightening around her skull. The hands of the clock had passed ten, and the late-morning light jabbed deep into her eyeballs. A motorcycle tearing down the street out front filled the room with the groaning of a torture machine.

She was naked in her own bed, but she had absolutely no idea how she had managed to make it back. Most of the clothes she had been wearing the night before were scattered all over the floor. She must have torn them off her body. Her shoulder bag was on the desk. Stepping over the scattered clothes, she went to the kitchen and drank one glass of water after another from the tap. Going from there to the bathroom, she washed her face with cold water and looked at her naked body in the big mirror. Close inspection revealed no bruises. She breathed a sigh of relief. Still, her lower body retained a trace of that special feeling that was always there the morning after an intense night of sex—the sweet lassitude that comes from having your insides powerfully churned. She seemed to notice, too, an unfamiliar sensation between her buttocks. My god, Aomame thought, pressing her fingers against her temples. They did it there, too? Damn, I don’t remember a thing.

With her brain still clouded and her hand against the wall, she took a hot shower, scrubbing herself all over with soap and water in hopes of expunging the memory—or the nameless something close to a memory—of last night. She washed her genitals and anus with special care. She also washed her hair. Next she brushed her teeth to rid her mouth of its sticky taste, cringing all the while from the mint flavor of the toothpaste. Finally she picked up last night’s underthings and stockings from the bedroom floor and, averting her gaze, threw them in the laundry basket.

She examined the contents of the shoulder bag on the table. The wallet was right where it belonged, as were her credit and ATM cards. Most of her money was in there, too. The only cash she had spent last night, apparently, was for the return taxi fare, and the only things missing from the bag were some of her condoms—four, to be exact. Why four? The wallet contained a folded sheet of memo paper with a Tokyo telephone number. She had absolutely no memory of whose phone number it could be.

She stretched out in bed again and tried to remember what she could about last night. Ayumi went over to the men’s table, arranged everything in her charming way, the four had drinks and the mood was good. The rest unfolded in the usual manner. They took two rooms in a nearby business hotel. As planned, Aomame had sex with the thin-haired one, and Ayumi took the big, young one. The sex wasn’t bad. Aomame and her man took a bath together and then engaged in a long, deliberate session of oral sex. She made sure he wore a condom before penetration took place.

An hour later the phone rang, and Ayumi asked if it was all right for the two of them to come to the room so they could have another little drink together. Aomame agreed, and a few minutes later Ayumi and her man came in. They ordered a bottle of whiskey and some ice and drank that as a foursome.

What happened after that, Aomame could not clearly recall. She was drunk almost as soon as all four were together again, it seemed. The choice of drink might have done it; Aomame almost never drank whiskey. Or she might have let herself get careless, having a female companion nearby instead of being alone with a man. She vaguely remembered that they changed partners. I was in bed with the young one, and Ayumi did it with the thin-haired one on the sofa. I’m pretty sure that was it. And after that … everything after that is in a deep fog. I can’t remember a thing. Oh well, maybe it’s better that way. Let me just forget the whole thing. I had some wild sex, that’s all. I’ll probably never see those guys again.

But did the second guy wear a condom? That was the one thing that worried Aomame. I wouldn’t want to get pregnant or catch something from such a stupid mistake. It’s probably okay, though. I wouldn’t slip up on that, even if I was drunk out of my mind.

Hmm, did I have some work scheduled today? No work. It’s Saturday. No work on Saturday. Oh, wait. I do have one thing. At three o’clock I’m supposed to go to the Willow House and do muscle stretching with the dowager. She had to see the doctor for some kind of test yesterday. Tamaru called a few days ago to see if I could switch our appointment to today. I totally forgot. But I’ve got four and a half hours left until three o’clock. My headache should be gone by then, and my brain will be a lot clearer.

