While she waited, Aomame let her eyes wander over the garden’s magnificent willow trees. Without a wind to stir them, their branches hung down toward the ground, as if they were people deep in thought.
Tamaru came back a short time later. “I’m going to have you go around to the back. She wants to see you in the hothouse today.”
The two of them circled the garden past the willows in the direction of the hothouse, which was behind the main house in a sunny area without trees. Tamaru carefully opened the glass door just far enough for Aomame to squeeze through without letting the butterflies escape. He slipped in after her, quickly shutting the door. This was not a motion that a big man would normally be good at, though he did it very efficiently. He simply didn’t think of it as a special accomplishment.
Spring had come inside the big, glass hothouse, completely and unreservedly. Flowers of all descriptions were blooming in profusion, but most of them were ordinary varieties that could be seen just about anywhere. Potted gladiolus, anemone, and daisies lined the shelves. Among them were plants that, to Aomame, could only be weeds. She saw not one that might be a prize specimen—no costly orchids, no rare roses, no primary-colored Polynesian blooms. Aomame had no special interest in plants, but the lack of affectation in this hothouse was something she rather liked.
Instead, the place was full of butterflies. The owner of this large glass enclosure seemed to be far more interested in raising unusual butterflies than rare plant specimens. Most of the flowers grown here were rich in the nectar preferred by the butterflies. To keep butterflies in a hothouse calls for a great deal of attention, knowledge, and effort, Aomame had heard, but she had absolutely no idea where such attention had been lavished here.
The dowager, the mistress of the house, would occasionally invite Aomame into the hothouse for private chats, though never at the height of summer. The glass enclosure was ideal to keep from being overheard. Their conversations were not the sort that could be held just anywhere at full volume, and the owner said it calmed her to be surrounded by flowers and butterflies. Aomame could see it on her face. The hothouse was a bit too warm for Aomame, but not unbearable.
The dowager was in her mid-seventies and slightly built. She kept her lovely white hair short. Today she wore a long-sleeved denim work shirt, cream-colored cotton pants, and dirty tennis shoes. With white cotton work gloves on her hands, she was using a large metal watering can to moisten the soil in one pot after another. Everything she wore seemed to be a size too large, but each piece hung on her body with comfortable familiarity. Whenever Aomame looked at her, she could not help but feel a kind of esteem for her natural, unaffected dignity.
Born into one of the fabulously wealthy families that dominated finance and industry prior to World War II, the dowager had married into the aristocracy, but there was nothing showy or pampered about her. When she lost her husband shortly after the war, she helped run a relative’s small investment company and displayed an outstanding talent for the stock market. Everyone recognized it as something for which she had a natural gift. Thanks to her efforts, the company developed rapidly, and the personal fortune left to her expanded enormously. With this money, she bought several first-class properties in the city that had been owned by former members of the aristocracy or the imperial family. She had retired ten years earlier, having increased her fortune yet again by well-timed sales of her holdings. Because she had always avoided appearing in public, her name was not widely known, though everyone in financial circles knew of her. It was also rumored that she had strong political connections. On a personal level, she was simply a bright, friendly woman who knew no fear, trusted her instincts, and stuck to her decisions.
When she saw Aomame come in, the dowager put down her watering can and motioned for her to sit in a small iron garden chair near the hothouse entrance. Aomame sat down, and the woman sat in the chair facing her. None of her movements made any sound. She was like a female fox cutting through the forest.
“Shall I bring drinks?” Tamaru asked.
“Some herbal tea for me,” the dowager said. “And for you …?” She looked at Aomame.
“I’ll have the same.”
Tamaru nodded and left the hothouse. After looking around to make sure there were no butterflies nearby, he opened the door a crack, slipped through, and closed the door again with the precision of a ballroom dancer.
The dowager took off her work gloves and set them on a table, carefully placing one on top of the other as she might with silk gloves she had worn to a soirée. Then she looked straight at Aomame with her lustrous black eyes. These were eyes that had witnessed much. Aomame returned her gaze as long as courtesy allowed.
“We seem to have lost a valuable member of society,” the dowager said. “Especially well known in oil circles, apparently. Still young, but quite the powerhouse, I hear.”
She always spoke softly. Her voice was easily drowned out by a slight gust of wind. People had to pay attention to what she was saying. Aomame often felt the urge to reach over and turn up the volume—if only there were a knob! She had no choice but to listen intently.
Aomame said, “But still, his sudden absence doesn’t seem to have inconvenienced anybody. The world just keeps moving along.”
The dowager smiled. “There is no one in this world who can’t be replaced. A person might have enormous knowledge or ability, but a successor can almost always be found. It would be terrible for us if the world were full of people who couldn’t be replaced. Though of course”—and here she raised her right index finger to make a point—“I can’t imagine finding anybody to take your place.”
“You might not find a person that easily, but you could probably find a way without too much trouble,” Aomame noted.
The dowager looked at Aomame calmly, her lips forming a satisfied smile. “That may be true,” she said, “but I almost surely could never find anything to take the place of what we are sharing here and now. You are you and only you. I’m very grateful for that. More grateful than I can say.”
