Kongqi Weng

Air Chrysalis is the story Eri recounts to Azami, who records and transcribes it, and it becomes both a partial route back to Eri’s emotions and a possible clue to mysteries surrounding her years among the Pioneers. Its images—including a blind goat, the Little People, and the air chrysalis itself—resist a single explanation: the Master allows that the story may echo witnessed events, but also that it can be read as myth or allegory.

Telling and transcription

In the evenings, Eri and Azami would shut themselves in their room. The Master did not know exactly what they did there, but came to believe that they spent much of the time discussing Eri’s story. Azami took notes or recorded Eri’s account, then transcribed it on the word processor in the Master’s office. The story thus passed from Eri’s telling through Azami’s written record, rather than arriving as a straightforward account composed by Eri herself.

The Master connects this activity to a change in Eri. Before she began recounting the story, a membrane-like indifference seemed to envelop her; afterward, expressions gradually returned to her face, and she seemed closer to the Eri he remembered. He describes the recovery as only partial, while suggesting that telling the story was linked to it. The act of narration matters, then, not only because it preserves a text but because it coincides with a limited return of emotional expression.

Images and uncertain reality

When Tengo asks about the story, the Master calls it interesting and extraordinarily suggestive, yet admits that he cannot determine what it suggests. He specifically wonders about the meaning of the blind goat, the Little People, and the air chrysalis. These images form the story’s distinctive symbolic field, but the evidence does not resolve them into a fixed interpretation.

The Master considers whether Eri actually experienced scenes like those in the story while living among the Pioneers. He does not rule out that possibility, but says it is difficult to establish where reality ends and the fantastic begins. The story can also be read as a kind of myth or an ingenious allegory. Its significance therefore lies partly in its maintained uncertainty: it may preserve concrete experience, transform it into fantastic narrative, or give it an allegorical shape.

A possible key to the past

The Master has spent seven years trying, alone, to understand what happened to Eri and what became of her parents, the Fukadas. He says that his efforts met with insurmountable obstacles and yielded no lead. He hopes that a hidden key in Air Chrysalis might illuminate the enigma, even if the chance of finding one is slight.

That hope makes the story more than a literary curiosity within the conversation. Its possible connection to Eri’s life among the Pioneers gives the uncertain images investigative weight: the same text that may have helped Eri recover some feeling might also contain traces of events the Master has been unable to reconstruct. The story offers a possibility, not a solution; the Master’s account leaves its factual basis unresolved.

Authorization to rewrite

The Master considers Tengo qualified to work on the text because he has recognized its value and immersed himself in it. Tengo asks directly for permission to rewrite Air Chrysalis, and the Master agrees, granting him full freedom in relation to the work while asking to read the revised version.

The permission rests in part on Eri’s trust: the Master says that she trusts Tengo completely and relies on no one else apart from Azami and himself. The rewriting is therefore tied both to the story’s possible evidentiary value and to the confidence Eri places in Tengo. The text remains open to transformation, but its unresolved images and uncertain relation to lived events are precisely what make that transformation consequential.