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sort of thing the Midori Society experienced only rarely—most recently when the six of them had decided to take their first trip abroad together (and ended up on a five-day, four-night excursion to Singapore and Hong Kong). None of the Midoris had ever been big on travel, and though they were always trying to think of things to do together, somehow the idea of going overseas had never before occurred to them. Every one of them had always thought of travel abroad as an extravagance she had no need for. They believed it was wrong to want things you didn’t need, and that the people who flaunted Celine scarves, for example, or Louis Vuitton bags or Chanel belts or Hermès perfumes, were essentially people who had no self-esteem. Somewhere deep in their internal organs the Midoris carried the conviction that buying such things was just an attempt, albeit on an extremely primitive level, to “heal one’s wounds,” but it goes without saying that they too aspired to Celine and Louis Vuitton and Chanel and Hermès, not to mention world travel. Which was why, on that day when they’d gathered at Suzuki Midori’s apartment for a dubious culinary experience billed as “Box Lunches of Seven Major Train Stations” and Iwata Midori said, “How about taking a trip overseas, somewhere nearby maybe?” this same sort of tingly silence had descended. Everyone was thrilled but hesitated to be the first to admit it.
    “So we find out who the killer is…and then what?” Henmi Midori, who tended to overdo the facial packs and whose forehead and cheeks shone so brightly as a result that they reflected the individual bulbs in the ceiling lamp, spoke these words, and there followed another, even deeper silence. All five lowered their eyes shyly, like young ladies meeting a proposed marriage partner for the first time and finding him just to their liking. Iwata Midori plucked at the loose threads of the carpet next to her cushion; Henmi Midori unclenched an incipient fist and gazed at her fingernails; Takeuchi Midori hummed tunelessly; Suzuki Midori raised her empty beer glass to her lips; and Tomiyama Midori fluttered her long false eyelashes—the kind you don’t often see anymore.
    No one spoke, so Henmi Midori, discoverer of Yanagimoto Midori’s corpse, took her question a step further.
    “Are we going to kill him ourselves?”
    What followed was the deepest silence yet.
     
     
    On Saturday of that week, Tomiyama Midori met her son, Osamu, at a station on the Keio Line. “How’s your father?” she asked, stroking his hair and reflecting that she couldn’t care less how his father was, and as always Osamu just tilted his head to one side and didn’t reply. Tomiyama Midori loved this unaffable child of hers, however, as only a mother could. In fact, it was only by thinking about her son that she was able even to grasp the concept of love. Love wasn’t about feeling at ease with someone, or bubbling with happiness as a result of just being with them. Love was when you felt compelled to expend every effort to see that they enjoyed their time in your company. In a sense, the time she spent with Osamu was fairly agonizing for her. He would stay one night and leave the following evening, and if he smiled once during that time, she would feel that she’d accomplished something of vital importance. Osamu’s was a strictly conservative temperament. He would meet his mother at the ticket gate in the station, walk with her through the arcade to MOS Burger, play the video game at Kiddy Kastle, have her buy him a new computer game and three volumes of various manga, ride the bus to her housing complex, hopscotch with rigorous precision over the flagstones, play the new computer game in her third-floor condo, read his manga after dinner, get in the bathtub at exactly eighteen minutes past the hour, and go to sleep holding his mother’s hand. The two of them didn’t do a lot of actual talking, but Osamu would always smile at least