The dowager reached out and gently placed her hand on Aomame’s.

“Of course you need that kind of thing once in a while. Don’t worry, I’m not blaming you. It’s just that I feel you ought to have a more ordinary kind of happiness—marry someone you love, happy ending.”

“I wouldn’t mind that myself. But it won’t be so easy.”

“Why not?”

Aomame did not answer this. She had no simple explanation.

“If you ever feel like talking to someone about these personal matters, please talk to me,” the dowager said, withdrawing her hand from Aomame’s and toweling the sweat from her face. “About anything at all. I might have something I can do for you.”

“Thanks very much,” Aomame said.

“Some things can’t be solved just by going wild every now and then.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“You are not doing anything that will destroy you?” the dowager said. “Nothing at all? You’re sure of that, are you?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Aomame said. She’s right. I’m not doing anything that is going to destroy me. Still, there is something quiet left behind. Like sediment in a bottle of wine.

Even now, Aomame still recalled the events surrounding the death of Tamaki Otsuka. It tore her apart to think that she could no longer see and talk to Tamaki. Tamaki was the first real friend she ever had. They could tell each other everything. Aomame had had no one like that before Tamaki, and no one since. Nor could anyone take her place. Had she never met Tamaki, Aomame would have led a far more miserable and gloomy life.

She and Tamaki were the same age. They had been teammates in the softball club of their public high school. From middle school into high school, Aomame had been passionately devoted to the game of softball. She had joined reluctantly at first when begged to help fill out a shorthanded team, and her early efforts were halfhearted at best, but eventually softball became her reason for living. She clung to the game the way a person clings to a post when a storm threatens to blow him away. And though she had never realized it before, Aomame was a born athlete. She became a central member of both her middle and high school teams and helped them breeze through one tournament after another. This gave her something very close to self-confidence (but only close: it was not, strictly speaking, self-confidence). Her greatest joy in life was knowing that her importance to the team was by no means small and that, as narrow as that world might be, she had been granted a definite place in it. Someone needed her.

Aomame was pitcher and cleanup batter—literally the central player of the team, both on offense and defense. Tamaki Otsuka played second base, the linchpin of the team, and she also served as captain. Tamaki was small but had great reflexes and knew how to use her brain. She could read all the complications of a situation instantaneously. With each pitch, she knew toward which side to incline her center of gravity, and as soon as the batter connected with the ball, she could gauge the direction of the hit and move to cover the proper position. Not a lot of infielders could do that. Her powers of judgment had saved the team from many a tight spot. She was not a distance hitter like Aomame, but her batting was sharp and precise, and she was quick on her feet. She was also an outstanding leader. She brought the team together as a unit, planned strategy, gave everyone valuable advice, and fired them up on the field. Her coaching was tough, but she won the other players’ confidence, as a result of which the team grew stronger day by day. They went as far as the championship game in the Tokyo regional playoffs and even made it to the national interscholastic tournament. Both Aomame and Tamaki were chosen to be on the Kanto area all-star team.

Aomame and Tamaki recognized each other’s talents and—without either taking the initiative—naturally drew close until each had become the other’s best friend. They spent long hours together on team trips to away games. They told each other about their backgrounds, concealing nothing. When she was a fifth grader, Aomame had made up her mind to break with her parents and had gone to live with an uncle on her mother’s side. The uncle’s family understood her situation and welcomed her warmly as a member of the household, but it was, ultimately, not her family. She felt lonely and hungry for love. Unsure where she was to find a purpose or meaning to her life, she passed one formless day after another. Tamaki came from a wealthy household of some social standing, but her parents’ terrible relationship had turned the home into a wasteland. Her father almost never came home, and her mother often fell into states of mental confusion. She would suffer from terrible headaches, and was unable to leave her bed sometimes for days at a time. Tamaki and her younger brother were all but ignored. They often ate at neighborhood restaurants or fast-food places or made do with ready-made boxed lunches. Each girl, then, had her reasons for becoming obsessed with softball.

Given all their problems, the two lonely girls had a mountain of things to tell each other. When they took a trip together one summer, they touched each other’s naked bodies in the hotel bed. It happened just that one time, spontaneously, and neither of them ever talked about it. But because it had happened, their relationship grew all the deeper and all the more conspiratorial.

Aomame kept playing softball after her graduation from high school when she went on to a private college of physical education. Having won a national reputation as an outstanding softball player, she was recruited and given a special scholarship. In college, too, she was a key member of the team. While devoting much energy to softball, she was also interested in sports medicine and started studying it in earnest, along with martial arts.

Tamaki entered the law program in a first-rank private university. She stopped playing softball upon graduating from high school. For an outstanding student like Tamaki, softball was merely a phase. She intended to take the bar exam and become a lawyer. Though their paths in life diverged, Aomame and Tamaki remained best friends. Aomame lived in a college dormitory with free room and board while Tamaki continued commuting from her family home. The place was as much of an emotional wasteland as ever, but at least it gave her economic freedom. The two would meet once a week to share a meal and catch up. They never ran out of things to talk about.

Tamaki lost her virginity in the autumn of her first year in college. The man was one year older than Tamaki, a fellow member of the college tennis club. He invited her to his room after a club party, and there he forced her to have sex with him. Tamaki had liked this man, which was why she had accepted the invitation to his room, but the violence with which he forced her into having sex and his narcissistic, self-centered manner came as a terrible shock. She quit the tennis club and went into a period of depression. The experience left her with a profound feeling of powerlessness. Her appetite disappeared, and she lost fifteen pounds. All she had wanted from the man was a degree of understanding and sympathy. If he had shown a trace of it and had taken the time to prepare her, the mere physical giving of herself to him would have been no great problem. She found it impossible to understand his actions. Why did he have to become so violent? It had been absolutely unnecessary!

Aomame comforted Tamaki and advised her to find a way to punish him, but Tamaki could not agree. Her own carelessness had been a part of it, she said, and it was too late now to lodge any complaints. “I bear some responsibility for going to his room alone,” she said. “All I can do now is forget about it.” But it was painfully clear to Aomame how deeply her friend had been wounded by the incident. This was not about the mere loss of her virginity but rather the sanctity of an individual human being’s soul. No one had the right to invade such sacred precincts with muddy feet. And once it happened, that sense of powerlessness could only keep gnawing away at a person.