After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

The Tale of the Heike
was a narrative poem 
handed down through an oral tradition. Fuka-Eri’s normal style of speaking was 
extremely flat, lacking almost all accent and intonation, but when she launched into 
the tale, her voice became startlingly strong, rich, and colorful, as if something had 
taken possession of her. The magnificent sea battle fought in 1185 on the swirling 
currents between Honshu and Kyushu came vividly to life. The Heike side was 
doomed to defeat, and Kiyomori’s wife Tokiko, the “Nun of Second Rank,” plunged 
into the waves holding her grandson, the child emperor Antoku, in her arms. Her 
ladies-in-waiting followed her in death rather than fall into the hands of the rough 
eastern warriors. Tomomori, concealing his grief, jokingly urged the ladies to kill 
themselves. 
You’ll have nothing but a living hell if you go on like this
, he had told 
them. 
You had best end your lives here and now
. 
“Want me to go on,” Fuka-Eri asked. 

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“No, that’s fine. Thank you,” Tengo answered, stunned. He understood how those 
news reporters, at a loss for words, must have felt. “How did you manage to 
memorize such a long passage?” 
“Listening to the tape over and over.” 
“Listening to the tape over and over, an ordinary person still wouldn’t be able to 
memorize it.” 
It suddenly dawned on Tengo that precisely to the degree she could not read a 
book, the girl’s ability to memorize what she had heard might be extraordinarily well 
developed, just as certain children with savant syndrome can absorb and remember 
huge amounts of visual information in a split second. 
“I want you to read me a book,” Fuka-Eri said. 
“What kind of book would you like?” 
“Do you have the book you were talking about with the Professor,” Fuka-Eri 
asked. “The one with Big Brother.” 
“
1984
? I don’t have that one.” 
“What kind of story is it.” 
Tengo tried to recall the plot. “I read it once a 
long
time ago in the school library, 
so I don’t remember the details too well. It was published in 1949, when 1984 seemed 
like a time far in the future.” 
“That’s this year.” 
“Yes, by coincidence. At some point the future becomes reality. And then it 
quickly becomes the past. In his novel, George Orwell depicted the future as a dark 
society dominated by totalitarianism. People are rigidly controlled by a dictator 
named Big Brother. Information is restricted, and history is constantly being 
rewritten. The protagonist works in a government office, and I’m pretty sure his job is 
to rewrite words. Whenever a new history is written, the old histories all have to be 
thrown out. In the process, words are remade, and the meanings of current words are 
changed. What with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true 
anymore. They lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally. It’s that kind of story.” 
“They rewrite history.” 
“Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of 
themselves. It’s a crime.” 
Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment. 
Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our 
collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective 
memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability 
to sustain our true selves.” 
“You rewrite stuff.” 
Tengo laughed and took a sip of wine. “All I did was touch up your story, for the 
sake of expedience. That’s totally different from rewriting history.” 
“But that Big Brother book is not here now,” she asked. 
“Unfortunately, no. So I can’t read it to you.” 
“I don’t mind another book.” 
Tengo went to his bookcase and scanned the spines of his books. He had read 
many books over the years, but he owned few. He tended to dislike filling his home 
with a lot of possessions. When he finished a book, unless it was something quite 

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special, he would take it to a used-book store. He bought only books he knew he was 
going to read right away, and he would read the ones he cared about very closely, 
until they were ingrained in his mind. When he needed other books he would borrow 
them from the neighborhood library. 
Choosing a book to read to Fuka-Eri took Tengo a long time. He was not used to 
reading aloud, and had almost no clue which might be best for that. After a good deal 
of indecision, he pulled out Anton Chekhov’s