1Q84 (9 page)

Fuka-Eri gave another little shrug. “You talked about it like you cared.”

“Oh, really?” Tengo said. No one had ever told him this before.

“Like you were talking about somebody important to you,” she said.

“I can maybe get even more passionate when I lecture on sequences,” Tengo said. “Sequences were a personal favorite of mine in high school math.”

“You like sequences,” Fuka-Eri asked, without a question mark.

“To me, they’re like Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
. I never get tired of them. There’s always something new to discover.”

“I know the
Well-Tempered Clavier
.”

“You like Bach?”

Fuka-Eri nodded. “The Professor is always listening to it.”

“The Professor? One of your teachers?”

Fuka-Eri did not answer. She looked at Tengo with an expression that seemed to say, “It’s too soon to talk about that.”

She took her coat off as if it had only now occurred to her to do so. She emerged from it like an insect sloughing off its skin. Without bothering to fold it, she set it on the chair next to hers. She wore a thin crew-neck sweater of pale green and white jeans, with no jewelry or makeup, but still she stood out. She had a slender build, in proportion to which her full breasts could not help but attract attention. They were beautifully shaped as well. Tengo had to caution himself not to look down there, but he couldn’t help it. His eyes moved to her chest as if toward the center of a great whirlpool.

The two glasses of white wine arrived. Fuka-Eri took a sip of hers, and then, after thoughtfully studying the glass, she set it on the table. Tengo took a perfunctory sip. Now it was time to talk about important matters.

Fuka-Eri brought her hand to her straight black hair and combed her fingers through it for a while. It was a lovely gesture, and her fingers were lovely, each seemingly moving according to its own will and purpose as if in tune with something occult.

“What do I like about math?” Tengo asked himself aloud again in order to divert his attention from her fingers and her chest. “Math is like water. It has a lot of difficult theories, of course, but its basic logic is very simple. Just as water flows from high to low over the shortest possible distance, figures can only flow in one direction. You just have to keep your eye on them for the route to reveal itself. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to do a thing. Just concentrate your attention and keep your eyes open, and the figures make everything clear to you. In this whole, wide world, the only thing that treats me so kindly is math.”

Fuka-Eri thought about this for a while. “Why do you write fiction,” she asked in her expressionless way.

Tengo converted her question into longer sentences: “In other words, if I like math so much, why do I go to all the trouble of writing fiction? Why not just keep doing math? Is that it?”

She nodded.

“Hmm. Real life is different from math. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route. For me, math is—how should I put it?—math is all too natural. It’s like beautiful scenery. It’s
just there
. There’s no need to exchange it with anything else. That’s why, when I’m doing math, I sometimes feel I’m turning transparent. And that can be scary.”

Fuka-Eri kept looking straight into Tengo’s eyes as if she were looking into an empty house with her face pressed up against the glass.

Tengo said, “When I’m writing a story, I use words to transform the surrounding scene into something more natural for me. In other words, I reconstruct it. That way, I can confirm without a doubt that this person known as ‘me’ exists in the world. This is a totally different process from steeping myself in the world of math.”

“You confirm that you exist,” Fuka-Eri said.

“I can’t say I’ve been one hundred percent successful at it,” Tengo said.

Fuka-Eri did not look convinced by Tengo’s explanation, but she said nothing more. She merely brought the glass of wine to her mouth and took soundless little sips as though drinking through a straw.

“If you ask me,” Tengo said, “you’re in effect doing the same thing. You transform the scenes you see into your own words and reconstruct them. And you confirm your own existence.”

Fuka-Eri’s hand that held her wineglass stopped moving. She thought about Tengo’s remark for a while, but again she offered no opinion.

“You gave shape to that process. In the form of the work you wrote,” Tengo added. “If the work succeeds in gaining many people’s approval and if they identify with it, then it becomes a literary work with objective value.”

Fuka-Eri gave her head a decisive shake. “I’m not interested in form.”

“You’re not interested in form,” Tengo said.

