Fukaéri et le professeur Ébisuno — lien de protection et de confiance

Fukaéri and Professor Ébisuno share a bond of protection and trust shaped by her escape from the Pioneers and her uncertain safety afterward. He acts as her guardian and advocate, while she retains her own judgment about what protection can mean: in a hidden message, she says that the professor is powerful and deeply intelligent, but that the Little People possess those qualities too. Their relationship therefore offers shelter without resolving the danger or the distance between what he knows and what she chooses to tell others.

Protection and Guardianship

When Fukaéri leaves the mountains for Tokyo, Professor Ébisuno accompanies her to the station. She does not say where she is going. Later, she tells him that she will not return to the mountains and will sleep at the Shinanomachi apartment, although she does not go there. The sequence shows him providing practical assistance while remaining unable to direct her movements: he sees her off, but her destination and subsequent whereabouts are withheld from him.

The professor’s protective role is also set against the care network surrounding the Dowager, who has made a safe house for women and children fleeing domestic abuse. When a vulnerable girl has nowhere else to go, the Dowager promises to take her in and hide her rather than return her to danger. She insists that the girl will be safest there, and argues that some bonds matter more than blood ties. These scenes make protection a concrete responsibility—shelter, secrecy, and a refusal to surrender someone to those who might harm her—rather than a merely benevolent sentiment.

The Dowager’s protective resolve can turn toward lethal action. After describing the lasting injuries inflicted on a victim, she insists that people who do such harm must be dealt with. Later she says that a man who may injure others must be sent into another world, while also insisting that the group act patiently and cautiously. This gives the book’s network of care a hard edge: its members try to protect the vulnerable where the law cannot help, but their chosen means raise the stakes of the protection they offer.

Disappearance and the Search

Three days after leaving Okutama, Fukaéri remains missing. Professor Ébisuno’s daughter and the professor are very worried, Komatsu tells Tengo. The professor intends to file a missing-person report with the police the next day. Komatsu urges him to wait a few days, fearing that an inquiry will draw attention to Fukaéri, whose public profile as the author of a book headed toward bestseller status makes her disappearance more newsworthy than an ordinary runaway’s.

The prospect of publicity threatens more than the privacy of a missing young woman. Komatsu worries that reporters will press him to comment and that their secrets may come out. Tengo, considering the professor’s possible motives, wonders whether Ébisuno might be using the disappearance to bring attention to Fukaéri’s parents’ ties to the Pioneers and discover where they are. He recognizes that the professor may understand the danger, but suspects that important facts about Fukaéri have not yet been shared with him. The relationship is thus framed through incomplete knowledge: Ébisuno takes steps to find her, while Tengo cannot tell whether those steps are solely protective or part of a larger plan.

Fukaéri’s Message and Independence

Fukaéri eventually sends Tengo a cassette by way of Azami, explaining that she has heard people say she disappeared and that she wants him to know she is safe. She says she has been told not to reveal her location. The Master has asked the police to search for her, she reports, but the police are doing nothing because runaways are not unusual. She plans to stay where she is without moving for a while. Her message confirms that the search is not simply a matter of Ébisuno’s concern: Fukaéri knows about it, and secrecy is part of how she intends to remain safe.

Her account of writing further clarifies the limits of the professor’s and Tengo’s influence. Fukaéri says she does not want to become a novelist or write another work. She asked Azami to look up the Gilyaks, whose oral life, as she describes it, is not fixed in written documents. Once her story has been written down, she says, it is no longer her story. She acknowledges that Tengo changed the written version skillfully, but separates that achievement from her own authorship and experience. Her trust in the people who helped her does not mean she relinquishes authority over her story.

Fukaéri also says that the Master has great power and intelligence, but that the Little People possess equal power and intelligence. She warns that the forest contains important things and that one must find what the Little People lack in order to pass through safely. The message does not explain how Professor Ébisuno understands or responds to this warning. It does, however, place his protective role within a danger that he may not control: in Fukaéri’s account, his strength is real but not singular, and survival requires knowledge beyond his reach.

Trust, Distance, and Uncertainty

The cassette reaches Tengo rather than Ébisuno, and Fukaéri says that she may not be able to see him for the time being. She thanks him for letting her sleep in his room and lending her his pajamas, then closes by saying that she and the Little People made written things and that they may be angry. These intimate details preserve gratitude and connection even as she withdraws. Her choice to send a message, but not her location, makes trust compatible with distance: she reassures someone close to her without allowing the reassurance to become a route to finding her.

Ébisuno’s care is expressed through accompaniment and the decision to seek official help; Fukaéri’s independence appears in her unannounced departure, her concealed refuge, and her insistence that written adaptation cannot remain fully her story. The relationship therefore does not settle into a simple opposition between guardian and runaway. He tries to protect her and may have broader intentions, while she remains alert to dangers that exceed his power and chooses what to disclose. The result is a bond sustained by concern but marked by uncertainty about her whereabouts, the professor’s full purpose, and the forces Fukaéri believes are active around her.