Tengo thought about it a moment. “I can start it anytime I decide to, but Fuka-Eri wants me to meet someone this Sunday before she gives me permission, and of course I haven’t met the person yet. If those negotiations break down, anything we do now could be a complete waste of time and money”

“Never mind, it’ll work out. Don’t worry about the details. Start working right away. We’re in a race against time.”

“Are you that sure my interview will go well?”

“That’s what my gut tells me,” Komatsu said. “I go by the gut. I might not appear to have any talent, but I’ve got plenty of gut instinct—if I do say so myself. That’s how I’ve survived all these years. By the way, Tengo, do you know what the biggest difference is between talent and gut instinct?”

“I have no idea.”

“You can have tons of talent, but it won’t necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, though, you’ll never go hungry.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Tengo said.

“All I’m saying is, don’t worry. You can start the job today.”

“If you say so, it’s fine with me. I was just trying to avoid kicking myself for starting too early.”

“Let me worry about that. I’ll take complete responsibility.”

“Okay, then. I’m seeing somebody this afternoon, but I’ll be free to start working after that. I can shop for a word processor this morning.”

“That’s great, Tengo. I’m counting on you. We’ll join forces and turn the world upside down.”

Tengo’s married girlfriend called just after nine, when she was finished dropping her husband and kids off at the train station for their daily commute. She was supposed to be visiting Tengo’s apartment that afternoon. They always got together on Fridays.

“I’m just not feeling right,” she said. “Sorry, but I don’t think I can make it today. See you next week.”

“Not feeling right” was her euphemism for her period. She had been raised to prefer delicate, euphemistic expressions. There was nothing delicate or euphemistic about her in bed, but that was another matter. Tengo said he was also sorry to miss her that day, but he supposed it couldn’t be helped.

In fact, he was not all that sorry to miss her on this particular Friday. He always enjoyed sex with her, but his feelings were already moving in the direction of rewriting Air Chrysalis. Ideas were welling up inside him like life-forms stirring in a primordial sea. This way, I’m no different from Komatsu, he thought. Nothing has been formally settled, and already my feelings are headed in that direction on their own.

At ten o’clock he went to Shinjuku and bought a Fujitsu word processor with his credit card. It was the latest model, far lighter than earlier versions. He also bought ink ribbon cartridges and paper. He carried everything back to his apartment, set the machine on his desk, and plugged it in. At work he used a full-sized Fujitsu word processor, and the basic functions of this portable model were not much different. To reassure himself of its operation, he launched into the rewriting of Air Chrysalis.

He had no well-defined plan for rewriting the novella, no consistent method or guidelines that he had prepared, just a few detailed ideas for certain sections. Tengo was not even sure it was possible to do a logical rewrite of a work of fantasy and feeling. True, as Komatsu had said, the style needed a great deal of improvement, but would it be possible for him to do that without destroying the work’s fundamental nature and atmosphere? Wouldn’t this be tantamount to giving a butterfly a skeleton? Such thoughts only caused him confusion and anxiety. But events had already started moving, and he had a limited amount of time. He couldn’t just sit there, thinking, arms folded. All he could do was deal with one small, concrete problem after another. Perhaps, as he worked on each detail by hand, an overall image would take shape spontaneously.

“I know you can do it, Tengo,” Komatsu had declared with confidence, and for some unfathomable reason, Tengo himself was able to swallow Komatsu’s words whole—for now. In both word and action, Komatsu could be a questionable character, and he basically thought of no one but himself. If the occasion arose, he would drop Tengo without batting an eyelash. But as Komatsu himself liked to say, he had special instincts as an editor. He made all judgments instantaneously and carried them out decisively, unconcerned what other people might say. This was a quality indispensable to a brilliant commanding officer on the front lines, but it was a quality that Tengo himself did not possess.

It was half past twelve by the time Tengo started rewriting Air Chrysalis. He typed the first few pages of the manuscript into the word processor as is, stopping at a convenient break in the story. He would rewrite this block of text first, changing none of the content but thoroughly reworking the style. It was like remodeling a condo. You leave the basic structure intact, keep the kitchen and bathroom in place, but tear out and replace the flooring, ceiling, walls, and partitions. I’m a skilled carpenter who’s been put in charge of everything, Tengo told himself. I don’t have a blueprint, so all I can do is use my intuition and experience to work on each separate problem that comes up.

After typing it in, he reread Fuka-Eri’s text, adding explanatory material to sections that felt too obscure, improving the flow of the language, and deleting superfluous or redundant passages. Here and there he would change the order of sentences or paragraphs. Fuka-Eri was extremely sparing in her use of adjectives and adverbs, and he wanted to remain consistent with that aspect of her style, but in certain places where he felt more descriptions were necessary, he would supply something appropriate. Her style overall was juvenile and artless, but the good and the bad passages stood out from each other so clearly that choosing among them took far less time and trouble than he had expected. The artlessness made some passages dense and difficult but it gave others a startling freshness. He needed only to throw out and replace the first type, and leave the second in place.

Rewriting her work gave Tengo a renewed sense that Fuka-Eri had written the piece without any intention of leaving behind a work of literature. All she had done was record a story—or, as she had put it, things she had actually witnessed—that she possessed inside her, and it just so happened that she had used words to do it. She might just as well have used something other than words, but she had not come across a more appropriate medium. It was as simple as that. She had never had any literary ambition, no thought of making the finished piece into a commodity, and so she felt no need to pay attention to the details of style, as if she had been making a room for herself and all she needed was walls and a roof to keep the weather out. This was why it made no difference to her how much Tengo reworked her writing. She had already accomplished her objective. When she said, “Fix it any way you like,” she was almost certainly expressing her true feelings.

And yet, the sentences and paragraphs that comprised Air Chrysalis were by no means the work of an author writing just for herself. If Fuka-Eri’s sole objective was to record things she had witnessed or imagined, setting them down as sheer information, she could have accomplished that much with a list. She didn’t have to go to the trouble of fashioning a story, which was unmistakably writing that was meant for other people to pick up and read, which was precisely why Air Chrysalis, though written without the objective of creating a literary work, and in crude and artless language, still had succeeded in acquiring the power to appeal directly to the heart. The more he read, however, the more convinced Tengo became that those “other people” were almost certainly not the same “general public” that modern literature invariably had in mind.