1Q84 (13 page)

And yet, the sentences and paragraphs that comprised
Air Chrysalis
were by no means the work of an author writing just for herself. If Fuka-Eri’s sole objective was to record things she had witnessed or imagined, setting them down as sheer information, she could have accomplished that much with a list. She didn’t have to go to the trouble of fashioning a story, which was unmistakably writing that was meant for other people to pick up and read, which was precisely why
Air Chrysalis
, though written without the objective of creating a literary work, and in crude and artless language, still had succeeded in acquiring the power to appeal directly to the heart. The more he read, however, the more convinced Tengo became that those “other people” were almost certainly not the same “general public” that modern literature invariably had in mind.

All right, then, what kind of reader was this meant for?

Tengo had no idea.

All he knew for sure was that
Air Chrysalis
was an utterly unique work of fiction combining enormous strengths with enormous flaws, and that it seemed to possess an objective that was something quite special.

Tengo found that his rewrite was more than doubling the length of the text. The original was far more often underwritten than overwritten, so rewriting it for coherence and consistency could not help but increase its volume. Fuka-Eri’s text was so threadbare! True, with its more logical style and consistent point of view, the new version was far easier to read, but the overall flow was becoming strangely sluggish. Its logicality showed through too clearly, dulling the sharpness of the original.

Once he had filled out this first block of text, Tengo’s next task was to eliminate from his bloated manuscript everything that was not strictly necessary, to remove every extra bit of fat. Subtraction was a far simpler process than addition, and it reduced the volume of his text by some thirty percent. It was a kind of mind game. He would set a certain time period for expanding the text as much as possible, then set a certain time period for reducing the text as much as possible. As he alternated tenaciously between the two processes, the swings between them gradually shrank in size, until the volume of text naturally settled down where it belonged, arriving at a point where it could be neither expanded nor reduced. He excised any hint of ego, shook off all extraneous embellishments, and sent all transparent signs of imposed logic into the back room. Tengo had a gift for such work. He was a born technician, possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the game.

Tengo had been all but lost in the work for some time when he looked up to find it was nearly three o’clock. Come to think of it, he hadn’t eaten lunch yet. He went to the kitchen, put a kettle on to boil, and ground some coffee beans. He ate a few crackers with cheese, followed those with an apple, and when the water boiled, made coffee. Drinking this from a large mug, he distracted himself with thoughts of sex with his older girlfriend. Ordinarily, he would have been doing it with her right about now. He pictured the things that he would be doing, and the things that she would be doing. He closed his eyes, turned his face toward the ceiling, and released a deep sigh heavy with suggestion and possibility.

Tengo then went back to his desk, switched circuits in his brain again, and read through his rewritten opening to
Air Chrysalis
on the word processor’s screen the way the general in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s
Paths of Glory
makes his rounds inspecting the trenches. He approved of what he found. Not bad. The writing was much improved. He was making headway. But not enough. He still had lots to do. The trench walls were crumbling here and there. The machine guns’ ammunition was running out. The barbed wire barriers had noticeable thin spots.

He printed a draft, saved the document, turned off the word processor, and shifted the machine to the side of his desk. Now, with pencil in hand, he did another careful read-through of the text, this time on paper. Again he deleted parts that seemed superfluous, fleshed out passages that felt underwritten, and revised sections until they fit more smoothly into the rest of the story. He selected his words with all the care of a craftsman choosing the perfect piece of tile to fill a narrow gap in a bathroom floor, inspecting the fit from every angle. Where the fit was less than perfect, he adjusted the shape. The slightest difference in nuance could bring the passage to life or kill it.

The exact same text was subtly different to read when viewed on the printed pages rather than on the word processor’s screen. The feel of the words he chose would change depending on whether he was writing them on paper in pencil or typing them on the keyboard. It was imperative to do both. He turned the machine on again and typed each penciled correction back into the word-processed document. Then he reread the revised text on the screen.
Not bad
, he told himself. Each sentence possessed the proper weight, which gave the whole thing a natural rhythm.

Tengo sat up straight in his chair, stretched his back, and, turning his face to the ceiling, let out a long breath. His job was by no means done. When he reread the text in a few days, he would find more things that needed fixing. But this was fine for now. His powers of concentration had just about reached their limit. He needed a cooling-off period. The hands of the clock were nearing five, and the light of day was growing dim. He would rewrite the next block tomorrow. It had taken him almost the whole day to rewrite just the first few pages. This was a lot more time-consuming than he had expected it to be. But the process should speed up once the rules were laid down and a rhythm took hold. Besides, the most difficult and time-consuming part would be the opening. Once he got through that, the rest—

Tengo pictured Fuka-Eri and wondered how she would feel when she read the rewritten manuscript. But then he realized that he had no idea how Fuka-Eri would feel about anything. He knew virtually nothing about her other than that she was seventeen, a junior in high school with no interest in taking college entrance exams, spoke in a very odd way, liked white wine, and had a disturbingly beautiful face.

Still, Tengo had begun to have a fairly strong sense that his grasp of the world that Fuka-Eri was trying to depict (or record) in
Air Chrysalis
was generally accurate. The scenes that Fuka-Eri had created with her peculiar, limited vocabulary took on a new clarity and vividness when reworked by Tengo, who paid such careful attention to detail. They flowed now. He could see that. All he had provided the work was a level of technical reinforcement, but the results were utterly natural, as if he himself had written the thing from scratch. Now the story of
Air Chrysalis
was beginning to emerge with tremendous power.