She made herself some hot coffee and forced a few cups into her stomach. Then she spent the rest of the morning in bed, with nothing but a bathrobe on, staring at the ceiling. That was the most she could get herself to do—stare at the ceiling. Not that the ceiling had anything of interest about it. But she couldn’t complain. Ceilings weren’t put on rooms to amuse people. The clock advanced to noon, but she still had no appetite. Motorcycle and car engines still echoed in her head. This was her first authentic hangover.

All of that sex did seem to have done her body a lot of good, though. Having a man hold her and gaze at her naked body and caress her and lick her and bite her and penetrate her and give her orgasms had helped release the tension of the spring wound up inside her. True, the hangover felt terrible, but that feeling of release more than made up for it.

But how long am I going to keep this up? Aomame wondered. How long can I keep it up? I’ll be thirty soon, and before long forty will come into view.

She decided not to think about this anymore. I’ll get to it later, when I have more time. Not that I’m faced with any deadlines at the moment. It’s just that, to think seriously about such matters, I’m—

At that point the phone rang. It seemed to roar in Aomame’s ears, like a super-express train in a tunnel. She staggered from the bed and lifted the receiver. The hands on the large wall clock were pointing to twelve thirty.

A husky female voice spoke her name. It was Ayumi.

“Yes, it’s me,” she answered.

“Are you okay? You sound like you’ve just been run over by a bus.”

“That’s maybe not far off.”

“Hangover?”

“Yeah, a bad one,” Aomame said. “How did you know my home phone?”

“You don’t remember? You wrote it down for me. Mine should be in your wallet. We were talking about getting together soon.”

“Oh, yeah? I don’t remember a thing.”

“I thought you might not. I was worried about you. That’s why I’m calling,” Ayumi said. “I wanted to make sure you got home okay. I did manage to get you into a cab at Roppongi Crossing and tell the driver your address, though.”

Aomame sighed. “I don’t remember, but I guess I made it here. I woke up in my own bed.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m working, what I’m supposed to be doing,” Ayumi said. “I’ve been riding around in a mini patrol and writing parking tickets since ten o’clock. I’m taking a break right now.”

“Very impressive,” Aomame said. She meant it.

“I’m a little sleep deprived, of course. Last night was fun, though! Best time I ever had, thanks to you.”

Aomame pressed her fingertips against her temples. “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember much of the second half. After you guys came to our room, I mean.”

“What a waste!” Ayumi said in all seriousness. “It was amazing! The four of us did everything. You wouldn’t believe it. It was like a porno movie. You and I played lesbians. And then—”

Aomame rushed to cut her off. “Never mind all that. I just want to know if I was using condoms. That’s what worries me. I can’t remember.”

“Of course you were. I’m very strict about that. I made absolutely sure, so don’t worry. I mean, when I’m not writing tickets I go around to high schools in the ward, holding assemblies for the girls and teaching them, like, the right way to put on condoms. I give very detailed instructions.”

“The right way to put on condoms?” Aomame was shocked. “What is a policewoman doing teaching stuff like that to high school kids?”

“Well, the original idea was for me to give information to prevent sex crimes, like the danger of date rape or what to do about gropers on the subway, but I figure as long as I’m at it, I can add my own personal message about condoms. A certain amount of student sex is unavoidable, so I tell them to make sure they avoid pregnancy and venereal disease. I can’t say it quite that directly, of course, with their teachers in the room. Anyhow, it’s like professional instinct with me. No matter how much I’ve been drinking, I never forget. So you don’t have to worry. You’re clean. ‘No condom, no penetration.’ That’s my motto.”

“Thank you,” Aomame said. “That’s a huge relief.”

“Hey, want to hear about all the stuff we did?”

“Maybe later,” Aomame said, expelling the congealed air that had been sitting in her lungs. “I’ll let you tell me the juicy details some other time. If you did it now, my head would split in two.”

“Okay, I get it. Next time I see you, then,” Ayumi said brightly. “You know, ever since I woke up I’ve been thinking what a great team we can make. Mind if I call you again? When I get in the mood for another night like last night, I mean.”

