After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 8 
Aomame 
NOT SUCH A BAD DOOR 
Except for the silent men who brought supplies every Tuesday afternoon, for the next 
two weeks no one else visited Aomame’s apartment. The man who claimed to be an 
NHK fee collector had insisted that he would be back. He had been determined, or at 
least that was the way it sounded to Aomame. But there hadn’t been a knock on the 
door since. Maybe he was busy with another route. 
On the surface, these were quiet, peaceful days. Nothing happened, nobody came 
by, the phone didn’t ring. To be on the safe side, Tamaru called as little as possible. 
Aomame always kept the curtains closed, living as quietly as she could so as not to 
attract attention. After dark, she turned on the bare minimum number of lights. 
Trying to stay as quiet as possible, she did strenuous workouts, mopped the floor 
every day, and spent a lot of time preparing meals. She asked for some Spanish-
language tapes and went over the lessons aloud. Not speaking for a long time makes 
the muscles around the mouth grow slack. She had to focus on moving her mouth as 
much as she could, and foreign language drills were good for that. Plus Aomame had 
long fantasized about South America. If she could go anywhere, she would like to live 
in a small, peaceful country in South America, like Costa Rica. She would rent a 
small villa on the coast and spend the days swimming and reading. With the money 
she had stuffed in her bag she should be able to live for ten years there, if she watched 
her expenses. She couldn’t see them chasing her all the way to Costa Rica. 
As she practiced Spanish conversation Aomame imagined a quiet, peaceful life on 
the Costa Rican beach. Could Tengo be a part of her life there? She closed her eyes 
and pictured the two of them sunbathing on a Caribbean beach. She wore a small, 
black bikini and sunglasses and was holding Tengo’s hand. But a sense of reality, the 
kind that would move her, was missing from the picture. It was nothing more than an 
ordinary tourist brochure photo. 
When she ran out of things to do, she cleaned the pistol. She followed the manual 
and disassembled the Heckler & Koch, cleaned each part with a cloth and brush, oiled 
them, and then reassembled it. She made sure the action was smooth. By now she had 
mastered the operation and the pistol felt like a part of her body. 
She would go to bed at ten, read a few pages in her book, and fall asleep. Aomame 
had never had trouble falling asleep. As she read, she would get sleepy. She would 
switch off the bedside lamp, rest her head on the pillow, and shut her eyes. With few 
exceptions, when she opened her eyes again it was morning. 

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Ordinarily she didn’t tend to dream much. Even if she did, she usually had 
forgotten most of the dream by the time she woke up. Sometimes faint scraps of her 
dream would get caught on the wall of her consciousness, but she couldn’t retrace 
these fragments back to any coherent narrative. All that remained were small, random 
images. She slept deeply, and the dreams she did have came from a very deep place. 
Like fish that live at the bottom of the ocean, most of her dreams weren’t able to float 
to the surface. Even if they did, the difference in water pressure would force a change 
in their appearance. 
But after coming to live in this hiding place, she dreamed every night. And these 
were clear, realistic dreams. She would be dreaming and wake up in the middle of a 
dream, unable to distinguish whether she was in the real world or the dream world. 
Aomame couldn’t remember ever having had this experience before. She would look 
over at the digital clock beside her bed. The numbers would say 1:15, 2:37, or 4:07. 
She would close her eyes and try to fall asleep again, but it wasn’t easy. The two 
different worlds were silently at odds within her, fighting over her consciousness, like 
the mouth of a river where the seawater and the fresh water flow in.