This was a great source of happiness for Tengo. The long hours of mental concentration had left him physically spent but emotionally uplifted. For some time after he had turned off the word processor and left his desk, Tengo could not suppress the desire to keep rewriting the story. He was enjoying the work immensely. At this rate, he might manage not to disappoint Fuka-Eri—though in fact he could not picture Fuka-Eri being either disappointed or pleased. Far from it. He could not even picture her cracking a smile or displaying the slightest hint of displeasure. Her face was devoid of expression. Tengo could not tell whether she lacked expression because she had no feelings or the feelings she had were unconnected to her expression. In any case, she was a mysterious girl.

The heroine of
Air Chrysalis
was probably Fuka-Eri herself in the past. A ten-year-old girl, she lived in a special mountain commune (or commune-like place), where she was assigned to look after a blind goat. All the children in the commune had work assignments. Though the goat was old, it had special meaning for the community, so the girl’s duty was to make sure that no harm came to it. She was not allowed to take her eyes off it for a second. One day, however, in a moment of carelessness, she did exactly that, and the goat died. As her punishment, the girl was put in total isolation for ten days, locked in an old storehouse with the goat’s corpse.

The goat served as a passageway to this world for the Little People. The girl did not know whether the Little People were good or bad (and neither did Tengo). When night came, the Little People would enter this world through the corpse, and they would go back to the other side when dawn broke. The girl could speak to them. They taught her how to make an air chrysalis.

What most impressed Tengo was the concrete detail with which the blind goat’s traits and actions were depicted. These details were what made the work as a whole so vivid. Could Fuka-Eri have actually been the keeper of a blind goat? And could she have actually lived in a mountain commune like the one in the story? Tengo guessed that the answer in both cases was yes. Because if she had never had these experiences, Fuka-Eri was a storyteller of rare, inborn talent.

Tengo decided that he would ask Fuka-Eri about the goat and the commune the next time they met (which was to be on Sunday). Of course she might not answer his questions. Judging from their previous conversation, it seemed that Fuka-Eri would only answer questions when she felt like it. When she didn’t want to answer, or when she clearly had no intention of responding, she simply ignored the questions, as if she had never heard them. Like Komatsu. The two were much alike in that regard. Which made them very different from Tengo. If someone asked Tengo a question, any question, he would do his best to answer it. He had probably been born that way.

His older girlfriend called him at five thirty.

“What did you do today?” she asked.

“I was writing a story all day,” he answered, half truthfully. He had not been writing his own fiction. But this was not something he could explain to her in any detail.

“Did it go well?”

“More or less.”

“I’m sorry for canceling today on such short notice. I think we can meet next week.”

“I’ll be looking forward to it.”

“Me too,” she said.

After that, she talked about her children. She often did that with Tengo. She had two little girls. Tengo had no siblings and obviously no children, so he didn’t know much about young children. But that never stopped her from telling Tengo about hers. Tengo rarely initiated a conversation, but he enjoyed listening to other people. And so he listened to her with interest. Her older girl, a second grader, was probably being bullied at school, she said. The girl herself had told her nothing, but the mother of one of the girl’s classmates had let her know that this was apparently happening. Tengo had never met the girl, but he had once seen a photograph. She didn’t look much like her mother.

“Why are they bullying her?” Tengo asked.

“She often has asthma attacks, so she can’t participate in a lot of activities with the other kids. Maybe that’s it. She’s a sweet little thing, and her grades aren’t bad.”

“I don’t get it,” Tengo said. “You’d think they’d take special care of a kid with asthma, not bully her.”

“It’s never that simple in the kids’ world,” she said with a sigh. “Kids get shut out just for being different from everyone else. The same kind of thing goes on in the grown-up world, but it’s much more direct in the children’s world.”

“Can you give me a concrete example?”

She gave him several examples, none of which was especially bad in itself, but which, continued on a daily basis, could have a severe impact on a child: hiding things, not speaking to the child, or doing nasty imitations of her. “Did you ever experience bullying when you were a child?”

Tengo thought back to his childhood. “I don’t think so,” he answered. “Or maybe I just never noticed.”

“If you never noticed, it never happened. I mean, the whole
point
of bullying is to make the person notice it’s being done to him or her. You can’t
have
bullying without the victim noticing.”

Even as a child, Tengo had been big and strong, and people treated him with respect, which was probably why he was never bullied. But he had far more serious problems than mere bullying to deal with back then.

“Were you ever bullied?” Tengo asked.

“Never,” she declared, but then she seemed to hesitate. “I did
do
some bullying, though.”

“You were part of a group that did it?”

“Yes, in the fifth grade. We got together and decided not to talk to one boy. I can’t remember why. There must have been a reason, but it probably wasn’t a very good one if I can’t even remember what it was. I still feel bad about it, though. I’m ashamed to think about it. I wonder why I went and did something like that. I have no idea what made me do it.”

This reminded Tengo of a certain event, something from the distant past that he would recall now and then. Something he could never forget. But he decided not to mention it. It would have been a long story. And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words. He had never told anyone about it, and he probably never would.

“Finally,” his girlfriend said, “everybody feels safe belonging
not
to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think,
Oh, I’m glad that’s not me
. It’s basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.”

“And those troubling things are all you
can
think about when you’re one of the few.”

“That’s about the size of it,” she said mournfully. “But maybe, if you’re in a situation like that, you learn to think for yourself.”

“Yes, but maybe what you end up thinking for yourself
about
is all those troubling things.”

“That’s another problem, I suppose.”

“Better not think about it too seriously,” Tengo said. “I doubt it’ll turn out to be that terrible. I’m sure there must be a few kids in her class who know how to use their brains.”