After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

me
for it and punish me. I was too scared to 
tell anybody.” 
“Not even your mother?” 
“
Especially
my mother,” Ayumi said. “My brother had always been her favorite, 
and she was always telling me how disappointed she was in me—I was sloppy, I was 
fat, I wasn’t pretty enough, my grades in school were nothing special. She wanted a 
different kind of daughter—a slim, cute little doll to send to ballet lessons. It was like 
asking for the impossible.” 
“So you didn’t want to disappoint her even more.” 
“Right. I was sure if I told her what my brother was doing, she’d hate me even 
more. She’d say it was 
my
fault instead of blaming him.” 
Aomame used her fingers to smooth out the wrinkles in her face. 
My mother 
refused to talk to me after I announced that I was abandoning the faith at the age 
often. She’d hand me notes when it was absolutely necessary to communicate 
something, but she would never speak. I ceased to be her daughter. I was just “the 
one who abandoned the faith.” I moved out after that
. 
“But there was no penetration?” Aomame asked Ayumi. 
“No penetration,” Ayumi said. “As bad as they were, they couldn’t do anything 
that
painful to me. Not even they would demand that much.” 
“Do you still see this brother and uncle of yours?” 
“Hardly ever after I took a job and left the house. But we are relatives, after all, 
and we’re in the same profession. Sometimes I can’t avoid seeing them, and when I 
do I’m all smiles. I don’t do anything to rock the boat. I bet they don’t even remember 
that something like that ever happened.” 
“Don’t remember?” 
“Sure, 
they
can forget about it,” Ayumi said. “I never can.” 
“Of course not,” Aomame said. 
“It’s like some historic massacre.” 
“Massacre?” 
“The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they 
did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims 
can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to 
child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.” 
“True,” Aomame said, scowling slightly. 
An endless battle of contrasting 
memories?
“To tell you the truth,” Ayumi said, “I kind of thought that you must have had the 
same kind of experience as me.” 
“Why did you think that?” 

---

260
“I don’t know, I can’t really explain it, I just sort of figured. Maybe I thought that 
having wild one-night stands with strange men was a result of something like that. 
And in your case, I thought I detected some kind of anger, too. Anyhow, you just 
don’t seem like someone who can do the ordinary thing, you know, like everybody 
else does: find a regular boyfriend, go out on a date, have a meal, and have sex in the 
usual way with just the one person. It’s more or less the same with me.” 
“You’re saying that you couldn’t follow the normal pattern because someone 
messed around with you when you were little?” 
“That’s how I felt,” Ayumi said. She gave a little shrug. “To tell you the truth, I’m 
afraid of men. Or, rather, I’m afraid of getting deeply involved with one particular 
man, of completely taking on another person. The very thought of it makes me cringe. 
But being alone can be hard sometimes. I want a man to hold me, to put his thing 
inside me. I want it so bad I can’t stand it sometimes. Not knowing the man at all 
makes it easier. A 
lot
easier.” 
“Because you’re afraid of men?” 
“I think that’s a large part of it.” 
“I don’t think I have any fear of men,” Aomame said. 
“Is there anything you