Hiroo is the Tokyo district where Aomamé finds work as a sports-club instructor after leaving her company job and competitive softball behind. The club’s self-defense classes give practical form to her conviction that women must be able to protect themselves, and introduce her to the elderly woman who shares that conviction.

Setting and Aomamé’s New Work

After graduating from a sports university, Aomamé worked for about four years at a company making diet products and sports drinks. She also led its women’s softball team, playing notably as both pitcher and cleanup hitter; the team reached the national tournament’s best eight several times. In the month after Tamaki Ootsuka died, Aomamé resigned and ended her softball career. She no longer wanted to play and was determined to change her life. Through a former university senior, she obtained a job teaching at a sports club in Hiroo.

The Club and Its Self-Defense Classes

Aomamé’s duties centered on strength training and martial-arts classes at an upscale club with high admission and membership fees, frequented by prominent people. She created several self-defense courses for women, making them her specialty. For practice, she built a cloth dummy shaped like a large man and sewed a black work glove into its crotch in place of the testicles. Sometimes two squash balls were put inside the glove to make the target more realistic; the participants practiced delivering repeated, fast, hard kicks. Many took to the exercise enthusiastically and made striking progress. The exercise also provoked complaints, mainly from men who found the scene objectionable. The club’s management summoned Aomamé and ordered her to stop the groin-striking drills. She argued that a woman confronted by a larger, stronger man needed to strike precisely there to have a chance of defending herself. Her comparison was to guerrilla warfare: the weaker side must find its opponent’s vulnerable point, surprise it, and strike decisively.

The Elderly Woman’s Connection

The elderly woman associated with the Willow House first met Aomamé as a participant in these short-lived, radical self-defense classes. She was the smallest and oldest woman in the group, yet moved lightly and could kick with agility. Aomamé recognized in her someone who would, if necessary, kick an assailant without hesitation or evasion—a directness she admired. At the end of one class, the woman remarked with a delicate smile that at her age she no longer particularly needed protection from an attacker. Aomamé rejected age as the relevant measure: what mattered, she insisted, was how one lived and whether one remained able to protect oneself. Resignation to being attacked, she warned, led nowhere; chronic powerlessness destroys a human being. Their exchange establishes the shared practical and moral outlook that links the club’s training room to Aomamé’s later work with the woman.