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‘They want revenge,’ said Masako, and as soon as the word had left her mouth the puzzle seemed to solve itself. Of course, that was it. He wanted revenge, an elaborate, expensive revenge. She’d been wrong in thinking it was about the insurance money. If it was money he wanted, would he have spent millions of yen to get Kuniko’s body here to scare them? But that made the whole thing even more terrifying.

The warm, still air that preceded a typhoon was oppressive. The storm, a fairly large one, was bearing down on them now, signalling an end to summer. Masako looked up at the sky, listening to the wind wailing in the upper atmosphere. As she reached her red Corolla, she saw a familiar bicycle coming toward her across the supermarket parking lot.

When a woman commits an unpremeditated murder, her first problem is what to do with the body. In general, she isn’t strong enough to move it by herself, so she’s often left with no choice but to cut it up. Men sometimes cut up bodies, too, but they usually do it to conceal the victim’s identity or because it gives them some kind of sick thrill; women do it because they can’t carry it whole.

Satake hated summer. It wasn’t the heat that bothered him so much as the various signs of the season in the back streets of the city that brought back memories with them. It was during summer vacation in his second year of high school that he’d hit his father hard enough to break his jaw, and then left home. That event, which had changed his life for ever, had taken place in a room just like this one, in August,

On a street behind Higashi Yamato Station there was a nearly deserted sushi restaurant that specialised in take-out. The awning was dirty and the delivery van was muddy, and behind the shop a young employee was using a toilet brush to scrub out the rice buckets. It was the kind of place the health department loved to shut down. And next to it, up a staircase that had a prefab smell to it, was Jumonji’s office.

in the darkness, she found several holes in the concrete. She took the key holder and the empty wallet from her bag and dropped them into one of them. Feeling a twinge of relief at the sound of the splash they made somewhere below her, she set off toward the twinkling lights of the factory. She never noticed Kazuo Miyamori, crouched next to the rusty shutter where he had pinned her the night before

The fact was, you never really knew your own limits until you’d killed someone – there was nothing else quite like it. To be sure, there was a deep sense of guilt, but Satake had also discovered in himself a tendency to enjoy inflicting pain, as well as a powerful charge from the proximity to death itself.

she could smell the faint odour of deep-fried food, the odour of the boxed-lunch factory where she was going to work.
‘I want to go home.’ The moment the smell hit her, the words came into her head. She didn’t know exactly what home it was she wanted to go to, certainly not the one she’d just left. But why didn’t she want to go back there? And where did she want to go? She felt lost.