Aomame and Ayumi were the perfect pair to host intimate but fully erotic all-night sex feasts. Ayumi was petite and cheerful, comfortable with strangers, and talkative. She brought a positive attitude to just about any situation once she had made up her mind to do so. She also had a healthy sense of humor. By contrast, Aomame, slim and muscular, tended to be rather expressionless and reserved, and she found it hard to be witty with a man she was meeting for the first time. In her speech there was a subtle note of cynicism and even hostility, and in her eyes an equally subtle gleam of intolerance. Still, when she felt like it, Aomame gave off a cool aura that naturally attracted men. It was like the sweet, sexually stimulating fragrance that animals or insects give off when necessary. This was not something that could be learned through conscious effort. It was probably inborn. But no—she might well have acquired the fragrance for some reason at a certain stage of life. In any case, this aura subtly aroused not only her sexual partners but also Ayumi, adding color and a positive warmth to their evenings.

Whenever they encountered suitable men, first Ayumi approached them with her natural cheer. Then Aomame would join them at an appropriate moment, creating a unique atmosphere that was part operetta, part film noir. Once things got to that point, the rest was simple. They would move to an appropriate place and (as Ayumi bluntly put it) “fuck like mad.” The hardest thing was finding suitable partners. Preferably, they should be two men together—clean, and reasonably good-looking. They had to be at least somewhat intellectual, but too much so could be a problem: boring conversation could turn the evening sterile. They also had to look like men who had money to spend. Obviously, the men paid for the drinks and the hotel rooms.

When they tried to hold a nice little sex feast near the end of June, however (in what would turn out to be their last team activity), they simply could not find suitable men. They put a lot of time into it, changing venues several times, always with the same results. In spite of the fact that it was the last Friday of the month, all the clubs they tried, from Roppongi to Akasaka, were shockingly quiet, almost deserted, giving them no real choice. Maybe it had something to do with the heavy clouds that hung in the sky, as if the whole of Tokyo were in mourning for someone.

“It doesn’t look good today,” Aomame said. “Maybe we should give up.” It was already ten thirty.

Ayumi reluctantly agreed. “I’ve never seen such a dead Friday night. And here I’m wearing my sexy purple underwear!”

“So go home and get carried away with yourself in the mirror.”

“Not even I have the guts to do that in the police dorm bathroom!”

“Anyhow, let’s just forget it. We’ll have a nice, quiet drink, then head home and go to bed.”

“That may be the best thing,” Ayumi said. Then, as if she had suddenly recalled something, she added, “Say, let’s have a bite to eat before we go home. I’ve got an extra thirty thousand yen in my purse.”

Aomame frowned. “Extra? How come? You’re always complaining how little they pay you.”

Ayumi scratched the side of her nose. “Actually, the last time, the guy gave me thirty thousand yen. He called it ‘taxi fare’ and handed it to me when we said good-bye. You know, the time we did it with those real estate guys.”

“And you just took it?” Aomame asked, shocked.

“Maybe he thought we were semi-pros,” Ayumi said with a chuckle. “I bet it never crossed his mind he was dealing with a cop and a martial arts instructor. Anyhow, what’s the difference? I’m sure he makes tons of money in real estate—more than he knows what to do with. I kept it separate, figured I’d spend it with you on a nice meal or something. I mean, money like that you don’t want to use on just regular expenses.”

Aomame did not tell Ayumi how she felt about this. To have taken money for casual sex with a man she didn’t know—she could hardly comprehend the fact that such a thing had occurred. She felt as if she were looking at a twisted image of herself in a warped mirror. Ethically, which was better—taking money for killing men or taking money for having sex with men?

“Tell me,” Ayumi asked Aomame uneasily, “does the idea of taking money from a man bother you?”

Aomame shook her head. “It doesn’t bother me so much as make me feel a little mystified. But what about you? I would have expected a female cop to feel reluctant to do anything like prostitution.”

