The first section is a fictional short story and will which lays out the setting: it is 1936 in the Shōwa period of pre-World War II Japan.

A painter and womanizer named Heikichi Umezawa has long been obsessed with astrology and alchemy; he is a wealthy but fairly old man from a respectable family, who stills lives in a traditionally run sprawling household.

In it, the narrator, who identifies himself as Heikichi, describes a long-running battle with mental disease, diabolism, and his murderous urge to create the perfect woman called "Azoth.” To do this, he will cut up his 2 daughters, 2 of his 3 stepdaughters and his 2 nieces, and take a single astrologically aligned piece of her body and combine it with the others.

Afterwards, an anonymous letter arrived, which claimed to be from one of the many secret agencies in pre-war Japan like the Nakano School.

In exchange for their silence, he would carry out a task for them: take the dead mutilated bodies of six young women to different places in Japan and bury them as specified.

In Act 2, Ishioka and Mitarai travel to Kyoto to interview surviving people related to the case.

In Act 4, Mitarai remains coy as to the solution, but takes Ishioka to a polite meeting with the culprit: an old woman who would have been 23 at the time of the murders.

Taeko was motivated to her elaborate revenge by the extremely poor treatment she received at the hands of her stepmother, stepsisters, and cousins and particularly by the treatment her mother (Heikichi's first wife, Tae) had received: divorced by Heikichi and impoverished, she had to waste her life selling cigarettes on the street.