“True, but … uh, is it okay for you to be saying stuff like that out loud? You’re on duty, right? Isn’t anybody else around?”

“Don’t worry, you can talk to me about anything.”

“Well, I’ve got a favor to ask if it’s something you can do for me. I can’t think of anyone else I can go to for this.”

“Sure,” Ayumi said. “I don’t know if I can help or not, but give it a try.”

“Do you know of a religious group called Sakigake? It’s headquartered in Yamanashi Prefecture, in the hills.”

“Sakigake? Hmm.” Ayumi took some ten seconds to search her memory. “I think I know it. It’s a kind of religious commune, isn’t it? The Akebono radicals that started the gun battle in Yamanashi used to belong to it. Three prefectural policemen died in the shootout. It was a real shame. But Sakigake had nothing to do with it. Their compound was searched after the shootout and came up clean. So …?”

“I’d like to know if Sakigake was involved in any kind of incident after the shootout—criminal, civil, anything. But I don’t know how to go about looking into such things. I can’t read all the compact editions of all the newspapers, but I figured the police probably had some way of finding out.”

“It’s easy, we just have to do a quick search on our computer—or, at least, I wish I could say that, but I’m afraid computerization is not so advanced in Japan’s police forces. I suspect it’ll take a few more years to get to that stage. So for now, if I wanted to find out about something like that, I’d probably have to ask the Yamanashi Prefectural Police to send copies of the related materials in the mail. And for that I’d first have to fill out a materials request form and get my boss’s okay. Of course I’d have to give a good reason for the request. And we’re a government office, after all, so we’re getting paid to make things as complicated as possible.”

“I see,” Aomame said with a sigh. “So that’s out.”

“But why do you want to know something like that? Is some friend of yours mixed up in some kind of case connected to Sakigake?”

Aomame hesitated a moment before deciding to tell Ayumi the truth. “Close. It involves rape. I can’t go into detail yet, but it’s about the rape of young girls. I’ve been informed that they’re systematically raping them in there under cover of religion.”

Aomame could sense Ayumi wrinkling her brow at the other end. “The rape of young girls, huh? We can’t let that happen,” Ayumi said.

“Of course we can’t,” Aomame said.

“What do you mean by ‘young’?”

“Maybe ten, or even younger. Girls who haven’t had their first period, at least.”

Ayumi went silent for a while. Then, in a flat voice, she said, “I see what you mean. I’ll think of something. Can you give me two or three days?”

“Sure. Just let me know.”

They spent the next few minutes in unrelated chatter until Ayumi said, “Okay, I’ve got to get back to work.”

After hanging up, Aomame sat in her reading chair by the window and stared at her right hand for a while. Long, slim fingers, closely trimmed nails. Nails well cared for but unpolished. Looking at her nails, Aomame had a strong sense of what a fragile, fleeting thing her own existence was. Something as simple as the shape of her fingernails: it had been decided without her. Somebody else made the decision, and all I could do was go along with it, like it or not. Who could have decided that this was how my nails would be shaped?

The dowager had recently said to her, “Your parents were—and still are—ardent believers in the Society of Witnesses.” Which meant that they were probably still devoting themselves to missionary work even now. Aomame had a brother four years her senior, a docile young man. At the time Aomame made up her mind to leave home, he was still living according to his parents’ instructions, keeping the faith. What could he be doing now? Not that Aomame had an actual desire to know what was happening with her family. To her, they were just a part of her life that had ended. The ties had snapped.

Aomame had struggled for a long time to forget everything that had happened to her before the age of ten. My life actually started when I was ten. Everything before that was some kind of miserable dream. Let me throw those memories away somewhere. But try as she might, her heart was constantly being drawn back into that nightmarish world. It seemed to her that almost everything she possessed had its roots sunk in that dark soil and was deriving its nourishment from it. No matter how far away I try to go, I always have to come back here, she thought.

I must send that “Leader” into the other world, Aomame told herself, for my own sake as well.

A phone call came from Ayumi three nights later. “I’ve got some facts for you,” she said. “About Sakigake?”

“Yes. I was mulling it over when all of a sudden I remembered that the uncle of one of my police academy classmates is on the Yamanashi Prefectural Police force—a fairly high-ranking officer. So I tried asking my old classmate. I told him a relative of mine, a young girl, ran into some trouble when she was in the process of converting to that faith, so I was collecting information on Sakigake, and if he wouldn’t mind, could he help me? I’m pretty good at making up stuff like that.”

“Thanks, Ayumi. I appreciate it,” Aomame said.

“So he called his uncle in Yamanashi and explained the situation, and the uncle introduced me to the officer in charge of investigating Sakigake. So I spoke to him directly.”

“Oh, wonderful.”

“Yup. Well, I had a long talk with him and got all kinds of information about Sakigake, but you probably know everything that was in the papers, so I’ll just tell you the stuff that wasn’t, the parts that aren’t known to the public, okay?”

“That’s fine.”

“First of all, Sakigake has had a number of legal problems—civil suits, mostly concerning land deals. They seem to have a lot of money, and they’re buying up all the property around them. Sure, land is cheap in the country, but still. And a lot of times they’re pretty much forcing people to sell. They hide their involvement behind fake companies and buy up everything they can get their hands on. That way they start trouble with landowners and local governments. I mean, they operate like any ordinary landshark. Up to now, though, it’s all been civil actions, so the police haven’t had to get involved. They’ve come pretty close to crossing the line into criminal territory, but so far things haven’t gone public. They might be involved with organized crime or politicians. The police back off when politicians are mixed up in it. Of course, it’ll be a whole new ball game if something blows up and the prosecutor has to step in.”

“So Sakigake is not as clean as it looks where economic activity is concerned.”

“I don’t know about their ordinary believers, but as far as I can tell from the records of their real estate transactions, the top people in charge of the funds are probably not that clean. Even trying to cast it in the best light, it’s almost inconceivable that they would be using their money in search of pure spirituality. And besides, these guys hold land and buildings not just in Yamanashi but in downtown Tokyo and Osaka—first-class properties! Shibuya, Minami-Aoyama, Shoto: the organization seems to be planning to expand its religious activities on a national scale—assuming it’s not going to switch from religion to the real estate business.”

“I thought they wanted to live in natural surroundings and practice pure, stringent religious austerities. Why in the world would such an organization have to branch out to the middle of Tokyo?”

“And where do they get the kind of cash they’re throwing around?” Ayumi added. “There’s no way they could have amassed such a fortune selling daikon radishes and carrots.”