“Sure,” Aomame said.

“Oh, great.”

“Thanks for the call.”

“Take care of yourself,” Ayumi said, and hung up.

Her brain was much clearer by two o’clock, thanks to the black coffee and a nap. Her headache was gone, too, thankfully. All that was left of her hangover was a slight heavy feeling in her muscles. She left the apartment carrying her gym bag—without the special ice pick, of course, just a change of clothes and a towel. Tamaru met her at the front door as usual.

He showed her to a long, narrow sunroom. A large open window faced the garden, but it was covered by a lace curtain for privacy. A row of potted plants stood on the windowsill. Tranquil baroque music played from a small ceiling speaker—a sonata for recorder and harpsichord. In the middle of the room stood a massage table. The dowager was already lying facedown on top of it, wearing a white robe.

When Tamaru left the room, Aomame changed into looser clothing. The dowager turned her head to watch Aomame change from her perch on the massage table. Aomame was not concerned about being seen naked by a member of the same sex. It was an everyday occurrence for team athletes, and the dowager herself was nearly naked during a massage, which made checking the condition of her muscles that much easier. Aomame took off her cotton pants and blouse, putting on a matching jersey top and bottom. She folded her street clothing and set them down in a corner.

“You’re so firm and well toned,” the dowager said. Sitting up, she took off her robe, leaving only thin silk on top and bottom.

“Thank you,” Aomame said.

“I used to be built like you.”

“I can tell that,” Aomame said. Even now, in her seventies, the dowager retained physical traces of youth. Her body shape had not disintegrated, and even her breasts had a degree of firmness. Moderate eating and daily exercise had preserved her natural beauty. Aomame guessed that this had been supplemented with a touch of plastic surgery—some periodic wrinkle removal, and some lifting around the eyes and mouth.

“Your body is still quite lovely,” Aomame said.

The dowager’s lips curled slightly. “Thank you, but it’s nothing like it used to be.”

Aomame did not reply to this.

“I gained great pleasure from my body back then. I gave great pleasure with it, too, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” Aomame said.

“And are you enjoying yours?”

“Now and then,” Aomame said.

“Now and then may not be enough,” the dowager said, lying facedown again. “You have to enjoy it while you’re still young. Enjoy it to the fullest. You can use the memories of what you did to warm your body after you get old and can’t do it anymore.”

Aomame recalled the night before. Her anus still retained a slight feeling of having been penetrated. Would memories of this actually warm her body in old age?

Aomame placed her hands on the dowager’s body and concentrated on stretching one set of muscles after another. Now the earlier remaining dullness in her own body was gone. Once she had changed her clothes and touched the dowager’s flesh, her nerves had sharpened into clarity.

Aomame’s fingers traced the dowager’s muscles as though following roads on a map. She remembered in detail the degree of each muscle’s tension and stiffness and resistance the way a pianist memorizes a long score. In matters concerning the body, Aomame possessed minute powers of memory. And if she should forget, her fingers remembered. If a muscle felt the slightest bit different than usual, she would stimulate it from various angles using varying degrees of strength, checking to see what kind of response she got from it, whether pain or pleasure or numbness. She would not simply loosen the knots in a pulled muscle but direct the dowager to move it using her own strength. Of course there were parts of the body that could not be relieved merely by her own strength, and for those parts, Aomame concentrated on stretching. What muscles most appreciated and welcomed, however, was daily self-help efforts.

“Does this hurt?” Aomame asked. The dowager’s groin muscles were far stiffer than usual—nastily so. Placing her hand in the hollow of the dowager’s pelvis, Aomame very slightly bent her thigh at a special angle.

“A lot,” the dowager said, grimacing.

“Good,” Aomame said. “It’s good that you feel pain. If it stopped hurting, you’d have something seriously wrong with you. This is going to hurt a little more. Can you stand it?”

