After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

What
is 
this thing?
Tengo asked himself as he stood there, frozen to the spot, eyes 
narrowed. How had this come to be here in his father’s place? No doctor or nurse had 
brought it in, that much was obvious. Around it hovered some special kind of air that 
was out of sync with reality. 
Then it suddenly hit him: 
This is an air chrysalis!
This was the first time that Tengo had ever seen an air chrysalis. He had described 
some in great detail in the novella, but of course he had never seen a real one with his 
own eyes, and he had never thought of them as things that actually existed. But what 
he saw before him now was the very object his mind had imagined and his words had 
described: an air chrysalis. He experienced such a violent sense of déjà vu that it felt 
as if a metal band had been tightened around his stomach. Nevertheless, he stepped 
inside the room and closed the door. Better not let anyone see him. He swallowed the 
saliva that had been collecting in his mouth, making a strange sound in his throat. 
Tengo crept toward the bed, stopping when there was no more than a yard between 
him and it, examining the air chrysalis in greater detail. Now he could be sure that it 
looked exactly like the picture he had drawn of an air chrysalis at the time he wrote 
the story. He had done a simple pencil sketch before attempting to create a description 
of an air chrysalis, first putting the image in his mind into visual form and then 
transferring it into words. He had left the picture pinned to the wall over his desk 
while he rewrote 
Air Chrysalis
. It was shaped more like a cocoon than a chrysalis, but 
“air chrysalis” was the only name by which Fuka-Eri (and Tengo himself) could 
possibly call the thing. 
During his revision, Tengo had created most of the external features of an air 
chrysalis and added them to his descriptions, including the gracefully narrowed waist 
in the middle and the swelling, round, decorative protuberance at either end. These 
came entirely from Tengo’s mind. There had been no mention of them in Fuka-Eri’s 
original narrative. To Fuka-Eri, an air chrysalis was simply that—an air chrysalis, 
something midway between an object and a concept—and she seemed to feel little 
need to describe its appearance in words. Tengo had to invent all the details himself, 
and the air chrysalis that he was now seeing had these same details exactly: the waist 
in the middle and the lovely protuberances at either end. 

---

516
This is the very air chrysalis I sketched and described
, Tengo thought. 
The same 
thing happened with the two moons
. For some reason, every detail he had put into 
writing had now become a reality. Cause and effect were jumbled together. 
All four of Tengo’s limbs felt a strange, nervous, twisting sensation, and his flesh 
began to crawl. He could no longer distinguish how much of this present world was 
reality and how much of it fiction. How much of it belonged to Fuka-Eri, how much 
was Tengo’s, and how much was “ours”? 
A small tear had opened at the very top of the air chrysalis: the chrysalis was about 
to break in two. The gap that had formed was perhaps an inch long. If he bent over 
and brought his eye to the opening, he could probably see what was inside. But Tengo 
could not find the courage to do so. He sat down on the stool by the bed, staring at the 
air chrysalis while his shoulders rose and fell imperceptibly as he struggled to bring 
his breathing under control. The white chrysalis lay there still, emitting its faint glow, 
quietly waiting, like a mathematical proposition, for Tengo to approach it. 
What could possibly be inside the chrysalis? 
What was it trying to show him? 
In the novella