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Tengo suddenly recalled the fact that people lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off, turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned. If so, there’s nothing mysterious about somebody suddenly disappearing one day.

  “I may be next,” Tengo said.

  Fuka-Eri gave her head a tight, little shake. “Not you,” she said.

  “Why not me?”

  “Because I did a purification.”

  Tengo contemplated this for several seconds without reaching a conclusion. He knew from the start that no amount of thinking could do any good. Still, he could not entirely forgo the effort to think.

  “In any case, we can’t see Mr. Komatsu right now,” Tengo said. “And I can’t give the money back to him.”

  “The money is no problem,” Fuka-Eri said.

  “Then what is a problem?” Tengo asked.

  Of course, he did not receive an answer.

  Tengo decided to follow through on last night’s resolution to search for Aomame. If he spent the whole day in a concentrated effort, he should at least be able to come up with some kind of clue. But in fact, it turned out not to be that easy. He left Fuka-Eri in his apartment (after warning her repeatedly not to open the door for anyone) and went to the telephone company’s main office, which had a complete set of telephone books for every part of the country, available for public use. He went through all the phone books for Tokyo’s twenty-three central wards, looking for the name “Aomame.” Even if he didn’t find Aomame herself, a relative might be living there, and he could ask that person for news of Aomame.

  But he found no one with the name Aomame. He broadened his search to include the entire Tokyo metropolis and still found no one. He further broadened his search to include the entire Kanto region—the prefectures of Chiba, Kanagawa, and Saitama. At that point, his time and energy ran out. After glaring at the phone books’ tiny type all day, his eyeballs were aching.

  Several possibilities came to mind.

  1 She was living in a suburb of the city of Utashinai on Hokkaido.

  2 She had married and changed her name to “Ito.”

  3 She kept her number unlisted to protect her privacy.

  4 She had died in the spring two years earlier from a virulent influenza.

  There must have been any number of possibilities besides these. It didn’t make sense to rely strictly on the phone books. Nor could he read every one in the country. It could be next month before he finally reached Hokkaido. He had to find another way.

  Tengo bought a telephone card and entered a booth at the telephone company. From there he called their old elementary school in Ichikawa and asked the female office worker who answered the phone to look up the address they had on file for Aomame, saying he wanted to reach her on alumni association business. The woman seemed kind and unhurried as she went through the roster of graduates. Aomame had transferred to another school in the fifth grade and was not a graduate. Her name therefore did not appear in the roster, and they did not know her current address. It would be possible, however, to find the address to which she moved at the time. Did he want to know that?

  Tengo said that he did want to know that.

  He took down the address and telephone number, “c/o Koji Tasaki” in Tokyo’s Adachi Ward. Aomame had apparently left her parents’ home at the time. Something must have happened. Figuring it was probably hopeless, Tengo tried dialing the phone number. As he had expected, the number was no longer in use. It had been twenty years, after all. He called Information and gave them the address and the name Koji Tasaki, but learned only that no telephone was listed under that name.

  Next Tengo tried finding the phone number for the headquarters of the Society of Witnesses, but no contacts were listed for them in any of the phone books he perused—nothing under “Before the Flood,” nothing under “Society of Witnesses” or anything else of that ilk. He tried the classified directory under “Religious Organizations” but found nothing. At the end of this struggle, Tengo concluded that they probably didn’t want anyone contacting them.

  This was, upon reflection, rather odd. They showed up all the time. They’d ring the bell or knock on the door, unconcerned that you might be otherwise occupied—be it baking a soufflé, soldering a connection, washing your hair, training a mouse to do tricks, or thinking about quadratic functions—and, with a big smile, invite you to study the Bible with them. They had no problem coming to see you, but you were not free to go to see them (unless you were a believer, probably). You couldn’t ask them one simple question. This was rather inconvenient.

  But even if he did manage to find the Society’s phone number and get in touch with them, it was hard to imagine that such a wary organization would freely disclose information on an individual believer. No doubt they had their reasons for being so guarded. Many people hated them for their extreme, eccentric doctrines and for the close-minded nature of their faith. They had caused several social problems, as a result of which their treatment often bordered on persecution. It had probably become second nature for them to protect their community from a less-than-welcoming outside world.

  In any case, Tengo’s search for Aomame had been shut down, at least for now. He could not immediately think of what additional search methods might remain. Aomame was such an unusual name, you could never forget it once you’d heard it. But in trying to trace the footsteps of one single human being who bore that name, he quickly collided with a hard wall. It might be quicker to go around asking Society of Witnesses members directly. Headquarters would probably doubt his motives and refuse to tell him anything, but if he were to ask some individual member, he felt, they would probably be kind enough to tell him. But Tengo did not know even one member of the Society of Witnesses. Come to think of it, no one from the Society had knocked on his door for a good ten years now. Why did they not come when you wanted them and come only when you didn’t want them?

  One possibility was to put a classified ad in the paper. “Aomame, please contact me immediately. Kawana.” Stupid sounding. Tengo couldn’t believe that Aomame would bother to contact him even if she saw such an ad. It would probably just end up scaring her away. “Kawana” was not such a common name, either, but Tengo couldn’t believe that Aomame would still remember it. Kawana—who’s that? She simply wouldn’t contact him. And besides, who read classified ads, anyway?

