After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 20 
Aomame 
ONE ASPECT OF MY TRANSFORMATION 
On Sunday the wind had died down. It was a warm, calm day, totally different from 
the night before. People took off their heavy coats and enjoyed the sunshine. 
Aomame, however, did not enjoy the nice weather—she spent the day as always, shut 
away in her room, the curtains closed. 
As she listened to Janá
č
ek’s 
Sinfonietta
, the sound down low, she stretched and 
then turned to her exercise machine to do some resistance training. She was gradually 
adding routines to her training workout and it now took nearly two hours to complete. 
Afterward she cooked, cleaned the apartment, and lay on the sofa to read 
In Search of 
Lost Time
. She had finally begun volume three, 
The Guermantes Way
. She tried her 
best to keep busy. She only watched TV twice a day—the NHK news broadcasts at 
noon and seven p.m. As always, nothing big was going on—no, actually, lots of big 
events were happening in the world. People all around the world had lost their lives, 
many of them in tragic ways—train wrecks, ferry boats sinking, plane crashes. A civil 
war went on with no end in sight, an assassination, a terrible ethnic massacre. 
Weather shifts had brought on drought, floods, famine. Aomame deeply sympathized 
with the people caught up in these tragedies and disasters, but even so, not a single 
thing had occurred that had a direct bearing on her. 
Neighborhood children were playing in the playground across the street, shouting 
something. She could hear the crows gathered on the roof, cawing out the latest 
gossip. The air had that early-winter city smell. 
It suddenly hit her that ever since she had been living in this condo she had never 
once felt any sexual desire. Not once had she felt like having sex. She hadn’t even 
masturbated. Maybe it was due to her pregnancy and her body’s hormonal changes. 
Still, Aomame was relieved. This wasn’t exactly the place to find a sexual outlet, 
should she decide she had to sleep with someone. She was happy, too, to not have any 
more periods. Her periods had never been heavy, but still she felt as if she had set 
down a load she had been carrying forever. It was one less thing to have to think 
about. 
In the three months that she had been here, her hair had grown long. In September 
it had barely touched her shoulders, but now it was down to her shoulder blades. 
When she was a child her mother had always trimmed it short, and from junior high 
onward, because sports had been her life, she had never let it grow out. It felt a bit too 
long now, but she couldn’t very well cut it herself. She trimmed her bangs, but that 
was all. She kept her hair up during the day and let it down at night. And then, while 

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listening to music, she brushed it a hundred strokes, something you can only do if you 
have plenty of time on your hands. 
Normally she wore almost no makeup, and now especially there was no need for it. 
But she wanted to keep a set daily routine as much as she could, so she made sure to 
take good care of her skin. She massaged her skin with creams and lotions, put on a 
face mask before bedtime. She was basically a very healthy person, and just a little 
extra care was all it took for her skin to be beautiful and lustrous. Or maybe this, too, 
was a by-product of being pregnant? She had heard that pregnant women had 
beautiful skin. Either way, when she sat at her mirror, let down her hair, and 
examined her face, she did feel she looked prettier than ever before. Or at least she 
was taking on the composure of a mature woman. Probably. 
Aomame had never once felt beautiful. No one had ever told her that she was. Her 
mother treated her like she was an ugly child. “If only you were prettier,” her mother 
always said—meaning if she were prettier, a cuter child, they could recruit more 
converts. So Aomame had always avoided looking at herself in mirrors. When she 
absolutely had to, she quickly, efficiently, checked out her reflection. 
Tamaki Otsuka had told her she liked her features.