Tamaru

Tamaru is the Dowager’s security chief, driver, and trusted intermediary, a man whose quiet manner conceals formidable capacity for violence. He protects the clandestine refuge for women escaping abuse, supports Aomamé’s work, and takes responsibility for security from beginning to end. His character rests on that tension: he is gentle and perceptive in ordinary life, yet prepared to act decisively when protection requires force.

Identity and Bearing

When Aomamé visits the residence, Tamaru is waiting outside on a teak garden chair. He is a compact, powerfully built man in his forties, with a shaved head and neatly trimmed moustache. His immaculate clothes—a strongly shouldered gray jacket, white shirt, dark silk tie, and spotless black Cordovan shoes—give him the air of a professional bodyguard, which is precisely what he is. Silver rings pierce both ears. The carefully composed appearance does not soften the physical impression of strength.

Tamaru has a high rank in karate and can use a weapon effectively; if necessary, he can defend himself and become more violent than anyone around him. Yet the narrator distinguishes this capacity from his habitual disposition: he is generally gentle, calm, and perspicacious. His eyes, when he permits someone to look into them, seem to hold a soft light. The contrast is not a disguise that cancels either side. His steadiness is compatible with force because both are governed by judgment.

His private life is described with the same matter-of-factness as his work. Away from duty, he repairs all kinds of machines and collects progressive-rock records from the 1960s and 1970s. He lives near Azabu with his boyfriend, a stylish young hairdresser. The narrative does not establish whether Tamaru is his first name or surname, or how it would be written in kanji; everyone calls him Mr. Tamaru.

Work and the Refuge

Tamaru’s role extends beyond guarding the Dowager’s residence. The Dowager has arranged a private safe house in a small, single-storey building near her home in Azabu, renovating otherwise vacant apartments for women who urgently need somewhere to go. Lawyers and volunteers staff a telephone consultation service for victims of domestic violence and refer women to the refuge. Some arrive with children; its residents receive food and clothes, help one another, and live communally while they seek a safer future. The Dowager personally covers the expenses.

The refuge’s care is practical as well as emotional. Lawyers and counselors visit to discuss possible next steps with the women; the Dowager listens to them individually, offers advice, and helps them find work and permanent housing. Tamaru handles physical emergencies. When an abusive husband discovers where his wife has gone and tries to take her home by force, he intervenes quickly and effectively. The work makes him the network’s protective boundary: he gives the refuge a means of resisting the very violence from which its residents have fled.

The Dowager acknowledges the limits of what she and Tamaru can accomplish alone, including cases in which the law offers no help. Her response to abuse includes both shelter and punishment. She says she has destroyed her late daughter’s abusive husband socially and continues to keep watch over him, while refusing to grant him a quick death. Tamaru’s work belongs to this wider, extra-legal system of protection, though the evidence does not describe him carrying out that particular punishment. His defined responsibility is security: the Dowager entrusts him with the difficult situations that require physical intervention.

Relationship with Aomamé

Tamaru and Aomamé interact through measured routines and concise exchanges. He receives her at the residence, checks appointments, and manages access to the Dowager. When Aomamé asks about a possible danger connected with a girl’s liking for spinach, he does not dismiss the concern; he answers that it is not impossible, then checks the time and tells her the meeting may be moved forward. His manner makes caution part of ordinary procedure rather than a reason for alarm.

Their professional familiarity has a history. During the first month of Aomamé’s visits, Tamaru did not speak in front of her, leading her to ask the Dowager whether he was mute. In conversation about Aomamé’s self-defense technique—a kick to the groin—the Dowager wonders whether it would work on Tamaru. Aomamé judges that it probably would not: he knows how to anticipate an opponent’s movements, and the technique is useful only against amateurs unfamiliar with real combat. Asked whether she had inferred that Tamaru was no amateur, Aomamé says that he seems different from ordinary people. The exchange establishes her respect for his ability without turning their relationship into a contest.

After Aomamé has completed work involving a man’s life, Tamaru offers a handshake. The gesture is a quiet acknowledgment of the strain of her task and of the need for warm, reassuring contact afterward. Their trust also appears in the way he keeps her informed and attentive to the Dowager’s requests. He can ask directly whether a concern has anything to do with the police; when Aomamé denies it, he does not press her, and their conversation ends in a long, natural silence. His discretion is part of his usefulness to her.

Judgment, Force, and Responsibility

Tamaru’s account of the October 1981 fighting near Lake Motosu shows how he connects an event of violence to the institutions it changed. He recalls a bloody clash in Yamanashi Prefecture between local police and extremists. The extremists had five AK-47s; the police had old-fashioned six-shot revolvers. Three policemen were killed, and special units of the Self-Defense Forces were flown in by helicopter. The police’s loss of face was followed by Prime Minister Nakasone’s push to strengthen police powers, organizational changes, creation of special armed units, and the issuing of more capable Beretta 92 semi-automatic pistols to ordinary officers. Tamaru’s account gives Aomamé the context for the uniform and equipment changes she has been trying to place in time.

He also recognizes that her questions may conceal something more personal. When she repeats that the events occurred two years earlier, he watches her closely and asks whether something is troubling her or whether it concerns the police. She denies any connection and explains that she had only been thinking about the uniform changes. Tamaru accepts the explanation without forcing a disclosure. His neutrality is attentive rather than indifferent: he leaves room for her to confide in him while allowing her to withhold what she is not ready to say.

That judgment is clearest in his attitude toward police involvement. After Bun, the German shepherd who liked spinach, dies, Tamaru tells Aomamé that the circumstances are “rather unpleasant.” He explains that involving the police would be useless: they would go to the wrong place, do the wrong thing, and make the matter more complicated. The Dowager listens to his report and nods, leaving security entirely to him. Tamaru explicitly treats it as his job to handle the matter from beginning to end. The exchange presents his authority as both operational and morally weighty: the silence after his report matches the burden of responsibility he carries.

Care and Narrative Significance

Tamaru’s care is not expressed through sentimentality. It takes the form of dependable attendance, accurate arrangements, physical protection, and an awareness of when to ask a question—or stop asking it. He brings tea to the Dowager and Aomamé after their exercises and massage sessions, though at first he remains entirely silent. Later, he answers calls about appointments, welcomes Aomamé at the entrance, and reports that the Dowager visits Tsubasa every day and that the girl seems to be growing attached to her. These small duties link the household, the refuge, and Aomamé’s work in a functioning chain of support.

The Dowager’s decision to shelter Tsubasa makes the stakes of that chain explicit. She says the child has nowhere else to go and resolves to take responsibility for her, hide her if necessary, and never send her back, regardless of whether her parents or someone else come looking. Later, when she says that the man who abused the girl must be sent into another world before he can hurt anyone else, she also insists on caution and patience. Tamaru is not assigned the speech or decision, but his established role in security gives the plan a practical dimension: the protection of vulnerable people depends on a trusted person able to act when ordinary safeguards fail.

As Aomamé’s point of contact with the Dowager’s private operation, Tamaru joins care to coercive power without confusing their costs. His gentleness does not make him passive; his willingness to use force does not erase his attentiveness. The recurring routines—waiting at the entrance, checking an appointment, bringing tea, offering a handshake, taking charge of security—make the clandestine network legible through its ordinary procedures. Tamaru’s significance lies in making those procedures hold under pressure, while the question of what happens when protection exceeds the law remains deliberately unresolved.