After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

partially written document. 
True, rewriting the past probably had almost no meaning, Tengo felt. His older 
girlfriend had been right about that. No matter how passionately or minutely he might 
attempt to rewrite the past, the present circumstances in which he found himself 
would remain generally unchanged. Time had the power to cancel all changes 
wrought by human artifice, overwriting all new revisions with further revisions, 
returning the flow to its original course. A few minor facts might be changed, but 
Tengo would still be Tengo. 
What Tengo would have to do, it seemed, was take a hard, honest look at the past 
while standing at the crossroads of the present. Then he could create a future, as 
though he were rewriting the past. It was the only way. 
Contrition and repentance 
Tear the sinful heart in two. 
O that my teardrops may be 
A sweet balm unto thee, 
Faithful Jesus. 
This was the meaning of the aria from the 
St. Matthew Passion
that Fuka-Eri had 
sung the other day. He had wondered about it and listened again to his recording at 
home, looking up the words in translation. It was an aria near the beginning of the 
Passion
concerned with the so-called Anointing in Bethany. When Jesus visits the 
home of a leper in the town of Bethany, a woman pours “very costly fragrant oil” on 
his head. The disciples around him scold her for wasting the precious ointment, 
saying that she could have sold it and used the money to help the poor. But Jesus 
quiets the angry disciples and says that the woman has done a good deed. “For in 
pouring this fragrant oil on my body, she did it for my burial.” 
The woman knew that Jesus would have to die soon. And so, as though bathing 
him in her tears, she could do no less than pour the valuable, fragrant oil on his head. 
Jesus also knew that he would soon have to tread the road to death, and he told his 
disciples, “Wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has 
done will also be told as a memorial to her.” 
None of them, of course, was able to change the future. 
Tengo closed his eyes again, took a deep breath, found the words he needed and set 
them in a row. Then he rearranged them to give the image greater clarity and 
precision. Finally, he improved the rhythm. 
Like Vladimir Horowitz seated before eighty-eight brand-new keys, Tengo curved 
his ten fingers suspended in space. Then, when he was ready, he began typing 
characters to fill the word processor’s screen. 

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He depicted a world in which two moons hung side by side in the evening eastern 
sky, the people living in that world, and the time flowing through it. 
“Wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done 
will also be told as a memorial to her.” 

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