“Transfer,” Fuka-Eri said. Then she took Tengo’s hand again. This was just before the train pulled into Tachikawa Station.

They stepped off the train and walked down one set of stairs and up another to a different platform. Fuka-Eri never once let go of Tengo’s hand. They probably looked like a pair of fond lovers to the people around them. There was quite an age difference, but Tengo looked younger than his actual age. Their size difference also probably amused some onlookers. A happy Sunday-morning date in the spring.

Through the hand holding his, however, Tengo felt no hint of affection for the opposite sex. The strength of her grip never changed. Her fingers had something like the meticulous professionalism of a doctor taking a patient’s pulse. It suddenly occurred to Tengo: Perhaps this girl thinks we can communicate wordlessly through the touch of fingers and palms. But even supposing such communication had actually taken place, it was all traveling in one direction rather than back and forth. Fuka-Eri’s palm might well be absorbing what was in Tengo’s mind, but that didn’t mean that Tengo could read Fuka-Eri’s mind. This did not especially worry Tengo, however. There was nothing in his mind—no thoughts or feelings—that he would be concerned to have her know.

Even if she has no feeling for me as a member of the opposite sex, she must like me to some extent, Tengo surmised. Or at least she must not have a bad impression of me. Otherwise, whatever her purpose, she wouldn’t go on holding my hand like this for such a long time.

Having changed now to the platform for the Oume Line, they boarded the waiting train. This station, Tachikawa, was the beginning of the Oume Line, which headed yet farther toward the hills northwest of Tokyo. The car was surprisingly crowded, full of old folks and family groups in Sunday hiking gear. Tengo and Fuka-Eri stood near the door.

“We seem to have joined an outing,” Tengo said, scanning the crowd.

“Is it okay to keep holding your hand,” Fuka-Eri asked Tengo. She had not let go even after they boarded the train.

“That’s fine,” Tengo said. “Of course”

Fuka-Eri seemed relieved and went on holding his hand. Her fingers and palm were as smooth as ever, and free of sweat. They still seemed to be trying to find and verify something inside him.

“You’re not afraid anymore,” she asked without a question mark.

“No, I’m not,” Tengo answered. He was not lying. His Sunday-morning panic attack had certainly lost its force, thanks perhaps to Fuka-Eri’s holding his hand. He was no longer sweating, nor could he hear his heart pounding. The hallucination paid him no visit, and his breathing was as calm as usual.

“Good,” she said without inflection.

Yes, good, Tengo also thought.

There was a simple, rapidly spoken announcement that the train would soon depart, and the train doors rumbled closed, sending an outsized shudder through the train as if some huge, ancient animal were waking itself from a long sleep. As though it had finally made up its mind, the train pulled slowly away from the platform.

Still holding hands with Fuka-Eri, Tengo watched the scenery go past the train window. At first, it was just the usual residential area scenery, but the farther they went, the more the flat Musashino Plain gave way to views of distant mountains. After nearly a dozen stops, the two-track line narrowed down to a single line of rails, and they had to transfer to a four-car train. The surrounding mountains were becoming increasingly prominent. Now they had gone beyond commuting distance from downtown Tokyo. The hills out here retained the withered look of winter, which brought out the brilliance of the evergreens. The smell of the air was different, too, Tengo realized, as the train doors opened at each new station, and sounds were subtly different. Fields lay by the tracks, and farmhouses increased in number. Pickup trucks seemed to outnumber sedans. We’ve really come a long way, Tengo thought. How far do we have to go?

“Don’t worry,” Fuka-Eri said, as if she had read his mind.

Tengo nodded silently. I don’t know, it feels like I’m going to meet her parents to ask for her hand in marriage, he thought.

Finally, after five stops on the single-track section of the line, they got off at a station called Futamatao. Tengo had never heard of the place before. What a strange name. Forked Tail? The small station was an old wooden building. Five other passengers got off with them. No one got on. People came to Futamatao to breathe the clean air on the mountain trails, not to see a performance of Man of La Mancha or go to a disco with a wild reputation or visit an Aston Martin showroom or eat gratin de homard at a famous French restaurant. That much was obvious from the clothing of the passengers who left the train here.

