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  Tengo did not know for certain whether he wanted to be a professional novelist, nor was he sure he had the talent to write fiction. What he did know was that he could not help spending a large part of every day writing fiction. To him, writing was like breathing.

  Komatsu said practically nothing as he listened to Tengo’s story. He seemed to like Tengo, though it was not clear why. Tengo was a big man (he had been a key member of his judo team in middle school, high school, and college), and he had the eyes of an early-waking farmer. He wore his hair short, seemed always to have a tan, and had cauliflower ears. He looked neither like a youthful devotee of literature nor like a teacher of mathematics, which was also something that Komatsu seemed to like about him.

  Whenever Tengo finished a story, he would take it to Komatsu. Komatsu would read it and offer his comments. Tengo would rewrite it following his advice and bring it to Komatsu again, who would provide new instructions, like a coach raising the bar a little at a time. “Your case might take some time,” he said. “But we’re in no hurry. Just make up your mind to write every single day. And don’t throw anything out. It might come in handy later.” Tengo agreed to follow Komatsu’s advice.

  For his part, Komatsu would occasionally send small writing jobs Tengo’s way. Anonymously, Tengo wrote copy for the women’s magazine produced by Komatsu’s publisher. He handled everything: revising letters to the editor, writing background pieces on movies and books, composing horoscopes. His horoscopes were especially popular because they were often right. Once when he wrote, “Beware an early-morning earthquake,” there actually was a big earthquake early one morning. Tengo was grateful for the extra income and for the writing practice this work provided. It made him happy to see his writing in print—in any form—displayed in the bookstores.

  Eventually Tengo was hired as a screener for the literary magazine’s new writers’ prize. It was odd for him to be screening other writers’ works when he himself was competing for the prize, but he read everything impartially, not terribly concerned about the delicacy of his situation. If nothing else, the experience of reading mounds of badly written fiction gave him an indelible lesson in exactly what constituted badly written fiction. He read around one hundred works each time, choosing ten that might have some point to them to bring to Komatsu with written comments. Five works would make it to the short list, and from those the four-person committee would select the winner.

  Tengo was not the only part-time screener, and Komatsu was only one of several editors engaged in assembling the short list. This was all in the name of fairness, but such efforts were not really necessary. No matter how many works were entered in the competition, there were never more than two or three of any value, and no one could possibly miss those. Three of Tengo’s stories had made the short list in the past. Each had been chosen not by Tengo himself, of course, but by two other screeners and then by Komatsu, who manned the editorial desk. None had won the prize, but this had not been a crushing blow to Tengo. For one thing, Komatsu had ingrained in him the idea that he just had to give it time. And Tengo himself was not all that eager to become a novelist right away.

  If he arranged his teaching schedule well, Tengo was able to spend four days a week at home. He had taught at the same cram school for seven years now, and he was popular with the students because he knew how to convey the subject succinctly and clearly, and he could answer any question on the spot. Tengo surprised himself with his own eloquence. His explanations were clever, his voice carried well, and he could excite the class with a good joke. He had always thought of himself as a poor speaker, and even now he could be at a loss for words when confronted face-to-face. In a small group, he was strictly a listener. In front of a large class, however, his head would clear, and he could speak at length with ease. His own teaching experience gave him renewed awareness of the inscrutability of human beings.

  Tengo was not dissatisfied with his salary. It was by no means high, but the school paid in accordance with ability. The students were asked to do course evaluations periodically, and compensation hinged on the results. The school was afraid of having its best teachers lured away (and, in fact, Tengo had been headhunted several times). This never happened at ordinary schools. There, salary was set by seniority, teachers’ private lives were subject to the supervision of administrators, and ability and popularity counted for nothing. Tengo actually enjoyed teaching at the cram school. Most of the students went there with the explicit purpose of preparing for the college entrance exams, and they attended his lectures enthusiastically. Teachers had only one duty: to teach their classes. This was exactly what Tengo wanted. He never had to deal with student misbehavior or infractions of school rules. All he had to do was show up in the classroom and teach students how to solve mathematical problems. And the manipulation of pure abstractions using numerical tools came naturally to Tengo.

  When he was home, Tengo usually wrote from first thing in the morning until the approach of evening. All he needed to satisfy him was his Mont Blanc pen, his blue ink, and standard manuscript sheets, each page lined with four hundred empty squares ready to accept four hundred characters. Once a week his married girlfriend would come to spend the afternoon with him. Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn’t lead to anything. As the sun was setting, he would head out for a long walk, and once the sun was down he would read a book while listening to music. He never watched television. Whenever the NHK fee collector came, he would point out that he had no television set, and politely refuse to pay. “I really don’t have one. You can come in and look if you want,” he would say, but the collector would never come in. They were not allowed to.

  “I have something bigger in mind,” Komatsu said.

  “Something bigger?”

  “Much bigger. Why be satisfied with small-scale stuff like the new writers’ prize? As long as we’re aiming, why not go for something big?”

  Tengo fell silent. He had no idea what Komatsu was getting at, but he sensed something disturbing.

  “The Akutagawa Prize!” Komatsu declared after a moment’s pause.

