he door to the balcony was wide open. Five degrees centigrade. The cold dawn air poured in, cooling the room to roughly the same temperature as outside. Satake pulled up the zipper on his navy-blue jacket. He lay stretched out on the bed in the grey work pants he'd worn all night. He wanted the windows open to let the cold air circulate through the rooms; but the north side, facing the passageway, was shut up tight.

Apartment 412. It was a cramped little place, long and narrow, running north and south. Two rooms and an eat-in kitchen. As in his apartment in Shinjuku, he had removed all the sliding doors to open up the space. There was no furniture except for a bed, positioned to look out at the skies above the Musashi plain.

The morning stars were visible now, but Satake couldn't see them. He lay with his eyes closed, his teeth clenched against the cold. He wasn't sleepy; he simply wanted no distractions as he tried to recall every detail of Masako Katori's face and voice. He lay in the cold, stitching together the fragments of his memory and then taking them apart again, over and over. Her face came floating up to him, lit by his flashlight there in the parking lot. The watchful eyes, the thin, determined lips, the taut cheeks. Satake smiled, remembering the shadow of fear that had crossed that face, lean with self-denial.

'Don't bother,' she'd said. 'I'll be fine by myself.' The low voice, rejecting everyone and everything, still echoed in his ears; the look of her as she walked away down that dark road. As he'd followed a few paces behind, it was another woman she called to mind; and when she'd turned again, her face illuminated in the beam of the flashlight, his body had shivered with pleasure at the sight of her, the irritated look, the fine lines on her forehead. She was so much like the other woman: the face, the voice, even the wrinkles.

That woman had been ten years older than Satake at the time. But he'd been wrong to think she'd died all those years ago; she hadn't, she'd been living here in secret, in this dull, dusty suburb under another name. Masako Katori. She had felt it, too. She had started to ask if they'd met before, and that gave him his first glimpse of a crack in her hard protective shell. Fate, he whispered.

He thought back to that hot summer day, seventeen years ago, when he'd first seen the other woman on the streets of Shinjuku. Someone had been luring girls away from the clubs and massage parlours run by his gang. Whoever it was - and the person was rumoured to be a woman in her thirties who'd once been a hooker herself - was a slick operator. Satake had been violently offended by the idea that it was a woman jerking them around. In order to catch her, he had spent a good deal of time and energy planting bait - in the form of girls he trusted - around the neighbourhood; and at last he hooked her. She'd arranged to meet one of his decoys at a certain cafe. It was a muggy evening, with rain threatening.

He had watched her from the shadows as she approached the place, holding back so as not to scare her off. Her outfit was too flashy: a sleeveless blue mini-dress of some glossy synthetic fibre that clung to her slim figure so closely it made him hot just looking at it. She had white sandals on her bare feet; the nail polish was chipped and peeling. Short hair, and a body so thin he could see the strap of her black bra through the armhole of her dress. But the eyes told him he was looking at a strong, resourceful woman. And the eyes saw through him, spotting him almost instantly. She turned away from the cafe and ran off into the crowd.

Even now, after all these years, he could see the expression on her face at the moment she realised who he was. After a flash of anger at having fallen into his trap, she sneered at him, signalling her determination to escape. Despite the danger, she'd still found a few seconds to insult him; and it was that fleeting look that had set off an explosion in him. I'll track you down! I'll catch you and shake you like a rat till you're dead, he'd sworn. When he had laid the trap, he'd had no intention of killing her. He'd planned just to nab her and scare her a bit. But that look had released something in him that had lain hidden until then.

He'd been shocked even then at the way his excitement had mounted as he chased her through the streets. He knew he could simply catch up with her, but that would have been too easy. Better to reel her out, lull her into a sense of security, and then grab her. That would prolong the agony, make it all more interesting. As he loped through the warm, humid dusk, pushing past people on the street, his mood grew darker and more violent, his hand itching to grab her hair and drag her down from behind.

The woman was getting more desperate. She dashed through the traffic on Yasukuni Avenue and dodged down the stairs into a basement shopping arcade. She must have realised that she would be walking right into his back yard if she'd headed for Kabuki-cho. But he knew all of Shinjuku like the back of his hand. He pretended to let her slip away and then plunged into an underground garage. By running at full speed through a passage under the Oume Highway, he came out at the opposite end of the arcade; and just as she was emerging from a restroom where she'd hidden, sure that she had lost him, he grabbed her arm from behind. He could still remember the feel of her bare skin, damp with sweat from her dash through the summer streets.

Caught unawares, she turned on him with pure hatred and hissed, 'Fucking bastard! What a lousy trick.' The voice was low and raspy.

'You didn't think you'd get away, did you, bitch?'

'You don't scare me,' she said.

'Oh, but I will,' he said, nudging his knife into her side. He had to fight the urge to stab her on the spot. As the blade poked through her dress, she seemed to understand what he had in mind and fell silent. She allowed herself to be led back to his apartment without any tears or pleas for her life. He held her arm to keep her from running off again, aware of how little flesh there was on the bones inside. The skin on her face, too, seemed paper thin, but her eyes shone with light, like those of a stray cat. He could use a woman like this, find pleasure in her resistance; but he was startled and confused by these unfamiliar feelings. Women had been nothing much more than tools for his pleasure, so he'd always preferred them pretty and submissive.

