After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

There has to be a reason. How could I have 
overlooked such a major event, one that shook the whole of Japan?
And this incident is not the only one. I didn’t know anything about the NHK fee 
collector’s stabbing of the college student. It’s absolutely mystifying. I couldn’t 
possibly have missed one major thing after another. I’m too observant, too meticulous 
for that. I know when something’s off by a millimeter. And I know my memory is 
strong. This is why, in sending a number of men to the “other side,” I’ve never made 
a single mistake. This is why I’ve been able to survive. I read the newspaper carefully 
every day, and when I say “read the newspaper carefully,” that means never missing 
anything that is in any way significant
. 
The newspaper continued for days to devote major space to the “Lake Motosu 
Incident.” The Self-Defense Force and the Yamanashi Prefectural Police chased down 

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ten escaped radicals, staging a large-scale manhunt in the surrounding hills, killing 
three of them, severely wounding two, and arresting four (one of whom turned out to 
be a woman). The last person remained unaccounted for. The paper was filled with 
reports on the incident, completely obliterating any follow-up reports on the NHK fee 
collector who stabbed the college student in Itabashi Ward. 
Though no one at NHK ever said so, of course, the broadcasters must have been 
extremely relieved. For if something like the Lake Motosu Incident had not occurred, 
the media would almost certainly have been screaming about the NHK collections 
system or raising doubts about the very nature of NHK’s quasi-governmental status. 
At the beginning of that year, information on the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s 
objections to an NHK special on the Lockheed scandal was leaked, exposing how the 
NHK had, in response, changed some of the content. After these revelations, much of 
the nation was—quite reasonably—beginning to doubt the autonomy of NHK 
programming and to question its political fairness. This in turn gave added impetus to 
a campaign against paying NHK subscription fees. 
Aside from the Lake Motosu Incident and the incident involving the NHK fee 
collector, Aomame clearly remembered the other events and incidents and accidents 
that had occurred at the time, and she clearly remembered having read all the 
newspaper reports about them. Only in those two cases did her powers of recall seem 
to fail her. Why should that be? Why should there be absolutely nothing left in her 
memory from those two events alone? 
Even supposing this is all due to some 
malfunction in my brain, could I possibly have erased those two matters so cleanly, 
leaving everything else intact?
Aomame closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against her temples—hard. 
Maybe such a thing is, in fact, possible. Maybe my brain is giving rise to some kind of 
function that is trying to remake reality, that singles out certain news stories and 
throws a black cloth over them to keep me from seeing or remembering them—the 
police department’s switch to new guns and uniforms, the construction of a joint U.S.-
Soviet moon base, an NHK fee collector’s stabbing of a college student, a fierce gun 
battle at Lake Motosu between a radical group and a special detachment of the Self-
Defense Force
. 
But what do any of these things have in common?
Nothing at all, as far as I can see
. 
Aomame continued tapping on her teeth with the top end of her ballpoint pen as 
her mind spun furiously. 
She kept this up for a long time until finally, the thought struck her: