After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 17 
Aomame 
PULL THE RAT OUT 
The seven a.m. television news carried a big report on the Akasaka-Mitsuke subway 
station’s flooding, but there was no mention of the death of Sakigake’s Leader in a 
suite at the Hotel Okura. When NHK’s news ended, Aomame switched channels and 
watched the news on a few other channels, but none of them announced that large 
man’s painless death. 
They hid his body
, Aomame thought, scowling. Tamaru had predicted such a 
possibility, but she had found it hard to believe that they would actually do it. 
Somehow they had managed to carry Leader’s corpse from the Hotel Okura suite, 
load it into a car, and take it away. He was a big man, and the corpse must have been 
tremendously heavy. The hotel was full of guests and employees. Security cameras 
were everywhere. How had they succeeded in carrying the corpse to the hotel’s 
underground parking lot without having anyone notice? 
They must have transported the body at night to the headquarters in Yamanashi 
and then held a discussion of what to do with it. At least they were not going to 
formally report his death to the police. Once you’ve hidden something, you have to 
keep it hidden. 
Aomame, of course, had no idea how they intended to fill the vacuum created by 
Leader’s death. But they would exhaust every means available to them to maintain the 
organization. As the man himself had said, the system would endure with or without a 
leader. Who could inherit Leader’s mantle? That problem had nothing to do with 
Aomame. Her assignment had been to liquidate Leader, not to crush a religion. 
She thought about the two bodyguards in their dark suits. Buzzcut and Ponytail. 
When they got back to headquarters, would they be held responsible for having 
allowed Leader to be wiped out before their very eyes? Aomame imagined their next 
assignment: “Find that woman, no matter what. Don’t come back here until you do.” 
It was possible. 
She ate an apple for breakfast, but she had almost no appetite. Her hands still 
retained the sensation of driving the needle into the back of the man’s neck. While 
peeling the apple with a small knife in her right hand, she felt a slight trembling in her 
body—a trembling she had never experienced before. When she had killed someone 
in the past, the memory of it had nearly faded after a night’s sleep. Though it never 
felt good to take a person’s life, those were all men who didn’t deserve to go on 
living. They inspired more disgust than human pity. But this time was different. 
Objectively, what this man had been doing was perhaps an affront to humanity. But 

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he himself was, in many senses, an extraordinary human being, and his 
extraordinariness, at least in part, appeared to transcend standards of good and evil. 
Ending his life had also been something extraordinary. It had left a strange kind of 
resonance in her hands—an extraordinary resonance. 
What he had left behind was a “promise.” This was the conclusion to which 
Aomame’s thoughts led her. The weight of that promise was left in her hands as a 
sign
. She understood this. The sign might not fade from her hands—ever. 
The phone rang shortly after nine a.m. It was Tamaru. It rang three times, stopped, 
and started again twenty seconds later. 
“They didn’t call the police after all,” Tamaru said. “It’s not on the TV news or in 
the paper.” 
“He 
did
die, though. I’m sure of that.” 
“Yes, of course, I know. No question he died. There were a few movements around 
there. They’ve already cleared out of the hotel. They called in several people from 
their city branch office in the middle of the night, probably to help deal with the body. 
They’re good at things like that. Around one a.m., an S-Class Mercedes and a Toyota 
Hiace van left the hotel parking lot. Both had dark glass and Yamanashi plates. They 
were probably back in Sakigake headquarters by sunrise. The police investigated the 
compound the day before yesterday, but it wasn’t a full-scale operation, and all the 
officers were long gone by then. Sakigake has a big incinerator. If you threw a body 
in there, it wouldn’t leave a bone, just clean smoke.” 
“Creepy.” 
“They’re a creepy bunch, all right. Even if their Leader is dead, the organization 
will keep moving for a while, like a snake that keeps going even after its head is cut 
off. Head on or off, it knows exactly where it’s headed. Nobody can say what will 
happen in the future. It might die. Or grow a new head.” 
“He was no ordinary man.” 
Tamaru offered no opinion on that matter. 
“Completely different from the others,” Aomame said. 
Tamaru took a moment to gauge the resonance of her words. Then he said, “Yes, I 
can imagine this was different from the others. But we’d better start thinking about 
what happens