After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 8 
Tengo 
TIME FOR THE CATS TO COME 
Tengo spent the next week or more in a strange silence. One night, the man named 
Yasuda had called to tell Tengo that his wife had been lost and would never visit 
Tengo again. An hour later Ushikawa had called to tell him that Tengo and Fuka-Eri 
were functioning together as a carrier of a “thought crime” epidemic. Each caller had 
conveyed to Tengo a message containing (he could only believe that it 
did
contain) a 
deep meaning, the way a toga-clad Roman would mount a platform in the middle of 
the Forum to make a proclamation to concerned citizens. And once each man had 
spoken his piece, he had hung up on Tengo. 
Not one person had contacted Tengo since those two nighttime calls. There were 
no phone calls, no letters, no knocks on the door, no carrier pigeons. Neither Komatsu 
nor Professor Ebisuno nor Fuka-Eri nor Kyoko Yasuda had anything at all they 
needed to convey to Tengo. 
And Tengo felt as if he had lost all interest in those people. Nor was it just them: 
he seemed to have lost interest in anything at all. He didn’t care about the sales of 
Air 
Chrysalis
or what its author, Fuka-Eri, might be doing now, or what was happening 
with Komatsu’s scheme or whether Professor Ebisuno’s coolly conceived plan was 
progressing well, or how close the media had come to sniffing out the truth, or what 
kind of moves Sakigake might be making. If the boat they were all riding in was 
plunging over the falls upside down, there was nothing to do but fall with it. Tengo 
could struggle all he wanted to at this point, and it would do nothing to change the 
flow of the river. 
He was, of course, worried about Kyoko Yasuda. He had no real idea what was 
happening to her, but he would spare no effort to help her if he could. Whatever 
problems she was facing at the moment, however, were out of his reach. There was 
nothing he could do. 
He stopped reading the papers. The world was moving ahead in a direction 
unconnected with him. Apathy enveloped him as if it were his own personal haze. He 
was so sick of seeing the piles of 
Air Chrysalis
on display that he stopped going to 
bookstores. He would travel in a straight line from home to the school and back. Most 
people were enjoying summer vacation, but the cram schools had summer courses, 
which kept him busier than ever. He welcomed this schedule. At least while he was 
lecturing, he didn’t have to think about anything but mathematics. 
He gave up on writing his novel, too. He might sit at his desk, switch on the word 
processor, and watch the screen light up, but he couldn’t find the motivation to write. 

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Whenever he tried to think of anything, snatches of his conversations with Kyoko 
Yasuda’s husband or with Ushikawa would come to mind. He couldn’t concentrate on 
his novel.