After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

love
fantasies! Everybody needs 
some
kind of 
fantasy to go on living, don’t you think? You want me to wear a white slip next time, 
too?” 
Tengo shook his head. “No, thanks, once was enough.” 
Tengo often wondered if the young man sucking on his mother’s breasts in his vision 
might be his biological father. This was because Tengo in no way resembled the man 
who was supposed to be his father—the stellar NHK collections agent. Tengo was a 
tall, strapping man with a broad forehead, narrow nose, and tightly balled ears. His 
father was short and squat and utterly unimpressive. He had a narrow forehead, flat 
nose, and pointed ears like a horse’s. Virtually every facial feature of his contrasted 
with Tengo’s. Where Tengo had a generally relaxed and generous look, his father 
appeared nervous and tightfisted. Comparing the two of them, people often openly 
remarked that they did not look like father and son. 
Still, it was not their different facial features that made it difficult for Tengo to 
identify with his father; rather, it was their psychological makeup and tendencies. His 
father showed no sign at all of what might be called intellectual curiosity. True, his 
father had not had a decent education. Having been born in poverty, he had not had 
the opportunity to establish in himself an orderly intellectual system. Tengo felt a 
degree of pity regarding his father’s circumstances. But still, a basic desire to obtain 
knowledge at a universal level—which Tengo assumed to be a more or less natural 
urge in people—was lacking in the man. There was a certain practical wisdom at 
work in him that enabled him to survive, but Tengo could discover no hint of a 

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willingness in his father to raise himself up, to deepen himself, to view a wider, larger 
world. 
But Tengo’s father never seemed to suffer discomfort from the narrowness and the 
stagnant air of his cramped little world. Tengo never once saw him pick up a book at 
home. They never had newspapers (watching the regular NHK news broadcasts was 
enough, he would say). He had absolutely no interest in music or movies, and he 
never took a trip. The only thing that seemed to interest him was his assigned 
collection route. He would make a map of the area, mark it with colored pens, and 
examine it whenever he had a spare moment, the way a biologist classifies 
chromosomes. 
By contrast, Tengo was regarded as a math prodigy from early childhood. His 
grades in arithmetic were always outstanding. He could solve high school math 
problems by the time he was in the third grade. He won high marks in the other 
sciences as well without any apparent effort. And whenever 
he
had a spare moment, 
he would devour books. Hugely curious about everything, he would absorb 
knowledge from a broad range of fields with all the efficiency of a power shovel 
scooping earth. Whenever he looked at his father, he found it inconceivable that half 
of the genes that made his existence possible could come from this narrow, 
uneducated man. 
My real father must be somewhere else
. This was the conclusion that Tengo 
reached in boyhood. Like the unfortunate children in a Dickens novel, Tengo must 
have been led by strange circumstances to be raised by this man. Such a possibility 
was both a nightmare and a great hope. He became obsessed with Dickens after 
reading 
Oliver Twist
, plowing through every Dickens volume in the library. As he 
traveled through the world of the stories, he steeped himself in reimagined versions of 
his own life. The reimaginings (or obsessive fantasies) in his head grew ever longer 
and more complex. They followed a single pattern, but with infinite variations. In all 
of them, Tengo would tell himself that this was not the place where he belonged. He 
had been mistakenly locked in a cage. Someday his real parents, guided by sheer good 
fortune, would find him. They would rescue him from this cramped and ugly cage and 
bring him back where he belonged. Then he would have the most beautiful, peaceful, 
and free Sundays imaginable. 
Tengo’s father exulted over the boy’s outstanding schoolwork. He prided himself 
on Tengo’s excellent grades, and boasted of them to people in the neighborhood. At 
the same time, however, he showed a certain displeasure regarding Tengo’s 
brightness and talent. Often when Tengo was at his desk, studying, his father would 
interrupt him, seemingly on purpose. He would order the boy to do chores or nag 
Tengo about his supposedly offensive behavior. The content of his father’s nagging 
was always the same: he was running himself ragged every day, covering huge 
distances and sometimes enduring people’s curses as a collections agent, while Tengo 
did nothing but take it easy all the time, living in comfort. “They had me working my 
tail off around the house when I was your age, and my father and older brother would 
beat me black and blue for anything at all. They never gave me enough food, and 
treated me like an animal. I don’t want you thinking you’re so special just because 
you got a few good grades.” His father would go on like this endlessly. 

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