The Windup Girl

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Chapters 31-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 31 Summary

Anderson returns to the ruined factory to find the algae baths rotting, and the text explains that these baths were the basis for a new source of energy. He extricates a hidden code book from deep within the muck of a drain, and dials numbers to bring in weapons and invasion teams to take down General Pracha. Upon his return, he finds Emiko at his apartment building. She burns, furnace-like, panicked and bloody. Anderson cleans her up. He responds tenderly to her as she admits that she is now alone, for “there is no place for new people” (267). He calms her, and she falls asleep.

They awake to the sound of Carlyle pounding on the door. Anderson tells Emiko to hide but she jumps off the balcony, convinced he is with white shirts. The door crashes open. Carlyle has been beaten up and he is accompanied by Akkarat and Black Panthers. They slam Anderson against the wall and beat him. Akkarat demands to know how Anderson got Emiko into the country. He protests and says that she is merely a Japanese discard, and he played no role in her arrival. Akkarat doesn’t believe him and says Anderson introduced her to the Somdet Chaopraya and that she is a military windup and possible assassin of royalty because she killed eight men. Anderson coughs, and spits up blood. Akkarat breaks his finger. He feverishly tries to convince Akkarat that it’s the white shirts and Pracha setting him up. Akkarat finally relents and tells Anderson he has twelve hours to find out what really happened.

Chapter 32 Summary

Kanya and her men burn Mai’s village because the plague has mutated and more have died. Her next goal is to burn the SpringLife factory, the source of the plague. Her dialogue with Jaidee continues. He forgives her, since she had once been in the same confused position as Mai. She is called away to meet Narong at the city shrine. Jaidee refers to her as the new Tiger of Bangkok. When she meets Narong, he tells her that the Somdet Chaopraya is dead, and that she must conduct the investigation to see if it was Emiko in the guise of a military windup or if it is General Pracha’s doing. Kanya is shocked and reluctant but must obey.

Kanya arrives at the Ploenchit and encounters the dead bodies of Raleigh and the Somdet Chaopraya, whose throats have been torn out. The other men of his retinue are also dead. Pracha approaches Kanya. Kanya is uncertain of how much he knows. Pracha tells her to investigate how the windup managed to stay in the country for so long. The thought of the goings-on in the place disgust Kanya.

Chapter 33 Summary

Emiko hides in an alley near Anderson’s building because she has no place else to go. She sees Anderson being led out, head covered in a burlap hood. He is placed into a large, gas-fueled army truck. She also sees Akkarat get into a diesel-powered limo. Black Panthers distribute fliers. Emiko joins the crowd and learns that they are looking for a windup who killed the Somdet Chaopraya. She blends in via the smoothness of her disciplined movement and thinks of the masses “thinking she is one of them. All of them allowing her to live only because they do not yet see” (285).

Chapters 31-33 Analysis

Kanya’s role in the burning of the village recalls her own painful past, and she sees herself in Mai, who also has experienced a difficult journey for a young girl. Jaidee forgives Kanya but also taunts her, since she has been labeled the new Tiger of Bangkok. At Narong’s bidding, Kanya becomes involved in the investigation of the Somdet Chaopraya.

Emiko apparently has been the killer of the Somdet Chaopraya and his men. The text has previously shown how she tears out the throat of Raleigh. Her violence attests to a new independence and the banishment of her servility. When the Black Panthers enter Anderson’s apartment, she jumps over the balcony with an amazing speed that Anderson characterizes as “terrifyingly beautiful” (273). Although a Japanese, sexual windup, Emiko displays how she possesses the instincts of the Vietnamese windups used as killing machines.