After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Sakhalin Island
, which he had just 
finished reading the week before. He had marked the more interesting spots with 
paper tags and figured this would make it easy to choose suitable passages to read. 
Tengo prefaced his reading with a brief explanation of the book—that Chekhov 
was only thirty years old when he traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1890; that no one 
really knew why the urbane Chekhov, who had been praised as one of the most 
promising young writers of the generation after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and who 
was living a cosmopolitan life in Moscow, would have made up his mind to go off to 
live on Sakhalin Island, which was like the end of the earth. Sakhalin had been 
developed primarily as a penal colony, and to most people it symbolized only bad 
luck and misery. Furthermore, the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built, 
which meant that Chekhov had to make more than 2,500 miles of his trip in a horse-
drawn cart across frozen earth, an act of self-denial that subjected the young man in 
poor health to merciless suffering. And finally, when he ended his eight-month-long 
journey to the Far East and published 
Sakhalin
as the fruit of his labor, the work did 
little more than bewilder most readers, who found that it more closely resembled a dry 
investigative report or gazetteer than a work of literature. People whispered amongst 
themselves, “Why did Chekhov do such a wasteful, pointless thing at such an 
important stage in his literary career?” One critic answered scathingly, “It was just a 
publicity stunt.” Another view was that Chekhov had gone there looking for a new 
subject because he had run out of things to write about. Tengo showed Fuka-Eri the 
location of Sakhalin on the map included in the book. 
“Why did Chekhov go to Sakhalin,” Fuka-Eri asked. 
“You mean, why do 
I
think he went?” 
“Uh-huh. Did you read the book.” 
“I sure did.” 
“What did you think.” 
“Chekhov himself might not have understood exactly why he went,” Tengo said. 
“Or maybe he didn’t really have a reason. He just suddenly felt like going—say, he 
was looking at the shape of Sakhalin Island on a map and the desire to go just bubbled 
up out of nowhere. I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and 
I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter 
what.’ And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. 
I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what 
people are doing there. It’s like measles—you can’t show other people exactly where 
the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration. 
Of course, traveling from Moscow to Sakhalin in those days involved almost 
unimaginable hardships, so I suspect that wasn’t Chekhov’s only reason for going.” 
“Name another one.” 

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“Well, Chekhov was both a novelist and a doctor. It could be that, as a scientist, he 
wanted to examine something like a diseased part of the vast Russian nation with his 
own eyes. Chekhov felt uncomfortable living as a literary star in the city. He was fed 
up with the atmosphere of the literary world and was put off by the affectations of 
other writers, who were mainly interested in tripping each other up. He was disgusted 
by the malicious critics of the day. His journey to Sakhalin may have been an act of 
pilgrimage designed to cleanse him of such literary impurities. Sakhalin Island 
overwhelmed him in many ways. I think it was precisely for this reason that Chekhov 
never wrote a single literary work based on his trip to Sakhalin. It was not the kind of 
half-baked experience that could be easily made into material for a novel. The 
diseased part of the country became, so to speak, a physical part of him, which may 
have been the very thing he was looking for.” 
“Is the book interesting,” Fuka-Eri asked. 
“I found it very interesting. It’s full of dry figures and statistics and, as I said 
earlier, not much in the way of literary color. The scientist side of Chekhov is on full 
display. But that is the very quality of the book that makes me feel I can sense the 
purity of the decision reached by Anton Chekhov the individual. Mixed in with the 
dry records are some very impressive examples of observation of character and scenic 
description. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the dry passages that 
relate only facts. Some of them are quite marvelous. For example, the sections on the 
Gilyaks.” 
“The Gilyaks,” Fuka-Eri said. 
“The Gilyaks were the indigenous people of Sakhalin long before the Russians 
arrived to colonize it. They originally lived at the southern end of the island, but they 
moved up to the center when they were displaced by the Ainu, who moved north from 
Hokkaido. Of course, the Ainu themselves had also been pushed northward—by the 
Japanese. Chekhov struggled to observe at close hand and to record as accurately as 
possible the rapidly disappearing Gilyak culture.” 
Tengo opened to a passage on the Gilyaks. At some points he would introduce 
suitable omissions and changes to the text in order to make it easily understandable to 
his listener. 
The Gilyak is of strong, thick-set build, and average, even small, in height. Tall 
stature would hamper him in the taiga. [“That’s a Russian forest,” Tengo added.] His 
bones are thick and are distinctive for the powerful development of all the appendages 
and protuberances to which the muscles are attached, and this leads one to assume 
firm, powerful muscles and a constant strenuous battle with nature. His body is lean 
and wiry, without a layer of fat; you do not come across obese, plump Gilyaks. 
Obviously all the fat is expended in warmth, of which the body of a Sakhalin 
inhabitant needs to produce such a great deal in order to compensate for the loss 
engendered by the low temperature and the excessive dampness of the air. It’s clear 
why the Gilyak consumes such a lot of fat in his food. He eats rich seal, salmon, 
sturgeon and whale fat, meat and blood, all in large quantities, in a raw, dry, often 
frozen state, and because he eats coarse, unrefined food, the places to which his 
masticatory muscles are attached are singularly well developed and his teeth are 
heavily worn. His diet is made up exclusively of animal products, and rarely, only 
when he happens to have his dinner at home or if he eats out at a celebration, will he 

