“When you say, ‘It takes time,’ do you mean … it takes a lot of time?” Tengo asked.

“A lot,” Fuka-Eri declared.

“A lot longer than most people?”

Fuka-Eri gave him a sharp nod.

“That must be a problem in school, too. I’m sure you have to read a lot of books for your classes.”

“I just fake it,” she said coolly.

Somewhere in his head, Tengo heard an ominous knock. He wished he could ignore it, but that was out of the question. He had to know the truth.

“Could what you’re talking about be what they call ‘dyslexia’?” he asked.

“Dyslexia.”

“A learning disability. It means you have trouble making out characters on a page.”

“They have mentioned that. Dys—”

“Who mentioned that?”

She gave a little shrug.

“In other words,” Tengo went on, searching for the right way to say it, “is this something you’ve had since you were little?”

Fuka-Eri nodded.

“So that explains why you’ve hardly read any novels.”

“By myself,” she said.

This also explained why her writing was free of the influence of any established authors. It made perfect sense.

“You didn’t read them ‘by yourself,’ ” Tengo said.

“Somebody read them to me.”

“Your father, say, or your mother read books aloud to you?”

Fuka-Eri did not reply to this.

“Maybe you can’t read, but you can write just fine, I would think,” Tengo asked with growing apprehension.

Fuka-Eri shook her head. “Writing takes time too.”

“A lot of time?”

Fuka-Eri gave another small shrug. This meant yes.

Tengo shifted his position on the train seat. “Which means, perhaps, that you didn’t write the text of Air Chrysalis by yourself.”

“I didn’t.”

Tengo let a few seconds go by. A few heavy seconds. “So who did write it?”

“Azami,” she said.

“Who’s Azami?”

“Two years younger.”

There was another short gap. “This other girl wrote Air Chrysalis for you.”

Fuka-Eri nodded as though this were an absolutely normal thing.

Tengo set the gears of his mind spinning. “In other words, you dictated the story, and Azami wrote it down. Right?”

“Typed it and printed it,” Fuka-Eri said.

Tengo bit his lip and tried to put in order the few facts that he had been offered so far. Once he had done the rearranging, he said, “In other words, Azami printed the manuscript and sent it in to the magazine as an entry in the new writer’s contest, probably without telling you what she was doing. And she’s the one who gave it the title Air Chrysalis.”

Fuka-Eri cocked her head to one side in a way that signaled neither a clear yes nor a clear no. But she did not contradict him. This probably meant that he generally had the right idea.

“This Azami—is she a friend of yours?”

“Lives with me.”

“She’s your younger sister?”

Fuka-Eri shook her head. “Professor’s daughter.”

“The Professor,” Tengo said. “Are you saying this Professor also lives with you?”

Fuka-Eri nodded. Why bother to ask something so obvious? she seemed to be saying.

“So the person I’m going to meet now must be this ‘Professor,’ right?”

Fuka-Eri turned toward Tengo and looked at him for a moment as if observing the flow of a distant cloud or considering how best to deal with a slow-learning dog. Then she nodded.

“We are going to meet the Professor,” she said in a voice lacking expression.

This brought their conversation to a tentative end. Again Tengo and Fuka-Eri stopped talking and, side by side, watched the cityscape stream past the train window opposite them. Featureless houses without end stretched across the flat, featureless earth, thrusting numberless TV antennas skyward like so many insects. Had the people living in those houses paid their NHK subscription fees? Tengo often found himself wondering about TV and radio reception fees on Sundays. He didn’t want to think about them, but he had no choice.

Today, on this wonderfully clear mid-April morning, a number of less-than-pleasant facts had come to light. First of all, Fuka-Eri had not written Air Chrysalis herself. If he was to take what she said at face value (and for now he had no reason to think that he should not), Fuka-Eri had merely dictated the story and another girl had written it down. In terms of its production process, it was no different from some of the greatest landmarks in Japanese literary history—the Kojiki, with its legendary history of the ruling dynasty, for example, or the colorful narratives of the warring samurai clans of the twelfth century, The Tale of the Heike. This fact served to lighten somewhat the guilt he felt about modifying the text of Air Chrysalis, but at the same time it made the situation as a whole significantly more complicated.

In addition, Fuka-Eri had a bad case of dyslexia and couldn’t even read a book in the normal way. Tengo mentally reviewed his knowledge of dyslexia. He had attended lectures on the disorder when he was taking teacher training courses in college. A person with dyslexia could, in principle, both read and write. The problem had nothing to do with intelligence. Reading simply took time. The person might have no trouble with a short selection, but the longer the passage, the more difficulty the person’s information processing faculty encountered, until it could no longer keep up. The link between a character and what it stood for was lost. These were the general symptoms of dyslexia. The causes were still not fully understood, but it was not surprising for there to be one or two dyslexic children in any classroom. Einstein had suffered from dyslexia, as had Thomas Edison and Charles Mingus.

Tengo did not know whether people with dyslexia generally experienced the same difficulties in writing as in reading, but it seemed to be the case with Fuka-Eri. One was just as difficult for her as the other.

What would Komatsu say when he found out about this? Tengo caught himself sighing. This seventeen-year-old girl was congenitally dyslexic and could neither read books nor write extended passages. Even when she engaged in conversation, she could only speak one sentence at a time (assuming she was not doing so intentionally). To make someone like this into a professional novelist (even if only for show) was going to be impossible. Even supposing that Tengo succeeded in rewriting Air Chrysalis, that it took the new writers’ prize, and that it was published as a book and praised by the critics, they could not go on deceiving the public forever. It might go well at first, but before long people would begin to think that “something” was “funny.” If the truth came out at that point, everyone involved would be ruined. Tengo’s career as a novelist would be cut short before it had hardly begun.

There was no way they could pull off such a flawed conspiracy. He had felt they were treading on thin ice from the outset, but now he realized that such an expression was far too tepid. The ice was already creaking before they ever stepped on it. The only thing for him to do was go home, call Komatsu, and announce, “I’m withdrawing from the plan. It’s just too dangerous for me.” This was what anyone with any common sense would do.

But when he started thinking about Air Chrysalis, Tengo was split with confusion. As dangerous as Komatsu’s plan might be, he could not possibly stop rewriting the novella at this point. He might have been able to give up on the idea before he started working on it, but that was out of the question now. He was up to his neck in it. He was breathing the air of its world, adapting to its gravity. The story’s essence had permeated every part of him, to the walls of his viscera. Now the story was begging him to rework it: he could feel it pleading with him for help. This was something that only Tengo could do. It was a job well worth doing, a job he simply had to do.