“This is how he found himself living a life that had him running back and forth between Sakigake and the new commune. He took upon himself the simultaneous duties of leader of one and adviser to the other. So a person who no longer truly believed in the revolution continued to preach revolutionary theory. The members of the new commune carried on with their farm work while they submitted to the harsh discipline of military training and ideological indoctrination. And politically, in contrast to Fukada, they became increasingly radicalized. They adopted a policy of obsessive secrecy, and they no longer allowed outsiders to enter. Aware of their calls for armed revolution, the security police identified them as a group that needed to be watched and placed them under surveillance, though not at a high level of alert.”

The Professor stared at his knees again, and then looked up.

“Sakigake split in two in 1976,” he went on. “Eri escaped from Sakigake and came to live with us the following year. Around that time the new commune began calling itself ‘Akebono.’ ”

Tengo looked up and narrowed his eyes. “Wait a minute,” he said. Akebono. I’m absolutely certain I’ve heard that name, too. But the memory was vague and incoherent. All he could grab hold of were a few fragmentary, fact-like details. “This Akebono … didn’t they cause some kind of big incident a while ago?”

“Exactly,” Professor Ebisuno said, looking at Tengo more intently than he had until now. “We’re talking about the famous Akebono, of course, the ones who staged the gun battle with the police in the mountains near Lake Motosu.”

Gun battle, Tengo thought. I remember hearing about that. It was big news. I can’t remember the details, though, for some reason, and I’m confused about the sequence of events. When he strained to recall more, he experienced a wrenching sensation through his whole body, as though his top and bottom halves were being twisted in opposite directions. He felt a dull throbbing deep in his head, and the air around him suddenly went thin. Sounds became muffled as though he were underwater. He was probably about to have an “attack.”

“Is something wrong?” the Professor asked with obvious concern. His voice seemed to be coming from a very great distance.

Tengo shook his head and in a strained voice said, “I’m fine. It’ll go away soon.”

CHAPTER 11

Aomame

THE HUMAN BODY IS A TEMPLE

The number of people who could deliver a kick to the balls with Aomame’s mastery must have been few indeed. She had studied kick patterns with great diligence and never missed her daily practice. In kicking the balls, the most important thing was never to hesitate. One had to deliver a lightning attack to the adversary’s weakest point and do so mercilessly and with the utmost ferocity—just as when Hitler easily brought down France by striking at the weak point of the Maginot Line. One must not hesitate. A moment of indecision could be fatal.

Generally speaking, there was no other way for a woman to take down a bigger, stronger man one-on-one. This was Aomame’s unshakable belief. That part of the body was the weakest point attached to—or, rather, hanging from—the creature known as man, and most of the time, it was not effectively defended. Not to take advantage of that fact was out of the question.

As a woman, Aomame had no concrete idea how much it hurt to suffer a hard kick in the balls, though judging from the reactions and facial expressions of men she had kicked, she could at least imagine it. Not even the strongest or toughest man, it seemed, could bear the pain and the major loss of self-respect that accompanied it.

“It hurts so much you think the end of the world is coming right now. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s different from ordinary pain,” said a man, after careful consideration, when Aomame asked him to explain it to her.

Aomame gave some thought to his analogy. The end of the world?

“Conversely, then,” she said, “would you say that when the end of the world is coming right now, it feels like a hard kick in the balls?”

“Never having experienced the end of the world, I can’t be sure, but that might be right,” the man said, glaring at a point in space with unfocused eyes. “There’s just this deep sense of powerlessness. Dark, suffocating, helpless.”

Sometime after that, Aomame happened to see the movie On the Beach on late-night television. It was an American movie made around 1960. Total war broke out between the U.S. and the USSR and a huge number of missiles were launched between the continents like schools of flying fish. The earth was annihilated, and humanity was wiped out in almost every part of the world. Thanks to the prevailing winds or something, however, the ashes of death still hadn’t reached Australia in the Southern Hemisphere, though it was just a matter of time. The extinction of the human race was simply unavoidable. The surviving human beings there could do nothing but wait for the end to come. They chose different ways to live out their final days. That was the plot. It was a dark movie offering no hope of salvation. (Though, watching it, Aomame reconfirmed her belief that everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.)

In any case, watching the movie in the middle of the night, alone, Aomame felt satisfied that she now had at least some idea of what it felt like to be kicked in the balls.

After graduating from a college of physical education, Aomame spent four years working for a company that manufactured sports drinks and health food. She was a key member of the company’s women’s softball team (ace pitcher, cleanup batter). The team did fairly well and several times reached the quarterfinals of the national championship playoffs. A month after Tamaki Otsuka died, though, Aomame resigned from the company and marked the end of her softball career. Any desire she might have had to continue with the game had vanished, and she felt a need to start her life anew. With the help of an older friend from college, she found a job as an instructor at a sports club in Tokyo’s swank Hiroo District.

Aomame was primarily in charge of classes in muscle training and martial arts. It was a well-known, exclusive club with high membership fees and dues, and many of its members were celebrities. Aomame established several classes in her best area, women’s self-defense techniques. She made a large canvas dummy in the shape of a man, sewed a black work glove in the groin area to serve as testicles, and gave female club members thorough training in how to kick in that spot. In the interest of realism, she stuffed two squash balls into the glove. The women were to kick this target swiftly, mercilessly, and repeatedly. Many of them took special pleasure in this training, and their skill improved markedly, but other members (mostly men, of course) viewed the spectacle with a frown and complained to the club’s management that she was going overboard. As a result, Aomame was called in and instructed to rein in the ball-kicking practice.

“Realistically speaking, though,” she protested, “it’s impossible for women to protect themselves against men without resorting to a kick in the testicles. Most men are bigger and stronger than women. A swift testicle attack is a woman’s only chance. Mao Zedong said it best. You find your opponent’s weak point and make the first move with a concentrated attack. It’s the only chance a guerrilla force has of defeating a regular army.”

The manager did not take well to her passionate defense. “You know perfectly well that we’re one of the few truly exclusive clubs in the metropolitan area,” he said with a frown. “Most of our members are celebrities. We have to preserve our dignity in all aspects of our operations. Image is crucial. I don’t care what the reason is for these drills of yours, it’s less than dignified to have a gang of nubile women kicking a doll in the crotch and screeching their heads off. We’ve already had at least one case of a potential member touring the club and withdrawing his application after he happened to see your class in action. I don’t care what Mao Zedong said—or Genghis Khan, for that matter: a spectacle like that is going to make most men feel anxious and annoyed and upset.”