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by Haruki Murakami

  A black Mitsubishi Pajero and a large, green Jaguar were parked in front of the old Japanese house. The Pajero was shiny and new, but the Jaguar was an old model so coated with white dust that its color was almost obscured. It seemed not to have been driven in some time. The air was startlingly fresh, and a stillness filled the surrounding space. It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it. The perfectly clear sky seemed to soar upward, and the warmth of the sunlight gently touched any skin directly exposed to it. Tengo heard the high, unfamiliar cry of a bird now and then, but he could not see the bird itself.

  The house was large and elegant. It had obviously been built long ago, but it was well cared for. The trees and bushes in the front yard were beautifully trimmed. Several of the trees were so perfectly shaped and matched that they looked like plastic imitations. One large pine cast a broad shadow on the ground. The view from here was unobstructed, but it revealed not a single house as far as the eye could see. Tengo guessed that a person would have to loathe human contact to build a home in such an inconvenient place.

  Turning the knob with a clatter, Fuka-Eri walked in through the unlocked front door and signaled for Tengo to follow her. No one came out to greet them. They removed their shoes in the quiet, almost too-large front entry hall. The glossy wooden floor of the corridor felt cool against stocking feet as they walked down it to the large reception room. The windows there revealed a panoramic view of the mountains and of a river meandering far below, the sunlight reflecting on its surface. It was a marvelous view, but Tengo was in no mood to enjoy it. Fuka-Eri sat him down on a large sofa and left the room without a word. The sofa bore the smell of a distant age, but just how distant Tengo could not tell.

  The reception room was almost frighteningly free of decoration. There was a low table made from a single thick plank. Nothing lay on it—no ashtray, no tablecloth. No pictures adorned the walls. No clocks, no calendars, no vases. No sideboard, no magazines, no books. The floor had an antique rug so faded that its pattern could not be discerned, and the sofa and easy chairs seemed just as old. There was nothing else, just the large, raft-like sofa on which Tengo was sitting and three matching chairs. There was a large, open-style fireplace, but it showed no signs of having contained a fire recently. For a mid-April morning, the room was downright chilly, as if the cold that had seeped in through the winter had decided to stay for a while. Many long months and years seemed to have passed since the room had made up its mind never to welcome any visitors. Fuka-Eri returned and sat down next to Tengo, still without speaking.

  Neither of them said anything for a long time. Fuka-Eri shut herself up in her own enigmatic world, while Tengo tried to calm himself with several quiet deep breaths. Except for the occasional distant bird cry, the room was hushed. Tengo listened to the silence, which seemed to offer several different meanings. It was not simply an absence of sound. The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself. For no reason, he looked at his watch. Raising his face, he glanced at the view outside the window, and then looked at his watch again. Hardly any time had passed. Time always passed slowly on Sunday mornings.

  Ten minutes went by like this. Then suddenly, without warning, the door opened and a thinly built man entered the reception room with nervous footsteps. He was probably in his mid-sixties. He was no taller than five foot three, but his excellent posture prevented him from looking unimpressive. His back was as straight as if it had a steel rod in it, and he kept his chin pulled in smartly. His eyebrows were bushy, and he wore black, thick-framed glasses that seemed to have been made to frighten people. His movements suggested an exquisite machine with parts designed for compactness and efficiency. Tengo started to stand and introduce himself, but the man quickly signaled for him to remain seated. Tengo sat back down while the man rushed to lower himself into the facing easy chair, as if in a race with Tengo. For a while, the man simply stared at Tengo, saying nothing. His gaze was not exactly penetrating, but his eyes seemed to take in everything, narrowing and widening like a camera’s diaphragm when the photographer adjusts the aperture.

  The man wore a deep green sweater over a white shirt and dark gray woolen trousers. Each piece looked as if it had been worn daily for a good ten years or more. They conformed to his body well enough, but they were also a bit threadbare. This was not a person who paid a great deal of attention to his clothes. Nor, perhaps, did he have people close by who did it for him. The thinness of his hair emphasized the rather elongated shape of his head from front to back. He had sunken cheeks and a square jaw. A plump child’s tiny lips were the one feature of his that did not quite match the others. His razor had missed a few patches on his face—or possibly it was just the way the light struck him. The mountain sunlight pouring through the windows seemed different from the sunlight Tengo was used to seeing.

  “I’m sorry I made you come all this way,” the man said. He spoke with an unusually clear intonation, like someone long accustomed to public speaking—and probably about logical topics. “It’s not easy for me to leave this place, so all I could do was ask you to go to the trouble of coming here.”

  Tengo said it was no trouble at all. He told the man his name and apologized for not having a business card.

  “My name is Ebisuno,” the man said. “I don’t have a business card either.”

  “Mr. ‘Ebisuno’?” Tengo asked.

  “Everybody calls me ‘Professor.’ I don’t know why, but even my own daughter calls me ‘Professor.’ ”

  “What characters do you write your name with?”

  “It’s an unusual name. I hardly ever see anybody else with it. Eri, write the characters for him, will you?”

