After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

ordinary
kind of 
happiness—marry someone you love, happy ending.” 
“I wouldn’t mind that myself. But it won’t be so easy.” 
“Why not?” 
Aomame did not answer this. She had no simple explanation. 

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“If you ever feel like talking to someone about these personal matters, please talk 
to me,” the dowager said, withdrawing her hand from Aomame’s and toweling the 
sweat from her face. “About anything at all. I might have something I can do for 
you.” 
“Thanks very much,” Aomame said. 
“Some things can’t be solved just by going wild every now and then.” 
“You’re absolutely right.” 
“You are not doing anything that will destroy you?” the dowager said. “Nothing at 
all? You’re sure of that, are you?” 
“Yes, I’m sure,” Aomame said. 
She’s right. I’m not doing anything that is going to 
destroy me. Still, there is something quiet left behind. Like sediment in a bottle of 
wine
. 
Even now, Aomame still recalled the events surrounding the death of Tamaki Otsuka. 
It tore her apart to think that she could no longer see and talk to Tamaki. Tamaki was 
the first real friend she ever had. They could tell each other everything. Aomame had 
had no one like that before Tamaki, and no one since. Nor could anyone take her 
place. Had she never met Tamaki, Aomame would have led a far more miserable and 
gloomy life. 
She and Tamaki were the same age. They had been teammates in the softball club 
of their public high school. From middle school into high school, Aomame had been 
passionately devoted to the game of softball. She had joined reluctantly at first when 
begged to help fill out a shorthanded team, and her early efforts were halfhearted at 
best, but eventually softball became her reason for living. She clung to the game the 
way a person clings to a post when a storm threatens to blow him away. And though 
she had never realized it before, Aomame was a born athlete. She became a central 
member of both her middle and high school teams and helped them breeze through 
one tournament after another. This gave her something very close to self-confidence 
(but only close: it was not, strictly speaking, self-confidence). Her greatest joy in life 
was knowing that her importance to the team was by no means small and that, as 
narrow as that world might be, she had been granted a definite 
place
in it. Someone 
needed
her. 
Aomame was pitcher and cleanup batter—literally 
the
central player of the team, 
both on offense and defense. Tamaki Otsuka played second base, the linchpin of the 
team, and she also served as captain. Tamaki was small but had great reflexes and 
knew how to use her brain. She could read all the complications of a situation 
instantaneously. With each pitch, she knew toward which side to incline her center of 
gravity, and as soon as the batter connected with the ball, she could gauge the 
direction of the hit and move to cover the proper position. Not a lot of infielders could 
do that. Her powers of judgment had saved the team from many a tight spot. She was 
not a distance hitter like Aomame, but her batting was sharp and precise, and she was 
quick on her feet. She was also an outstanding leader. She brought the team together 
as a unit, planned strategy, gave everyone valuable advice, and fired them up on the 
field. Her coaching was tough, but she won the other players’ confidence, as a result 
of which the team grew stronger day by day. They went as far as the championship 

