After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 8 
Tengo 
MEETING NEW PEOPLE IN NEW PLACES 
Most people think of Sunday morning as a time for rest. Throughout his youth, 
however, Tengo never once thought of Sunday morning as something to enjoy. 
Instead, it depressed him. When the weekend came, his whole body felt sluggish and 
achy, and his appetite would disappear. For Tengo, Sunday was like a misshapen 
moon that showed only its dark side. 
If only Sunday would never come!
he would 
often think as a boy. 
How much more fun it would be to have school every day 
without a break!
He even prayed for Sunday not to come, though his prayers were 
never answered. Even now, as an adult, dark feelings would inexplicably overtake 
him when he awoke on a Sunday morning. He felt his joints creaking and wanted to 
throw up. Such a reaction to Sunday had long since permeated his heart, perhaps in 
some deep, unconscious region. 
Tengo’s father was a collector of subscription fees for NHK—Japan’s quasi-
governmental broadcasting network—and he would take little Tengo with him as he 
went from door to door. These rounds started before Tengo entered kindergarten and 
continued through the fifth grade without a single weekend off, excepting only those 
Sundays when there was a special function at school. Waking at seven, his father 
would make him scrub his face with soap and water, inspect his ears and nails, and 
dress him in the cleanest (but least showy) clothes he owned, promising that, in 
return, he would buy Tengo a yummy treat. 
Tengo had no idea whether the other NHK subscription fee collectors kept working 
on weekends and holidays, but as far as he could remember, his father always did. If 
anything, he worked with even more enthusiasm than usual, because on Sundays he 
could often catch people who were usually out during the week. 
Tengo’s father had several reasons for taking him on his rounds. One was that he 
could not leave the boy home alone. On weekdays and Saturdays, he could leave 
Tengo in daycare or kindergarten or elementary school, but these were all closed on 
Sundays. Another reason, he said, was that it was important for a father to show his 
son the type of work he did. A child should learn from early on what kind of activity 
supported his daily life, and he should appreciate the importance of labor. Tengo’s 
father had been sent out to work in the fields, Sunday or no, from the time he was old 
enough to understand anything, and he had even been kept out of school during the 
busiest seasons on the farm. To him, such a life was a given. 
His third and final reason was a more calculating one, which is why it left the 
deepest scars on Tengo’s heart. His father knew that having a small child with him 

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made his job easier. When a fee collector had a child in hand, people found it more 
difficult to say to him, “I don’t want to pay, so get out of here.” With a little person 
staring up at them, even people determined not to pay would usually end up forking 
over the money, which was why he saved the most difficult routes for Sunday. Tengo 
sensed from the beginning that this was the role he was expected to play, and he 
absolutely hated it. But he also felt that he had to act out his role as cleverly as he 
could in order to please his father. He might as well have been a trained monkey. If he 
pleased his father, he would be treated kindly that day. 
Tengo’s one salvation was that his father’s route was fairly far from home. They 
lived in a suburban residential district outside the city of Ichikawa, but his father’s 
rounds were in the center of the city. The school district was different there as well. 
At least he was able to avoid doing collections at the homes of his kindergarten and 
elementary school classmates. Occasionally, though, when walking in the downtown 
shopping area, he would spot a classmate on the street. When this happened, he would 
dodge behind his father to keep from being noticed. 
Most of Tengo’s school friends had fathers who commuted to office jobs in the 
center of Tokyo. These men thought of Ichikawa as a part of Tokyo that just 
happened to have been incorporated into Chiba Prefecture. On Monday mornings his 
school friends would talk excitedly about where they had gone and what they had 
done on Sunday. They went to amusement parks and zoos and baseball games. In the 
summer they would go swimming, in the winter skiing. Their fathers would take them 
for drives or to go hiking. They would share their experiences with enthusiasm, and 
exchange information about new places. But Tengo had nothing to talk about. He 
never went to tourist attractions or amusement parks. From morning to evening on 
Sundays, he and his father would ring the doorbells of strangers’ houses, bow their 
heads, and take money from the people who came to the door. If someone didn’t want 
to pay, his father would threaten or cajole them. With anyone who tried to talk his 
way out of paying, he would have an argument. Sometimes he would curse at them 
like stray dogs. Such experiences were not the kind of thing Tengo could share with 
school friends. 
