After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 2 
Tengo 
I DON’T HAVE A THING EXCEPT MY SOUL 
He set his recording of Janá
č
ek’s 
Sinfonietta
on the turntable and pressed the “auto-
play” button. Seiji Ozawa conducting the Chicago Symphony. The turntable started to 
spin at 33
⅓
RPM, the tonearm moved over the edge of the record, and the needle 
traced the groove. Following the brass introduction, the ornate timpani resounded 
from the speakers. It was the section that Tengo liked best. 
While listening to the music, Tengo faced the screen of his word processor and 
typed in characters. It was a daily habit of his to listen to Janá
č
ek’s 
Sinfonietta
early 
in the morning. The piece had retained a special significance for him ever since he 
performed it as an impromptu high school percussionist. It gave him a sense of 
personal encouragement and protection—or at least he felt that it did. 
He sometimes listened to Janá
č
ek’s 
Sinfonietta
with his older girlfriend. “Not 
bad,” she would say, but she liked old jazz records more than classical—the older the 
better. It was an odd taste for a woman her age. Her favorite record was a collection 
of W. C. Handy blues songs, performed by the young Louis Armstrong, with Barney 
Bigard on clarinet and Trummy Young on trombone. She gave Tengo a copy, though 
less for him than for herself to listen to. 
After sex, they would often lie in bed listening to the record. She never tired of it. 
“Armstrong’s trumpet and singing are absolutely wonderful, of course, but if you ask 
me, the thing you should concentrate on is Barney Bigard’s clarinet,” she would say. 
Yet the actual number of Bigard solos on the record was small, and they tended to be 
limited to a single chorus. Louis Armstrong was the star of this record. But she 
obviously loved those few Bigard solos, the way she would quietly hum along with 
every memorized note. 
She said she supposed there might be more talented jazz clarinetists than Barney 
Bigard, but you couldn’t find another one who could play with such warmth and 
delicacy. His best performances always gave rise to a particular mental image. Tengo 
could not, off the top of his head, name any other jazz clarinetists, but as he listened 
to this record over and over, he began to appreciate the sheer, unforced beauty of its 
clarinet performances—their richly nourishing and imaginative qualities. He had to 
listen closely and repeatedly for this to happen, and he had to have a capable guide. 
He would have missed the nuances on his own. 
His girlfriend once said, “Barney Bigard plays beautifully, like a gifted second 
baseman. His solos are marvelous, but where he really shines is in the backup he 

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gives the other musicians. That is 
so hard
, but he does it like it’s nothing at all. Only 
an attentive listener can fully appreciate his true worth.” 
Whenever the sixth tune on the flip side of the LP, “Atlanta Blues,” began, she 
would grab one of Tengo’s body parts and praise Bigard’s concise, exquisite solo, 
which was sandwiched between Armstrong’s song and his trumpet solo. “Listen to 
that! Amazing—that first, long wail like a little child’s cry! What is it—surprise? 
Overflowing joy? An appeal for happiness? It turns into a joyful sigh and weaves its 
way through a beautiful river of sound until it’s smoothly absorbed into some perfect, 
unknowable place. There! Listen! Nobody else can play such thrilling solos. Jimmy 
Noone, Sidney Bechet, Pee Wee Russell, Benny Goodman: they’re all great 
clarinetists, but none of them can create such perfectly sculptured works of art.” 
“How come you know so much about old-time jazz?” Tengo once asked. 
“I have lots of past lives that you don’t know anything about—past lives that no 
one can change in any way,” she said, gently massaging Tengo’s scrotum with the 
palm of her hand. 
When he was finished writing for the morning, Tengo walked to the station and 
bought a paper at the newsstand. This he carried into a nearby café, where he ordered 
a “morning set” of buttered toast and a hard-boiled egg. He drank coffee and opened 
the paper while waiting for his food to come. As Komatsu had predicted, there was an 
article about Fuka-Eri on the human interest page. Not very large, the article appeared 
above an ad for Mitsubishi automobiles, under the headline “Popular High School 
Girl Writer Runaway?” 
Fuka-Eri (penname of Eriko Fukada, 17), author of the current bestseller