After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 24 
Tengo 
AS LONG AS THIS WARMTH REMAINS 
Tengo took a morning special express train from Tokyo Station to Tateyama, changed 
there to a local, and rode it as far as Chikura. The morning was clear and beautiful. 
There was no wind, and there was hardly a wave to be seen on the ocean. Summer 
was long gone. He wore a thin cotton jacket over a short-sleeved shirt, which turned 
out to be exactly right for the weather. Without bathers, the seaside town was 
surprisingly deserted and quiet. 
Like a real town of cats
, Tengo thought. 
He had a simple lunch by the station and took a taxi to the sanatorium, arriving just 
after one o’clock. The same middle-aged nurse greeted him at the reception desk—the 
woman who had taken his phone call the night before. Nurse Tamura. She 
remembered Tengo and was somewhat friendlier than she had been the first time, 
even managing a little smile, perhaps influenced by Tengo’s nicer outfit. 
She guided Tengo first to the lunchroom and poured him a cup of coffee. “Please 
wait here. The doctor will come to see you,” she said. Ten minutes later, his father’s 
doctor appeared, drying his hands with a towel. Flecks of white were beginning to 
appear among the stiff hairs of his head. He was probably around fifty. He was not 
wearing a white jacket, as if he had just completed some task. Instead he wore a gray 
sweatshirt, matching gray sweatpants, and an old pair of jogging shoes. He was well 
built and looked less like a doctor than a college sports coach who had never been 
able to rise past Division II. 
The doctor told Tengo pretty much the same thing he had said on the phone the 
night before. Judging from his expression and his words, he seemed genuinely 
saddened when he said, “I’m sorry to say there is almost nothing we can do for him 
medically at this point. The only thing left to do is let him hear his son’s voice. It 
might enhance his will to live.” 
“Do you think he can hear what people say?” Tengo asked. 
The doctor frowned thoughtfully as he sipped his lukewarm green tea. “To tell you 
the truth, not even I know the answer to that. Your father is in a coma. He shows 
absolutely no physical response when we speak to him. There have been cases, 
though, where someone in a deep coma has been able to hear people talking and 
sometimes even understand what was being said.” 
“But you can’t tell by looking at them.” 
“No, we can’t.” 
“I can stay here until six thirty tonight,” Tengo said. “I’ll sit with him all day and 
talk to him as much as possible. Let’s see if it does any good.” 

---

507
“Please let me know if he shows any kind of reaction,” the doctor said. “I’ll be 
around here somewhere.” 
A young nurse showed Tengo to his father’s room. She wore a name badge that 
read “Adachi.” His father had been moved to a private room in the new wing, the 
wing for more serious patients. In other words, the gears had advanced one more 
notch. There was nowhere else to move after this. It was a drab little room, long and 
narrow, and more than half filled by the bed. Beyond the window stretched the pine 
woods that acted as a windbreak. The dense grove looked like a wall, separating the 
sanatorium from the vitality of the real world. The nurse went out, leaving Tengo 
alone with his father, who lay on his back, sound asleep. Tengo sat on a small wooden 
stool by the bed and looked at his father. 
Near the head of the bed stood an intravenous feeding device, the liquid in its 
plastic bag being sent into a vein in his father’s arm through a tube. A catheter had 
been inserted to catch urine, surprisingly little of which had been collected. His father 
seemed to have shrunk another size or two since the month before. His emaciated 
cheeks and chin wore perhaps two days’ growth of white beard. His father had always 
had sunken eyes, but now they were more deeply set than ever. Tengo couldn’t help 
wondering if it might be necessary to pull the eyeballs up from their holes with some 
kind of medical device. His eyelids were tightly shut at the bottoms of those caverns 
like lowered shutters, and his mouth was slightly open. Tengo couldn’t hear his 
father’s breathing, but, bringing his ear close, he could feel the slight movement of 
air. Life was being quietly maintained there at a minimal level. 
The doctor’s words on the phone last night—“like a train, dropping its speed little 
by little as it begins to stop”—began to feel terribly real to Tengo. This “father” train 
was gradually lowering its speed, waiting for its momentum to run down, and 
preparing to come to a quiet stop in the middle of an empty prairie. At least there was 
no longer a single passenger aboard, no one to raise a complaint even if the train came 
to a halt. That was the only salvation. 
Tengo felt he ought to start talking to his father, but he did not know what he 
should say, how he should say it, or what tone of voice to use.