After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Under certain limited conditions
, Tengo added to himself. 
“Did she love you.” 
“Probably. To some extent.” 
“Were you having intercourse.” 
It took a moment for the word “intercourse” to register with Tengo. It was hard to 
imagine that word coming from Fuka-Eri’s mouth. 
“Of course. She wasn’t coming here every week to play Monopoly.” 
“Monopoly,” she asked. 
“Never mind,” Tengo said. 
“But she won’t come here anymore.” 

---

399
“That’s what I was told, at least. That she won’t come here anymore.” 
“She told you that,” Fuka-Eri asked. 
“No, I didn’t hear it directly from her. Her husband told me. That she was 
irretrievably lost
and couldn’t come here anymore.” 
“Irretrievably lost.” 
“I don’t know exactly what it means either. I couldn’t get him to explain. There 
were lots of questions but not many answers. Like a trade imbalance. Want some 
tea?” 
Fuka-Eri nodded. 
Tengo poured the boiling water into the teapot, put the lid on, and waited. 
“Oh well,” Fuka-Eri said. 
“What? The few answers? Or that she was lost?” 
Fuka-Eri did not reply. 
Tengo gave up and poured tea into two cups. “Sugar?” 
“A level teaspoonful,” Fuka-Eri said. 
“Lemon or milk?” 
Fuka-Eri shook her head. Tengo put a spoonful of sugar into the cup, stirred it 
slowly, and set it in front of the girl. He added nothing to his own tea, picked up the 
cup, and sat at the table across from her. 
“Did you like having intercourse,” Fuka-Eri asked. 
“Did I like having intercourse with my girlfriend?” Tengo rephrased it as an 
ordinary question. 
Fuka-Eri nodded. 
“I think I did,” Tengo said. “Having intercourse with a member of the opposite sex 
that you’re fond of. Most people enjoy that.” 
To himself he said, 
She was very good at it. Just as every village has at least one 
farmer who is good at irrigation, she was good at sexual intercourse. She liked to try 
different methods
. 
“Are you sad she stopped coming,” Fuka-Eri asked. 
“Probably,” Tengo said. Then he drank his tea. 
“Because you can’t do intercourse.” 
“That’s part of it, naturally.” 
Fuka-Eri stared straight at Tengo again for a time. She seemed to be having some 
kind of thoughts about intercourse. What she was actually thinking about, no one 
could say. 
“Hungry?” Tengo asked. 
Fuka-Eri nodded. “I have hardly eaten anything since this morning.” 
“I’ll make dinner,” Tengo said. He himself had hardly eaten anything since the 
morning, and he was feeling hungry. Also, he could not think of anything to do for the 
moment aside from making dinner. 
Tengo washed the rice, put it in the cooker, and turned on the switch. He used the 
time until the rice was ready to make miso soup with wakame seaweed and green 
onions, grill a sun-dried mackerel, take some tofu out of the refrigerator and flavor it 
with ginger, grate a chunk of daikon radish, and reheat some leftover boiled 

---

400
vegetables. To go with the rice, he set out some pickled turnip slices and a few 
pickled plums. With Tengo moving his big body around inside it, the little kitchen 
looked especially small. It did not bother him, though. He was long used to making do 
with what he had there. 
“Sorry, but these simple things are all I can make,” Tengo said. 
Fuka-Eri studied Tengo’s skillful kitchen work in great detail. With apparent 
fascination, she scrutinized the results of that work neatly arranged on the table and 
said, “You know how to cook.” 
“I’ve been living alone for a long time. I prepare my meals alone as quickly as 
possible and I eat alone as quickly as possible. It’s become a habit.” 
“Do you always eat alone.” 
“Pretty much. It’s very unusual for me to sit down to a meal like this with 
somebody. I used to eat lunch here once a week with the woman we were talking 
about. But, come to think of it, I haven’t eaten dinner with anybody for a very long 
time.” 
“Are you nervous.” 
Tengo shook his head. “No, not especially. It’s just dinner. It does seem a little 
strange, though.” 
“I used to eat with lots of people. We all lived together when I was little. And I ate 
with lots of different people after I moved to the Professor’s. He always had visitors.” 
He had never heard Fuka-Eri speak so many sentences in a row. 
“But you were eating alone all the time you were in hiding?” Tengo asked. 
Fuka-Eri nodded. 
“Where 
were
you in hiding?” Tengo asked. 
“Far away. The Professor arranged it for me.” 
“What were you eating alone?” 
“Instant stuff. Packaged food,” Fuka-Eri said. “I haven’t had a meal like this in a 
long time.” 
Fuka-Eri put a lot of time into tearing the flesh of the mackerel from the bones 
with her chopsticks. She brought the pieces of fish to her mouth and put more time 
into chewing them, as though she were eating some rare new food. Then she took a 
sip of miso soup, examined the taste, made some kind of judgment, set her chopsticks 
on the table, and went on thinking. 
Just before nine o’clock, Tengo thought he might have caught the sound of thunder in 
the distance. He parted the curtains slightly and looked outside. The sky was totally 
dark now, and across it streamed a number of ominously shaped clouds. 
“You were right,” Tengo said after closing the curtain. “The weather’s looking 
very ugly out there.” 
“Because the Little People are stirring,” Fuka-Eri said with a somber expression. 
“When the Little People begin stirring, it does extraordinary things to the 
weather?” 
“It depends. Weather is a question of how you look at it.” 
“A question of how you look at it?” 
Fuka-Eri shook her head. “I don’t really get it.” 

