After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

just there
. I was always a big boy and good at judo, and I always 
did well in the prefectural tournaments. But when I went out into the wider world, 
there were lots of guys who were stronger than I was. I was never chosen to represent 
my university in the national tournaments. This was a great shock to me, and for a 
while I no longer knew who I was. But that was only natural, because in fact I was 
nobody.” 
Tengo opened the bottle of mineral water he had brought with him and took a 
drink. Then he sat down on the stool again. 
“I told you this before, but I’m grateful to you. I believe I’m not your real son. I’m 
almost sure of it. I’m grateful to you for having raised me even though we had no 
blood tie. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for a man to raise a small child alone. Now, though, 
when I recall how you took me around on your NHK collections, I feel sick at heart. I 
have only terrible memories of that. But I’m sure that you could think of no other way 
to communicate with me. How should I put it? It was probably the best you could do. 
That was your only point of contact with society, and you wanted to show me what it 
was like out there. I can see that now. Of course, you also calculated that having a 

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child with you would make it easier for you to collect the money. But that wasn’t all 
you had in mind, I suspect.” 
Tengo paused briefly to let his words sink in and to organize his own thoughts. 
“Of course, as a child, I couldn’t see it that way. It was just embarrassing and 
painful to me—that I had to go around with you making collections while my 
classmates spent their Sundays having fun. I can’t tell you how much I hated it when 
Sundays came around. But now, at least to some extent, I can understand what you 
did. I’m not saying that it was right. It left me with scars. It was hard for a child. But 
what’s done is done. Don’t let it bother you. One good thing it did was to make me 
tougher. I learned firsthand that it’s not easy making your way through this world.” 
Tengo opened his hands and looked at his palms for a while. 
“I’m going to go on living one way or another. I think I can do a better job of it 
from now on, without such pointless detours. I don’t know what you want to do. 
Maybe you just want to go on sleeping quietly, without ever waking up again. That’s 
what you should do if you want to. I can’t stand in your way if that’s what you are 
hoping for. All I can do is let you go on sleeping. In any case, I wanted to say all this 
to you—to tell you what I have done so far in life and what I am thinking. Maybe you 
would have preferred not to hear any of this, and if that’s the case, I’m sorry to have 
inflicted it on you. Anyhow, I have nothing more to tell you. I’ve pretty much said 
everything I thought I ought to say. I won’t bother you anymore. Now you can sleep 
as much as you like.” 
After five o’clock, Nurse Omura, the one with the ballpoint pen in her hair, came to 
the room and checked the amount of intravenous fluid in the bag. This time she did 
not check his father’s temperature. 
“Anything to report?” she asked. 
“Not really. He’s just been sleeping the whole time,” Tengo answered. 
The nurse nodded. “The doctor will be here soon. How late can you stay here 
today, Mr. Kawana?” 
Tengo glanced at his watch. “I’ll be catching the train just before seven, so I can 
stay as late as six thirty.” 
The nurse wrote something on his father’s chart and put the pen back into her hair. 
“I’ve been talking to him all afternoon, but he doesn’t seem to hear me,” Tengo 
said. 
The nurse said, “If I learned anything in nursing school, it’s that bright words make 
the eardrums vibrate brightly. They have their own bright sound. So even if the 
patient doesn’t understand what you’re saying, his eardrums will physically vibrate on 
that bright wavelength. We’re taught to always talk to the patient in a big, bright voice 
whether he can hear you or not. It definitely helps, whatever the logic involved. I can 
say that from experience.” 
Tengo thought about this remark. “Thank you,” he said. Nurse Omura nodded 
lightly and, with a few quick steps, left the room. 
After that, Tengo and his father maintained a long silence. Tengo had nothing 
more to say, but the silence was not an uncomfortable one for him. The afternoon 

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light was gradually fading, and hints of evening hung in the air. The sun’s last rays 
moved silently and stealthily through the room. 
Tengo suddenly wondered if he had said anything to his father about the two 
moons. He had the feeling that he had probably not done so. Tengo was now living in 
a world with two moons. “It’s a very strange sight, no matter how many times I see 
it,” he wanted to say, but he also felt that there wouldn’t be much point to mentioning 
it. The number of moons in the sky was of no concern to his father. This was a 
problem that Tengo would have to handle on his own. 
Ultimately, though, whether this world (or 
that
world) had only one moon or two 
moons or three moons, there was only one Tengo. What difference did it make? 
Whatever world he was in, Tengo was just Tengo, the same person with his own 
unique problems and his own unique characteristics. The real question was not in the 
moons but in Tengo himself. 
Half an hour later, Nurse Omura came into the room again. For some reason, she no 
longer had a pen in her hair. Where could it have gone? Tengo found himself 
strangely concerned about the pen. Two male staff members came with her, wheeling 
a movable bed. Both men were stockily built and dark-complexioned, and neither of 
them said a word. They might have been foreigners. 
“We have to take your father for some tests, Mr. Kawana,” the nurse said. “Would 
you like to wait here?” 
Tengo looked at the clock. “Is something wrong with him?” 
The nurse shook her head. “No, not at all. We just don’t have the testing equipment 
in this room, so we’re taking him to where it is. It’s nothing special. The doctor will 
probably talk to you afterward.” 
“I see. I’ll wait here.” 
“You could go to the lunchroom for some hot tea. You should get some rest.” 
“Thank you,” Tengo said. 
The two men gently lifted his father’s thin body, with the intravenous tubes still 
attached, and transferred him to the wheeled bed, moving the bed and intravenous 
stand into the corridor with quick, practiced movements. Still they did not say a word. 
“This won’t take too long,” the nurse said. 
But his father did not return to the room for a long time. The light coming in the 
window grew slowly weaker, but Tengo did not turn on the lamp. If he did so, he felt, 
something important here would be lost. 
An indentation remained in the bed where his father had been lying. His father 
now probably weighed next to nothing, but still he had left a clear impression of his 
shape. Looking at the indentation, Tengo had a strong feeling that he had been left 
behind in this world all alone. He even felt that the dawn might never come again, 
once the sun had set tonight. 
Sitting on the stool by the bed, steeped in the colors of the approaching evening, 
Tengo stayed in the same position, lost in thought. Then suddenly it occurred to him 
that he had not actually been thinking at all but had been aimlessly submerging 
himself in a vacuum. He stood up slowly, went to the toilet, and relieved himself. 
After washing his face with cold water, he dried his face with his handkerchief and 

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looked at himself in the mirror. Then, recalling what the nurse had said, he went 
downstairs to the lunchroom and drank some hot green tea. 
His father had still not been brought back to the room when Tengo returned there after 
twenty minutes downstairs. Instead, what he found, in the hollow that his father had 
left in the bed, was a white object that he had never seen before. 
Nearly five feet in length, it had smooth, beautiful curves. At first sight, it seemed 
to be shaped like a peanut shell, its entire surface covered with something like short, 
soft down that emitted a faint but even glow. In the rapidly darkening room, the pale 
bluish light enveloped the object softly. The thing lay still in the bed, as if to fill the 
individual space that his father had temporarily left behind. Tengo halted in the 
doorway, hand on the knob, staring at the mysterious object. His lips seemed to move 
somewhat, but no words emerged from them.