“Form has no
meaning
.”

“So then, why did you write the story and submit it for the new writers’ prize?”

She put down her wineglass. “I didn’t,” she said.

To calm himself, Tengo picked up his glass and took a drink of water. “You’re saying you didn’t submit it?”

Fuka-Eri nodded. “I didn’t send it in.”

“Well, who did?”

She gave a little shrug, then kept silent for a good fifteen seconds. Finally, she said, “It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tengo repeated, emitting a long, slow breath from his pursed lips.
Oh, great. Things really are
not
going to go smoothly. I knew it
.

Several times, Tengo had formed personal relationships with his female cram school students, though always after they had left the school and entered universities, and it was always the girls who took the initiative. They would call and say they wanted to see him. The two of them would meet and go somewhere together. He had no idea what attracted them to him, but ultimately he was a bachelor, and they were no longer his students. He had no good reason to refuse when asked for a date.

Twice the dates had led to sex, but the relationships had eventually faded on their own. Tengo could not quite relax when he was with energetic young college girls. It was like playing with a kitten, fresh and fun at first, but tiring in the end. The girls, too, seemed disappointed to discover that in person, Tengo was not the same as the passionate young math lecturer they encountered in class. He could understand how they felt.

Tengo was able to relax when he was with older women. Not having to take the lead in everything seemed to lift a weight from his shoulders. And many older women liked him. Which is why, after having formed a relationship with a married woman ten years his senior a year ago, he had stopped dating any young girls. By meeting his older girlfriend in his apartment once a week, any desire (or need) he might have for a flesh-and-blood woman was pretty well satisfied. The rest of the week he spent shut up in his room alone, writing, reading, and listening to music; occasionally he would go for a swim in the neighborhood pool. Aside from a little chatting with his colleagues at the cram school, he hardly spoke with anyone. He was not especially dissatisfied with this life. Far from it: for him, it was close to ideal.

But this seventeen-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, was different. The mere sight of her sent a violent shudder through him. It was the same feeling her photograph had given him when he first saw it, but in the living girl’s presence it was far stronger. This was not the pangs of love or sexual desire. A certain
something
, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that Fuka-Eri had made. It had always been there inside Tengo. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.

“You’re not interested in writing fiction, and you didn’t enter the new writers’ competition,” Tengo said as if confirming what she had told him.

With her eyes locked on his, Fuka-Eri nodded in agreement. Then she gave a little shrug, as if shielding herself from a cold autumn blast.

“You don’t want to be a writer.” Tengo was shocked to hear himself asking a question without a question mark. The style was obviously contagious.

“No, I don’t,” Fuka-Eri said.

At that point their meal arrived—a large bowl of salad and a roll for Fuka-Eri, and seafood linguine for Tengo. Fuka-Eri used her fork to turn over several lettuce leaves, inspecting them as if they were imprinted with newspaper headlines.

“Well,
somebody
sent your
Air Chrysalis
to the publisher for the new writers’ competition. I found it when I was screening manuscripts.”

“
Air Chrysalis
,” Fuka-Eri said, narrowing her eyes.

“That’s the title of the novella you wrote,” Tengo said.

Fuka-Eri kept her eyes narrowed, saying nothing.

“That’s not the title you gave it?” Tengo asked with an uneasy twinge.

Fuka-Eri gave her head a tiny shake.

He began to feel confused again, but he decided not to pursue the question of the title. The important thing was to make some progress with the discussion at hand.

“Never mind, then. Anyway, it’s not a bad title. It has real atmosphere, and it’ll attract attention, make people wonder what it could possibly be about. Whoever thought of it, I have no problem with it as a title. I’m not sure about the distinction between ‘chrysalis’ and ‘cocoon,’ but that’s no big deal. What I’m trying to tell you is that the work really
got
to me, which is why I brought it to Mr. Komatsu. He liked it a lot, too, but he felt that the writing needed work if it was going to be a serious contender for the new writers’ prize. The style doesn’t quite measure up to the strength of the story, so what he wants to do is have it rewritten, not by you but by me. I haven’t decided whether I want to do it or not, and I haven’t given him my answer. I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do.”

