The image of a hand with dry skin and wrinkles and prominent veins formed in his mind. A woman in her late thirties, holding a thin black menthol cigarette in a hand like an autumn leaf.

He’d met her when he was seventeen and lived with her for nearly two years. She was nineteen years older, and they were often mistaken for mother and son. Whenever this happened, the woman would force a smile and maintain a veneer of cool indifference; but afterwards, when she and Kawashima were alone, she’d rail bitterly against the person who’d committed the faux pas, sometimes for hours at a time. She was a stripper working in Gotanda when he met her, though in the two years they were together she must have changed clubs a dozen times.

The woman frequently brought men she’d met at her strip club back to the apartment and fooled around with them, right in front of Kawashima. If they asked, she’d tell them in a drunken mumble that he was her little brother. And yet invariably, after the men left, she’d go ballistic on Kawashima, attacking him with her fists and shrieking: ‘If you really loved me! You wouldn’t just sit there! And let another man! Make me do those things! You’d beat the hell out of him! Or kill him!’ Eventually he did rough some of them up, after which she’d start pounding him anyway, screaming that he was going to make her lose her job. The hysteria wouldn’t stop until she ran completely out of steam and passed out. What a hateful bitch, Kawashima used to think — how does a person ever get to be this despicable? He was sure he was the only one in the world who could ever care about her. Which was why he believed she would never leave him.

The night he stabbed her with an ice pick had always been somewhat unclear in his memory. He’d returned to the apartment late that night after sniffing thinner with a friend, so he wasn’t exactly in a lucid state of mind to begin with.