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I guess that’s possible
, Tengo thought. He himself could sense when a call was
coming in from Komatsu. The way it rang was sort of nervous and fidgety, like
someone tapping their fingers persistently on a desktop. But this was, after all, just a
feeling. It wasn’t as if he knew who was on the phone.
Fuka-Eri’s days were just as monotonous as Tengo’s. She never set foot outside
the apartment. There was no TV, and she didn’t read any books. She hardly ate
anything, so at this point there was no need to go out shopping.
“Since I’m not moving much there’s not much need to eat,” Fuka-Eri said.
“What are you doing by yourself every day?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
She didn’t answer the question. “There’s a crow that comes, too.”
“The crow comes once every day.”
“It comes many times, not just once,” she said.
“Is it the same crow?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody else comes?”
“The N-H-K person came again.”
“Is it the same NHK person as before?”
“He says,
Mr. Kawana, you’re a thief
, in a loud voice.”
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“You mean he yells that right outside my door?”
“So everyone else can hear him.”
Tengo pondered this for a moment. “Don’t worry about that. It has nothing to do
with you, and it’s not going to cause any harm.”
“He said he knows you are hiding in here.”
“Don’t let it bother you,” Tengo said. “He can’t tell that. He’s just saying it to
intimidate me. NHK people do that sometimes.”
Tengo had witnessed his father do exactly the same thing any number of times. A
Sunday afternoon, his father’s voice, filled with malice, ringing out down the hallway
of a public housing project. Threatening and ridiculing the resident. Tengo lightly
pressed the tips of his fingers against his temple. The memory brought with it a heavy
load of other baggage.
As if sensing something from his silence, Fuka-Eri asked, “Are you okay.”
“I’m fine. Just ignore the NHK person, okay?”
“The crow said the same thing.”
“Glad to hear it,” Tengo said.
Ever since he saw two moons in the sky, and an air chrysalis materializing on his
father’s bed in the sanatorium, nothing surprised Tengo very much. Fuka-Eri and the
crow exchanging opinions by the windowsill wasn’t hurting anybody.
“I think I’ll be here a little longer. I can’t go back to Tokyo yet. Is that all right?”
“You should be there as long as you want to be.”
And then she hung up. Their conversation vanished in an instant, as if someone
had taken a nicely sharpened hatchet to the phone line and chopped it in two.
Afterward Tengo called the publishing company where Komatsu worked. He wasn’t
in. He had put in a brief appearance around one p.m. but then had left, and the person
on the phone had no idea where he was or if he was coming back. This wasn’t that
unusual for Komatsu. Tengo left the number for the sanatorium, saying that was
where he could be found during the day, and asked that Komatsu call back. If he had
left the inn’s number and Komatsu ended up calling in the middle of the night, that
would be a problem.
The last time he had heard from Komatsu had been near the end of September, just a
short talk on the phone. Since then Komatsu hadn’t been in touch, and neither had
Tengo. For a three-week period starting at the end of August, Komatsu had
disappeared. He had called the publisher with some vague excuse, claiming he was ill
and needed time off to rest, but hadn’t called afterward, as if he were a missing
person. Tengo was concerned, but not overly worried. Komatsu had always done his
own thing. Tengo was sure that he would show up before long and saunter back into
the office.
Such self-centered behavior was usually forbidden in a corporate environment. But
in Komatsu’s case, one of his colleagues always smoothed things over so he didn’t get
in trouble. Komatsu wasn’t the most popular man, but somehow there always seemed
to be a willing person on hand, ready to clean up whatever mess he left behind. The
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publishing house, for its part, was willing, to a certain extent, to look the other way.
Komatsu was self-centered, uncooperative, and insolent, but when it came to his job,
he was capable. He had handled, on his own, the bestseller
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