Tengo broke off at that point to see Fuka-Eri’s reaction. There was no reaction.

“What I’d like to hear from you now is what you think of the idea of me rewriting
Air Chrysalis
instead of you. Even if I decided to do it, it couldn’t happen without your agreement and cooperation.”

Using her fingers, Fuka-Eri picked a cherry tomato out of her salad and ate it. Tengo stabbed a mussel with his fork and ate that.

“You can do it,” Fuka-Eri said simply. She picked up another tomato. “Fix it any way you like.”

“Don’t you think you should take a little more time to think it over? This is a pretty big decision.”

Fuka-Eri shook her head. No need.

“Now, supposing I rewrote your novella,” Tengo continued, “I would be careful not to change the story but just strengthen the style. This would probably involve some major changes. But finally, you are the author. It would remain a work by the seventeen-year-old girl named Fuka-Eri. That would not change. If it won the prize, you would get it. Just you. If it were published as a book, you would be the only author listed on the title page. We would be a team—the three of us, you, me, and Mr. Komatsu, the editor. But the only name on the book would be yours. He and I would stay in the background and not say a word, kind of like prop men in a play. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

Fuka-Eri brought a piece of celery to her mouth with her fork. “I understand,” she said with a nod.

“
Air Chrysalis
belongs entirely to you. It came out of you. I could never make it mine. I would be nothing but your technical helper, and you would have to keep that fact a complete secret. We’d be engaged in a conspiracy, in other words, to lie to the whole world. Any way you look at it, this is not an easy thing to do, to keep a secret locked up in your heart.”

“Whatever you say,” Fuka-Eri said.

Tengo pushed his mussel shells to the side of his plate and started to take a forkful of linguine but then reconsidered and stopped. Fuka-Eri picked up a piece of cucumber and bit it carefully, as if tasting something she had never seen before.

Fork in hand, Tengo said, “Let me ask you one more time. Are you sure you have no objection to my rewriting your story?”

“Do what you want,” Fuka-Eri said, when she had finished the cucumber.

“Any way I rewrite it is okay with you?”

“Okay.”

“Why is that?” he asked. “You don’t know a thing about me.”

Fuka-Eri gave a little shrug, saying nothing.

The two continued their meal wordlessly. Fuka-Eri gave her full concentration to her salad. Now and then she would butter a piece of bread, eat it, and reach for her wine. Tengo mechanically transported his linguine to his mouth and filled his mind with many possibilities.

Setting his fork down, he said, “You know, when Mr. Komatsu suggested this idea to me, I thought it was crazy, that there was no way it could work. I was planning to turn him down. But after I got home and thought about it for a while, I started to feel more and more that I wanted to give it a try. Ethical questions aside, I began to feel that I wanted to put my own stamp on the novella that you had written. It was—how to put this?—a totally natural, spontaneous desire.”

Or rather than a desire
, hunger
might be a better way to put it
, Tengo added mentally. Just as Komatsu had predicted, the hunger was becoming increasingly difficult to suppress.

Fuka-Eri said nothing, but from somewhere deep inside her neutral, beautiful eyes, she looked hard at Tengo. She seemed to be struggling to understand the words that Tengo had spoken.

“You want to rewrite the story,” she asked.

Tengo looked straight into her eyes. “I think I do.”

A faint flash crossed Fuka-Eri’s black pupils, as if they were projecting something. Or at least they looked that way to Tengo.

Tengo held his hands out, as if he were supporting an imaginary box in the air. The gesture had no particular meaning, but he needed some kind of imaginary medium like that to convey his feelings. “I don’t know how to put it exactly,” he said, “but in reading
Air Chrysalis
over and over, I began to feel that I could see what you were seeing. Especially when the Little People appear. Your imagination has some special kind of power. It’s entirely original, and quite contagious.”