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add Manchurian garlic or berries. According to Nevelskoy’s testimony, the Gilyaks 
consider working the soil a great sin; anybody who begins to dig the earth or who 
plants anything will infallibly die. But bread, which they were acquainted with by the 
Russians, they eat with pleasure, as a delicacy, and it is not a rarity these days in 
Alexandrovsk or Rykovo to meet a Gilyak carrying a round loaf under his arm. 
Tengo stopped reading at that point for a short breather. Fuka-Eri was listening 
intently, but he could not read any reaction from her expression. 
“What do you think? Do you want me to keep reading? Or do you want to switch 
to another book?” he asked. 
“I want to know more about the Gilyaks.” 
“Okay, I’ll keep going.” 
“Is it okay if I get in bed?” Fuka-Eri asked. 
“Sure,” Tengo said. 
They moved into the bedroom. Fuka-Eri crawled into bed, and Tengo brought a 
chair next to the bed and sat in it. He continued with his reading. 
The Gilyaks never wash, so that even ethnographers find it difficult to put a name to 
the real colour of their faces; they do not wash their linen, and their fur clothing looks 
as if it has just been stripped off a dead dog. The Gilyaks themselves give off a heavy, 
acid smell, and you know you are near their dwellings from the repulsive, sometimes 
hardly bearable odour of dried fish and rotting fish offal. By each yurt usually lies a 
drying ground filled to the brim with split fish, which from a distance, especially 
when the sun is shining on them, look like filaments of coral. Around these drying 
grounds Kruzenshtern saw a vast number of maggots covering the ground to the depth 
of an inch. 
“Kruzenshtern.” 
“I think he was an early explorer. Chekhov was a very studious person. He had 
read every book ever written about Sakhalin.” 
“Let’s keep going.” 
In winter the yurts are full of acrid smoke which comes from the open fireplace, and 
on top of all this the Gilyaks, their wives and even the children smoke tobacco. 
Nothing is known about the morbidity and mortality of the Gilyaks, but one must 
form the conclusion that these unhealthy hygienic arrangements must inevitably have 
a bad effect on their health. Possibly it is to this they owe their small stature, the 
puffiness of their faces, and a certain sluggishness and laziness of movement. 
“The poor Gilyaks!” Fuka-Eri said. 
Writers give varying accounts of the Gilyaks’ character, but all agree on one 
thing—that they are not a warlike race, they do not like quarrels or fights, and they 
get along peacefully with their neighbours. They have always treated the arrival of 
new people with suspicion, with apprehension about their future, but have met them 
every time amiably, without the slightest protest, and the worst thing they would do 
would be to tell lies at people’s arrival, painting Sakhalin in gloomy colours and 
thinking by so doing to frighten foreigners away from the island. They embraced 

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Kruzenshtern’s travelling companions, and when Shrenk fell ill this news quickly 
spread among the Gilyaks and aroused genuine sorrow. They tell lies only when 
trading or talking to a suspicious and, in their opinion, dangerous person, but, before 
telling a lie, they exchange glances with each other in an utterly childlike manner. 
Every sort of lie and bragging in the sphere of everyday life and not in the line of 
business is repugnant to them. 
“The wonderful Gilyaks!” Fuka-Eri said. 
The Gilyaks conscientiously fulfil commissions they have undertaken, and there 
has not yet been a single case of a Gilyak abandoning mail halfway or embezzling 
other people’s belongings. They are perky, intelligent, cheerful, and feel no stand-
offishness or uneasiness whatever in the company of the rich and powerful. They do 
not recognize that anybody has power over them, and, it seems, they do not possess 
even the concept of “senior” and “junior.” People say and write that the Gilyaks do 
not respect family seniority either. A father does not think he is superior to his son, 
and a son does not look up to his father but lives just as he wishes; an elderly mother 
has no greater power in a yurt than an adolescent girl. Boshnyak writes that he 
chanced more than once to see a son striking his own mother and driving her out, and 
nobody daring to say a word to him. The male members of the family are equal 
among themselves; if you entertain them with vodka, then you also have to treat the 
very smallest of them to it as well. But the female members are all equal in their lack 
of rights; be it grandmother, mother or baby girl still being nursed, they are ill treated 
in the same way as domestic animals, like an object which can be thrown out, sold or 
shoved with one’s foot like a dog. However, the Gilyaks at least fondle their dogs, but 
their womenfolk—never. Marriage is considered a mere trifle, of less importance, for 
instance, than a drinking spree, and it is not surrounded by any kind of religious or 
superstitious ceremony. A Gilyak exchanges a spear, a boat or a dog for a girl, takes 
her back to his own yurt and lies with her on a bearskin—and that is all there is to it. 
Polygamy is allowed, but it has not become widespread, although to all appearances 
there are more women than men. Contempt toward women, as if for a lower creature 
or object, reaches such an extreme in the Gilyak that, in the field of the question of 
women’s rights, he does not consider reprehensible even slavery in the literal and 
crude sense of the word. Evidently with them a woman represents the same sort of 
trading object as tobacco or nankeen. The Swedish writer Strindberg, a renowned 
misogynist, who desired that women should be merely slaves and should serve men’s 
whims, is in essence of one and the same mind as the Gilyaks; if he ever chanced to 
come to northern Sakhalin, they would spend ages embracing each other. 
Tengo took a break at that point, but Fuka-Eri remained silent, offering no opinion 
on the reading. Tengo continued. 
They have no courts, and they do not know the meaning of “justice.” How hard it is 
for them to understand us may be seen merely from the fact that up till the present day 
they still do not fully understand the purpose of roads. Even where a road has already 
been laid, they will still journey through the taiga. One often sees them, their families 

