After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

His mother took off her blouse, dropped the straps of her slip, and let a man 
not his father suck on her breasts. Tengo slept next to them, his breathing 
audible. But at the same time, Tengo was not asleep. He was watching his 
mother
. 
This was Tengo’s souvenir photograph of his mother. The ten-second scene was 
burned into his brain with perfect clarity. It was the only concrete information he had 
about his mother, the one tenuous connection his mind could make with her. They 
were linked by a hypothetical umbilical cord. His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of 
memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such 
a vivid scene was burned into Tengo’s brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo 
was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he 
obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace 
with his secrets. 
It was a clear, pleasant Sunday morning. There was a chill in the mid-April breeze, 
though, a reminder of how easily the seasons can turn backward. Over a thin, black 
crew-neck sweater, Tengo wore a herringbone jacket that he had owned since his 
college days. He also had on beige chino pants and brown Hush Puppies. The shoes 
were rather new. This was as close as he could come to dapper attire. 
When Tengo reached the front end of the outward-bound Chuo Line platform in 
Shinjuku Station, Fuka-Eri was already there, sitting alone on a bench, utterly still, 
staring into space with narrowed eyes. She wore a cotton print dress that had to be 
meant for midsummer. Over the dress she wore a heavy, grass-green winter cardigan, 

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and on her bare feet she wore faded gray sneakers—a somewhat odd combination for 
the season. The dress was too thin, the cardigan too thick. On her, though, the outfit 
did not seem especially out of place. Perhaps she was expressing her own special 
worldview by this mismatch. It was not entirely out of the question. But probably she 
had just chosen her clothing at random without much thought. 
She was not reading a newspaper, she was not reading a book, she was not 
listening to a Walkman, she was just sitting still, her big, black eyes staring straight 
ahead. She could have been staring at something or looking at nothing at all. She 
could have been thinking about something or not thinking at all. From a distance, she 
looked like a realistic sculpture made of some special material. 
“Did I keep you waiting?” Tengo asked. 
Fuka-Eri glanced at him and shook her head a centimeter or two from side to side. 
Her black eyes had a fresh, silken luster but, as before, no perceptible expression. She 
looked as though she did not want to speak with anyone for the moment, so Tengo 
gave up on any attempt to keep up a conversation and sat beside her on the bench, 
saying nothing. 
When the train came, Fuka-Eri stood up, and the two of them boarded together. 
There were few passengers on the weekend rapid-service train, which went all the 
way out to the mountains of Takao. Tengo and Fuka-Eri sat next to each other, 
silently watching the cityscape pass the windows on the other side. Fuka-Eri said 
nothing, as usual, so Tengo kept silent as well. She tugged the collar of her cardigan 
closed as if preparing for a wave of bitter cold to come, looking straight ahead with 
her lips drawn into a perfectly straight line. 
Tengo took out a small paperback he had brought along and started to read, but 
after some hesitation he stopped reading. Returning the book to his pocket, he folded 
his hands on his knees and stared straight ahead, adopting Fuka-Eri’s pose as if to 
keep her company. He considered using the time to think, but he couldn’t think of 
anything to think about. Because he had been concentrating on the rewrite of