“Not at all,” Ayumi insisted cheerfully. “I have no problem with that. You know, a prostitute is somebody who agrees on a price and gets her money before having sex. The first rule is ‘Pay me before you take your pants off.’ She couldn’t make a living if guys told her, ‘Gee, I don’t have any money’ after it was all over. But when there’s no prior negotiation of a price, and afterward the guy gives you a little something for ‘taxi fare,’ it’s just an expression of gratitude. That’s different from professional prostitution. There’s a clear distinction between the two.”

What Ayumi had to say made a certain kind of sense.

The men that Aomame and Ayumi had chosen the last time were in their late thirties or early forties. Both had full heads of hair, but Aomame was willing to compromise on that point. They said they were with a company that dealt in real estate, but judging from their Hugo Boss suits and Missoni Uomo neckties, they were not just ordinary employees of giant conglomerates like Mitsubishi or Mitsui, whose employees were bound by finicky rules, tradition, and endless meetings, but rather they worked for a more aggressive, flexible company with a cool, foreign-sounding name, a place that looked for individual talent and richly rewarded success. One of the men carried keys to a brand-new Alfa Romeo. Tokyo was short on office space, they said. The economy had recovered from the oil shocks and was showing signs of heating up again. Capital was growing ever more fluid, and soon it would be impossible to meet the need for space no matter how many new high-rise buildings they put up.

“Sounds like real estate is where the money is,” Aomame said to Ayumi.

“That’s true,” Ayumi said. “If you have anything extra lying around, you ought to invest it in real estate. Huge amounts of money are just pouring into Tokyo, which is only so big. Land prices are bound to soar. Buy now, and there’s no way you can lose. It’s like betting on horses when you know you hold the winning ticket. Unfortunately, low-ranking public employees like me don’t have anything to spare. But how about you, Aomame? Do you do any investing?”

Aomame shook her head. “I don’t trust anything but cash.”

Ayumi laughed out loud. “You have the mind of a criminal!”

“The thing to do is keep your cash in your mattress so in a jam, you can grab it and escape out the window.”

“That’s it!” Ayumi said, snapping her fingers. “Like in The Getaway. The Steve McQueen movie. A wad of bills and a shotgun. I love that kind of stuff.”

“More than being on the side that enforces the law?”

“Personally, yes,” Ayumi said with a smile. “I’m more drawn to outlaws. They’re a whole lot more exciting than riding around in a mini patrol car and handing out parking tickets. That’s what I like about you.”

“Do I look like an outlaw?”

Ayumi nodded. “How should I put it? I don’t know, you just have that atmosphere about you, though maybe not like a Faye Dunaway holding a machine gun.”

“I don’t need a machine gun,” Aomame said.

“About that religious commune we were talking about last time, Sakigake …,” Ayumi said.

The two were sharing a light meal and a bottle of Chianti at a small, late-night Italian restaurant in Iikura, a quiet neighborhood. Aomame was having a salad with strips of raw tuna, while Ayumi had ordered a plate of gnocchi with basil sauce.

“Uh-huh,” Aomame said.

“You got me interested, so I did a little searching on my own. And the more I looked, the fishier it began to smell. Sakigake calls itself a religion, and it even has official certification, but it’s totally lacking any religious substance. Doctrine-wise, it’s kind of deconstructionist or something, just a jumble of images of religion thrown together. They’ve added some new-age spiritualism, fashionable academicism, a return to nature, anticapitalism, occultism, and stuff, but that’s all: it has a bunch of flavors, but no substantial core. Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance. In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool.”

“McLuhanesque?”

“Hey, look, even I read a book now and then,” Ayumi protested. “McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right.”

“In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?”

“Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around.”

Aomame considered this for a moment and said, “The core of Sakigake as a religion is unclear, but that has nothing to do with why people are drawn to it, you mean?”

