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  “Hungry?” Tengo asked. On their way back to his apartment earlier, they had had some spaghetti at a small restaurant near Koenji Station. The portions had not been very big, and several hours had elapsed in the meantime. “I can make you a sandwich or something else simple if you’d like.”

  “I’m not hungry. I’d rather have you read me what you wrote.”

  “You mean what I was writing just now?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Tengo picked up his pen and twirled it between his fingers. It looked ridiculously small in his big hand. “I make it a policy not to show people manuscripts until they’re finished and revised. I don’t want to jinx my writing.”

  “ ‘Jinx.’ ”

  “It’s an English word. ‘To cause bad luck.’ It’s a kind of rule of mine.”

  Fuka-Eri looked at Tengo for several moments. Then she drew the pajama collar closed. “So read me a book.”

  “You can get to sleep if someone reads you a book?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I suppose Professor Ebisuno has read you lots of books.”

  “Because he stays up all night.”

  “Did he read you The Tale of the Heike?”

  Fuka-Eri shook her head. “I listened to a tape.”

  “So that’s how you memorized it! Must have been a very long tape.”

  Fuka-Eri used two hands to suggest a pile of cassette tapes. “Very long.”

  “What part did you recite at the press conference?”

  “ ‘General Yoshitsune’s Flight from the Capital.’ ”

  “That’s the part after the defeat of the Heike where the victorious Genji general Yoshitsune flees from Kyoto, with his brother Yoritomo in pursuit. The Genji have won the war against the Heike, but then the family starts fighting among themselves.”

  “Right.”

  “What other sections can you recite from memory?”

  “Tell me what you want to hear.”

  Tengo tried to recall some episodes from The Tale of the Heike. It was a long book, with an endless number of stories. Off the top of his head, Tengo named “The Battle of Dan-no-ura.”

  Fuka-Eri took some twenty seconds to collect her thoughts in silence. Then she began to chant a decisive part of the final sea battle in the original verse:

  The Genji warriors had boarded the Heike ships to find

  The sailors and helmsmen pierced by arrows or slashed by swords,

  Their corpses lying in the bilge, leaving no one to steer.

  Aboard a small boat, New Middle Counselor Tomomori

  Approached the Imperial Ship and said:

  “And so it seems to have come to this.

  Heave everything unsightly into the ocean.”

  He ran from stem to stern, sweeping, scrubbing,

  Gathering litter, cleaning everything with his own hands.

  The ladies-in-waiting asked, “How goes the battle, Counselor?”

  “Soon you will behold those marvelous men of the east,”

  He replied with caustic laughter.

  “How dare you jest at a time like this?” the women cried.

  Observing this state of affairs, the Nun of Second Rank

  Proceeded to carry out the plan

  Upon which she had settled long before.

  Hooding herself under two dark-gray robes,

  She lifted high the hems of her glossy silk split skirt,

  Tucked the Imperial Bead Strand under one arm,

  Thrust the Imperial Sword under her sash,

  And took the Child Emperor himself in her arms.

  “Mere woman though I am, I shall never fall into enemy hands.

  I shall go wherever His Majesty goes.

  All you women whose hearts are with him,

  Follow us without delay.” So saying,

  She strode to the gunwale.

  His Majesty had turned but eight that year,

  Yet he exhibited a maturity far beyond his age.

  His handsome countenance radiated an Imperial glow,

  And his glossy black hair could cascade down his back past the waist.

  Confused by all the commotion, he asked,

  “Grandmother, where are you taking me?”

  She turned to the innocent young Sovereign and,

  Fighting back her tears, she said,

  “Do you not know yet what is happening?

  For having followed the Ten Precepts in your previous life,

  You were born to be a Lord commanding

  Ten thousand charioteers,

  But now, dragged down by an evil karma,

  Your good fortune has exhausted itself.

  Turn first now to the east,

  And say your farewell to the Grand Shrine of Ise.

  Then turn toward the west and call upon Amida Buddha

  That his heavenly hosts may guide you to the Western Pure Land.

  This country is no better than a scattering of millet,

  A place where hearts know only sadness.

  I am taking you, therefore, to a wonderful pure land called ‘Paradise.’ ”

  Her tears escaped as she spoke thus to him.

  His Majesty wore a robe of olive-tinged gray,

  And his hair was bound on either side in boyish loops.

  Tears streaming from his eyes, he joined his darling hands.

  First, he bowed toward the east

  And spoke his farewell to the Grand Shrine of Ise.

  Then he turned to the west and, once he had called upon Amida Buddha,

  The Nun of Second Rank clasped him to her breast and,

  Comforting him with the words,

  “There is another capital beneath the waves,”

  She plunged ten thousand fathoms beneath the sea.

