“Aren’t there any members of the elite who have quit?”

“Not one, as far as I can tell.”

“Does that mean you’re not allowed to leave once you’ve learned the secrets?”

“There might be some pretty dramatic developments if it came to that,” Ayumi said with a short sigh. Then she said to Aomame, “So tell me, about that raping of little girls you mentioned: how definite is that?”

“Pretty definite, but there’s still no proof.”

“It’s being done systematically inside the commune?”

“That’s not entirely clear, either. We do have one actual victim, though. I’ve met the girl. They did terrible things to her.”

“By ‘rape,’ do you mean actual penetration?”

“Yes, there’s no question about that.”

Ayumi twisted her lips at an angle, thinking. “I’ve got it! Let me dig into this a little more in my own way.”

“Don’t get in over your head, now.”

“Don’t worry,” Ayumi said. “I may not look it, but I’m very cautious.”

They finished their meal, and the waiter cleared the table. They declined to order dessert and, instead, continued drinking wine.

Ayumi said, “Remember how you told me that no men had fooled around with you when you were a little girl?”

Aomame glanced at Ayumi, registering the look on her face, and nodded. “My family was very religious. There was never any talk of sex, and it was the same with all the other families we knew. Sex was a forbidden topic.”

“Well, okay, but being religious has nothing to do with the strength or weakness of a person’s sex drive. Everybody knows the clergy is full of sex freaks. In fact, we arrest a lot of people connected with religion—and with education—for stuff like prostitution and groping women on commuter trains.”

“Maybe so, but at least in our circles, there was no hint of that kind of thing, nobody who did anything they shouldn’t.”

“Well, good for you,” Ayumi said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“It was different for you?”

Instead of responding immediately, Ayumi gave a little shrug. Then she said, “To tell you the truth, they messed around with me a lot when I was a girl.”

“Who were ‘they’?”

“My brother. And my uncle.”

Aomame grimaced slightly. “Your brother and uncle?”

“That’s right. They’re both policemen now. Not too long ago, my uncle even received official commendation as an outstanding officer—thirty years of continuous service, major contributions to public safety in the district and to improvement of the environment. He was featured in the paper once for saving a stupid dog and her pup that wandered into a rail crossing.”

“What did they do to you?”

“Touched me down there, made me give them blow jobs.”

The wrinkles of Aomame’s grimace deepened. “Your brother and uncle?”

“Separately, of course. I think I was ten and my brother maybe fifteen. My uncle did it before that—two or three times, when he stayed over with us.”

“Did you tell anybody?”

Ayumi responded with a few slow shakes of the head. “I didn’t say a word. They warned me not to, threatened that they’d get me if I said anything. And even if they hadn’t, I was afraid if I told, they’d blame me for it and punish me. I was too scared to tell anybody.”

“Not even your mother?”

“Especially my mother,” Ayumi said. “My brother had always been her favorite, and she was always telling me how disappointed she was in me—I was sloppy, I was fat, I wasn’t pretty enough, my grades in school were nothing special. She wanted a different kind of daughter—a slim, cute little doll to send to ballet lessons. It was like asking for the impossible.”

“So you didn’t want to disappoint her even more.”

“Right. I was sure if I told her what my brother was doing, she’d hate me even more. She’d say it was my fault instead of blaming him.”

Aomame used her fingers to smooth out the wrinkles in her face. My mother refused to talk to me after I announced that I was abandoning the faith at the age often. She’d hand me notes when it was absolutely necessary to communicate something, but she would never speak. I ceased to be her daughter. I was just “the one who abandoned the faith.” I moved out after that.

“But there was no penetration?” Aomame asked Ayumi.

“No penetration,” Ayumi said. “As bad as they were, they couldn’t do anything that painful to me. Not even they would demand that much.”

“Do you still see this brother and uncle of yours?”

“Hardly ever after I took a job and left the house. But we are relatives, after all, and we’re in the same profession. Sometimes I can’t avoid seeing them, and when I do I’m all smiles. I don’t do anything to rock the boat. I bet they don’t even remember that something like that ever happened.”

“Don’t remember?”

“Sure, they can forget about it,” Ayumi said. “I never can.”

“Of course not,” Aomame said.

“It’s like some historic massacre.”

“Massacre?”

“The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

“True,” Aomame said, scowling slightly. An endless battle of contrasting memories?

“To tell you the truth,” Ayumi said, “I kind of thought that you must have had the same kind of experience as me.”

“Why did you think that?”

“I don’t know, I can’t really explain it, I just sort of figured. Maybe I thought that having wild one-night stands with strange men was a result of something like that. And in your case, I thought I detected some kind of anger, too. Anyhow, you just don’t seem like someone who can do the ordinary thing, you know, like everybody else does: find a regular boyfriend, go out on a date, have a meal, and have sex in the usual way with just the one person. It’s more or less the same with me.”

“You’re saying that you couldn’t follow the normal pattern because someone messed around with you when you were little?”

“That’s how I felt,” Ayumi said. She gave a little shrug. “To tell you the truth, I’m afraid of men. Or, rather, I’m afraid of getting deeply involved with one particular man, of completely taking on another person. The very thought of it makes me cringe. But being alone can be hard sometimes. I want a man to hold me, to put his thing inside me. I want it so bad I can’t stand it sometimes. Not knowing the man at all makes it easier. A lot easier.”

“Because you’re afraid of men?”

“I think that’s a large part of it.”

“I don’t think I have any fear of men,” Aomame said.

“Is there anything you are afraid of?”

“Of course there is,” Aomame said. “The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.”

“What are you doing right now?”

Aomame stared at the wineglass in her hand for a time. “I wish I knew.” She looked up. “But I don’t. I can’t even be sure what world I’m in now, what year I’m in.”

“It’s 1984. We’re in Tokyo, in Japan.”

“I wish I could declare that with such certainty.”

“You’re strange,” Ayumi said with a smile. “They’re just self-evident truths. ‘Declaring’ and ‘certainty’ are beside the point.”

“I can’t explain it very well, but I can’t say they’re self-evident truths to me.”

“You can’t?” Ayumi said as if deeply impressed. “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about, but I will say this: whatever time and place this might be, you do have one person you love deeply, and that’s something I can only envy. I don’t have anybody like that.”

Aomame set her wineglass down on the table and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. Then she said, “You may be right. Whatever time and place this might be, totally unrelated to that, I want to see him. I want to see him so badly I could die. That’s the only thing that seems certain. It’s the only thing I can say with confidence.”