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  Young Tengo heard this story from his father so many times that he grew sick of it. His father never sang him lullabies, never read storybooks to him at bedtime. Instead, he would tell the boy stories of his actual experiences—over and over, from his childhood in a poor farm family in Tohoku, through the ultimate (and inevitable) happy ending of his good fortune as a fully fledged NHK fee collector.

  His father was a good storyteller. There was no way for Tengo to ascertain how much was based on fact, but the stories were at least coherent and consistent. They were not exactly pregnant with deep meaning, but the details were lively and his father’s narrative was strongly colored. There were funny stories, touching stories, and violent stories. There were astounding, preposterous stories and stories that Tengo had trouble following no matter how many times he heard them. If a life was to be measured by the color and variety of its episodes, his father’s life could be said to have been rich in its own way, perhaps.

  But when they touched on the period after he became a full-fledged NHK employee, his father’s stories suddenly lost all color and reality. They lacked detail and wholeness, as if he thought of them as mere sequels not worth telling. He met a woman, married her, and had a child—that is, Tengo. A few months after Tengo was born, his mother fell ill and died. His father raised him alone after that, never remarrying, just working hard for NHK. The End.

  How he happened to meet Tengo’s mother and marry her, what kind of woman she was, what had caused her death (could it have had something to do with Tengo’s birth?), whether her death had been a relatively easy one or she had suffered greatly—his father told him almost nothing about such matters. If Tengo tried asking, his father would just evade the question and, finally, never answer. Most of the time, such questions put him in a foul mood, and he would clam up. Not a single photo of Tengo’s mother had survived, and not a single wedding photo. “We couldn’t afford a ceremony,” he explained, “and I didn’t have a camera.”

  But Tengo fundamentally disbelieved his father’s story. His father was hiding the facts, remaking the story. His mother had not died some months after he was born. In his only memory of her, she was still alive when he was one and a half. And near where he was sleeping, she was in the arms of a man other than his father.

  His mother took off her blouse, dropped the straps of her slip, and let a man not his father suck on her breasts. Tengo slept next to them, his breathing audible. But at the same time, Tengo was not asleep. He was watching his mother.

  This was Tengo’s souvenir photograph of his mother. The ten-second scene was burned into his brain with perfect clarity. It was the only concrete information he had about his mother, the one tenuous connection his mind could make with her. They were linked by a hypothetical umbilical cord. His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo’s brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.

  It was a clear, pleasant Sunday morning. There was a chill in the mid-April breeze, though, a reminder of how easily the seasons can turn backward. Over a thin, black crew-neck sweater, Tengo wore a herringbone jacket that he had owned since his college days. He also had on beige chino pants and brown Hush Puppies. The shoes were rather new. This was as close as he could come to dapper attire.

  When Tengo reached the front end of the outward-bound Chuo Line platform in Shinjuku Station, Fuka-Eri was already there, sitting alone on a bench, utterly still, staring into space with narrowed eyes. She wore a cotton print dress that had to be meant for midsummer. Over the dress she wore a heavy, grass-green winter cardigan, and on her bare feet she wore faded gray sneakers—a somewhat odd combination for the season. The dress was too thin, the cardigan too thick. On her, though, the outfit did not seem especially out of place. Perhaps she was expressing her own special worldview by this mismatch. It was not entirely out of the question. But probably she had just chosen her clothing at random without much thought.

  She was not reading a newspaper, she was not reading a book, she was not listening to a Walkman, she was just sitting still, her big, black eyes staring straight ahead. She could have been staring at something or looking at nothing at all. She could have been thinking about something or not thinking at all. From a distance, she looked like a realistic sculpture made of some special material.

  “Did I keep you waiting?” Tengo asked.

  Fuka-Eri glanced at him and shook her head a centimeter or two from side to side. Her black eyes had a fresh, silken luster but, as before, no perceptible expression. She looked as though she did not want to speak with anyone for the moment, so Tengo gave up on any attempt to keep up a conversation and sat beside her on the bench, saying nothing.

  When the train came, Fuka-Eri stood up, and the two of them boarded together. There were few passengers on the weekend rapid-service train, which went all the way out to the mountains of Takao. Tengo and Fuka-Eri sat next to each other, silently watching the cityscape pass the windows on the other side. Fuka-Eri said nothing, as usual, so Tengo kept silent as well. She tugged the collar of her cardigan closed as if preparing for a wave of bitter cold to come, looking straight ahead with her lips drawn into a perfectly straight line.

  Tengo took out a small paperback he had brought along and started to read, but after some hesitation he stopped reading. Returning the book to his pocket, he folded his hands on his knees and stared straight ahead, adopting Fuka-Eri’s pose as if to keep her company. He considered using the time to think, but he couldn’t think of anything to think about. Because he had been concentrating on the rewrite of Air Chrysalis, it seemed, his mind refused to form any coherent thoughts. At the core of his brain was a mass of tangled threads.

