ost people think of Sunday morning as a time for rest. Throughout his youth, however, Tengo never once thought of Sunday morning as something to enjoy. Instead, it depressed him. When the weekend came, his whole body felt sluggish and achy, and his appetite would disappear. For Tengo, Sunday was like a misshapen moon that showed only its dark side. If only Sunday would never come! he would often think as a boy. How much more fun it would be to have school every day without a break! He even prayed for Sunday not to come, though his prayers were never answered. Even now, as an adult, dark feelings would inexplicably overtake him when he awoke on a Sunday morning. He felt his joints creaking and wanted to throw up. Such a reaction to Sunday had long since permeated his heart, perhaps in some deep, unconscious region.

Tengo’s father was a collector of subscription fees for NHK—Japan’s quasi-governmental broadcasting network—and he would take little Tengo with him as he went from door to door. These rounds started before Tengo entered kindergarten and continued through the fifth grade without a single weekend off, excepting only those Sundays when there was a special function at school. Waking at seven, his father would make him scrub his face with soap and water, inspect his ears and nails, and dress him in the cleanest (but least showy) clothes he owned, promising that, in return, he would buy Tengo a yummy treat.

Tengo had no idea whether the other NHK subscription fee collectors kept working on weekends and holidays, but as far as he could remember, his father always did. If anything, he worked with even more enthusiasm than usual, because on Sundays he could often catch people who were usually out during the week.

Tengo’s father had several reasons for taking him on his rounds. One was that he could not leave the boy home alone. On weekdays and Saturdays, he could leave Tengo in daycare or kindergarten or elementary school, but these were all closed on Sundays. Another reason, he said, was that it was important for a father to show his son the type of work he did. A child should learn from early on what kind of activity supported his daily life, and he should appreciate the importance of labor. Tengo’s father had been sent out to work in the fields, Sunday or no, from the time he was old enough to understand anything, and he had even been kept out of school during the busiest seasons on the farm. To him, such a life was a given.

His third and final reason was a more calculating one, which is why it left the deepest scars on Tengo’s heart. His father knew that having a small child with him made his job easier. When a fee collector had a child in hand, people found it more difficult to say to him, “I don’t want to pay, so get out of here.” With a little person staring up at them, even people determined not to pay would usually end up forking over the money, which was why he saved the most difficult routes for Sunday. Tengo sensed from the beginning that this was the role he was expected to play, and he absolutely hated it. But he also felt that he had to act out his role as cleverly as he could in order to please his father. He might as well have been a trained monkey. If he pleased his father, he would be treated kindly that day.

Tengo’s one salvation was that his father’s route was fairly far from home. They lived in a suburban residential district outside the city of Ichikawa, but his father’s rounds were in the center of the city. The school district was different there as well. At least he was able to avoid doing collections at the homes of his kindergarten and elementary school classmates. Occasionally, though, when walking in the downtown shopping area, he would spot a classmate on the street. When this happened, he would dodge behind his father to keep from being noticed.

Most of Tengo’s school friends had fathers who commuted to office jobs in the center of Tokyo. These men thought of Ichikawa as a part of Tokyo that just happened to have been incorporated into Chiba Prefecture. On Monday mornings his school friends would talk excitedly about where they had gone and what they had done on Sunday. They went to amusement parks and zoos and baseball games. In the summer they would go swimming, in the winter skiing. Their fathers would take them for drives or to go hiking. They would share their experiences with enthusiasm, and exchange information about new places. But Tengo had nothing to talk about. He never went to tourist attractions or amusement parks. From morning to evening on Sundays, he and his father would ring the doorbells of strangers’ houses, bow their heads, and take money from the people who came to the door. If someone didn’t want to pay, his father would threaten or cajole them. With anyone who tried to talk his way out of paying, he would have an argument. Sometimes he would curse at them like stray dogs. Such experiences were not the kind of thing Tengo could share with school friends.

When Tengo was in the third grade, word spread that his father was an NHK subscription fee collector. Someone had probably seen them making their rounds together. He was, after all, walking all day long behind his father to every corner of the city every Sunday, so it was almost inevitable that he would be spotted at some point (especially now that he was too big to hide behind his father). Indeed, it was surprising that it hadn’t happened before.