“Yes, of course,” the dowager said. There was no need to ask her each time. She could tolerate a great deal of pain. Most of the time, she bore it in silence. She might grimace but she would never cry out. Aomame had often made big, strong men cry out in pain from her massages. She had to admire the dowager’s strength of will.

Setting her right elbow against the dowager like a fulcrum, Aomame bent her thigh still farther. The joint moved with a dull snap. The dowager gasped, but she made no sound with her voice.

“That should do it for you,” Aomame said. “You’ll feel a lot better.”

The dowager released a great sigh. Sweat glistened on her forehead. “Thank you,” she murmured.

Aomame spent a full hour unknotting muscles all over the dowager’s body, stimulating them, stretching them, and loosening joints. The process involved a good deal of pain, but without such pain nothing would be resolved. Both Aomame and the dowager knew this perfectly well, and so they spent the hour almost wordlessly. The recorder sonata ended at some point, and the CD player fell silent. All that could be heard was the calls of birds in the garden.

“My whole body feels so light now!” the dowager said after some time had passed. She was slumped facedown on the massage table, the large towel spread beneath her dark with sweat.

“I’m glad,” Aomame said.

“It’s such a help to have you with me! I’d hate for you to leave.”

“Don’t worry, I have no plans to go anywhere just yet.”

The dowager seemed to hesitate for a moment, and only after a brief silence she asked, “I don’t mean to get too personal, but do you have someone you’re in love with?”

“I do,” Aomame said.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“Unfortunately, though, he’s not in love with me.”

“This may be an odd thing to ask, but why do you think he doesn’t love you? Objectively speaking, I think you are a fascinating young woman.”

“He doesn’t even know I exist.”

The dowager took a few minutes to think about what Aomame had said.

“Don’t you have any desire to convey to him the fact that you do exist?”

“Not at this point,” Aomame said.

“Is there something standing in the way—something preventing you from taking the initiative?”

“There are a few things, most of which have to do with my own feelings.”

The dowager looked at Aomame with apparent admiration. “I’ve met lots of odd people in my lifetime, but you may be one of the oddest.”

Aomame relaxed the muscles around her mouth somewhat. “There’s nothing odd about me. I’m just honest about my own feelings.”

“You mean that once you’ve decided on a rule, you follow it?”

“That’s it.”

“So you’re a little stubborn, and you tend to be short-tempered.”

“That may be true.”

“But last night you went kind of wild.”

Aomame blushed. “How do you know that?”

“Looking at your skin. And I can smell it. Your body still has traces of it. Getting old teaches you a lot.”

Aomame frowned momentarily. “I need that kind of thing. Now and then. I know it’s nothing to brag about.”

The dowager reached out and gently placed her hand on Aomame’s.

“Of course you need that kind of thing once in a while. Don’t worry, I’m not blaming you. It’s just that I feel you ought to have a more ordinary kind of happiness—marry someone you love, happy ending.”

“I wouldn’t mind that myself. But it won’t be so easy.”

“Why not?”

Aomame did not answer this. She had no simple explanation.

“If you ever feel like talking to someone about these personal matters, please talk to me,” the dowager said, withdrawing her hand from Aomame’s and toweling the sweat from her face. “About anything at all. I might have something I can do for you.”

“Thanks very much,” Aomame said.

“Some things can’t be solved just by going wild every now and then.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“You are not doing anything that will destroy you?” the dowager said. “Nothing at all? You’re sure of that, are you?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Aomame said. She’s right. I’m not doing anything that is going to destroy me. Still, there is something quiet left behind. Like sediment in a bottle of wine.

Even now, Aomame still recalled the events surrounding the death of Tamaki Otsuka. It tore her apart to think that she could no longer see and talk to Tamaki. Tamaki was the first real friend she ever had. They could tell each other everything. Aomame had had no one like that before Tamaki, and no one since. Nor could anyone take her place. Had she never met Tamaki, Aomame would have led a far more miserable and gloomy life.