Ayumi nodded. “I wouldn’t say it’s amazing how many people join Sakigake, but the numbers are by no means small. And the more people who join, the more money they put together. Obviously. So, then, what is it about this religion that attracts so many people? If you ask me, it’s primarily that it doesn’t smell like a religion. It’s very clean and intellectual, and it looks systematic. That’s what attracts young professionals. It stimulates their intellectual curiosity. It provides a sense of achievement they can’t get in the real world—something tangible and personal. And these intellectual believers, like an elite officers’ corps, form the powerful brains of the organization.

“Plus,” Ayumi continued, “their ‘Leader’ seems to have a good deal of charisma. People idolize him. His very presence, you might say, functions like a doctrinal core. It’s close in origin to primitive religion. Even early Christianity was more or less like that at first. But this guy never comes out in the open. Nobody knows what he looks like, or his name, or how old he is. The religion has a governing council that supposedly runs everything, but another person heads the council and acts as the public face of the religion in official events, though I don’t think he’s any more than a figurehead. The one who is at the center of the system seems to be this mysterious ‘Leader’ person.”

“Sounds like he wants to keep his identity hidden.”

“Well, either he has something to hide or he keeps his existence obscure on purpose to heighten the mysterious atmosphere around him.”

“Or else he’s tremendously ugly,” Aomame said.

“That’s possible, I suppose. A grotesque creature from another world,” Ayumi said, with a monster’s growl. “But anyway, aside from the founder, this religion has too many things that stay hidden. Like the aggressive real estate dealings I mentioned on the phone the other day. Everything on the surface is there for show: the nice buildings, the handsome publicity, the intelligent-sounding theories, the former social elites who have converted, the stoic practices, the yoga and spiritual serenity, the rejection of materialism, the organic farming, the fresh air and lovely vegetarian diet—they’re all like calculated photos, like ads for high-class resort condos that come as inserts in the Sunday paper. The packaging is beautiful, but I get the feeling that suspicious plans are hatching behind the scenes. Some of it might even be illegal. Now that I’ve been through a bunch of materials, that’s the impression I get.”

“But the police aren’t making any moves now.”

“Something may be happening undercover, but I wouldn’t know about that. The Yamanashi Prefectural Police do seem to be keeping an eye on them to some extent. I kind of sensed that when I spoke to the guy in charge of the investigation. I mean, Sakigake gave birth to Akebono, the group that staged the shootout, and it’s just guesswork that Akebono’s Chinese-made Kalashnikovs came in through North Korea: nobody’s really gotten to the bottom of that. Sakigake is still under some suspicion, but they’ve got that ‘Religious Juridical Person’ label, so they have to be handled with kid gloves. The police have already investigated the premises once, and that made it more or less clear that there was no direct connection between Sakigake and the shootout. As for any moves the Public Security Intelligence Agency might be making, we just don’t know. Those guys work in absolute secrecy and have never gotten along with us.”

“How about the children who stopped coming to public school? Do you know any more about them?”

“No, nothing. Once they stop going to school, I guess, they never come outside the walls of the compound again. We don’t have any way of investigating their cases. It would be different if we had concrete evidence of child abuse, but for now we don’t have anything.”

“Don’t you get any information about that from people who have quit Sakigake? There must be a few people at least who become disillusioned with the religion or can’t take the harsh discipline and break away.”

“There’s constant coming and going, of course—people joining, people quitting. Basically, people are free to quit anytime. When they join, they make a huge donation as a ‘Permanent Facility Use Fee’ and sign a contract stipulating that it is entirely nonrefundable, so as long as they’re willing to accept that loss, they can come out with nothing but the clothes on their backs. There’s an organization of people who have quit the religion, and they accuse Sakigake of being a dangerous, antisocial cult engaged in fraudulent activity. They’ve filed a suit and put out a little newsletter, but they’re such a small voice they have virtually zero impact on public opinion. The religion has a phalanx of top lawyers, and they’ve put together a watertight defense. One lawsuit can’t budge them.”