She bent forward, stretched out her hand, and laid it on Aomame’s. She kept it there for a full ten seconds. Then, with a look of great satisfaction on her face, she withdrew her hand and twisted around to face the other way. A butterfly came fluttering along and landed on the shoulder of her blue work shirt. It was a small, white butterfly with a few crimson spots on its wings. The butterfly seemed to know no fear as it went to sleep on her shoulder.
“I’m sure you’ve never seen this kind of butterfly,” the dowager said, glancing toward her own shoulder. Her voice betrayed a touch of pride. “Even down in Okinawa, you’d have trouble finding one of these. It gets its nourishment from only one type of flower—a special flower that only grows in the mountains of Okinawa. You have to bring the flower here and grow it first if you want to keep this butterfly in Tokyo. It’s a lot of trouble. Not to mention the expense.”
“It seems to be very comfortable with you.”
“This little person thinks of me as a friend.”
“Is it possible to become friends with a butterfly?”
“It is if you first become a part of nature. You suppress your presence as a human being, stay very still, and convince yourself that you are a tree or grass or a flower. It takes time, but once the butterfly lets its guard down, you can become friends quite naturally.”
“Do you give them names?” Aomame asked, curious. “Like dogs or cats?”
The dowager gave her head a little shake. “No, I don’t give them names, but I can tell one from another by their shapes and patterns. And besides, there wouldn’t be much point in giving them names: they die so quickly. These people are your nameless friends for just a little while. I come here every day, say hello to the butterflies, and talk about things with them. When the time comes, though, they just quietly go off and disappear. I’m sure it means they’ve died, but I can never find their bodies. They don’t leave any trace behind. It’s as if they’ve been absorbed by the a
ir. They’re dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.”
The hothouse air was warm and humid and thick with the smell of plants. Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end. Whenever she came in here, Aomame felt as if she had lost all sense of time.
Tamaru came back with a silver tray bearing a beautiful celadon teapot and two matching cups, cloth napkins, and a small dish of cookies. The aroma of herbal tea mingled with the fragrance of the surrounding flowers.
“Thank you, Tamaru. I’ll take over from here,” the dowager said.
Tamaru set the tray on the nearby table, gave the dowager a bow, and moved silently away, opening and closing the hothouse door, exiting with the same light steps as before. The woman lifted the teapot lid, inhaling the fragrance inside and checking the degree of openness of the leaves. Then she slowly filled their two cups, taking great care to ensure the equality of their strength.
“It’s none of my business, but why don’t you put a screen door on the entrance?” Aomame asked.
The dowager raised her head and looked at Aomame. “Screen door?”
“Yes, if you were to add a screen door inside the glass one, you wouldn’t have to be so careful every time to make sure no butterflies escaped.”
The dowager lifted her saucer with her left hand and, with her right hand, brought her cup to her mouth for a quiet sip of herbal tea. She savored its fragrance and gave a little nod. She returned the cup to the saucer and the saucer to the tray. After dabbing at her mouth with her napkin, she returned the cloth to her lap. At the very least, she took three times as long to accomplish these motions as the ordinary person. Aomame felt she was observing a fairy deep in the forest sipping a life-giving morning dew.
The woman lightly cleared her throat. “I don’t like screens,” she said.
Aomame waited for the dowager to continue, but she did not. Was her dislike of screens based on a general opposition to things that restricted freedom, or on aesthetic considerations, or on a mere visceral preference that had no special reason behind it? Not that it was an especially important problem. Aomame’s question about screens had simply popped into her head.
Like the dowager, Aomame picked up her cup and saucer together and silently sipped her tea. She was not that fond of herbal tea. She preferred coffee as hot and strong as a devil at midnight, but perhaps that was not a drink suited to a hothouse in the afternoon. And so she always ordered the same drink as the mistress of the house when they were in the hothouse. When offered a cookie, she ate one. A gingersnap. Just baked, it had the taste of fresh ginger. Aomame recalled that the dowager had spent some time after the war in England. The dowager also took a cookie and nibbled it in tiny bits, slowly and quietly so as not to wake the rare butterfly sleeping on her shoulder.
“Tamaru will give you the key when you leave,” the woman said. “Please mail it back when you’re through with it. As always.”
“Of course.”
A tranquil moment of silence followed. No sounds reached the sealed hothouse from the outside world. The butterfly went on sleeping.
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” the woman said, looking straight at Aomame.
Aomame lightly set her teeth against her lower lip and nodded. “I know.”
“Look at what’s in that envelope,” the woman said.
From an envelope lying on the table Aomame took seven Polaroid photographs and set them in a row, like unlucky tarot cards, beside the fine celadon teapot. They were close-up shots of a young woman’s body: her back, breasts, buttocks, thighs, even the soles of her feet. Only her face was missing. Each body part bore marks of violence in the form of lurid welts, raised, almost certainly, by a belt. Her pubic hair had been shaved, the skin marked with what looked like cigarette burns. Aomame found herself scowling. She had seen photos like this in the past, but none as bad.
“You haven’t seen these before, have you?”
Aomame shook her head in silence. “I had heard, but this is the first I’ve seen of them.”
