After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

We’ve really come a long way
, Tengo thought. 
How far 
do we have to go?
“Don’t worry,” Fuka-Eri said, as if she had read his mind. 
Tengo nodded silently. 
I don’t know, it feels like I’m going to meet her parents to 
ask for her hand in marriage
, he thought. 
Finally, after five stops on the single-track section of the line, they got off at a station 
called Futamatao. Tengo had never heard of the place before. 
What a strange name. 
Forked Tail?
The small station was an old wooden building. Five other passengers 
got off with them. No one got on. People came to Futamatao to breathe the clean air 
on the mountain trails, not to see a performance of 
Man of La Mancha
or go to a disco 
with a wild reputation or visit an Aston Martin showroom or eat 
gratin de homard
at a 
famous French restaurant. That much was obvious from the clothing of the passengers 
who left the train here. 
There were virtually no shops by the station, and no people. There was, however, 
one taxi parked there. It probably showed up whenever a train was scheduled to 
arrive. Fuka-Eri tapped on the window, and the rear door opened. She ducked inside 
and motioned for Tengo to follow her. The door closed, Fuka-Eri told the driver 
briefly where she wanted to go, and he nodded in response. 
They were not in the taxi very long, but the route was tremendously complicated. 
They went up one steep hill and down another along a narrow farm road where there 
was barely enough room to squeeze past other vehicles. The number of curves and 
corners was beyond counting, but the driver hardly slowed down for any of them. 
Tengo clutched the door’s grip in terror. The taxi finally came to a stop after climbing 
a hill as frighteningly steep as a ski slope on what seemed to be the peak of a small 

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108
mountain. It felt less like a taxi trip than a spin on an amusement park ride. Tengo 
produced two thousand-yen bills from his wallet and received his change and receipt 
in return. 
A black Mitsubishi Pajero and a large, green Jaguar were parked in front of the old 
Japanese house. The Pajero was shiny and new, but the Jaguar was an old model so 
coated with white dust that its color was almost obscured. It seemed not to have been 
driven in some time. The air was startlingly fresh, and a stillness filled the 
surrounding space. It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it. 
The perfectly clear sky seemed to soar upward, and the warmth of the sunlight gently 
touched any skin directly exposed to it. Tengo heard the high, unfamiliar cry of a bird 
now and then, but he could not see the bird itself. 
The house was large and elegant. It had obviously been built long ago, but it was 
well cared for. The trees and bushes in the front yard were beautifully trimmed. 
Several of the trees were so perfectly shaped and matched that they looked like plastic 
imitations. One large pine cast a broad shadow on the ground. The view from here 
was unobstructed, but it revealed not a single house as far as the eye could see. Tengo 
guessed that a person would have to loathe human contact to build a home in such an 
inconvenient place. 
Turning the knob with a clatter, Fuka-Eri walked in through the unlocked front 
door and signaled for Tengo to follow her. No one came out to greet them. They 
removed their shoes in the quiet, almost too-large front entry hall. The glossy wooden 
floor of the corridor felt cool against stocking feet as they walked down it to the large 
reception room. The windows there revealed a panoramic view of the mountains and 
of a river meandering far below, the sunlight reflecting on its surface. It was a 
marvelous view, but Tengo was in no mood to enjoy it. Fuka-Eri sat him down on a 
large sofa and left the room without a word. The sofa bore the smell of a distant age, 
but just how distant Tengo could not tell. 
The reception room was almost frighteningly free of decoration. There was a low 
table made from a single thick plank. Nothing lay on it—no ashtray, no tablecloth. No 
pictures adorned the walls. No clocks, no calendars, no vases. No sideboard, no 
magazines, no books. The floor had an antique rug so faded that its pattern could not 
be discerned, and the sofa and easy chairs seemed just as old. There was nothing else, 
just the large, raft-like sofa on which Tengo was sitting and three matching chairs. 
There was a large, open-style fireplace, but it showed no signs of having contained a 
fire recently. For a mid-April morning, the room was downright chilly, as if the cold 
that had seeped in through the winter had decided to stay for a while. Many long 
months and years seemed to have passed since the room had made up its mind never 
to welcome any visitors. Fuka-Eri returned and sat down next to Tengo, still without 
speaking. 
Neither of them said anything for a long time. Fuka-Eri shut herself up in her own 
enigmatic world, while Tengo tried to calm himself with several quiet deep breaths. 
Except for the occasional distant bird cry, the room was hushed. Tengo listened to the 
silence, which seemed to offer several different meanings. It was not simply an 
absence of sound. The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself. 
For no reason, he looked at his watch. Raising his face, he glanced at the view outside 

