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naturally to Tengo.
    When he was home, Tengo usually wrote from first thing in the morning until the approach of evening. All he needed to satisfy him was his Mont Blanc pen, his blue ink, and standard manuscript sheets, each page lined with four hundred empty squares ready to accept four hundred characters. Once a week his married girlfriend would come to spend the afternoon with him. Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn’t lead to anything. As the sun was setting, he would head out for a long walk, and once the sun was down he would read a book while listening to music. He never watched television. Whenever the NHK fee collector came, he would point out that he had no television set, and politely refuse to pay. “I really don’t have one. You can come in and look if you want,” he would say, but the collector would never come in. They were not allowed to.

    “I have something bigger in mind,” Komatsu said.
    “Something bigger?”
    “Much bigger. Why be satisfied with small-scale stuff like the new writers’ prize? As long as we’re aiming, why not go for something big?”
    Tengo fell silent. He had no idea what Komatsu was getting at, but he sensed something disturbing.
    “The Akutagawa Prize!” Komatsu declared after a moment’s pause.
    “The Akutagawa Prize?” Tengo repeated the words slowly, as if he were writing them in huge characters with a stick on wet sand.
    “Come on, Tengo, you can’t be
that
out of touch! The Akutagawa Prize! Every writer’s dream! Huge headlines in the paper! TV news!”
    “Now you’re losing me. Are we still talking about Fuka-Eri?”
    “Of course we are—Fuka-Eri and
Air Chrysalis
. Have we been discussing anything else?”
    Tengo bit his lip as he tried to fathom the meaning behind Komatsu’s words. “But you yourself said there’s no way
Air Chrysalis
can take the new writers’ prize. Haven’t we been talking about that all along, how the work will never amount to anything the way it is?”
    “Precisely. It’ll never amount to anything the way it is. That is for certain.”
    Tengo needed time to think. “Are you saying it needs to be revised?”
    “It’s the only way. It’s not that unusual for an author to revise a promising work with the advice of an editor. It happens all the time. Only, in this case, rather than the author, someone else will do the revising.”
    “Someone else?” Tengo asked, but he already knew what Komatsu’s answer would be.
    “You.”
    Tengo searched for an appropriate response but couldn’t find one. He heaved a sigh and said, “You know as well as I do that this work is going to need more than a little patching here and there. It’ll never come together without a fundamental top-to-bottom rewrite.”
    “Which is why you’ll rewrite it from top to bottom. Just use the framework of the story as is. And keep as much of the tone as possible. But change the language—a total remake. You’ll be in charge of the actual writing, and I’ll be the producer.”
    “Just like that?” Tengo muttered, as if to himself.
    “Look,” Komatsu said, picking up a spoon and pointing it at Tengo the way a conductor uses his baton to single out a soloist from the rest of the orchestra. “This Fuka-Eri girl has something special. Anyone can see it reading
Air Chrysalis
. Her imagination is far from ordinary. Unfortunately, though, her writing is hopeless. A total mess. You, on the other hand, know how to write. Your story lines are good. You have taste. You may be built like a lumberjack, but you write with intelligence and sensitivity. And real power. Unlike Fuka-Eri, though, you still haven’t grasped exactly what it is you want to write about. Which is why a lot of your stories are missing something at the core. I know you’ve got something inside you that you need to write about, but you can’t get it to come out. It’s like a frightened little animal hiding way back in a