There were virtually no shops by the station, and no people. There was, however, one taxi parked there. It probably showed up whenever a train was scheduled to arrive. Fuka-Eri tapped on the window, and the rear door opened. She ducked inside and motioned for Tengo to follow her. The door closed, Fuka-Eri told the driver briefly where she wanted to go, and he nodded in response.

They were not in the taxi very long, but the route was tremendously complicated. They went up one steep hill and down another along a narrow farm road where there was barely enough room to squeeze past other vehicles. The number of curves and corners was beyond counting, but the driver hardly slowed down for any of them. Tengo clutched the door’s grip in terror. The taxi finally came to a stop after climbing a hill as frighteningly steep as a ski slope on what seemed to be the peak of a small mountain. It felt less like a taxi trip than a spin on an amusement park ride. Tengo produced two thousand-yen bills from his wallet and received his change and receipt in return.

A black Mitsubishi Pajero and a large, green Jaguar were parked in front of the old Japanese house. The Pajero was shiny and new, but the Jaguar was an old model so coated with white dust that its color was almost obscured. It seemed not to have been driven in some time. The air was startlingly fresh, and a stillness filled the surrounding space. It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it. The perfectly clear sky seemed to soar upward, and the warmth of the sunlight gently touched any skin directly exposed to it. Tengo heard the high, unfamiliar cry of a bird now and then, but he could not see the bird itself.

The house was large and elegant. It had obviously been built long ago, but it was well cared for. The trees and bushes in the front yard were beautifully trimmed. Several of the trees were so perfectly shaped and matched that they looked like plastic imitations. One large pine cast a broad shadow on the ground. The view from here was unobstructed, but it revealed not a single house as far as the eye could see. Tengo guessed that a person would have to loathe human contact to build a home in such an inconvenient place.

Turning the knob with a clatter, Fuka-Eri walked in through the unlocked front door and signaled for Tengo to follow her. No one came out to greet them. They removed their shoes in the quiet, almost too-large front entry hall. The glossy wooden floor of the corridor felt cool against stocking feet as they walked down it to the large reception room. The windows there revealed a panoramic view of the mountains and of a river meandering far below, the sunlight reflecting on its surface. It was a marvelous view, but Tengo was in no mood to enjoy it. Fuka-Eri sat him down on a large sofa and left the room without a word. The sofa bore the smell of a distant age, but just how distant Tengo could not tell.

The reception room was almost frighteningly free of decoration. There was a low table made from a single thick plank. Nothing lay on it—no ashtray, no tablecloth. No pictures adorned the walls. No clocks, no calendars, no vases. No sideboard, no magazines, no books. The floor had an antique rug so faded that its pattern could not be discerned, and the sofa and easy chairs seemed just as old. There was nothing else, just the large, raft-like sofa on which Tengo was sitting and three matching chairs. There was a large, open-style fireplace, but it showed no signs of having contained a fire recently. For a mid-April morning, the room was downright chilly, as if the cold that had seeped in through the winter had decided to stay for a while. Many long months and years seemed to have passed since the room had made up its mind never to welcome any visitors. Fuka-Eri returned and sat down next to Tengo, still without speaking.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Fuka-Eri shut herself up in her own enigmatic world, while Tengo tried to calm himself with several quiet deep breaths. Except for the occasional distant bird cry, the room was hushed. Tengo listened to the silence, which seemed to offer several different meanings. It was not simply an absence of sound. The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself. For no reason, he looked at his watch. Raising his face, he glanced at the view outside the window, and then looked at his watch again. Hardly any time had passed. Time always passed slowly on Sunday mornings.

Ten minutes went by like this. Then suddenly, without warning, the door opened and a thinly built man entered the reception room with nervous footsteps. He was probably in his mid-sixties. He was no taller than five foot three, but his excellent posture prevented him from looking unimpressive. His back was as straight as if it had a steel rod in it, and he kept his chin pulled in smartly. His eyebrows were bushy, and he wore black, thick-framed glasses that seemed to have been made to frighten people. His movements suggested an exquisite machine with parts designed for compactness and efficiency. Tengo started to stand and introduce himself, but the man quickly signaled for him to remain seated. Tengo sat back down while the man rushed to lower himself into the facing easy chair, as if in a race with Tengo. For a while, the man simply stared at Tengo, saying nothing. His gaze was not exactly penetrating, but his eyes seemed to take in everything, narrowing and widening like a camera’s diaphragm when the photographer adjusts the aperture.

