After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Air Chrysalis
even if it could put Eri in some danger.” 
“As I said before, that is because my desire comes from a place that reason and 
common sense can’t reach. Of course I would like to protect Eri as much as possible, 
but I can’t promise that she would never be harmed by this. That would be a lie.” 
“I see,” the Professor said. Then he cleared his throat as if to mark a turning point 
in the discussion. “Well, you seem to be an honest person, at least.” 
“I’m trying to be as straightforward with you as I can.” 
The Professor stared at the hands resting on his knees as if he had never seen them 
before. First he stared at the backs of his hands, and then he flipped them over and 
stared at his palms. Then he raised his face and said, “So, does this editor, this Mr. 
Komatsu, think that his plan is really going to work?” 
“Komatsu’s view is that there are always two sides to everything,” Tengo said. “A 
good side and a not-so-bad side.” 
The Professor smiled. “A most unusual view. Is this Mr. Komatsu an optimist, or is 
he self-confident?” 
“Neither,” Tengo said. “He’s just cynical.” 
The Professor shook his head lightly. “When he gets cynical, he becomes an 
optimist. Or he becomes self-confident. Is that it?” 
“He might have such tendencies.” 
“A hard man to deal with, it seems.” 
“He is a pretty hard man to deal with,” Tengo said. “But he’s no fool.” 
The Professor let out a long, slow breath. Then he turned to Fuka-Eri. “How about 
it, Eri? What do you think of this plan?” 
Fuka-Eri stared at an anonymous point in space for a while. Then she said, “It’s 
okay.” 
“In other words, you don’t mind letting Mr. Kawana here rewrite 
Air Chrysalis
?” 
“I don’t mind,” she said. 
“It might cause you a lot of trouble.” 
Fuka-Eri said nothing in response to this. All she did was tightly grip the collar of 
her cardigan together at the neck, but the gesture was a direct expression of her firm 
resolve. 
“She’s probably right,” the Professor said with a touch of resignation. 
Tengo stared at her little hands, which were balled into fists. 
“There is one other problem, though,” the Professor said to Tengo. “You and this 
Mr. Komatsu plan to publish 
Air Chrysalis
and present Eri to the public as a novelist, 
but she’s dyslexic. Did you know that?” 
“I got the general idea on the train this morning.” 
“She was probably born that way. In school, they think she suffers from a kind of 
retardation, but she’s actually quite smart—even wise, in a very profound way. Still, 
her dyslexia can’t help your plan, to put it mildly.” 
“How many people know about this?” 
“Aside from Eri herself, three,” the Professor said. “There’s me, of course, my 
daughter Azami, and you. No one else knows.” 
“You mean to say her teachers don’t know?” 

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113
“No, they don’t. It’s a little school in the countryside. They’ve probably never even 
heard of dyslexia. And besides, she only went to school for a short time.” 
“Then we might be able to hide it.” 
The Professor looked at Tengo for a while, as if judging the value of his face. 
“Eri seems to trust you,” he said a moment later. “I don’t know why, but she does. 
And I—” 
Tengo waited for him to continue. 
“And I trust Eri. So if she says it’s all right to let you rewrite her novella, all I can 
do is give my approval. On the other hand, if you really do plan to go ahead with this 
scheme, there are a few things you should know about Eri.” The Professor swept his 
hand lightly across his right knee several times as if he had found a tiny piece of 
thread there. “What her childhood was like, for example, and where she spent it, and 
how I became responsible for raising her. This could take a while to tell.” 
“I’m listening,” Tengo said. 
Next to him on the sofa, Fuka-Eri sat up straight, still holding the collar of her 
cardigan closed at the throat. 
“All right, then,” the Professor said. “The story goes back to the sixties. Eri’s father 
and I were close friends for a long time. I was ten years older, but we both taught in 
the same department at the same university. Our personalities and worldviews were 
very different, but for some reason we got along. Both of us married late, and we both 
had daughters shortly after we got married. We lived in the same faculty apartment 
building, and our families were always together. Professionally, too, we were doing 
very well. People were starting to notice us as ‘rising stars of academe.’ We often 
appeared in the media. It was a tremendously exciting time for us. 
“Toward the end of the sixties, though, things started to change for the worse. The 
second renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was coming in 1970, and the 
student movement was opposed to it. They blockaded the university campuses, fought 
with the riot police, had bloody factional disputes, and as a result, people died. All of 
this was more than I wanted to deal with, and I decided to leave the university. I had 
never been that temperamentally suited to the academic life, but once these protests 
and riots began, I became fed up with it. Establishment, antiestablishment: I didn’t 
care. Ultimately, it was just a clash of organizations, and I simply didn’t trust any 
kind of organization, big or small. You, I would guess, were not yet old enough to be 
in the university in those days.” 
“No, the commotion had all died down by the time I started.” 
“The party was over, you mean.” 
“Pretty much.” 
The Professor raised his hands for a moment and then lowered them to his knees 
again. “So I quit the university, and two years later Eri’s father left. At the time, he 
was a great believer in Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideology and supported China’s 
Cultural Revolution. We heard almost nothing in those days about how terrible and 
inhumane the Cultural Revolution could be. It even became trendy with some 
intellectuals to hold up Mao’s