Akasaka is where Aomamé goes after completing a killing, seeking a drink before returning home and settling into a hotel bar as she watches for a particular kind of customer. The scene makes the district’s luxury setting part of her disguise: amid polished business travelers, a book about Manchurian railways helps her appear to belong while she confronts the unsettling likeness between her own role and that of a woman waiting for a client.

The hotel and its setting

After finishing her work, Aomamé walks for a while, hails a taxi, and goes to a hotel in Akasaka. The hotel bar occupies the top floor of a tall building, with a pleasing view and a comfortable counter. Aomamé has visited it several times before. She arrives shortly after seven in the evening, when the room is still relatively quiet, and orders a gin and tonic with pistachios.

A young piano-and-guitar duo is playing “Sweet Lorraine.” Aomamé listens while taking her time over the drink; she does not want to become drunk too quickly, and the night is still young. Later she orders another gin and tonic and some vegetable sticks, having not eaten dinner. As the evening advances, the bar fills and the surrounding voices and sounds grow more numerous.

Aomamé’s reading and disguise

Aomamé takes a book from her bag and reads about the railways in Manchuria during the 1930s. The account traces the South Manchuria Railway’s expansion from the transfer of Russian railway rights after the Russo-Japanese War, its role as a vanguard of the Japanese Imperial Army’s invasion of China, and its dissolution by Soviet forces in 1945. Until the German-Soviet war began in 1941, connections with the Trans-Siberian Railway had made it possible to travel from Shimonoseki to Paris in thirteen days.

The book also serves as an unlikely prop. A woman in a business suit, carrying a large shoulder bag, drinking gin alone, and absorbed in a hardback about Manchurian railways would not readily be mistaken for a high-class prostitute, Aomamé thinks. Yet she does not know exactly what such a woman would look like. Perhaps, if her clients were wealthy businessmen, she would deliberately avoid appearing to be a prostitute so that she would not be expelled from the bar or alarm her regular customers. In that imagined version, a Junko Shimada suit, a white blouse, understated makeup, a large bag, and the railway book could all fit the part.

The reflection turns back on Aomamé herself: she sees no real difference between a woman waiting in a bar for a client and what she is actually doing. Her bookish appearance does not erase the parallel; it gives it a cover.

The clientele she seeks

As the bar grows busier, Aomamé has still not spotted the man she is looking for. The hotel attracts a different class of business traveler from those who stay in cheap business hotels near railway stations, where a cramped bed nearly fills the room and a shower means repeatedly banging one’s elbows against the walls. Such travelers may drink a beer at a neighborhood bar and eat a quick rice-and-meat breakfast before leaving.

Guests at this hotel, by contrast, tend to travel first class on the Shinkansen and stay only in luxury establishments. After finishing work, they drink expensive liquor in the hotel bar. Many are executives at major companies or professionals such as doctors and lawyers: mature men who are no longer short of money and generally enjoy entertainment. This is the type of man Aomamé has in mind.

At last, a solitary man takes a seat at the counter. Around fifty, slightly tanned, with noticeably thinning hair and no glasses, he wears a well-cut suit and a carefully chosen tie that is neither showy nor too discreet. Aomamé supposes that he is in Tokyo on business, has finished his work, and wants a drink to relax his nerves before bed, much as she does. The scene establishes the hotel not merely as a backdrop but as the meeting place where her calculated watchfulness and the routines of affluent business travel intersect.

Aftermath and significance

Aomamé has come to the bar because she needs alcohol to let her nervous tension subside. She has just sent a man to his death. Though she considers the man she killed a wretched person, she cannot dismiss the fact that he was human: she took a life with her own hands and remains conscious of his final breath and the separation of his soul from his body.

That knowledge shadows the leisurely details of the evening—the music, the view, the drinks, and the reading. Akasaka’s luxurious calm gives Aomamé a place to manage the immediate strain of violence, but her own comparison between herself and a prostitute waiting for business unsettles the apparent safety of her disguise. She is both an observer of the bar’s social codes and someone using them to wait for the next man she has selected.