After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Thanks. It was fun. Bye!
It’s impossible. Of course, the other way around 
happens sometimes.” 

---

576
“Is that right?” Nurse Adachi said, inclining her head just a fraction. “I guess I’m a 
bit naive.” 
“Yes, that’s the way it is,” Nurse Omura declared. She looked at Tengo for a 
while, as if stepping back from a stone monument to examine the words chiseled into 
it. Then she nodded. “When you get a little older you’ll understand.” 
“Oh, my—it’s been simply ages,” Nurse Tamura said, sinking deeper into her 
chair. 
For a time the three nurses were lost in a conversation about the sexual escapades 
of someone he didn’t know (another nurse, he surmised). With his glass of whiskey 
and water in hand, Tengo surveyed these three nurses, picturing the three witches in 
Macbeth
. The ones who chant “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” as they fill Macbeth’s 
head with evil ambitions. But Tengo wasn’t seeing the three nurses as evil beings. 
They were kind and straightforward women. They worked hard and took good care of 
his father. Overworked, living in this small, less-than-stimulating fishing town, they 
were just letting off steam, as they did once every month. But when he witnessed how 
the energy in these three women, all of different generations, was converging, he 
couldn’t help but envision the moors of Scotland—a gloomy, overcast sky, a cold 
wind and rain howling through the heath. 
In college he had read 
Macbeth
in English class, and somehow a few lines 
remained with him. 
By the pricking of my thumbs
, 
Something wicked this way comes
, 
Open, locks
, 
Whoever knocks!
Why should he remember only these lines? He couldn’t even recall who spoke them 
in the play. But they made Tengo think of that persistent NHK collector, knocking at 
the door of his apartment in Koenji. Tengo looked at his own thumbs. They didn’t feel 
pricked. Still, Shakespeare’s skillful rhyme had an ominous ring to it. 
Something wicked this way comes …
Tengo prayed that Fuka-Eri wouldn’t unlock the door. 

---

577