After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Air Chrysalis
were by no 
means the work of an author writing just for herself. If Fuka-Eri’s sole objective was 
to record things she had witnessed or imagined, setting them down as sheer 
information, she could have accomplished that much with a list. She didn’t have to go 
to the trouble of fashioning a story, which was unmistakably writing that was meant 
for other people to pick up and read, which was precisely why 
Air Chrysalis
, though 
written without the objective of creating a literary work, and in crude and artless 
language, still had succeeded in acquiring the power to appeal directly to the heart. 
The more he read, however, the more convinced Tengo became that those “other 
people” were almost certainly not the same “general public” that modern literature 
invariably had in mind. 
All right, then, what kind of reader was this meant for?
Tengo had no idea. 
All he knew for sure was that 
Air Chrysalis
was an utterly unique work of fiction 
combining enormous strengths with enormous flaws, and that it seemed to possess an 
objective that was something quite special. 
. . . 
Tengo found that his rewrite was more than doubling the length of the text. The 
original was far more often underwritten than overwritten, so rewriting it for 
coherence and consistency could not help but increase its volume. Fuka-Eri’s text was 
so threadbare! True, with its more logical style and consistent point of view, the new 
version was far easier to read, but the overall flow was becoming strangely sluggish. 
Its logicality showed through too clearly, dulling the sharpness of the original. 
Once he had filled out this first block of text, Tengo’s next task was to eliminate 
from his bloated manuscript everything that was not strictly necessary, to remove 
every extra bit of fat. Subtraction was a far simpler process than addition, and it 
reduced the volume of his text by some thirty percent. It was a kind of mind game. He 
would set a certain time period for expanding the text as much as possible, then set a 
certain time period for reducing the text as much as possible. As he alternated 
tenaciously between the two processes, the swings between them gradually shrank in 
size, until the volume of text naturally settled down where it belonged, arriving at a 
point where it could be neither expanded nor reduced. He excised any hint of ego, 
shook off all extraneous embellishments, and sent all transparent signs of imposed 
logic into the back room. Tengo had a gift for such work. He was a born technician, 
possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of 
prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the 
game. 

---

69
Tengo had been all but lost in the work for some time when he looked up to find it 
was nearly three o’clock. Come to think of it, he hadn’t eaten lunch yet. He went to 
the kitchen, put a kettle on to boil, and ground some coffee beans. He ate a few 
crackers with cheese, followed those with an apple, and when the water boiled, made 
coffee. Drinking this from a large mug, he distracted himself with thoughts of sex 
with his older girlfriend. Ordinarily, he would have been doing it with her right about 
now. He pictured the things that he would be doing, and the things that she would be 
doing. He closed his eyes, turned his face toward the ceiling, and released a deep sigh 
heavy with suggestion and possibility. 
Tengo then went back to his desk, switched circuits in his brain again, and read 
through his rewritten opening to 
Air Chrysalis
on the word processor’s screen the way 
the general in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s