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was not even sure it was possible to do a logical rewrite of a work of fantasy and
feeling. True, as Komatsu had said, the style needed a great deal of improvement, but
would it be possible for him to do that without destroying the work’s fundamental
nature and atmosphere? Wouldn’t this be tantamount to giving a butterfly a skeleton?
Such thoughts only caused him confusion and anxiety. But events had already started
moving, and he had a limited amount of time. He couldn’t just sit there, thinking,
arms folded. All he could do was deal with one small, concrete problem after another.
Perhaps, as he worked on each detail by hand, an overall image
would take shape
spontaneously.
“I know you can do it, Tengo,” Komatsu had declared with confidence, and for
some unfathomable reason, Tengo himself was able to swallow Komatsu’s words
whole—for now. In both word and action, Komatsu could be a questionable character,
and he basically thought of no one but himself. If the occasion arose, he would drop
Tengo without batting an eyelash. But as Komatsu himself liked to say, he had
special
instincts as an editor. He made all judgments instantaneously and carried them out
decisively, unconcerned what other people might say. This was a quality
indispensable to a brilliant commanding officer on the front lines, but it was a quality
that Tengo himself did not possess.
It was half past twelve by the time Tengo started rewriting
Air Chrysalis
. He typed
the first few pages of the manuscript into the word processor as is, stopping at a
convenient break in the story. He would rewrite this block of
text first, changing none
of the content but thoroughly reworking the style. It was like remodeling a condo.
You leave the basic structure intact, keep the kitchen and bathroom in place, but tear
out and replace the flooring, ceiling, walls, and partitions.
I’m a skilled carpenter
who’s been put in charge of everything
, Tengo told himself.
I don’t have a blueprint,
so all I can do is use my intuition and experience to work on each separate problem
that comes up
.
After typing it in, he reread Fuka-Eri’s text, adding explanatory material to
sections
that felt too obscure, improving the flow of the language, and deleting
superfluous or redundant passages. Here and there he would change the order of
sentences or paragraphs. Fuka-Eri was extremely sparing in her use of adjectives and
adverbs, and he wanted to remain consistent with that aspect of her style, but in
certain places where he felt more descriptions were necessary, he would supply
something appropriate. Her style overall was juvenile and artless,
but the good and the
bad passages stood out from each other so clearly that choosing among them took far
less time and trouble than he had expected. The artlessness made some passages
dense and difficult but it gave others a startling freshness. He needed only to throw
out and replace the first type, and leave the second in place.
Rewriting her work gave Tengo a renewed sense that Fuka-Eri had written the
piece without any intention of leaving behind a work of literature. All she had done
was record a story—or, as she had put it, things she had actually witnessed—that she
possessed
inside her, and it just so happened that she had used words to do it. She
might just as well have used something other than words, but she had not come across
a more appropriate medium. It was as simple as that. She had never had any literary
ambition, no thought of making the finished piece into a commodity, and so she felt
no need to pay attention to the details of style, as if she had been making a room for
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herself and all she needed was walls and a roof to keep the weather out. This was why
it made no difference to her how much Tengo reworked her writing. She had already
accomplished her objective. When she said, “Fix it any way you like,” she was almost
certainly expressing her true feelings.
And yet, the sentences and paragraphs
that comprised
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