The man wore a deep green sweater over a white shirt and dark gray woolen trousers. Each piece looked as if it had been worn daily for a good ten years or more. They conformed to his body well enough, but they were also a bit threadbare. This was not a person who paid a great deal of attention to his clothes. Nor, perhaps, did he have people close by who did it for him. The thinness of his hair emphasized the rather elongated shape of his head from front to back. He had sunken cheeks and a square jaw. A plump child’s tiny lips were the one feature of his that did not quite match the others. His razor had missed a few patches on his face—or possibly it was just the way the light struck him. The mountain sunlight pouring through the windows seemed different from the sunlight Tengo was used to seeing.

“I’m sorry I made you come all this way,” the man said. He spoke with an unusually clear intonation, like someone long accustomed to public speaking—and probably about logical topics. “It’s not easy for me to leave this place, so all I could do was ask you to go to the trouble of coming here.”

Tengo said it was no trouble at all. He told the man his name and apologized for not having a business card.

“My name is Ebisuno,” the man said. “I don’t have a business card either.”

“Mr. ‘Ebisuno’?” Tengo asked.

“Everybody calls me ‘Professor.’ I don’t know why, but even my own daughter calls me ‘Professor.’”

“What characters do you write your name with?”

“It’s an unusual name. I hardly ever see anybody else with it. Eri, write the characters for him, will you?”

Fuka-Eri nodded, took out a kind of notebook, and slowly, painstakingly, wrote the characters for Tengo on a blank sheet with a ballpoint pen. The “Ebisu” part was the character normally used for ancient Japan’s wild northern tribes. The “no” was just the usual character for “field.” The way Fuka-Eri wrote them, the two characters could have been scratched into a brick with a nail, though they did have a certain style of their own.

“In English, my name could be translated as ‘field of savages’—perfect for a cultural anthropologist, which is what I used to be.” The Professor’s lips formed something akin to a smile, but his eyes lost none of their attentiveness. “I cut my ties with the research life a very long time ago, though. Now, I’m doing something completely different. I’m living in a whole new ‘field of savages.’”

To be sure, the Professor’s name was an unusual one, but Tengo found it familiar. He was fairly certain there had been a famous scholar named Ebisuno in the late sixties who had published a number of well-received books. He had no idea what the books were about, but the name, at least, remained in some remote corner of his memory. Somewhere along the way, though, he had stopped encountering it.

“I think I’ve heard your name before,” Tengo said tentatively.

“Perhaps,” the Professor said, looking off into the distance, as if speaking about someone not present. “In any case, it would have been a long time ago.”

Tengo could sense the quiet breathing of Fuka-Eri seated next to him—slow, deep breathing.

“Tengo Kawana,” the Professor said as if reading a name tag.

“That’s right,” Tengo said.

“You majored in mathematics in college, and now you teach math at a cram school in Yoyogi,” the Professor said. “But you also write fiction. That’s what Eri tells me. Is that about right?”

“Yes, it is,” Tengo said.

“You don’t look like a math teacher. You don’t look like a writer, either.”

Tengo gave him a strained smile and said, “Somebody said exactly the same thing to me the other day. It’s probably my build.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad sense,” the Professor said, pressing back the bridge of his black-framed glasses. “There’s nothing wrong with not looking like something. It just means you don’t fit the stereotype yet.”

“I’m honored to have you say that. I’m not a writer yet. I’m still just trying to write fiction.”

“Trying.”

“It’s still trial and error for me.”

“I see,” the Professor said. Then, as if he had just noticed the chilliness of the room, he rubbed his hands together. “I’ve also heard that you’re going to be revising the novella that Eri wrote in the hopes that she can win a literary magazine’s new writers’ prize. You’re planning to sell her to the public as a writer. Is my interpretation correct?”

