Ebisuno Professor

Ebisuno Professor is Fukaéri’s guardian and an ally in the effort to protect her from the Pioneers and uncover the truth about her family. When she vanishes on the way from Okutama to Tokyo, he sets a search in motion. His response is more than a straightforward attempt to locate her: as Tengo suspects, the professor may be using the disappearance to draw attention to the Pioneers and find Fukaéri’s parents, accepting the risk that publicity could expose secrets and endanger those involved.

Guardian and Protector

Ebisuno Professor is presented through the people who depend on him and through the consequences of his decisions. He accompanies Fukaéri to the station when she leaves Okutama for Tokyo, and she later tells him she will not return to the mountains. Her stated destination is the apartment in Shinanomachi, where his daughter is also staying, but she never arrives. Three days pass without contact. The professor’s role as her guardian therefore becomes inseparable from the uncertainty of her whereabouts and the question of how to search without drawing unwanted attention.

His protection of Fukaéri is also part of a broader opposition to the Pioneers. Their history and her parents’ past as revolutionaries could become public knowledge if her disappearance attracts reporters. The professor’s actions suggest that protecting her cannot be separated from confronting the organization that shaped her life: a search may find Fukaéri, but it may also expose the history that others would prefer to keep hidden.

Disappearance and Search

After Fukaéri fails to appear at the Shinanomachi apartment, Ebisuno Professor decides to report her disappearance to the police. Komatsu tells Tengo that the professor plans to file a search request the next day; Komatsu has urged him to wait a few days, but expects he will not delay much longer. The decision puts the private search on the threshold of an official investigation, one likely to attract attention because Fukaéri is a celebrated author rather than an unknown runaway.

Komatsu expects the police to have to show that they are responding, even if the case is not treated as an urgent emergency. He is more worried about the media, whose attention could turn Fukaéri’s absence into a public spectacle. Once reporters begin tracing her relationship with Ebisuno Professor, he fears they will uncover her parents’ revolutionary past and their links to the Pioneers. The professor’s decision to seek official help thus carries consequences beyond finding Fukaéri: it may make the concealed history surrounding her impossible to contain.

Strategy and Risk

Tengo considers a more deliberate explanation for the professor’s choice. He wonders whether Ebisuno Professor actually wants Fukaéri’s disappearance to make noise, using public attention to clarify her parents’ relationship with the Pioneers and ultimately discover their whereabouts. This remains Tengo’s inference, not a confirmed account of the professor’s intentions. Still, it frames the search as a possible strategy: publicity, normally a threat to privacy, could also become a means of forcing hidden connections into view.

Tengo also recognizes the danger in that strategy. Ebisuno Professor is intelligent and, in Tengo’s estimation, unlikely to have overlooked the complications; yet Tengo suspects that he himself has not been told every important fact about Fukaéri. The incomplete information leaves the professor’s plan difficult to assess. His apparent willingness to risk exposure may be purposeful, but the narrative does not establish what he knows, what outcome he expects, or how much danger the publicity could bring.

Public Exposure and Narrative Role

As the search becomes public, Komatsu tells Tengo that Ebisuno Professor has officially reported Fukaéri missing and that journalists have already pursued him at home. Komatsu says he is limiting his response to stating that he knows nothing, while anticipating that reporters will investigate the professor’s connection to Fukaéri and her family history. The professor’s attempt to locate his ward therefore draws the literary partnership and its secrets into the same widening scrutiny.

Ebisuno Professor is characterized less by direct speech here than by the competing interpretations of his actions. To Komatsu, the police report threatens an exhausting media storm; to Tengo, it may be an intentional means of exposing the Pioneers and searching for Fukaéri’s parents. The account leaves that motive unresolved, preserving the distinction between what the professor does and what others believe he may intend. His decisive significance lies in that uncertainty: he acts as Fukaéri’s protector while turning her disappearance into a possible route toward truths that could not safely be pursued in private.