Éri’s flight from the Pioneers at the age of ten brought a silent, isolated child to the Master’s door and began seven years in which she had no contact with her parents. Recalled by the Master to Tengo, the episode joins a practical act of escape to the community’s deepening secrecy, while the story Éri later told of a blind goat and the Little People gives her departure a darker, uncanny background.

Departure and arrival

Éri appeared unexpectedly at the Master’s home when she was ten. Once taciturn and distant with strangers, she had previously spoken freely with the Master, whom she had known since early childhood. On arrival, however, she could no longer speak: when addressed, she could only nod yes or no. Her changed manner made plain that something grave had happened, though the Master did not claim to know precisely what.

Her journey to the house was difficult. She had a little money and a piece of paper bearing the address, and had been raised in an unusually secluded environment; despite being unable to explain herself, she managed to make the necessary connections between different forms of transport and reach the mountain. The small scrap of paper was both her practical guide and the only evidence of a destination she could pursue without words.

A woman who helped in the household and the Master’s daughter, Azami, cared for her. When Éri had become calmer after a few days, the Master called the Pioneers and asked to speak with Fukada. He was told that Fukada could not speak at that time. The same answer followed when he asked to speak with Fukada’s wife; no explanation was offered for either parent’s unavailability. The Master chose not to disclose that Éri was with him until he could speak directly with Fukada, and later attempts to make contact through other means also failed.

Silence, shelter, and separation

The Master did not press Éri to explain what had happened or force her to open up. He judged that she needed time, and acted as though her silence did not alarm him. Though she seemed neither frightened nor visibly distressed, she adapted to the household more easily than he had expected. She was intelligent and listened attentively to what he told her; apart from her inability to speak, their life together brought no obvious difficulty.

Azami became Éri’s constant companion. After returning from school and finishing their meal, the two girls would shut themselves in their room together. The Master did not know what they did or whether they conversed, and deliberately did not intrude. Éri did not attend school: as long as she could not utter a word, sending her there seemed impossible. The household therefore gave her a place to live without demanding an account of her past, while her closest connection there formed in private, through her inseparability from Azami.

Her parents did not contact her during the seven years she lived with the Master. Nor did they ask him what had become of her, although, as he emphasized to Tengo, the Fukadas had loved Éri deeply and regarded her as their most precious possession. They had broken with their own families, and Éri had grown up without knowing her grandparents; in the Master’s understanding, his home was the only place where she could have been helped. Her parents had even told her that she could go there if necessary. Their complete silence after her arrival is therefore not a simple absence of a known refuge: it is a striking contradiction between the refuge they had designated and their failure to seek news once she reached it.

The community behind the flight

The Master’s account places Éri’s departure amid a broader withdrawal by the Pioneers from the outside world. Before her flight, Fukada’s long letters to the Master—once full of community events and personal feeling—began arriving late and then stopped. The Master’s own letters went unanswered, telephone calls became difficult to complete, and when Fukada did speak, the brevity and abruptness of his replies suggested that someone might be listening. When the Master later tried to reach both parents after Éri’s arrival, neither could be reached or allowed to speak.

The timing does not, in the Master’s view, establish that Éri fled because of the armed conflict involving the dissident L’Aube, which had led to that community’s dissolution in 1981. He says that her coming to his home was, at least for the moment, unrelated to those troubles. The distinction matters: the flight is set against the wider history of conflict and increasing enclosure, but its immediate cause remains undisclosed. The narrative preserves the gap between what can be established—the child’s arrival, her silence, and her parents’ inaccessibility—and what the adults cannot explain.

The blind goat and Air Chrysalis

Tengo encounters another account of Éri’s childhood in Air Chrysalis, whose central girl is evidently modeled on Éri herself. At ten, the girl lives in a strange mountain commune and is assigned to watch an old, blind goat, an animal treated as important to the community. She is repeatedly told not to take her eyes off it. When the goat dies after she neglects her duty, the community punishes her by locking her for ten days in an old earthen storehouse with its corpse, cut off from everyone and forbidden to leave or speak with anyone.

In the story, the goat serves as a passage between this world and the world of the Little People. They enter through its corpse after nightfall and depart again at dawn. The girl can speak with them, and they teach her how to make an Air Chrysalis. Tengo is struck by the precision with which the goat’s habits and behavior are described. He cannot tell whether Éri truly lived in a mountain community or actually tended such an animal, but he considers it possible; if the experience was invented, he thinks, the narrator must possess extraordinary talent.

The book’s account of her flight and the tale in Air Chrysalis remain related but not interchangeable. The Master recounts the real-world circumstances of a child arriving at his house, while Tengo reads a fictional narrative whose details may draw on Éri’s life. Together, they place separation and silence beside an image of punishment and passage: in the story, the child is confined with the dead goat, yet that same animal opens a route between worlds. The novel does not resolve the mysteries surrounding Éri’s departure, but it shows how a hidden childhood can surface indirectly, transformed into a story whose vividness exceeds what its reader can verify.