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109
the window, and then looked at his watch again. Hardly any time had passed. Time 
always passed slowly on Sunday mornings. 
Ten minutes went by like this. Then suddenly, without warning, the door opened and 
a thinly built man entered the reception room with nervous footsteps. He was 
probably in his mid-sixties. He was no taller than five foot three, but his excellent 
posture prevented him from looking unimpressive. His back was as straight as if it 
had a steel rod in it, and he kept his chin pulled in smartly. His eyebrows were bushy, 
and he wore black, thick-framed glasses that seemed to have been made to frighten 
people. His movements suggested an exquisite machine with parts designed for 
compactness and efficiency. Tengo started to stand and introduce himself, but the 
man quickly signaled for him to remain seated. Tengo sat back down while the man 
rushed to lower himself into the facing easy chair, as if in a race with Tengo. For a 
while, the man simply stared at Tengo, saying nothing. His gaze was not exactly 
penetrating, but his eyes seemed to take in everything, narrowing and widening like a 
camera’s diaphragm when the photographer adjusts the aperture. 
The man wore a deep green sweater over a white shirt and dark gray woolen 
trousers. Each piece looked as if it had been worn daily for a good ten years or more. 
They conformed to his body well enough, but they were also a bit threadbare. This 
was not a person who paid a great deal of attention to his clothes. Nor, perhaps, did he 
have people close by who did it for him. The thinness of his hair emphasized the 
rather elongated shape of his head from front to back. He had sunken cheeks and a 
square jaw. A plump child’s tiny lips were the one feature of his that did not quite 
match the others. His razor had missed a few patches on his face—or possibly it was 
just the way the light struck him. The mountain sunlight pouring through the windows 
seemed different from the sunlight Tengo was used to seeing. 
“I’m sorry I made you come all this way,” the man said. He spoke with an 
unusually clear intonation, like someone long accustomed to public speaking—and 
probably about logical topics. “It’s not easy for me to leave this place, so all I could 
do was ask you to go to the trouble of coming here.” 
Tengo said it was no trouble at all. He told the man his name and apologized for 
not having a business card. 
“My name is Ebisuno,” the man said. “I don’t have a business card either.” 
“Mr. ‘Ebisuno’?” Tengo asked. 
“Everybody calls me ‘Professor.’ I don’t know why, but even my own daughter 
calls me ‘Professor.’ ” 
“What characters do you write your name with?” 
“It’s an unusual name. I hardly ever see anybody else with it. Eri, write the 
characters for him, will you?” 
Fuka-Eri nodded, took out a kind of notebook, and slowly, painstakingly, wrote the 
characters for Tengo on a blank sheet with a ballpoint pen. The “Ebisu” part was the 
character normally used for ancient Japan’s wild northern tribes. The “no” was just 
the usual character for “field.” The way Fuka-Eri wrote them, the two characters 
could have been scratched into a brick with a nail, though they did have a certain style 
of their own. 

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110
“In English, my name could be translated as ‘field of savages’—perfect for a 
cultural anthropologist, which is what I used to be.” The Professor’s lips formed 
something akin to a smile, but his eyes lost none of their attentiveness. “I cut my ties 
with the research life a very long time ago, though. Now, I’m doing something 
completely different. I’m living in a whole new ‘field of savages.’ ” 
To be sure, the Professor’s name was an unusual one, but Tengo found it familiar. 
He was fairly certain there had been a famous scholar named Ebisuno in the late 
sixties who had published a number of well-received books. He had no idea what the 
books were about, but the name, at least, remained in some remote corner of his 
memory. Somewhere along the way, though, he had stopped encountering it. 
“I think I’ve heard your name before,” Tengo said tentatively. 
“Perhaps,” the Professor said, looking off into the distance, as if speaking about 
someone not present. “In any case, it would have been a long time ago.” 
Tengo could sense the quiet breathing of Fuka-Eri seated next to him—slow, deep 
breathing. 
“Tengo Kawana,” the Professor said as if reading a name tag. 
“That’s right,” Tengo said. 
“You majored in mathematics in college, and now you teach math at a cram school 
in Yoyogi,” the Professor said. “But you also write fiction. That’s what Eri tells me. Is 
that about right?” 
“Yes, it is,” Tengo said. 
“You don’t look like a math teacher. You don’t look like a writer, either.” 
Tengo gave him a strained smile and said, “Somebody said exactly the same thing 
to me the other day. It’s probably my build.” 
“I didn’t mean it in a bad sense,” the Professor said, pressing back the bridge of his 
black-framed glasses. “There’s nothing wrong with not looking like something. It just 
means you don’t fit the stereotype yet.” 
“I’m honored to have you say that. I’m not a writer yet. I’m still just trying to write 
fiction.” 
“Trying.” 
“It’s still trial and error for me.” 
“I see,” the Professor said. Then, as if he had just noticed the chilliness of the 
room, he rubbed his hands together. “I’ve also heard that you’re going to be revising 
the novella that Eri wrote in the hopes that she can win a literary magazine’s new 
writers’ prize. You’re planning to sell her to the public as a writer. Is my 
interpretation correct?” 
“That is basically correct,” Tengo said. “An editor named Komatsu came up with 
the idea. I don’t know if the plan is going to work or not. Or whether it’s even ethical. 
My only role is to revise the style of the work,