The chapter alternates between descriptions of Eiji waiting in the café and his fantasies about his meeting with Akiko Kato: first he imagines trying to bluff his way into the building before storming it with weapons and stealing his file; then that a huge flood would submerge Tokyo and drown him; then that he subtly follows Akiko Kato into a movie theater, eavesdropping on her meeting with his father while a surrealistic film plays on the screen.
His boss, Mr. Aoyama, is worried that a restructuring could cost him a job; he becomes paranoid, accuses Eiji of conspiring against him, kidnaps a railway manager and finally kills himself.
In parallel, Eiji remembers his youth on the island of Yakushima, where he lived with his twin sister Anju after their mother abandoned them.
Mariko was an alcoholic and was unsuited to raising children, at one point deciding to throw Eiji off the balcony of her apartment.
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 who 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.
Eiji finds himself alone with the girl who spent her night lavished by Daimon, and despite the odd, abrupt decision, they have sex.
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.
Eiji finds out from him that there is a yakuza war going on: The old boss, Konosuke Tsuru, has disappeared and his two subordinates, Jun Nagasaki and Ryutaro Morino, are struggling to replace him.
He only finds a picture of his father with Akiko Kato and a message to meet with Morino immediately at a slot machine arcade.
He takes him through a murderous spree that ends in a confrontation with Nagasaki near an unfinished bridge to a new airport terminal that is being built on land reclaimed from the sea.
He receives a visit from Buntaro, his landlord, and discovers that he is the son of Mrs. Sasaki, Eiji's boss at the subway station.
Subaru Tsukiyama was a pilot of kaiten, a torpedo modified with a cockpit, used towards the end of the war for suicide missions against American ships.
But at the fatal moment Subaru's kaiten doesn't explode, it sinks to the sea bottom and he has the time to write his last journal entries before dying.
One evening, Suga shows up completely drunk and tells Eiji about a tragic event of his past when he involuntarily caused the death of a child.
One day he receives a package from Kozue Yamaya: she reveals that, when she was a young mother, she and her baby were kidnapped by yakuza as payment for her husband's debts and she was forced to prostitute herself.
She managed to escape, became a private eye and dedicated her life to investigating the gang that killed her child.
She is presumed dead but sent discs of information on the yakuza organ-harvesting ring to several people she trusts, including Eiji.
When Suga is discovered trying to break into the Pentagon's computers, the secret service offers him a job working for them in Saratoga, Texas.
He realizes that the lawyer is his father, but when he goes to meet him he discovers that he is a selfish and vulgar man and prefers not to reveal his identity.
Eiji later uses Suga's virus to send Yamaya's information disc to thousands of e-mail accounts across Japan, including law enforcement.