She and Tamaki were the same age. They had been teammates in the softball club of their public high school. From middle school into high school, Aomame had been passionately devoted to the game of softball. She had joined reluctantly at first when begged to help fill out a shorthanded team, and her early efforts were halfhearted at best, but eventually softball became her reason for living. She clung to the game the way a person clings to a post when a storm threatens to blow him away. And though she had never realized it before, Aomame was a born athlete. She became a central member of both her middle and high school teams and helped them breeze through one tournament after another. This gave her something very close to self-confidence (but only close: it was not, strictly speaking, self-confidence). Her greatest joy in life was knowing that her importance to the team was by no means small and that, as narrow as that world might be, she had been granted a definite place in it. Someone needed her.

Aomame was pitcher and cleanup batter—literally the central player of the team, both on offense and defense. Tamaki Otsuka played second base, the linchpin of the team, and she also served as captain. Tamaki was small but had great reflexes and knew how to use her brain. She could read all the complications of a situation instantaneously. With each pitch, she knew toward which side to incline her center of gravity, and as soon as the batter connected with the ball, she could gauge the direction of the hit and move to cover the proper position. Not a lot of infielders could do that. Her powers of judgment had saved the team from many a tight spot. She was not a distance hitter like Aomame, but her batting was sharp and precise, and she was quick on her feet. She was also an outstanding leader. She brought the team together as a unit, planned strategy, gave everyone valuable advice, and fired them up on the field. Her coaching was tough, but she won the other players’ confidence, as a result of which the team grew stronger day by day. They went as far as the championship game in the Tokyo regional playoffs and even made it to the national interscholastic tournament. Both Aomame and Tamaki were chosen to be on the Kanto area all-star team.

Aomame and Tamaki recognized each other’s talents and—without either taking the initiative—naturally drew close until each had become the other’s best friend. They spent long hours together on team trips to away games. They told each other about their backgrounds, concealing nothing. When she was a fifth grader, Aomame had made up her mind to break with her parents and had gone to live with an uncle on her mother’s side. The uncle’s family understood her situation and welcomed her warmly as a member of the household, but it was, ultimately, not her family. She felt lonely and hungry for love. Unsure where she was to find a purpose or meaning to her life, she passed one formless day after another. Tamaki came from a wealthy household of some social standing, but her parents’ terrible relationship had turned the home into a wasteland. Her father almost never came home, and her mother often fell into states of mental confusion. She would suffer from terrible headaches, and was unable to leave her bed sometimes for days at a time. Tamaki and her younger brother were all but ignored. They often ate at neighborhood restaurants or fast-food places or made do with ready-made boxed lunches. Each girl, then, had her reasons for becoming obsessed with softball.

Given all their problems, the two lonely girls had a mountain of things to tell each other. When they took a trip together one summer, they touched each other’s naked bodies in the hotel bed. It happened just that one time, spontaneously, and neither of them ever talked about it. But because it had happened, their relationship grew all the deeper and all the more conspiratorial.

Aomame kept playing softball after her graduation from high school when she went on to a private college of physical education. Having won a national reputation as an outstanding softball player, she was recruited and given a special scholarship. In college, too, she was a key member of the team. While devoting much energy to softball, she was also interested in sports medicine and started studying it in earnest, along with martial arts.

Tamaki entered the law program in a first-rank private university. She stopped playing softball upon graduating from high school. For an outstanding student like Tamaki, softball was merely a phase. She intended to take the bar exam and become a lawyer. Though their paths in life diverged, Aomame and Tamaki remained best friends. Aomame lived in a college dormitory with free room and board while Tamaki continued commuting from her family home. The place was as much of an emotional wasteland as ever, but at least it gave her economic freedom. The two would meet once a week to share a meal and catch up. They never ran out of things to talk about.

