After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

That child
in the safe house was not actual substance, according to Leader. She 
was merely one form of a concept and had since been “retrieved.” But Aomame could 
hardly say this to the dowager now. Aomame herself did not know what it meant. She 
did, however, remember the levitation of the marble clock. She had seen it happen 
with her own eyes. 
Aomame asked, “How many days will I be hiding out in this safe house?” 
“You should assume it will be from four days to a week. After that you will be 
given a new name and situation and moved to a faraway place. Once you have settled 
down there, we will have to cut off all contact with you for your own safety. I won’t 
be able to see you for a while. Considering my age, I might never be able to see you 
again. It might have been better if I had never lured you into this troublesome 
business. I have thought about that many times. Then I would not have had to lose 
you this way. But—” 
The dowager’s voice caught in her throat. Aomame waited quietly for her to 
continue speaking. 
“But I have no regrets. Everything was more or less destined to happen. I had to 
involve you. I had no choice. A very strong force was at work, and that is what has 
moved me. Still, I feel bad for you that it has come to this.” 
“On the other hand, we have shared something, something important, something 
we could not have shared with anyone else, something we could not have had any 
other way.” 
“Yes, you are right,” the dowager said. 
“Sharing it was something that I needed, too.” 
“Thank you for saying that. It gives me a measure of salvation.” 
Aomame was also pained to think that she could no longer see the dowager, who 
was one of the few ties she possessed with the outside world. 
“Be well,” Aomame said. 
“You, too,” the dowager said. “And be happy.” 
“If possible,” Aomame said. Happiness was one of the farthest things away from 
her. 
Tamaru came on the phone. 
“You haven’t used 
it
so far, have you?” he asked. 
“No, not yet.” 
“Try your best not to use it.” 
“I’ll keep that in mind.” 

---

452
After a momentary pause, Tamaru said, “I think I told you the other day that I grew 
up in an orphanage in the mountains of Hokkaido.” 
“You were put in there after you were evacuated from Sakhalin when you were 
separated from your parents.” 
“There was a boy in that orphanage two years younger than I was. He was mixed: 
half Japanese, half black. I think his father was a soldier from the American base in 
Misawa. I don’t know about his mother, but she was probably a prostitute or a bar 
hostess. She abandoned him soon after he was born, and he was put in the orphanage. 
He was a lot bigger than me, but not very smart. The other kids teased him, of course, 
mainly because his color was different. You know how that goes.” 
“I guess.” 
“I wasn’t Japanese, either, so it fell to me one way or another to be his protector. 
Our situations were similar—a Korean evacuee and the illegitimate mixed-race kid of 
a black guy and a whore. You can’t get much lower than that. But it did me good: it 
toughened me up. Not him, though. He could never be tough. Left on his own, he 
would have died for sure. In that place, you had to have a quick wit or be a tough 
fighter if you wanted to survive.” 
Aomame waited quietly for him to go on. 
“He was bad at everything. He couldn’t do anything right. He couldn’t button his 
own shirt or wipe his ass. Carving, though, was something else. He was great at that. 
Give him a few carving tools and a block of wood and before you knew it he had 
made a really fine carving. No sketches or anything: the image would pop into his 
head and he would produce an accurate three-dimensional figure, tremendously 
detailed and realistic. He was a kind of genius. It was amazing.” 
“A savant,” Aomame said. 
“Yes, sure. I learned about that stuff later, the so-called savant syndrome. People 
with extraordinary powers. But nobody knew about that back then. People assumed 
he was mentally retarded or something—a kid with a slow brain but gifted hands that 
made him good at carving. For some reason, though, the only thing he would ever 
carve was rats. He could do those beautifully. They looked alive from any angle. But 
he never, ever carved anything but rats. Everybody would urge him to carve some 
other animal—a horse or a bear—and they even took him to the zoo for that purpose, 
but he never showed the slightest interest in other creatures. So then they just gave up 
and let him have his way, making nothing but rats. He made rats of every shape and 
size and pose. It was strange, I guess. By which I mean that there 
weren’t
any rats in 
the orphanage. It was too cold there, and there was nothing for them to eat. The place 
was too poor even for rats. Nobody could figure out why he was so fixated on rats.… 
Well, anyway, word got out about the rats he was making. The local paper carried a 
story, and people started asking to buy them. The head of the orphanage, a Catholic 
priest, got a craft shop to carry the carved rats and sell them to tourists. They must 
have brought in some decent money, but of course none of it ever came back to the 
boy. I don’t know what they did with it, but I suspect the top people in the orphanage 
used it for themselves. All the boy ever got was more carving tools and wood to keep 
making rats in the workshop. True, he was spared the hard fieldwork; all he had to do 
was carve rats by himself while the rest of us were out. He was lucky to that extent.” 
“What finally happened to him?” 

---

453
“I really don’t know. I ran away from the orphanage when I was fourteen and lived 
on my own after that. I headed straight for the ferry, crossed over to the main island, 
and I haven’t set foot in Hokkaido since then. The last I saw him, he was bent over a 
workbench, concentrating on his carving. You couldn’t get through to him at those 
times, so we never even said good-bye. If he’s still alive, I imagine he’s still carving 
rats somewhere. It was all he could do.” 
Aomame kept silent and waited for the rest of the story. 
“I often think of him even now. Life in the orphanage was terrible. They fed us 
next to nothing, and we were always hungry. The winters were 
cold
. The work was 
harsh, and the older kids bullied us something awful. But he never seemed to find the 
life there all that painful. He appeared to be happy as long as he could carve. 
Sometimes he would go half mad when he picked up his carving tools, but otherwise 
he was a truly docile little fellow. He didn’t make trouble for anyone but just kept 
quietly carving his rats. He’d pick up a block of wood and stare at it for a long time 
until he could see what kind of rat in what kind of pose was lurking inside. It took a 
long while before he could see the figure, but once that happened, all he had to do was 
pull the rat out of the block with his knives. He often used to say that: ‘I’m going to 
pull the rat out.’ And the rats he