Ayumi nodded. “How should I put it? I don’t know, you just have that atmosphere about you, though maybe not like a Faye Dunaway holding a machine gun.”

“I don’t need a machine gun,” Aomame said.

“About that religious commune we were talking about last time, Sakigake …,” Ayumi said.

The two were sharing a light meal and a bottle of Chianti at a small, late-night Italian restaurant in Iikura, a quiet neighborhood. Aomame was having a salad with strips of raw tuna, while Ayumi had ordered a plate of gnocchi with basil sauce.

“Uh-huh,” Aomame said.

“You got me interested, so I did a little searching on my own. And the more I looked, the fishier it began to smell. Sakigake calls itself a religion, and it even has official certification, but it’s totally lacking any religious substance. Doctrine-wise, it’s kind of deconstructionist or something, just a jumble of images of religion thrown together. They’ve added some new-age spiritualism, fashionable academicism, a return to nature, anticapitalism, occultism, and stuff, but that’s all: it has a bunch of flavors, but no substantial core. Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance. In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool.”

“McLuhanesque?”

“Hey, look, even I read a book now and then,” Ayumi protested. “McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right.”

“In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?”

“Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around.”

Aomame considered this for a moment and said, “The core of Sakigake as a religion is unclear, but that has nothing to do with why people are drawn to it, you mean?”

Ayumi nodded. “I wouldn’t say it’s amazing how many people join Sakigake, but the numbers are by no means small. And the more people who join, the more money they put together. Obviously. So, then, what is it about this religion that attracts so many people? If you ask me, it’s primarily that it doesn’t smell like a religion. It’s very clean and intellectual, and it looks systematic. That’s what attracts young professionals. It stimulates their intellectual curiosity. It provides a sense of achievement they can’t get in the real world—something tangible and personal. And these intellectual believers, like an elite officers’ corps, form the powerful brains of the organization.

“Plus,” Ayumi continued, “their ‘Leader’ seems to have a good deal of charisma. People idolize him. His very presence, you might say, functions like a doctrinal core. It’s close in origin to primitive religion. Even early Christianity was more or less like that at first. But this guy never comes out in the open. Nobody knows what he looks like, or his name, or how old he is. The religion has a governing council that supposedly runs everything, but another person heads the council and acts as the public face of the religion in official events, though I don’t think he’s any more than a figurehead. The one who is at the center of the system seems to be this mysterious ‘Leader’ person.”

“Sounds like he wants to keep his identity hidden.”

“Well, either he has something to hide or he keeps his existence obscure on purpose to heighten the mysterious atmosphere around him.”

“Or else he’s tremendously ugly,” Aomame said.

“That’s possible, I suppose. A grotesque creature from another world,” Ayumi said, with a monster’s growl. “But anyway, aside from the founder, this religion has too many things that stay hidden. Like the aggressive real estate dealings I mentioned on the phone the other day. Everything on the surface is there for show: the nice buildings, the handsome publicity, the intelligent-sounding theories, the former social elites who have converted, the stoic practices, the yoga and spiritual serenity, the rejection of materialism, the organic farming, the fresh air and lovely vegetarian diet—they’re all like calculated photos, like ads for high-class resort condos that come as inserts in the Sunday paper. The packaging is beautiful, but I get the feeling that suspicious plans are hatching behind the scenes. Some of it might even be illegal. Now that I’ve been through a bunch of materials, that’s the impression I get.”

“But the police aren’t making any moves now.”

“Something may be happening undercover, but I wouldn’t know about that. The Yamanashi Prefectural Police do seem to be keeping an eye on them to some extent. I kind of sensed that when I spoke to the guy in charge of the investigation. I mean, Sakigake gave birth to Akebono, the group that staged the shootout, and it’s just guesswork that Akebono’s Chinese-made Kalashnikovs came in through North Korea: nobody’s really gotten to the bottom of that. Sakigake is still under some suspicion, but they’ve got that ‘Religious Juridical Person’ label, so they have to be handled with kid gloves. The police have already investigated the premises once, and that made it more or less clear that there was no direct connection between Sakigake and the shootout. As for any moves the Public Security Intelligence Agency might be making, we just don’t know. Those guys work in absolute secrecy and have never gotten along with us.”

“How about the children who stopped coming to public school? Do you know any more about them?”

“No, nothing. Once they stop going to school, I guess, they never come outside the walls of the compound again. We don’t have any way of investigating their cases. It would be different if we had concrete evidence of child abuse, but for now we don’t have anything.”

“Don’t you get any information about that from people who have quit Sakigake? There must be a few people at least who become disillusioned with the religion or can’t take the harsh discipline and break away.”

“There’s constant coming and going, of course—people joining, people quitting. Basically, people are free to quit anytime. When they join, they make a huge donation as a ‘Permanent Facility Use Fee’ and sign a contract stipulating that it is entirely nonrefundable, so as long as they’re willing to accept that loss, they can come out with nothing but the clothes on their backs. There’s an organization of people who have quit the religion, and they accuse Sakigake of being a dangerous, antisocial cult engaged in fraudulent activity. They’ve filed a suit and put out a little newsletter, but they’re such a small voice they have virtually zero impact on public opinion. The religion has a phalanx of top lawyers, and they’ve put together a watertight defense. One lawsuit can’t budge them.”

“Haven’t the ex-members made any statements about Leader or the children inside?”

“I don’t know,” Ayumi said. “I’ve never read their newsletter. As far as I’ve been able to check, though, all the dissidents are from the lowest ranks of the group, just small fry. Sakigake makes a big deal about how they reject all worldly values, but part of the organization is completely hierarchical, sharply divided between the leadership and the rest of them. You can’t become a member of the leadership without an advanced degree or specialized professional qualifications. Only elite believers in the leadership group ever get to see or receive direct instruction from Leader or make contact with key figures of the organization. All the others just make their required donations and spend one sterile day after another performing their religious austerities in the fresh air, devoting themselves to farming, or spending hours in the meditation rooms. They’re like a flock of sheep, led out to pasture under the watchful eye of the shepherd and his dog, and brought back to their shed at night, one peaceful day after the next. They look forward to the day when their position rises high enough in the organization for them to come into the presence of Big Brother, but that day never comes. That’s why ordinary believers know almost nothing about the inner workings of the organization. Even if they quit Sakigake, they don’t have any important information they can offer the outside world. They’ve never even seen Leader’s face.”