“That is basically correct,” Tengo said. “An editor named Komatsu came up with the idea. I don’t know if the plan is going to work or not. Or whether it’s even ethical. My only role is to revise the style of the work, Air Chrysalis. I’m just a technician. Komatsu is responsible for everything else.”

The Professor concentrated on his thoughts for a while. In the hushed room, Tengo could almost hear his brain working. The Professor then said, “This editor, Mr. Komatsu, came up with the idea, and you’re cooperating with him on the technical side.”

“Correct.”

“I’ve always been a scholar, and, to tell you the truth, I’ve never read fiction with much enthusiasm. I don’t know anything about customary practice in the world of writing and publishing fiction, but what you people are planning to do sounds to me like a kind of fraud. Am I wrong about that?”

“No, you are not wrong. It sounds like fraud to me, too,” Tengo said.

The Professor frowned slightly. “You yourself obviously have ethical doubts about this scheme, and still you are planning to go along with it, out of your own free will.”

“Well, it’s not exactly my own free will, but I am planning to go along with it. That is correct.”

“And why is that?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking myself again and again all week,” Tengo said honestly.

The Professor and Fuka-Eri waited in silence for Tengo to continue.

“Reasoning, common sense, instinct—they are all pleading with me to pull out of this as quickly as possible. I’m basically a cautious, commonsensical kind of person. I don’t like gambling or taking chances. If anything, I’m a kind of coward. But this is different. I just can’t bring myself to say no to Komatsu’s plan, as risky as it is. And my only reason is that I’m so strongly drawn to Air Chrysalis. If it had been any other work, I would have refused out of hand.”

The Professor gave Tengo a quizzical look. “In other words, you have no interest in the fraudulent part of the scheme, but you have a deep interest in the rewriting of the work. Is that it?”

“Exactly. It’s more than a ‘deep interest.’ If Air Chrysalis has to be rewritten, I don’t want to let anyone else do it.”

“I see,” the Professor said. Then he made a face, as if he had accidentally put something sour in his mouth. “I see. I think I understand your feelings in the matter. But how about this Komatsu person? What is he in it for? Money? Fame?”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what Komatsu wants,” Tengo said. “But I do think it’s something bigger than money or fame.”

“And what might that be?”

“Well, Komatsu himself might not see it that way, but he is another person who is obsessed with literature. People like him are looking for just one thing, and that is to find, if only once in their lifetimes, a work that is unmistakably the real thing. They want to put it on a tray and serve it up to the world.”

The Professor kept his gaze fixed on Tengo for a time. Then he said, “In other words, you and he have very different motives—motives that have nothing to do with money or fame.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Whatever your motives might be, though, the plan is, as you said, a very risky one. If the truth were to come out at some point, it would be sure to cause a scandal, and the public’s censure would not be limited to you and Mr. Komatsu. It could deliver a fatal blow to Eri’s life at the tender age of seventeen. That’s the thing that worries me most about this.”

“And you should be worried,” Tengo said with a nod. “You’re absolutely right.”

The space between the Professor’s thick, black eyebrows contracted half an inch. “But what you are telling me is that you want to be the one to rewrite Air Chrysalis even if it could put Eri in some danger.”

“As I said before, that is because my desire comes from a place that reason and common sense can’t reach. Of course I would like to protect Eri as much as possible, but I can’t promise that she would never be harmed by this. That would be a lie.”

“I see,” the Professor said. Then he cleared his throat as if to mark a turning point in the discussion. “Well, you seem to be an honest person, at least.”

“I’m trying to be as straightforward with you as I can.”

The Professor stared at the hands resting on his knees as if he had never seen them before. First he stared at the backs of his hands, and then he flipped them over and stared at his palms. Then he raised his face and said, “So, does this editor, this Mr. Komatsu, think that his plan is really going to work?”

“Komatsu’s view is that there are always two sides to everything,” Tengo said. “A good side and a not-so-bad side.”

The Professor smiled. “A most unusual view. Is this Mr. Komatsu an optimist, or is he self-confident?”

