After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

That’s it, they’ve got me!
he 
thinks. His smell seems to have aroused the cats to anger. They have big, sharp claws 
and white fangs. Humans are not supposed to set foot in this town. He has no idea 
what terrible fate awaits him if he is discovered, but he is sure they will never let him 
leave the town alive now that he has learned their secret. 
Three cats climb to the top of the bell tower and sniff the air. “Strange,” one cat 
says, twitching his whiskers. “I smell a human, but there’s no one here.” 
“It 
is
strange,” says a second cat. “But there is definitely no one here. Let’s look 
somewhere else.” 
“I don’t get it, though.” 
The three cats cock their heads, puzzled, then retreat down the stairs. The young 
man hears their footsteps going down and fading into the dark of night. He breathes a 
sigh of relief, but 
he
doesn’t get it, either. He was literally nose-to-nose with the cats 
in this small space. There was no way they could have missed him. But for some 
reason they did not see him. He brings his hand to his eyes and can see it perfectly 
well. It hasn’t turned transparent. Strange. In any case, though, when morning comes, 
he knows he should go to the station and take the train away from this town. Staying 
here would be too dangerous. His luck can’t last forever. 

---

355
The next day, however, the morning train does not stop at the station. He watches 
it pass by without slowing down. The afternoon train does the same. He can even see 
the engineer seated at the controls. The passengers’ faces, too, are visible through the 
windows. But the train shows no sign of stopping. It is as though people cannot see 
the young man waiting for a train—or even see the station itself. Once the afternoon 
train disappears down the track, the place grows quieter than ever. The sun begins to 
sink. It is time for the cats to come. He knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no 
town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is a 
place not of this world that has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for 
all eternity, will the train stop at this station to bring him back to his original world. 
Tengo read the story twice. The phrase “the place where he is meant to be lost” 
attracted his attention. He closed the book and let his eyes wander aimlessly across 
the drab coastal industrial scene passing by the train window—the flame of an oil 
refinery, the gigantic gas tanks, the squat but equally gigantic smokestacks shaped 
like long-range cannons, the line of tractor-trailers and tank trucks moving down the 
road. It was a scene remote from “Town of Cats,” but it had its own sense of fantasy 
about it, as though it were the netherworld supporting urban life from below. 
Soon afterward Tengo closed his eyes and imagined Kyoko Yasuda closed up in 
her own “lost place,” where there were no trains or telephones or mail. During the day 
there was nothing but absolute loneliness, and with night came the cats’ relentless 
searching, the cycle repeating itself with no apparent end. Apparently, he had drifted 
off to sleep in his seat—not a long nap, but a deep one. He woke covered in sweat. 
The train was moving along the southern coastline of the Boso Peninsula in 
midsummer. 
He left the express train in Tateyama, transferred to a local, and went as far as 
Chikura. Stepping from the train, he caught a whiff of the old familiar smell of the 
seashore. Everyone on the street was darkly tanned. He took a cab from the station to 
the sanatorium. At the reception desk, he gave his name and his father’s name. 
The middle-aged nurse at the desk asked, “Have you by any chance notified us of 
your intention to visit today?” There was a hard edge to her voice. A small woman, 
she wore metal-frame glasses, and her short hair had a touch of gray. The ring on her 
stubby ring finger might have been bought as part of a matching set with the glasses. 
Her name tag said “Tamura.” 
“No, it just occurred to me to come this morning and I hopped on a train,” Tengo 
answered honestly. 
The nurse gave him a look of mild disgust. Then she said, “Visitors are supposed 
to notify us before they arrive to see a patient. We have our schedules to keep, and the 
wishes of the patient must also be taken into account.” 
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” 
“When was your last visit?” 
“Two years ago.” 

---

356
“Two years ago,” Nurse Tamura said as she checked the list of visitors with a 
ballpoint pen in hand. “You mean to say that you have not made a single visit in two 
years?” 
“That’s right,” Tengo said. 
“According to our records, you are Mr. Kawana’s only relative.” 
“That is correct.” 
She set the list on the desk and glanced at Tengo, but she said nothing. Her eyes 
were not blaming Tengo, just checking the facts. Apparently, Tengo’s case was not 
exceptional. 
“At the moment, your father is in group rehabilitation. That will end in half an 
hour. You can see him then.” 
“How is he doing?” 
“Physically, he’s healthy. He has no special problems. It’s in the 
other
area that he 
has his ups and downs,” she said, touching her temple with an index finger. “I’ll leave 
it to you to see what I mean about ups and downs.” 
Tengo thanked her and went to pass the time in the lounge by the entrance, sitting 
on a sofa that smelled like an earlier era and reading more of his book. A breeze 
passed through now and then, carrying the scent of the sea and the cooling sound of 
the pine windbreak outside. Cicadas clung to the branches of the trees, screeching 
their hearts out. Summer was now at its height, but the cicadas seemed to know that it 
would not last long. 
Eventually bespectacled Nurse Tamura came to tell Tengo that he could see his 
father now that the rehabilitation session was over. 
“I’ll show you to his room,” she said. Tengo got up from the sofa and, passing by a 
large mirror on the wall, realized for the first time what a sloppy outfit he was 
wearing—a Jeff Beck Japan Tour T-shirt under a faded dungaree shirt with 
mismatched buttons, chinos with specks of pizza sauce near one knee, long-unwashed 
khaki-colored sneakers, a baseball cap: no way for a thirty-year-old son to dress on 
his first hospital visit to his father in two years. Nor did he have anything with him 
that might serve as a gift on such an occasion. He had a paperback book shoved into 
one pocket, nothing more. No wonder the nurse had given him that look of disgust. 
As they crossed the sanatorium grounds toward the wing in which his father’s 
room was located, the nurse gave him a general description of the place. There were 
three wings divided according to the severity of the patient’s illness. Tengo’s father 
was now housed in the “moderate” wing. People usually started in the “mild” wing, 
moved to “moderate,” and then to “severe.” As with a door that opens in only one 
direction, backward movement was not an option. There was nowhere to go beyond 
the “severe” wing—other than the crematorium. The nurse did not add that remark, of 
course, but her meaning was clear. 
His father was in a double room, but his roommate was out attending some kind of 
class. The sanatorium offered several rehabilitation classes—ceramics, or gardening, 
or exercise. Though all were supposedly for “rehabilitation,” they did not aim at 
“recovery.” Their purpose, rather, was to slow the advance of the disease as much as 
possible. Or just to kill time. Tengo’s father was seated in a chair by the open 
window, looking out, hands on his knees. A nearby table held a potted plant. Its 
flowers had several delicate, yellow petals. The floor was made of some soft material 

