1Q84 (21 page)

“We seem to have joined an outing,” Tengo said, scanning the crowd.

“Is it okay to keep holding your hand,” Fuka-Eri asked Tengo. She had not let go even after they boarded the train.

“That’s fine,” Tengo said. “Of course”

Fuka-Eri seemed relieved and went on holding his hand. Her fingers and palm were as smooth as ever, and free of sweat. They still seemed to be trying to find and verify something inside him.

“You’re not afraid anymore,” she asked without a question mark.

“No, I’m not,” Tengo answered. He was not lying. His Sunday-morning panic attack had certainly lost its force, thanks perhaps to Fuka-Eri’s holding his hand. He was no longer sweating, nor could he hear his heart pounding. The hallucination paid him no visit, and his breathing was as calm as usual.

“Good,” she said without inflection.

Yes, good
, Tengo also thought.

There was a simple, rapidly spoken announcement that the train would soon depart, and the train doors rumbled closed, sending an outsized shudder through the train as if some huge, ancient animal were waking itself from a long sleep. As though it had finally made up its mind, the train pulled slowly away from the platform.

Still holding hands with Fuka-Eri, Tengo watched the scenery go past the train window. At first, it was just the usual residential area scenery, but the farther they went, the more the flat Musashino Plain gave way to views of distant mountains. After nearly a dozen stops, the two-track line narrowed down to a single line of rails, and they had to transfer to a four-car train. The surrounding mountains were becoming increasingly prominent. Now they had gone beyond commuting distance from downtown Tokyo. The hills out here retained the withered look of winter, which brought out the brilliance of the evergreens. The smell of the air was different, too, Tengo realized, as the train doors opened at each new station, and sounds were subtly different. Fields lay by the tracks, and farmhouses increased in number. Pickup trucks seemed to outnumber sedans.
We’ve really come a long way
, Tengo thought.
How far do we have to go?

“Don’t worry,” Fuka-Eri said, as if she had read his mind.

Tengo nodded silently.
I don’t know, it feels like I’m going to meet her parents to ask for her hand in marriage
, he thought.

Finally, after five stops on the single-track section of the line, they got off at a station called Futamatao. Tengo had never heard of the place before.
What a strange name. Forked Tail?
The small station was an old wooden building. Five other passengers got off with them. No one got on. People came to Futamatao to breathe the clean air on the mountain trails, not to see a performance of
Man of La Mancha
or go to a disco with a wild reputation or visit an Aston Martin showroom or eat
gratin de homard
at a famous French restaurant. That much was obvious from the clothing of the passengers who left the train here.

There were virtually no shops by the station, and no people. There was, however, one taxi parked there. It probably showed up whenever a train was scheduled to arrive. Fuka-Eri tapped on the window, and the rear door opened. She ducked inside and motioned for Tengo to follow her. The door closed, Fuka-Eri told the driver briefly where she wanted to go, and he nodded in response.

They were not in the taxi very long, but the route was tremendously complicated. They went up one steep hill and down another along a narrow farm road where there was barely enough room to squeeze past other vehicles. The number of curves and corners was beyond counting, but the driver hardly slowed down for any of them. Tengo clutched the door’s grip in terror. The taxi finally came to a stop after climbing a hill as frighteningly steep as a ski slope on what seemed to be the peak of a small mountain. It felt less like a taxi trip than a spin on an amusement park ride. Tengo produced two thousand-yen bills from his wallet and received his change and receipt in return.

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 stereotype 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.”