Aboard a small boat, New Middle Counselor Tomomori

    Approached the Imperial Ship and said:

    “And so it seems to have come to this.

    Heave everything unsightly into the ocean.”

    He ran from stem to stern, sweeping, scrubbing,

    Gathering litter, cleaning everything with his own hands.

    The ladies-in-waiting asked, “How goes the battle, Counselor?”

    “Soon you will behold those marvelous men of the east,”

    He replied with caustic laughter.

    “How dare you jest at a time like this?” the women cried.

    Observing this state of affairs, the Nun of Second Rank

    Proceeded to carry out the plan

    Upon which she had settled long before.

    Hooding herself under two dark-gray robes,

    She lifted high the hems of her glossy silk split skirt,

    Tucked the Imperial Bead Strand under one arm,

    Thrust the Imperial Sword under her sash,

    And took the Child Emperor himself in her arms.

    “Mere woman though I am, I shall never fall into enemy hands.

    I shall go wherever His Majesty goes.

    All you women whose hearts are with him,

    Follow us without delay.” So saying,

    She strode to the gunwale.

    His Majesty had turned but eight that year,

    Yet he exhibited a maturity far beyond his age.

    His handsome countenance radiated an Imperial glow,

    And his glossy black hair could cascade down his back past the waist.

    Confused by all the commotion, he asked,

    “Grandmother, where are you taking me?”

    She turned to the innocent young Sovereign and,

    Fighting back her tears, she said,

    “Do you not know yet what is happening?

    For having followed the Ten Precepts in your previous life,

    You were born to be a Lord commanding

    Ten thousand charioteers,

    But now, dragged down by an evil karma,

    Your good fortune has exhausted itself.

    Turn first now to the east,

    And say your farewell to the Grand Shrine of Ise.

    Then turn toward the west and call upon Amida Buddha

    That his heavenly hosts may guide you to the Western Pure Land.

    This country is no better than a scattering of millet,

    A place where hearts know only sadness.

    I am taking you, therefore, to a wonderful pure land called ‘Paradise.’ ”

    Her tears escaped as she spoke thus to him.

    His Majesty wore a robe of olive-tinged gray,

    And his hair was bound on either side in boyish loops.

    Tears streaming from his eyes, he joined his darling hands.

    First, he bowed toward the east

    And spoke his farewell to the Grand Shrine of Ise.

    Then he turned to the west and, once he had called upon Amida Buddha,

    The Nun of Second Rank clasped him to her breast and,

    Comforting him with the words,

    “There is another capital beneath the waves,”

    She plunged ten thousand fathoms beneath the sea.

Listening to her recite the story with his eyes closed, Tengo felt as though he were hearing it the traditional way, chanted by a blind priest accompanying himself on the lute, and he was reminded anew that The Tale of the Heike was a narrative poem handed down through an oral tradition. Fuka-Eri’s normal style of speaking was extremely flat, lacking almost all accent and intonation, but when she launched into the tale, her voice became startlingly strong, rich, and colorful, as if something had taken possession of her. The magnificent sea battle fought in 1185 on the swirling currents between Honshu and Kyushu came vividly to life. The Heike side was doomed to defeat, and Kiyomori’s wife Tokiko, the “Nun of Second Rank,” plunged into the waves holding her grandson, the child emperor Antoku, in her arms. Her ladies-in-waiting followed her in death rather than fall into the hands of the rough eastern warriors. Tomomori, concealing his grief, jokingly urged the ladies to kill themselves. You’ll have nothing but a living hell if you go on like this, he had told them. You had best end your lives here and now.

“Want me to go on,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“No, that’s fine. Thank you,” Tengo answered, stunned. He understood how those news reporters, at a loss for words, must have felt. “How did you manage to memorize such a long passage?”

“Listening to the tape over and over.”

“Listening to the tape over and over, an ordinary person still wouldn’t be able to memorize it.”

It suddenly dawned on Tengo that precisely to the degree she could not read a book, the girl’s ability to memorize what she had heard might be extraordinarily well developed, just as certain children with savant syndrome can absorb and remember huge amounts of visual information in a split second.

“I want you to read me a book,” Fuka-Eri said.

“What kind of book would you like?”

“Do you have the book you were talking about with the Professor,” Fuka-Eri asked. “The one with Big Brother.”

“1984? I don’t have that one.”

“What kind of story is it.”

Tengo tried to recall the plot. “I read it once a long time ago in the school library, so I don’t remember the details too well. It was published in 1949, when 1984 seemed like a time far in the future.”

“That’s this year.”

“Yes, by coincidence. At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past. In his novel, George Orwell depicted the future as a dark society dominated by totalitarianism. People are rigidly controlled by a dictator named Big Brother. Information is restricted, and history is constantly being rewritten. The protagonist works in a government office, and I’m pretty sure his job is to rewrite words. Whenever a new history is written, the old histories all have to be thrown out. In the process, words are remade, and the meanings of current words are changed. What with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true anymore. They lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally. It’s that kind of story.”

“They rewrite history.”

“Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime.”

Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.

Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”

“You rewrite stuff.”

Tengo laughed and took a sip of wine. “All I did was touch up your story, for the sake of expedience. That’s totally different from rewriting history.”

“But that Big Brother book is not here now,” she asked.

“Unfortunately, no. So I can’t read it to you.”

“I don’t mind another book.”

Tengo went to his bookcase and scanned the spines of his books. He had read many books over the years, but he owned few. He tended to dislike filling his home with a lot of possessions. When he finished a book, unless it was something quite special, he would take it to a used-book store. He bought only books he knew he was going to read right away, and he would read the ones he cared about very closely, until they were ingrained in his mind. When he needed other books he would borrow them from the neighborhood library.

Choosing a book to read to Fuka-Eri took Tengo a long time. He was not used to reading aloud, and had almost no clue which might be best for that. After a good deal of indecision, he pulled out Anton Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, which he had just finished reading the week before. He had marked the more interesting spots with paper tags and figured this would make it easy to choose suitable passages to read.