“Our man did this,” the dowager said. “We’ve taken care of her three fractures, but one ear is exhibiting symptoms of hearing loss and may never be the same again.” She spoke as quietly as ever, but her voice took on a cold, hard edge that seemed to startle the butterfly on her shoulder. It spread its wings and fluttered away.
She continued, “We can’t let anyone get away with doing something like this. We simply can’t.”
Aomame gathered the photos and returned them to the envelope.
“Don’t you agree?” the dowager asked.
“I certainly do,” said Aomame.
“We did the right thing,” the dowager declared.
She left her chair and, perhaps to calm herself, picked up the watering can by her side as if taking in hand a sophisticated weapon. She was somewhat pale now, her eyes sharply focused on a corner of the hothouse. Aomame followed her gaze but saw nothing more unusual than a potted thistle.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” the dowager said, still holding the empty watering can. “I appreciate your efforts.” This seemed to signal the end of their interview.
Aomame stood and picked up her bag. “Thank you for the tea.”
“And let me thank you again,” the dowager said.
Aomame gave her a faint smile.
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” the dowager said. Her voice had regained its gentle tone. A warm glow shone in her eyes. She touched Aomame’s arm. “We did the right thing, I’m telling you.”
Aomame nodded. The woman always ended their conversations this way. Perhaps she was saying the same thing to herself repeatedly, like a prayer or mantra. “You don’t have anything to worry about. We did the right thing, I’m telling you.”
After checking to be sure there were no butterflies nearby, Aomame opened the hothouse door just enough to squeeze through, and closed it again. The dowager stayed inside, the watering can in her hand. The air outside was chilling and fresh with the smell of trees and grass. This was the real world. Here time flowed in the normal manner. Aomame inhaled the real world’s air deep into her lungs.
She found Tamaru seated in the same teak chair by the front entrance, waiting for her. His task was to hand her a key to a post office box.
“Business finished?” he asked.
“I think so,” Aomame replied. She sat down next to him, took the key, and tucked it into a compartment of her shoulder bag.
For a time, instead of speaking, they watched the birds that were visiting the garden. There was still no wind, and the branches of the willows hung motionlessly. Several branches were nearly touching the ground.
“Is the woman doing okay?” Aomame asked.
“Which woman?”
“The wife of the man who suffered the heart attack in the Shibuya hotel.”
“Doing okay? Not really. Not yet,” Tamaru said with a scowl. “She’s still in shock. She can hardly speak. It’ll take time.”
“What’s she like?”
“Early thirties. No kids. Pretty. Seems like a nice person. Stylish. Unfortunately, she won’t be wearing bathing suits this summer. Maybe not next year, either. Did you see the Polaroids?”
“Yes, just now.”
“Horrible, no?”
“Really,” Aomame said.
Tamaru said, “It’s such a common pattern. Talented guy, well thought of, good family, impressive career, high social standing.”
“But he becomes a different person at home,” Aomame said, continuing his thought. “Especially when he drinks, he becomes violent. But only toward women. His wife is the only one he can knock around. To everyone else, he shows only his good side. Everybody thinks of him as a gentle, loving husband. The wife tries to tell people what terrible things he’s doing to he
r, but no one will believe her. The husband knows that, so when he’s violent he chooses parts of her body she can’t easily show to people, or he’s careful not to make bruises. Is this the ‘pattern’?”
Tamaru nodded. “Pretty much. Only this guy didn’t drink. He was stone-cold sober and out in the open about it. A really ugly case. She wanted a divorce, but he absolutely refused. Who knows? Maybe he loved her. Or maybe he didn’t want to let go of such a handy victim. Or maybe he just enjoyed raping his wife.”
Tamaru raised one foot, then the other, to check the shine on his shoes again. Then he continued, “Of course, you can usually get a divorce if you have proof of domestic violence, but it takes time and it takes money. If the husband hires a good lawyer, he can make it very unpleasant for you. The family courts are full, and there’s a shortage of judges. If, in spite of all that, you do get a divorce, and the judge awards a divorce settlement or alimony, the number of men who actually pay up is small. They can get out of it all kinds of ways. In Japan, ex-husbands almost never get put in jail for not paying. If they demonstrate a willingness to pay and cough up a little bit, the courts usually look the other way. Men still have the upper hand in Japanese society.”
Aomame said, “Maybe so, but as luck would have it, one of those violent husbands suffered a heart attack in a Shibuya hotel room a few days ago.”
“ ‘As luck would have it’ is a bit too direct for me,” Tamaru said with a click of the tongue. “I prefer ‘Due to heavenly dispensation.’ In any case, no doubts have been raised regarding the cause of death, and the amount of life insurance was not so high as to attract attention, so the insurance company won’t have any suspicions. They’ll probably pay without a hitch. Finally, it’s a decent amount of money, enough for her to begin a new life. Plus she’ll be saving all the time and money that would have been eaten up by suing for divorce. When it’s over, she will have avoided all the complicated, meaningless legal procedures and all the subsequent mental anguish.”
“Not to mention that that scummy bastard won’t be set loose on some new victim.”
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