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“No, they don’t. It’s a little school in the countryside. They’ve probably never even
heard of dyslexia. And besides, she only went to school for a short time.”
“Then we might be able to hide it.”
The Professor
looked at Tengo for a while, as if judging the value of his face.
“Eri seems to trust you,” he said a moment later. “I don’t know why, but she does.
And I—”
Tengo waited for him to continue.
“And I trust Eri. So if she says it’s all right to let you rewrite her novella, all I can
do is give my approval. On the other hand, if you really do plan to go ahead with this
scheme, there are a few things you should know about Eri.” The Professor swept his
hand lightly across his right knee several times as if he had found a tiny piece of
thread there. “What her
childhood was like, for example, and where she spent it, and
how I became responsible for raising her. This could take a while to tell.”
“I’m listening,” Tengo said.
Next to him on the sofa, Fuka-Eri sat up straight, still holding the collar of her
cardigan closed at the throat.
“All right, then,” the Professor said. “The story goes back to the sixties. Eri’s father
and I were close friends for a long time. I was ten years older, but we both taught in
the same department at the same university. Our personalities and worldviews were
very different, but for some reason we got along. Both
of us married late, and we both
had daughters shortly after we got married. We lived in the same faculty apartment
building, and our families were always together. Professionally, too, we were doing
very well. People were starting to notice us as ‘rising stars of academe.’ We often
appeared in the media. It was a tremendously exciting time for us.
“Toward the end of the sixties, though, things started to change for the worse. The
second renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was coming in 1970, and the
student movement was opposed to it. They blockaded the university campuses, fought
with the riot police,
had bloody factional disputes, and as a result, people died. All of
this was more than I wanted to deal with, and I decided to leave the university. I had
never been that temperamentally suited to the academic life, but once these protests
and riots began, I became fed up with it. Establishment, antiestablishment: I didn’t
care. Ultimately, it was just a
clash of organizations, and I simply didn’t trust any
kind of organization, big or small. You, I would guess, were not yet old enough to be
in the university in those days.”
“No, the commotion had all died down by the time I started.”
“The party was over, you mean.”
“Pretty much.”
The Professor raised his hands for a moment and then lowered them to his knees
again. “So I quit the university, and two years later Eri’s father left. At the time, he
was a great believer in Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideology and supported China’s
Cultural Revolution. We heard almost nothing in those days about how terrible and
inhumane the Cultural Revolution could be. It even became
trendy with some
intellectuals to hold up Mao’s
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