Tengo

During his writing session one morning, Tengo listens to Janáček’s Sinfonietta, a piece he has remembered fondly ever since he played the percussion part of it in high school. After he finishes writing for the day, he buys breakfast and a newspaper. The paper contains an article about Fuka-Eri, a brief piece stating that she is missing. Tengo reflects that the news writers are hedging their bets. They do not want to ignore the story in case it turns big, but they do not want to make a big deal of it in case it turns out to be nothing.

At the cram school that day, Tengo has a strange visitor named Toshiharu Ushikawa. Ushikawa is an unusually ugly man. His whole head is misshapen, and his clothing is so unstylish that he appears to be “deliberately desecrating the very idea of clothes.” He presents Tengo with a business card that declares him to be the director of an organization called the New Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Arts. Tengo has never heard of such an organization.

Ushikawa explains that his foundation seeks out young people and provides them a year’s funding to pursue their creative work. On the spot, he offers a sum of money sufficient to support Tengo modestly for a full year. Tengo instinctively mistrusts this offer. Fearing either a scam or a plot by Sakigake, he refuses to accept the grant.

At this, Ushikawa grows vaguely threatening. He says that Tengo was seen more than once in the company of the young author Fuka-Eri, who recently disappeared. He also says that it is a bad idea to go around “selling off one’s talents in dribs and drabs.” This strongly suggests that he knows about Tengo's work on Air Chrysalis.

As soon as Tengo can get away, he asks the cram school’s secretary to call the number on Ushikawa's card and ascertain whether there really is an organization called the New Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Arts. She reports that the number does seem to belong to that organization, but Tengo still suspects that Ushikawa’s offer is an elaborate scam.

That afternoon, Tengo calls Komatsu and explains that someone knows he was involved with the Air Chrysalis rewrite. Komatsu says that people have been sniffing around his office as well. Neither has any idea what to do about the situation, so they agree to sit tight and wait to see what happens.

That evening, Tengo sits drinking tea and wondering how Fuka-Eri is doing. He thinks about her letter, especially its odd references to a “forest” that was clearly not literal. Privately he reflects that this forest is now his whole world.