After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Maza
and 
dohta
. It’s from the book 
Air Chrysalis
. Do you know it?” she asked. 
“I do.” 
“Have you read it?” 
Tengo silently nodded. 
“Great. That makes things easier. I 
love
that book. I bought it in the summer and 
read it three times. I hardly ever read a book three times. And as I was smoking 
hashish for the first time in my life I thought it felt like I was inside an air chrysalis 
myself. Like I was enveloped in something and waiting to be born. With my 
maza
watching over me.” 
“You saw your 
maza?
” Tengo asked. 
“Yes, I did. From inside the air chrysalis you can see outside, to a certain extent. 
Though you can’t see in from outside. That’s how it’s structured. But I couldn’t make 
out her expression. She was a vague outline. But I knew it was my 
maza
. I could feel 
it very clearly. That this person was my 
maza.
” 
“So an air chrysalis is actually a kind of womb.” 
“I guess you could say that. I don’t remember anything from when I was in the 
womb, so I can’t make an exact comparison,” Kumi Adachi said, and giggled again. 

---

599
It was the kind of cheaply made two-story apartment building you often find in the 
suburbs of provincial cities. It looked fairly new, yet it was already starting to fall 
apart. The outside stairway creaked, and the doors didn’t quite hang right. Whenever 
a large truck rolled by outside, the windows rattled. The walls were thin, and if 
anyone were to practice a bass guitar in one of the apartments, the whole building 
would end up being one large sound box. 
Tengo wasn’t all that drawn to the idea of smoking hashish. He had a sane mind, 
yet he lived in a world with two moons. There was no need to distort the world any 
more than that. He also didn’t have any sexual desire for Kumi Adachi. Certainly he 
did feel friendly toward this young twenty-three-year-old nurse. But friendliness and 
sexual desire were two different things, at least for Tengo. So if she hadn’t mentioned 
maza
and 
dohta
, most likely he would have made up an excuse and not gone inside. 
He would have taken a bus back, or, if there weren’t any buses, he would have had 
her call a cab, and then returned to the inn. This was, after all, the cat town. It was 
best to avoid any dangerous spots. But once Kumi mentioned the words 
maza
and 
dohta
, Tengo couldn’t turn down her invitation. Maybe she could give him a hint as to 
why the young Aomame had appeared in the air chrysalis in the hospital room. 
The apartment was a typical place for two sisters in their twenties living together. 
There were two small bedrooms, plus a combined kitchen and dining room that 
connected to a tiny living room. The furniture looked thrown together from all over, 
with no unifying style. Above the laminated dining table there hung a tacky imitation 
Tiffany lamp, quite out of place. If you were to open the curtain, with its tiny floral 
pattern, outside there was a cultivated field, and beyond that, a thick, dark grove of 
various trees. The view was nice, with nothing to obstruct it, but far from 
heartwarming. 
Kumi sat Tengo down on the love seat in the living room—a gaudy, red love 
seat—facing the TV. She took out a can of Sapporo beer from the fridge and set it 
down, with a glass, in front of him. 
“I’m going to change into something more comfortable, so wait here. I’ll be right 
back.” 
But she didn’t come back for a long time. He could hear the occasional sound from 
behind the door across the narrow corridor—the sound of drawers that didn’t slide 
well, opening and closing, the thud of things clunking to the ground. With each thud, 
Tengo couldn’t help but look in that direction. Maybe she really was drunker than she 
looked. He could hear a TV through the thin walls of the apartment. He couldn’t make 
out what the people were saying, but it appeared to be a comedy show, and every ten 
or fifteen seconds there was a burst of laughter from the audience. Tengo regretted not 
having turned down her invitation. At the same time, though, in a corner of his mind 
he felt it was inevitable that he had come here. 
The love seat was cheap, and the fabric itched whenever his skin touched it. 
Something bothered him, too, about the shape of it, and he couldn’t get comfortable 
no matter how he shifted around. This only amplified his sense of unease. Tengo took 
a sip of beer and picked up the TV remote from the table. He stared at it for a time, as 
if it were some odd object, and then hit the on button. He surfed through a few 
channels, finally settling on an NHK documentary about railroads in Australia. He 
chose this program simply because it was quieter than the others. While an oboe piece 

---

600
played in the background, a woman announcer was calmly introducing the elegant 
sleeper cars in the line that ran across the whole of Australia. 
Tengo sat there in the uncomfortable love seat, unenthusiastically following the 
images on the screen, but his mind was on