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game in the Tokyo regional playoffs and even made it to the national interscholastic 
tournament. Both Aomame and Tamaki were chosen to be on the Kanto area all-star 
team. 
Aomame and Tamaki recognized each other’s talents and—without either taking 
the initiative—naturally drew close until each had become the other’s best friend. 
They spent long hours together on team trips to away games. They told each other 
about their backgrounds, concealing nothing. When she was a fifth grader, Aomame 
had made up her mind to break with her parents and had gone to live with an uncle on 
her mother’s side. The uncle’s family understood her situation and welcomed her 
warmly as a member of the household, but it was, ultimately, not her family. She felt 
lonely and hungry for love. Unsure where she was to find a purpose or meaning to her 
life, she passed one formless day after another. Tamaki came from a wealthy 
household of some social standing, but her parents’ terrible relationship had turned 
the home into a wasteland. Her father almost never came home, and her mother often 
fell into states of mental confusion. She would suffer from terrible headaches, and 
was unable to leave her bed sometimes for days at a time. Tamaki and her younger 
brother were all but ignored. They often ate at neighborhood restaurants or fast-food 
places or made do with ready-made boxed lunches. Each girl, then, had her reasons 
for becoming obsessed with softball. 
Given all their problems, the two lonely girls had a mountain of things to tell each 
other. When they took a trip together one summer, they touched each other’s naked 
bodies in the hotel bed. It happened just that one time, spontaneously, and neither of 
them ever talked about it. But because it had happened, their relationship grew all the 
deeper and all the more conspiratorial. 
Aomame kept playing softball after her graduation from high school when she 
went on to a private college of physical education. Having won a national reputation 
as an outstanding softball player, she was recruited and given a special scholarship. In 
college, too, she was a key member of the team. While devoting much energy to 
softball, she was also interested in sports medicine and started studying it in earnest, 
along with martial arts. 
Tamaki entered the law program in a first-rank private university. She stopped 
playing softball upon graduating from high school. For an outstanding student like 
Tamaki, softball was merely a phase. She intended to take the bar exam and become a 
lawyer. Though their paths in life diverged, Aomame and Tamaki remained best 
friends. Aomame lived in a college dormitory with free room and board while Tamaki 
continued commuting from her family home. The place was as much of an emotional 
wasteland as ever, but at least it gave her economic freedom. The two would meet 
once a week to share a meal and catch up. They never ran out of things to talk about. 
Tamaki lost her virginity in the autumn of her first year in college. The man was 
one year older than Tamaki, a fellow member of the college tennis club. He invited 
her to his room after a club party, and there he forced her to have sex with him. 
Tamaki had liked this man, which was why she had accepted the invitation to his 
room, but the violence with which he forced her into having sex and his narcissistic, 
self-centered manner came as a terrible shock. She quit the tennis club and went into a 
period of depression. The experience left her with a profound feeling of 
powerlessness. Her appetite disappeared, and she lost fifteen pounds. All she had 

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wanted from the man was a degree of understanding and sympathy. If he had shown a 
trace of it and had taken the time to prepare her, the mere physical giving of herself to 
him would have been no great problem. She found it impossible to understand his 
actions. Why did he have to become so violent? It had been absolutely unnecessary! 
Aomame comforted Tamaki and advised her to find a way to punish him, but 
Tamaki could not agree. Her own carelessness had been a part of it, she said, and it 
was too late now to lodge any complaints. “I bear some responsibility for going to his 
room alone,” she said. “All I can do now is forget about it.” But it was painfully clear 
to Aomame how deeply her friend had been wounded by the incident. This was not 
about the mere loss of her virginity but rather the sanctity of an individual human 
being’s soul. No one had the right to invade such sacred precincts with muddy feet. 
And once it happened, that sense of powerlessness could only keep gnawing away at a 
person. 
Aomame decided to take it upon herself to punish the man. She got his address 
from Tamaki and went to his apartment carrying a softball bat in a plastic blueprint 
tube. Tamaki was away for the day in Kanazawa, attending a relative’s memorial 
service or some such thing, which was a perfect alibi. Aomame checked to be sure the 
man was not at home. She used a screwdriver and hammer to break the lock on his 
door. Then she wrapped a towel around the bat several times to dampen the noise and 
proceeded to smash everything in the apartment that was smashable—the television, 
the lamps, the clocks, the records, the toaster, the vases: she left nothing whole. She 
cut the telephone cord with scissors, cracked the spines of all the books and scattered 
their pages, spread the entire contents of a toothpaste tube and shaving cream canister 
on the rug, poured Worcestershire sauce on the bed, took notebooks from a drawer 
and ripped them to pieces, broke every pen and pencil in two, shattered every 
lightbulb, slashed all the curtains and cushions with a kitchen knife, took scissors to 
every shirt in the dresser, poured a bottle of ketchup into the underwear and sock 
drawers, pulled out the refrigerator fuse and threw it out a window, ripped the flapper 
out of the toilet tank and tore it apart, and crushed the bathtub’s showerhead. The 
destruction was utterly deliberate and complete. The room looked very much like the 
recent news photos she had seen of the streets of Beirut after the shelling. 
Tamaki was an intelligent girl (with grades in school that Aomame could never hope 
to match), and in softball she had always been on her toes. Whenever Aomame got 
herself into a difficult situation on the mound, Tamaki would run over to her, offer her 
a few quick words of advice, flash her a smile, pat her on the butt with her glove, and 
go back to her position in the infield. Her view of things was broad, her heart was 
warm, and she had a good sense of humor. She put a great deal of effort into her 
schoolwork and could speak with real eloquence. Had she continued with her studies, 
she would undoubtedly have made a fine lawyer. 
In the presence of men, however, Tamaki’s powers of judgment fell totally to 
pieces. Tamaki liked handsome men. She was a sucker for good looks. As Aomame 
saw it, this tendency of her friend’s ranked as a sickness. Tamaki could meet men of 
marvelous character or with superior talents who were eager to woo her, but if their 
looks did not meet her standards, she was utterly unmoved. For some reason, the ones 

