“Probably because the ‘self’ doesn’t really exist.”

Tamaru had nothing to say to that.

“You were in the Self-Defense Force?” Aomame asked.

“Yeah, in the toughest unit. They fed us rats and snakes and locusts. They’re not inedible, but they sure don’t taste good.”

“What did you do after that?”

“All kinds of stuff. Security work, mainly as a bodyguard—though maybe that’s too fancy a word for what I was doing in some cases. I’m not much of a team player, so I tend to work alone. I was involved in the underworld, too, for a little while, when that was the only thing I could find. I saw a lot of stuff going down—things that most people never have to see in their lifetimes. Still, I never got into the worst of the worst. I was always careful not to cross the line. I’m careful by nature, and I don’t think much of the yakuza. So, like I said before, my record is clean. After that, I came here.” Tamaru pointed straight down. “My life has been very settled ever since. Not that a stable life is all I’m looking for, but I’d like to try to keep things as they are for now. It isn’t easy finding jobs you like.”

“No, of course not,” Aomame said. “But really, shouldn’t I pay you something for this?”

Tamaru shook his head. “No, I don’t want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don’t like to owe anybody anything, so I keep myself as much on the lending side as I can.”

“Thank you,” Aomame said.

“If, by any chance, the cops end up grilling you about where you got the gun, I don’t want you giving them my name. And if they do come here, I’ll deny everything, of course. They’ll never find out anything about my past. If they go after Madame, though, I won’t have a leg to stand on.”

“I won’t give your name, of course.”

Tamaru pulled a folded piece of notepaper from his pocket and handed it to Aomame. On it was written a man’s name.

Tamaru said, “On July 4, you met this man at the Renoir Café near Sendagaya Station. He gave you the gun and seven bullets, and you paid him five hundred thousand yen in cash. He contacted you after he heard that you were looking for a gun. If he is questioned by police, he is supposed to freely admit to the charges and spend a few years in prison. You don’t have to tell them any more than that. As long as they can establish how the gun got into your hands, the police will come off looking good. And you might spend a little while behind bars too, for violating the Firearm and Sword Possession Control Law.”

Aomame memorized the name and handed the slip of paper back to Tamaru. He tore it into little pieces and threw it into the wastebasket. Then he said, “Like I said before, I’m very careful by nature. I almost never depend on anybody for anything, and even when I do, I still don’t trust them. I never leave things to work themselves out. But what I’m most hoping for in this case is that the gun will come back to me unused. Then no one gets in trouble, no one dies, no one gets hurt, and no one goes to prison.”

Aomame nodded. “Meaning, you want me to violate Chekhov’s rule.”

“Exactly. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired,” Tamaru said. Then he frowned slightly, as if recalling something. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot something important. I have to give you a pager.”

He took a small device from his drawer and set it on the desk. It had a metal clip to attach to clothing or a belt. Tamaru picked up the phone and punched in a three-digit quick-dial code. The phone rang three times, and the pager responded by emitting a series of electronic beeps. After turning up the volume as high as it would go, Tamaru pressed a switch to turn it off. He squinted at the device to make sure it displayed the caller’s number, and then handed it to Aomame.

“I’d like you to keep this on you at all times if possible,” Tamaru said, “or at least don’t get too far away from it. If it rings, that means you have a message from me. An important message. I won’t signal you to talk about the weather. Call the number you see in the display. Right away. From a public phone. And one other thing: if you have luggage, put it in a coin locker in Shinjuku Station.”

“Shinjuku Station,” Aomame repeated.

“It goes without saying that you should be ready to travel light.”

“Of course.”

Back at her apartment, Aomame closed her curtains and took the Heckler & Koch HK4 and the bullets from her shoulder bag. Sitting at the kitchen table, she practiced ejecting and inserting the empty magazine a few times. Her speed increased with each repetition. Her movements developed a rhythm, and her hands stopped trembling. Then she wrapped the pistol in an old T-shirt and hid it in a shoe box, which she shoved to the back of the closet. The bag of bullets she stored inside the pocket of a raincoat on a hanger. Suddenly very thirsty, she took a pitcher of chilled barley tea from the refrigerator and drank three glassfuls. Her shoulder muscles were tense and stiff, and the sweat of her armpits had an unusual smell. The awareness that she now possessed a pistol was enough to make the world look a little different. Her surroundings had taken on a strange, unfamiliar coloration.

She undressed and took a hot shower to wash off the unpleasant sweat smell. Not all guns have to be fired, she told herself in the shower. A pistol is just a tool, and where I’m living is not a storybook world. It’s the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

Two weeks passed uneventfully. Aomame went to work at the sports club as usual, teaching her martial arts and stretching classes. She was not supposed to change her daily pattern. She followed the dowager’s instructions as strictly as possible. Coming home, she would eat dinner alone. Afterward, she would close the curtains, sit at the kitchen table, and practice handling the Heckler & Koch HK4 until its weight and hardness, the smell of its machine oil, its brute force and quietness all became a part of her.

Sometimes she practiced blindfolded, using a scarf. Soon she could nimbly load the magazine, release the safety, and pull back the slide without seeing a thing. The terse, rhythmical sound produced by each operation was pleasing to her ears. In the dark, she gradually lost track of the difference between the sounds the implement actually made and her aural perception of the sounds. The boundary between herself and her actions gradually faded until it disappeared entirely.

At least once a day she would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and put the muzzle of the loaded gun in her mouth. Feeling the hardness of the metal against the edges of her teeth, she imagined herself pulling the trigger. That was all it would take to end her life. In the next instant, she would have vanished from this world. To the self she saw standing in the mirror, she said, A few important points: not to let my hand shake; to brace for the recoil; not to be afraid; and, most important, not to hesitate.

I could do it now if I wanted to, Aomame thought. I’d just have to pull my finger inward half an inch. It would be so easy. Why don’t I just go ahead and do it? But she reconsidered and took the pistol from her mouth, returned the hammer to its uncocked position, set the safety, and laid the gun down by the sink between the toothpaste tube and her hairbrush. No, it’s too soon for that. There’s something I have to do first.

As instructed by Tamaru, Aomame kept the pager with her at all times. She set it next to the alarm clock when she slept. She was ready to deal with it whenever it rang, but another week went by in silence.

The pistol in the shoe box, the seven bullets in the raincoat pocket, the silent pager, her handmade ice pick, its deadly point, the suitcase packed with her personal effects; the new face and the new life that must be awaiting her; the bundle of bills in a Shinjuku Station coin locker: Aomame spent the midsummer days in their presence. More and more people went off on full-fledged summer vacations. Shops closed their shutters. The streets had fewer passersby. The number of cars declined, and a hush fell over the city. She sometimes felt she was on the verge of losing track of her location. Is this actually the real world? she asked herself. If it’s not, then where should I look for reality? She had no idea where else to look, and so she had no choice for now but to recognize this as the one and only reality and to use all her strength to ride it out.