After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Air Chrysalis
was probably Fuka-Eri herself in the past. A ten-year-
old girl, she lived in a special mountain commune (or commune-like place), where 
she was assigned to look after a blind goat. All the children in the commune had work 
assignments. Though the goat was old, it had special meaning for the community, so 
the girl’s duty was to make sure that no harm came to it. She was not allowed to take 
her eyes off it for a second. One day, however, in a moment of carelessness, she did 
exactly that, and the goat died. As her punishment, the girl was put in total isolation 
for ten days, locked in an old storehouse with the goat’s corpse. 
The goat served as a passageway to this world for the Little People. The girl did 
not know whether the Little People were good or bad (and neither did Tengo). When 
night came, the Little People would enter this world through the corpse, and they 
would go back to the other side when dawn broke. The girl could speak to them. They 
taught her how to make an air chrysalis. 
What most impressed Tengo was the concrete detail with which the blind goat’s traits 
and actions were depicted. These details were what made the work as a whole so 
vivid. Could Fuka-Eri have actually been the keeper of a blind goat? And could she 
have actually lived in a mountain commune like the one in the story? Tengo guessed 
that the answer in both cases was yes. Because if she had never had these experiences, 
Fuka-Eri was a storyteller of rare, inborn talent. 
Tengo decided that he would ask Fuka-Eri about the goat and the commune the 
next time they met (which was to be on Sunday). Of course she might not answer his 
questions. Judging from their previous conversation, it seemed that Fuka-Eri would 

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only answer questions when she felt like it. When she didn’t want to answer, or when 
she clearly had no intention of responding, she simply ignored the questions, as if she 
had never heard them. Like Komatsu. The two were much alike in that regard. Which 
made them very different from Tengo. If someone asked Tengo a question, any 
question, he would do his best to answer it. He had probably been born that way. 
His older girlfriend called him at five thirty. 
“What did you do today?” she asked. 
“I was writing a story all day,” he answered, half truthfully. He had not been 
writing his own fiction. But this was not something he could explain to her in any 
detail. 
“Did it go well?” 
“More or less.” 
“I’m sorry for canceling today on such short notice. I think we can meet next 
week.” 
“I’ll be looking forward to it.” 
“Me too,” she said. 
After that, she talked about her children. She often did that with Tengo. She had 
two little girls. Tengo had no siblings and obviously no children, so he didn’t know 
much about young children. But that never stopped her from telling Tengo about hers. 
Tengo rarely initiated a conversation, but he enjoyed listening to other people. And so 
he listened to her with interest. Her older girl, a second grader, was probably being 
bullied at school, she said. The girl herself had told her nothing, but the mother of one 
of the girl’s classmates had let her know that this was apparently happening. Tengo 
had never met the girl, but he had once seen a photograph. She didn’t look much like 
her mother. 
“Why are they bullying her?” Tengo asked. 
“She often has asthma attacks, so she can’t participate in a lot of activities with the 
other kids. Maybe that’s it. She’s a sweet little thing, and her grades aren’t bad.” 
“I don’t get it,” Tengo said. “You’d think they’d take special care of a kid with 
asthma, not bully her.” 
“It’s never that simple in the kids’ world,” she said with a sigh. “Kids get shut out 
just for being different from everyone else. The same kind of thing goes on in the 
grown-up world, but it’s much more direct in the children’s world.” 
“Can you give me a concrete example?” 
She gave him several examples, none of which was especially bad in itself, but 
which, continued on a daily basis, could have a severe impact on a child: hiding 
things, not speaking to the child, or doing nasty imitations of her. “Did you ever 
experience bullying when you were a child?” 
Tengo thought back to his childhood. “I don’t think so,” he answered. “Or maybe I 
just never noticed.” 
“If you never noticed, it never happened. I mean, the whole