After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 20 
Tengo 
THE WALRUS AND THE MAD HATTER 
No doubt about it: there were two moons. 
One was the moon that had always been there, and the other was a far smaller, 
greenish moon, somewhat lopsided in shape, and much less bright. It looked like a 
poor, ugly, distantly related child that had been foisted on the family by unfortunate 
events and was welcomed by no one. But it was undeniably there, neither a phantom 
nor an optical illusion, hanging in space like other heavenly bodies, a solid mass with 
a clear-cut outline. Not a plane, not a blimp, not an artificial satellite, not a papier-
mâché moon that someone made for fun. It was without a doubt a chunk of rock, 
having quietly, stubbornly settled on a position in the night sky, like a punctuation 
mark placed only after long deliberation or a mole bestowed by destiny. 
Tengo stared at the new moon for a long time as if to challenge it, never averting 
his gaze, hardly even blinking. But no matter how long he kept his eyes locked on it, 
it refused to budge. It stayed hunkered down in its spot in the sky with silent, 
stonehearted tenacity. 
Tengo unclenched his right fist and, almost unconsciously, gave his head a slight 
shake. 
Damn, it’s the same as in
Air Chrysalis
!
A world with two moons hanging in 
the sky side by side. When a
dohta 
is born, a second moon appears
. 
“That will be a sign. Watch the sky with great care,” one of the Little People said 
to the girl. 
Tengo was the one who wrote those words. Following Komatsu’s advice, he had 
made his description of the new moon as concrete and detailed as possible. It was the 
part on which he had worked the hardest. The look of the new moon was almost 
entirely Tengo’s creation. 
Komatsu had said, “Think of it this way, Tengo. Your readers have seen the sky 
with one moon in it any number of times, right? But I doubt they’ve seen a sky with 
two moons in it side by side. When you introduce things that most readers have 
never
seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precise 
detail as possible.” 
It made a lot of sense. 
Still looking up at the sky, Tengo shook his head again. The newly added moon 
was absolutely the same size and shape as the one for which he had invented a 

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description. Even the figurative language that he had used fit this one almost 
perfectly. 
This can’t be
, Tengo thought. 
What kind of reality mimics fictional creations?
“No, 
this can’t be,” he actually said aloud. Or tried to. His voice barely worked. His throat 
was parched, as if he had just run a very long distance. 
There’s no way this can be. 
That’s a fictional world, a world that does not exist in reality
. It was a world in a 
fantastic story that Fuka-Eri had told Azami night after night and that Tengo himself 
had fleshed out. 
Could this mean, then
—Tengo asked himself
—that this is the world of the novel? 
Could I have somehow left the real world and entered the world of
Air Chrysalis 
like 
Alice falling down the rabbit hole? Or could the real world have been made over so 
as to match exactly the story of
Air Chrysalis
? Does this mean that the world that 
used to be—the familiar world with only one moon—no longer exists anywhere? And 
could the power of the Little People have something to do with this in one way or 
another?
He looked around, hoping for answers, but all that appeared before his eyes was 
the perfectly ordinary urban residential neighborhood. He could find nothing about it 
that seemed odd or unusual—no Queen of Hearts, no walrus, no Mad Hatter. There 
was nothing in his surroundings but an empty sandbox and swings, a mercury-vapor 
lamp emitting its sterile light, the spreading branches of a zelkova tree, a locked 
public toilet, a new six-story condo (only four units of which had lighted windows), a 
ward notice board, a red vending machine with a Coca-Cola logo, an illegally parked 
old-model green Volkswagen Golf, telephone poles and electric lines, and primary-
color neon signs in the distance. The usual city noise, the usual lights. Tengo had been 
living here in Koenji for seven years. Not because he particularly liked it, but because 
he had just happened to find a cheap apartment that was not too far from the station. It 
was convenient for commuting, and moving somewhere else would have been too 
much trouble, so he had stayed on. But he at least knew the neighborhood inside and 
out and would have noticed any change immediately. 
How long had there been more than one moon? Tengo could not be sure. Perhaps 
there had been two moons for years now and he simply hadn’t noticed. He had missed 
lots of things that way. He wasn’t much of a newspaper reader, and he never watched 
television. There were countless things that everybody knew but him. Perhaps 
something had occurred just recently to increase the number of moons to two. He 
wanted to ask someone, “Excuse me, this is a strange question, but how long have 
there been two moons? I just thought you might know.” But there was nobody there 
to ask—literally, not even a cat. 
No, there