He sometimes listened to Janáček’s Sinfonietta with his older girlfriend. “Not bad,” she would say, but she liked old jazz records more than classical—the older the better. It was an odd taste for a woman her age. Her favorite record was a collection of W. C. Handy blues songs, performed by the young Louis Armstrong, with Barney Bigard on clarinet and Trummy Young on trombone. She gave Tengo a copy, though less for him than for herself to listen to.

After sex, they would often lie in bed listening to the record. She never tired of it. “Armstrong’s trumpet and singing are absolutely wonderful, of course, but if you ask me, the thing you should concentrate on is Barney Bigard’s clarinet,” she would say. Yet the actual number of Bigard solos on the record was small, and they tended to be limited to a single chorus. Louis Armstrong was the star of this record. But she obviously loved those few Bigard solos, the way she would quietly hum along with every memorized note.

She said she supposed there might be more talented jazz clarinetists than Barney Bigard, but you couldn’t find another one who could play with such warmth and delicacy. His best performances always gave rise to a particular mental image. Tengo could not, off the top of his head, name any other jazz clarinetists, but as he listened to this record over and over, he began to appreciate the sheer, unforced beauty of its clarinet performances—their richly nourishing and imaginative qualities. He had to listen closely and repeatedly for this to happen, and he had to have a capable guide. He would have missed the nuances on his own.

His girlfriend once said, “Barney Bigard plays beautifully, like a gifted second baseman. His solos are marvelous, but where he really shines is in the backup he gives the other musicians. That is so hard, but he does it like it’s nothing at all. Only an attentive listener can fully appreciate his true worth.”

Whenever the sixth tune on the flip side of the LP, “Atlanta Blues,” began, she would grab one of Tengo’s body parts and praise Bigard’s concise, exquisite solo, which was sandwiched between Armstrong’s song and his trumpet solo. “Listen to that! Amazing—that first, long wail like a little child’s cry! What is it—surprise? Overflowing joy? An appeal for happiness? It turns into a joyful sigh and weaves its way through a beautiful river of sound until it’s smoothly absorbed into some perfect, unknowable place. There! Listen! Nobody else can play such thrilling solos. Jimmy Noone, Sidney Bechet, Pee Wee Russell, Benny Goodman: they’re all great clarinetists, but none of them can create such perfectly sculptured works of art.”

“How come you know so much about old-time jazz?” Tengo once asked.

“I have lots of past lives that you don’t know anything about—past lives that no one can change in any way,” she said, gently massaging Tengo’s scrotum with the palm of her hand.

When he was finished writing for the morning, Tengo walked to the station and bought a paper at the newsstand. This he carried into a nearby café, where he ordered a “morning set” of buttered toast and a hard-boiled egg. He drank coffee and opened the paper while waiting for his food to come. As Komatsu had predicted, there was an article about Fuka-Eri on the human interest page. Not very large, the article appeared above an ad for Mitsubishi automobiles, under the headline “Popular High School Girl Writer Runaway?”

Fuka-Eri (penname of Eriko Fukada, 17), author of the current bestseller Air Chrysalis, has been listed as missing, it was revealed yesterday afternoon. According to her guardian, cultural anthropologist Takayuki Ebisuno (63), who filed the search request with the Oume police station, Eriko has failed to return either to her home in Oume City or to her Tokyo apartment since the night of June 27, and there has been no word from her since then. In response to this newspaper’s telephone inquiry, Mr. Ebisuno said that Eriko was in her usual good spirits when he last saw her, that he could think of no reason she would want to go into hiding, that she had never once failed to come home without permission, and that he is worried something might have happened to her. The editor in charge of Air Chrysalis at the ** publishing company, Yuji Komatsu, said, “The book has been at the top of the bestseller list for six straight weeks and has garnered a great deal of attention, but Miss Fukada herself has not wanted to make public appearances. We at the company have been unable to determine whether her current disappearance might have something to do with her attitude toward such matters. While young, Miss Fukada is an author with abundant talent from whom much can be expected in the future. We hope that she reappears in good health as soon as possible.” The police investigation is proceeding with several possible leads in view.

That was probably about as much as the newspapers could say at this stage, Tengo concluded. If they gave it a more sensational treatment and Fuka-Eri showed up at home two days later as if nothing had happened, the reporter who wrote the article would be embarrassed and the newspaper itself would lose face. The same was true for the police. Both issued brief, neutral statements like weather balloons to see what would happen. The story would turn big once the weekly magazines got ahold of it and the TV news shows turned up the volume. That would not happen for a few more days.

Sooner or later, though, things would heat up, that was for certain. A sensation was inevitable. There were probably only four people in the world who knew that she had not been abducted but was lying low somewhere, alone. Fuka-Eri herself knew it, of course, and Tengo knew it. Professor Ebisuno and his daughter Azami also knew it. No one else knew that the fuss over her disappearance was a hoax meant to attract broad attention.

Tengo could not decide whether his knowledge of the truth was something he should be pleased or upset about. Pleased, probably: at least he didn’t have to worry about Fuka-Eri’s welfare. She was in a safe place. At the same time it was also clear that Tengo was complicit in this complicated plot. Professor Ebisuno was using it as a lever, in order to pry up an ominous boulder and let the sunlight in. Then he would wait to see what crawled out from under the rock, and Tengo was being forced to stand right next to him. Tengo did not want to know what would crawl out from under the rock. He would prefer not to see it. It was bound to be a huge source of trouble. But he sensed he would have no choice but to look.

After he had drunk his coffee and eaten his toast and eggs, Tengo exited the café, leaving his rumpled newspaper behind. He went back to his apartment, brushed his teeth, showered, and prepared to leave for school.

.    .    .

During the noon break at the cram school, Tengo had a strange visitor. He had just finished his morning class and was reading a few of the day’s newspapers in the teachers’ lounge when the school director’s secretary approached him and said there was someone who wanted to see him. The secretary was a capable woman one year older than Tengo who, in spite of her title, handled virtually all of the school’s administrative business. Her facial features were a bit too irregular for her to be considered beautiful, but she had a nice figure and marvelous taste in clothes.

“He says his name is Mr. Ushikawa.”

Tengo did not recognize the name.

For some reason, a slight frown crossed her face. “He says he has ‘something important’ to discuss with you and wants to see you alone if possible.”

“Something important?” Tengo asked, taken aback. No one ever brought him “something important” to discuss at the cram school.

“The reception room was empty, so I showed him in there. Teachers aren’t supposed to use that room without permission, but I figured …”