After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

I 
have to accept these guys
as they are, he said to himself. He couldn’t explain why 
something like this could be possible, but it wasn’t a question he needed to delve into 
deeply at this point. The question was 
how to deal with it
. That was the real issue. To 
do so he needed to start by accepting what he was seeing, without questioning the 
logic of it. 
Ushikawa was there for some fifteen minutes. He sat, leaning against the railing of 
the slide, hardly moving a muscle. Like a diver slowly acclimatizing his body to a 
change in water pressure, he let himself be bathed in the light from these moons, let it 
seep into his skin. Ushikawa’s instinct told him this was important. 
Finally this small man with a misshapen head stood up, climbed down from the 
slide, and, completely caught up in indescribable musings, walked back to the 
apartment building. Things looked a little different from when he came. 
Maybe it’s 
the moonlight
, he told himself. 
That moonlight is gradually displacing
how things 
appear
. Thanks to this, he took the wrong turn a number of times. Before he walked 
inside the building he looked up at the third floor to check that Tengo’s lights were 
still off. Tengo was still out. It didn’t seem likely that he had just gone out to eat 
someplace nearby. Maybe he was meeting somebody? And maybe that somebody was 
Aomame. Or Fuka-Eri. 
Have I let a golden opportunity slip through my fingers?
he 
wondered. But it was too late to worry about it now. It was too risky to tail Tengo 
every time he went out. Tengo only had to spot him once to bring the whole operation 
crashing down. 
Ushikawa went back to his apartment and removed his coat, muffler, and hat. He 
opened a tin of corned beef, spread some on a roll, and ate it, standing up in the 
kitchen. He drank a container of lukewarm canned coffee. Nothing had any taste. He 
could feel the texture of the food, but he couldn’t taste anything. Whether this was the 
fault of the food and drink or his own sense of taste, he couldn’t say. Maybe it could 
be blamed on those two moons. He heard a faint doorbell ring somewhere. A pause, 
then it rang again. He didn’t care. It wasn’t his chime ringing, but somebody else’s, 
far away, on a different floor. 

---

735
He finished his sandwich, drained the coffee, then leisurely smoked a cigarette to 
bring his mind back to reality. He reconfirmed what it was he had to do here, and sat 
down behind the camera at the window. He switched on the electric space heater and 
warmed his hands in front of the orange light. It was Sunday evening, not yet nine. 
Traffic into and out of the building was sparse, but Ushikawa was determined to see 
what time Tengo returned. 
A moment later a woman in a black down jacket came out of the entrance, a 
woman he had never seen before. She had on a gray muffler up to her mouth, dark-
framed glasses, and a baseball cap—the perfect getup to hide yourself from prying 
eyes. She was empty-handed and was walking briskly, taking long strides. 
Instinctively Ushikawa switched on the camera’s motor drive and snapped three quick 
shots. He had to find out where she was going, but by the time he had gotten to his 
feet, the woman had reached the road and vanished into the night. Ushikawa frowned 
and gave up. At the pace she was walking, by the time he got his shoes on and chased 
after her, it would be too late to catch up. 
He did an instant replay in his mind of what he had just seen. The woman was 
about five feet six inches tall, and wore narrow blue jeans and white sneakers. All her 
clothes looked strangely brand-new. He would put her at mid-twenties to about thirty. 
Her hair was stuffed in her collar, so he couldn’t tell how long it was. The puffy down 
jacket made it hard to tell what sort of figure she had, but judging from her legs, she 
must be fairly slim. Her good posture and quick pace indicated she was young and 
healthy. She must be into sports. All these characteristics fit the Aomame that 
Ushikawa knew about, though he couldn’t make too many assumptions. Still, she 
seemed to be very cautious. You could tell how tense her whole body was, like an 
actress being stalked by paparazzi.