  Listening to her recite the story with his eyes closed, Tengo felt as though he were hearing it the traditional way, chanted by a blind priest accompanying himself on the lute, and he was reminded anew that The Tale of the Heike was a narrative poem handed down through an oral tradition. Fuka-Eri’s normal style of speaking was extremely flat, lacking almost all accent and intonation, but when she launched into the tale, her voice became startlingly strong, rich, and colorful, as if something had taken possession of her. The magnificent sea battle fought in 1185 on the swirling currents between Honshu and Kyushu came vividly to life. The Heike side was doomed to defeat, and Kiyomori’s wife Tokiko, the “Nun of Second Rank,” plunged into the waves holding her grandson, the child emperor Antoku, in her arms. Her ladies-in-waiting followed her in death rather than fall into the hands of the rough eastern warriors. Tomomori, concealing his grief, jokingly urged the ladies to kill themselves. You’ll have nothing but a living hell if you go on like this, he had told them. You had best end your lives here and now.

  “Want me to go on,” Fuka-Eri asked.

  “No, that’s fine. Thank you,” Tengo answered, stunned. He understood how those news reporters, at a loss for words, must have felt. “How did you manage to memorize such a long passage?”

  “Listening to the tape over and over.”

  “Listening to the tape over and over, an ordinary person still wouldn’t be able to memorize it.”

  It suddenly dawned on Tengo that precisely to the degree she could not read a book, the girl’s ability to memorize what she had heard might be extraordinarily well developed, just as certain children with savant syndrome can absorb and remember huge amounts of visual information in a split second.

  “I want you to read me a book,” Fuka-Eri said.

  “What kind of book would you like?”

  “Do you have the book you were talking about with the Professor,” Fuka-Eri asked. “The one with Big Brother.”

  “1984? I don’t have that one.”

  “What kind of story is it.”

  Tengo tried to recall the plot. “I read it once a long time ago in the school library, so I don’t remember the details too well. It was published in 1949, when 1984 seemed like a time far in the
future.”

  “That’s this year.”

  “Yes, by coincidence. At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past. In his novel, George Orwell depicted the future as a dark society dominated by totalitarianism. People are rigidly controlled by a dictator named Big Brother. Information is restricted, and history is constantly being rewritten. The protagonist works in a government office, and I’m pretty sure his job is to rewrite words. Whenever a new history is written, the old histories all have to be thrown out. In the process, words are remade, and the meanings of current words are changed. What with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true anymore. They lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally. It’s that kind of story.”

  “They rewrite history.”

  “Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime.”

  Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.

  Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”

  “You rewrite stuff.”

  Tengo laughed and took a sip of wine. “All I did was touch up your story, for the sake of expedience. That’s totally different from rewriting history.”

  “But that Big Brother book is not here now,” she asked.

  “Unfortunately, no. So I can’t read it to you.”

  “I don’t mind another book.”

  Tengo went to his bookcase and scanned the spines of his books. He had read many books over the years, but he owned few. He tended to dislike filling his home with a lot of possessions. When he finished a book, unless it was something quite special, he would take it to a used-book store. He bought only books he knew he was going to read right away, and he would read the ones he cared about very closely, until they were ingrained in his mind. When he needed other books he would borrow them from the neighborhood library.

  Choosing a book to read to Fuka-Eri took Tengo a long time. He was not used to reading aloud, and had almost no clue which might be best for that. After a good deal of indecision, he pulled out Anton Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, which he had just finished reading the week before. He had marked the more interesting spots with paper tags and figured this would make it easy to choose suitable passages to read.

  Tengo prefaced his reading with a brief explanation of the book—that Chekhov was only thirty years old when he traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1890; that no one really knew why the urbane Chekhov, who had been praised as one of the most promising young writers of the generation after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and who was living a cosmopolitan life in Moscow, would have made up his mind to go off to live on Sakhalin Island, which was like the end of the earth. Sakhalin had been developed primarily as a penal colony, and to most people it symbolized only bad luck and misery. Furthermore, the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built, which meant that Chekhov had to make more than 2,500 miles of his trip in a horse-drawn cart across frozen earth, an act of self-denial that subjected the young man in poor health to merciless suffering. And finally, when he ended his eight-month-long journey to the Far East and published Sakhalin as the fruit of his labor, the work did little more than bewilder most readers, who found that it more closely resembled a dry investigative report or gazetteer than a work of literature. People whispered amongst themselves, “Why did Chekhov do such a wasteful, pointless thing at such an important stage in his literary career?” One critic answered scathingly, “It was just a publicity stunt.” Another view was that Chekhov had gone there looking for a new subject because he had run out of things to write about. Tengo showed Fuka-Eri the location of Sakhalin on the map included in the book.

  “Why did Chekhov go to Sakhalin,” Fuka-Eri asked.

  “You mean, why do I think he went?”

  “Uh-huh. Did you read the book.”

  “I sure did.”

  “What did you think.”

