Tengo

Shortly after he finishes the rewrite of Air Chrysalis, Tengo meets Komatsu in a café. Tengo admits that he enjoyed doing the rewrite and feels good about the product, but he is still worried about a possible scandal. He suggests withdrawing the piece from the new writers competition. Komatsu refuses. He says that the rewrite is too brilliant to suppress. At this point, it would be “a crime” to keep such a great piece of literature out of the public eye.

Komatsu offers only one critique of Tengo’s rewrite. At the end of the story, the narrator sees two moons in the sky. Komatsu says that the description of these two moons has to be more detailed so that the reader can really picture what the second moon looks like. Tengo agrees to make the change.

After leaving this meeting, Tengo tries to read a book, but he cannot concentrate. He keeps thinking about his strange memory of his mother having her nipple sucked by a strange man. Not for the first time, Tengo wonders if the man in the memory is his biological father. The man Tengo knows as his father, the one who raised him, always seemed to hate him. Tengo remembers one occasion, in fifth grade, when he asked for permission to study on Sundays instead of accompanying his father on the NHK rounds. For this his father kicked him out of the house. A concerned teacher let Tengo sleep on her couch and afterward convinced his father that it was not acceptable to abandon such a young child.

After that, Tengo and his father struck a tentative truce, and Tengo was allowed to stay home on Sundays. He was required to do housework for several hours, but after that he could do as he pleased. Tengo spent some of his free time having fun, but more often he studied. He excelled in school, especially math. However, as he grew older, he found that literature had a greater pull on him. Unlike math, fiction gave him glimpses of insight into human conditions Tengo found difficult to understand.

As soon as Tengo could, he moved out of his father’s house. In high school he won a judo scholarship that supplied tuition, dormitory housing, and meals. This made it possible for Tengo to end his reliance on his father. Once in his junior year, he was injured and unable to compete with the judo team for several weeks. At that point, a music teacher begged Tengo to play the drums in the school band, to replace two drummers who were suddenly unavailable. Tengo learned the drum part of Janáček’s Sinfonietta and found, to his surprise, that he was quite talented. He performed the piece after only a few weeks, and his school’s band won the competition.