After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Paths of Glory
makes his 
rounds inspecting the trenches. He approved of what he found. Not bad. The writing 
was much improved. He was making headway. But not enough. He still had lots to 
do. The trench walls were crumbling here and there. The machine guns’ ammunition 
was running out. The barbed wire barriers had noticeable thin spots. 
He printed a draft, saved the document, turned off the word processor, and shifted 
the machine to the side of his desk. Now, with pencil in hand, he did another careful 
read-through of the text, this time on paper. Again he deleted parts that seemed 
superfluous, fleshed out passages that felt underwritten, and revised sections until 
they fit more smoothly into the rest of the story. He selected his words with all the 
care of a craftsman choosing the perfect piece of tile to fill a narrow gap in a 
bathroom floor, inspecting the fit from every angle. Where the fit was less than 
perfect, he adjusted the shape. The slightest difference in nuance could bring the 
passage to life or kill it. 
The exact same text was subtly different to read when viewed on the printed pages 
rather than on the word processor’s screen. The feel of the words he chose would 
change depending on whether he was writing them on paper in pencil or typing them 
on the keyboard. It was imperative to do both. He turned the machine on again and 
typed each penciled correction back into the word-processed document. Then he 
reread the revised text on the screen. 
Not bad
, he told himself. Each sentence 
possessed the proper weight, which gave the whole thing a natural rhythm. 
Tengo sat up straight in his chair, stretched his back, and, turning his face to the 
ceiling, let out a long breath. His job was by no means done. When he reread the text 
in a few days, he would find more things that needed fixing. But this was fine for 
now. His powers of concentration had just about reached their limit. He needed a 
cooling-off period. The hands of the clock were nearing five, and the light of day was 
growing dim. He would rewrite the next block tomorrow. It had taken him almost the 
whole day to rewrite just the first few pages. This was a lot more time-consuming 
than he had expected it to be. But the process should speed up once the rules were laid 
down and a rhythm took hold. Besides, the most difficult and time-consuming part 
would be the opening. Once he got through that, the rest— 
Tengo pictured Fuka-Eri and wondered how she would feel when she read the 
rewritten manuscript. But then he realized that he had no idea how Fuka-Eri would 
feel about anything. He knew virtually nothing about her other than that she was 

---

70
seventeen, a junior in high school with no interest in taking college entrance exams, 
spoke in a very odd way, liked white wine, and had a disturbingly beautiful face. 
Still, Tengo had begun to have a fairly strong sense that his grasp of the world that 
Fuka-Eri was trying to depict (or record) in 
Air Chrysalis
was generally accurate. The 
scenes that Fuka-Eri had created with her peculiar, limited vocabulary took on a new 
clarity and vividness when reworked by Tengo, who paid such careful attention to 
detail. They flowed now. He could see that. All he had provided the work was a level 
of technical reinforcement, but the results were utterly natural, as if he himself had 
written the thing from scratch. Now the story of 
Air Chrysalis
was beginning to 
emerge with tremendous power. 
This was a great source of happiness for Tengo. The long hours of mental 
concentration had left him physically spent but emotionally uplifted. For some time 
after he had turned off the word processor and left his desk, Tengo could not suppress 
the desire to keep rewriting the story. He was enjoying the work immensely. At this 
rate, he might manage not to disappoint Fuka-Eri—though in fact he could not picture 
Fuka-Eri being either disappointed or pleased. Far from it. He could not even picture 
her cracking a smile or displaying the slightest hint of displeasure. Her face was 
devoid of expression. Tengo could not tell whether she lacked expression because she 
had no feelings or the feelings she had were unconnected to her expression. In any 
case, she was a mysterious girl. 
The heroine of