“Haven’t the ex-members made any statements about Leader or the children inside?”

“I don’t know,” Ayumi said. “I’ve never read their newsletter. As far as I’ve been able to check, though, all the dissidents are from the lowest ranks of the group, just small fry. Sakigake makes a big deal about how they reject all worldly values, but part of the organization is completely hierarchical, sharply divided between the leadership and the rest of them. You can’t become a member of the leadership without an advanced degree or specialized professional qualifications. Only elite believers in the leadership group ever get to see or receive direct instruction from Leader or make contact with key figures of the organization. All the others just make their required donations and spend one sterile day after another performing their religious austerities in the fresh air, devoting themselves to farming, or spending hours in the meditation rooms. They’re like a flock of sheep, led out to pasture under the watchful eye of the shepherd and his dog, and brought back to their shed at night, one peaceful day after the next. They look forward to the day when their position rises high enough in the organization for them to come into the presence of Big Brother, but that day never comes. That’s why ordinary believers know almost nothing about the inner workings of the organization. Even if they quit Sakigake, they don’t have any important information they can offer the outside world. They’ve never even seen Leader’s face.”

“Aren’t there any members of the elite who have quit?”

“Not one, as far as I can tell.”

“Does that mean you’re not allowed to leave once you’ve learned the secrets?”

“There might be some pretty dramatic developments if it came to that,” Ayumi said with a short sigh. Then she said to Aomame, “So tell me, about that raping of little girls you mentioned: how definite is that?”

“Pretty definite, but there’s still no proof.”

“It’s being done systematically inside the commune?”

“That’s not entirely clear, either. We do have one actual victim, though. I’ve met the girl. They did terrible things to her.”

“By ‘rape,’ do you mean actual penetration?”

“Yes, there’s no question about that.”

Ayumi twisted her lips at an angle, thinking. “I’ve got it! Let me dig into this a little more in my own way.”

“Don’t get in over your head, now.”

“Don’t worry,” Ayumi said. “I may not look it, but I’m very cautious.”

They finished their meal, and the waiter cleared the table. They declined to order dessert and, instead, continued drinking wine.

Ayumi said, “Remember how you told me that no men had fooled around with you when you were a little girl?”

Aomame glanced at Ayumi, registering the look on her face, and nodded. “My family was very religious. There was never any talk of sex, and it was the same with all the other families we knew. Sex was a forbidden topic.”

“Well, okay, but being religious has nothing to do with the strength or weakness of a person’s sex drive. Everybody knows the clergy is full of sex freaks. In fact, we arrest a lot of people connected with religion—and with education—for stuff like prostitution and groping women on commuter trains.”

“Maybe so, but at least in our circles, there was no hint of that kind of thing, nobody who did anything they shouldn’t.”

“Well, good for you,” Ayumi said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“It was different for you?”

Instead of responding immediately, Ayumi gave a little shrug. Then she said, “To tell you the truth, they messed around with me a lot when I was a girl.”

“Who were ‘they’?”

“My brother. And my uncle.”

Aomame grimaced slightly. “Your brother and uncle?”

“That’s right. They’re both policemen now. Not too long ago, my uncle even received official commendation as an outstanding officer—thirty years of continuous service, major contributions to public safety in the district and to improvement of the environment. He was featured in the paper once for saving a stupid dog and her pup that wandered into a rail crossing.”

“What did they do to you?”

“Touched me down there, made me give them blow jobs.”

The wrinkles of Aomame’s grimace deepened. “Your brother and uncle?”

“Separately, of course. I think I was ten and my brother maybe fifteen. My uncle did it before that—two or three times, when he stayed over with us.”

“Did you tell anybody?”

Ayumi responded with a few slow shakes of the head. “I didn’t say a word. They warned me not to, threatened that they’d get me if I said anything. And even if they hadn’t, I was afraid if I told, they’d blame me for it and punish me. I was too scared to tell anybody.”