---

357
to prevent injury in case of a fall. There were two plain wood-frame beds, two writing 
desks, and two dressers. Next to each desk was a small bookcase, and the window 
curtains had yellowed from years of exposure to sunlight. 
Tengo did not realize at first that the old man seated by the window was his own 
father. He had become a size smaller—though “shriveled up” might be more accurate. 
His hair was shorter and as white as a frost-covered lawn. His cheeks were sunken, 
which may have been why the hollows of his eyes looked much larger than they had 
before. Three deep creases marked his forehead. The shape of his head seemed more 
deformed than it had, probably because his shorter hair made it more obvious. His 
eyebrows were extremely long and thick, and white hair poked out from both ears. 
His large, pointed ears were now larger than ever and looked like bat wings. Only the 
shape of the nose was the same—round and pudgy, in marked contrast to the ears, and 
it wore a reddish black tinge. His lips drooped at both ends, seemingly ready to drool 
at any moment. His mouth was slightly open, revealing uneven teeth. Sitting so still at 
the window, his father reminded Tengo of one of van Gogh’s last self-portraits. 
Although Tengo entered the room, the man did nothing but glance momentarily in 
his direction, after which he continued to stare outside. From a distance, he looked 
less like a human being than some kind of creature resembling a rat or a squirrel—a 
creature that might not be terribly clean but that possessed all the cunning it needed. It 
was, however, without a doubt, Tengo’s father—or, rather, the wreckage of Tengo’s 
father. The two intervening years had taken much from him physically, the way a 
merciless tax collector strips a poor family’s house of all its possessions. The father 
that Tengo remembered was a tough, hardworking man. Introspection and 
imagination may have been foreign qualities to him, but he had his own moral code 
and a simple but strong sense of purpose. He was a stoic individual; Tengo never once 
heard him whine or make excuses for himself. But the man Tengo saw before him 
now was a mere empty shell, a vacant house deprived of all warmth. 
“Mr. Kawana!” the nurse said to Tengo’s father in a crisp, clear tone of voice she 
must have been trained to use when addressing patients. “Mr. Kawana! Look who’s 
here! It’s your son!” 
His father turned once more in Tengo’s direction. His expressionless eyes made 
Tengo think of two empty swallows’ nests hanging from the eaves. 
“Hello,” Tengo said. 
“Mr. Kawana, your son is here from Tokyo!” the nurse said. 
His father said nothing. Instead, he looked straight at Tengo as if he were reading a 
bulletin written in a foreign language. 
“Dinner starts at six thirty,” the nurse said to Tengo. “Please feel free to stay until 
then.” 
Tengo hesitated for a moment after the nurse was gone, and then approached his 
father, sitting down in the chair that faced his—a faded, cloth-covered chair, its 
wooden parts scarred from long use. His father’s eyes followed his movements. 
“How are you?” Tengo asked. 
“Fine, thank you,” his father said formally. 
Tengo did not know what to say after that. Toying with the third button of his 
dungaree shirt, he turned his gaze toward the pine trees outside and then back again to 
his father. 

---

358
“You have come from Tokyo, is it?” his father asked, apparently unable to 
remember Tengo. 
“Yes, from Tokyo.” 
“You must have come by express train.” 
“That’s right,” Tengo said. “As far as Tateyama. There I transferred to a local for 
the trip here to Chikura.” 
“You’ve come to swim?” his father asked. 
“I’m Tengo. Tengo Kawana. Your son.” 
“Where do you live in Tokyo?” his father asked. 
“In Koenji. Suginami Ward.” 
The three wrinkles across his father’s forehead deepened. “A lot of people tell lies 
because they don’t want to pay their NHK subscription fee.” 
“Father!” Tengo called out to him. This was the first time he had spoken the word 
in a very long time. “I’m Tengo. Your son.” 
“I don’t have a son,” his father declared. 
“You don’t have a son,” Tengo repeated mechanically. 
His father nodded. 
“So, what am I?” Tengo asked. 
“You’re nothing,” his father said with two short shakes of the head. 
Tengo caught his breath. He could find no words. Nor did his father have any more 
to say. Each sat in silence, searching through his tangled thoughts. Only the cicadas 
sang without confusion, screeching at top volume.