drowned. He takes revenge on the thunder god by climbing to the top of the mountain to his statue's shrine, and sawing off the statue's head before throwing it into the sea. While in Tokyo, Eiji receives two letters. The first is from Akiko Kato, attempting to deter Eiji from seeking his father. The second is from his mother, Mariko Miyake, revealing details of his and Anju's birth and infancy. Their mother had a rich married lover. When she got pregnant, he abandoned her. Mariko was an alcoholic and was unsuited to raising children, at one point deciding to throw Eiji off the balcony of her apartment. Before she could do so, he fell down the stairs. After Eiji's injury, she decided to bring the children to her native island and give them to her own mother to raise. When present-day Eiji calls the hospital from which the letter was written, he is told she left that morning. Three: Video Games While playing in a video game arcade, Eiji is befriended by Yuzu Daimon, a rich final-year law student. Daimon is waiting for a girl that doesn't show up, so he decides to take Eiji to a Christmas-themed bar in Shibuya. They pick up a couple of girls and Daimon takes them to an exclusive bar where he behaves very rudely to the waitress, named Miriam. Then Daimon takes Eiji and the girls to a love hotel where they drink and take drugs, but before pairing off to sleep together, Daimon insists that he and Eiji switch partners. Eiji finds himself alone with the girl that spent her night lavished by Daimon, and despite the odd, abrupt decision, they have sex. The next morning Eiji wakes up to find that he has been left there with the bill to pay, and Daimon is nowhere to be found. The management attempts to trap Eiji, but he escapes through the kitchen of an adjoining hotel and finds himself near the bar in front of Panopticon where he was at the beginning of the novel. He helps the waitress with the beautiful neck to get rid of a bad customer and he makes friends with her, learning her name, Ai Imajo. Later he meets Miriam in a park. She mentions something about his father and leaves, dropping a library book. Eiji, with the help of a hacker friend called Suga, traces her and