“Not even your mother?”

“Especially my mother,” Ayumi said. “My brother had always been her favorite, and she was always telling me how disappointed she was in me—I was sloppy, I was fat, I wasn’t pretty enough, my grades in school were nothing special. She wanted a different kind of daughter—a slim, cute little doll to send to ballet lessons. It was like asking for the impossible.”

“So you didn’t want to disappoint her even more.”

“Right. I was sure if I told her what my brother was doing, she’d hate me even more. She’d say it was my fault instead of blaming him.”

Aomame used her fingers to smooth out the wrinkles in her face. My mother refused to talk to me after I announced that I was abandoning the faith at the age often. She’d hand me notes when it was absolutely necessary to communicate something, but she would never speak. I ceased to be her daughter. I was just “the one who abandoned the faith.” I moved out after that.

“But there was no penetration?” Aomame asked Ayumi.

“No penetration,” Ayumi said. “As bad as they were, they couldn’t do anything that painful to me. Not even they would demand that much.”

“Do you still see this brother and uncle of yours?”

“Hardly ever after I took a job and left the house. But we are relatives, after all, and we’re in the same profession. Sometimes I can’t avoid seeing them, and when I do I’m all smiles. I don’t do anything to rock the boat. I bet they don’t even remember that something like that ever happened.”

“Don’t remember?”

“Sure, they can forget about it,” Ayumi said. “I never can.”

“Of course not,” Aomame said.

“It’s like some historic massacre.”

“Massacre?”

“The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

“True,” Aomame said, scowling slightly. An endless battle of contrasting memories?

“To tell you the truth,” Ayumi said, “I kind of thought that you must have had the same kind of experience as me.”

“Why did you think that?”

“I don’t know, I can’t really explain it, I just sort of figured. Maybe I thought that having wild one-night stands with strange men was a result of something like that. And in your case, I thought I detected some kind of anger, too. Anyhow, you just don’t seem like someone who can do the ordinary thing, you know, like everybody else does: find a regular boyfriend, go out on a date, have a meal, and have sex in the usual way with just the one person. It’s more or less the same with me.”

“You’re saying that you couldn’t follow the normal pattern because someone messed around with you when you were little?”

“That’s how I felt,” Ayumi said. She gave a little shrug. “To tell you the truth, I’m afraid of men. Or, rather, I’m afraid of getting deeply involved with one particular man, of completely taking on another person. The very thought of it makes me cringe. But being alone can be hard sometimes. I want a man to hold me, to put his thing inside me. I want it so bad I can’t stand it sometimes. Not knowing the man at all makes it easier. A lot easier.”

“Because you’re afraid of men?”

“I think that’s a large part of it.”

“I don’t think I have any fear of men,” Aomame said.

“Is there anything you are afraid of?”

“Of course there is,” Aomame said. “The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.”

“What are you doing right now?”

Aomame stared at the wineglass in her hand for a time. “I wish I knew.” She looked up. “But I don’t. I can’t even be sure what world I’m in now, what year I’m in.”

“It’s 1984. We’re in Tokyo, in Japan.”

“I wish I could declare that with such certainty.”

“You’re strange,” Ayumi said with a smile. “They’re just self-evident truths. ‘Declaring’ and ‘certainty’ are beside the point.”

“I can’t explain it very well, but I can’t say they’re self-evident truths to me.”

“You can’t?” Ayumi said as if deeply impressed. “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about, but I will say this: whatever time and place this might be, you do have one person you love deeply, and that’s something I can only envy. I don’t have anybody like that.”

Aomame set her wineglass down on the table and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. Then she said, “You may be right. Whatever time and place this might be, totally unrelated to that, I want to see him. I want to see him so badly I could die. That’s the only thing that seems certain. It’s the only thing I can say with confidence.”

“Want me to have a look at the police materials? If you give me the basic information, we might be able to find out where he is and what he’s doing.”

