After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

It was Tengo
. 
No
, she thought, 
that couldn’t possibly be
. She gave her head several short, sharp 
shakes. 
No way. I must be wrong. Things don’t work out like that
. She found it 
impossible to breathe normally. Her body wasn’t working right. Thought and action 
refused to sync. 
I’ve got to take another good look at him
, she thought, but for some 
reason she couldn’t get her eyes to focus. Something seemed to be causing the vision 
of her right and left eyes to become hugely different, all of a sudden. She 
unconsciously twisted her features out of shape. 
What should I do?
She got out of her garden chair and looked around helplessly. Then she recalled 
that there had been a small pair of Nikon binoculars in the sideboard, and she went in 
to get them. She hurried back to the balcony holding the binoculars and looked at the 
slide. The young man was still there. In the same position, in profile, looking at the 
sky. With trembling fingers, she focused the binoculars and looked at his profile 
close-up, holding her breath, concentrating. No doubt about it: it was Tengo. Twenty 
years might have gone by, but she knew for sure: it could not be anyone but Tengo. 
What most surprised Aomame was that Tengo’s appearance had hardly changed 
from the time he was ten, as if the ten-year-old boy had aged directly into a thirty-
year-old man. This was not to say that he looked childish. His body and his head 
were, of course, far bigger than they used to be, and his features were now those of an 
adult. His facial expression had a new depth to it. The hands resting on his knees were 

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big and strong, very different from the hand she had grasped in that elementary school 
classroom twenty years earlier. Even so, the aura projected by his physical presence 
was the same. His solid, massive body gave her a deep, natural sense of warmth and 
security. She felt a strong desire to press her cheek against his chest, and that filled 
her with joy. He was sitting on a playground slide, looking at the sky, staring hard at 
exactly the same things that she was looking at—the two moons. 
Yes, it is possible for 
us to see the same things
.