  Fuka-Eri nodded, took out a kind of notebook, and slowly, painstakingly, wrote the characters for Tengo on a blank sheet with a ballpoint pen. The “Ebisu” part was the character normally used for ancient Japan’s wild northern tribes. The “no” was just the usual character for “field.” The way Fuka-Eri wrote them, the two characters could have been scratched into a brick with a nail, though they did have a certain style of their own.

  “In English, my name could be translated as ‘field of savages’—perfect for a cultural anthropologist, which is what I used to be.” The Professor’s lips formed something akin to a smile, but his eyes lost none of their attentiveness. “I cut my ties with the research life a very long time ago, though. Now, I’m doing something completely different. I’m living in a whole new ‘field of savages.’ ”

  To be sure, the Professor’s name was an unusual one, but Tengo found it familiar. He was fairly certain there had been a famous scholar named Ebisuno in the late sixties who had published a number of well-received books. He had no idea what the books were about, but the name, at least, remained in some remote corner of his memory. Somewhere along the way, though, he had stopped encountering it.

  “I think I’ve heard your name before,” Tengo said tentatively.

  “Perhaps,” the Professor said, looking off into the distance, as if speaking about someone not present. “In any case, it would have been a long time ago.”

  Tengo could sense the quiet breathing of Fuka-Eri seated next to him—slow, deep breathing.

  “Tengo Kawana,” the Professor said as if reading a name tag.

  “That’s right,” Tengo said.

  “You majored in mathematics in college, and now you teach math at a cram school in Yoyogi,” the Professor said. “But you also write fiction. That’s what Eri tells me. Is that about right?”

  “Yes, it is,” Tengo said.

  “You don’t look like a math teacher. You don’t look like a writer, either.”

  Tengo gave him a strained smile and said, “Somebody said exactly the same thing to me the other day. It’s probably my build.”

  “I didn’t mean it in a bad sense,” the Professor said, pressing back the bridge of his black-framed glasses. “There’s nothing wrong with not looking like something. It just means you don’t fit the ste
reotype yet.”

  “I’m honored to have you say that. I’m not a writer yet. I’m still just trying to write fiction.”

  “Trying.”

  “It’s still trial and error for me.”

  “I see,” the Professor said. Then, as if he had just noticed the chilliness of the room, he rubbed his hands together. “I’ve also heard that you’re going to be revising the novella that Eri wrote in the hopes that she can win a literary magazine’s new writers’ prize. You’re planning to sell her to the public as a writer. Is my interpretation correct?”

  “That is basically correct,” Tengo said. “An editor named Komatsu came up with the idea. I don’t know if the plan is going to work or not. Or whether it’s even ethical. My only role is to revise the style of the work, Air Chrysalis. I’m just a technician. Komatsu is responsible for everything else.”

  The Professor concentrated on his thoughts for a while. In the hushed room, Tengo could almost hear his brain working. The Professor then said, “This editor, Mr. Komatsu, came up with the idea, and you’re cooperating with him on the technical side.”

  “Correct.”

  “I’ve always been a scholar, and, to tell you the truth, I’ve never read fiction with much enthusiasm. I don’t know anything about customary practice in the world of writing and publishing fiction, but what you people are planning to do sounds to me like a kind of fraud. Am I wrong about that?”

  “No, you are not wrong. It sounds like fraud to me, too,” Tengo said.

  The Professor frowned slightly. “You yourself obviously have ethical doubts about this scheme, and still you are planning to go along with it, out of your own free will.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly my own free will, but I am planning to go along with it. That is correct.”

  “And why is that?”

  “That’s what I’ve been asking myself again and again all week,” Tengo said honestly.

  The Professor and Fuka-Eri waited in silence for Tengo to continue.

  “Reasoning, common sense, instinct—they are all pleading with me to pull out of this as quickly as possible. I’m basically a cautious, commonsensical kind of person. I don’t like gambling or taking chances. If anything, I’m a kind of coward. But this is different. I just can’t bring myself to say no to Komatsu’s plan, as risky as it is. And my only reason is that I’m so strongly drawn to Air Chrysalis. If it had been any other work, I would have refused out of hand.”

  The Professor gave Tengo a quizzical look. “In other words, you have no interest in the fraudulent part of the scheme, but you have a deep interest in the rewriting of the work. Is that it?”

  “Exactly. It’s more than a ‘deep interest.’ If Air Chrysalis has to be rewritten, I don’t want to let anyone else do it.”

  “I see,” the Professor said. Then he made a face, as if he had accidentally put something sour in his mouth. “I see. I think I understand your feelings in the matter. But how about this Komatsu person? What is he in it for? Money? Fame?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what Komatsu wants,” Tengo said. “But I do think it’s something bigger than money or fame.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Well, Komatsu himself might not see it that way, but he is another person who is obsessed with literature. People like him are looking for just one thing, and that is to find, if only once in their lifetimes, a work that is unmistakably the real thing. They want to put it on a tray and serve it up to the world.”