“Neither,” Tengo said. “He’s just cynical.”

The Professor shook his head lightly. “When he gets cynical, he becomes an optimist. Or he becomes self-confident. Is that it?”

“He might have such tendencies.”

“A hard man to deal with, it seems.”

“He is a pretty hard man to deal with,” Tengo said. “But he’s no fool.”

The Professor let out a long, slow breath. Then he turned to Fuka-Eri. “How about it, Eri? What do you think of this plan?”

Fuka-Eri stared at an anonymous point in space for a while. Then she said, “It’s okay.”

“In other words, you don’t mind letting Mr. Kawana here rewrite Air Chrysalis?”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“It might cause you a lot of trouble.”

Fuka-Eri said nothing in response to this. All she did was tightly grip the collar of her cardigan together at the neck, but the gesture was a direct expression of her firm resolve.

“She’s probably right,” the Professor said with a touch of resignation.

Tengo stared at her little hands, which were balled into fists.

“There is one other problem, though,” the Professor said to Tengo. “You and this Mr. Komatsu plan to publish Air Chrysalis and present Eri to the public as a novelist, but she’s dyslexic. Did you know that?”

“I got the general idea on the train this morning.”

“She was probably born that way. In school, they think she suffers from a kind of retardation, but she’s actually quite smart—even wise, in a very profound way. Still, her dyslexia can’t help your plan, to put it mildly.”

“How many people know about this?”

“Aside from Eri herself, three,” the Professor said. “There’s me, of course, my daughter Azami, and you. No one else knows.”

“You mean to say her teachers don’t know?”

“No, they don’t. It’s a little school in the countryside. They’ve probably never even heard of dyslexia. And besides, she only went to school for a short time.”

“Then we might be able to hide it.”

The Professor looked at Tengo for a while, as if judging the value of his face.

“Eri seems to trust you,” he said a moment later. “I don’t know why, but she does. And I—”

Tengo waited for him to continue.

“And I trust Eri. So if she says it’s all right to let you rewrite her novella, all I can do is give my approval. On the other hand, if you really do plan to go ahead with this scheme, there are a few things you should know about Eri.” The Professor swept his hand lightly across his right knee several times as if he had found a tiny piece of thread there. “What her childhood was like, for example, and where she spent it, and how I became responsible for raising her. This could take a while to tell.”

“I’m listening,” Tengo said.

Next to him on the sofa, Fuka-Eri sat up straight, still holding the collar of her cardigan closed at the throat.

“All right, then,” the Professor said. “The story goes back to the sixties. Eri’s father and I were close friends for a long time. I was ten years older, but we both taught in the same department at the same university. Our personalities and worldviews were very different, but for some reason we got along. Both of us married late, and we both had daughters shortly after we got married. We lived in the same faculty apartment building, and our families were always together. Professionally, too, we were doing very well. People were starting to notice us as ‘rising stars of academe.’ We often appeared in the media. It was a tremendously exciting time for us.

“Toward the end of the sixties, though, things started to change for the worse. The second renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was coming in 1970, and the student movement was opposed to it. They blockaded the university campuses, fought with the riot police, had bloody factional disputes, and as a result, people died. All of this was more than I wanted to deal with, and I decided to leave the university. I had never been that temperamentally suited to the academic life, but once these protests and riots began, I became fed up with it. Establishment, antiestablishment: I didn’t care. Ultimately, it was just a clash of organizations, and I simply didn’t trust any kind of organization, big or small. You, I would guess, were not yet old enough to be in the university in those days.”

“No, the commotion had all died down by the time I started.”

“The party was over, you mean.”

“Pretty much.”

The Professor raised his hands for a moment and then lowered them to his knees again. “So I quit the university, and two years later Eri’s father left. At the time, he was a great believer in Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideology and supported China’s Cultural Revolution. We heard almost nothing in those days about how terrible and inhumane the Cultural Revolution could be. It even became trendy with some intellectuals to hold up Mao’s Little Red Book. Eri’s father went so far as to organize a group of students into a kind of Red Guard on campus, and he participated in the strike against the university. Some student-believers on other campuses came to join his organization, and for a while, under his leadership, the faction became quite large. Then the university got the riot police to storm the campus. He was holed up there with his students, so he was arrested with them, convicted, and sentenced. This led to his de facto dismissal from the university. Eri was still a little girl then and probably doesn’t remember any of this.”