From that point on, Tengo’s nickname became “NHK.” He could not help becoming a kind of alien in a society of middle-class children of white-collar workers. Much of what they took for granted, Tengo could not. He lived a different kind of life in a different world. His grades were outstanding, as was his athletic ability. He was big and strong, and the teachers focused on him. So even though he was an “alien,” he was never a class outcast. If anything, in most circumstances he was treated with respect. But whenever the other boys invited him to go somewhere or to visit their homes on a Sunday, he had to turn them down. He knew that if he told his father, “Some of the boys are getting together this Sunday at so-and-so’s house,” it wouldn’t make any difference. Soon, people stopped inviting him. Before long he realized that he didn’t belong to any groups. He was always alone.

Sunday collection rounds were an absolute rule: no exceptions, no changes. If he caught a cold, if he had a persistent cough, if he was running a little fever, if he had an upset stomach, his father accepted no excuses. Staggering after his father on such days, he would often wish he could fall down and die on the spot. Then, perhaps, his father might think twice about his own behavior; it might occur to him that he had been too strict with his son. For better or worse, though, Tengo was born with a robust constitution. Even if he had a fever or a stomachache or felt nauseous, he always walked the entire long route with his father, never falling down or fainting, and never complaining.

Tengo’s father was repatriated from Manchuria, destitute, when the war ended in 1945. Born the third son of a farming family in the hardscrabble Tohoku region, he joined a homesteaders’ group and crossed over to Manchuria in the 1930s with friends from the same prefecture. None of them had swallowed whole the government’s claims that Manchuria was a paradise where the land was vast and rich, offering an affluent life to all comers. They knew enough to realize that “paradise” was not to be found anywhere. They were simply poor and hungry. The best they could hope for if they stayed at home was a life on the brink of starvation. The times were terrible, and huge numbers of people were unemployed. The cities offered no hope of finding decent work. This left crossing the sea to Manchuria as virtually the only way to survive. As farmers developing new land, they received basic training in the use of firearms in case of emergency, were given some minimal information about farming conditions in Manchuria, were sent off with three cheers from their villages, and then were transported by train from the port of Dalian to a place near the Manchurian-Mongolian border. There they were given some land and farming implements and small arms, and together started cultivating the earth. The soil was poor and rocky, and in winter everything froze. Sometimes stray dogs were all they had to eat. Even so, with government support the first few years, they managed to get by.

Their lives were finally becoming more stable when, in August 1945, the Soviet Union broke its neutrality treaty with Japan and launched a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. Having ended its operations on the European front, the Soviet army had used the Trans-Siberian Railway to shift a huge military force to the Far East in preparation for the border crossing. Tengo’s father had been expecting this to happen, having been secretly informed of the impending situation by a certain official, a man he had become friendly with thanks to a distant connection. The man had told him privately that Japan’s weakened Kwantung Army could never stand up to such an invasion, so he should prepare to flee with the clothes on his back as soon as it happened—the sooner the better. The minute he heard the news that the Soviet army had apparently violated the border, he mounted his horse, galloped to the local train station, and boarded the second-to-last train for Dalian. He was the only one among his farming companions to make it back to Japan before the end of the year.

He went to Tokyo after the war and tried making a living as a black marketeer and as a carpenter’s apprentice, but nothing seemed to work. He could barely keep himself alive. He was working as a liquor store delivery man in the Asakusa entertainment district when he bumped into an acquaintance from his Manchurian days on the street. It was the official who had warned him of the impending Soviet invasion. The man had originally gone over to work for the postal service in Japan’s Manchukuo puppet state, and now that he was back in Japan he had his old job back with the Ministry of Communications. He seemed to like Tengo’s father, both because they came from the same village and because he knew what a hard worker he was. He invited him to share a bite.

When the man learned that Tengo’s father was having a hard time finding a decent job, he asked if he might be interested in working as a subscription fee collector for NHK. He offered to recommend him to a friend in that department, and Tengo’s father gladly accepted. He knew almost nothing about NHK, but he was willing to try anything that promised a steady income. The man wrote him a letter of recommendation and even served as a guarantor for him, smoothing his way to become an NHK subscription fee collector. They gave him training, a uniform, and a quota to fill. People then were just beginning to recover from the shock of defeat and to look for entertainment in their destitute lives. Radio was the most accessible and cheapest form of entertainment; and postwar radio, which offered music, comedy, and sports, was incomparably more popular than its wartime predecessor, with its virtuous exhortations for patriotic self-sacrifice. NHK needed huge numbers of people to go from door to door collecting listeners’ fees.

