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imagination, being true to that incomprehensible teaching known as humanism, and if possible to realize it in reality too.’ Pretty cool way to put it, eh?”
    As he was speaking, Sugioka looked around the room and noticed that for once everyone was listening carefully and trying to follow what he was saying. Nobue knitted his brow—a rare sight—and said, “Amazing. He sounds like a truly amazing man.” Ishihara’s eyes were shining as he added, “I’ll say. But this book—where can you buy it? Who’s the publisher? Kadokawa, I bet, yeah?” Sugiyama stared down at his hands and muttered, “Deep. That shit is deep!” while Yano, looking like a hopped-up Vietcong fighter preparing for an attack on a moonless night, shouted, “He’s a DOER, that’s what he is! Not a Thinker, like that Rodin guy, but a Doer,” and a dewy-eyed Kato murmured, “Now, that’s the sort of gentleman who should carry a shoulder bag by Hunting World!” Thrilled with the reflection that this had never happened before—all eyes on one person, all ears on one tale—Sugioka kept talking.
    “In other words, you visualize bringing something down, but you can’t do that with just the power of your own will, you need some sort of help. Like in my case it was morning wood and not enough sleep, but it can’t be something like ideas or ideology or whatever—things like that aren’t worth squat, according to this guy. He says that after targeting dogs and cats and things he started visualizing himself taking down human beings, but that was it, that’s as far as he went, just visualization. But then one morning who should put his teachings into practice in the real world but me? I mean, just because I came up behind that Oba-san and poked her in the ass with my tent pole, she starts screaming like a banshee. I’m not about to put up with that kind of shit. Anybody would’ve lost it, right? I mean, what about my dignity? So I broke through the imagination barrier and took out my knife in the real world and slit her throat, guerrilla-style, and that was it. It was the right thing to do too.”
    Everyone agreed. “It’s true. You’ve got to take things to the limit,” somebody said, and somebody else said, “When you come right down to it, murder’s the only thing that has any meaning these days.”
    Such were the triumphal moments Sugioka was remembering as, snickering to himself, he reached his apartment building. Henmi Midori and Iwata Midori made a note of the address.
     
     
    The five remaining Midoris gathered at Iwata’s home to conduct a study group on the subject of How to Commit a Murder. Iwata Midori’s three-room condo was relatively upscale but made of flimsy new “engineered materials,” and the walls were so thin that the Midoris had to speak quietly and suppress the volume on the videos they’d acquired to aid in their research. Various murder methods were proposed and analyzed. In hushed voices they argued the pros and cons of poisoning and bludgeoning and strangulation, and all were shocked and profoundly moved when they realized that they were actually listening to one another’s opinions. Iwata Midori was the first to remark on it. “We’ve never really shared ideas like this, and listened to each other like this before, have we?” she said. “I know,” said Henmi Midori. “It’s like, if you listen carefully to what other people are saying, you can really understand what they’re trying to say, you know what I mean?” And Takeuchi Midori summed it all up: “It kinda makes you see that the other person is really another person.”
    After nearly four decades of life on this planet, the Midoris had discovered other people. And by the end of the evening, once they’d scientifically chosen and agreed upon a murder method, they would all hold hands and weep. For women of this particular nation, who had basically never known anything beyond the Banzai Charge, it was a transformative and revolutionary