Tamaki lost her virginity in the autumn of her first year in college. The man was one year older than Tamaki, a fellow member of the college tennis club. He invited her to his room after a club party, and there he forced her to have sex with him. Tamaki had liked this man, which was why she had accepted the invitation to his room, but the violence with which he forced her into having sex and his narcissistic, self-centered manner came as a terrible shock. She quit the tennis club and went into a period of depression. The experience left her with a profound feeling of powerlessness. Her appetite disappeared, and she lost fifteen pounds. All she had wanted from the man was a degree of understanding and sympathy. If he had shown a trace of it and had taken the time to prepare her, the mere physical giving of herself to him would have been no great problem. She found it impossible to understand his actions. Why did he have to become so violent? It had been absolutely unnecessary!

Aomame comforted Tamaki and advised her to find a way to punish him, but Tamaki could not agree. Her own carelessness had been a part of it, she said, and it was too late now to lodge any complaints. “I bear some responsibility for going to his room alone,” she said. “All I can do now is forget about it.” But it was painfully clear to Aomame how deeply her friend had been wounded by the incident. This was not about the mere loss of her virginity but rather the sanctity of an individual human being’s soul. No one had the right to invade such sacred precincts with muddy feet. And once it happened, that sense of powerlessness could only keep gnawing away at a person.

Aomame decided to take it upon herself to punish the man. She got his address from Tamaki and went to his apartment carrying a softball bat in a plastic blueprint tube. Tamaki was away for the day in Kanazawa, attending a relative’s memorial service or some such thing, which was a perfect alibi. Aomame checked to be sure the man was not at home. She used a screwdriver and hammer to break the lock on his door. Then she wrapped a towel around the bat several times to dampen the noise and proceeded to smash everything in the apartment that was smashable—the television, the lamps, the clocks, the records, the toaster, the vases: she left nothing whole. She cut the telephone cord with scissors, cracked the spines of all the books and scattered their pages, spread the entire contents of a toothpaste tube and shaving cream canister on the rug, poured Worcestershire sauce on the bed, took notebooks from a drawer and ripped them to pieces, broke every pen and pencil in two, shattered every lightbulb, slashed all the curtains and cushions with a kitchen knife, took scissors to every shirt in the dresser, poured a bottle of ketchup into the underwear and sock drawers, pulled out the refrigerator fuse and threw it out a window, ripped the flapper out of the toilet tank and tore it apart, and crushed the bathtub’s showerhead. The destruction was utterly deliberate and complete. The room looked very much like the recent news photos she had seen of the streets of Beirut after the shelling.

Tamaki was an intelligent girl (with grades in school that Aomame could never hope to match), and in softball she had always been on her toes. Whenever Aomame got herself into a difficult situation on the mound, Tamaki would run over to her, offer her a few quick words of advice, flash her a smile, pat her on the butt with her glove, and go back to her position in the infield. Her view of things was broad, her heart was warm, and she had a good sense of humor. She put a great deal of effort into her schoolwork and could speak with real eloquence. Had she continued with her studies, she would undoubtedly have made a fine lawyer.

In the presence of men, however, Tamaki’s powers of judgment fell totally to pieces. Tamaki liked handsome men. She was a sucker for good looks. As Aomame saw it, this tendency of her friend’s ranked as a sickness. Tamaki could meet men of marvelous character or with superior talents who were eager to woo her, but if their looks did not meet her standards, she was utterly unmoved. For some reason, the ones who aroused her interest were always sweet-faced men with nothing inside. And when it came to men, she would stubbornly resist anything Aomame might have to say. Tamaki was always ready to accept—and even respect—Aomame’s opinions on other matters, but if Aomame criticized her choice of boyfriend, Tamaki simply refused to listen. Aomame eventually gave up trying to advise her. She didn’t want to quarrel with Tamaki and destroy their friendship. Ultimately, it was Tamaki’s life. All Aomame could do was let her live it. Tamaki became involved with many men during her college years, and each one led to trouble. They would always betray her, wound her, and abandon her, leaving Tamaki each time in a state close to madness. Twice she resorted to abortions. Where relations with the opposite sex were concerned, Tamaki was truly a born victim.

