After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

In any form:
that phrase disturbed Tengo the most. It suggested 
something dark, damp, and slimy. 
What this man named Yasuda wanted to convey to Tengo, it seemed, was the 
message that even if his wife 
wanted
to visit Tengo’s apartment again, it was literally 
impossible
for her to carry out that wish. Impossible in what way? In what context? 
And what did it mean to say that she was “irretrievably lost”? An image formed in his 
mind of Kyoko Yasuda with serious injuries from an accident or having come down 

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with an incurable disease or her face horribly disfigured by violence. She was 
confined to a wheelchair or had lost a limb or was wrapped head to toe in bandages, 
unable to move. Or then again she was being held in an underground room, fastened 
like a dog on a thick chain. All of these possibilities, however, seemed far-fetched. 
Kyoko Yasuda (as Tengo was now calling her in his mind) had hardly ever spoken 
of her husband. Tengo had learned nothing about him from her—his profession, his 
age, his looks, his personality, where they had met, when they had married, whether 
he was skinny or fat, tall or short, or whether or not they got along well. All Tengo 
knew was that she was not particularly hard-pressed economically (she appeared to be 
quite comfortable, in fact), and that she seemed dissatisfied with either the frequency 
or the quality of the sex she had with her husband, though even these were entirely 
matters of conjecture on his part. She and Tengo spent their afternoons in bed talking 
of many things, but never once had the subject of her husband come up, nor had 
Tengo wanted to know about him. He preferred to remain ignorant of the man whose 
wife he was stealing. It seemed only proper. Now that this new situation had 
developed, however, he was sorry that he had never asked her about her husband (she 
would almost certainly have responded frankly if he had asked). Was her husband 
jealous? Possessive? Did he have violent tendencies? 
He tried to put himself in the man’s place. How would he feel if the situation were 
reversed? Say, he has a wife, two small children, and a tranquil home life, but he 
discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man once a week—a man ten years 
her junior, and the affair has been going on for over a year. What would he think if he 
found himself in such a situation? What emotions would rule his heart? Violent 
anger? Deep disappointment? Vague sadness? Scornful indifference? A sense of 
having lost touch with reality? Or an indistinguishable blend of several emotions? 
No amount of thinking enabled Tengo to hit upon exactly how he would feel. What 
came to mind through all his hypothesizing was the image of his mother in a white 
slip giving her breasts to a young man he did not know. 
Destiny seems to have come 
full circle
, Tengo thought. The enigmatic young man was perhaps Tengo himself, the 
woman in his arms Kyoko Yasuda. The composition was exactly the same; only the 
individuals had changed. 
Does this mean
that my life has been nothing but a process 
through which I am giving concrete form to the dormant image inside me? And how 
much responsibility do I bear for her having become irretrievably lost?
Tengo could not get back to sleep again. He kept hearing the voice of the man who 
called himself Yasuda. The hints that he had left behind weighed heavily on Tengo, 
and the words he had spoken bore a strange reality. Tengo thought about Kyoko 
Yasuda. He pictured her face and body in minute detail. He had last seen her on 
Friday, two weeks prior. As always, they had spent a lot of time having sex. After the 
phone call from her husband, though, it seemed like something that had happened in 
the distant past, like an episode out of history. 
On his shelf remained several LP records that she had brought from home to listen 
to in bed with him, all jazz records from long, long ago—Louis Armstrong, Billie 
Holliday (this one, too, had Barney Bigard as a sideman), some 1940s Duke 
Ellington. She had listened to them—and handled them—with great care. The jackets 

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had faded somewhat with the years, but the records themselves looked brand-new. 
Tengo picked up one jacket after another. Gazing at them, he felt with growing 
certainty that he might never see her again. 
Tengo was not, strictly speaking, in love with Kyoko Yasuda. He had never felt 
that he wanted to spend his life with her or that saying good-bye to her could be 
painful. She had never made him feel that deep trembling of the heart. But he had 
grown accustomed to having this older girlfriend as part of his life, and naturally, he 
had grown fond of her. He looked forward to welcoming her to his apartment once a 
week and joining his naked flesh with hers. Their relationship was an unusual one for 
Tengo. He had never been able to feel very close to many women. In fact, most 
women—whether he was in a sexual relationship with them or not—made Tengo feel 
uncomfortable. And in order to curb that discomfort, Tengo had to fence off a certain 
territory inside himself. In other words, he had to keep certain rooms in his heart 
locked tight. With Kyoko Yasuda, however, such complex operations were 
unnecessary. First of all, she seemed to grasp exactly what Tengo wanted and what he 
did not want. And so Tengo counted himself lucky that they had happened to find 
each other. 
Now, however, something had happened, and she was irretrievably lost. For some 
unknowable reason, she could never visit here