  “Chekhov himself might not have understood exactly why he went,” Tengo said. “Or maybe he didn’t really have a reason. He just suddenly felt like going—say, he was looking at the shape of Sakhalin Island on a map and the desire to go just bubbled up out of nowhere. I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what.’ And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what people are doing there. It’s like measles—you can’t show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration. Of course, traveling from Moscow to Sakhalin in those days involved almost unimaginable hardships, so I suspect that wasn’t Chekhov’s only reason for going.”

  “Name another one.”

  “Well, Chekhov was both a novelist and a doctor. It could be that, as a scientist, he wanted to examine something like a diseased part of the vast Russian nation with his own eyes. Chekhov felt uncomfortable living as a literary star in the city. He was fed up with the atmosphere of the literary world and was put off by the affectations of other writers, who were mainly interested in tripping each other up. He was disgusted by the malicious critics of the day. His journey to Sakhalin may have been an act of pilgrimage designed to cleanse him of such literary impurities. Sakhalin Island overwhelmed him in many ways. I think it was precisely for this reason that Chekhov never wrote a single literary work based on his trip to Sakhalin. It was not the kind of half-baked experience that could be easily made into material for a novel. The diseased part of the country became, so to speak, a physical part of him, which may have been the very thing he was looking for.”

  “Is the book interesting,” Fuka-Eri asked.

  “I found it very interesting. It’s full of dry figures and statistics and, as I said earlier, not much in the way of literary color. The scientist side of Chekhov is on full display. But that is the very quality of the book that makes me feel I can sense the purity of the decision reached by Anton Chekhov the individual. Mixed in with the dry records are some very impressive examples of observation of character and scenic description. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the dry passages that relate only facts. Some of them are quite marvelous. For example, the sections on the Gilyaks.”

  “The Gilyaks,” Fuka-Eri said.

  “The Gilyaks were the indigenous people of Sakhalin long before the Russians arrived to colonize it. They originally lived at the southern end of the island, but they moved up to the center when they were displaced by the Ainu, who moved north from Hokkaido. Of course, the Ainu themselves had also been pushed northward—by the Japanese. Chekhov struggled to observe at close hand and to record as accurately as possible the rapidly disappearing Gilyak culture.”

  Tengo opened to a passage on the Gilyaks. At some points he would introduce suitable omissions and changes to the text in order to make it easily understandable to his listener.

  The Gilyak is of strong, thick-set build, and average, even small, in height. Tall stature would hamper him in the taiga. [“That’s a Russian forest,” Tengo added.] His bones are thick and are distinctive for the powerful development of all the appendages and protuberances to which the muscles are attached, and this leads one to assume firm, powerful muscles and a constant strenuous battle with nature. His body is lean and wiry, without a layer of fat; you do not come across obese, plump Gilyaks. Obviously all the fat is expended in warmth, of which the body of a Sakhalin inhabitant needs to produce such a great deal in order to compensate for the loss engendered by the low temperature and the excessive dampness of the air. It’s clear why the Gilyak consumes such a lot of fat in his food. He eats rich seal, salmon, sturgeon and whale fat, meat and blood, all in large quantities, in a raw, dry, often frozen state, and
because he eats coarse, unrefined food, the places to which his masticatory muscles are attached are singularly well developed and his teeth are heavily worn. His diet is made up exclusively of animal products, and rarely, only when he happens to have his dinner at home or if he eats out at a celebration, will he add Manchurian garlic or berries. According to Nevelskoy’s testimony, the Gilyaks consider working the soil a great sin; anybody who begins to dig the earth or who plants anything will infallibly die. But bread, which they were acquainted with by the Russians, they eat with pleasure, as a delicacy, and it is not a rarity these days in Alexandrovsk or Rykovo to meet a Gilyak carrying a round loaf under his arm.

  Tengo stopped reading at that point for a short breather. Fuka-Eri was listening intently, but he could not read any reaction from her expression.

  “What do you think? Do you want me to keep reading? Or do you want to switch to another book?” he asked.

  “I want to know more about the Gilyaks.”

  “Okay, I’ll keep going.”

  “Is it okay if I get in bed?” Fuka-Eri asked.

  “Sure,” Tengo said.

  They moved into the bedroom. Fuka-Eri crawled into bed, and Tengo brought a chair next to the bed and sat in it. He continued with his reading.

  The Gilyaks never wash, so that even ethnographers find it difficult to put a name to the real colour of their faces; they do not wash their linen, and their fur clothing looks as if it has just been stripped off a dead dog. The Gilyaks themselves give off a heavy, acid smell, and you know you are near their dwellings from the repulsive, sometimes hardly bearable odour of dried fish and rotting fish offal. By each yurt usually lies a drying ground filled to the brim with split fish, which from a distance, especially when the sun is shining on them, look like filaments of coral. Around these drying grounds Kruzenshtern saw a vast number of maggots covering the ground to the depth of an inch.

  “Kruzenshtern.”

  “I think he was an early explorer. Chekhov was a very studious person. He had read every book ever written about Sakhalin.”