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  “What does Madame say?”

  “Nothing. She just nodded when I gave her my report,” Tamaru said. “All security measures are my responsibility, from beginning to end. It’s my job.”

  A short silence followed, a heavy silence having to do with responsibility.

  “Tomorrow at four thirty,” Aomame said.

  “Tomorrow at four thirty,” Tamaru repeated, and quietly hung up.

  CHAPTER 24

  Tengo

  WHAT’S THE POINT OF ITS BEING

  A WORLD THAT ISN’T HERE?

  It rained all Thursday morning, not a heavy downpour, but persistent rain. There had been no letup since the previous afternoon. Whenever it seemed about to stop it would start pouring again. June was half gone without a sign the rainy season would ever end. The sky remained dark, as if covered with a lid, and the world wore a heavy dampness.

  Just before noon, Tengo put on a raincoat and hat and was headed out to the local market when he noticed a brown padded envelope in his mailbox. It bore no postmark, stamps, or address, and no return address, either. His name had been written with a ballpoint pen in the middle of the front in small, stiff characters that might have been scratched into dry clay with a nail—Fuka-Eri’s writing, without question. He tore it open to find a single bare sixty-minute TDK audiotape cassette. No letter or memo accompanied it. It was not in a plastic case, and the cassette bore no label.

  After a moment of uncertainty, Tengo decided to forget about shopping and listen to the tape. Back in his apartment, he held the cassette in the air and gave it several shakes. For all the mystery surrounding its arrival, it was obviously just an ordinary mass-produced object. There was nothing suggesting that it would explode after he played it.

  Taking off his raincoat, he set a radio cassette player on the kitchen table. He removed the cassette from the padded envelope and inserted it into the player, next to which he placed memo paper and a ballpoint pen in case he wanted to take notes. After looking around to make certain there was no one else present, he pressed the “play” button.

  There was no sound at first. This lasted for some time. Just as he was beginning to suspect that it was nothing but a blank tape, there were some sudden bumping sounds like the moving of a chair. Then a light clearing of the throat (it seemed). Then, without warning, Fuka-Eri began to speak.

  “Tengo,” she said, as if in a sound test. As far as he could recall, this was probably the first time she had actually called him by name.

  She cleared her throat again. She seemed tense.

  I should write you a letter, but I’m bad at that, so I’ll record a tape. It’s easier for me to talk this way than on the phone. Somebody might be listening on the phone. Wait, I need water.

  Tengo heard what he thought were the sounds of Fuka-Eri picking up a glass, taking a drink, and setting the glass back down on a table. Recorded on tape, her uniquely unaccented manner of speech without question marks or other punctuation sounded even stranger than in conversation. It was almost unreal. On tape, however, as opposed to conversation, she was able to speak several sentences in a row.

  I hear you don’t know where I am. You might be worried. But you don’t have to be. This is not a dangerous place. I wanted to tell you that. I really shouldn’t do this, but I felt like I ought to.

  [Ten seconds of silence.]

  They told me not to tell anyone. That I’m here. The Professor filed a search request with the police to look for me. But they’re not doing anything. Kids run away all the time. So I will just stay still here a while.

  [Fifteen seconds of silence.]

  This place is far away. No one will find me if I don’t go out walking. Very far away. Azami will bring this tape to you. Better not send it in the mail. Gotta be careful. Wait, I’ll make sure it’s recording.

  [A click. An empty interval. Another click.]

  Good, it’s recording.

  Children shouting in the distance. Faint sounds of music. These were probably coming through an open window. There might have been a kindergarten nearby.

  Thanks for putting me up that time. I needed you to do that. I also needed to get to know you. Thanks for reading the book to me. I felt close to the Gilyaks. Why do the Gilyaks walk through the forest swamps and not on the wide roads.

  [Tengo secretly added a question mark at the end.]

  Even if the roads are convenient, it’s easier for the Gilyaks to keep away from the roads and walk through the forest. To walk on the roads, they would have to completely remake the way they walk. If they remade the way they walk, they would have to remake other things. I couldn’t live like the Gilyaks. I would hate for men to hit me all the time. I would hate to live with a lot of maggots around—so dirty! But I don’t like to walk on wide roads, either. I need more water.

  Fuka-Eri took another drink of water. After a short silence, her glass came back to the table with a clunk. Then there was an interval while she wiped her lips with her fingertips. Didn’t this girl realize that tape recorders have pause buttons?

  I think it might be trouble for you that I went away. But I don’t want to be a novelist, and I don’t plan to write anymore. I asked Azami to look up stuff about the Gilyaks for me. She went to the library. The Gilyaks live in Sakhalin and are like the Ainu and American Indians: they don’t have writing. They don’t leave records. I’m the same. Once it gets written down, the story is not mine anymore. You did a good job of writing my story. I don’t think anybody else could do that. But it’s not my story anymore. But don’t worry. It’s not your fault. I’m just walking in a place away from the road.

  Here Fuka-Eri inserted another pause. Tengo imagined her trudging along silently, alone, off to the side, away from a road.