  The Professor kept his gaze fixed on Tengo for a time. Then he said, “In other words, you and he have very different motives—motives that have nothing to do with money or fame.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “Whatever your motives might be, though, the plan is, as you said, a very risky one. If the truth were to come out at some point, it would be sure to cause a scandal, and the public’s censure would not be limited to you and Mr. Komatsu. It could deliver a fatal blow to Eri’s life at the tender age of seventeen. That’s the thing that worries me most about this.”

  “And you should be worried,” Tengo said with a nod. “You’re absolutely right.”

  The space between the Professor’s thick, black eyebrows contracted half an inch. “But what you are telling me is that you want to be the one to rewrite Air Chrysalis even if it could put Eri in some danger.”

  “As I said before, that is because my desire comes from a place that reason and common sense can’t reach. Of course I would like to protect Eri as much as possible, but I can’t promise that she would never be harmed by this. That would be a lie.”

  “I see,” the Professor said. Then he cleared his throat as if to mark a turning point in the discussion. “Well, you seem to be an honest person, at least.”

  “I’m trying to be as straightforward with you as I can.”

  The Professor stared at the hands resting on his knees as if he had never seen them before. First he stared at the backs of his hands, and then he flipped them over and stared at his palms. Then he raised his face and said, “So, does this editor, this Mr. Komatsu, think that his plan is really going to work?”

  “Komatsu’s view is that there are always two sides to everything,” Tengo said. “A good side and a not-so-bad side.”

  The Professor smiled. “A most unusual view. Is this Mr. Komatsu an optimist, or is he self-confident?”

  “Neither,” Tengo said. “He’s just cynical.”

  The Professor shook his head lightly. “When he gets cynical, he becomes an optimist. Or he becomes self-confident. Is that it?”

  “He might have such tendencies.”

  “A hard man to deal with, it seems.”

  “He is a pretty hard man to deal with,” Tengo said. “But he’s no fool.”

  The Professor let out a long, slow breath. Then he turned to Fuka-Eri. “How about it, Eri? What do you think of this plan?”

  Fuka-Eri stared at an anonymous point in space for a while. Then she said, “It’s okay.”

  “In other words, you don’t mind letting Mr. Kawana here rewrite Air Chrysalis?”

  “I don’t mind,” she said.

  “It might cause you a lot of trouble.”

  Fuka-Eri said nothing in response to this. All she did was tightly grip the collar of her cardigan together at the neck, but the gesture was a direct expression of her firm resolve.

  “She’s probably right,” the Professor said with a touch of resignation.

  Tengo stared at her little hands, which were balled into fists.

  “There is one other problem, though,” the Professor said to Tengo. “You and this Mr. Komatsu plan to publish Air Chrysalis and present Eri to the public as a novelist, but she’s dyslexic. Did you know that?”

  “I got the general idea on the train this morning.”

  “She was probably born that way. In school, they think she suffers from a kind of retardation, but she’s actually quite smart—even wise, in a very profound way. Still, her dyslexia can’t help your plan, to put it mildly.”

  “How many people know about this?”

  “Aside from Eri herself, three,” the Professor said. “There’s me, of course, my daughter Azami, and you. No one else knows.”

  “You mean to say her teachers don’t know?”

  “No, they don’t. It’s a little school in the countryside. They’ve probably never even heard of dyslexia. And besides, she only went to school for a short time.”

  “Then we might be able to hide it.”

  The Professor looked at Tengo for a while, as if judging the value of his face.

  “Eri seems to trust you,” he said a moment later. “I don’t know why, but she does. And I—”

  Tengo waited for him to continue.

  “And I trust Eri. So if she says it’s all right to let you rewrite her novella, all I can do is give my approval. On the other hand, if you really do plan to go ahead with this scheme, there are a few things you should know about Eri.” The Pr
ofessor swept his hand lightly across his right knee several times as if he had found a tiny piece of thread there. “What her childhood was like, for example, and where she spent it, and how I became responsible for raising her. This could take a while to tell.”

  “I’m listening,” Tengo said.

  Next to him on the sofa, Fuka-Eri sat up straight, still holding the collar of her cardigan closed at the throat.

  “All right, then,” the Professor said. “The story goes back to the sixties. Eri’s father and I were close friends for a long time. I was ten years older, but we both taught in the same department at the same university. Our personalities and worldviews were very different, but for some reason we got along. Both of us married late, and we both had daughters shortly after we got married. We lived in the same faculty apartment building, and our families were always together. Professionally, too, we were doing very well. People were starting to notice us as ‘rising stars of academe.’ We often appeared in the media. It was a tremendously exciting time for us.

  “Toward the end of the sixties, though, things started to change for the worse. The second renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was coming in 1970, and the student movement was opposed to it. They blockaded the university campuses, fought with the riot police, had bloody factional disputes, and as a result, people died. All of this was more than I wanted to deal with, and I decided to leave the university. I had never been that temperamentally suited to the academic life, but once these protests and riots began, I became fed up with it. Establishment, antiestablishment: I didn’t care. Ultimately, it was just a clash of organizations, and I simply didn’t trust any kind of organization, big or small. You, I would guess, were not yet old enough to be in the university in those days.”