After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Even if I left this world, 
I doubt anyone would notice. I would shout out from the dark, but no one would hear 
me. Still, I have to keep soldiering on until I die, the only way I know how. Not a 
laudable sort of life, but the only life I know how to live
. And when it came to 
not very 
laudable things
, Ushikawa was more capable than almost anyone. 
At two thirty a young woman wearing a baseball cap exited the building. She had no 
bags with her and quickly strode across Ushikawa’s line of sight. He hurriedly pushed 
the motor drive switch in his hand and got off three quick shots. It was the first time 
he had seen her. She was a beautiful young girl, thin and long limbed with wonderful 
posture, like a ballerina. She looked about sixteen or seventeen and had on faded 
jeans, white sneakers, and a man’s leather jacket. Her hair was tucked into the collar 
of the jacket. After leaving the building the girl took a couple of steps, then stopped, 
frowned, and looked intently up above the electric pole in front. She then lowered her 
gaze to the ground and started off again. She turned left and disappeared from 
Ushikawa’s sight. 
That girl looks like somebody
, he thought. Somebody he knew, that he had seen 
recently. With her looks she might be a TV personality. Ushikawa never watched 
anything on TV but news, and had never been interested in cute girl TV stars. 
Ushikawa pushed his memory accelerator to the floor and shifted his brain into 
high gear. He narrowed his eyes and squeezed his brain cells hard, like wringing out a 
dishrag. His nerves ached painfully with the effort. And suddenly it came to him: that 
somebody
was none other than Eriko Fukada. He had never seen her in person, only a 
photo of her in the literary column of the papers. But the sense of aloof transparency 
that hung over her was exactly the same impression he had gotten from the tiny black-
and-white photo of her in the paper. She and Tengo must have met each other during 
the rewriting of 
Air Chrysalis
. It was entirely possible that she had grown fond of 
Tengo and was lying low in his apartment. 
Almost without thinking, Ushikawa grabbed his knit cap, yanked on his navy-blue 
pea coat, and wrapped his muffler around his neck. He left the building and trotted off 
in the direction he had last seen her. 
She was a very fast walker. 
It might be impossible to catch up with her
, he thought. 
But she was carrying nothing, which meant she wasn’t going far. Instead of 
shadowing her and risking drawing her attention, wouldn’t it make more sense to wait 
patiently for her to return? Ushikawa pondered this, but couldn’t stop following her. 
The girl had a certain illogical something that shook him. The same feeling as the 
moment at twilight when a mysteriously colored beam of light conjures up a special 
memory. 
After a while he spotted her. Fuka-Eri had stopped in front of a tiny stationery 
store and was peering intently inside, where something had undoubtedly caught her 

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667
interest. Ushikawa casually turned his back on her and stood in front of a vending 
machine. He took some coins out and bought a can of hot coffee. 
Finally the girl took off again. Ushikawa laid the half-finished can of coffee at his 
feet and followed her at a safe distance. The girl seemed to be concentrating very hard 
on the act of walking, as if she were gliding across the surface of a placid lake. Walk 
in this special way, and you won’t sink or get your shoes wet. It was as if she had 
grasped the key to doing this. 
There was something different about this girl. She had a special something most 
people didn’t. Ushikawa didn’t know a lot about Eriko Fukada. From what he had 
gathered, she was Leader’s only daughter, had run away from Sakigake at age ten, 
had grown up in the household of a well-known scholar named Professor Ebisuno, 
and had written a novel entitled