  Tengo watched the scenery streaming past the window and listened to the monotonous sound of the rails. The Chuo Line stretched on and on straight westward, as if following a line drawn on the map with a ruler. In fact, “as if” was probably unnecessary: they must have done just that when they laid it out a hundred years earlier. In this part of the Kanto Plain there was not a single topographical obstruction worth mentioning, which led to the building of a line without a perceivable curve, rise, or fall, and no bridges or tunnels. All they needed back then was a ruler, and all the trains did now was run in a perfectly straight line to the mountains out west.

  At some point, Tengo fell asleep. When the swaying of the train woke him, they were slowing down for the stop in Ogikubo Station, no more than ten minutes out of Shinjuku—a short nap. Fuka-Eri was sitting in the same position, staring straight ahead. Tengo had no idea what she was, in fact, looking at. Judging from her air of concentration, she had no intention of getting off the train for some time yet.

  “What kind of books do you read?” Tengo asked Fuka-Eri when they had gone another ten minutes and were past Mitaka. He raised the question not only out of sheer boredom but because he had been meaning to ask her about her reading habits.

  Fuka-Eri glanced at him and faced forward again. “I don’t read books,” she answered simply.

  “At all?”

  She gave him a quick nod.

  “Are you just not interested in reading books?” he asked.

  “It takes time,” she said.

  “You don’t read books because it takes time?” he asked, not quite sure he was understanding her properly.

  Fuka-Eri kept facing forward and offered no reply. Her posture seemed to convey the message that she had no intention of negating his suggestion.

  Generally speaking, of course, it does take some time to read a book. It’s different from watching television, say, or reading manga. The reading of a book is an activity that involves some continuity; it is carried out over a relatively long time frame. But in Fuka-Eri’s statement that “it takes time,” there seemed
to be included a nuance somewhat different from such generalities.

  “When you say, ‘It takes time,’ do you mean … it takes a lot of time?” Tengo asked.

  “A lot,” Fuka-Eri declared.

  “A lot longer than most people?”

  Fuka-Eri gave him a sharp nod.

  “That must be a problem in school, too. I’m sure you have to read a lot of books for your classes.”

  “I just fake it,” she said coolly.

  Somewhere in his head, Tengo heard an ominous knock. He wished he could ignore it, but that was out of the question. He had to know the truth.

  “Could what you’re talking about be what they call ‘dyslexia’?” he asked.

  “Dyslexia.”

  “A learning disability. It means you have trouble making out characters on a page.”

  “They have mentioned that. Dys—”

  “Who mentioned that?”

  She gave a little shrug.

  “In other words,” Tengo went on, searching for the right way to say it, “is this something you’ve had since you were little?”

  Fuka-Eri nodded.

  “So that explains why you’ve hardly read any novels.”

  “By myself,” she said.

  This also explained why her writing was free of the influence of any established authors. It made perfect sense.

  “You didn’t read them ‘by yourself,’ ” Tengo said.

  “Somebody read them to me.”

  “Your father, say, or your mother read books aloud to you?”

  Fuka-Eri did not reply to this.

  “Maybe you can’t read, but you can write just fine, I would think,” Tengo asked with growing apprehension.

  Fuka-Eri shook her head. “Writing takes time too.”

  “A lot of time?”

  Fuka-Eri gave another small shrug. This meant yes.

  Tengo shifted his position on the train seat. “Which means, perhaps, that you didn’t write the text of Air Chrysalis by yourself.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Tengo let a few seconds go by. A few heavy seconds. “So who did write it?”

  “Azami,” she said.

  “Who’s Azami?”

  “Two years younger.”

  There was another short gap. “This other girl wrote Air Chrysalis for you.”

  Fuka-Eri nodded as though this were an absolutely normal thing.

  Tengo set the gears of his mind spinning. “In other words, you dictated the story, and Azami wrote it down. Right?”

  “Typed it and printed it,” Fuka-Eri said.

  Tengo bit his lip and tried to put in order the few facts that he had been offered so far. Once he had done the rearranging, he said, “In other words, Azami printed the manuscript and sent it in to the magazine as an entry in the new writer’s contest, probably without telling you what she was doing. And she’s the one who gave it the title Air Chrysalis.”

  Fuka-Eri cocked her head to one side in a way that signaled neither a clear yes nor a clear no. But she did not contradict him. This probably meant that he generally had the right idea.

  “This Azami—is she a friend of yours?”

  “Lives with me.”

  “She’s your younger sister?”

  Fuka-Eri shook her head. “Professor’s daughter.”

  “The Professor,” Tengo said. “Are you saying this Professor also lives with you?”

  Fuka-Eri nodded. Why bother to ask something so obvious? she seemed to be saying.

