After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Is my memory really that accurate?
Aomame wasn’t certain. She just 
had a feeling
about it. Sometimes our memory 
betrays us. 
Aomame kept her doubts to herself. She shut her eyes for a moment to let her 
breathing and heart rate get back to normal, and waited for the clouds to pass. 

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799
People continued to stare at the two of them through the car windows. What are 
these two looking at? And why are they clutching each other’s hand so tightly? A 
number of them craned their heads, trying to see what the couple was staring at, but 
all that was visible were white clouds and an Esso billboard. 
Put a Tiger in Your 
Tank
, the billboard tiger’s profile said, facing to the left, urging those driving by to 
consume even more gasoline, his orange-striped tail jauntily raised to the sky. 
. . . 
The clouds finally broke and the moon came into view. 
There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon 
that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose—a gleaming, 
round saucer—over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the 
rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, 
that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. 
The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul—or, as a new moon, 
silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. 
That
moon. The moon was fixed in the 
sky right above the Esso billboard, and there was no smaller, misshapen greenish 
moon beside it. It was hanging there, taciturn, beholden to no one. Simultaneously, 
the two of them looked at the same scene. Wordlessly Aomame clutched Tengo’s 
hand. The feeling of an internal backflow had vanished. 
We’re back in 1984
, Aomame told herself. 
This isn’t 1Q84 anymore. This is the 
world of 1984, the world I came from
. 
But is it? Could the world really go back so easily to what it was? Hadn’t Leader, 
just before he died, asserted that there was no pathway back to the old world?
Could this be another, altogether different place? Did we move from one world to 
yet another, third world? Where the Esso tiger shows us the left side of his face, not 
his right? Where new riddles and new rules await us?
It might well be
, Aomame thought. 
At least at this point I can’t swear that it isn’t. 
But there is one thing I can say for sure. No matter how you look at it, this isn’t that 
world, with its two moons in the sky. And I am holding Tengo’s hand. The two of us 
entered a dangerous place, where logic had no purpose, and we managed to survive 
some terrible ordeals, found each other, and slipped away. Whether this place we’ve 
arrived in is the world we started out from or a whole new world, what do I have to 
be afraid of? If there are new trials ahead for us, we just have to overcome them, like 
we’ve done before. That’s all. But at least we’re no longer alone
. 
Believing in what she needed to believe, she relaxed, leaning back against Tengo’s 
large body. She pressed her ear against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, and 
gave herself up to his arms. Just like a pea in a pod. 
“Where should we go now?” Tengo asked Aomame after some time had passed. They 
couldn’t stay here forever. That much was clear. But there was no shoulder on the 
Metropolitan Expressway. The Ikejiri exit was relatively close, but even in a traffic 
jam like this it was too dangerous for a pedestrian to walk through the backup of cars. 
They were certain, too, that holding out their thumbs to hitchhike wasn’t likely to get 

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them any rides. They could use the emergency phone to call for help from the Japan 
Highway Public Corporation, but then they would have to come up with a reasonable 
explanation for why they were stranded. Even if they were able to make it on foot to 
the Ikejiri exit, the toll collector would be sure to question them. Going back down the 
same stairs they had climbed up was out of the question. 
“I don’t know,” Aomame said. 
She really had no idea what they should do, or where they should go. Once they 
had climbed the emergency stairway, her role was over. She was too drained to think, 
or make a judgment call. There wasn’t a drop left in her tank. She could only let some 
other power take over. 
O Lord in Heaven, may Thy name be praised in utmost purity for ever and ever, and 
may Thy kingdom come to us. Please forgive our many sins, and bestow Thy 
blessings upon our humble pathways. Amen. 
The prayer flowed out from her like a conditioned reflex. She didn’t have to think 
about it. Each individual word had no meaning. The phrases were nothing more than 
sounds to her now, a list of signs and nothing more. Still, as she mechanically recited 
the prayer, a strange feeling came over her, something you might even call reverence. 
Something deep inside her struck a chord in her heart.