“Want me to have a look at the police materials? If you give me the basic information, we might be able to find out where he is and what he’s doing.”

Aomame shook her head. “Please don’t look for him. I think I told you before, I’ll run into him sometime, somewhere, strictly by chance. I’ll just keep patiently waiting for that time to come.”

“Like a big, romantic TV series,” Ayumi said, impressed. “I love stuff like that. I get chills just thinking about it.”

“It’s tough on the one who’s actually doing it, though.”

“I know what you mean,” Ayumi said, lightly pressing her fingers against her temples. “But still, even though you’re that much in love with him, you feel like sleeping with strange men every once in a while.”

Aomame clicked her fingernails against the rim of the thin wineglass. “I need to do it. To keep myself in balance as a flesh-and-blood human being.”

“And it doesn’t destroy the love you have inside you.”

Aomame said, “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

“Marvelous,” Ayumi said. “The Tibetan Wheel of the Passions, huh?”

And she drank down the wine remaining in her glass.

Two days later, a little after eight o’clock at night, a call came from Tamaru. As always, he skipped the preliminary greetings and went straight to business.

“Are you free tomorrow afternoon?”

“I don’t have a thing in the afternoon. I can come over whenever you need me.”

“How about four thirty?”

Aomame said that would be fine.

“Good,” Tamaru said. She could hear his ballpoint pen scratching the time into his calendar. He was pressing down hard.

“How is Tsubasa doing?” Aomame asked.

“She’s doing well, I think. Madame is going there every day to look after her. The girl seems to be growing fond of her.”

“That’s good news.”

“Yes, it is good news, but something else happened that is not so good.”

“Something not so good?” Aomame knew that when Tamaru said something was “not so good,” it had to be terrible.

“The dog died,” Tamaru said.

“The dog? You mean Bun?”

“Yes, the funny German shepherd that liked spinach. She died last night.”

Aomame was shocked to hear this. The dog was maybe five or six years old, not an age for dying. “She was perfectly healthy the last time I saw her.”

“She didn’t die from illness,” Tamaru said, his voice flat. “I found her this morning in pieces.”

“In pieces?!”

“As if she had exploded. Her guts were splattered all over the place. It was pretty intense. I had to go around picking up chunks of flesh with paper towels. The force of the blast turned her body inside out. It was as if somebody had set off a small but powerful bomb inside her stomach.”

“The poor dog!”

“Oh, well, there’s nothing to be done about the dog,” Tamaru said. “She’s dead and won’t be coming back. I can find another guard dog to take her place. What worries me, though, is what happened. It wasn’t something that any ordinary person could do—setting off a bomb inside a dog like that. For one thing, that dog barked like crazy whenever a stranger approached. This was not an easy thing to carry off.”

“That’s for sure,” Aomame said in a dry tone of voice.

“The women in the safe house are scared to death. The one in charge of feeding the dog found her like that this morning. First she puked her guts out and then she called me. I asked if anything suspicious happened during the night. Not a thing, she said. Nobody heard an explosion. If there had been such a big sound, everybody would have woken up for sure. These women live in fear even in the best of times. It must have been a soundless explosion. And nobody heard the dog bark. It was an especially quiet night, but when morning came, there was the dog, inside out. Fresh organs had been blown all over, and the neighborhood crows were having a great time. For me, though, it was nothing but worries.”

“Something weird is happening.”

“That’s for sure,” Tamaru said. “Something weird is happening. And if what I’m feeling is right, this is just the beginning of something.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Hell, no,” Tamaru said, with a contemptuous little snort. “The police are useless—looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. They’d just complicate matters.”

“What does Madame say?”

“Nothing. She just nodded when I gave her my report,” Tamaru said. “All security measures are my responsibility, from beginning to end. It’s my job.”

A short silence followed, a heavy silence having to do with responsibility.

“Tomorrow at four thirty,” Aomame said.

“Tomorrow at four thirty,” Tamaru repeated, and quietly hung up.

CHAPTER 24

Tengo

WHAT’S THE POINT OF ITS BEING

A WORLD THAT ISN’T HERE?

It rained all Thursday morning, not a heavy downpour, but persistent rain. There had been no letup since the previous afternoon. Whenever it seemed about to stop it would start pouring again. June was half gone without a sign the rainy season would ever end. The sky remained dark, as if covered with a lid, and the world wore a heavy dampness.

Just before noon, Tengo put on a raincoat and hat and was headed out to the local market when he noticed a brown padded envelope in his mailbox. It bore no postmark, stamps, or address, and no return address, either. His name had been written with a ballpoint pen in the middle of the front in small, stiff characters that might have been scratched into dry clay with a nail—Fuka-Eri’s writing, without question. He tore it open to find a single bare sixty-minute TDK audiotape cassette. No letter or memo accompanied it. It was not in a plastic case, and the cassette bore no label.

After a moment of uncertainty, Tengo decided to forget about shopping and listen to the tape. Back in his apartment, he held the cassette in the air and gave it several shakes. For all the mystery surrounding its arrival, it was obviously just an ordinary mass-produced object. There was nothing suggesting that it would explode after he played it.

Taking off his raincoat, he set a radio cassette player on the kitchen table. He removed the cassette from the padded envelope and inserted it into the player, next to which he placed memo paper and a ballpoint pen in case he wanted to take notes. After looking around to make certain there was no one else present, he pressed the “play” button.

There was no sound at first. This lasted for some time. Just as he was beginning to suspect that it was nothing but a blank tape, there were some sudden bumping sounds like the moving of a chair. Then a light clearing of the throat (it seemed). Then, without warning, Fuka-Eri began to speak.

“Tengo,” she said, as if in a sound test. As far as he could recall, this was probably the first time she had actually called him by name.

She cleared her throat again. She seemed tense.

I should write you a letter, but I’m bad at that, so I’ll record a tape. It’s easier for me to talk this way than on the phone. Somebody might be listening on the phone. Wait, I need water.

Tengo heard what he thought were the sounds of Fuka-Eri picking up a glass, taking a drink, and setting the glass back down on a table. Recorded on tape, her uniquely unaccented manner of speech without question marks or other punctuation sounded even stranger than in conversation. It was almost unreal. On tape, however, as opposed to conversation, she was able to speak several sentences in a row.