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cave—you know it’s in there, but there’s no way to catch it until it comes out. Which is why I keep telling you, just give it time.”
    Tengo shifted awkwardly on the booth’s vinyl seat. He said nothing.
    “The answer is simple,” Komatsu said, still lightly waving his spoon. “We put the two writers together and invent a brand-new one. We add your perfect style to Fuka-Eri’s raw story. It’s an ideal combination. I know you’ve got it in you. Why do you think I’ve been backing you all this time? Just leave the rest to me. With the two of you together, the new writers’ prize will be easy, and then we can shoot for the Akutagawa. I haven’t been wasting my time in this business all these years. I know how to pull the right strings.”
    Tengo let his lips part as he stared at Komatsu. Komatsu put his spoon back in his saucer. It made an abnormally loud sound.
    “Supposing the story wins the Akutagawa Prize, then what?” Tengo asked, recovering from the shock.
    “If it takes the Akutagawa, it’ll cause a sensation. Most people don’t know the value of a good novel, but they don’t want to be left out, so they’ll buy it and read it—especially when they hear it was written by a high school girl. If the book sells, it’ll make a lot of money. We’ll split it three ways. I’ll take care of that.”
    “Never mind the money” Tengo said, his voice flat. “How about your professional ethics as an editor? If the scheme became public, it’d cause an uproar. You’d lose your job.”
    “It wouldn’t come out so easily. I can handle the whole thing very carefully. And even if it did come out, I’d be glad to leave the company. Management doesn’t like me, and they’ve never treated me decently. Finding another job would be no problem for me. Besides, I wouldn’t be doing it for the money. I’d be doing it to screw the literary world. Those bastards all huddle together in their gloomy cave and kiss each other’s asses, and lick each other’s wounds, and trip each other up, all the while spewing this pompous crap about the mission of literature. I want to have a good laugh at their expense. I want to outwit the system and make idiots out of the whole bunch of them. Doesn’t that sound like fun to you?”
    It did not sound like all that much fun to Tengo. For one thing, he had never actually seen this “literary world.” And when he realized that a competent individual like Komatsu had such childish motives for crossing such a dangerous bridge, he was momentarily at a loss for words.
    “It sounds like a scam to me,” he said at length.
    “Coauthorship is not that unusual,” Komatsu said with a frown. “Half the magazines’ serialized
manga
are coauthored. The staff toss around ideas and make up the story, the artist does simple line drawings, his assistants fill in the details and add color. It’s not much different from the way a factory makes alarm clocks. The same sort of thing goes on in the fiction world. Romance novels, for example. With most of those, the publisher hires writers to make up stories following the guidelines they’ve established. Division of labor: that’s the system. Mass production would be impossible any other way. In the self-conscious world of literary fiction, of course, such methods are not openly sanctioned, so as a practical strategy we have to set Fuka-Eri up as our single author. If the deception comes out, it might cause a bit of a scandal, but we wouldn’t be breaking the law. We’d just be riding the current of the times. And besides, we’re not talking about a Balzac or a Murasaki Shikibu here. All we’d be doing is patching the holes in the story some high school girl wrote and making it a better piece of fiction. What’s wrong with that? If the finished work is good and brings pleasure to a lot of readers, then no harm done, don’t you agree?”
    Tengo gave some thought to what Komatsu was saying, and he answered with care. “I see two