After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Air Chrysalis
by yourself.” 
“I didn’t.” 
Tengo let a few seconds go by. A few heavy seconds. “So who did write it?” 
“Azami,” she said. 
“Who’s Azami?” 
“Two years younger.” 
There was another short gap. “This other girl wrote 
Air Chrysalis
for you.” 
Fuka-Eri nodded as though this were an absolutely normal thing. 
Tengo set the gears of his mind spinning. “In other words, you dictated the story, 
and Azami wrote it down. Right?” 
“Typed it and printed it,” Fuka-Eri said. 
Tengo bit his lip and tried to put in order the few facts that he had been offered so 
far. Once he had done the rearranging, he said, “In other words, Azami printed the 
manuscript and sent it in to the magazine as an entry in the new writer’s contest, 
probably without telling you what she was doing. And she’s the one who gave it the 
title 
Air Chrysalis
.” 
Fuka-Eri cocked her head to one side in a way that signaled neither a clear yes nor 
a clear no. But she did not contradict him. This probably meant that he generally had 
the right idea. 
“This Azami—is she a friend of yours?” 
“Lives with me.” 
“She’s your younger sister?” 
Fuka-Eri shook her head. “Professor’s daughter.” 
“The Professor,” Tengo said. “Are you saying this Professor also lives with you?” 
Fuka-Eri nodded. 
Why bother to ask something so obvious?
she seemed to be 
saying. 
“So the person I’m going to meet now must be this ‘Professor,’ right?” 
Fuka-Eri turned toward Tengo and looked at him for a moment as if observing the 
flow of a distant cloud or considering how best to deal with a slow-learning dog. Then 
she nodded. 
“We are going to meet the Professor,” she said in a voice lacking expression. 
This brought their conversation to a tentative end. Again Tengo and Fuka-Eri 
stopped talking and, side by side, watched the cityscape stream past the train window 
opposite them. Featureless houses without end stretched across the flat, featureless 
earth, thrusting numberless TV antennas skyward like so many insects. Had the 
people living in those houses paid their NHK subscription fees? Tengo often found 
himself wondering about TV and radio reception fees on Sundays. He didn’t 
want
to 
think about them, but he had no choice. 
Today, on this wonderfully clear mid-April morning, a number of less-than-pleasant 
facts had come to light. First of all, Fuka-Eri had not written 
Air Chrysalis
herself. If 
he was to take what she said at face value (and for now he had no reason to think that 

---

94
he should not), Fuka-Eri had merely dictated the story and another girl had written it 
down. In terms of its production process, it was no different from some of the greatest 
landmarks in Japanese literary history—the 
Kojiki
, with its legendary history of the 
ruling dynasty, for example, or the colorful narratives of the warring samurai clans of 
the twelfth century, 
The Tale of the Heike
. This fact served to lighten somewhat the 
guilt he felt about modifying the text of 
Air Chrysalis
, but at the same time it made 
the situation as a whole significantly more complicated. 
In addition, Fuka-Eri had a bad case of dyslexia and couldn’t even read a book in 
the normal way. Tengo mentally reviewed his knowledge of dyslexia. He had 
attended lectures on the disorder when he was taking teacher training courses in 
college. A person with dyslexia could, in principle, both read and write. The problem 
had nothing to do with intelligence. Reading simply took time. The person might have 
no trouble with a short selection, but the longer the passage, the more difficulty the 
person’s information processing faculty encountered, until it could no longer keep up. 
The link between a character and what it stood for was lost. These were the general 
symptoms of dyslexia. The causes were still not fully understood, but it was not 
surprising for there to be one or two dyslexic children in any classroom. Einstein had 
suffered from dyslexia, as had Thomas Edison and Charles Mingus. 
Tengo did not know whether people with dyslexia generally experienced the same 
difficulties in writing as in reading, but it seemed to be the case with Fuka-Eri. One 
was just as difficult for her as the other. 
What would Komatsu say when he found out about this? Tengo caught himself 
sighing. This seventeen-year-old girl was congenitally dyslexic and could neither read 
books nor write extended passages. Even when she engaged in conversation, she 
could only speak one sentence at a time (assuming she was not doing so 
intentionally). To make someone like this into a professional novelist (even if only for 
show) was going to be impossible. Even supposing that Tengo succeeded in rewriting