Fuka-Eri remained silent.

“Her father’s name is Tamotsu Fukada. After leaving the university, he took with him ten core students from his Red Guard unit and they entered the Takashima Academy. Most of the students had been expelled from the university. They all needed someplace to go, and Takashima Academy was not a bad choice for them. The media paid some attention to their movements at the time. Do you know anything about this?”

Tengo shook his head. “No, nothing.”

“Fukada’s family went with him—meaning his wife and Eri here. They all entered Takashima together. You know about the Takashima Academy, don’t you?”

“In general,” Tengo said. “It’s organized like a commune. They live a completely communal lifestyle and support themselves by farming. Dairy farming, too, on a national scale. They don’t believe in personal property and own everything collectively.”

“That’s it. Fukada was supposedly looking for a utopia in the Takashima system,” the Professor said with a frown. “But utopias don’t exist, of course, anywhere in any world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion. What Takashima is doing, if you ask me, is making mindless robots. They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve. To people who are searching for that kind of environment, the Takashima Academy may well be utopia.

“But Fukada is not that kind of person. He likes to think things out for himself, to examine every aspect of an issue. That’s how he made his living all those years: it was his profession. He could never be satisfied with a place like Takashima. He knew that much from the start. Kicked out of the university with a bunch of book-smart students in tow, he didn’t have anywhere else to go, so he chose Takashima as a temporary refuge. What he was looking for there was not utopia but an understanding of the Takashima system. The first thing they had to do was learn farming techniques. Fukada and his students were all city people. They didn’t know any more about farming than I know about rocket science. And there was a lot for them to learn: distribution systems, the possibilities and limits of a self-sufficient economy, practical rules for communal living, and so on. They lived in Takashima for two years, learning everything they could. After that, Fukada took his group with him, left Takashima, and went out on his own.”

“Takashima was fun,” Fuka-Eri said.

The Professor smiled. “I’m sure Takashima is fun for little children. But when you grow up and reach a certain age and develop an ego, life in Takashima for most young people comes close to a living hell. The leaders use their power to crush people’s natural desire to think for themselves. It’s foot-binding for the brain.”

“Foot-binding,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“In the old days in China, they used to cram little girls’ feet into tiny shoes to keep them from growing,” Tengo explained to her.

She pictured it to herself, saying nothing.

The Professor continued, “The core of Fukada’s splinter group, of course, was made up of ex-students who were with him from his Red Guard days, but others came forward too, so the size of the group snowballed beyond anyone’s expectations. A good number of people had entered Takashima for idealistic reasons but were dissatisfied and disappointed with what they found: people who had been hoping for a hippie-style communal life, leftists scarred by the university uprisings, people dissatisfied with ordinary life and searching for a new world of spirituality, single people, people who had their families with them like Fukada—a motley crew if ever there was one, and Fukada was their leader. He had a natural gift for leadership, like Moses leading the Israelites. He was smart, eloquent, and had outstanding powers of judgment. He was a charismatic figure—a big man. Just about your size, come to think of it. People placed him at the center of the group as a matter of course, and they followed his judgment.”

The Professor held out his arms to indicate the man’s physical bulk. Fuka-Eri stared first at the Professor’s arms and then at Tengo, but she said nothing.

“Fukada and I are totally different, both in looks and personality. But even given our differences, we were very close friends. We recognized each other’s abilities and trusted each other. I can say without exaggeration that ours was a once-in-a-lifetime friendship.”

Under Tamotsu Fukada’s leadership, the group had found a depopulated village that suited their purposes in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture. The village was on the brink of death. The few old people who remained there could not manage the crops themselves and had no one to carry on the farm work after they were gone. The group was able to purchase the fields and houses for next to nothing, including the vinyl greenhouses. The village office provided a subsidy on condition that the group continue to cultivate the established farmland, and they were granted preferential tax treatment for at least the first few years. In addition, Fukada had his own personal source of funds, but Professor Ebisuno had no idea where the money came from.