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and their dogs, picking their way in Indian file across a quagmire right by the 
roadway. 
Fuka-Eri had her eyes closed and was breathing very softly. Tengo studied her face 
for a while but could not tell whether she was sleeping or not. He decided to turn the 
page and keep reading. If she was sleeping, he wanted to give her as sound a sleep as 
possible, and he also felt like reading more Chekhov aloud. 
Formerly the Naibuchi Post stood at the river mouth. It was founded in 1866. Mitzul 
found eighteen buildings here, both dwellings and non-residential premises, plus a 
chapel and a shop for provisions. One correspondent who visited Naibuchi in 1871 
wrote that there were twenty soldiers there under the command of a cadet-officer; in 
one of the cabins he was entertained with fresh eggs and black bread by a tall and 
beautiful female soldier, who eulogized her life here and complained only that sugar 
was very expensive. 
Now there are not even traces left of those cabins, and, gazing round at the 
wilderness, the tall, beautiful female soldier seems like some kind of myth. They are 
building a new house here, for overseers’ offices or possibly a weather center, and 
that is all. The roaring sea is cold and colourless in appearance, and the tall grey 
waves pound upon the sand, as if wishing to say in despair: “Oh God, why did you 
create us?” This is the Great, or, as it is otherwise known, the Pacific, Ocean. On this 
shore of the Naibuchi river the convicts can be heard rapping away with axes on the 
building work, while on the other, far distant, imagined shore, lies America … to the 
left the capes of Sakhalin are visible in the mist, and to the right are more 
capes … while all around there is not a single living soul, not a bird, not a fly, and it is 
beyond comprehension who the waves are roaring for, who listens to them at nights 
here, what they want, and, finally, who they would roar for when I was gone. There 
on the shore one is overcome not by connected, logical thoughts, but by reflections 
and reveries. It is a sinister sensation, and yet at the very same time you feel the desire 
to stand for ever looking at the monotonous movement of the waves and listening to 
their threatening roar. 
It appeared that Fuka-Eri was now sound asleep. He listened for her quiet 
breathing. He closed the book and set it on the little table by the bed. Then he stood 
up and turned the light off, taking one final look at Fuka-Eri. She was sleeping 
peacefully on her back, her mouth a tight, straight line. Tengo closed the bedroom 
door and went back to the kitchen. 
It was impossible for him to continue with his own writing, though. His mind was 
now fully occupied by Chekhov’s desolate Sakhalin coastal scenes. He could hear the 
sound of the waves. When he closed his eyes, Tengo was standing alone on the shore 
of the Sea of Okhotsk, a prisoner of his own meditations, sharing in Chekhov’s 
inconsolable melancholy. What Chekhov must have felt there at the end of the earth 
was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. To be a Russian writer at the end of the 
nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they 
tried to flee from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them. 
After rinsing his wineglass and brushing his teeth, Tengo turned off the kitchen 
light, stretched out on the sofa, pulled a blanket over himself, and tried to sleep. The 

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roar of the ocean still echoed in his ears, but eventually he began to lose 
consciousness and was drawn into a deep sleep. 
He awoke at eight thirty in the morning. There was no sign of Fuka-Eri in his bed. 
The pajamas he had lent her were balled up and tossed into the bathroom washing 
machine, the cuffs and legs still rolled up. He found a note on the kitchen table: “How 
are the Gilyaks doing now? I’m going home.” Written in ballpoint pen on notepaper, 
the characters were small, square, and indefinably strange, like an aerial view of 
characters written on a beach in seashells. He folded the paper and put it in his desk 
drawer. If his girlfriend found something like this when she arrived at eleven, she 
would make a terrible fuss. 
Tengo straightened the bed and returned the fruits of Chekhov’s labor to the 
bookcase. Then he made himself coffee and toast. While eating breakfast, he noticed 
that some kind of heavy object had settled itself in his chest. Some time had to go by 
before he figured out what it was. Fuka-Eri’s tranquil sleeping face.