After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

Air Chrysalis
might lead to revelations about what happened to 
Eri’s parents. Is that what you mean about throwing a stone in a pond?” 
“That’s pretty close,” Professor Ebisuno said. “If 
Air Chrysalis
becomes a 
bestseller, the media are going to swarm like carp in a pond. In fact, the commotion 
has already started. After the press conference, requests for interviews started pouring 
in from magazines and TV. I’m turning them all down, of course, but things are likely 
to get increasingly overheated as publication of the book draws near. If we don’t do 
interviews, they’ll use every tool at their disposal to look into Eri’s background. 
Sooner or later it will come out—who her parents are, where and how she was raised, 
who’s looking after her now. All of that should make for interesting news. 
“I’m not doing this for fun or profit. I enjoy my nice, quiet life in the mountains, 
and I don’t want to get mixed up with anything that is going to draw the attention of 
the public. What I am hoping is that I can spread bait to guide the attention of the 
media toward Eri’s parents. 
Where are they now, and what are they doing?
In other 
words, I want the media to do for me what the police can’t or won’t do. I’m also 
thinking that, if it works well, we might even be able to exploit the flow of events to 
rescue the two of them. In any case, Fukada and his wife are both very important to 
me—and of course to Eri. I can’t just leave them unaccounted for like this.” 
“Yes, but assuming the Fukadas are in there, what possible reason could there have 
been for them to have been kept under restraint for seven years? That’s a 
very long 
time
!” 

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“I don’t know any better than you do. I can only guess,” Professor Ebisuno said. 
“As I told you last time, the police did a search of Sakigake in connection with the 
Akebono shootout, but all they found was that Sakigake had absolutely nothing to do 
with the case. Ever since then, Sakigake has continued steadily to strengthen its 
position as a religious organization. No, what am I saying? Not steadily: they did it 
quite rapidly. But even so, people on the outside had almost no idea what they were 
actually doing in there. I’m sure you don’t know anything about them.” 
“Not a thing,” Tengo said. “I don’t watch TV, and I hardly read the newspaper. 
You can’t tell by me what people in general know.” 
“No, it’s not just you who don’t know anything about them. They purposely keep 
as low a profile as possible. Other new religions do showy things to get as many 
converts as they can, but not Sakigake. Their goal is not to increase the number of 
their believers. They want healthy, young believers who are highly motivated and 
skilled in a wide variety of professional fields. So they don’t go out of their way to 
attract converts. And they don’t admit just anybody. When people show up asking to 
join, they interview them and admit them selectively. Sometimes they go out of their 
way to recruit people who have particular skills they are looking for. The end result is 
a militant, elite religious organization.” 
“Based on what kind of doctrine?” 
“They probably don’t have any set scriptures. Or if they do, they’re very eclectic. 
Roughly, the group follows a kind of esoteric Buddhism, but their everyday lives are 
centered not so much on particular doctrines as on labor and ascetic practice—quite 
stern austerities. Young people in search of that kind of spiritual life hear about them 
and come from all over the country. The group is highly cohesive and obsessed with 
secrecy.” 
“Do they have a guru?” 
“Ostensibly, no. They reject the idea of a personality cult, and they practice 
collective leadership, but what actually goes on in there is unclear. I’m doing my best 
to gather what intelligence I can, but very little seeps out. The one thing I can say is 
that the organization is developing steadily and seems to be very well funded. The 
land owned by Sakigake keeps expanding, and its facilities are constantly improving. 
Also, the wall around the property has been greatly reinforced.” 
“And at some point, the name of Fukada, the original leader of Sakigake, stopped 
appearing.” 
“Exactly. It’s all very strange. I’m just not convinced by what I hear,” Professor 
Ebisuno said. He glanced at Fuka-Eri and turned back to Tengo. “Some kind of major 
secret is hidden inside there. I’m sure that, at some point, a kind of realignment 
occurred in Sakigake’s organization. What it consisted of, I don’t know. But because 
of it, Sakigake underwent a major change of direction from agricultural commune to 
religion. I imagine that something like a coup d’état occurred at that point, and 
Fukada was swept up in it. As I said before, Fukada was a man without the slightest 
religious inclinations. He must have poured every ounce of his strength into trying to 
put a stop to such a development. And probably he lost the battle for supremacy in 
Sakigake at that time.” 
Tengo considered this for a moment and said, “I understand what you are saying, 
but even if you are right, isn’t this something that could have been solved just by 

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209
expelling Fukada from Sakigake, like the peaceful splitting off of Akebono from 
Sakigake? They wouldn’t have had to lock him up, would they?” 
“You’re quite right about that. Under ordinary circumstances, there would have 
been no need to take the trouble of locking him up. But Fukada would almost 
certainly have had his hands on some of Sakigake’s secrets by then, things that 
Sakigake would have found very awkward if they were exposed to the public. So just 
throwing him out was not the answer. 
“As the original founder of the community, Fukada had acted as its virtual leader 
for years and must have witnessed everything that had been done on the inside. He 
must have known too much. In addition to which, he himself was quite well known to 
the public at large. So even if Fukada and his wife wanted to renounce their ties with 
the group, Sakigake could not simply let them go.” 
“And so you are trying to shake up the stalemate indirectly? You want to stir up 
public interest by letting Eri have a sensational debut as a writer, with