After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 16 
Ushikawa 
A CAPABLE, PATIENT, UNFEELING MACHINE 
The next morning Ushikawa again took a seat by the window and continued his 
surveillance through a gap in the curtain. Nearly the same lineup of people who had 
come back to the apartment building the night before, or at least people who looked 
the same, were now exiting. Their faces were still grim, their shoulders hunched over. 
A new day had barely begun and yet they already looked fed up and exhausted. Tengo 
wasn’t among them, but Ushikawa went ahead and snapped photos of each and every 
face that passed by. He had plenty of film and it was good practice so he could be 
more efficient at stealthily taking photos. 
When the morning rush had passed and he saw that everyone who was going out 
had done so, he left the apartment and slipped into a nearby phone booth. He dialed 
the Yoyogi cram school and asked to speak with Tengo. 
“Mr. Kawana has been on leave for the last ten days,” said the woman who 
answered the phone. 
“I hope he’s not ill?” 
“No, someone in his family is, so he went to Chiba.” 
“Do you know when he will be back?” 
“I’m afraid I haven’t asked him that,” the woman said. 
Ushikawa thanked her and hung up. 
Tengo’s family, as far as Ushikawa knew, meant just his father—the father who 
used to be an NHK fee collector. Tengo still didn’t know anything about his mother. 
And as far as Ushikawa was aware, Tengo and his father had always had a bad 
relationship. Yet Tengo had taken more than ten days off from work in order to take 
care of his sick father. Ushikawa found this hard to swallow. How could Tengo’s 
antagonism for his father soften so quickly? What sort of illness did his father have, 
and where in Chiba was he in the hospital? There should be ways of finding out, 
though it would take at least a half a day to do so. And he would have to put his 
surveillance on hold while he did. 
Ushikawa wasn’t sure what to do. If Tengo was away from Tokyo, then it was 
pointless to stake out this building. It might be smarter to take a break from 
surveillance and search in another direction. He should find out where Tengo’s father 
was a patient, or investigate Aomame’s background. He could meet her classmates 
and colleagues from her college days and from the company she used to work for, and 
gather more personal information. Who knows but this might provide some new 
clues. 

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But after mulling it over, he decided to stay put and continue watching the 
apartment building. First, if he suspended his surveillance at this point, it would put a 
crimp in the daily rhythm he had established, and he would have to start again from 
scratch. Second, even if he located Tengo’s father, and learned more about Aomame’s 
friendships, the payoff might not be worth the trouble. Pounding the pavement on an 
investigation can be productive up to a point, but oddly, once you pass that point, 
nothing much comes of it. He knew this through experience. Third, his intuition told 
him, in no uncertain terms, to 
stay put
—to stay right where he was, watch all the faces 
that passed by, and let nothing get by him. 
So he decided that, with or without Tengo, he would continue to stake out the 
building. If he stayed put, by the time Tengo came back Ushikawa would know each 
and every face. Once he knew all the residents, then he would know in a glance if 
someone was new to the building. 
I’m a carnivore
, Ushikawa thought. 
And carnivores 
have to be forever patient. They have to blend in with their surroundings and know 
everything about their prey
. 
Just before noon, when the foot traffic in and out of the building was at its most 
sparse, Ushikawa left the apartment. He tried to disguise himself a bit, wearing a knit 
cap and a muffler pulled up to his nose, but still he couldn’t help but draw attention to 
himself. The beige knit cap perched on top of his huge head like a mushroom cap. 
The green muffler looked like a big snake coiled around him. Trying a disguise didn’t 
work. Besides, the cap and muffler clashed horribly. 
Ushikawa stopped by the film lab near the station and dropped off two rolls of film 
to be developed. Then he went to a soba noodle shop and ordered a bowl of soba 
noodles with tempura. It had been a while since he had had a hot meal. He savored the 
tempura noodles and drank down the last drop of broth. By the time he finished he 
was so hot he had started to perspire. He put on his knit cap, wrapped the muffler 
around his neck again, and walked back to the apartment. As he smoked a cigarette, 
he lined up all the photos that he had had printed on the floor. He collated the photos 
of people going out in the morning and the ones of people coming back, and if any 
matched he put them together. In order to easily distinguish them, he made up names 
for each person, and wrote the names on the photos with a felt-tip pen. 
Once the morning rush hour was over, hardly any residents left the building. One 
young man—a college student, by the looks of him—hurried out around ten a.m., a 
bag slung over his shoulder. An old woman around seventy and a woman in her mid-
thirties also went out but then returned lugging bags of groceries from a supermarket. 
Ushikawa took their photos as well. During the morning the mailman came and sorted 
the mail into the various mailboxes at the entrance. A deliveryman with a cardboard 
box came in and left, empty-handed, five minutes later. 
Once an hour Ushikawa left his camera and did some stretching for five minutes. 
During that interval his surveillance was put on hold, but he knew from the start that 
total coverage by one person was impossible. It was more important to make sure his 
body didn’t get numb. His muscles would start to atrophy and then he wouldn’t be 
able to react quickly if need be. Like Gregor Samsa when he turned into a beetle, he 
deftly stretched his rotund, misshapen body on the floor, working the kinks out of his 
tight muscles. 