  The Professor has big power and deep wisdom. But the Little People have just as deep wisdom and big power as he does. Better be careful in the forest. Important things are in the forest, and the Little People are in the forest, too. To make sure the Little People don’t harm you, you have to find something the Little People don’t have. If you do that, you can get through the forest safely.

  Having managed to say all this in one go, Fuka-Eri paused to take a deep breath. She did this without averting her face from the microphone, thereby recording what sounded like a huge gust of wind blowing between buildings. When that quieted down, there came the deep, foghorn-like sound of a large truck honking in the distance. Two short blasts. Apparently Fuka-Eri was in a place not far from a major highway.

  [Clearing of throat.] I’m getting hoarse. Thanks for worrying about me. Thanks for liking my chest shape and putting me up in your apartment and lending me your pajamas. We probably can’t see each other for a while. The Little People may be mad that they were put into writing. But don’t worry. I’m used to the forest. Bye.

  There was a click, and the recording ended.

  Tengo stopped the tape and rewound to the beginning. Listening to the rain dripping from the eaves, he took several deep breaths and twirled the plastic ballpoint pen in his fingers. Then he set the pen down. He had not taken a single note. He had merely listened in fascination to Fuka-Eri’s normally peculiar narrative style. Without resorting to note taking, he had grasped the three main points of her message:

  1 She had not been abducted, but was merely in temporary hiding. There was no need to worry about her.

  2 She had no intention of publishing any more books. Her story was meant for oral transmission, not print.

  3 The Little People possessed no less wisdom and power than Professor Ebisuno. Tengo should be careful.

  These were the points she hoped to convey. She also spoke of the Gilyaks, the people who had to stay off broad roads when they walked.

  Tengo went to the kitchen and made himself some coffee. While drinking his coffee, he stared aimlessly at the cassette tape. Then he listened to it again from the beginning. This time, just to make sure, he occasionally pushed the pause button and took brief notes. Then he let his eyes make their way t
hrough the notes. This led to no new discoveries.

  Had Fuka-Eri made her own simple notes at first and followed them as she spoke into the recorder? Tengo could not believe she had done that. She wasn’t the type to do such a thing. She had undoubtedly spoken her thoughts into the mike as they came to her in real time (without even pushing the pause button).

  What kind of place could she be in? The recorded background noises provided Tengo with few hints. The distant sound of a door slamming. Children’s shouts apparently coming in through an open window. A kindergarten? A truck horn. She was obviously not deep in the woods but somewhere in a city. The time of the recording was probably late morning or early afternoon. The sound of the door might suggest that she was not alone.

  One thing was clear: Fuka-Eri had gone into hiding on her own initiative. No one had forced her to make the tape: that much was obvious from the sound of her voice and the way she spoke. There was some perceptible nervousness at the beginning, but otherwise it sounded as if she had freely spoken her own thoughts into the microphone.

  The Professor has big power and deep wisdom. But the Little People have just as deep wisdom and big power as he does. Better be careful in the forest. Important things are in the forest, and the Little People are in the forest, too. To make sure the Little People don’t harm you, you have to find something the Little People don’t have. If you do that, you can get through the forest safely.

  . . .

  Tengo played that part back one more time. Fuka-Eri narrated this section somewhat more rapidly than the others. The intervals between sentences were a touch shorter. The Little People were beings who possessed the potential for harming both Tengo and Professor Ebisuno, but he could not discern in Fuka-Eri’s tone of voice any suggestion that she had written them off as evil. Judging from the way she spoke of them, they seemed like neutral beings who could go either way. Tengo had misgivings about another passage:

  The Little People may be mad that they were put into writing.

  If the Little People were, in fact, angry, it stood to reason that Tengo himself would be one of the objects of their anger. He was, after all, one of those most responsible for having publicized their existence in print. Even if he were to beg their forgiveness on the grounds that he had done so without malice, they were not likely to listen to him.

  What kind of harm did the Little People inflict on others? Tengo could hardly be expected to know the answer. He rewound the tape again, returned it to the envelope, and stuffed it in a drawer. Putting his raincoat and hat on again, he set out for the market once more in the pouring rain.

  Komatsu telephoned after nine o’clock that night. Once again, Tengo knew it was Komatsu before he lifted the receiver. He was in bed, reading. He let the phone ring three times, eased himself out of bed, and sat at the kitchen table to answer the call.

  “Hey, Tengo,” Komatsu said. “Having a drink?”

  “No, I’m sober.”

  “You may want to take a drink after this call,” Komatsu said.

  “Must be about something enjoyable.”

  “I wonder. I don’t think it’s all that enjoyable. It might have a certain amount of paradoxical humor about it, though.”

  “Like a Chekhov short story.”

  “Exactly,” Komatsu said. “ ‘Like a Chekhov short story.’ Well said! Your expressions are always concise and to the point, Tengo.”

  Tengo remained silent. Komatsu went on.

