After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 31 
Tengo and Aomame 
LIKE A PEA IN A POD 
Aomame recognized the spot as they got out of the taxi. She stood at the intersection 
looking around and found the gloomy storage area, surrounded by a metal panel 
fence, down below the expressway. Leading Tengo by the hand, she crossed at the 
crosswalk and headed toward it. 
She couldn’t remember which of the metal panels had the loose bolts, but after 
patiently testing each one, she found a space that a person could manage to slip 
through. Aomame bent down and, careful to keep her clothes from getting snagged, 
slipped inside. Tengo hunched down as much as his large body would allow, and 
followed behind her. Inside the storage area, everything was exactly as it had been in 
April, when Aomame had last seen it. Discarded, faded bags of cement, rusty metal 
pipes, weary weeds, scattered old wastepaper, splotches of hardened white pigeon 
excrement here and there. In eight months, nothing had changed. During that time, 
perhaps no one had ever set foot in here. It was like a sandbar on a main highway in 
the middle of the city—a completely abandoned, forgotten little spot. 
“Is this the place?” Tengo asked, looking around. 
Aomame nodded. “If there’s no exit here, then we’re not going anywhere.” 
In the darkness Aomame searched for the emergency stairway she had climbed 
down, the narrow stairs linking the expressway and the ground below. 
The stairway
has to be here, she told herself. 
I have to believe it
. 
And she found it. It was actually closer to a ladder than a stairway. It was shabbier 
and more rickety than she remembered. She was amazed that she had managed to 
clamber down it before. At any rate, though, here it was. All they needed to do now 
was climb up, step by step, instead of down. She took off her Charles Jourdan high 
heels, stuffed them into her bag, and slung the bag across her shoulders. She stepped 
onto the first rung of the ladder in her stocking feet. 
“Follow me,” Aomame said, turning around to Tengo. 
“Maybe I should go first?” Tengo asked worriedly. 
“No, I’ll go first.” This was the path she had come down, and she would have to be 
the first to climb back up. 
The stairway was colder than when she had come down it. Her hands got so numb 
that she thought she would lose all feeling. The wind whipped between the support 
columns under the expressway. It was much more sharp and piercing than it had been 
before. The stairway was aloof and uninviting. It promised her nothing. 

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At the beginning of September when she had searched for the stairway on the 
expressway, it had vanished. The route had been blocked. Yet now the route from the 
storage area, going up, was still here, just as she had predicted. She had had a feeling 
that if she started from this direction, she would find it. 
If this
little one 
inside me
, she 
thought, 
has any special powers, then it will surely protect me and show me the right 
way to go
. 
The stairway existed, but whether it 
really
connected up to the expressway, she 
didn’t know. It might be blocked halfway, a dead end. In this world, anything could 
happen. The only thing to do was to climb up with her own hands and feet and find 
out what was there—and what was not. 
She cautiously climbed up one step after another. She looked down and saw Tengo 
right behind her. A fierce wind howled, making her spring coat flutter. It was a 
cutting wind. The hem of her short skirt had crept up to her thighs. The wind had 
made a mess of her hair, plastering it against her face and blocking her vision, so 
much so that she found it hard to breathe. Aomame regretted not having tied her hair 
back.