  “So the person I’m going to meet now must be this ‘Professor,’ right?”

  Fuka-Eri turned toward Tengo and looked at him for a moment as if observing the flow of a distant cloud or considering how best to deal with a slow-learning dog. Then she nodded.

  “We are going to meet the Professor,” she said in a voice lacking expression.

  This brought their conversation to a tentative end. Again Tengo and Fuka-Eri stopped talking and, side by side, watched the cityscape stream past the train window opposite them. Featureless houses without end stretched across the flat, featureless earth, thrusting numberless TV antennas skyward like so many insects. Had the people living in those houses paid their NHK subscription fees? Tengo often found himself wondering about TV and radio reception fees on Sundays. He didn’t want to think about them, but he had no choice.

  Today, on this wonderfully clear mid-April morning, a number of less-than-pleasant facts had come to light. First of all, Fuka-Eri had not written Air Chrysalis herself. If he was to take what she said at face value (and for now he had no reason to think that he should not), Fuka-Eri had merely dictated the story and another girl had written it down. In terms of its production process, it was no different from some of the greatest landmarks in Japanese literary history—the Kojiki, with its legendary history of the ruling dynasty, for example, or the colorful narratives of the warring samurai clans of the twelfth century, The Tale of the Heike. This fact served to lighten somewhat the guilt he felt about modifying the text of Air Chrysalis, but at the same time it made the situation as a whole significantly more complicated.

  In addition, Fuka-Eri had a bad case of dyslexia and couldn’t even read a book in the normal way. Tengo mentally reviewed his knowledge of dyslexia. He had attended lectures on the disorder when he was taking teacher training courses in college. A person with dyslexia could, in principle, both read and write. The problem had nothing to do with intelligence. Reading simply took time. The person might have no trouble with a short selection, but the longer the passage, the more difficulty the person’s information processing faculty encountered, until it could no longer keep up. The link between a character and what it stood for was lost. These were the general symptoms of dyslexia. The causes were still not fully understood, but it was not surprising for there to be one or two dyslexic children in any classroom. Einstein had suffered from dyslexia, as had Thomas Edison and Charles Mingus.

  Tengo did not know whether people with dyslexia generally experienced the same difficulties in writing as in reading, but it seemed to be the case with Fuka-Eri. One was just as difficult for her as the other.

  What would Komatsu say when he found out about this? Tengo caught himself sighing. This seventeen-year-old girl was congenitally dyslexic and could neither read books nor write extended passages. Even when she engaged in conversation, she could only speak one sentence at a time (assuming she was not doing so intentionally). To make someone like this into a professional novelist (even if only for show) was going to be impossible. Even supposing that Tengo succeeded in rewriting Air Chrysalis, that it took the new writers’ prize, and that it was published as a book and praised by the critics, they could not go on deceiving the public forever. It might go well at first, but before long people would begin to think that “something” was “funny.” If the truth came out at that point, everyone involved would be ruined. Tengo’s career as a novelist would be cut short before it had hardly begun.

  There was no way they could pull off such a flawed conspiracy. He had felt they were treading on thin ice from the outset, but now he realized that such an expression was far too tepid. The ice was already creaking before they ever stepped on it. The only thing for him to do was go home, call Komatsu, and announce, “I’m withdrawing from the plan. It’s just too dangerous for me.” This was what anyone with any common sense would do.

  But when he started thinking about Air Chrysalis, Tengo was split with confusion. As dangerous as Komatsu’s plan might be, he could not possibly stop rewriting the novella at this point. He might have been able to give up on the idea before he started working on it, but that was out of the question now. He was up to his neck in it. He was breathing the air of its world, adapting to its gravity. The story’s essence had permeated every part of him, to the walls of his viscera. Now the story was begging him to rework it: he could feel it pleading with him for help. This was something that only Tengo could do. It was a job well worth doing, a job he simply had to do.

 
Sitting on the train seat, Tengo closed his eyes and tried to reach some kind of conclusion as to how he should deal with the situation. But no conclusion was forthcoming. No one split with confusion could possibly produce a reasonable conclusion.

  “Does Azami take down exactly what you say?” Tengo asked.

  “Exactly what I tell her.”

  “You speak, and she writes it down.”

  “But I have to speak softly”

  “Why do you have to speak softly?”

  Fuka-Eri looked around the car. It was almost empty. The only other passengers were a mother and her two small children on the opposite seat a short distance away from Tengo and Fuka-Eri. The three of them appeared to be headed for someplace fun. There existed such happy people in the world.

  “So they won’t hear me,” Fuka-Eri said quietly.

  “ ‘They’?” Tengo asked. Looking at Fuka-Eri’s unfocused eyes, it was clear that she was not talking about the mother and children. She was referring to particular people that she knew well and that Tengo did not know at all. “Who are ‘they’?” Tengo, too, had lowered his voice.