  “The Akutagawa Prize?” Tengo repeated the words slowly, as if he were writing them in huge characters with a stick on wet sand.

  “Come on, Tengo, you can’t be that out of touch! The Akutagawa Prize! Every writer’s dream! Huge headlines in the paper! TV news!”

  “Now you’re losing me. Are we still talking about Fuka-Eri?”

  “Of course we are—Fuka-Eri and Air Chrysalis. Have we been discussing anything else?”

  Tengo bit his lip as he tried to fathom the meaning behind Komatsu’s words. “But you yourself said there’s no way Air Chrysalis can take the new writers’ prize. Haven’t we been talking about that all along, how the work will never amount to anything the way it is?”

  “Precisely. It’ll never amount to anything the way it is. That is for certain.”

  Tengo needed time to think. “Are you saying it needs to be revised?”

  “It’s the only way. It’s not that unusual for an author to revise a promising work with the advice of an editor. It happens all the time. Only, in this case, rather than the author, someone else will do the revising.”

  “Someone else?” Tengo asked, but he already knew what Komatsu’s answer would be.

  “You.”

  Tengo searched for an appropriate response but couldn’t find one. He heaved a sigh and said, “You know as well as I do that this work is going to need more than a little patching here and there. It’ll never come together without a fundamental top-to-bottom rewrite.”

  “Which is why you’ll rewrite it from top to bottom. Just use the framework of the story as is. And keep as much of the tone as possible. But change the language—a total remake. You’ll be in charge of the actual writing, and I’ll be the producer.”

  “Just like that?” Tengo muttered, as if to himself.

  “Look,” Komatsu said, picking up a spoon an
d pointing it at Tengo the way a conductor uses his baton to single out a soloist from the rest of the orchestra. “This Fuka-Eri girl has something special. Anyone can see it reading Air Chrysalis. Her imagination is far from ordinary. Unfortunately, though, her writing is hopeless. A total mess. You, on the other hand, know how to write. Your story lines are good. You have taste. You may be built like a lumberjack, but you write with intelligence and sensitivity. And real power. Unlike Fuka-Eri, though, you still haven’t grasped exactly what it is you want to write about. Which is why a lot of your stories are missing something at the core. I know you’ve got something inside you that you need to write about, but you can’t get it to come out. It’s like a frightened little animal hiding way back in a cave—you know it’s in there, but there’s no way to catch it until it comes out. Which is why I keep telling you, just give it time.”

  Tengo shifted awkwardly on the booth’s vinyl seat. He said nothing.

  “The answer is simple,” Komatsu said, still lightly waving his spoon. “We put the two writers together and invent a brand-new one. We add your perfect style to Fuka-Eri’s raw story. It’s an ideal combination. I know you’ve got it in you. Why do you think I’ve been backing you all this time? Just leave the rest to me. With the two of you together, the new writers’ prize will be easy, and then we can shoot for the Akutagawa. I haven’t been wasting my time in this business all these years. I know how to pull the right strings.”

  Tengo let his lips part as he stared at Komatsu. Komatsu put his spoon back in his saucer. It made an abnormally loud sound.

  “Supposing the story wins the Akutagawa Prize, then what?” Tengo asked, recovering from the shock.

  “If it takes the Akutagawa, it’ll cause a sensation. Most people don’t know the value of a good novel, but they don’t want to be left out, so they’ll buy it and read it—especially when they hear it was written by a high school girl. If the book sells, it’ll make a lot of money. We’ll split it three ways. I’ll take care of that.”

  “Never mind the money” Tengo said, his voice flat. “How about your professional ethics as an editor? If the scheme became public, it’d cause an uproar. You’d lose your job.”

  “It wouldn’t come out so easily. I can handle the whole thing very carefully. And even if it did come out, I’d be glad to leave the company. Management doesn’t like me, and they’ve never treated me decently. Finding another job would be no problem for me. Besides, I wouldn’t be doing it for the money. I’d be doing it to screw the literary world. Those bastards all huddle together in their gloomy cave and kiss each other’s asses, and lick each other’s wounds, and trip each other up, all the while spewing this pompous crap about the mission of literature. I want to have a good laugh at their expense. I want to outwit the system and make idiots out of the whole bunch of them. Doesn’t that sound like fun to you?”

  It did not sound like all that much fun to Tengo. For one thing, he had never actually seen this “literary world.” And when he realized that a competent individual like Komatsu had such childish motives for crossing such a dangerous bridge, he was momentarily at a loss for words.

  “It sounds like a scam to me,” he said at length.

  “Coauthorship is not that unusual,” Komatsu said with a frown. “Half the magazines’ serialized manga are coauthored. The staff toss around ideas and make up the story, the artist does simple line drawings, his assistants fill in the details and add color. It’s not much different from the way a factory makes alarm clocks. The same sort of thing goes on in the fiction world. Romance novels, for example. With most of those, the publisher hires writers to make up stories following the guidelines they’ve established. Division of labor: that’s the system. Mass production would be impossible any other way. In the self-conscious world of literary fiction, of course, such methods are not openly sanctioned, so as a practical strategy we have to set Fuka-Eri up as our single author. If the deception comes out, it might cause a bit of a scandal, but we wouldn’t be breaking the law. We’d just be riding the current of the times. And besides, we’re not talking about a Balzac or a Murasaki Shikibu here. All we’d be doing is patching the holes in the story some high school girl wrote and making it a better piece of fiction. What’s wrong with that? If the finished work is good and brings pleasure to a lot of readers, then no harm done, don’t you agree?”

