After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

CHAPTER 20 
Tengo 
THE POOR GILYAKS 
Tengo couldn’t sleep. Fuka-Eri was in his bed, wearing his pajamas, sound asleep. 
Tengo had made simple preparations for sleeping on the couch (no great imposition, 
since he often napped there), but he had felt not the slightest bit sleepy when he lay 
down, so he was writing his long novel at the kitchen table. The word processor was 
in the bedroom; he was using a ballpoint pen on a writing pad. This, too, was no great 
imposition. The word processor was undeniably more convenient for writing speed 
and for saving documents, but he loved the classic act of writing characters by hand 
on paper. 
Writing fiction at night was rather rare for Tengo. He enjoyed working when it was 
light outside and people were walking around. Sometimes, when he was writing at 
night while everything was hushed and wrapped in darkness, the style he produced 
would be a little too heavy, and he would have to rewrite the whole passage in the 
light of day. Rather than go to that trouble, it was better to write in daylight from the 
outset. 
Writing at night for the first time in ages, though, using a ballpoint pen and paper, 
Tengo found his mind working smoothly. His imagination stretched its limbs and the 
story flowed freely. One idea would link naturally with the next almost without 
interruption, the tip of the pen raising a persistent scrape against the white paper. 
Whenever his hand tired, he would set the pen down and move the fingers of his right 
hand in the air, like a pianist doing imaginary scales. The hands of the clock were 
nearing half past one. He heard strangely few sounds from the outside, as though 
extraneous noises were being soaked up by the clouds covering the city’s sky like a 
thick cotton layer. 
He picked up his pen again and was still arranging words on paper when suddenly 
he remembered: tomorrow was the day his older girlfriend would be coming. She 
always showed up around eleven o’clock on Friday mornings. He would have to get 
rid of Fuka-Eri before then. Thank goodness she wore no perfume or cologne! His 
girlfriend would be sure to notice right away if the bed had someone else’s smell. 
Tengo knew how observant and jealous she could be. It was fine for her to have sex 
with her husband now and then, but she became seriously angry if Tengo went out 
with another woman. 
“Married sex is something else,” she explained. “It’s charged to a separate 
account.” 
“A separate account?” 

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“Under a whole different heading.” 
“You mean you use a different part of your feelings?” 
“That’s it. Even if I use the same body parts, I make a distinction in the feelings I 
use. So it really doesn’t matter. I have the ability to do that as a mature woman. But 
you’re not allowed to sleep with other girls and stuff.” 
“I’m not doing that!” Tengo said. 
“Even if you’re not having sex with another girl, I would feel slighted just to think 
such a possibility exists.” 
“Just to think such a possibility exists?” Tengo asked, amazed. 
“You don’t understand a woman’s feelings, do you? And you call yourself a 
novelist!” 
“This seems awfully unfair to me.” 
“It may be unfair. But I’ll make it up to you,” she said. And she did. 
Tengo was satisfied with this relationship with his older girlfriend. She was no 
beauty, at least in the general sense. Her facial features were, if anything, rather 
unusual. Some might even find her ugly. But Tengo had liked her looks from the start. 
And as a sexual partner, she was beyond reproach. Her demands on him were few: to 
meet her once a week for three or four hours, to participate in attentive sex—twice, if 
possible—and to keep away from other women. Basically, that was all she asked of 
him. Home and family were very important to her, and she had no intention of 
destroying them for Tengo. She simply did not have a satisfying sex life with her 
husband. Her interests and Tengo’s were a perfect fit. 
Tengo had no particular desire for other women. What he wanted most of all was 
uninterrupted free time. If he could have sex on a regular basis, he had nothing more 
to ask of a woman. He did not welcome the unavoidable responsibility that came with 
dating a woman his own age, falling in love, and having a sexual relationship. The 
psychological stages through which one had to pass, the hints regarding various 
possibilities, the unavoidable collisions of expectations: Tengo hoped to get by 
without taking on such burdens. 
The concept of duty always made Tengo cringe. He had lived his life thus far 
skillfully avoiding any position that entailed responsibility, and to do so, he was 
prepared to endure most forms of deprivation. 
In order to flee from responsibility, Tengo learned early on in life to make himself 
inconspicuous. He worked hard to negate his presence by publicly displaying very 
little of his true abilities, by keeping his opinions to himself, and by avoiding 
situations that put him at the center of attention. He had to survive on his own, 
without depending on others, from the time he was a child. But children have no real 
power. And so, whenever a strong wind began to blow, he would have to take shelter 
and grab onto something to prevent himself from being blown away. It was necessary 
for him to keep such contrivances in mind at all times, like the orphans in Dickens’s 
novels. 
But while it could be said that things had gone well for Tengo so far, several tears 
had begun to appear in the fabric of his tranquil life since he first laid his hands on the 
manuscript of Fuka-Eri’s