Komatsu probably had it all figured out so that no matter what happened, he at least would survive. Just how he would manage it in this case, Tengo did not know, but Komatsu probably had his own clever ways of exploiting anything, be it a scandal or even total destruction. He was a shrewd player who was in no position to be criticizing Professor Ebisuno in that regard. But Tengo told himself with some confidence that Komatsu would be sure to contact him if clouds of suspicion began to appear on the horizon concerning the authorship of Air Chrysalis. So far, Tengo had merely functioned as a convenient and effective tool for Komatsu, but now he was also Komatsu’s Achilles’ heel. If Tengo were to disclose all the facts, that would put Komatsu in a terrible position, so Komatsu could not afford to ignore him. All Tengo had to do was wait for Komatsu to call; as long as there was no call, the “heat” was not “on.”

Tengo was more interested in what Professor Ebisuno might be doing at the moment. No doubt he was making things happen with the police, hounding them with the possibility that Sakigake was involved in Fuka-Eri’s disappearance, exploiting the event to pry open the religious organization’s hard shell. But were the police moving in that direction? Yes, they probably were. The media were already foaming at the mouth over the relationship of Fuka-Eri and Sakigake. If the police did nothing and important facts later emerged along that line, they would be attacked for having failed to investigate. In any case, however, their investigation would be carried out behind the scenes, which meant that no substantial new information was to be gleaned from either the weekly magazines or TV news.

Coming home from the cram school one day, Tengo found a thick envelope shoved into his mailbox in the apartment building’s front entrance. It bore Komatsu’s name as sender, the logo of his publisher, and six special-delivery postmarks. Back in his apartment, Tengo opened it to find copies of all the latest reviews of Air Chrysalis and a letter from Komatsu. Deciphering Komatsu’s scrawl took a good bit of time.

Tengo–

There have been no major developments so far. They still haven’t found Fuka-Eri. The weekly magazines and TV reports are mainly concentrating on the question of her birth and childhood, and fortunately the damage has not spread to us. The book keeps selling more and more, which may or may not be a cause for celebration, it’s hard to say. The company’s very happy, though, and the boss gave me a certificate of commendation and a cash bonus. I’ve been working for this publisher for over twenty years, but this is the first time he’s ever had anything nice to say about me. It kind of makes me want to see the look on their faces if they found out the truth.

I am enclosing copies of reviews and other articles regarding Air Chrysalis. Have a look at them for your own enlightenment when you get a chance. I think some of them will be of special interest to you, and a few will make you laugh—if you’re in the mood for laughing, that is.

I had an acquaintance of mine look into that New Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Arts we talked about. It was set up a few years ago, received government approval, and is now actively operating. It has an office and submits its annual financial reports. It awards grants to a number of scholars and writers each year—or so they claim. My source can’t tell where they get their money, and he finds the whole thing just plain fishy. It could be a front established as a tax write-off. A detailed investigation might turn up some more information, but we don’t have that kind of time and effort to spare. As I said to you when we last talked, I’m not quite convinced that a place like that wants to give three million yen to an unknown writer like you. There’s something going on behind the scenes, and we can’t discount the possibility that Sakigake has something to do with it. If so, it means they’ve sniffed out your connection to Air Chrysalis. In any case, it makes sense for you to have nothing to do with that organization.

Tengo returned Komatsu’s letter to the envelope. Why would Komatsu have bothered to write him a letter? It could simply be that, as long as he was sending the reviews, he put a letter in with them, but that was not like Komatsu. If he had something to tell Tengo, he would have done it on the phone as usual. A letter like this could remain as evidence in the future. Cautious Komatsu could not have failed to think about that. Or possibly Komatsu was less worried about evidence remaining than the possibility of a wiretap.

Tengo looked over at his phone. A wiretap? It had never occurred to him that anyone might be tapping his phone. Though, come to think of it, no one had called him in the past week. Maybe it was common knowledge that this phone was being tapped. He had not even heard from his older girlfriend, who liked talking on the phone. That was very unusual.

Even more unusual was the fact that she had not come to his apartment last Friday. She always called if something came up to prevent her from visiting him—say, her child was home from school with a cold, or her period had started all of a sudden. That Friday, however, she had not contacted him; she simply never showed up. Tengo had prepared a simple lunch for them in anticipation of her arrival, but ended up spending the day alone. Perhaps she was stuck dealing with some emergency, but it was not normal not to have had the slightest word from her. Meanwhile, he was not able to contact her from his end.

Tengo stopped thinking about both his girlfriend and the telephone. He sat at the kitchen table to read the book reviews in order. They had been assembled chronologically, the title of the newspaper or magazine and date of publication written in ballpoint pen in the upper left-hand corner. Komatsu must have had his part-time female assistant do it; he would never have undertaken such drudgery himself. Most of the reviews were positive. Many of the reviewers praised the story’s depth and boldness and acknowledged the precision of the style, several of them finding it “incredible” that the work had been written by a seventeen-year-old girl.

Not a bad guess, Tengo thought.

One article called the author “a Françoise Sagan who has absorbed the air of magical realism.” This piece, though vague and filled with reservations, generally seemed to be in praise of the work.

More than a few of the reviewers seemed perplexed by—or simply undecided about—the meaning of the air chrysalis and the Little People. One reviewer concluded his piece, “As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author’s intention, but many readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of ‘authorial laziness.’ While this may be fine for a debut work, if the author intends to have a long career as a writer, in the near future she may well need to explain her deliberately cryptic posture.”

Tengo cocked his head in puzzlement. If an author succeeded in writing a story “put together in an exceptionally interesting way” that “carries the reader along to the very end,” who could possibly call such a writer “lazy”?

But Tengo, in all honesty, had nothing clear to say to this. Maybe his thoughts on the matter were mistaken and the critic was right. He had immersed himself so deeply in the rewriting of Air Chrysalis that he was practically incapable of any kind of objectivity. He now saw the air chrysalis and the Little People as things that existed inside himself. Not even he could honestly say he knew what they meant. Nor was this so very important to him. The most meaningful thing was whether or not one could accept their existence as a fact, and Tengo was able to do this quite readily, which was precisely why he had been able to immerse his heart and soul in rewriting Air Chrysalis. Had he not been able to accept the story on its own terms, he would never have participated in the fraud, even if tempted with a fortune or faced with threats.