After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 22 
Tengo 
THAT TIME COULD TAKE ON 
DEFORMED SHAPES AS IT MOVED AHEAD
Tengo thought about his brain. Lots of things made him do this. 
The size of the human brain had increased four times over the past two and a half 
million years. In terms of weight, the brain occupied only two percent of the human 
body, but it consumed some forty percent of the body’s total energy (according to a 
book he had recently read). Owing to the dramatic expansion of the brain, human 
beings had been able to acquire the concepts of time, space, and possibility. 
The concepts of time, space, and possibility
. 
Tengo knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward. Time itself 
was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One 
period of time might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and 
short. Occasionally the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order 
itself could vanish entirely. Sometimes things that should not be there at all might be 
added onto time. By adjusting time this way to suit their own purposes, people 
probably adjusted the meaning of their existences. In other words, by adding such 
operations to time, they were able—but just barely—to preserve their own sanity. 
Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly 
in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain. Such a life, Tengo felt, would 
be sheer torture. 
Through the expansion of the brain, people had acquired the concept of 
temporality, but they simultaneously learned ways in which to change and adjust 
time. In parallel with their ceaseless consumption of time, people would ceaselessly 
reproduce time that they had mentally adjusted. This was no ordinary feat. No wonder 
the brain was said to consume forty percent of the body’s total energy! 
Tengo often wondered whether he had actually witnessed the memory he retained 
from the age of one and a half or, at most, two—the scene in which his mother in 
underclothes let a man who was not his father suck on her breasts. Her arms were 
wrapped around the man. Could a one- or two-year-old infant distinguish such details 
and remember them so vividly? Wasn’t this a false memory that he had later 
conveniently fashioned to protect himself? 
That was entirely conceivable. At some point Tengo’s brain might have 
subconsciously created the memory of another man (his possibly “real” father) in 
order to “prove” that he was not the biological child of the man who was supposed to 

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be his father. This was how he tried to eliminate “the man who was supposed to be his 
father” from the tight circle of blood. By establishing inside himself the hypothetical 
existence of a mother who must be alive somewhere and a “real” father, he was trying 
to create a portal leading out of his limited, suffocating life. 
The problem with this view was that the memory came with such a vivid sense of 
reality. It had such an authentic feel, and weight, and smell, and depth. It was 
stubbornly fastened to the walls of his mind like an oyster clinging to a sunken ship. 
He could never manage to shake it off, to wash it away. He found it impossible to 
believe that such a memory was a mere counterfeit that his mind had created in 
response to some need. It was too real, too solid, to be imaginary. 
What if it was real, then?
Tengo thought. 
His infant self would certainly have been frightened to witness such a scene. 
Someone else, some other human being, was sucking on breasts that should have been 
for him—someone bigger and stronger. And it appeared that Tengo’s mother had—at 
least temporarily—forgotten about him, creating a situation that threatened his very 
survival, small and weak as he was. The primal terror of that moment may have been 
indelibly imprinted on the photo paper of his mind. 
The memory of that terror came rushing back to him when he least expected it, 
attacking him with all the ferocity of a flash flood, and putting him into a near panic. 
This terror spoke to him, forcing him to remember: