After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

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. 
Tamaki committed suicide on a windy late-autumn day three days before her twenty-
sixth birthday. She hanged herself at home. Her husband found her the next evening 
when he returned from a business trip. 
“We had no domestic problems, and I never heard of any dissatisfaction on her 
part. I can’t imagine what would have caused her to take her own life,” the husband 
told the police. His parents said much the same thing. 
But they were lying. The husband’s constant sadistic violence had left Tamaki 
covered with scars both physical and mental. His actions toward her had verged on 
the monomaniacal, and his parents generally knew the truth. The police could also tell 
what had happened from the autopsy, but their suspicions never became public. They 
called the husband in and questioned him, but the case was clearly a suicide, and at 
the time of death the husband was hundreds of miles away in Hokkaido. He was never 
charged with a crime. Tamaki’s younger brother subsequently revealed all this to 
Aomame in confidence. 
The violence had been there from the beginning, he said, and it only grew more 
insistent and more gruesome with the passage of time. But Tamaki had been unable to 
escape from her nightmare. She had not said a word about it to Aomame because she 
knew what the answer would be if she asked for advice: Get out of that house 
now
. 
But that was the one thing she could not do. 

---

153
At the very end, just before she killed herself, Tamaki wrote a long letter to 
Aomame. It started by saying that she had been wrong and Aomame had been right 
from the start. She closed the letter this way: 
I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I 
don’t know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my 
prison. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key. 
This marriage was of course a mistake, just as you said. But the deepest problem is 
not in my husband or in my married life. It is inside me. I deserve all the pain I am 
feeling. I can’t blame anyone else. You are my only friend, the only person in the 
world I can trust. But I am beyond saving now. Please remember me always if you 
can. If only we could have gone on playing softball together forever! 
Aomame felt horribly sick as she read Tamaki’s letter. Her body would not stop 
trembling. She called Tamaki’s house several times, but no one took the call. All she 
got was the machine. She took the train to Setagaya and walked to Tamaki’s house in 
Okusawa. It was on a large plot of land behind a high wall. Aomame rang the 
intercom bell, but no one answered this, either. There was only the sound of a dog 
barking inside. All she could do was give up and go home. She had no way of 
knowing it, but Tamaki had already drawn her last breath. She was hanging alone 
from a rope she had tied to the stairway handrail. Inside the hushed house, the 
telephone’s bell and the front-door chime had been ringing in emptiness. 
Aomame received the news of Tamaki’s death with little sense of surprise. 
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she must have been expecting it. She felt no 
sadness welling up. She gave the caller a perfunctory answer, hung up, and settled 
into a chair. After she had been sitting there for a considerable length of time, she felt 
all the liquids in her body pouring out of her. She could not get out of the chair for a 
very long time. She telephoned her company to say she felt sick and would not be in 
for several days. She stayed in her apartment, not eating, not sleeping, hardly drinking 
even water. She did not attend the funeral. She felt as if, with a distinct click, 
something had switched places inside her. 
This marks a borderline
, she felt strongly. 
From now on, I will no longer be the person I was
. 
Aomame resolved in her heart to punish the man for what he had done. 
Whatever 
happens, I must be sure to present him with the end of the world. Otherwise, he will 
do the same thing to someone else
. 
Aomame spent a great deal of time formulating a meticulous plan. She had already 
learned that a needle thrust into a certain point on the back of the neck at a certain 
angle could kill a person instantly. It was not something that just anyone could do, of 
course. But she could do it. First, she would have to train herself to find the extremely 
subtle point by touch in the shortest possible time. Next she would have to have an 
instrument suited to such a task. She obtained the necessary tools and, over time, 
fashioned for herself a special implement that looked like a small, slender ice pick. Its 
needle was as sharp and cold and pointed as a merciless idea. She found many ways 
to undertake the necessary training, and she did so with great dedication. When she 
was satisfied with her preparation, she put her plan into action. Unhesitatingly, coolly, 
and precisely, she brought the kingdom down upon the man. And when she was 

---

154
finished she even intoned a prayer, its phrases falling from her lips almost as a matter 
of reflex: 
O Lord in Heaven, may Thy name be praised in utmost purity for ever and ever, and 
may Thy kingdom come to us. Please forgive our many sins, and bestow Thy 
blessings upon our humble pathways. Amen. 
It was after this that Aomame came to feel an intense periodic craving for men’s 
bodies. 

---

155