“Fukada refused to talk about it, and he never revealed the secret to anybody, but somewhere he got hold of a considerable amount of cash that was needed to establish the commune. They used the money to buy farm machinery and building materials, and to set up a reserve fund. They repaired the old houses by themselves and built facilities that would enable their thirty members to live. This was in 1974. They called their new commune “Sakigake,” or “Forerunner.”

Sakigake? The name sounded familiar to Tengo, but he couldn’t remember where he might have heard it before. When his attempt to trace the memory back ended in failure, he felt unusually frustrated.

The Professor continued, “Fukada was resigned to the likelihood that the operation of the commune would be tough for the first several years until they became accustomed to the area, but things went more smoothly than he had expected. They were blessed with good weather and helpful neighbors. People readily took to Fukada as leader, given his sincere personality, and they admired the hardworking young members they saw sweating in the fields. The locals offered useful advice. In this way, the members were able to absorb practical knowledge about farming techniques and learn how to live off the land.

“While they continued to practice what they had learned in Takashima, Sakigake also came up with several of their own innovations. For example, they switched to organic farming, eschewing chemical pesticides and growing their vegetables entirely with organic fertilizers. They also started a mail-order food service pitched directly to affluent urbanites. That way they could charge more per unit. They were the first of the so-called ecological farmers, and they knew how to make the most of it. Having been raised in the city, the commune’s members knew that city people would be glad to pay high prices for fresh, tasty vegetables free of pollutants. They created their own distribution system by contracting with delivery companies and simplifying their routes. They were also the first to make a virtue of the fact that they were selling ‘un-uniform vegetables with the soil still clinging to them.’”

The professor went on. “I visited Fukada on his farm any number of times. He seemed invigorated by his new surroundings and the chance to try new possibilities there. It was probably the most peaceful, hope-filled time of his life, and his family also appeared to have adapted well to this new way of living.

“More and more people would hear about Sakigake farm and show up there wanting to become members. The name had gradually become more widely known through the mail order business, and the mass media had reported on it as an example of a successful commune. More than a few people were eager to escape from the real world’s mad pursuit of money and its flood of information, instead earning their living by the sweat of their brow. Sakigake appealed to them. When these people showed up, Sakigake would interview and investigate them, and give the promising ones membership. They couldn’t admit everyone who came. They had to preserve the members’ high quality and ethics. They were looking for people with strong farming skills and healthy physiques who could tolerate hard physical labor. They also welcomed women in hopes of keeping something close to a fifty-fifty male-female ratio. Increasing the numbers would mean enlarging the scale of the farm, but there were plenty of extra fields and houses nearby, so that was no problem. Young bachelors made up the core of the farm’s membership at first, but the number of people joining with families gradually increased. Among the newcomers were well-educated professionals—doctors, engineers, teachers, accountants, and the like. Such people were heartily welcomed by the community since their professional skills could be put to good use.”

Tengo asked, “Did the commune adopt Takashima’s type of primitive communist system?”

The Professor shook his head. “No, Fukada avoided the communal ownership of property. Politically, he was a radical, but he was also a coolheaded realist. What he was aiming for was a more flexible community, not a society like an ant colony. His approach was to divide the whole into a number of units, each leading its own flexible communal life. They recognized private property and apportioned out compensation to some extent. If you weren’t satisfied with your unit, you could switch to another one, and you were free to leave Sakigake itself anytime you liked. There was full access to the outside world, too, and there was virtually no ideological inculcation or brainwashing. He had learned when they were in Takashima that a natural, open system would increase productivity.”

Under Fukada’s leadership, the operation of Sakigake farm remained on track, but eventually the commune split into two distinct factions. Such a split was inevitable as long as they kept Fukada’s flexible unit system. On one side was a militant faction, a revolutionary group based on the Red Guard unit that Fukada had originally organized. For them, the farming commune was strictly preparatory for the revolution. Farming was just a cover for them until the time came for them to take up arms. That was their unshakable stance.

