After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

After you
do
something like that, the everyday
look
of things might seem to 
change a little. Things may look
different
to you than they did before. But don’t 
let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality
. 
At the time, Aomame had found this odd, but she had had no idea what he was trying 
to tell her, so she hadn’t given it much thought. She had been in too much of a hurry 
to puzzle over riddles. Thinking back on it now, though, his remarks had come out of 
nowhere, and they were truly strange. They could be taken as cautionary advice or an 
evocative message. 
What was he trying to convey to me?
And then there was the Janá
č
ek music
. 
How was I able to tell instantly that it was Janá
č
ek’s
Sinfonietta
?
And how did I 
know it was composed in 1926? Janá
č
ek’s
Sinfonietta 
is not such popular music that 
anyone can recognize it on hearing the first few bars. Nor have I ever been such a 
passionate fan of classical music. I can’t tell Haydn from Beethoven. Yet the moment 
it came flowing through the car radio, I knew what it was. Why was that, and why 
should it have given me such an intensely physical—and intensely personal—jolt?
Yes, that jolt was utterly personal. It felt as if something had awakened a memory 
that had been asleep inside me for years. Something seemed to grab my shoulder and 
shake me. Which means I might have had a deep connection with that music at some 
point in my life. The music started playing, threw an automatic switch to “on,” and 
perhaps some kind of memory came fully awake. Janá
č
ek’s
Sinfonietta. 
But though she tried to probe her memory, Aomame could come up with nothing 
else. She looked around, stared at her palms, inspected the shape of her fingernails, 
and grabbed her breasts through her shirt to check the shape. 
No change. Same size 
and shape. I’m still the same me. The world is still the same world. But something has 
started to change
. She could feel it. It was like looking for differences between two 
identical pictures. Two pictures hang on the wall side by side. They look exactly 
alike, even with careful comparison. But when you examine the tiniest details, 
minuscule differences become apparent. 

---

103
Aomame switched mental gears, turned the page of the compact-edition 
newspaper, and started taking detailed notes on the gun battle at Lake Motosu. There 
was speculation that the five Chinese-made Kalashnikov AK-47s had been smuggled 
in through the Korean Peninsula. They were most likely used military surplus in fairly 
good condition and came with lots of ammunition. The Japan Sea’s coast was a long 
one. Bringing in weapons and ammunition under cover of night and using a spy ship 
disguised as a fishing vessel was not that difficult. That was how drugs and weapons 
were brought into Japan in exchange for massive quantities of Japanese yen. 
The Yamanashi Prefectural Police had been unaware that the radicals were so 
heavily armed. They obtained a search warrant on the (purely pro-forma) charge of 
inflicting bodily injury, and were carrying only their usual weapons when they piled 
into two patrol cars and a minibus and headed for the “farm.” This was the 
headquarters of a group that called itself Akebono, or “First Light.” On the face of it, 
the group members were simply operating an organic farm. They refused to allow the 
police to search their property. A confrontation ensued, and at some point it turned 
into a gun battle. 
The Akebono group owned high-powered Chinese-made hand grenades, which 
fortunately they did not use, purely because they had obtained the grenades so 
recently that they had not had time to learn how to operate them. If the radicals had 
used hand grenades, casualties among the police and the Self-Defense Force would 
almost certainly have been much greater. Initially, the police did not even bring 
bulletproof vests with them. Critics singled out the police authorities’ poor 
intelligence analysis and the department’s aging weaponry. What most shocked 
people, however, was the very fact that there still survived in Japan such an armed 
radical group operating so actively beneath the surface. The late sixties’ bombastic 
calls for “revolution” were already a thing of the past, and everyone assumed that the 
remnants of the radicals had been wiped out in the police siege of the Asama 
Mountain Lodge in 1972. 
When she had finished taking all her notes, Aomame returned the compact 
newspaper to the reference counter. Choosing a thick book called