After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance



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If only I had been born like that
, he wondered, 
what sort of life would I have 
led?
But this was a supposition that exceeded his powers of imagination. Ushikawa 
was too Ushikawa-like, and there was no room in his brain for such hypotheses. It 
was precisely because of his large, misshapen head, his bulging eyes, and his short, 
bandy legs that he was who he was, a skeptical young boy, full of intellectual 
curiosity, quiet but eloquent. 
As the years passed the ugly boy grew up into an ugly youth, and before he knew it, 
into an ugly middle-aged man. At every stage of his life, people continued to turn and 
stare. Children would stare unabashedly at him. 
When I become an ugly old man

Ushikawa sometimes thought, 
then maybe I won’t attract so much attention
. But he 
wouldn’t know for sure. Maybe he would end up the ugliest old man the world had 
ever seen. 
At any rate, he was not equipped with the skills needed to blend into the 
background. And to make matters worse, Tengo knew what he looked like. If he was 
discovered hanging around outside Tengo’s building, the whole operation would 
come crashing down. 
In situations like this, Ushikawa normally hired someone from a PI agency. Ever 
since he was a lawyer, he had made use of these sorts of organizations, which mostly 
employed former policemen who were adept at digging up information, shadowing 
people, and conducting surveillance. But in this case, he didn’t want to involve any 
outsiders. Things were too touchy, and a serious crime—murder—was involved. 
Besides, Ushikawa wasn’t even sure what he might gain by putting Tengo under 
surveillance. 
What Ushikawa wanted was to make clear the 
connection
between Tengo and 
Aomame, but he wasn’t even sure what Aomame looked like. He had tried all sorts of 
methods but had yet to come up with a decent photo. Even Bat hadn’t been able to 


638
obtain one. Ushikawa had looked at her high school graduation album, but in the class 
photo her face was tiny and somehow unnatural-looking, like a mask. In the photo of 
her company softball team she had on a wide-brimmed cap and her face was in 
shadow. So even if Aomame were to pass him on the street, he would have no way of 
knowing if it was really her. He knew she was nearly five feet six inches tall and had 
a trim body and good posture. Her eyes and cheekbones were distinctive, and she 
wore her hair down to her shoulders. But there were plenty of women in the world 
who fit that description. 
So it looked like Ushikawa would have to undertake the surveillance by himself. 
He would have to keep his eyes open, patiently waiting for something to happen, and, 
when it did, instantly react. He couldn’t ask someone else to handle such a delicate 
undertaking. 
Tengo was living on the third floor of an old, three-story concrete apartment building. 
At the entrance was a row of mailboxes for all the residents, one of them with a name 
tag on it that said 
Kawana
. Some of the mailboxes were rusty, the paint peeling off. 
They all had locks, but most of the residents left them unlatched. The front door of the 
building was unlocked, and anyone could go inside. 
The dark corridor inside had that special odor you find in older apartment 
buildings. It is a peculiar mix of smells—of unrepaired leaks, old sheets washed in 
cheap detergent, stale tempura oil, a dried-up poinsettia, cat urine from the weed-
filled front yard. Live there long enough and you would probably get used to the 
smell. But no matter how used to it you got, the fact remained that this was not a 
heartwarming odor. 
Tengo’s apartment faced the main road. It wasn’t all that noisy, but there was a fair 
amount of foot traffic. An elementary school was nearby and at certain times of day 
there were large groups of children outside. Across from the building was a clump of 
small single-family homes, two-story houses with no garden. Just down the road were 
a liquor store and a stationery store catering to elementary school children. And two 
blocks farther down was a small police substation. There was nowhere to hide, and if 
he were to stand by the road and look up at Tengo’s apartment—even if Tengo didn’t 
discover him—the neighbors would be sure to cast a suspicious eye his way. And 
since he was such an 
unusual
-looking character, the locals’ alert level would be 
ratcheted up a couple of levels. He might be mistaken for a pervert waiting for the 
kids to get out of school, and neighbors might call the police. 
In surveillance the first requirement is finding a suitable place from which to 
watch, a place to track your target’s movements and maintain a steady supply of water 
and food. The ideal situation would be to have a room from which Ushikawa could 
see Tengo’s apartment. He could set up a camera with a telephoto lens on a tripod and 
keep watch over movement in the apartment and who came in and out. Since he was 
alone on the assignment, twenty-four-hour coverage was impossible, but Ushikawa 
figured he could cover it for ten hours a day. Needless to say, however, finding a 
suitable place was going to be tricky. 
Even so, Ushikawa walked the neighborhood, searching. He wasn’t the type to 
give up easily. Tenaciousness was, after all, his forte. But after pounding the 


639
pavement of every nook and cranny of the neighborhood, Ushikawa called it quits. 
Koenji was a densely populated residential area, flat with no tall buildings. The 
number of places from which Tengo’s apartment was visible was very limited, and 
there was not a single one he thought he could use. 
Whenever Ushikawa had trouble coming up with a good idea, he liked to take a 
long, lukewarm soak in the tub, so he went back home and drew a bath. As he lay in 
the acrylic bathtub, he listened to Sibelius’s violin concerto on the radio. He didn’t 
particularly want to listen to Sibelius—and Sibelius’s concerto wasn’t exactly the 
right music to listen to at the end of a long day as you soaked in the tub. Perhaps, he 
mused, Finnish people liked to listen to Sibelius while in a sauna during their long 
nights. But in a tiny, one-unit bathroom of a two-bedroom condo in Kohinata, Bunkyo 
Ward, Sibelius’s music was too emotional, too tense. Not that this bothered him—as 
long as there was some background music, he was fine. A concerto by Rameau would 
do just as well, nor would he have complained if it had been Schumann’s 

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