After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

My
dohta 
must have awakened
, the girl thinks. The two moons cast the shadow of her 
heart and mind. Her heart gives a shudder. 
The world has changed. And something is 
beginning to happen
. 
The girl hears nothing from her parents. Perhaps no one in the Gathering has noticed 
her disappearance. That is because her other self, her 
dohta
, has remained behind. The 
two of them look exactly alike, so most people can’t tell the difference. Her parents, 
of course, should be able to tell that the 
dohta
is not the actual girl, that she is nothing 
but the girl’s other self, that their actual daughter has run away from the Gathering, 
leaving the 
dohta
behind in her place. There is only one place where the girl might 
have gone, but still her parents never try to contact her. This in itself might be a 
wordless message to the girl to stay away. 
The girl goes to school irregularly. The new outside world is simply too different 
from the world of the Gathering where she grew up. The rules are different, the aims 
are different, the words they use are different. For this reason, she has trouble making 
friends in this new world. She can’t get used to life in the school. 
In middle school, however, she befriends a boy. His name is Toru. He is small and 
skinny, and his face has several deep wrinkles like that of a monkey. He seems to 
have suffered from a serious illness when little and can’t participate in strenuous 
activities. His backbone is somewhat curved. At recess time, he always stays by 
himself, reading a book. Like the girl, he has no friends. He is too small and too ugly. 
During one lunch break, the girl sits next to him and starts to talk to him. She asks 
about the book he is reading. He reads it aloud to her. She likes his voice, which is 
small and hoarse but very clear to her. The stories he tells with that voice all but carry 
her away. He reads prose so beautifully that it sounds as if he is reciting poetry. Soon 
she is spending every lunchtime with him, sitting very still and listening with deep 
attention to the stories he reads her. 
Before long, however, Toru is lost to the girl. The Little People snatch him away 
from her. 
One night an air chrysalis appears in Toru’s room. The Little People make it bigger 
and bigger each night while he sleeps, and they show the scene to the girl through her 
dreams. The girl can do nothing to stop them. Eventually the chrysalis reaches full 
size and a vertical split appears in its side, just as it happened with the girl. But inside 
this chrysalis are three big, black snakes. The three snakes are tightly intertwined, so 
tightly that no one—including themselves—can pull them apart. They look like a 
shiny perpetual 
tangle
with three heads. The snakes are terribly angry that they cannot 
pull free. They writhe in a frantic effort to separate themselves from each other, but 
the more they writhe, the more entangled they become. The Little People show these 

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creatures to the girl. The boy called Toru sleeps on beside them, unaware. Only the 
girl can see all this. 
The boy suddenly falls ill a few days later and is sent to a distant sanatorium. The 
nature of his illness is not disclosed. In any case, Toru will surely never return to the 
school. He has been irretrievably lost. 
The girl realizes that this is a message from the Little People. Apparently they 
cannot do anything to the girl, a 
maza
, directly. What they can do instead is harm and 
even destroy the people around her. But they cannot do this to just anyone—they 
cannot touch her guardian, the painter, or his daughter, Kurumi. Instead they choose 
the weakest ones for their prey. They dragged the three black snakes from the depths 
of the boy’s mind and woke them from their slumber. By destroying the boy, they 
have sent a warning to the girl and are trying their best to bring her back to her