After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Air 
Chrysalis
, it seemed, his mind refused to form any coherent thoughts. At the core of 
his brain was a mass of tangled threads. 
Tengo watched the scenery streaming past the window and listened to the 
monotonous sound of the rails. The Chuo Line stretched on and on straight westward, 
as if following a line drawn on the map with a ruler. In fact, “as if” was probably 
unnecessary: they must have done just that when they laid it out a hundred years 
earlier. In this part of the Kanto Plain there was not a single topographical obstruction 
worth mentioning, which led to the building of a line without a perceivable curve, 
rise, or fall, and no bridges or tunnels. All they needed back then was a ruler, and all 
the trains did now was run in a perfectly straight line to the mountains out west. 
At some point, Tengo fell asleep. When the swaying of the train woke him, they 
were slowing down for the stop in Ogikubo Station, no more than ten minutes out of 
Shinjuku—a short nap. Fuka-Eri was sitting in the same position, staring straight 
ahead. Tengo had no idea what she was, in fact, looking at. Judging from her air of 
concentration, she had no intention of getting off the train for some time yet. 
“What kind of books do you read?” Tengo asked Fuka-Eri when they had gone 
another ten minutes and were past Mitaka. He raised the question not only out of 
sheer boredom but because he had been meaning to ask her about her reading habits. 

---

92
Fuka-Eri glanced at him and faced forward again. “I don’t read books,” she 
answered simply. 
“At all?” 
She gave him a quick nod. 
“Are you just not interested in reading books?” he asked. 
“It takes time,” she said. 
“You don’t read books because it takes time?” he asked, not quite sure he was 
understanding her properly. 
Fuka-Eri kept facing forward and offered no reply. Her posture seemed to convey 
the message that she had no intention of negating his suggestion. 
Generally speaking, of course, it does take some time to read a book. It’s different 
from watching television, say, or reading manga. The reading of a book is an activity 
that involves some continuity; it is carried out over a relatively long time frame. But 
in Fuka-Eri’s statement that “it takes time,” there seemed to be included a nuance 
somewhat different from such generalities. 
“When you say, ‘It takes time,’ do you mean … it takes a 
lot
of time?” Tengo 
asked. 
“A 
lot
,” Fuka-Eri declared. 
“A lot longer than most people?” 
Fuka-Eri gave him a sharp nod. 
“That must be a problem in school, too. I’m sure you have to read a lot of books 
for your classes.” 
“I just fake it,” she said coolly. 
Somewhere in his head, Tengo heard an ominous knock. He wished he could 
ignore it, but that was out of the question. He had to know the truth. 
“Could what you’re talking about be what they call ‘dyslexia’?” he asked. 
“Dyslexia.” 
“A learning disability. It means you have trouble making out characters on a 
page.” 
“They have mentioned that. Dys—” 
“Who mentioned that?” 
She gave a little shrug. 
“In other words,” Tengo went on, searching for the right way to say it, “is this 
something you’ve had since you were little?” 
Fuka-Eri nodded. 
“So that explains why you’ve hardly read any novels.” 
“By myself,” she said. 
This also explained why her writing was free of the influence of any established 
authors. It made perfect sense. 
“You didn’t read them ‘by yourself,’ ” Tengo said. 
“Somebody read them to me.” 
“Your father, say, or your mother read books aloud to you?” 
Fuka-Eri did not reply to this. 
“Maybe you can’t read, but you can write just fine, I would think,” Tengo asked 
with growing apprehension. 
Fuka-Eri shook her head. “Writing takes time too.” 

---

93
“A 
lot
of time?” 
Fuka-Eri gave another small shrug. This meant yes. 
Tengo shifted his position on the train seat. “Which means, perhaps, that you 
didn’t write the text of