After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

That one never said a word
, Aomame thought. She returned his bow and 
started to slip past him. 
In that moment, however, a violent urge penetrated Aomame’s skin, like an intense 
electric current. Ponytail’s hand shot out as if to grab her right arm. It should have 
been a swift, precise movement—like grabbing a fly in thin air. Aomame had a vivid 
sense of its happening 
right there
. Every muscle in her body stiffened up. Her skin 
crawled, and her heart skipped a beat. Her breath caught in her throat, and icy insects 
crawled up and down her spine. A blazing hot white light poured into her mind: 
If this 
man grabs my right arm, I won’t be able to reach for the pistol. And if that happens, I 
have no hope of winning. He feels it. He feels that I’ve done something. His intuition 
recognizes that
something 
happened in this hotel room. He doesn’t know what, but it 
is something that should not have happened. His instincts are telling him, “You have 
to stop this woman,” ordering him to wrestle me to the floor, drop his whole weight 
on me, and dislocate my shoulders. But he has only instinct, no proof. If his feeling 
turns out to be wrong, he’ll be in big trouble. He was intensely conflicted, and now 
he’s given up. Buzzcut is the one who makes the decisions and gives the orders. 
Ponytail is not qualified. He struggled to suppress the impulse of his right hand and 

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let the tension go out of his shoulder
. Aomame had a vivid sense of the stages through 
which Ponytail’s mind had passed in that second or two. 
Aomame stepped out into the carpeted hallway and headed for the elevator without 
looking back, walking coolly down the perfectly straight corridor. Ponytail, it seemed, 
had stuck his head out the door and was following her movements with his eyes. She 
continued to feel his sharp, knifelike gaze piercing her back. Every muscle in her 
body was tingling, but she refused to look back. She 
must not
look back. Only when 
she turned the corner did she feel the tension go out of her. But still she could not 
relax. There was no telling what could happen next. She pushed the elevator’s “down” 
button and reached around to hold the pistol grip until the elevator came (which took 
an eternity), ready to draw the gun if Ponytail changed his mind and came after her. 
She would have to shoot him without hesitation before he put his powerful hands on 
her. Or shoot herself without hesitation. She could not decide which. Perhaps she 
would not be able to decide. 
But no one came after her. The hotel corridor was hushed. The elevator door opened 
with a ring, and Aomame got on. She pressed the button for the lobby and waited for 
the door to close. Biting her lip, she glared at the floor number display. Then she 
exited the elevator, walked across the broad lobby, and stepped into a cab waiting for 
passengers at the front door. The rain had cleared up completely, but the cab had 
water dripping from its entire chassis, as if it had made its way here underwater. 
Aomame told the driver to take her to the west exit of Shinjuku Station. As they 
pulled away from the hotel, she exhaled every bit of air she was holding inside. Then 
she closed her eyes and emptied her mind. She didn’t want to think about anything for 
a while. 
A strong wave of nausea hit her. It felt as if the entire contents of her stomach were 
surging up toward her throat, but she managed to force them back down. She pressed 
the button to open her window halfway, sending the damp night air deep into her 
lungs. Then she leaned back and took several deep breaths. Her mouth produced an 
ominous smell, as though something inside her were beginning to rot. 
It suddenly occurred to her to search in her pants pocket, where she found two 
sticks of chewing gum. Her hands trembled slightly as she tore off the wrappers. She 
put the sticks in her mouth and began chewing slowly. Spearmint. The pleasantly 
familiar aroma helped to quiet her nerves. As she moved her jaw, the bad smell in her 
mouth began to dissipate. 
It’s not as if I actually have something rotting inside me. 
Fear is doing funny things to me, that’s all
. 
Anyhow, it’s all over now
, Aomame thought. 
I don’t have to kill anyone anymore. 
And what I did was right
, she told herself. 
He deserved to be killed for what he did. It 
was a simple case of just punishment. And as it happened (strictly by chance), the 
man himself had a strong desire to be killed. I gave him the peaceful death he was 
hoping for. I did nothing wrong. All I did was break the law
. 
Try as she might, however, Aomame was unable to convince herself that this was 
true. Only moments before, she had killed a far-from-ordinary human being with her 
own hands. She retained a vivid memory of how it felt when the needle sank 
soundlessly into the back of the man’s neck. That far-from-ordinary feeling was still 

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there, in her hands, upsetting her to no small degree. She opened her palms and stared 
at them. Something was different, utterly different. But she was unable to discover 
what had changed, and how. 
If she was to believe what he had told her, she had just killed a prophet, one 
entrusted with the voice of a god. But the master of that voice was no god. It was 
probably the Little People. A prophet is simultaneously a king, and a king is destined 
to be killed. She was, in other words, an assassin sent by destiny. By violently 
exterminating a being who was both prophet and king, she had preserved the balance 
of good and evil in the world, as a result of which she must die. But when she 
performed the deed, she struck a bargain. By killing the man and, in effect, throwing 
her own life away, she would save Tengo’s life. That was the content of the bargain.