When Tengo was in the third grade, word spread that his father was an NHK 
subscription fee collector. Someone had probably seen them making their rounds 
together. He was, after all, walking all day long behind his father to every corner of 
the city every Sunday, so it was almost inevitable that he would be spotted at some 
point (especially now that he was too big to hide behind his father). Indeed, it was 
surprising that it hadn’t happened before. 
From that point on, Tengo’s nickname became “NHK.” He could not help 
becoming a kind of alien in a society of middle-class children of white-collar workers. 
Much of what they took for granted, Tengo could not. He lived a different kind of life 
in a different world. His grades were outstanding, as was his athletic ability. He was 
big and strong, and the teachers focused on him. So even though he was an “alien,” he 
was never a class outcast. If anything, in most circumstances he was treated with 
respect. But whenever the other boys invited him to go somewhere or to visit their 
homes on a Sunday, he had to turn them down. He knew that if he told his father, 
“Some of the boys are getting together this Sunday at so-and-so’s house,” it wouldn’t 

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make any difference. Soon, people stopped inviting him. Before long he realized that 
he didn’t belong to any groups. He was always alone. 
Sunday collection rounds were an absolute rule: no exceptions, no changes. If he 
caught a cold, if he had a persistent cough, if he was running a little fever, if he had an 
upset stomach, his father accepted no excuses. Staggering after his father on such 
days, he would often wish he could fall down and die on the spot. Then, perhaps, his 
father might think twice about his own behavior; it might occur to him that he had 
been too strict with his son. For better or worse, though, Tengo was born with a robust 
constitution. Even if he had a fever or a stomachache or felt nauseous, he always 
walked the entire long route with his father, never falling down or fainting, and never 
complaining. 
Tengo’s father was repatriated from Manchuria, destitute, when the war ended in 
1945. Born the third son of a farming family in the hardscrabble Tohoku region, he 
joined a homesteaders’ group and crossed over to Manchuria in the 1930s with friends 
from the same prefecture. None of them had swallowed whole the government’s 
claims that Manchuria was a paradise where the land was vast and rich, offering an 
affluent life to all comers. They knew enough to realize that “paradise” was not to be 
found anywhere. They were simply poor and hungry. The best they could hope for if 
they stayed at home was a life on the brink of starvation. The times were terrible, and 
huge numbers of people were unemployed. The cities offered no hope of finding 
decent work. This left crossing the sea to Manchuria as virtually the only way to 
survive. As farmers developing new land, they received basic training in the use of 
firearms in case of emergency, were given some minimal information about farming 
conditions in Manchuria, were sent off with three cheers from their villages, and then 
were transported by train from the port of Dalian to a place near the Manchurian-
Mongolian border. There they were given some land and farming implements and 
small arms, and together started cultivating the earth. The soil was poor and rocky, 
and in winter everything froze. Sometimes stray dogs were all they had to eat. Even 
so, with government support the first few years, they managed to get by. 
Their lives were finally becoming more stable when, in August 1945, the Soviet 
Union broke its neutrality treaty with Japan and launched a full-scale invasion of 
Manchuria. Having ended its operations on the European front, the Soviet army had 
used the Trans-Siberian Railway to shift a huge military force to the Far East in 
preparation for the border crossing. Tengo’s father had been expecting this to happen, 
having been secretly informed of the impending situation by a certain official, a man 
he had become friendly with thanks to a distant connection. The man had told him 
privately that Japan’s weakened Kwantung Army could never stand up to such an 
invasion, so he should prepare to flee with the clothes on his back as soon as it 
happened—the sooner the better. The minute he heard the news that the Soviet army 
had apparently violated the border, he mounted his horse, galloped to the local train 
station, and boarded the second-to-last train for Dalian. He was the only one among 
his farming companions to make it back to Japan before the end of the year. 
He went to Tokyo after the war and tried making a living as a black marketeer and 
as a carpenter’s apprentice, but nothing seemed to work. He could barely keep himself 

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alive. He was working as a liquor store delivery man in the Asakusa entertainment 
district when he bumped into an acquaintance from his Manchurian days on the street. 
