Tengo prefaced his reading with a brief explanation of the book—that Chekhov was only thirty years old when he traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1890; that no one really knew why the urbane Chekhov, who had been praised as one of the most promising young writers of the generation after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and who was living a cosmopolitan life in Moscow, would have made up his mind to go off to live on Sakhalin Island, which was like the end of the earth. Sakhalin had been developed primarily as a penal colony, and to most people it symbolized only bad luck and misery. Furthermore, the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built, which meant that Chekhov had to make more than 2,500 miles of his trip in a horse-drawn cart across frozen earth, an act of self-denial that subjected the young man in poor health to merciless suffering. And finally, when he ended his eight-month-long journey to the Far East and published Sakhalin as the fruit of his labor, the work did little more than bewilder most readers, who found that it more closely resembled a dry investigative report or gazetteer than a work of literature. People whispered amongst themselves, “Why did Chekhov do such a wasteful, pointless thing at such an important stage in his literary career?” One critic answered scathingly, “It was just a publicity stunt.” Another view was that Chekhov had gone there looking for a new subject because he had run out of things to write about. Tengo showed Fuka-Eri the location of Sakhalin on the map included in the book.

“Why did Chekhov go to Sakhalin,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“You mean, why do I think he went?”

“Uh-huh. Did you read the book.”

“I sure did.”

“What did you think.”

“Chekhov himself might not have understood exactly why he went,” Tengo said. “Or maybe he didn’t really have a reason. He just suddenly felt like going—say, he was looking at the shape of Sakhalin Island on a map and the desire to go just bubbled up out of nowhere. I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what.’ And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what people are doing there. It’s like measles—you can’t show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration. Of course, traveling from Moscow to Sakhalin in those days involved almost unimaginable hardships, so I suspect that wasn’t Chekhov’s only reason for going.”

“Name another one.”

“Well, Chekhov was both a novelist and a doctor. It could be that, as a scientist, he wanted to examine something like a diseased part of the vast Russian nation with his own eyes. Chekhov felt uncomfortable living as a literary star in the city. He was fed up with the atmosphere of the literary world and was put off by the affectations of other writers, who were mainly interested in tripping each other up. He was disgusted by the malicious critics of the day. His journey to Sakhalin may have been an act of pilgrimage designed to cleanse him of such literary impurities. Sakhalin Island overwhelmed him in many ways. I think it was precisely for this reason that Chekhov never wrote a single literary work based on his trip to Sakhalin. It was not the kind of half-baked experience that could be easily made into material for a novel. The diseased part of the country became, so to speak, a physical part of him, which may have been the very thing he was looking for.”

“Is the book interesting,” Fuka-Eri asked.

“I found it very interesting. It’s full of dry figures and statistics and, as I said earlier, not much in the way of literary color. The scientist side of Chekhov is on full display. But that is the very quality of the book that makes me feel I can sense the purity of the decision reached by Anton Chekhov the individual. Mixed in with the dry records are some very impressive examples of observation of character and scenic description. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the dry passages that relate only facts. Some of them are quite marvelous. For example, the sections on the Gilyaks.”

“The Gilyaks,” Fuka-Eri said.

“The Gilyaks were the indigenous people of Sakhalin long before the Russians arrived to colonize it. They originally lived at the southern end of the island, but they moved up to the center when they were displaced by the Ainu, who moved north from Hokkaido. Of course, the Ainu themselves had also been pushed northward—by the Japanese. Chekhov struggled to observe at close hand and to record as accurately as possible the rapidly disappearing Gilyak culture.”

Tengo opened to a passage on the Gilyaks. At some points he would introduce suitable omissions and changes to the text in order to make it easily understandable to his listener.

The Gilyak is of strong, thick-set build, and average, even small, in height. Tall stature would hamper him in the taiga. [“That’s a Russian forest,” Tengo added.] His bones are thick and are distinctive for the powerful development of all the appendages and protuberances to which the muscles are attached, and this leads one to assume firm, powerful muscles and a constant strenuous battle with nature. His body is lean and wiry, without a layer of fat; you do not come across obese, plump Gilyaks. Obviously all the fat is expended in warmth, of which the body of a Sakhalin inhabitant needs to produce such a great deal in order to compensate for the loss engendered by the low temperature and the excessive dampness of the air. It’s clear why the Gilyak consumes such a lot of fat in his food. He eats rich seal, salmon, sturgeon and whale fat, meat and blood, all in large quantities, in a raw, dry, often frozen state, and because he eats coarse, unrefined food, the places to which his masticatory muscles are attached are singularly well developed and his teeth are heavily worn. His diet is made up exclusively of animal products, and rarely, only when he happens to have his dinner at home or if he eats out at a celebration, will he add Manchurian garlic or berries. According to Nevelskoy’s testimony, the Gilyaks consider working the soil a great sin; anybody who begins to dig the earth or who plants anything will infallibly die. But bread, which they were acquainted with by the Russians, they eat with pleasure, as a delicacy, and it is not a rarity these days in Alexandrovsk or Rykovo to meet a Gilyak carrying a round loaf under his arm.

Tengo stopped reading at that point for a short breather. Fuka-Eri was listening intently, but he could not read any reaction from her expression.

“What do you think? Do you want me to keep reading? Or do you want to switch to another book?” he asked.

“I want to know more about the Gilyaks.”

“Okay, I’ll keep going.”

“Is it okay if I get in bed?” Fuka-Eri asked.

“Sure,” Tengo said.

They moved into the bedroom. Fuka-Eri crawled into bed, and Tengo brought a chair next to the bed and sat in it. He continued with his reading.

The Gilyaks never wash, so that even ethnographers find it difficult to put a name to the real colour of their faces; they do not wash their linen, and their fur clothing looks as if it has just been stripped off a dead dog. The Gilyaks themselves give off a heavy, acid smell, and you know you are near their dwellings from the repulsive, sometimes hardly bearable odour of dried fish and rotting fish offal. By each yurt usually lies a drying ground filled to the brim with split fish, which from a distance, especially when the sun is shining on them, look like filaments of coral. Around these drying grounds Kruzenshtern saw a vast number of maggots covering the ground to the depth of an inch.

“Kruzenshtern.”

“I think he was an early explorer. Chekhov was a very studious person. He had read every book ever written about Sakhalin.”