After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

If this girl 
were my lover, I would probably never tire of kissing her there
, Tengo thought. 
While 
I was inside her, I would kiss that ear, give it little bites, run my tongue over it, blow 
my breath into it, inhale its fragrance. Not that I want to do that
now. This was just a 
momentary fantasy based on pure hypothesis concerning what he would do 
if
she 
were his lover. Morally, it was nothing for him to be ashamed of—probably. 
But whether this involved a moral question or not, he should not have been 
thinking about it. Tengo’s penis began to wake from its tranquil sleep in the mud, as if 
it had been poked in its back by a finger. It gave a yawn and slowly raised its head, 
gradually growing harder until, like a yacht whose sails are filled by a strong 
northwest tailwind, it achieved a full, unreserved erection. As a result, his hardened 
penis could not help but press against Fuka-Eri’s hip. Tengo released a deep mental 
sigh. He had not had sex for more than a month following the disappearance of his 
girlfriend. Probably that was the cause. He should have continued multiplying three-
digit figures. 
“Don’t let it bother you,” Fuka-Eri said. “Getting hard is only natural.” 
“Thank you,” Tengo said. “But maybe the Little People are watching from 
somewhere.” 
“Just watching. They can’t do anything.” 
“That’s good,” Tengo said, his voice unsettled. “But it does kind of bother me to 
think that I’m being watched.” 
Again a lightning bolt cracked the sky in two, like the ripping of an old curtain, 
and the thunder gave the windowpane a violent shake as if 
they
were seriously trying 
to shatter the glass. The glass might actually break before long, it seemed. The 
window had a sturdy aluminum frame, but it might not hold up if such ferocious 
shaking continued. Big, hard raindrops went on knocking against the glass like bullets 
slamming into a deer. 

---

419
“The thunderbolts have hardly moved, it seems,” Tengo said. “Lightning storms 
don’t usually go on this long.” 
Fuka-Eri looked up at the ceiling. “It won’t go anywhere for a while.” 
“How long a while?” 
Fuka-Eri did not answer him. Tengo went on holding Fuka-Eri apprehensively, his 
unanswered question and his useless erection both intact. 
“We will go to the cat town again,” Fuka-Eri said. “So we have to sleep.” 
“Do you think we 
can
sleep with all this thunder going? And it’s barely past nine,” 
Tengo said anxiously. 
Tengo arranged mathematical formulas in his head. It was a problem concerning 
long, complex mathematical formulas, but he already knew the answer. The 
assignment was to find how quickly and by how short a route he could arrive at the 
answer. He wasted no time setting his mind in motion, pushing his brain to the point 
of abuse. But this did nothing to relieve his erection. Its hardness only seemed to 
increase. 
“We can sleep,” Fuka-Eri said. 
And she was right. Even in the midst of the violent downpour, surrounded by 
thunder rattling the building, and beset by his jangled nerves and his stubborn 
erection, Tengo drifted into sleep before he knew it. He couldn’t believe such a thing 
was possible, and yet … 
This is total chaos
, Tengo thought just before he fell asleep. 
I’ve got to find the
shortest route to the solution. Time is running out, and there’s so little space on the 
examination sheet they distributed
. Tick-tock, tick-tock, the clock dutifully counted 
off time. 
He was naked when he awoke, and so was Fuka-Eri. Completely and totally naked. 
Her breasts were perfect hemispheres. Her nipples were not overly large, and they 
were soft, still quietly groping for the maturity that was to come. Her breasts 
themselves were large, however, and fully ripe. They seemed to be virtually 
uninfluenced by the force of gravity, the nipples turned beautifully upward, like a 
vine’s new tendrils seeking sunlight. The next thing that Tengo became aware of was 
that Fuka-Eri had no pubic hair. Where there should have been pubic hair there was 
only smooth, bare white skin, its whiteness giving emphasis to its utter 
defenselessness. She had her legs spread; he could see her vagina. Like the ear he had 
been staring at, it looked as if it had just been made only moments before. And 
perhaps it really had been made only moments before.