---

401
Tengo didn’t get it either. To him, weather seemed to be an independent, objective 
condition. But he probably couldn’t get anywhere pursuing this question further. He 
decided to ask another question instead. 
“Do you think the Little People are angry about something?” 
“Something is about to happen,” the girl said. 
“What kind of something?” 
Fuka-Eri shook her head. “We’ll see soon.” 
Together they washed and dried the dishes and put them away, after which they sat 
facing each other across the table, drinking tea. He would have liked a beer, but 
decided it might be better to refrain from drinking today. He sensed some kind of 
danger in the air, and thought he should remain as clearheaded as possible in case 
something happened. 
“It might be better to go to sleep early,” Fuka-Eri said, pressing her hands against 
her cheeks like the screaming man on the bridge in the Munch picture. Not that she 
was screaming: she was just sleepy. 
“Okay, you can use my bed,” Tengo said. “I’ll sleep on the sofa like before. Don’t 
worry, I can sleep anywhere.” 
It was true. Tengo could fall asleep anywhere right away. It was almost a talent. 
Fuka-Eri only nodded. She looked straight at Tengo for a while, offering no 
opinions. Then she briefly touched her freshly made ears, as if to check that they were 
still there. “Can you lend me your pajamas. I didn’t bring mine.” 
Tengo took his extra pajamas from the bedroom dresser drawer and handed them 
to Fuka-Eri. They were the same pajamas he had lent her the last time she stayed 
here—plain blue cotton pajamas, washed and folded from that time. Tengo held them 
to his nose to check for odors, but there were none. Fuka-Eri took them, went to the 
bathroom to change, and came back to the dining table. Now her hair was down. The 
pajama legs and arms were rolled up as before. 
“It’s not even nine o’clock,” Tengo said, glancing at the wall clock. “Do you 
always go to bed so early?” 
Fuka-Eri shook her head. “Today is special.” 
“Because the Little People are stirring outside?” 
“I’m not sure. I’m just tired now.” 
“You 
do
look sleepy,” Tengo admitted. 
“Can you read me a book or tell me a story in bed,” Fuka-Eri asked. 
“Sure,” Tengo said. “I don’t have anything else to do.” 
It was a hot and humid night, but as soon as she got into bed, Fuka-Eri pulled the 
quilt up to her chin, as if to form a firm barrier between the outside world and her own 
world. In bed, somehow, she looked like a little girl no more than twelve years old. 
The thunder rumbling outside the window was much louder than before, as though the 
lightning were beginning to strike somewhere quite close by. With each thunderclap, 
the windowpanes would rattle. Strangely, though, there were no lightning flashes to 
be seen, just thunder rolling across the pitch-dark sky. Nor was there any hint of rain. 
Something was definitely out of balance. 
“They are watching us,” Fuka-Eri said. 
“You mean the Little People?” Tengo asked. 
Fuka-Eri did not answer him. 

---

402
“They know we’re here,” Tengo said. 
“Of course they know,” Fuka-Eri said. 
“What are they trying to do to us?” 
“They can’t do anything to us.” 
“That’s good.” 
“For now, that is.” 
“They can’t touch us for now,” Tengo repeated feebly. “But there’s no telling how 
long that will go on.” 
“No one knows,” Fuka-Eri declared with conviction. 
“But even if they can’t do anything to us, they 
can
, instead, do something to the 
people around us?” Tengo asked. 
“Maybe so.” 
“Maybe they can make terrible things happen to them?” 
Fuka-Eri narrowed her eyes for a time with a deadly serious look, like a sailor 
trying to catch the song of a ship’s ghost. Then she said, “In some cases.” 
“Maybe the Little People used their powers against my girlfriend. To give me a 
warning.” 
Fuka-Eri slipped a hand out from beneath the quilt and gave her freshly made ear a 
scratching. Then she slipped the hand back inside. “What the Little People can do is 
limited.” 
Tengo bit his lip for a moment. Then he said, “Exactly what kinds of things 
can
they do, for example?” 
Fuka-Eri started to offer an opinion on the matter but then had second thoughts and 
stopped. Her opinion, unvoiced, sank back into the place it had originated from—a 
deep, dark, unknown place. 
“You said that the Little People have wisdom and power.” 
Fuka-Eri nodded. 
“But they have their limits.” 
Fuka-Eri nodded. 
“And that’s because they are people of the forest; when they leave the forest, they 
can’t unleash their powers so easily. And in this world, there exist something like 
values that make it possible to resist their wisdom and power. Is that it?” 
Fuka-Eri did not answer him. Perhaps the question was too long. 
“Have you ever met the Little People?” Tengo asked. 
Fuka-Eri stared at him vaguely, as though she could not grasp the meaning of his 
question. 
“Have you ever actually seen them?” Tengo rephrased his question. 
“Yes,” Fuka-Eri said. 
“How many of the Little People did you see?” 
“I don’t know. More than I could count on my fingers.” 
“But not just one.” 
“Their numbers can sometimes increase and sometimes decrease, but there is never 
just one.” 
“The way you depicted them in