“That is true,” the man said. “There are aspects to what I did, I must admit, that can be viewed that way in the light of commonly held concepts. In the eyes of earthly law, I am a criminal. I did have physical relations with girls who had still not reached maturity—even if it was something that I myself did not seek.”

All that Aomame could do was inhale and exhale deeply. She had no idea how to go about quieting the intense emotional currents streaming through her body. Her face was greatly distorted, and her right and left hands seemed to be longing for entirely different things.

“I would like you to take my life,” the man said. “It makes no sense for me to go on living in this world. I should be obliterated in order to maintain the world’s balance.”

“What would happen after I killed you?”

“The Little People would lose one who listens to their voices. I still have no successor.”

“How is it possible to believe this?” Aomame practically spit the words out between her taut lips. “You may just be a sexual pervert trying to justify your despicable actions with convenient rationalizations. There never were any ‘Little People,’ no voices of the gods, no heavenly grace. You may be just another phony claiming to be a prophet or religious leader.”

“See the clock over there?” the man said without lifting his head. “On the right-hand chest of drawers.”

Aomame looked to the right. There was a rounded, waist-high chest, on top of which sat a clock embedded in a marble frame—obviously, a heavy object.

“Keep your eyes on it. Don’t look away.”

As instructed, Aomame kept her neck turned in that direction and fixed her eyes on the clock. Beneath her fingers, she could feel every muscle in the man’s body turning to stone and filling with an incredibly intense power. As if in response to that power, the marble clock rose slowly from the surface of the chest. She watched it begin to tremble, as if hesitating, come to rest at a point some three inches in the air, and stay there for a full ten seconds. Then the man’s muscles lost their strength, and the clock dropped back to the chest with a dull thud, as if it had just remembered the earth’s gravity.

The man took a long time to release a deep, exhausted-sounding breath.

“Even a little thing like that takes a huge amount of energy,” he said once he had expelled every last breath in his body. “Enough to shorten my life. But I hope you see it now: at least I am no phony.”

Aomame did not answer him. The man took time bringing his strength back with a series of deep breaths. The clock went on silently displaying the time as though nothing had happened. Only its position on top of the chest had shifted slightly on a diagonal. Aomame stared hard at the clock while the second hand made a circuit.

“You do have special powers,” Aomame said drily.

“As you have now seen.”

“There is an episode involving the devil and Christ in The Brothers Karamazov, I recall. The Christ is undergoing harsh austerities in the wilderness when the devil challenges him to perform a miracle—to change a stone into bread. But the Christ ignores him. Miracles are the devil’s temptation.”

“Yes, I know that. I, too, have read The Brothers Karamazov. And what you say is true: this kind of showing off doesn’t solve a thing. But I had to convince you in the limited amount of time we have, so I went ahead and performed for you.”

Aomame remained silent.

“In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil,” the man said. “Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good. This is what I mean when I say that I must die in order to keep things in balance.”

“I don’t feel any need to kill you at this point,” Aomame declared. “As you probably know, that is what I came here to do. I can’t permit a person like you to exist. I was determined to obliterate you from this world. But I no longer feel that determination. You are suffering terribly, I can tell. You deserve to die slowly, going to pieces bit by bit, in terrible pain. I can’t find it in me to grant you an easy death.”

Still lying facedown, the man responded with a small nod. “If you were to kill me, my people would be sure to track you down. They are absolute fanatics, and they are powerful and persistent. With me gone, the religion would lose its centripetal force. But once it is formed, a system takes on a life of its own.”

Aomame listened to him speak as he lay there facedown.

“What I did to your friend was very bad.”

“My friend?”

“Your girlfriend with the handcuffs. Now, what was her name again …?”

A sudden calm filled Aomame. The inner conflict was gone. A heavy silence hung over her now.

“Ayumi Nakano,” Aomame said.

“Poor girl.”

“Did you do that?” Aomame asked coldly. “Are you the one who killed Ayumi?”

“No, not at all. I didn’t kill her.”

“But for some reason you know—that someone killed her.”

“Our researcher found out,” the man said. “We don’t know who killed her. All we know is that your friend, the policewoman, was strangled to death in a hotel.”

Aomame’s right hand became tightly clenched again. “But you said, ‘What I did to your friend was very bad.’ ”

“That I was unable to prevent it. Whoever may have killed her, the fact is that they always go after your weakest point—the way wolves chase down the weakest sheep in the herd.”

“You’re saying that Ayumi was a weak point of mine?”

The man did not answer.

Aomame closed her eyes. “But why did they have to kill her? She was such a good person! She would never hurt anyone. Why? Because I am involved in this? If so, wouldn’t it have been enough just to destroy me?”

The man said, “They can’t destroy you.”

“Why not?” Aomame asked. “Why can’t they destroy me?”

“Because you have long since become a special being.”

“Special being?” Aomame asked. “In what way ‘special’?”

“You will discover that eventually.”

“Eventually?”

“When the time comes.”

Aomame screwed up her face again. “I can’t understand what you are saying.”

“You will at some point.”

Aomame shook her head. “In any case, they can’t attack me for now. And so they aimed at a weak point near me. In order to give me a warning. To keep me from taking your life.”

The man remained silent. It was a silence of affirmation.

“It’s too terrible,” Aomame said. She shook her head. “What real difference could it possibly have made for them to murder her?”

“No, they are not murderers. They never destroy anyone with their own hands. What killed your friend, surely, was something she had inside of her. The same kind of tragedy would have happened sooner or later. Her life was filled with risk. All they did was to provide the stimulus. Like changing the setting on a timer.”

Setting on a timer?

“She was no electric oven! She was a living human being! So what if her life was full of risk? She was a dear friend of mine. You people took that from me like nothing at all. Meaninglessly. Callously.”

“Your anger is entirely justified,” the man said. “You should direct it at me.”

Aomame shook her head. “Even if I take your life here, that won’t bring Ayumi back.”

“No, but it would provide some degree of retaliation against the Little People. You could have your revenge, as it were. They don’t want me to die yet. If I die now, it will open up a vacuum—at least a temporary vacuum, until a successor comes into being. It would be a strike against them. At the same time, it would be a benefit to you.”