After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

quite ordinary lives
was stereotypical, lacking 
depth and color. A married couple, probably with two kids. The mother has on an 
apron. Steam rising from a bubbling pot, voices around the dining table—that’s as far 
as his imagination took him before plowing into a solid wall. What would a 
quite 
ordinary
family talk about around the dinner table? He had no memory himself of 
ever talking with his father at the dinner table. They each just stuffed food into their 
mouths, silently, whenever they felt like it. And what they ate was hard to call a real 
meal. 
After checking out all the illuminated windows in the building, Tengo again 
looked up at the pair of moons. But no matter how long he waited, neither moon said 
anything to him. Their faces were expressionless as they floated in the sky beside 
each other, like a precarious couplet in need of reworking. Today there was no 
message. That was the only thing they conveyed to Tengo. 
The clouds swept tirelessly toward the south. All sizes and shapes of clouds 
appeared, then disappeared. Some of them had very unusual shapes, as if they had 

---

654
their own unique thoughts—small, hard, clearly etched thoughts. But Tengo wanted 
to know what the moons were thinking, not the clouds. 
He finally gave up and stood, stretching his arms and legs, then climbed down 
from the slide. 
That’s all I can do. I was able to see that the number of moons hasn’t 
changed, and I will leave it at that for now
. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his 
leather jacket, left the playground, and strode back to his apartment. As he walked he 
suddenly thought of Komatsu. It was about time for them to talk. He had to sort out, 
even if just barely, what had transpired between them. And Komatsu, too, had some 
things he must need to talk to Tengo about. Tengo had left the number of the 
sanatorium in Chikura with Komatsu’s office, but he had never heard from him. He 
would give Komatsu a call tomorrow. Before that, though, he needed to go to the 
cram school and read the letter that Fuka-Eri had left for him. 
Fuka-Eri’s letter was in his desk drawer, unopened. For such a tightly sealed 
envelope, it was a short letter. On a page and a half of notebook paper, in blue ink, 
was her writing, that distinctive cuneiform-like script, the kind of writing that would 
be more appropriate on a clay tablet than notebook paper. Tengo knew it must have 
taken her a long time to write like that. 
Tengo read the letter over and over. She 
had to get out of
his place. 
Right this 
minute
, she had written, because they were being 
watched
. She had underlined these 
three places with a soft, thick pencil. Terribly eloquent underlining. 
Who
was watching us, and 
how
she knew this—about this she said nothing. In the 
world that Fuka-Eri lived in, it seemed that facts were not conveyed directly. Like a 
map showing buried pirate treasure, things had to be connected through hints and 
riddles, ellipses and variations. He had grown used to it and, for the time being, 
provisionally, accepted whatever Fuka-Eri announced. When she said that they were 
being 
watched
, no doubt they actually were being watched. When she felt that she 
had to get out
, that meant the time had come for her to leave. The first thing to do was 
to accept all those statements as one comprehensive fact. Later on he could discover, 
or surmise, the background, the details, the basis for these hypotheses—or else just 
give up on it from the very beginning.