  “Things have taken a somewhat problematic turn. The police have responded to Professor Ebisuno’s search request by formally initiating a search for Fuka-Eri. I don’t think they’ll go so far as to actually mount a full-scale search, though, especially since there’s been no ransom demand or anything. They’ll probably just go through the motions so it won’t be too embarrassing for them if something really does come up. Otherwise, it’ll look as if they stood by with their arms folded. The media are not going to let it go so easily, though. I’ve already gotten several inquiries from the papers. I pretended to know nothing, of course. I mean, there’s nothing to say at this point. By now they’ve probably uncovered the relationship between Fuka-Eri and Professor Ebisuno, as well as her parents’ background as revolutionaries. Lots of facts like that are going to start coming out. The problem is with the weekly magazines. Their freelancers or journalists or whatever you call them will start circling like sharks smelling blood. They’re all good at what they do, and once they latch on, they don’t let go. Their livelihood depends on it, after all. They can’t afford to have little things like good taste or people’s privacy stand in their way. They may be ‘writers’ like you, Tengo, but they’re a different breed, they don’t live in your literary ivory tower.”

  “So I’d better be careful too, I suppose.”

  “Absolutely. Get ready to protect yourself. There’s no telling what they’ll sniff out.”

  Tengo imagined a small boat surrounded by sharks, but only as a single cartoon frame without a clever twist. “You have to find something the Little People don’t have,” Fuka-Eri had said. What kind of “something” could that possibly be?

  Tengo said to Komatsu, “But isn’t this working out the way Professor Ebisuno planned it from the beginning?”

  “Well, maybe so,” Komatsu said. “Maybe it’ll turn out that he was just discreetly using us. But to some extent we knew what he was up to right from the start. He wasn’t hiding his plan from us. In that sense, it was a fair transaction. We could have said, ‘Sorry, Professor, too dangerous, we can’t get involved.’ That’s what any normal editor would have done. But as you know, Tengo, I’m no normal editor. Besides, things were already moving forward by then, and there was a little greed at work on my part, too. Maybe that’s why I had let my defenses down somewhat.”

  There was silence on the telephone—a short but dense silence.

  Tengo spoke first. “In other words, your plan was more or less hijacked by Professor Ebisuno.”

  “I suppose you could say that. Ultimately, his agenda trumped mine.”

  Tengo said, “Do you think Professor Ebisuno will be able to make things work his way?”

  “Well, he certainly thinks he can. He knows how to read a situation, and he has plenty of self-confidence. It just might go his way. But if this new commotion exceeds even Professor Ebisuno’s expectations, he might not be able to control the outcome. There’s a limit to what one person can do, even the most outstanding individual. So you’d better tighten your seat belt!”

  “Not even the tightest seat belt is going to do you any good if your plane crashes.”

  “No, but at least it makes you feel a little better.”

  Tengo couldn’t help smiling—if somewhat feebly. “Is that the point of this call—the thing that might not be all that enjoyable but might have a certain amount of paradoxical humor about it?”

  “To tell you the truth, I am feeling sorry I got you involved in this,” Komatsu said in an expressionless voice.

  “Don’t worry about me. I don’t have a thing to lose—no family, no social position, no future to speak of. What I’m worried about is Fuka-Eri. She’s just a seventeen-year-old girl.”

  “That concerns me, too, of course. There’s no way it couldn’t. But we can rack our brains here and it won’t change anything for her. For now, let’s just think about how we’re going to tie ourselves down somewhere so this storm doesn’t blow us away. We’d better keep a close eye on the papers.”

  “I’ve been making sure I check the papers every day.”

  “Good,” Komatsu said. “Which reminds me, do you have any idea at all where Fuka-Eri might be? Nothing comes to mind?”

  “Not a thing,” Tengo said. He was not a good liar. And Komatsu was strangely sensitive about such things. But he did not seem to notice the slight quaver in Tengo’s voice. His head was probably too full of himself at that point.

  “I’ll get in touch with you if anything else comes up,” Komatsu said, terminating the call.

&nb
sp; The first thing Tengo did after hanging up was pour an inch of bourbon into a glass. Komatsu had been right: he needed a drink.

  On Friday Tengo’s girlfriend came for her regular visit. The rain had stopped, but every inch of the sky was covered in gray cloud. They had a light meal and got into bed. Even during sex, Tengo went on thinking one fragmentary thought after another, but this did nothing to dull his physical pleasure. As always, she skillfully drew a week’s worth of desire out of Tengo and took care of it with great efficiency. She experienced full satisfaction, too, like a talented accountant who finds deep pleasure in the complex manipulation of figures in a ledger. Still, she seemed to notice that something else was on Tengo’s mind.

  “Hmm, your whiskey level seems to be going down,” she said. Her left hand rested on Tengo’s thick chest, enjoying the aftertaste of sex. Her third finger bore a smallish but sparkling diamond wedding ring. She was referring to the bottle of Wild Turkey that had been sitting on the shelf for months. Like most older women in sexual relationships with younger men, she was quick to note even tiny changes in his surroundings.

  “I’ve been waking up a lot at night,” Tengo said.

  “You’re not in love, are you?”

  Tengo shook his head. “No, I’m not in love.”

  “Your writing’s not going well, then?”

  “No, it’s moving along—where to, I’m not sure.”

  “But still, something’s bothering you.”

  “I wonder. I just can’t sleep very well. That rarely happens to me. I’ve always been a sound sleeper.”