Tengo’s father performed his duties with great enthusiasm. His foremost strengths were his sturdy constitution and his perseverance in the face of adversity. Here was a man who had barely eaten a filling meal since birth. To a person like that, the collection of NHK fees was not excruciating work. The most violent curses hurled at him were nothing. Moreover, he felt much satisfaction at belonging to a gigantic organization, even as one of its lowest-ranking members. He worked for one year as a commissioned collector without job security, his only income a percentage of his collections, but his performance and attitude were so outstanding that he was taken directly into the ranks of the full-fledged employees, an almost unheard-of achievement in NHK. Part of this had to do with his superior results in an especially difficult collection area, but also effective here was the influence of his guarantor, the Communications Ministry official. Soon he received a set basic salary plus expenses. He was able to move into a corporation-owned apartment and join the health care plan. The difference in treatment was like night and day. It was the greatest stroke of good fortune he had ever encountered in life. In other words, he had finally worked his way up to the lowest spot on the totem pole.

Young Tengo heard this story from his father so many times that he grew sick of it. His father never sang him lullabies, never read storybooks to him at bedtime. Instead, he would tell the boy stories of his actual experiences—over and over, from his childhood in a poor farm family in Tohoku, through the ultimate (and inevitable) happy ending of his good fortune as a fully fledged NHK fee collector.

His father was a good storyteller. There was no way for Tengo to ascertain how much was based on fact, but the stories were at least coherent and consistent. They were not exactly pregnant with deep meaning, but the details were lively and his father’s narrative was strongly colored. There were funny stories, touching stories, and violent stories. There were astounding, preposterous stories and stories that Tengo had trouble following no matter how many times he heard them. If a life was to be measured by the color and variety of its episodes, his father’s life could be said to have been rich in its own way, perhaps.

But when they touched on the period after he became a full-fledged NHK employee, his father’s stories suddenly lost all color and reality. They lacked detail and wholeness, as if he thought of them as mere sequels not worth telling. He met a woman, married her, and had a child—that is, Tengo. A few months after Tengo was born, his mother fell ill and died. His father raised him alone after that, never remarrying, just working hard for NHK. The End.

How he happened to meet Tengo’s mother and marry her, what kind of woman she was, what had caused her death (could it have had something to do with Tengo’s birth?), whether her death had been a relatively easy one or she had suffered greatly—his father told him almost nothing about such matters. If Tengo tried asking, his father would just evade the question and, finally, never answer. Most of the time, such questions put him in a foul mood, and he would clam up. Not a single photo of Tengo’s mother had survived, and not a single wedding photo. “We couldn’t afford a ceremony,” he explained, “and I didn’t have a camera.”

But Tengo fundamentally disbelieved his father’s story. His father was hiding the facts, remaking the story. His mother had not died some months after he was born. In his only memory of her, she was still alive when he was one and a half. And near where he was sleeping, she was in the arms of a man other than his father.

His mother took off her blouse, dropped the straps of her slip, and let a man not his father suck on her breasts. Tengo slept next to them, his breathing audible. But at the same time, Tengo was not asleep. He was watching his mother.

This was Tengo’s souvenir photograph of his mother. The ten-second scene was burned into his brain with perfect clarity. It was the only concrete information he had about his mother, the one tenuous connection his mind could make with her. They were linked by a hypothetical umbilical cord. His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo’s brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.

It was a clear, pleasant Sunday morning. There was a chill in the mid-April breeze, though, a reminder of how easily the seasons can turn backward. Over a thin, black crew-neck sweater, Tengo wore a herringbone jacket that he had owned since his college days. He also had on beige chino pants and brown Hush Puppies. The shoes were rather new. This was as close as he could come to dapper attire.

