After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 9 
Aomame 
NEW SCENERY, NEW RULES 
Aomame went to the ward library closest to home. At the reference desk, she 
requested the compact edition of the newspaper for the three-month period from 
September to November, 1981. The clerk pointed out that they had such editions for 
four newspapers—the 
Asahi
, the 
Yomiuri
, the 
Mainichi
, and the 
Nikkei
—and asked 
which she preferred. The bespectacled middle-aged woman seemed less a regular 
librarian than a housewife doing part-time work. She was not especially fat, but her 
wrists were puffy, almost ham-like. 
Aomame said she didn’t care which newspaper they gave her to read: they were all 
pretty much the same. 
“That may be true, but I really need 
you
to decide which you would like,” the 
woman said in a flat voice meant to repel any further argument. Aomame had no 
intention of arguing, so she chose the 
Mainichi
, for no special reason. Sitting in a 
cubicle, she opened her notebook and, ballpoint pen in hand, started scanning one 
article after another. 
No especially major events had occurred in the early autumn of 1981. Charles and 
Diana had married that July, and the aftereffects were still in evidence—reports on 
where they went, what they did, what she wore, what her accessories were like. 
Aomame of course knew about the wedding, but she had no particular interest in it, 
and she could not figure out why people were so deeply concerned about the fate of 
an English prince and princess. Charles looked less like a prince than a high school 
physics teacher with stomach trouble. 
In Poland, Lech Walesa’s “Solidarity” movement was deepening its confrontation 
with the government, and the Soviet government was expressing its “concern.” More 
directly, the Soviets were threatening to send in tanks, just as they had prior to the 
1968 “Prague Spring,” if the Polish government failed to bring things under control. 
Aomame generally remembered these events as well. She knew that the Soviet 
government eventually gave up any thought of interfering in the situation, so there 
was no need for her to read these articles closely. One thing did catch her attention, 
though. When President Reagan issued a declaration meant to discourage the Soviets 
from intervening in Polish internal affairs, he was quoted as saying, “We hope that the 
tense situation in Poland will not interfere with joint U.S.-Soviet plans to construct a 
moon base.” Construct a moon base? She had never heard of such a plan. Come to 
think of it, though, there had been some mention of that on the TV news the other 

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98
day—that night when she had sex with the balding, middle-aged man from Kansai in 
the Akasaka hotel. 
On September 20, the world’s largest kite-flying competition took place in Jakarta, 
with more than ten thousand participants. Aomame was unfamiliar with that particular 
bit of news, but there was nothing strange about it. Who would remember news about 
a giant kite-flying competition held in Jakarta three years ago? 
On October 6, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by radical Islamic 
terrorists. Aomame recalled the event with renewed pity for Sadat. She had always 
been fond of Sadat’s bald head, and she felt only revulsion for any kind of religious 
fundamentalists. The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their 
inflated sense of their own superiority, and their callous imposition of their own 
beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage. Her anger was almost 
uncontrollable. But this had nothing to do with the problem she was now confronting. 
She took several deep breaths to calm her nerves, and then she turned the page. 
On October 12, in a residential section of the Itabashi Ward of Tokyo, an NHK 
subscription fee collector (aged fifty-six) became involved in a shouting match with a 
college student who refused to pay. Pulling out the butcher knife he always carried in 
his briefcase, he stabbed the student in the abdomen, wounding him seriously. The 
police rushed to the scene and arrested him on the spot. The collector was standing 
there in a daze with the bloody knife in his hand. He offered no resistance. According 
to one of his fellow collectors, the man had been a full-time staff member for six 
years and was an extremely serious worker with an outstanding record. 
Aomame had no recollection of such an event. She always took the 
Yomiuri
newspaper and read it from cover to cover, paying close attention to the human 
interest stories—especially those involving crimes (which comprised fully half the 
human interest stories in the evening edition). There was almost no way she could 
have failed to read an article as long as this one. Of course,