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He listened to AM radio with an earphone to keep from getting bored. Most of the 
daytime programs appealed to housewives and elderly listeners. The people who 
appeared on the programs told jokes that fell flat, pointlessly burst out laughing, gave 
their moronic, hackneyed opinions, and played music so awful you felt like covering 
your ears. Periodically they gave blaring sales pitches for products no one could 
possibly want. At least this is how it all sounded to Ushikawa. But he wanted to hear 
people’s voices, so he endured listening to the inane programs, wondering all the 
while why people would produce such idiotic shows and go to the trouble of using the 
airwaves to disseminate them. 
Not that Ushikawa himself was involved in an operation that was so lofty and 
productive—hiding behind the curtains in a cheap one-room apartment, secretly 
snapping photos of people. He couldn’t very well criticize the actions of others. 
It was not just now, either. Back when he was a lawyer it was the same. He 
couldn’t remember having done anything that helped society. His biggest clients ran 
small and medium-sized financial firms and had ties to organized crime. Ushikawa 
created the most efficient ways to disperse their profits and made all the 
arrangements. Basically, it was money laundering. He was also involved in land 
sharking: when investors had their eyes on an area, he helped drive out longtime 
residents so they could knock down their houses and sell the remaining large lot to 
condo builders. Huge amounts of money rolled in. The same type of people were 
involved in this as well. He also specialized in defending people brought up on tax-
evasion charges. Most of the clients were suspicious characters that an ordinary 
lawyer would hesitate to have anything to do with. But as long as a client wanted him 
to represent him—and as long as a certain amount of money changed hands—
Ushikawa never hesitated. He was a skilled lawyer, with a decent track record, so he 
never hurt for business. His relationship with Sakigake began in the same way. For 
whatever reason, Leader took a personal liking to him. 
If he had followed the path that ordinary lawyers take, Ushikawa would probably 
have found it hard to earn a living. He had passed the bar exam not long after he left 
college, and he had become a lawyer, but he had no connections or influential 
backers. With his looks, no prestigious law firm would ever hire him, so if he had 
stayed on a straight and narrow path he would have had very few clients. There can’t 
be many people in the world who would go out of their way to hire a lawyer who 
looked as unappealing as Ushikawa, plus pay the high fees involved. The blame might 
lie with TV law dramas, which have conditioned people to expect lawyers to be both 
bright and attractive. 
So as time went on, Ushikawa became linked with the underworld. People in the 
underworld didn’t care about his looks. In fact, his peculiar appearance was one 
element that helped them trust and accept him, since neither of them were accepted by 
the ordinary world. They recognized his quick mind, his practical abilities, his 
eloquence. They put him in charge of moving vast sums of money (a task they 
couldn’t openly undertake), and compensated him generously. Ushikawa quickly 
learned the ropes—how to evade the authorities while still doing what was barely 
legal. His intuitiveness and strong will were a big help. Unfortunately, though, he got 
too greedy, made some assumptions he shouldn’t have, and went over the line. He 

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avoided criminal punishment—barely—but was expelled from the Tokyo Bar 
Association. 
Ushikawa switched off the radio and smoked a Seven Stars. He breathed the smoke 
deep into his lungs, then leisurely exhaled. He used an empty can of peaches as an 
ashtray. If he went on like this, he would probably die a miserable death. Before long 
he would make a false step and fall alone in some dark place.