Aomame shook her head. “Please don’t look for him. I think I told you before, I’ll run into him sometime, somewhere, strictly by chance. I’ll just keep patiently waiting for that time to come.”

“Like a big, romantic TV series,” Ayumi said, impressed. “I love stuff like that. I get chills just thinking about it.”

“It’s tough on the one who’s actually doing it, though.”

“I know what you mean,” Ayumi said, lightly pressing her fingers against her temples. “But still, even though you’re that much in love with him, you feel like sleeping with strange men every once in a while.”

Aomame clicked her fingernails against the rim of the thin wineglass. “I need to do it. To keep myself in balance as a flesh-and-blood human being.”

“And it doesn’t destroy the love you have inside you.”

Aomame said, “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

“Marvelous,” Ayumi said. “The Tibetan Wheel of the Passions, huh?”

And she drank down the wine remaining in her glass.

Two days later, a little after eight o’clock at night, a call came from Tamaru. As always, he skipped the preliminary greetings and went straight to business.

“Are you free tomorrow afternoon?”

“I don’t have a thing in the afternoon. I can come over whenever you need me.”

“How about four thirty?”

Aomame said that would be fine.

“Good,” Tamaru said. She could hear his ballpoint pen scratching the time into his calendar. He was pressing down hard.

“How is Tsubasa doing?” Aomame asked.

“She’s doing well, I think. Madame is going there every day to look after her. The girl seems to be growing fond of her.”

“That’s good news.”

“Yes, it is good news, but something else happened that is not so good.”

“Something not so good?” Aomame knew that when Tamaru said something was “not so good,” it had to be terrible.

“The dog died,” Tamaru said.

“The dog? You mean Bun?”

“Yes, the funny German shepherd that liked spinach. She died last night.”

Aomame was shocked to hear this. The dog was maybe five or six years old, not an age for dying. “She was perfectly healthy the last time I saw her.”

“She didn’t die from illness,” Tamaru said, his voice flat. “I found her this morning in pieces.”

“In pieces?!”

“As if she had exploded. Her guts were splattered all over the place. It was pretty intense. I had to go around picking up chunks of flesh with paper towels. The force of the blast turned her body inside out. It was as if somebody had set off a small but powerful bomb inside her stomach.”

“The poor dog!”

“Oh, well, there’s nothing to be done about the dog,” Tamaru said. “She’s dead and won’t be coming back. I can find another guard dog to take her place. What worries me, though, is what happened. It wasn’t something that any ordinary person could do—setting off a bomb inside a dog like that. For one thing, that dog barked like crazy whenever a stranger approached. This was not an easy thing to carry off.”

“That’s for sure,” Aomame said in a dry tone of voice.

“The women in the safe house are scared to death. The one in charge of feeding the dog found her like that this morning. First she puked her guts out and then she called me. I asked if anything suspicious happened during the night. Not a thing, she said. Nobody heard an explosion. If there had been such a big sound, everybody would have woken up for sure. These women live in fear even in the best of times. It must have been a soundless explosion. And nobody heard the dog bark. It was an especially quiet night, but when morning came, there was the dog, inside out. Fresh organs had been blown all over, and the neighborhood crows were having a great time. For me, though, it was nothing but worries.”

“Something weird is happening.”

“That’s for sure,” Tamaru said. “Something weird is happening. And if what I’m feeling is right, this is just the beginning of something.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Hell, no,” Tamaru said, with a contemptuous little snort. “The police are useless—looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. They’d just complicate matters.”

“What does Madame say?”

“Nothing. She just nodded when I gave her my report,” Tamaru said. “All security measures are my responsibility, from beginning to end. It’s my job.”

A short silence followed, a heavy silence having to do with responsibility.

“Tomorrow at four thirty,” Aomame said.

“Tomorrow at four thirty,” Tamaru repeated, and quietly hung up.