After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Well, no 
need to rush it
, she thought. She forgot about the pregnancy kits for a while and sat 
down on the sofa and concentrated on Proust. 
It was after three when she felt the need to urinate. She peed into a container she 
found and stuck the test strip in it. As she watched, the strip changed color, until it 
was a vivid blue. A lovely shade of blue that would work well as the color of a car. A 
small blue convertible with a tan top. How great it would feel to drive along the coast 
in a car like that, racing through the summer breeze. But in the bathroom of an 
apartment in the middle of the city, in the deepening autumn, what this blue told her 
was the fact that she was pregnant—or, at least, that there was a 95 percent chance of 
it. Aomame stood in front of the mirror and gazed at the thin strip of paper, now blue. 
No matter how long she stared, the color wasn’t about to change. 
Just to be sure, she tried another test. This one instructed you to “urinate directly 
onto the tip of the stick.” But since she wouldn’t feel the need to pee for a while she 
dipped the stick into the container of urine. Freshly collected urine. Pee directly on it 
or dip it in pee—what is the difference? You would get the same result. Two vertical 
lines clearly appeared in the little plastic window. This, too, told Aomame she 
might 
be pregnant
. 
Aomame poured the urine into the toilet and flushed it down. She wrapped the test 
strip in a wad of tissue and threw it in the trash, and rinsed the container in the bath. 
She went to the kitchen and drank two more glasses of water. 
Tomorrow I will try 
again and do the third test
, she thought. 
Three is a good number to stop at. Strike one, 
strike two
. Waiting, with bated breath, for the final pitch. 
Aomame boiled some water and made hot tea, sat down on the sofa, and continued 
reading Proust. She laid out some cheese biscuits on one of a set of matching plates 
and munched on them as she sipped her tea. A quiet afternoon, perfect for reading. 
Her eyes followed the printed words, but nothing stayed with her. She had to reread 
the same spot several times. She gave up, shut her eyes, and she was driving a blue 

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619
convertible, the top down, speeding along the shore. The light breeze, fragrant with 
the smell of the sea, rustled her hair. A sign along the road had two vertical lines. 
These meant 
Warning: You May Be Pregnant
. 
Aomame sighed and tossed her book aside. 
She knew very well there was no need to try the third test. She could do it a 
hundred times and the result would be the same. It would be a waste of time. 
My 
human chorionic gonadotropin would still maintain the same attitude toward my 
womb—keeping the corpus luteum intact, obstructing my period from coming, helping 
form the placenta. Face it: I’m pregnant. The human chorionic gonadotropin knows 
that. And so do I. I can feel it as a pinpoint in my lower abdomen. It’s still tiny—
nothing more than
a hint of something. 
But eventually it will have a placenta, and 
grow bigger. It will take nutrition from me and, in the dark, heavy liquid, grow—
steadily, unceasingly
. 
This was the first time she had been pregnant. She was always a very careful 
person, and only trusted what she could see with her own eyes. When she had sex she 
made absolutely sure her partner used a condom. Even when she was drunk, she never 
failed to check. As she had told the dowager, ever since her first menstruation at age 
ten, she had never missed a period. Her periods were regular, never more than a day 
late. Her cramps were light. She merely bled for a few days, that was all. It never got 
in the way of her exercising or playing sports. 
She got her first period a few months after holding Tengo’s hand in the elementary 
school classroom. Somehow, she felt that the two events were connected. The feel of 
Tengo’s hand may have stirred something inside her. When she told her mother she 
got her period, her mother made a face, like it was one more burden to add to all the 
others she carried. It’s a little early, her mother commented. But that didn’t bother 
Aomame. It was her problem, not her mother’s or anybody else’s. She had stepped 
into a brand-new world. 
And now she was pregnant. 
She thought about her eggs. 
Of my allotted four hundred or so, one of them (near 
the middle of the bunch, she imagined) went and got herself fertilized. Most likely on 
that September night, during the terrible storm. In a dark room when I murdered a 
man. When I stuck a sharp needle from the base of his neck into the lower part of his 
brain. But that man was completely different from the men I had killed before. He 
knew he was about to be murdered, and he wanted it to happen. I actually gave him 
what he
wanted. 
Not as punishment, but more as an act of mercy. In exchange for 
which, he gave me what I was seeking. An act of negotiation carried out in a deep, 
dark place. Very quietly, fertilization took place that night. I know it
, she thought. 
With these hands I took a man’s life, and almost simultaneously, a new life began 
inside me. Was this part of the transaction?
Aomame shut her eyes and stopped thinking. Her head empty, something silently 
flowed inside. And before she knew it, she was praying. 
O Lord in Heaven, may Thy name be praised in utmost purity for ever and ever, and 
may Thy kingdom come to us. Please forgive our many sins, and bestow Thy 
blessings upon our humble pathways. Amen. 

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Why would a prayer come to my lips at a time like this? I don’t believe in things 
like heaven or paradise or the Lord, yet the words are chiseled into my brain. Ever 
since I was three or four and didn’t even know what they meant, I could recite this 
prayer from memory. If I made the slightest mistake, I got the back of my hands 
smacked with a ruler. Though you couldn’t normally see it, when something happened 
it would rise to the surface, like a secret tattoo
. 
What would my mother say if I told her I got pregnant without having had sex? She 
might see it as a terrible sacrilege against her faith
. In any case, it was a kind of 
immaculate conception—though Aomame was certainly not a virgin. But still. Or 
maybe her mother wouldn’t be bothered to even deal with it, not even listen to her. 
Because she sees me as a failure, someone who long ago had fallen from her world
. 
Let me think about it in a different way
, Aomame thought. 
I won’t try to force an 
explanation on the inexplicable, but instead I’ll examine the phenomenon from a 
different angle, as the riddle that it is
.