After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 4 
Tengo 
IT MIGHT BE BETTER 
NOT TO WISH FOR SUCH A THING
Where is she now, and what could she be doing? Does she still belong to the Society 
of Witnesses?
I sure hope not
, Tengo thought. Of course, religious faith was a matter of 
individual freedom. He shouldn’t be weighing in on it. But as he recalled, she gave no 
indication as a young girl that she enjoyed being a believer in the Society of 
Witnesses. 
In college, Tengo worked part-time in a liquor wholesaler’s warehouse. The pay 
wasn’t bad, but moving heavy cases around was hard work, even for the sturdy 
Tengo, whose every joint would ache at the end of the day. By coincidence, two 
young fellows who had grown up as “second-generation” members of the Society of 
Witnesses worked alongside him. Both were polite young men, nice guys. They were 
the same age as Tengo, and serious workers. They worked without complaint and 
without cutting corners. Once after work the three of them went to a bar and had a 
pint of beer together. The two of them had been friends since childhood, they said, but 
a few years earlier they had abandoned the faith. On separating from the religion, they 
had set foot in the real world. As far as Tengo could see, however, neither of them 
had fully adapted to their new world. Because they had been raised in a narrow, close-
knit community, they found it hard to understand and accept the rules of the broader 
world. Often they would lose what confidence they had in their own judgments and 
end up perplexed. They felt liberated by their abandonment of the faith, but they 
simultaneously retained a nagging suspicion that their decision had been a mistake. 
Tengo could not help but sympathize with them. If they had separated from that 
world while they were still children, before their egos had been firmly established, 
they would have had a much better chance of adapting to the social mainstream, but 
once they missed that chance, they had no choice but to live in the Witness 
community, conforming with its values. Or else, with considerable sacrifice, and 
depending entirely on their own strength, they had to remake their customs and 
attitudes from the ground up. When he spoke with them, Tengo would recall the girl 
and hope that she had not experienced the same pain as these two young men. 
After the girl finally let go of his hand and dashed out of the classroom without 
looking back, Tengo could only stand there, unable to do a thing. She had gripped his 
left hand with considerable strength, and a vivid sense of her touch remained in that 

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hand for several days. Even after more time went by and the direct sensation began to 
fade, his heart retained the deep impression she had made there. 
Shortly after that, Tengo experienced his first ejaculation. A very small amount of 
liquid emerged from the tip of his erect penis. It was somewhat thicker than urine and 
was accompanied by a faintly painful throbbing. Tengo did not realize that this was 
the precursor of full-fledged semen. He had never seen such a thing before, and it 
worried him. Something scary might be happening to him. It was not something he 
could discuss with his father, however, nor could he ask his classmates about it. That 
night, he woke from a dream (the contents of which he could not remember) to find 
his underpants slightly damp. It seemed to Tengo as if, by squeezing his hand, the girl 
had drawn something out of him. 
He had no contact with her after that. Aomame maintained the same isolated 
position in the class, spoke with no one, and recited the usual prayer before lunch in 
the same clear voice. Even if they happened to pass each other somewhere, her 
expression exhibited not the slightest change, as if there had been nothing between 
them—as if she had not even seen Tengo. 
Tengo, for his part, took to observing Aomame closely and covertly whenever he 
had the chance. He realized now, on closer inspection, that she had a nice face—nice 
enough for him to feel he could like her. She was long and thin, and she always wore 
faded clothing that was too big for her. When she put on gym clothes, he could tell 
that her chest had not yet begun to develop. Her face displayed virtually no 
expression, she hardly ever talked, and her eyes, which always seemed to be focused 
on something far away, had no sign of life in them. Tengo found this strange, because, 
on that day when her eyes had looked straight into his, they had been so clear and 
luminous. 
After she squeezed his hand like that, Tengo came to see that this skinny little girl 
was far tougher inside than the average person. Her grip itself was impressive, but it 
was more than that. She seemed to possess an even greater strength of mind. 
Ordinarily she kept this energy hidden where the other students couldn’t see it. When 
the teacher called on her in class, she would say no more than minimally necessary to 
answer the question (and sometimes not even that much), but her posted test scores 
were never bad. Tengo guessed that she could earn still better grades if she wanted to, 
but she might be deliberately holding back on exams so as not to attract attention. 
Perhaps this was the wisdom with which a child in her position survived: by 
minimizing her wounds—staying as small as possible, as nearly transparent as 
possible. 
How great it would be, Tengo thought, if only she were a totally ordinary girl with 
whom he could have a lighthearted conversation! Maybe they could have been good 
friends. For a ten-year-old boy and girl to become good friends was not easy under 
any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in 
the world. But while they ought to have managed the occasional friendly chat, such an 
opportunity never presented itself to Tengo and Aomame. So rather than make the 
effort to forge a real relationship with the flesh-and-blood Aomame, Tengo chose to 
relate to her through the silent realm of imagination and memory. 
The ten-year-old Tengo had no concrete image of sex. All he wanted from the girl 
was for her to hold his hand again if possible. He wanted her to squeeze his hand 

