239
treated to beautiful explanations of spiritual awakening, and they went home satisfied.
They never had a glimpse of what was really going on inside
.
Aomame went straight from the library to a café, where she ordered a cup of coffee
and used the phone to call Ayumi at her office, on the number that Ayumi had told
her she could call anytime. A colleague picked up the phone. Ayumi was
out making
rounds but should be back at the station in about two hours, he said. “I’ll call again
later,” Aomame said without giving her name.
She went back to her apartment and dialed the number again two hours later. This
time Ayumi answered the phone herself.
“Hi, Aomame, how are you?”
“Fine, how are you?”
“Nothing wrong with me that a good man wouldn’t fix. How about you?”
“Same here,” Aomame said.
“Too bad,” Ayumi said. “There must be something wrong with the world if women
like us have to complain to each other about overly healthy sex drives. We’ll have to
do something about that.”
“True, but … uh, is it okay for you to be saying stuff like that out loud? You’re on
duty, right? Isn’t anybody else around?”
“Don’t worry, you can talk to me about anything.”
“Well, I’ve got a favor to ask if it’s something you can do for me. I can’t think of
anyone else I can go to for this.”
“Sure,” Ayumi said. “I don’t know if I can help or not, but give it a try.”
“Do you know of a religious group called Sakigake? It’s headquartered in
Yamanashi Prefecture, in the hills.”
“Sakigake? Hmm.” Ayumi took some ten seconds to search her memory. “I think I
know it. It’s
a kind of religious commune, isn’t it? The Akebono radicals that started
the gun battle in Yamanashi used to belong to it. Three prefectural policemen died in
the shootout. It was a real shame. But Sakigake had nothing to do with it. Their
compound was searched after the shootout and came up clean. So …?”
“I’d like to know if Sakigake was involved in any kind of incident after the
shootout—criminal, civil, anything. But I don’t know how to go about looking into
such things. I can’t read all the compact
editions of all the newspapers, but I figured
the police probably had some way of finding out.”
“It’s easy, we just have to do a quick search on our computer—or, at least, I wish I
could say that, but I’m afraid computerization is not so advanced in Japan’s police
forces. I suspect it’ll take a few more years to get to that stage. So for now,
if I wanted
to find out about something like that, I’d probably have to ask the Yamanashi
Prefectural Police to send copies of the related materials in the mail. And for that I’d
first have to fill out a materials request form and get my boss’s okay. Of course I’d
have to give a good reason for the request. And we’re a government office, after all,
so we’re getting paid to make things as complicated as possible.”
“I see,” Aomame said with a sigh. “So that’s out.”
“But why do you want to know something like that? Is some
friend of yours mixed
up in some kind of case connected to Sakigake?”
240
Aomame hesitated a moment before deciding to tell Ayumi the truth. “Close. It
involves rape. I can’t go into detail yet, but it’s about the rape of young girls. I’ve
been informed that they’re systematically raping them in there under cover of
religion.”
Aomame could sense Ayumi wrinkling her brow at the other end. “The rape of
young girls, huh? We can’t let that happen,” Ayumi said.
“Of course we can’t,” Aomame said.
“What do you mean by ‘young’?”
“Maybe ten, or even younger. Girls who haven’t had their first period, at least.”
Ayumi went silent for a while. Then, in a flat voice, she said, “I see what you
mean. I’ll think of something. Can you give me two or three days?”
“Sure. Just let me know.”
They spent the next few minutes in unrelated
chatter until Ayumi said, “Okay, I’ve
got to get back to work.”
After hanging up, Aomame sat in her reading chair by the window and stared at her
right hand for a while. Long, slim fingers, closely trimmed nails. Nails well cared for
but unpolished. Looking at her nails, Aomame had a
strong sense of what a fragile,
fleeting thing her own existence was. Something as simple as the shape of her
fingernails: it had been decided without her.
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