Tengo washed the rice, put it in the cooker, and turned on the switch. He used the time until the rice was ready to make miso soup with wakame seaweed and green onions, grill a sun-dried mackerel, take some tofu out of the refrigerator and flavor it with ginger, grate a chunk of daikon radish, and reheat some leftover boiled vegetables. To go with the rice, he set out some pickled turnip slices and a few pickled plums. With Tengo moving his big body around inside it, the little kitchen looked especially small. It did not bother him, though. He was long used to making do with what he had there.

“Sorry, but these simple things are all I can make,” Tengo said.

Fuka-Eri studied Tengo’s skillful kitchen work in great detail. With apparent fascination, she scrutinized the results of that work neatly arranged on the table and said, “You know how to cook.”

“I’ve been living alone for a long time. I prepare my meals alone as quickly as possible and I eat alone as quickly as possible. It’s become a habit.”

“Do you always eat alone.”

“Pretty much. It’s very unusual for me to sit down to a meal like this with somebody. I used to eat lunch here once a week with the woman we were talking about. But, come to think of it, I haven’t eaten dinner with anybody for a very long time.”

“Are you nervous.”

Tengo shook his head. “No, not especially. It’s just dinner. It does seem a little strange, though.”

“I used to eat with lots of people. We all lived together when I was little. And I ate with lots of different people after I moved to the Professor’s. He always had visitors.”

He had never heard Fuka-Eri speak so many sentences in a row.

“But you were eating alone all the time you were in hiding?” Tengo asked.

Fuka-Eri nodded.

“Where were you in hiding?” Tengo asked.

“Far away. The Professor arranged it for me.”

“What were you eating alone?”

“Instant stuff. Packaged food,” Fuka-Eri said. “I haven’t had a meal like this in a long time.”

Fuka-Eri put a lot of time into tearing the flesh of the mackerel from the bones with her chopsticks. She brought the pieces of fish to her mouth and put more time into chewing them, as though she were eating some rare new food. Then she took a sip of miso soup, examined the taste, made some kind of judgment, set her chopsticks on the table, and went on thinking.

Just before nine o’clock, Tengo thought he might have caught the sound of thunder in the distance. He parted the curtains slightly and looked outside. The sky was totally dark now, and across it streamed a number of ominously shaped clouds.

“You were right,” Tengo said after closing the curtain. “The weather’s looking very ugly out there.”

“Because the Little People are stirring,” Fuka-Eri said with a somber expression.

“When the Little People begin stirring, it does extraordinary things to the weather?”

“It depends. Weather is a question of how you look at it.”

“A question of how you look at it?”

Fuka-Eri shook her head. “I don’t really get it.”

Tengo didn’t get it either. To him, weather seemed to be an independent, objective condition. But he probably couldn’t get anywhere pursuing this question further. He decided to ask another question instead.

“Do you think the Little People are angry about something?”

“Something is about to happen,” the girl said.

“What kind of something?”

Fuka-Eri shook her head. “We’ll see soon.”

Together they washed and dried the dishes and put them away, after which they sat facing each other across the table, drinking tea. He would have liked a beer, but decided it might be better to refrain from drinking today. He sensed some kind of danger in the air, and thought he should remain as clearheaded as possible in case something happened.

“It might be better to go to sleep early,” Fuka-Eri said, pressing her hands against her cheeks like the screaming man on the bridge in the Munch picture. Not that she was screaming: she was just sleepy.

“Okay, you can use my bed,” Tengo said. “I’ll sleep on the sofa like before. Don’t worry, I can sleep anywhere.”

It was true. Tengo could fall asleep anywhere right away. It was almost a talent.

Fuka-Eri only nodded. She looked straight at Tengo for a while, offering no opinions. Then she briefly touched her freshly made ears, as if to check that they were still there. “Can you lend me your pajamas. I didn’t bring mine.”

Tengo took his extra pajamas from the bedroom dresser drawer and handed them to Fuka-Eri. They were the same pajamas he had lent her the last time she stayed here—plain blue cotton pajamas, washed and folded from that time. Tengo held them to his nose to check for odors, but there were none. Fuka-Eri took them, went to the bathroom to change, and came back to the dining table. Now her hair was down. The pajama legs and arms were rolled up as before.

“It’s not even nine o’clock,” Tengo said, glancing at the wall clock. “Do you always go to bed so early?”

Fuka-Eri shook her head. “Today is special.”

“Because the Little People are stirring outside?”

“I’m not sure. I’m just tired now.”

“You do look sleepy,” Tengo admitted.

“Can you read me a book or tell me a story in bed,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“Sure,” Tengo said. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

It was a hot and humid night, but as soon as she got into bed, Fuka-Eri pulled the quilt up to her chin, as if to form a firm barrier between the outside world and her own world. In bed, somehow, she looked like a little girl no more than twelve years old. The thunder rumbling outside the window was much louder than before, as though the lightning were beginning to strike somewhere quite close by. With each thunderclap, the windowpanes would rattle. Strangely, though, there were no lightning flashes to be seen, just thunder rolling across the pitch-dark sky. Nor was there any hint of rain. Something was definitely out of balance.

“They are watching us,” Fuka-Eri said.

“You mean the Little People?” Tengo asked.

Fuka-Eri did not answer him.

“They know we’re here,” Tengo said.

“Of course they know,” Fuka-Eri said.

“What are they trying to do to us?”

“They can’t do anything to us.”

“That’s good.”

“For now, that is.”

“They can’t touch us for now,” Tengo repeated feebly. “But there’s no telling how long that will go on.”

“No one knows,” Fuka-Eri declared with conviction.

“But even if they can’t do anything to us, they can, instead, do something to the people around us?” Tengo asked.

“Maybe so.”

“Maybe they can make terrible things happen to them?”

Fuka-Eri narrowed her eyes for a time with a deadly serious look, like a sailor trying to catch the song of a ship’s ghost. Then she said, “In some cases.”

“Maybe the Little People used their powers against my girlfriend. To give me a warning.”

Fuka-Eri slipped a hand out from beneath the quilt and gave her freshly made ear a scratching. Then she slipped the hand back inside. “What the Little People can do is limited.”

Tengo bit his lip for a moment. Then he said, “Exactly what kinds of things can they do, for example?”

Fuka-Eri started to offer an opinion on the matter but then had second thoughts and stopped. Her opinion, unvoiced, sank back into the place it had originated from—a deep, dark, unknown place.

“You said that the Little People have wisdom and power.”

Fuka-Eri nodded.

“But they have their limits.”

Fuka-Eri nodded.

“And that’s because they are people of the forest; when they leave the forest, they can’t unleash their powers so easily. And in this world, there exist something like values that make it possible to resist their wisdom and power. Is that it?”