Aomame decided to take it upon herself to punish the man. She got his address from Tamaki and went to his apartment carrying a softball bat in a plastic blueprint tube. Tamaki was away for the day in Kanazawa, attending a relative’s memorial service or some such thing, which was a perfect alibi. Aomame checked to be sure the man was not at home. She used a screwdriver and hammer to break the lock on his door. Then she wrapped a towel around the bat several times to dampen the noise and proceeded to smash everything in the apartment that was smashable—the television, the lamps, the clocks, the records, the toaster, the vases: she left nothing whole. She cut the telephone cord with scissors, cracked the spines of all the books and scattered their pages, spread the entire contents of a toothpaste tube and shaving cream canister on the rug, poured Worcestershire sauce on the bed, took notebooks from a drawer and ripped them to pieces, broke every pen and pencil in two, shattered every lightbulb, slashed all the curtains and cushions with a kitchen knife, took scissors to every shirt in the dresser, poured a bottle of ketchup into the underwear and sock drawers, pulled out the refrigerator fuse and threw it out a window, ripped the flapper out of the toilet tank and tore it apart, and crushed the bathtub’s showerhead. The destruction was utterly deliberate and complete. The room looked very much like the recent news photos she had seen of the streets of Beirut after the shelling.

Tamaki was an intelligent girl (with grades in school that Aomame could never hope to match), and in softball she had always been on her toes. Whenever Aomame got herself into a difficult situation on the mound, Tamaki would run over to her, offer her a few quick words of advice, flash her a smile, pat her on the butt with her glove, and go back to her position in the infield. Her view of things was broad, her heart was warm, and she had a good sense of humor. She put a great deal of effort into her schoolwork and could speak with real eloquence. Had she continued with her studies, she would undoubtedly have made a fine lawyer.

In the presence of men, however, Tamaki’s powers of judgment fell totally to pieces. Tamaki liked handsome men. She was a sucker for good looks. As Aomame saw it, this tendency of her friend’s ranked as a sickness. Tamaki could meet men of marvelous character or with superior talents who were eager to woo her, but if their looks did not meet her standards, she was utterly unmoved. For some reason, the ones who aroused her interest were always sweet-faced men with nothing inside. And when it came to men, she would stubbornly resist anything Aomame might have to say. Tamaki was always ready to accept—and even respect—Aomame’s opinions on other matters, but if Aomame criticized her choice of boyfriend, Tamaki simply refused to listen. Aomame eventually gave up trying to advise her. She didn’t want to quarrel with Tamaki and destroy their friendship. Ultimately, it was Tamaki’s life. All Aomame could do was let her live it. Tamaki became involved with many men during her college years, and each one led to trouble. They would always betray her, wound her, and abandon her, leaving Tamaki each time in a state close to madness. Twice she resorted to abortions. Where relations with the opposite sex were concerned, Tamaki was truly a born victim.

Aomame never had a steady boyfriend. She was asked out on dates now and then, and she thought that a few of the men were not at all bad, but she never let herself become deeply involved.

Tamaki asked her, “Are you going to stay a virgin the rest of your life?”

“I’m too busy for that,” Aomame would say. “I can barely keep my life going day to day. I don’t have time to be fooling around with a boyfriend.”

After graduation, Tamaki stayed on in graduate school to prepare for the bar exam. Aomame went to work for a company that made sports drinks and health food, and she played for the company’s softball team. Tamaki continued to commute from home, while Aomame went to live in the company dorm in Yoyogi Hachiman. As in their student days, they would meet for a meal on weekends and talk.

When she was twenty-four, Tamaki married a man two years her senior. As soon as they became engaged, she left graduate school and gave up on continuing her legal studies. He insisted that she do so. Aomame met Tamaki’s fiancé only once. He came from a wealthy family, and, just as she had suspected, his features were handsome but utterly lacking in depth. His hobby was sailing. He was a smooth talker and clever in his own way, but there was no substance to his personality, and his words carried no weight. He was, in other words, a typical Tamaki-type boyfriend. But there was more about him, something ominous, that Aomame sensed. She disliked him from the start. And he probably didn’t like her much, either.

“This marriage will never work,” Aomame said to Tamaki. She hated to offer unwanted advice again, but this was marriage, not playing house. As Tamaki’s best and oldest friend, Aomame could not keep silent. This led to their first violent argument. Aomame’s opposition to her marriage made Tamaki hysterical, and she screamed harsh words at Aomame, among them words that Aomame least wanted to hear. Aomame did not attend the wedding.

The two of them made up before long. As soon as she came back from her honeymoon, Tamaki showed up at Aomame’s without warning and apologized for her behavior. “I want you to forget everything I said that time,” she pleaded. “I wasn’t myself. I was thinking about you all during my honeymoon.” Aomame told her not to worry, that she had already forgotten everything. They held each other close. Soon they were joking and laughing.

But still, after the wedding, there was a sudden decline in the number of occasions when Aomame and Tamaki could meet face-to-face. They exchanged frequent letters and talked on the telephone, but Tamaki seemed to find it difficult to arrange times when the two of them could get together. Her excuse was that she had so much to do at home. “Being a full-time housewife is hard work,” she would say, but there was something in her tone of voice suggesting that her husband did not want her meeting people outside the house. Also, Tamaki and her husband were living in the same compound as his parents, which seemed to make it difficult for her to go out. Aomame was never invited to Tamaki’s new home.

Her married life was going well, Tamaki would tell Aomame whenever she had the chance. “My husband is gentle with me, and his parents are very kind. We’re quite comfortable. We often take the yacht out of Enoshima on weekends. I’m not sorry I stopped studying law. I was feeling a lot of pressure over the bar exam. Maybe this ordinary kind of life was the right thing for me all along. I’ll probably have a child soon, and then I’ll really be just a typical boring mother. I might not have any time for you!” Tamaki’s voice was always cheery, and Aomame could find no reason to doubt her words. “That’s great,” she would say, and she really did think it was great. She would certainly prefer to have her premonitions miss the mark than to be on target. Something inside Tamaki had finally settled down where it belonged, she guessed. Or so she tried to believe.

Aomame had no other real friends; as her contact with Tamaki diminished, she became increasingly unsure what to do with each passing day. She could no longer concentrate on softball as she used to. Her very feeling for the game seemed to wane as Tamaki grew more distant from her life. Aomame was twenty-five but still a virgin. Now and then, when she felt unsettled, she would masturbate, but she didn’t find this life especially lonely. Deep personal relationships with people were a source of pain for Aomame. Better to keep to herself.