  Another approach might be to hire a private detective. They should know how to look for people. They have their methods and connections. The clues Tengo already had might be enough for them to find her right away. And it probably wouldn’t be too expensive. But that might be something to set aside as a last resort, Tengo thought. He would try a little harder to see what he could come up with himself.

  When the daylight began to fade, he went home to find Fuka-Eri sitting on the floor, listening to records—old jazz records left by his girlfriend. Record jackets were spread on the floor—Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Billie Holliday. Spinning on the turntable just then was Louis Armstrong singing “Chantez les Bas,” a memorable song. It reminded him of his girlfriend. They had often listened to this one between bouts of lovemaking. Near the end, the trombonist, Trummy Young, gets carried away, forgets to end his solo at the agreed-upon point, and plays an extra eight bars. “Here, this is the part,” his girlfriend had explained to him. When it ended, it was Tengo’s job to get out of bed naked, go to the next room, and turn the LP over to play the second side. He felt a twinge of nostalgia recalling those days. Though he never thought the relationship would last forever, he had not expected it to end so abruptly.

  Tengo felt odd seeing Fuka-Eri listening intently to the records that Kyoko Yasuda had left behind. Wrinkling her brow in complete concentration, she seemed to be trying to hear something beyond the old music, straining to see the shadow of something in its tones.

  “You like this record?”

  “I listened to it a lot,” Fuka-Eri said.
“Is that okay.”

  “Sure, it’s okay. But aren’t you bored here all by yourself?”

  Fuka-Eri gave her head a little shake. “I have stuff to think about.”

  Tengo wanted to ask Fuka-Eri about what had happened between them during the thunderstorm. Why did you do that? He couldn’t believe that Fuka-Eri had any sexual desire for him. It must have been an act that somehow took shape unconnected with sex. If so, what possible meaning could it have had?

  Even if he asked her about it outright, though, he doubted he would receive a straight answer. And Tengo couldn’t quite bring himself to broach a subject like that directly on such a peaceful, quiet September evening. It was an act that had been performed in hiding at a dark hour in a dark place in the midst of a raging thunderstorm. Brought out into everyday circumstances, the nature of its meaning might change.

  So Tengo approached the question from a different angle, one that admitted a simple yes-or-no answer. “You don’t have periods?”

  “No” was Fuka-Eri’s curt reply.

  “You’ve never had even one?”

  “No, not even one.”

  “This may be none of my business, but you’re seventeen years old. It’s probably not normal that you’ve never had a period.”

  Fuka-Eri gave a little shrug.

  “Have you seen a doctor about it?”

  Fuka-Eri shook her head. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Why wouldn’t it do any good?”

  Fuka-Eri did not answer. She gave no sign that she had even heard the question. Maybe her ears had a special valve that sensed a question’s appropriateness or inappropriateness, opening and closing as needed, like a mermaid’s gills.

  “Are the Little People involved in this, too?” Tengo asked.

  Again no answer.

  Tengo sighed. He couldn’t think of anything else to ask that would enable him to approach a clarification of last night’s events. The narrow, uncertain path gave out at that point, and only a deep forest lay ahead. He checked his footing, scanned his surroundings, and looked up to the heavens. This was always the problem with talking to Fuka-Eri. All roads inevitably gave out. A Gilyak might be able to continue on even after the road ended, but for Tengo it was impossible.

  Instead he brought up a new subject. “I’m looking for a certain person,” he said. “A woman.”

  There was no point in talking about this to Fuka-Eri. Tengo was fully aware of that. But he wanted to talk about it to someone. He wanted to hear himself telling someone—anyone—what he was thinking about Aomame. Unless he did so, he felt Aomame would grow even more distant from him.

  “I haven’t seen her for twenty years. I was ten when I last saw her. She and I are the same age. We were in the same class in elementary school. I’ve tried different ways of finding her without any luck.”

  The record ended. Fuka-Eri lifted it from the turntable, narrowed her eyes, and sniffed the vinyl a few times. Then, handling it carefully by the edges so as not to leave fingerprints on it, she slipped it into its paper envelope and slid the envelope into the record jacket—gently, lovingly, like transferring a sleeping kitten to its bed.

  “You want to see this person,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark.

  “Yes, she is very important to me.”

  “Have you been looking for her for twenty years,” Fuka-Eri asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” Tengo said. While searching for the proper words to continue, Tengo folded his hands on the table. “To tell you the truth, I just started looking for her today.”

  “Today,” she said.

  “If she’s so important to you, why have you never looked for her until today?” Tengo asked for Fuka-Eri. “Good question.”

  Fuka-Eri looked at him in silence.

  Tengo put his thoughts into some kind of order. Then he said, “I’ve probably been taking a long detour. This girl named Aomame has been—how should I put this?—at the center of my consciousness all this time without a break. She has functioned as an important anchor to my very existence. In spite of that fact—is it?—I guess I haven’t been able to fully grasp her significance to me precisely because she has been all too close to the center.”