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again someplace where the two of them could be alone. And he wanted her to tell him 
something—anything—about herself, to whisper some secret about what it meant to 
be Aomame, what it meant to be a ten-year-old girl. He would try hard to understand 
it, and that would be the beginning of something, though even now, Tengo still had no 
idea what that “something” might be. 
April came, and the new school year began. Now they were fifth graders, but Tengo 
and the girl were put into separate classes. Sometimes they would pass each other in 
the hall or wait at the same bus stop, but the girl continued to act as if she were 
unaware of Tengo’s existence—or at least it appeared that way to Tengo. He could be 
right next to her and she wouldn’t move an eyebrow. She wouldn’t even bother to 
look away from him. As before, all depth and brightness were gone from her eyes. 
Tengo wondered what that incident in the classroom could have meant. Often it 
seemed to him like something that had happened in a dream. And yet his hand still 
retained the vivid feel of Aomame’s extraordinary grip. This world was far too full of 
riddles for Tengo. 
Then at some point he realized that the girl named Aomame was no longer in 
school. She had transferred to another school, but that was all he found out. No one 
knew where she had moved to. He was probably the only one in the entire elementary 
school even slightly bothered by the fact that she had ceased to exist among them. 
For a very long time after that, Tengo continued to regret his actions—or, more 
precisely, his 
lack
of action. Now, finally, he could think of the words that he should 
have spoken to her. Inside him at last were the things that he wanted to tell her, the 
things he should have told her. It would not have been so hard. He should have 
stopped her on the street and said something. If only he had found a good opportunity 
and whipped up a tiny bit of courage! But that had been impossible for Tengo. And 
now the chance was lost forever. 
Tengo often thought about Aomame after he graduated from the elementary school 
and advanced to a public middle school. He started having erections more often and 
masturbated while thinking of her. He always used his left hand—the hand that 
retained the touch of her grasp. In his memory, Aomame remained a skinny little girl 
without breasts, but he was able to bring himself to ejaculation with the thought of her 
in gym clothes. 
In high school, he started dating girls his own age. Their brand-new breasts 
showed clearly through their clothes, and the sight made it hard for Tengo to breathe. 
But even so, in bed, before he fell asleep at night, Tengo would move his left hand 
while thinking of Aomame’s flat chest, which lacked even a hint of swelling. There 
must be something wrong with him, something perverted, Tengo thought. 
Once he entered college, though, Tengo no longer thought about Aomame all the 
time. The main reason for this was that he started dating real women, actually having 
sex with some of them. Physically, at least, he was a mature man, for whom the image 
of a skinny little ten-year-old girl in gym clothes had, naturally enough, grown 
removed from the objects of his desire. 

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Still, Tengo never again experienced the same intense shuddering of the heart that 
he had felt when Aomame gripped his hand in the elementary school classroom. None 
of the women he met in college or after leaving college to the present day made as 
distinct an impression on his heart as Aomame. He could not find what he was really 
looking for in any of them. There had been beautiful ones and warmhearted ones and 
ones who truly cared for him, but they had come and gone, like vividly colored birds 
perching momentarily on a branch before flying off somewhere. They could not 
satisfy him, and he could not satisfy them. 
Even now, on the verge of turning thirty, Tengo was surprised to find his thoughts 
drifting back to the ten-year-old Aomame. There she was, in the deserted classroom, 
staring straight at him with her crystal-clear eyes, her hand tightly gripping his. 
Sometimes her skinny frame was draped in gym clothes. Or she was walking behind 
her mother down the Ichikawa shopping mall on a Sunday morning, her lips clamped 
shut, her eyes staring at a place that was no place. 
At such times, Tengo would think,