  Tengo gave some thought to what Komatsu was saying, and he answered with care. “I see two problems here. I’m sure there are more than that, but for now let me concentrate on these two. One is that we don’t know whether the author, Fuka-Eri, would go along with having someone else rewrite her work. If she says no, of course, that’s the end of that. The other problem, assuming she says okay, is whether I could really do a good job of rewriting it. Coauthorship is a very delicate matter; I can’t believe things would go as easily as you are suggesting.”

  “I know you can do it, Tengo,” Komatsu said without hesitation, as if he had been anticipating Tengo’s reaction. “I have no doubt whatever. I knew it the first time I read Air Chrysalis. The first thing that popped into my head was ‘Tengo has to rewrite this!’ It’s perfect for you. It’s aching for you to rewrite it. Don’t you see?”

  Tengo merely shook his head, saying nothing.

  “There’s no rush,” Komatsu said quietly. “This is important. Take two or three days to think about it. Read Air Chrysalis again, and give some good, careful thought to what I’m proposing. And—oh yes, let me give you this.”

  Komatsu withdrew a brown envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Tengo. Inside the envelope were two standard-size color photos, pictures of a girl. One showed her from the chest up, the other was a full-length snapshot. They seemed to have been taken at the same time. She was standing in front of a stairway somewhere, a broad stone stairway. Classically beautiful features. Long, straight hair. White blouse. Small and slim. Her lips were trying to smile, but her eyes were resisting. Serious eyes. Eyes in search of something. Tengo stared at the two photos. The more he looked, the more he thought about himself at that age, and the more he sensed a small, dull ache in his chest. It was a special ache, something he had not experienced for a very long time.

  “That’s Fuka-Eri,” Komatsu said. “Beautiful girl, don’t you think? Sweet and fresh. Seventeen. Perfect. We won’t tell anyone that her real name is Eriko Fukada. We’ll keep her as ‘Fuka-Eri.’ The name alone should cause a stir if she wins the Akutagawa Prize, don’t you think? She’ll have reporters swarming around her like bats at sunset. The books’ll sell out overnight.”

  Tengo wondered how Komatsu had gotten hold of the photos. Entrants were not required to send in photos with their manuscripts. But he decided not to ask, partly because he didn’t want to know the answer, whatever it might be.

  “You can keep those,” Komatsu said. “They might come in handy.”

  Tengo put them back into the envelope and laid them on the manuscript. Then he said to Komatsu, “I don’t know much about how the ‘industry’ works, but sheer common sense tells me this is a tremendously risky plan. Once you start lying to the public, you have to keep lying. It never ends. It’s not easy, either psychologically or practically, to keep tweaking the truth to make it all fit together. If one person who’s in on the plan makes one little slip, everybody could be done for. Don’t you agree?”

  Komatsu pulled out another cigarette and lit it. “You’re absolutely right. It is risky. There are a few too many uncertainties at this point in time. One slip, and things could get very unpleasant for us. I’m perfectly aware of that. But you know, Tengo, taking everything into consideration, my instincts still tell me, ‘Go for it!’ For the simple reason that you don’t get chances like this very often. I’ve never had one before, and I’m sure I’ll never have another one. Comparing this to gambling might not be the best way to look at it, but we’ve got all the right cards and a mountain of chips. The conditions are perfect. If we let a chance like this slip away, we’ll regret it for t
he rest of our lives.”

  Tengo stared in silence at Komatsu’s utterly sinister smile.

  Komatsu continued: “And the most important thing is that we are remaking Air Chrysalis into a much better work. It’s a story that should have been much better written. There’s something important in it, something that needs someone to bring it out. I’m sure you think so too, Tengo. Am I wrong? We each contribute our own special talents to the project: we pool our resources for one thing only, and that is to bring out that important something in the work. Our motives are pure: we can present them anywhere without shame.”

  “Well, you can try to rationalize it all you want, you can invent all kinds of noble-sounding pretexts, but in the end, a scam is a scam.”

  “Look, Tengo, you’re losing sight of one crucial fact,” Komatsu said, his mouth opening in a big, wide grin the likes of which Tengo had never seen. “Or should I say you are deliberately choosing not to look at it? And that’s the simple fact that you want to do this. You already feel that way—‘risk’ and ‘morality’ be damned. I can see it. You’re itching to rewrite Air Chrysalis with your own hands. You want to be the one, not Fuka-Eri, who brings out that special something in the work. I want you to go home now and figure out what you really think. Stand in front of a mirror and give yourself a long, hard look. It’s written all over your face.”

  Tengo felt the air around him growing thin. He glanced at his surroundings. Was the image coming to him again? But no, there was no sign of it. The thinness of the air had come from something else. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow. Komatsu was always right. Why should that be?

  CHAPTER 3

  Aomame