Oops, forgot to put up my post for Chapter 3.
Aomame climbs down the maintenance stairway to street level. Along the way, she remembers the two times from her childhood when she had a lesbian experience with a friend of her's, another player on the high school softball team. The memories comes to her unbidden, and once she starts thinking about it, she can't stop, like how once Tengo starts recollecting the memory of his mother, he is overcome with it. When she reaches the ground, she finds that she is locked within what used to be some kind of enclosure for road workers. identifying the detritus as that left by bums, and that they aren't around, she concludes that there must be an easy way out, and eventually finds it. From there, she takes the subway to a hotel.
She freshens up inside the bathroom and makes herself ready for whatever it is she has come to do. Whatever it is requires ruthlessness, however. Aomame goes up to the fourth floor, takes a clipboard out of her bag, and knocks on door 426. She pretends to be part of the hotel staff come to check on a faulty air conditioning unit and the man inside allows her entry. One Mr. Miyama. After pretending to check out the AC unit, Aomame tells Miyama that there is something on the back of his neck, can she check it out? He assents and she gets him to bend his head forward, exposing a sensitive area on the back of his neck. She feels for the right spot and then takes a specially constructed knife (it resembles an ice pick) out of her bag. She removes a piece of cork capping the point and stabs it into Miyama's neck. The exact spot where she stabs him hits the part of his brain that causes his heart to stop immediately. No autopsy will be done because it will appear to be a simple heart attack.
Aomame has come to kill Miyama because he beat his wife with a golf club. Well, that is the reason the reader is supposed to assume, I guess. How Aomame learned everything about Miyama, and the details of the hotel and the room, her knowledge of assassination techniques, and the means of accomplishing it without getting caught, are still left unanswered. It isn't entirely clear why she kills or if she works as a contract killer for a third party. So the fact that Miyama beat his wife may not be the only reason for his assassination, nor may it even be true.
Afterwards, Aomame composes herself and leaves the room. She is once again posing as just a regular businesswoman.
"She glanced at her watch. The time was still okay, but she couldn't go on hanging around in this place forever."
This is a great way to recall the very recent experience of having dates fly through the air as if ripped off a calendar - past, present, and future. But now Aomame is grounded, literally and figuratively.
"As someone who had to move stealthily, anonymously, behind the scenes in the big city, she felt at one with them."
Coming before she arrives at the hotel, and before we meet Mr. Miyama, this reads as another cryptic reference to whatever shady business Aomame is involved in. There's another incident where she notices a policeman's uniform and his pistol. When she first sees the policeman, she tenses up, a natural reaction, like seeing a cop car in your rear view mirror and having that moment of panic that you are about to be pulled over. So this is a normal reaction. But then a lot of evidence is given that Aomame is not only very aware of cops, but knows great detail about their uniforms and equipment and firearms. Which would seem a strange hobby. So what is she up to?
There are more sea references in this chapter. We'll see if this continues to be a running theme throughout the book, when it comes to Aomame.
- "Snug though her miniskirt was, it filled like a sail with the occasional strong gust from below ..."
- "Listening to the racket (not that she wanted to listen, but she was in no position to be covering her ears), she began to feel almost seasick."
- "... the slight discomfort, like seasickness ..."
- "... listening to the sound like distant surf ..."
- "Marine-blue shirt."
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