Tengo

Komatsu calls Tengo at five o’clock in the morning to ask if he owns a word processor. Tengo replies that he cannot afford one on his teacher salary. Komatsu says that he wants to buy Tengo a word processor for use in the revision of Air Chrysalis. The original story was printed with a word processor, and the rewrite must look the same.

Tengo has a girlfriend, an older married woman with two kids who comes to his house once a week for sex. She is supposed to come today, but she cancels at the last minute. Tengo does not mind. Although he enjoys his low-stress, going-nowhere relationship, he is eager to get started on the Air Chrysalis project. He still has misgivings about the plan, but his imagination is already wrapped up in the story.

As soon as Tengo gets the word processor, he sits down and starts working. He quickly types up the beginning of the story and then begins revising it. First he adds text to flesh it out, and then he deletes superfluous parts. After going through this process several times, he prints the pages and works through them carefully with a pen, adjusting the word choice so that it conveys the greatest possible power. He types these changes into the word processor and reads the finished product.

Fuka-Eri’s story describes a ten-year-old girl who lives on a farm commune. She is supposed to care for a blind goat, but she makes a mistake that causes it to die. As punishment, the girl is locked up with the goat’s corpse for ten days. The corpse becomes a portal to a world of Little People. They speak to the girl and teach her how to make an air chrysalis.

Tengo enjoys the revision process. As he works, he becomes convinced that parts of the story are true. Fuka-Eri really seems to have lived on a commune and cared for a goat. It is difficult to imagine how a seventeen-year-old girl could invent the details of the story otherwise.

When Tengo stops working to make dinner, he gets a call from Fuka-Eri. She asks him to meet her at a certain subway station at nine o’clock on Sunday morning. She asks about the rewrite, and he says that it is going well. He asks about the blind goat, and she refuses to talk about it. This seems to confirm his suspicion that she really took care of such an animal.