On the other side was the moderate faction. As the majority, they shared the militant faction’s opposition to capitalism, but they kept some distance from politics, instead preferring the creation of a self-sufficient communal life in nature. Insofar as farming was concerned, each faction shared the same goals, but whenever it became necessary to make decisions regarding operational policy of the commune as a whole, their opinions split. Often they could find no room for rapprochement, and this would give rise to violent arguments. The breakup of the commune was just a matter of time.

Maintaining a neutral stance became increasingly difficult with each passing day. Eventually, Fukada found himself trapped between the two factions. He was generally aware that 1970s Japan was not the place or time for mounting a revolution. What he had always had in mind was the potential of a revolution—revolution as a metaphor or hypothesis. He believed that exercising that kind of antiestablishment, subversive will was indispensable for a healthy society. But his students wanted a real revolution with real bloodshed. Of course Fukada bore some responsibility for this. He was the one who had planted such baseless myths in their heads. But he never told them that his “revolution” had quotation marks around it.

And so the two factions of the Sakigake commune parted ways. The moderate faction continued to call itself “Sakigake” and remained in the original village, while the militant faction moved to a different, abandoned village a few miles away and made it the base of their revolutionary movement. The Fukada family remained in Sakigake with all the other families. The split was a friendly one. It appears that Fukada obtained the funds for the new commune from his usual unspecified source. Even after their separation, the two farms maintained a cooperative relationship. They traded necessary materials and, for economic reasons, used the same distribution routes for their products. The two small communities had to help each other if they were to survive.

One thing did change, however, shortly after the split: the effective cessation of visits between the old Sakigake members and the new commune. Only Fukada himself continued to correspond with his former radical students. Fukada felt a strong sense of responsibility for them, as the one who had originally organized and led them into the mountains of Yamanashi. In addition, the new commune needed the secret funds that Fukada controlled.

“Fukada was probably in a kind of schizoid state by then,” the Professor said. “He no longer believed with his whole heart in the possibility or the romance of the revolution. Neither, however, could he completely disavow it. To do so would mean disavowing his life and confessing his mistakes for all to see. This was something he could not do. He had too much pride, and he worried about the confusion that would surely arise among his students as a result. At that stage, he still wielded a certain degree of control over them.

“This is how he found himself living a life that had him running back and forth between Sakigake and the new commune. He took upon himself the simultaneous duties of leader of one and adviser to the other. So a person who no longer truly believed in the revolution continued to preach revolutionary theory. The members of the new commune carried on with their farm work while they submitted to the harsh discipline of military training and ideological indoctrination. And politically, in contrast to Fukada, they became increasingly radicalized. They adopted a policy of obsessive secrecy, and they no longer allowed outsiders to enter. Aware of their calls for armed revolution, the security police identified them as a group that needed to be watched and placed them under surveillance, though not at a high level of alert.”

The Professor stared at his knees again, and then looked up.

“Sakigake split in two in 1976,” he went on. “Eri escaped from Sakigake and came to live with us the following year. Around that time the new commune began calling itself ‘Akebono.’”

Tengo looked up and narrowed his eyes. “Wait a minute,” he said. Akebono. I’m absolutely certain I’ve heard that name, too. But the memory was vague and incoherent. All he could grab hold of were a few fragmentary, fact-like details. “This Akebono … didn’t they cause some kind of big incident a while ago?”

“Exactly,” Professor Ebisuno said, looking at Tengo more intently than he had until now. “We’re talking about the famous Akebono, of course, the ones who staged the gun battle with the police in the mountains near Lake Motosu.”

Gun battle, Tengo thought. I remember hearing about that. It was big news. I can’t remember the details, though, for some reason, and I’m confused about the sequence of events. When he strained to recall more, he experienced a wrenching sensation through his whole body, as though his top and bottom halves were being twisted in opposite directions. He felt a dull throbbing deep in his head, and the air around him suddenly went thin. Sounds became muffled as though he were underwater. He was probably about to have an “attack.”

“Is something wrong?” the Professor asked with obvious concern. His voice seemed to be coming from a very great distance.

Tengo shook his head and in a strained voice said, “I’m fine. It’ll go away soon.”