After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

This is a kind of mantra for him
, thought Tengo. 
He has protected himself all these 
years by reciting such phrases
. Tengo felt he had to smash this obstinate amulet of 
his, to pull the living human being out from behind the surrounding barrier. 

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360
He cut his father short. “What kind of person was my mother? Where did she go? 
What happened to her?” 
His father brought his incantation to a sudden halt. 
Tengo went on, “I’m tired of living in hatred and resentment. I’m tired of living 
unable to love anyone. I don’t have a single friend—
not one
. And, worst of all, I can’t 
even love myself. Why is that? Why can’t I love myself? It’s because I can’t love 
anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving 
and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person 
who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself. No, I’m not blaming 
you for this. Come to think of it, you may be such a victim. You probably don’t know 
how to love yourself. Am I wrong about that?” 
His father was closed off in silence, lips shut tight. It was impossible to tell from 
his expression whether he had understood Tengo or not. Tengo also fell silent and 
settled more deeply into his chair. A breeze blew in through the open window, stirred 
the sun-bleached curtains and the delicate petals of the potted plant, and slipped 
through the open door into the corridor. The smell of the sea was stronger than before. 
The soft sound of pine needles brushing against each other blended with the cries of 
the cicadas. 
His voice softer now, Tengo went on, “A vision often comes to me—the same one, 
over and over, ever since I can remember. I suspect it’s probably not so much a vision 
as a memory of something that actually happened. I’m one and a half years old, and 
my mother is next to me. She and a young man are holding each other. The man is not 
you. Who he is, I have no idea, but he is definitely not you. I don’t know why, but the 
scene is permanently burned into me.” 
His father said nothing, but his eyes were clearly seeing something else—
something not there. The two maintained their silence. Tengo was listening to the 
suddenly stronger breeze. He did not know what his father was listening to. 
“I wonder if I might ask you to read me something,” his father said in formal tones 
after a long silence. “My sight has deteriorated to the point where I can’t read books 
anymore. I can’t follow the words on the page for long. That bookcase has some 
books. Choose any one you like.” 
Tengo gave up and left his chair to scan the spines of the volumes in the bookcase. 
Most of them were historical novels set in ancient times when samurai roamed the 
land. All the volumes of 
Sword of Doom
were there. Tengo couldn’t bring himself to 
read his father some musty old book full of archaic language. 
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather read a story about a town of cats,” Tengo said. “I 
brought it to read myself.” 
“A story about a town of cats,” his father said, savoring the words. “Please read 
that to me, if it is not too much trouble.” 
Tengo looked at his watch. “It’s no trouble at all. I have plenty of time before my 
train leaves. It’s an odd story; I don’t know if you’ll like it or not.” 
Tengo pulled out his paperback and started reading “Town of Cats.” His father 
listened to him read the entire story, not changing his position in the chair by the 
window. Tengo read slowly in a clearly audible voice, taking two or three breaks 
along the way to catch his breath. He glanced at his father whenever he stopped 
reading but saw no discernible reaction on his face. Was he enjoying the story or not? 

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361
He could not tell. When he was through reading the story, his father was sitting 
perfectly still with his eyes closed. He looked as if he could be sound asleep, but he 
was not. He was simply deep inside the story, and it took him a while to come back 
out. Tengo waited patiently for that to happen. The afternoon light had begun to 
weaken and blend with touches of evening. The ocean breeze continued to shake the 
pines. 
“Does that town of cats have television?” his father asked. 
“The story was written in Germany in the 1930s. They didn’t have television yet 
back then. They did have radio, though.” 
“I was in Manchuria, but I didn’t even have a radio. There weren’t any stations. 
The newspaper often didn’t arrive, and when it did it was two weeks old. There was 
hardly anything to eat, and we had no women. Sometimes there were wolves roaming 
around. It was like the edge of the earth out there.” 
He fell silent for a while, thinking, probably recalling the hard life he led as a 
young pioneer in distant Manchuria. But those memories soon clouded over, 
swallowed up into nothingness. Tengo could read these movements of his father’s 
mind from the changing expressions on his face. 
“Did the cats build the town? Or did people build it a long time ago and the cats 
came to live there?” his father asked, speaking toward the windowpane as if to 
himself, though the question seemed to have been directed to Tengo. 
“I don’t know,” Tengo said. “But it does seem to have been built by human beings 
long before. Maybe the people left for some reason—say, they all died in an 
epidemic—and the cats came to live there.” 
His father nodded. “When a vacuum forms, something has to come along to fill it. 
Because that’s what everybody does.” 
“That’s what everybody does?” 
“Exactly.” 
“What kind of vacuum are 
you
filling?” 
His father scowled. His long eyebrows came down to hide his eyes. Then he said 
with a touch of sarcasm in his voice, “Don’t you know?” 
“I don’t know,” Tengo said. 
His father’s nostrils flared. One eyebrow rose slightly. This was the expression he 
always used when he was dissatisfied with something. “If you can’t understand it 
without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.” 
Tengo narrowed his eyes, trying to read the man’s expression. Never once had his 
father employed such odd, suggestive language. He always spoke in concrete, 
practical terms. To say only what was necessary when necessary: that was his 
unshakable definition of a conversation. But there was no expression on his face to be 
read. 
“I see. So you are filling in some kind of vacuum,” Tengo said. “All right, then, 
who is going to fill the vacuum that you have left behind?” 
“You,” his father declared, raising an index finger and thrusting it straight at 
Tengo. “Isn’t it obvious? I have been filling in the vacuum that somebody else made, 
so you will fill in the vacuum that I have made. Like taking turns.” 
“The way the cats filled in the town after the people were gone.” 

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362
“Right. Lost like the town,” his father said. Then he stared vacantly at his own 
outstretched index finger as if looking at some mysterious, misplaced object. 
“Lost like the town,” Tengo repeated his father’s words. 
“The woman who gave birth to you is not anywhere anymore.” 
“ ‘Not anywhere.’ ‘Lost like the town.’ Are you saying she’s dead?” 
His father made no reply to that. 
Tengo sighed. “So, then, who is my father?” 
“Just a vacuum. Your mother joined her body with a vacuum and gave birth to 
you. I filled in that vacuum.” 
Having said that much, his father closed his eyes and closed his mouth. 
“Joined her body with a vacuum?” 
“Yes.” 
“And you raised me. Is that what you’re saying?” 
After one ceremonious clearing of his throat, his father said, as if trying to explain 
a simple truth to a slow-witted child, “That is why I said, ‘If you can’t understand it 
without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.’ ” 
“So you’re telling me that I came out of a vacuum?” Tengo asked. 
No answer. 
Tengo folded his hands in his lap and looked straight into his father’s face once 
more. 
This man is no empty shell, no vacant house. He is a flesh-and-blood human 
being with a narrow, stubborn soul and shadowed memories, surviving in fits and 
starts on this patch of land by the sea. He has no choice but to coexist with the 
vacuum that is slowly spreading inside him. The vacuum and his memories are still at 
odds, but eventually, regardless of his wishes, the vacuum will completely swallow up 
whatever memories are left. It is just a matter of time. Could the vacuum that he is 
confronting now be the same vacuum from which I was born?
Tengo thought he might be hearing the distant rumble of the sea mixed with the 
early-evening breeze slipping through the pine branches. Though it could have been 
an illusion. 

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