Aomame didn’t attend kindergarten, but went into the local neighborhood municipal public elementary school in Ichikawa. And when she was in fifth grade she withdrew from the Witnesses. It was unclear why she left. The Witnesses didn’t record each and every reason a member renounced the faith. Whoever fell into the clutches of the devil could very well stay there. Talking about paradise and the path to get there kept members busy enough. The righteous had their own work to do, and the devil, his—a spiritual division of labor.

In Ushikawa’s brain someone was knocking on a cheaply made, plywood partition. “Mr. Ushikawa! Mr. Ushikawa!” the voice was yelling. Ushikawa closed his eyes and listened carefully. The voice was faint, but persistent. I must have overlooked something, he thought. A critical fact must be written here, somewhere, in these very documents. But I can’t see it. The knock must be telling me this.

Ushikawa turned again to the thick stack of documents, not just following what was written, but trying to imagine actual scenes in his mind. Three-year-old Aomame going with her mother as she spread the gospel door to door. Most of the time people slammed the door in their faces. Next she’s in elementary school. She continues proselytizing. Her weekends are taken up entirely with propagating their faith. She doesn’t have any time to play with friends. She might not even have had any friends. Most children in the Witnesses were bullied and shunned at school. Ushikawa had read a book on the Witnesses and was well aware of this. And at age eleven she left the religion. That must have taken a great deal of determination. Aomame had been raised in the faith, had had it drummed into her since she was born. The faith had seeped into every fiber of her being, so she couldn’t easily slough it off, like changing clothes. That would mean she was isolated within the home. They wouldn’t easily accept a daughter who had renounced the faith. For Aomame, abandoning the faith was the same as abandoning her family.

When Aomame was eleven, what in the world had happened to her? What could have made her come to that decision?

The Ichikawa Municipal ** Elementary School. Ushikawa tried saying the name aloud. Something had happened there. Something had most definitely happened … He inhaled sharply. I’ve heard the name of that school before, he realized.

But where? Ushikawa had no ties to Chiba Prefecture. He had been born in Urawa, a city in Saitama, and ever since he came to Tokyo to go to college—except for the time he lived in Chuorinkan, in Kanagawa Prefecture—he had lived entirely within the twenty-three wards of Tokyo. He had barely set foot in Chiba Prefecture. Only once, as he recalled, when he went to the beach at Futtsu. So why did the name of an elementary school in Ichikawa ring a bell?

It took him a while to remember. He rubbed his misshapen head as he concentrated. He fumbled through the dark recesses of memory, as if sticking his hand deep down into mud. It wasn’t so long ago that he first heard that name. Very recently, in fact. Chiba Prefecture … Ichikawa Municipal ** Elementary School. Finally he grabbed onto one end of a thin rope.

Tengo Kawana. That’s it—Tengo Kawana was from Ichikawa! And I think he attended a municipal public elementary school in town, too.

Ushikawa pulled down from his document shelf the file on Tengo. This was material he had compiled a few months back, at the request of Sakigake. He flipped through the pages to confirm Tengo’s school record. His plump finger came to rest on Tengo’s name. It was just as he had thought: Masami Aomame had attended the same elementary school as Tengo Kawana. Based on their birthdates, they were probably in the same year in school. Whether they were in the same class or not would require further investigation. But there was a high probability they knew each other.

Ushikawa put a Seven Stars cigarette in his mouth and lit up with his lighter. He had the distinct feeling that things were starting to fall into place. He was connecting the dots, and though he was unsure of what sort of picture would emerge, before long he should be able to see the outlines.

Miss Aomame, can you hear my footsteps? Probably not, since I’m walking as quietly as I can. But step by step I’m getting closer. I’m a dull, silly tortoise, but I’m definitely making progress. Pretty soon I’ll catch sight of the rabbit’s back. You can count on it.

Ushikawa leaned back from his desk, looked up at the ceiling, and slowly let the smoke rise up from his mouth.

CHAPTER 8

Aomame

NOT SUCH A BAD DOOR

Except for the silent men who brought supplies every Tuesday afternoon, for the next two weeks no one else visited Aomame’s apartment. The man who claimed to be an NHK fee collector had insisted that he would be back. He had been determined, or at least that was the way it sounded to Aomame. But there hadn’t been a knock on the door since. Maybe he was busy with another route.

On the surface, these were quiet, peaceful days. Nothing happened, nobody came by, the phone didn’t ring. To be on the safe side, Tamaru called as little as possible. Aomame always kept the curtains closed, living as quietly as she could so as not to attract attention. After dark, she turned on the bare minimum number of lights.

Trying to stay as quiet as possible, she did strenuous workouts, mopped the floor every day, and spent a lot of time preparing meals. She asked for some Spanish-language tapes and went over the lessons aloud. Not speaking for a long time makes the muscles around the mouth grow slack. She had to focus on moving her mouth as much as she could, and foreign language drills were good for that. Plus Aomame had long fantasized about South America. If she could go anywhere, she would like to live in a small, peaceful country in South America, like Costa Rica. She would rent a small villa on the coast and spend the days swimming and reading. With the money she had stuffed in her bag she should be able to live for ten years there, if she watched her expenses. She couldn’t see them chasing her all the way to Costa Rica.

As she practiced Spanish conversation Aomame imagined a quiet, peaceful life on the Costa Rican beach. Could Tengo be a part of her life there? She closed her eyes and pictured the two of them sunbathing on a Caribbean beach. She wore a small, black bikini and sunglasses and was holding Tengo’s hand. But a sense of reality, the kind that would move her, was missing from the picture. It was nothing more than an ordinary tourist brochure photo.

When she ran out of things to do, she cleaned the pistol. She followed the manual and disassembled the Heckler & Koch, cleaned each part with a cloth and brush, oiled them, and then reassembled it. She made sure the action was smooth. By now she had mastered the operation and the pistol felt like a part of her body.

She would go to bed at ten, read a few pages in her book, and fall asleep. Aomame had never had trouble falling asleep. As she read, she would get sleepy. She would switch off the bedside lamp, rest her head on the pillow, and shut her eyes. With few exceptions, when she opened her eyes again it was morning.

Ordinarily she didn’t tend to dream much. Even if she did, she usually had forgotten most of the dream by the time she woke up. Sometimes faint scraps of her dream would get caught on the wall of her consciousness, but she couldn’t retrace these fragments back to any coherent narrative. All that remained were small, random images. She slept deeply, and the dreams she did have came from a very deep place. Like fish that live at the bottom of the ocean, most of her dreams weren’t able to float to the surface. Even if they did, the difference in water pressure would force a change in their appearance.