Ébisuno

Ébisuno, whom even his daughter calls the Master, is Fukaéri’s guardian and the former academic who gives Tengo the history needed to understand her and her manuscript. His decisive contribution is not simply supplying background: he trusts Fukaéri’s judgment enough to accept her choice of collaborator, allowing Tengo to take on the rewriting project.

Identity and Introduction

When Tengo visits him at his remote mountain home, Ébisuno explains that circumstances prevent him from leaving the place. He speaks with the measured logic of someone long accustomed to addressing a large audience. Asked his name, he introduces himself as Ébisuno; he has no business card, and neither does Tengo. The name is rare, so Ébisuno asks Fukaéri to show Tengo how it is written in ideograms. He then explains that everyone calls him the Master, including his daughter.

The scene presents him through both authority and informality. His former public life is audible in his deliberate manner of speaking, but his chosen title belongs to the intimate world of the household as well as to the past. Tengo’s visit places him at the crossing point between Fukaéri’s private history and the literary undertaking now being proposed.

Guardian and Keeper of Fukaéri’s History

Ébisuno describes Fukaéri as dyslexic, a condition he believes may be congenital. Her school once mistook her difficulty for intellectual impairment, although he insists that she is intelligent and full of ideas. She attended school only briefly, and its rural teachers did not know about dyslexia. In explaining this, Ébisuno makes clear that the obstacle concerns the means by which she reads and writes, not the quality of her thought.

He also establishes how narrowly the information has been held: apart from Fukaéri herself, only he, his daughter Azami, and Tengo know of the dyslexia. His account turns the proposed collaboration into a matter requiring care and discretion, rather than a routine editorial arrangement.

Ébisuno says that Fukaéri appears to trust Tengo, though he does not claim to know why. What matters to him is that he trusts her. If she considers it right to entrust her work to Tengo, Ébisuno will accept her decision. Before the project goes further, however, he says Tengo must understand the circumstances of her childhood and how he came to take responsibility for her upbringing. His willingness to speak is thus both an act of confidence in Fukaéri and a condition of informed cooperation.

Political Background and the Master’s Account

In recounting Fukaéri’s past, Ébisuno identifies her father as Tamotsu Fukada. After Fukada was removed from the university, the remaining core of his Red Guard followers—about ten students, most expelled from the university—went with him into the Takashima Course. Ébisuno describes it as a place for people who had been left with nowhere else to go, and recalls that the move was reported in the media at the time. Fukaéri was very young then; he supposes she remembers nothing of it.

The account links her early life to a political rupture without treating her as a reliable witness to events from her infancy. Ébisuno speaks as a guardian reconstructing a past she cannot be expected to recall, and his explanation gives Tengo context for the work while preserving the difference between Fukaéri’s own experience and the history narrated to him. His role is therefore not just protective: he is also the person who can connect her manuscript to the circumstances from which it emerged.

Trust, Care, and the Limits of Protection

Ébisuno’s guardianship belongs to a wider network of protection in the novel. The Dowager establishes a private safe house for women escaping domestic abuse, supports their material needs, and works with lawyers and counselors to help them find lasting housing and employment. Tamaru handles physical confrontations when an abuser tries to force his way into the refuge. The network responds to immediate danger with practical care, while acknowledging that neither the Dowager nor Tamaru can solve every case through ordinary legal means.

That care can extend to a child with no safe place to return to. The Dowager insists that Tsubasa, who has fled alone, will be protected and will not be sent back, even if her parents or someone else come looking for her. She then says that the man who harmed the girl must eventually be removed before he can injure others, but stresses that the response must be patient and cautious. These decisions illuminate the novel’s distinction between formal authority and personal responsibility: protection is created through relationships and resources, yet it can also lead its protectors toward secret, extralegal action.

Ébisuno’s own account of care is quieter and more domestic. He does not claim authority over Fukaéri’s manuscript simply because he raised her. Instead, he accepts her choice of Tengo and offers the history he believes the collaborator needs. In a story where people’s pasts are concealed, rewritten, or spoken for by others, his confidence in Fukaéri gives her decision priority. His importance lies in making a protected space for her work while allowing her to determine who will help carry it forward.