Ayumi

Ayumi is a young police officer who becomes an important ally and confidante to Aomamé. Cheerful, quick-witted, and capable of meeting danger constructively, she brings a social ease that contrasts with Aomamé’s guarded intensity. Their friendship matters not simply because Ayumi helps with Aomamé’s work: after Tamaki Ootsuka’s death, she is the first person for whom Aomamé again feels sympathy and the first new friend to whom she can begin opening her heart.

Identity and Background

Ayumi tells Aomamé that she had not originally set out to join the police. She wanted to avoid ordinary office work but did not believe she possessed a particular talent that would give her an obvious alternative. In her fourth year at university, she therefore sat the entrance examination for the prefectural police. Her family connections helped: her father, older brother, and an uncle were all police officers, and she describes the police as a largely closed system in which having relatives inside helped her gain admission.

Once on the force, Ayumi discovered how sharply its professed equality diverged from women’s working lives. Women were confined to routine duties—monitoring traffic violations, paperwork, school safety instruction, and searches of female suspects—while less capable men advanced toward positions of authority. The institution’s public language of equal opportunity could not erase the practical discrimination she saw around her. She argues that this treatment drains women’s enthusiasm for their work, speaking from inside the system rather than as an outside critic.

Aomamé’s Unexpected Partner

Ayumi first surprises Aomamé by revealing that, despite her appearance, she has practiced aikido for a long time and is a police officer. Aomamé is left momentarily speechless. The pairing is striking: Ayumi’s police identity gives her access to an official world, while her martial-arts experience and readiness to act make her more than a genial companion. She imagines that the two women could make an invincible team.

Their alliance takes shape around a shared hunt for men who meet their joint approval. Ayumi’s role is to approach a suitable man, using her natural friendliness to establish an opening; when the timing is right, Aomamé appears. Ayumi is small, smiling, sociable, and readily responsive, while Aomamé is tall and muscular, nearly expressionless, and often edged with aggression or cynicism in conversation. The contrast is functional as well as temperamental: Ayumi’s ease initiates contact, and Aomamé’s presence changes its character. Their method requires agreement on the men they pursue; they seek two men who are pleasant, clean, reasonably attractive, and intelligent enough for conversation but not so intellectual that the evening becomes tedious.

The account of their partnership presents the encounters as a carefully coordinated performance, combining the lightness of operetta with the atmosphere of a crime film. Aomamé’s ability to attract men is described as an aura she did not consciously cultivate, though the narration hints that circumstances in her past made it necessary for her to acquire it. That same effect also reaches Ayumi, who becomes more confident and radiant in Aomamé’s company. The arrangement is therefore not a simple division between pursuer and accomplice: each woman’s qualities alter the other’s presence and help the partnership work.

Friendship, Grief, and Intimacy

Aomamé’s response to Ayumi changes the meaning of their encounters. After Tamaki’s death, she is surprised to realize that she feels sympathy for another person for the first time. She recognizes that this feeling is unlike the bond she had with Tamaki, yet the prospect of going to a restaurant with Ayumi is something she had not even allowed herself to imagine for a long time. That their new companion is a police officer only sharpens Aomamé’s sense of the world’s strangeness.

The two women’s closeness includes flirtation, but Aomamé distinguishes affection from sexual intimacy. She explains that she did not want to establish that kind of relationship with Tamaki; it was not because such a relationship would be wrong or dirty, but because she did not want their precious friendship to take that form. Ayumi accepts the explanation and asks to spend the night at Aomamé’s home rather than return to her lodging and lose the feeling of the refined evening they have shared. Aomamé agrees, while making clear that the invitation is not sexual.

When Ayumi falls asleep beside her, Aomamé strokes her hair. She then leaves the bed and spends the night on the sofa, drinking water and sitting alone on the balcony after midnight. Inwardly, she admits that she wants to love Ayumi as much as she can and that she can open her heart to her naturally, at least to a point. At the same time, she tells the dead Tamaki, whom she still carries within her, that no one can compare with her. The scene makes room for a new attachment without presenting it as a replacement: Ayumi’s importance lies in allowing Aomamé to begin relating again while the singularity of her earlier friendship remains intact.

From Companionship to Practical Trust

The friendship also becomes a means of seeking help. After reflecting on the difference between the Pioneers’ polished public presentation and the abuse allegedly hidden behind it, Aomamé calls Ayumi from a café. She uses the number Ayumi has said she can call under any circumstances. A colleague answers and reports that Ayumi is out and should return in about two hours; Aomamé withholds her name and says only that she will call later. When she rings again from home, Ayumi answers warmly, and Aomamé tells her that the Pioneers’ leader is said to sexually abuse girls aged ten or younger under the pretext of religious practice.

Ayumi falls silent briefly before agreeing to try to find a way to help and asking for two or three days. Her response is measured: she does not claim that the allegation is already provable or promise an instant solution, but she accepts the responsibility of looking into it. Later, she asks whether the abuse Aomamé described has been established and whether it occurred systematically within the religious group. Aomamé distinguishes between what she knows to be true and what they can currently prove. Their conversation thus joins emotional confidence to a practical problem of evidence, and Ayumi’s police position gives the friendship a possible route into that problem without erasing the limits Aomamé acknowledges.

Narrative Role and Significance

Ayumi’s presence marks a limited but consequential opening in Aomamé’s life. Aomamé had decided after Tamaki’s death that she would form no more real relationships; with Ayumi, she finds herself sharing feelings without forcing the act. The friendship does not reproduce the earlier bond, and neither woman’s willingness to share a night together settles into a romantic relationship. Its significance is instead visible in small acts of trust: arranging to meet again, inviting Ayumi to stay, letting her sleep close, and calling her when the danger surrounding the Pioneers requires assistance.

Ayumi also complicates the boundary between private alliance and public authority. She is a police officer who has experienced gender discrimination within the institution, yet she remains willing to use her judgment and connections to respond to Aomamé’s report. Her place in the story is therefore both intimate and functional: she helps Aomamé recover a capacity for friendship, and she may help turn knowledge of hidden abuse into action. The evidence leaves the outcome of her proposed inquiry unresolved, but establishes the trust that makes Aomamé’s appeal possible.