After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

A freshly made ear and a 
freshly made vagina look very much alike
, Tengo thought. Both appeared to be turned 
outward, trying to listen closely to something—something like a distant bell. 
I was sleeping
, Tengo realized. He had fallen asleep still erect. And even now he 
was firmly erect. Had the erection continued the whole time he was sleeping? Or was 
this a new erection, following the relaxation of the first (like Prime Minister So-and-
So’s Second Cabinet)? 
How long was I sleeping? But what’s the difference? I’m still 
erect now, and it shows no sign of subsiding. Neither Sonny and Cher nor three-digit 
multiplication nor complex mathematics had managed to bring it down
. 

---

420
“I don’t mind,” Fuka-Eri said. She had her legs spread and was pressing her freshly 
made vagina against his belly. He could detect no hint of embarrassment on her part. 
“Getting hard is not a bad thing,” she said. 
“I can’t move my body,” he said. It was true. He was trying to raise himself, but he 
couldn’t move a finger. He could 
feel
his body—feel the weight of Fuka-Eri’s body 
on top of his—feel the hardness of his erection—but his body was as heavy and stiff 
as if it had been fastened down by something. 
“You have no 
need
to move it,” Fuka-Eri said. 
“I 
do
have a 
need
to move it. It’s 
my
body,” Tengo said. 
Fuka-Eri said nothing in response to that. 
Tengo could not even be sure whether what he was saying was vibrating in the air 
as vocal sounds. He had no clear sense that the muscles around his mouth were 
moving and forming the words he tried to speak. The things he wanted to say were 
more or less getting through to Fuka-Eri, it seemed, but their communication was as 
uncertain as a long-distance phone call with a bad connection. She, at least, could get 
by without hearing what she had no need to hear. But this was not possible for Tengo. 
“Don’t worry,” Fuka-Eri said, moving her body lower down on his. The meaning 
of her movement was clear. Her eyes had taken on a certain gleam, the hue of which 
he had never seen before. 
It seemed inconceivable that his adult penis could penetrate her small, newly made 
vagina. It was too big and too hard. The pain should have been enormous. Before he 
knew it, though, every bit of him was inside her. There had been no resistance 
whatever. The look on her face remained totally unchanged as she brought him inside. 
Her breathing became slightly agitated, and the rhythm with which her breasts rose 
and fell changed subtly for five or six seconds, but that was all. Everything else 
seemed like a normal, natural part of everyday life. 
Having brought Tengo deep inside her, Fuka-Eri remained utterly still, as did 
Tengo, feeling himself deep inside of her. He remained incapable of moving his body, 
and she, eyes closed, perched on top of him like a lightning rod, stopped moving. He 
could see that her mouth was slightly open and her lips were making delicate, rippling 
movements as if groping in space to form some kind of words. Aside from this, she 
exhibited no movement at all. She seemed to be holding that posture as she waited for 
something to happen. 
A deep sense of powerlessness came over Tengo. Even though something was 
about to happen, he had no idea what that something might be, and had no way of 
controlling it through his own will. His body felt nothing. He could not move. But his 
penis had feeling—or, rather than feeling, it had what might have been closer to a 
concept. In any case, 
it
was telling him that he was inside Fuka-Eri and that he had the 
consummate erection. Shouldn’t he be wearing a condom? He began to worry. It 
could be a real problem if she got pregnant. His older girlfriend was extremely strict 
about birth control, and she had trained Tengo to be just as strict. 
He tried as hard as he could to think of other things, but in fact he was unable to 
think about anything at all. He was in chaos. Inside that chaos, time seemed to have 
come to a stop. But time never stopped. That was a theoretical impossibility. Perhaps 
it had simply lost its uniformity. Taking the long view, time moved ahead at a fixed 
pace. There could be no mistake about that. But if you considered any one particular 

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421
part of time, it could cease to be uniform. In these momentary periods of slackness, 
such things as order and probability lost all value. 
“Tengo,” Fuka-Eri said. She had never called him by his first name before. She 
said it again: “Tengo” as if practicing the pronunciation of a foreign word.