  Fuka-Eri stared at Tengo. It was impossible to tell from her expression whether this young girl had the slightest comprehension of what he was saying. But that hardly mattered. Tengo was half talking to himself.

  “But it has finally hit me: she is neither a concept nor a symbol nor a metaphor. She actually exists: she has warm flesh and a spirit that moves. I never should have lost sight of that warmth and that movement. It took me twenty years to understand something so obvious. It always takes me a while to think of things, but this is a little too much. It may already be too late. But one way or another, I want to find her.”

  With her knees on the floor, Fuka-Eri straightened up, the shape of her nipples showing through the Jeff Beck T-shirt.

  “Ah-oh-mah-meh,” Fuka-Eri said slowly, as if pondering each syllable.

  “Yes. Green Peas. It’s an unusual name.”

  “You want to meet her,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark.

  “Yes, of course I want to meet her,” Tengo said.

  Fuka-Eri chewed her lower lip as she took a moment to think about something. Then she looked up as if she had hit upon a new idea and said, “She might be very close by.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Aomame

  PULL THE RAT OUT

  The seven a.m. television news carried a big report on the Akasaka-Mitsuke subway station’s flooding, but there was no mention of the death of Sakigake’s Leader in a suite at the Hotel Okura. When NHK’s news ended, Aomame switched channels and watched the news on a few other channels, but none of them announced that large man’s painless death.

  They hid his body, Aomame thought, scowling. Tamaru had predicted such a possibility, but she had found it hard to believe that they would actually do it. Somehow they had managed to carry Leader’s corpse from the Hotel Okura suite, load it into a car, and take it away. He was a big man, and the corpse must have been tremendously heavy. The hotel was full of guests and employees. Security cameras were everywhere. How had they succeeded in carrying the corpse to the hotel’s underground parking lot without having anyone notice?

  They must have transported the body at night to the headquarters in Yamanashi and then held a discussion of what to do with it. At least they were not going to formally report his death to the police. Once you’ve hidden something, you have to keep it hidden.

  Aomame, of course, had no idea how they intended to fill the vacuum created by Leader’s death. But they would exhaust every means available to them to maintain the organization. As the man himself had said, the system would endure with or without a leader. Who could inherit Leader’s mantle? That problem had nothing to do with Aomame. Her assignment had been to liquidate Leader, not to crush a religion.

  She thought about the two bodyguards in their dark suits. Buzzcut and Ponytail. When they got back to headquarters, would they be held responsible for having allowed Leader to be wiped out before their very eyes? Aomame imagined their next assignment: “Find that woman, no matter what. Don’t come back here until you do.” It was possible.

  She ate an apple for breakfast, but she had almost no appetite. Her hands still retained the sensation of driving the needle into the back of the man’s neck. While peeling the apple with a small knife in her right hand, she felt a slight trembling in her body—a trembling she had never experienced before. When she had killed someone in the past, the memory of it had nearly faded after a night’s sleep. Though it never felt good to take a person’s life, those were all men who didn’t deserve to go on living. They inspired more disgust than human pity. But this time was different. Objectively, what this man had been doing was perhaps an affront to humanity. But he himself was, in many senses, an extraordinary human being, and his extraordinariness, at least in part, appeared to transcend standards of good and evi
l. Ending his life had also been something extraordinary. It had left a strange kind of resonance in her hands—an extraordinary resonance.

  What he had left behind was a “promise.” This was the conclusion to which Aomame’s thoughts led her. The weight of that promise was left in her hands as a sign. She understood this. The sign might not fade from her hands—ever.

  The phone rang shortly after nine a.m. It was Tamaru. It rang three times, stopped, and started again twenty seconds later.

  “They didn’t call the police after all,” Tamaru said. “It’s not on the TV news or in the paper.”

  “He did die, though. I’m sure of that.”

  “Yes, of course, I know. No question he died. There were a few movements around there. They’ve already cleared out of the hotel. They called in several people from their city branch office in the middle of the night, probably to help deal with the body. They’re good at things like that. Around one a.m., an S-Class Mercedes and a Toyota Hiace van left the hotel parking lot. Both had dark glass and Yamanashi plates. They were probably back in Sakigake headquarters by sunrise. The police investigated the compound the day before yesterday, but it wasn’t a full-scale operation, and all the officers were long gone by then. Sakigake has a big incinerator. If you threw a body in there, it wouldn’t leave a bone, just clean smoke.”

  “Creepy.”

  “They’re a creepy bunch, all right. Even if their Leader is dead, the organization will keep moving for a while, like a snake that keeps going even after its head is cut off. Head on or off, it knows exactly where it’s headed. Nobody can say what will happen in the future. It might die. Or grow a new head.”

  “He was no ordinary man.”

  Tamaru offered no opinion on that matter.

  “Completely different from the others,” Aomame said.

  Tamaru took a moment to gauge the resonance of her words. Then he said, “Yes, I can imagine this was different from the others. But we’d better start thinking about what happens from now on, and be a little more practical. Otherwise you won’t be able to survive.”