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who aroused her interest were always sweet-faced men with nothing inside. And 
when it came to men, she would stubbornly resist anything Aomame might have to 
say. Tamaki was always ready to accept—and even respect—Aomame’s opinions on 
other matters, but if Aomame criticized her choice of boyfriend, Tamaki simply 
refused to listen. Aomame eventually gave up trying to advise her. She didn’t want to 
quarrel with Tamaki and destroy their friendship. Ultimately, it was Tamaki’s life. All 
Aomame could do was let her live it. Tamaki became involved with many men during 
her college years, and each one led to trouble. They would always betray her, wound 
her, and abandon her, leaving Tamaki each time in a state close to madness. Twice 
she resorted to abortions. Where relations with the opposite sex were concerned, 
Tamaki was truly a born victim. 
Aomame never had a steady boyfriend. She was asked out on dates now and then, 
and she thought that a few of the men were not at all bad, but she never let herself 
become deeply involved. 
Tamaki asked her, “Are you going to stay a virgin the rest of your life?” 
“I’m too busy for that,” Aomame would say. “I can barely keep my life going day 
to day. I don’t have time to be fooling around with a boyfriend.” 
After graduation, Tamaki stayed on in graduate school to prepare for the bar exam. 
Aomame went to work for a company that made sports drinks and health food, and 
she played for the company’s softball team. Tamaki continued to commute from 
home, while Aomame went to live in the company dorm in Yoyogi Hachiman. As in 
their student days, they would meet for a meal on weekends and talk. 
When she was twenty-four, Tamaki married a man two years her senior. As soon 
as they became engaged, she left graduate school and gave up on continuing her legal 
studies. He insisted that she do so. Aomame met Tamaki’s fiancé only once. He came 
from a wealthy family, and, just as she had suspected, his features were handsome but 
utterly lacking in depth. His hobby was sailing. He was a smooth talker and clever in 
his own way, but there was no substance to his personality, and his words carried no 
weight. He was, in other words, a typical Tamaki-type boyfriend. But there was more 
about him, something ominous, that Aomame sensed. She disliked him from the start. 
And he probably didn’t like her much, either. 
“This marriage will never work,” Aomame said to Tamaki. She hated to offer 
unwanted advice again, but this was marriage, not playing house. As Tamaki’s best 
and oldest friend, Aomame could not keep silent. This led to their first violent 
argument. Aomame’s opposition to her marriage made Tamaki hysterical, and she 
screamed harsh words at Aomame, among them words that Aomame least wanted to 
hear. Aomame did not attend the wedding. 
The two of them made up before long. As soon as she came back from her 
honeymoon, Tamaki showed up at Aomame’s without warning and apologized for her 
behavior. “I want you to forget everything I said that time,” she pleaded. “I wasn’t 
myself. I was thinking about you all during my honeymoon.” Aomame told her not to 
worry, that she had already forgotten everything. They held each other close. Soon 
they were joking and laughing. 
But still, after the wedding, there was a sudden decline in the number of occasions 
when Aomame and Tamaki could meet face-to-face. They exchanged frequent letters 
and talked on the telephone, but Tamaki seemed to find it difficult to arrange times 

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when the two of them could get together. Her excuse was that she had so much to do 
at home. “Being a full-time housewife is