It was the official who had warned him of the impending Soviet invasion. The man 
had originally gone over to work for the postal service in Japan’s Manchukuo puppet 
state, and now that he was back in Japan he had his old job back with the Ministry of 
Communications. He seemed to like Tengo’s father, both because they came from the 
same village and because he knew what a hard worker he was. He invited him to 
share a bite. 
When the man learned that Tengo’s father was having a hard time finding a decent 
job, he asked if he might be interested in working as a subscription fee collector for 
NHK. He offered to recommend him to a friend in that department, and Tengo’s 
father gladly accepted. He knew almost nothing about NHK, but he was willing to try 
anything that promised a steady income. The man wrote him a letter of 
recommendation and even served as a guarantor for him, smoothing his way to 
become an NHK subscription fee collector. They gave him training, a uniform, and a 
quota to fill. People then were just beginning to recover from the shock of defeat and 
to look for entertainment in their destitute lives. Radio was the most accessible and 
cheapest form of entertainment; and postwar radio, which offered music, comedy, and 
sports, was incomparably more popular than its wartime predecessor, with its virtuous 
exhortations for patriotic self-sacrifice. NHK needed huge numbers of people to go 
from door to door collecting listeners’ fees. 
Tengo’s father performed his duties with great enthusiasm. His foremost strengths 
were his sturdy constitution and his perseverance in the face of adversity. Here was a 
man who had barely eaten a filling meal since birth. To a person like that, the 
collection of NHK fees was not excruciating work. The most violent curses hurled at 
him were nothing. Moreover, he felt much satisfaction at belonging to a gigantic 
organization, even as one of its lowest-ranking members. He worked for one year as a 
commissioned collector without job security, his only income a percentage of his 
collections, but his performance and attitude were so outstanding that he was taken 
directly into the ranks of the full-fledged employees, an almost unheard-of 
achievement in NHK. Part of this had to do with his superior results in an especially 
difficult collection area, but also effective here was the influence of his guarantor, the 
Communications Ministry official. Soon he received a set basic salary plus expenses. 
He was able to move into a corporation-owned apartment and join the health care 
plan. The difference in treatment was like night and day. It was the greatest stroke of 
good fortune he had ever encountered in life. In other words, he had finally worked 
his way up to the lowest spot on the totem pole. 
Young Tengo heard this story from his father so many times that he grew sick of it. 
His father never sang him lullabies, never read storybooks to him at bedtime. Instead, 
he would tell the boy stories of his actual experiences—over and over, from his 
childhood in a poor farm family in Tohoku, through the ultimate (and inevitable) 
happy ending of his good fortune as a fully fledged NHK fee collector. 
His father was a good storyteller. There was no way for Tengo to ascertain how 
much was based on fact, but the stories were at least coherent and consistent. They 
were not exactly pregnant with deep meaning, but the details were lively and his 
father’s narrative was strongly colored. There were funny stories, touching stories, 

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and violent stories. There were astounding, preposterous stories and stories that Tengo 
had trouble following no matter how many times he heard them. If a life was to be 
measured by the color and variety of its episodes, his father’s life could be said to 
have been rich in its own way, perhaps. 
But when they touched on the period after he became a full-fledged NHK 
employee, his father’s stories suddenly lost all color and reality. They lacked detail 
and wholeness, as if he thought of them as mere sequels not worth telling. He met a 
woman, married her, and had a child—that is, Tengo. A few months after Tengo was 
born, his mother fell ill and died. His father raised him alone after that, never 
remarrying, just working hard for NHK. The End. 
How he happened to meet Tengo’s mother and marry her, what kind of woman she 
was, what had caused her death (could it have had something to do with Tengo’s 
birth?), whether her death had been a relatively easy one or she had suffered greatly—
his father told him almost nothing about such matters. If Tengo tried asking, his father 
would just evade the question and, finally, never answer. Most of the time, such 
questions put him in a foul mood, and he would clam up. Not a single photo of 
Tengo’s mother had survived, and not a single wedding photo. “We couldn’t afford a 
ceremony,” he explained, “and I didn’t have a camera.” 
But Tengo fundamentally disbelieved his father’s story. His father was hiding the 
facts, remaking the story. His mother had not died some months after he was born. In 
his only memory of her, she was still alive when he was one and a half. And near 
where he was sleeping, she was in the arms of a man other than his father.