When they reached his apartment, it was like a steam bath. He turned the air-conditioner to its coldest setting, drew the curtains, and turned on the lights. While the room was cooling down, he beat her about the face. He'd wanted to do this from the moment he'd seen her. As he hit her, instead of begging for mercy she seemed to grow more angry and defiant; and her hatred made her all the more attractive to him. He wanted to go on hurting her forever. Finally, when her face was swollen beyond recognition, he tied her to the bed and raped her - over and over again; he never knew how long they stayed there, with only the sound of the airconditioner groaning in the background.

Their bodies were smeared with sweat and blood. The leather belts binding her wrists cut into the skin, sending new trickles of red snaking down her arms. As he sucked at her swollen lips, his mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood. At some point, the knife he had used to prod her in the arcade appeared in his hand. He was inside her, his lips pressed to hers, when she suddenly cried out. At that moment the hatred seemed to drain from her eyes and she surrendered to him, but he was overcome with grief and frustration that he couldn't get deeper into her. He realised that he was stabbing the knife into her side. From her screams, he could tell that she had reached her climax, and he came inside her with a rush of intense pleasure.

It had been hell on earth. He stabbed her body here and there, then worked his finger into the wounds. But the more he tried to find a way in, the more impossible he realised it was. He held her then, wild with frustration and desire, willing their flesh to melt together, seeking a way to crawl into her, whispering all the while that he loved her, he loved her. And as they lay there, joined together in this bloody union, hell had gradually become heaven. But heaven or hell, it was a moment only the two of them could understand, a thing nobody else could presume to judge.

The experience had changed him. The person he'd been before vanished without a trace, and a new one appeared in its place. The woman had been the dividing line between the old Satake and this other one. He had never expected to meet anyone like her. She was the one thing he hadn't planned on, the one factor he couldn't control - in short, his fate. And now the cold, dark vision of her that he'd felt creeping up his spine began to fade; and in its place, Masako Katori seemed to reach out to him, beckoning him toward heaven... and hell.

***

As he stared up at the stars, he could imagine her, still working the line at the factory; he could picture her lonely figure as she moved about the cold concrete floor. Inside, she was probably feeling relieved, even a bit proud of herself for having fooled the police just as the other woman must have congratulated herself on giving him the slip. But she wouldn't celebrate for long. He was sure those watchful eyes would flash with the same kind of fury when he finally caught her. Blood would pour down her hollow cheeks when he beat her. As the memory of her eyes, squinting from the glare of his flashlight, floated up before him, he could feel himself honing his desire, sharpening his murderous instinct like a blade ground against a well-oiled whetstone.

He imagined how Masako must have mobilised their little group to help the wife get rid of the body. The wife lacked the guts and brains it would have taken. Satake had quickly lost interest in her as soon as he'd discovered the connection with Masako. He had no further use for her - except as a source of insurance money. He might have known to expect no more from the wife of a creep like Yamamoto. He didn't give a shit about their little domestic drama, the quarrels, the murder, the remorse. He didn't give a shit about any of them. Nothing shut down his emotions like contempt.

Now that he had found Masako, he'd all but forgotten why he'd been looking for revenge in the first place. He reached his hands over his head and felt the sturdy metal frame of the bed. It was icy cold from the winter wind blowing in through the windows, and his palms grew numb from gripping it. He would strip her and tie her here. Gag her and torture her, with the windows wide open. The cold would bring out taut little goose bumps on her skin, stiff enough to scrape with his knife, like grains of millet. And if she screamed, he could always go to work on her belly, hollow it out with his blade. Let her scream for mercy - he would never spare her. He knew a woman like that could take it.

Perhaps, at the very end, she would whisper in his ear the way the other one had done, 'Hospital.' A word that marked the split in his mind between the desire to keep her alive and the temptation to share her death. At that moment, she had seemed dearer to him than anything else in the world. Never had he experienced an emotion of this power: the joy and sorrow of sharing in her death. He began to tremble at the memory of her voice, and for the first time since he'd left prison all those years ago, his cock began to stiffen. Tugging at the zipper on his pants, he pulled it free and gripped it. His breath came white and ragged in the icy air as his hand began to move.

***

The sky was just growing light in the east when Satake got up from his bed. He gazed at the purple silhouettes of the hills shimmering at the horizon, and above them a crimson cloud that seemed to retreat in the face of the rising sun. The ghostly figure of Mount Fuji soared above the hills. It would soon be time for Masako to be heading home, her eyes puffy and red from lack of sleep. Each detail was so clear it was as if he could reach out and touch her: the disgruntled look, the way she smoked her cigarette, her heavy step on the dirt of the parking lot. He even knew exactly how her face must have looked as he'd followed her on that dark road. He could see her eyes, brimming with annoyance and hostility - exactly like those other eyes.

Get some sleep then. We'll meet again soon, and you'll know your fate. But until then, sleep in peace. He looked out in the direction of her house. As the sun rose higher in the sky, he closed the door to the balcony and drew the black curtains, restoring the night to his apartment.