When Tengo reached the front end of the outward-bound Chuo Line platform in Shinjuku Station, Fuka-Eri was already there, sitting alone on a bench, utterly still, staring into space with narrowed eyes. She wore a cotton print dress that had to be meant for midsummer. Over the dress she wore a heavy, grass-green winter cardigan, and on her bare feet she wore faded gray sneakers—a somewhat odd combination for the season. The dress was too thin, the cardigan too thick. On her, though, the outfit did not seem especially out of place. Perhaps she was expressing her own special worldview by this mismatch. It was not entirely out of the question. But probably she had just chosen her clothing at random without much thought.

She was not reading a newspaper, she was not reading a book, she was not listening to a Walkman, she was just sitting still, her big, black eyes staring straight ahead. She could have been staring at something or looking at nothing at all. She could have been thinking about something or not thinking at all. From a distance, she looked like a realistic sculpture made of some special material.

“Did I keep you waiting?” Tengo asked.

Fuka-Eri glanced at him and shook her head a centimeter or two from side to side. Her black eyes had a fresh, silken luster but, as before, no perceptible expression. She looked as though she did not want to speak with anyone for the moment, so Tengo gave up on any attempt to keep up a conversation and sat beside her on the bench, saying nothing.

When the train came, Fuka-Eri stood up, and the two of them boarded together. There were few passengers on the weekend rapid-service train, which went all the way out to the mountains of Takao. Tengo and Fuka-Eri sat next to each other, silently watching the cityscape pass the windows on the other side. Fuka-Eri said nothing, as usual, so Tengo kept silent as well. She tugged the collar of her cardigan closed as if preparing for a wave of bitter cold to come, looking straight ahead with her lips drawn into a perfectly straight line.

Tengo took out a small paperback he had brought along and started to read, but after some hesitation he stopped reading. Returning the book to his pocket, he folded his hands on his knees and stared straight ahead, adopting Fuka-Eri’s pose as if to keep her company. He considered using the time to think, but he couldn’t think of anything to think about. Because he had been concentrating on the rewrite of Air Chrysalis, it seemed, his mind refused to form any coherent thoughts. At the core of his brain was a mass of tangled threads.

Tengo watched the scenery streaming past the window and listened to the monotonous sound of the rails. The Chuo Line stretched on and on straight westward, as if following a line drawn on the map with a ruler. In fact, “as if” was probably unnecessary: they must have done just that when they laid it out a hundred years earlier. In this part of the Kanto Plain there was not a single topographical obstruction worth mentioning, which led to the building of a line without a perceivable curve, rise, or fall, and no bridges or tunnels. All they needed back then was a ruler, and all the trains did now was run in a perfectly straight line to the mountains out west.

At some point, Tengo fell asleep. When the swaying of the train woke him, they were slowing down for the stop in Ogikubo Station, no more than ten minutes out of Shinjuku—a short nap. Fuka-Eri was sitting in the same position, staring straight ahead. Tengo had no idea what she was, in fact, looking at. Judging from her air of concentration, she had no intention of getting off the train for some time yet.

“What kind of books do you read?” Tengo asked Fuka-Eri when they had gone another ten minutes and were past Mitaka. He raised the question not only out of sheer boredom but because he had been meaning to ask her about her reading habits.

Fuka-Eri glanced at him and faced forward again. “I don’t read books,” she answered simply.

“At all?”

She gave him a quick nod.

“Are you just not interested in reading books?” he asked.

“It takes time,” she said.

“You don’t read books because it takes time?” he asked, not quite sure he was understanding her properly.

Fuka-Eri kept facing forward and offered no reply. Her posture seemed to convey the message that she had no intention of negating his suggestion.

Generally speaking, of course, it does take some time to read a book. It’s different from watching television, say, or reading manga. The reading of a book is an activity that involves some continuity; it is carried out over a relatively long time frame. But in Fuka-Eri’s statement that “it takes time,” there seemed to be included a nuance somewhat different from such generalities.

“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.

Sitting on the train seat, Tengo closed his eyes and tried to reach some kind of conclusion as to how he should deal with the situation. But no conclusion was forthcoming. No one split with confusion could possibly produce a reasonable conclusion.

“Does Azami take down exactly what you say?” Tengo asked.

“Exactly what I tell her.”

“You speak, and she writes it down.”

“But I have to speak softly”

“Why do you have to speak softly?”

Fuka-Eri looked around the car. It was almost empty. The only other passengers were a mother and her two small children on the opposite seat a short distance away from Tengo and Fuka-Eri. The three of them appeared to be headed for someplace fun. There existed such happy people in the world.

