After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 18 
Tengo 
NO LONGER ANY PLACE FOR A BIG BROTHER 
Komatsu phoned after the press conference to say that everything had gone well. 
“A brilliant job,” he said with unusual excitement. “I never imagined she’d carry it 
off so flawlessly. The repartee was downright witty. She made a great impression on 
everybody.” 
Tengo was not at all surprised to hear Komatsu’s report. Without any strong basis 
for it, he had not been especially worried about the press conference. He had assumed 
she would at least handle herself well. But “made a great impression”? Somehow, that 
didn’t fit with the Fuka-Eri he knew. 
“So none of our dirty laundry came out, I suppose?” Tengo asked to make sure. 
“No, we kept it short and deflected any awkward questions. Though in fact, there 
weren’t any tough questions to speak of. I mean, not even newspaper reporters want 
to look like bad guys grilling a sweet, lovely, seventeen-year-old girl. Of course, I 
should add ‘for the time being.’ No telling how it’ll go in the future. In this world, the 
wind can change direction before you know it.” 
Tengo pictured Komatsu standing on a high cliff with a grim look on his face, 
licking his finger to test the wind direction. 
“In any case, your practice session did the trick, Tengo. Thanks for doing such a 
good job. Tomorrow’s evening papers will report on the award and the press 
conference.” 
“What was Fuka-Eri wearing?” 
“What was she wearing? Just ordinary clothes. A tight sweater and jeans.” 
“A sweater that showed off her boobs?” 
“Yes, now that you mention it. Nice shape. They looked brand new, fresh from the 
oven,” Komatsu said. “You know, Tengo, she’s going to be a huge hit: girl genius 
writer. Good looks, maybe talks a little funny, but 
smart
. She’s got that air about her: 
you know she’s not an ordinary person. I’ve been present at a lot of writers’ debuts, 
but she’s special. And when I say somebody’s special, they’re really special. The 
magazine carrying 
Air Chrysalis
is going to be in the bookstores in another week, and 
I’ll bet you anything—my left hand and right leg—it’ll be sold out in three days.” 
Tengo thanked Komatsu for the news and ended the call with some sense of relief. 
They had cleared the first hurdle, at least. How many more hurdles were waiting for 
them, though, he had no idea. 
The next evening’s newspapers carried reports of the press conference. Tengo 
bought four of them at the station after work at the cram school and read them at 

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home. They all said pretty much the same thing. None of the articles was especially 
long, but compared with the usual perfunctory five-line report, the treatment given to 
the event was unprecedented. As Komatsu had predicted, the media leapt on the news 
that a seventeen-year-old girl had won the prize. All reported that the four-person 
screening committee had chosen the work unanimously after only fifteen minutes of 
deliberation. That in itself was unusual. For four egotistical writers to gather in a 
room and be in perfect agreement was simply unheard of. The work was already 
causing a stir in the industry. A small press conference was held in the same room of 
the hotel where the award ceremony had taken place, the newspapers reported, and 
the prizewinner had responded to reporters’ questions “clearly and cheerfully.” 
In answer to the question “Do you plan to keep writing fiction?” she had replied, 
“Fiction is simply one form for expressing one’s thoughts. It just so happens that the 
form I employed this time was fiction, but I can’t say what form I will use next time.” 
Tengo found it impossible to believe that Fuka-Eri had actually spoken in such long 
continuous sentences. The reporters might have strung her fragments together, filled 
in the gaps, and made whole sentences out of them. But then again, she might well 
have spoken in complete sentences like this. He couldn’t say anything about Fuka-Eri 
with absolute certainty. 
When asked to name her favorite work of fiction, Fuka-Eri of course mentioned