Aomame never had a steady boyfriend. She was asked out on dates now and then, and she thought that a few of the men were not at all bad, but she never let herself become deeply involved.

Tamaki asked her, “Are you going to stay a virgin the rest of your life?”

“I’m too busy for that,” Aomame would say. “I can barely keep my life going day to day. I don’t have time to be fooling around with a boyfriend.”

After graduation, Tamaki stayed on in graduate school to prepare for the bar exam. Aomame went to work for a company that made sports drinks and health food, and she played for the company’s softball team. Tamaki continued to commute from home, while Aomame went to live in the company dorm in Yoyogi Hachiman. As in their student days, they would meet for a meal on weekends and talk.

When she was twenty-four, Tamaki married a man two years her senior. As soon as they became engaged, she left graduate school and gave up on continuing her legal studies. He insisted that she do so. Aomame met Tamaki’s fiancé only once. He came from a wealthy family, and, just as she had suspected, his features were handsome but utterly lacking in depth. His hobby was sailing. He was a smooth talker and clever in his own way, but there was no substance to his personality, and his words carried no weight. He was, in other words, a typical Tamaki-type boyfriend. But there was more about him, something ominous, that Aomame sensed. She disliked him from the start. And he probably didn’t like her much, either.

“This marriage will never work,” Aomame said to Tamaki. She hated to offer unwanted advice again, but this was marriage, not playing house. As Tamaki’s best and oldest friend, Aomame could not keep silent. This led to their first violent argument. Aomame’s opposition to her marriage made Tamaki hysterical, and she screamed harsh words at Aomame, among them words that Aomame least wanted to hear. Aomame did not attend the wedding.

The two of them made up before long. As soon as she came back from her honeymoon, Tamaki showed up at Aomame’s without warning and apologized for her behavior. “I want you to forget everything I said that time,” she pleaded. “I wasn’t myself. I was thinking about you all during my honeymoon.” Aomame told her not to worry, that she had already forgotten everything. They held each other close. Soon they were joking and laughing.

But still, after the wedding, there was a sudden decline in the number of occasions when Aomame and Tamaki could meet face-to-face. They exchanged frequent letters and talked on the telephone, but Tamaki seemed to find it difficult to arrange times when the two of them could get together. Her excuse was that she had so much to do at home. “Being a full-time housewife is hard work,” she would say, but there was something in her tone of voice suggesting that her husband did not want her meeting people outside the house. Also, Tamaki and her husband were living in the same compound as his parents, which seemed to make it difficult for her to go out. Aomame was never invited to Tamaki’s new home.

Her married life was going well, Tamaki would tell Aomame whenever she had the chance. “My husband is gentle with me, and his parents are very kind. We’re quite comfortable. We often take the yacht out of Enoshima on weekends. I’m not sorry I stopped studying law. I was feeling a lot of pressure over the bar exam. Maybe this ordinary kind of life was the right thing for me all along. I’ll probably have a child soon, and then I’ll really be just a typical boring mother. I might not have any time for you!” Tamaki’s voice was always cheery, and Aomame could find no reason to doubt her words. “That’s great,” she would say, and she really did think it was great. She would certainly prefer to have her premonitions miss the mark than to be on target. Something inside Tamaki had finally settled down where it belonged, she guessed. Or so she tried to believe.

Aomame had no other real friends; as her contact with Tamaki diminished, she became increasingly unsure what to do with each passing day. She could no longer concentrate on softball as she used to. Her very feeling for the game seemed to wane as Tamaki grew more distant from her life. Aomame was twenty-five but still a virgin. Now and then, when she felt unsettled, she would masturbate, but she didn’t find this life especially lonely. Deep personal relationships with people were a source of pain for Aomame. Better to keep to herself.

Tamaki committed suicide on a windy late-autumn day three days before her twenty-sixth birthday. She hanged herself at home. Her husband found her the next evening when he returned from a business trip.

