“I’m listening,” Tengo said.

Next to him on the sofa, Fuka-Eri sat up straight, still holding the collar of her cardigan closed at the throat.

“All right, then,” the Professor said. “The story goes back to the sixties. Eri’s father and I were close friends for a long time. I was ten years older, but we both taught in the same department at the same university. Our personalities and worldviews were very different, but for some reason we got along. Both of us married late, and we both had daughters shortly after we got married. We lived in the same faculty apartment building, and our families were always together. Professionally, too, we were doing very well. People were starting to notice us as ‘rising stars of academe.’ We often appeared in the media. It was a tremendously exciting time for us.

“Toward the end of the sixties, though, things started to change for the worse. The second renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was coming in 1970, and the student movement was opposed to it. They blockaded the university campuses, fought with the riot police, had bloody factional disputes, and as a result, people died. All of this was more than I wanted to deal with, and I decided to leave the university. I had never been that temperamentally suited to the academic life, but once these protests and riots began, I became fed up with it. Establishment, antiestablishment: I didn’t care. Ultimately, it was just a clash of organizations, and I simply didn’t trust any kind of organization, big or small. You, I would guess, were not yet old enough to be in the university in those days.”

“No, the commotion had all died down by the time I started.”

“The party was over, you mean.”

“Pretty much.”

The Professor raised his hands for a moment and then lowered them to his knees again. “So I quit the university, and two years later Eri’s father left. At the time, he was a great believer in Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideology and supported China’s Cultural Revolution. We heard almost nothing in those days about how terrible and inhumane the Cultural Revolution could be. It even became trendy with some intellectuals to hold up Mao’s Little Red Book. Eri’s father went so far as to organize a group of students into a kind of Red Guard on campus, and he participated in the strike against the university. Some student-believers on other campuses came to join his organization, and for a while, under his leadership, the faction became quite large. Then the university got the riot police to storm the campus. He was holed up there with his students, so he was arrested with them, convicted, and sentenced. This led to his de facto dismissal from the university. Eri was still a little girl then and probably doesn’t remember any of this.”

Fuka-Eri remained silent.

“Her father’s name is Tamotsu Fukada. After leaving the university, he took with him ten core students from his Red Guard unit and they entered the Takashima Academy. Most of the students had been expelled from the university. They all needed someplace to go, and Takashima Academy was not a bad choice for them. The media paid some attention to their movements at the time. Do you know anything about this?”

Tengo shook his head. “No, nothing.”

“Fukada’s family went with him—meaning his wife and Eri here. They all entered Takashima together. You know about the Takashima Academy, don’t you?”

“In general,” Tengo said. “It’s organized like a commune. They live a completely communal lifestyle and support themselves by farming. Dairy farming, too, on a national scale. They don’t believe in personal property and own everything collectively.”

“That’s it. Fukada was supposedly looking for a utopia in the Takashima system,” the Professor said with a frown. “But utopias don’t exist, of course, anywhere in any world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion. What Takashima is doing, if you ask me, is making mindless robots. They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve. To people who are searching for that kind of environment, the Takashima Academy may well be utopia.

“But Fukada is not that kind of person. He likes to think things out for himself, to examine every aspect of an issue. That’s how he made his living all those years: it was his profession. He could never be satisfied with a place like Takashima. He knew that much from the start. Kicked out of the university with a bunch of book-smart students in tow, he didn’t have anywhere else to go, so he chose Takashima as a temporary refuge. What he was looking for there was not utopia but an understanding of the Takashima system. The first thing they had to do was learn farming techniques. Fukada and his students were all city people. They didn’t know any more about farming than I know about rocket science. And there was a lot for them to learn: distribution systems, the possibilities and limits of a self-sufficient economy, practical rules for communal living, and so on. They lived in Takashima for two years, learning everything they could. After that, Fukada took his group with him, left Takashima, and went out on his own.”

“Takashima was fun,” Fuka-Eri said.

The Professor smiled. “I’m sure Takashima is fun for little children. But when you grow up and reach a certain age and develop an ego, life in Takashima for most young people comes close to a living hell. The leaders use their power to crush people’s natural desire to think for themselves. It’s foot-binding for the brain.”

“Foot-binding,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“In the old days in China, they used to cram little girls’ feet into tiny shoes to keep them from growing,” Tengo explained to her.

She pictured it to herself, saying nothing.

The Professor continued, “The core of Fukada’s splinter group, of course, was made up of ex-students who were with him from his Red Guard days, but others came forward too, so the size of the group snowballed beyond anyone’s expectations. A good number of people had entered Takashima for idealistic reasons but were dissatisfied and disappointed with what they found: people who had been hoping for a hippie-style communal life, leftists scarred by the university uprisings, people dissatisfied with ordinary life and searching for a new world of spirituality, single people, people who had their families with them like Fukada—a motley crew if ever there was one, and Fukada was their leader. He had a natural gift for leadership, like Moses leading the Israelites. He was smart, eloquent, and had outstanding powers of judgment. He was a charismatic figure—a big man. Just about your size, come to think of it. People placed him at the center of the group as a matter of course, and they followed his judgment.”

The Professor held out his arms to indicate the man’s physical bulk. Fuka-Eri stared first at the Professor’s arms and then at Tengo, but she said nothing.

“Fukada and I are totally different, both in looks and personality. But even given our differences, we were very close friends. We recognized each other’s abilities and trusted each other. I can say without exaggeration that ours was a once-in-a-lifetime friendship.”

Under Tamotsu Fukada’s leadership, the group had found a depopulated village that suited their purposes in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture. The village was on the brink of death. The few old people who remained there could not manage the crops themselves and had no one to carry on the farm work after they were gone. The group was able to purchase the fields and houses for next to nothing, including the vinyl greenhouses. The village office provided a subsidy on condition that the group continue to cultivate the established farmland, and they were granted preferential tax treatment for at least the first few years. In addition, Fukada had his own personal source of funds, but Professor Ebisuno had no idea where the money came from.