After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

You are not alone
. 
She is in hiding, Fuka-Eri had said. Like a wounded cat. 
Come to think of it, this was a strange coincidence. Fuka-Eri herself was in hiding 
here. She wouldn’t set foot outside of Tengo’s apartment. In this same section of 
Tokyo, two women were lying low, running away from something. Both women had 
deep connections with Tengo. Could that be significant? Or was it a mere 
coincidence? 
No answers were forthcoming, of course, just an aimless bunch of questions. Too 
many questions, too few answers. It was always like this. 
When he finished his beer, a young waiter came over and asked him if he would 
like something else. Tengo hesitated a moment and then requested a bourbon on the 
rocks and another bowl of mixed nuts. “The only bourbon we have is Four Roses, if 
that’s okay.” Tengo said it would be okay. Anything at all. Then he went back to 
thinking about Aomame. The fragrance of a baking pizza wafted toward him from the 
kitchen. 
From whom could Aomame possibly be hiding? The police? But Tengo could not 
believe that she had become a criminal. What kind of crime could she have 

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committed? No, it could not be the police who were chasing her. Whoever or 
whatever it might be, the law surely had nothing to do with it. 
Maybe they’re the same ones who are after Fuka-Eri
, it suddenly occurred to 
Tengo. 
The Little People? Why would the Little People have to pursue Aomame?
But if
they 
are really the ones pursuing Aomame, am I at the center of this?
Tengo 
of course had no idea why 
he
had to be the pivotal figure in such a chain of events, 
but if there was a connection between the two women, Fuka-Eri and Aomame, it 
could not be anyone other than Tengo himself. 
Without even being aware of it, I may 
have been using some kind of power to draw Aomame closer to me
. 
Some kind of power?
He stared at his hands. 
I don’t get it. Where could I have that kind of power?
His Four Roses on the rocks arrived along with a new bowl of nuts. He took a 
swallow of Four Roses, and, taking several nuts in the palm of his hand, he shook 
them like dice. 
Anyhow, Aomame is in this neighborhood. Within walking distance. That’s what 
Fuka-Eri says. And I believe it. I’d be hard-pressed to explain why, but I do believe it. 
Still, how can I go about finding Aomame in her hiding place? It’s hard enough 
finding someone living a normal life, but the task obviously becomes more
challenging when someone is deliberately hiding. Should I go through the streets 
calling her name on a loudspeaker? Sure, like that’s going to get her to step right up. 
It would just alert others to her presence and expose her to added danger
. 
There must be something else I should recall about her
, Tengo thought. 
“You remember some things about her. One of them might help,” Fuka-Eri had 
said. But even before she said that to him, Tengo had long suspected that he might 
have failed to recall an important fact or two regarding Aomame. It had begun to 
make him feel uneasy now and then, like a pebble in his shoe. The feeling was vague 
but persistent. 
Tengo swept his mind clean, as if erasing a blackboard, and started unearthing 
memories again—memories of Aomame, memories of himself, memories of the 
things around them, dredging the soft, muddy bottom like a fisherman dragging his 
net, putting the items in order and mulling them over with great care. Ultimately, 
though, these were things that had happened twenty years earlier. As vividly as he 
might recall them, there was a limit to how much he could bring back. 
It occurred to him to try thinking about lines of vision. What had Aomame been 
looking at? And what had Tengo himself been looking at? 
Let me think back along 
our moving lines of vision and the flow of time
. 
The girl was holding his hand and looking straight into his eyes. Her line of vision 
never wavered. Tengo, initially at a loss to understand her actions, sought an 
explanation in her eyes. 
This must be some kind of misunderstanding or mistake
, 
Tengo had thought. But there was no misunderstanding or mistake here. What he 
realized was that the girl’s eyes were almost shockingly deep and clear. He had never 
seen eyes of such absolute clarity. They were like two springs, utterly transparent, but 
too deep to see the bottoms. He felt he might be sucked inside if he went on looking 
into them. And so he had no choice but to turn away from them. 

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He looked first at the floorboards beneath his feet, then at the entrance to the empty 
classroom, and finally he bent his neck slightly to look outside through the window. 
All this time, Aomame’s gaze never wavered. She kept staring at Tengo’s eyes even 
as he looked outside the window. He could feel her line of vision stinging his skin and 
her fingers gripping his left hand with unwavering strength and with complete 
conviction. She was not afraid. There was nothing she had to fear. And she was trying 
to convey that feeling to Tengo through her fingertips. 
Because their encounter followed the cleaning of the classroom, the window had 
been left wide open for fresh air, and the white curtains were softly waving in the 
breeze. Beyond them stretched the sky. December had come, but it was still not that 
cold. High up in the sky floated a cloud—a straight, white cloud that retained a 
vestige of autumn, like a brand-new brushstroke across the sky. And there was 
something else there, hanging beneath the cloud. The sun? No, it was not the sun. 
Tengo held his breath, pressed his fingers to his temple and tried to peer into a 
still-deeper place in his memory, tracing a frail thread of consciousness that was ready 
to snap at any moment.