“We had no domestic problems, and I never heard of any dissatisfaction on her part. I can’t imagine what would have caused her to take her own life,” the husband told the police. His parents said much the same thing.

But they were lying. The husband’s constant sadistic violence had left Tamaki covered with scars both physical and mental. His actions toward her had verged on the monomaniacal, and his parents generally knew the truth. The police could also tell what had happened from the autopsy, but their suspicions never became public. They called the husband in and questioned him, but the case was clearly a suicide, and at the time of death the husband was hundreds of miles away in Hokkaido. He was never charged with a crime. Tamaki’s younger brother subsequently revealed all this to Aomame in confidence.

The violence had been there from the beginning, he said, and it only grew more insistent and more gruesome with the passage of time. But Tamaki had been unable to escape from her nightmare. She had not said a word about it to Aomame because she knew what the answer would be if she asked for advice: Get out of that house now. But that was the one thing she could not do.

At the very end, just before she killed herself, Tamaki wrote a long letter to Aomame. It started by saying that she had been wrong and Aomame had been right from the start. She closed the letter this way:

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don’t know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prison. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key. This marriage was of course a mistake, just as you said. But the deepest problem is not in my husband or in my married life. It is inside me. I deserve all the pain I am feeling. I can’t blame anyone else. You are my only friend, the only person in the world I can trust. But I am beyond saving now. Please remember me always if you can. If only we could have gone on playing softball together forever!

Aomame felt horribly sick as she read Tamaki’s letter. Her body would not stop trembling. She called Tamaki’s house several times, but no one took the call. All she got was the machine. She took the train to Setagaya and walked to Tamaki’s house in Okusawa. It was on a large plot of land behind a high wall. Aomame rang the intercom bell, but no one answered this, either. There was only the sound of a dog barking inside. All she could do was give up and go home. She had no way of knowing it, but Tamaki had already drawn her last breath. She was hanging alone from a rope she had tied to the stairway handrail. Inside the hushed house, the telephone’s bell and the front-door chime had been ringing in emptiness.

Aomame received the news of Tamaki’s death with little sense of surprise. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she must have been expecting it. She felt no sadness welling up. She gave the caller a perfunctory answer, hung up, and settled into a chair. After she had been sitting there for a considerable length of time, she felt all the liquids in her body pouring out of her. She could not get out of the chair for a very long time. She telephoned her company to say she felt sick and would not be in for several days. She stayed in her apartment, not eating, not sleeping, hardly drinking even water. She did not attend the funeral. She felt as if, with a distinct click, something had switched places inside her. This marks a borderline, she felt strongly. From now on, I will no longer be the person I was.

Aomame resolved in her heart to punish the man for what he had done. Whatever happens, I must be sure to present him with the end of the world. Otherwise, he will do the same thing to someone else.

Aomame spent a great deal of time formulating a meticulous plan. She had already learned that a needle thrust into a certain point on the back of the neck at a certain angle could kill a person instantly. It was not something that just anyone could do, of course. But she could do it. First, she would have to train herself to find the extremely subtle point by touch in the shortest possible time. Next she would have to have an instrument suited to such a task. She obtained the necessary tools and, over time, fashioned for herself a special implement that looked like a small, slender ice pick. Its needle was as sharp and cold and pointed as a merciless idea. She found many ways to undertake the necessary training, and she did so with great dedication. When she was satisfied with her preparation, she put her plan into action. Unhesitatingly, coolly, and precisely, she brought the kingdom down upon the man. And when she was finished she even intoned a prayer, its phrases falling from her lips almost as a matter of reflex:

O Lord in Heaven, may Thy name be praised in utmost purity for ever and ever, and may Thy kingdom come to us. Please forgive our many sins, and bestow Thy blessings upon our humble pathways. Amen.

It was after this that Aomame came to feel an intense periodic craving for men’s bodies.