After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Carnaval
. 
The radio station just happened to be broadcasting Sibelius’s violin concerto. That 
was all there was to it. 
As usual, Ushikawa let half his mind go blank and thought with the other half. 
David Oistrakh’s performance of Sibelius went through the blank half of his mind, 
like a gentle breeze wafting in through a wide-open entrance and out through a wide-
open exit. Maybe it was not the most laudable way of appreciating music. If Sibelius 
knew his music was being treated this way, it was easy to imagine how those large 
eyebrows would frown, the folds of his thick neck coming together. But Sibelius had 
died long ago, and even Oistrakh had long since gone to his grave. So Ushikawa 
could do as he pleased and let the music filter from right to left, as the unblank half of 
his brain toyed with random thoughts. 
In times like these, Ushikawa didn’t like to have a set objective. He let his thoughts 
run free, as if he were releasing dogs on a broad plain. He would tell them to go 
wherever they wanted and do whatever they liked, and then he would just let them go. 
He sank down in the bathwater up to his neck, closed his eyes, and, half listening to 
the music, let his mind wander. The dogs frolicked around, rolled down slopes, 
gamboled after each other tirelessly, chased pointlessly after squirrels, then came 
back, covered in mud and grass, and Ushikawa patted their heads and fastened their 
collars back on. The music came to an end. Sibelius’s violin concerto was a roughly 
thirty-minute piece—just the right length. The next piece, the announcer intoned, is 
Janá
č
ek’s 
Sinfonietta
. Ushikawa had a vague memory of hearing the name of the 
piece before, but he couldn’t remember exactly. When he tried to recall, his vision 
turned strangely cloudy and indistinct, as if a cream-colored mist had settled over his 
eyeballs. He must have stayed too long in the bath, he decided. He gave up, switched 
off the radio, got out of the bathtub, wrapped a towel around his waist, and got a beer 
from the fridge. 
Ushikawa lived by himself. He used to have a wife and two small daughters. They 
had bought a house in the Chuorinkan District in Yamato, in Kanagawa Prefecture. It 
was a small house, but they had a garden and a dog. His wife was good-looking 
enough, and his daughters were even pretty. Neither daughter had inherited anything 
of Ushikawa’s looks, which was a great relief. 

---

640
Then, like a sudden blackout on the stage between acts, he was alone. He found it 
hard to believe that there had ever been a time when he had a family and lived with 
them in a house in the suburbs. Sometimes he was even sure the whole thing must be 
a misunderstanding, that he had unconsciously fabricated this past for himself. But it 
had actually happened. He had actually had a wife he shared a bed with and two 
children who shared his bloodline. In his desk drawer, he had a family photo of the 
four of them. They were all smiling happily. Even the dog seemed to be grinning. 
There was no likelihood that they would ever be a family again. His wife and 
daughters lived in Nagoya now. The girls had a new father, the kind of father with 
normal looks who wouldn’t embarrass them when he showed up at parent-teacher 
conference day. The girls hadn’t seen Ushikawa for nearly four years, but they didn’t 
seem to regret this. They never even wrote to him. It didn’t bother Ushikawa much 
either that he couldn’t see his daughters. This didn’t mean that his daughters weren’t 
important to him. It was just that now his top priority was simply keeping himself 
secure, so for the time being he had to switch off any unnecessary emotional circuits 
and focus on the tasks at hand. 
Plus, he knew this: that no matter how far away his daughters went from him, his 
blood still flowed inside them. His daughters might forget all about him, but that 
blood would not lose its way. Blood had a frighteningly long memory. And the sign 
of that large head would, sometime, somewhere in the future, reappear, in an 
unexpected time and unexpected place. When it did, people would sigh and remember 
that Ushikawa had once existed. 
Ushikawa might be alive to witness this eruption, or perhaps not. It didn’t really 
matter. He was satisfied just to know that it was