“So they won’t hear me,” Fuka-Eri said quietly.

“‘They’?” Tengo asked. Looking at Fuka-Eri’s unfocused eyes, it was clear that she was not talking about the mother and children. She was referring to particular people that she knew well and that Tengo did not know at all. “Who are ‘they’?” Tengo, too, had lowered his voice.

Fuka-Eri said nothing, but a small wrinkle appeared between her brows. Her lips were clamped shut.

“Are ‘they’ the Little People?” Tengo asked.

Still no answer.

“Are ‘they’ somebody who might get mad at you if your story got into print and was released to the public and people started talking about them?”

Fuka-Eri did not answer this question, either. Her eyes were still not focused on any one point. He waited until he was quite sure there would be no answer, and then he asked another question.

“Can you tell me about your ‘Professor’? What’s he like?”

Fuka-Eri gave him a puzzled look, as if to say, What is this person talking about? Then she said, “You will meet the Professor.”

“Yes, of course,” Tengo said. “You’re absolutely right. I’m going to meet him in any case. I should just meet him and decide for myself.”

At Kokubunji Station, a group of elderly people dressed in hiking gear got on. There were ten of them altogether, five men and five women in their late sixties and early seventies. They carried backpacks and wore hats and were chattering away like schoolchildren. All carried water bottles, some strapped to their waists, others tucked in the pockets of their backpacks. Tengo wondered if he could possibly reach that age with such a sense of enjoyment. Then he shook his head. No way. He imagined these old folks standing proudly on some mountaintop, drinking from their water bottles.

In spite of their small size, the Little People drank prodigious amounts of water. They preferred to drink rainwater or water from the nearby stream, rather than tap water. And so the girl would scoop water from the stream during daylight hours and give it to the Little People to drink. Whenever it rained, she would collect water in a bucket because the Little People preferred rainwater to water gathered from the stream. They were therefore grateful for the girl’s kindness.

Tengo noticed he was having trouble staying focused on any one thought. This was not a good sign. He felt an internal confusion starting. An ominous sandstorm was developing somewhere on the plane of his emotions. This often happened on Sundays.

“Is something wrong,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark. She seemed able to sense the tension that Tengo was feeling.

“I wonder if I can do it.”

“Do what.”

“If I can say what I need to say.”

“Say what you need to say,” Fuka-Eri asked. She seemed to be having trouble understanding what he meant.

“To the Professor.”

“Say what you need to say to the Professor,” she repeated.

After some hesitation, Tengo confessed. “I keep thinking that things are not going to go smoothly, that everything is going to fall apart,” he said.

Fuka-Eri turned in her seat until she was looking directly at Tengo. “Afraid,” she asked.

“What am I afraid of?” Tengo rephrased her question.

She nodded silently.

“Maybe I’m just afraid of meeting new people. Especially on a Sunday morning.”

“Why Sunday,” Fuka-Eri asked.

Tengo’s armpits started sweating. He felt a suffocating tightness in the chest. Meeting new people and having new things thrust upon him. And having his present existence threatened by them.

“Why Sunday,” Fuka-Eri asked again.

Tengo recalled his boyhood Sundays. After they had walked all day, his father would take him to the restaurant across from the station and tell him to order anything he liked. It was a kind of reward for him, and virtually the only time the frugal pair would eat out. His father would even order a beer (though he almost never drank). Despite the offer, Tengo never felt the slightest bit hungry on these occasions. Ordinarily, he was hungry all the time, but he never enjoyed anything he ate on Sunday. To eat every mouthful of what he had ordered—which he was absolutely required to do—was nothing but torture for him. Sometimes he even came close to vomiting. This was what Sunday meant for Tengo as a boy.

Fuka-Eri looked into Tengo’s eyes in search of something. Then she reached out and took his hand. This startled him, but he tried not to let it show on his face.

Fuka-Eri kept her gentle grip on Tengo’s hand until the train arrived in Kunitachi Station, near the end of the line. Her hand was unexpectedly hard and smooth, neither hot nor cold. It was maybe half the size of Tengo’s hand.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s not just another Sunday,” she said, as if stating a well-known fact.

Tengo thought this might have been the first time he heard her speak two sentences at once.