Puncutron

The Puncutron is a body-mapping device associated with Takeshi Fumimota’s return to life. It has two sharply contrasting roles: it charts bodily points through a technical procedure, yet DL remembers it as the means by which Takeshi was resurrected. The novel does not explain how that transformation works, leaving the machine’s most consequential function more mysterious than its visible operation.

Design and Operation

When Takeshi is on the Puncutron, an inkjet printer travels along the meridians of his unclothed body, marking trigger points in different colors and identifying them with reference numbers and Chinese ideograms. An elderly kunoichi serves as the machine’s technician, taking notes and explaining the procedure to a small group of adolescent trainees in white uniforms and student armbands. The scene presents the device as a system for locating and recording bodily points; it offers no technical account of how that mapping relates to resurrection.

Takeshi’s Return to Life

DL later identifies the Puncutron as the means of Takeshi’s resurrection. This gives the device a significance beyond the mapping procedure witnessed during his visit to the kunoichi retreat: it belongs to a history in which a machine acts at the boundary between death and renewed life. The account confirms the outcome but leaves the process itself unexplained.

A Concealed History

When DL speaks with her mother, Norleen, about Takeshi, she withholds the circumstances of their meeting and the Puncutron’s role in his resurrection. She also keeps from Norleen the Vibrating Palm and the couple’s recurring visits to the retreat, where they underwent checkups and renewed their agreement. DL anticipates that revealing these matters could lead to the no-sex clause and distress her mother. The machine is therefore part of the private history DL does not disclose, rather than a device she openly explains to her family.

Death and the Novel’s Unsettled Boundary

The Puncutron’s individual role in Takeshi’s resurrection sits within a novel that also depicts Thanatoids as people with a distinct, death-adjacent condition. Their collective awakening to Bach’s Wachet Auf is presented separately from the Puncutron, not as an effect of it. Read together, these episodes make the device part of a wider imaginative world in which death, survival, and return do not fit into a simple, final division; the machine’s precise workings remain deliberately obscure.