Pr Ébisuno

Pr Ébisuno is Fukaéri’s guardian and the former ethnologist known to those around him as the Master. Having withdrawn from academic life for the mountains and built a successful career as an investment consultant, he becomes a crucial intermediary between Fukaéri’s story and the public world: he gives Tengo permission to rewrite La Chrysalide de l’air, while hoping its publication may help reveal what happened to the missing Fukadas.

Identity and Background

Pr Ébisuno was once an excellent specialist in ethnology, but the prestige and conventions of the university world did not suit him. He left scientific circles and eventually made his living as an investment consultant, directing substantial investments from his mountain home. Komatsu describes him as an unusually perceptive analyst who developed his own system and turned an intellectual curiosity about markets into a prosperous profession. The contrast between his scholarly past and financial work is striking, though the text presents both as expressions of his independent judgment rather than explaining a direct connection between them.

He rarely comes down from his mountain. When he meets Tengo and Fukaéri at a café, his unusually public appearance underscores the importance he attaches to the questions surrounding Fukaéri’s history. He sits upright and still, with an air that Tengo recognizes as characteristic of the Master.

Guardian and Investigator

Pr Ébisuno’s guardianship of Fukaéri is also a long effort to understand what happened to her parents, the Fukadas. He tells Tengo that he has spent seven years trying to untangle the mystery alone, only to find himself blocked by walls of unanswered questions. Because he believes La Chrysalide de l’air may contain a hidden key, he considers Tengo’s close reading of the manuscript a qualification for helping with that inquiry.

The book’s publication offers him a possible way to break the deadlock. Pr Ébisuno reasons that if La Chrysalide de l’air becomes a bestseller, media curiosity about its young author will grow. The attention could extend to Fukaéri’s parents and their disappearance. He does not welcome the publicity for its own sake and anticipates that it may expose private details, but he hopes to steer it toward the Fukadas and enlist the media where the police cannot or will not act. He says that he cannot accept their vanishing without a trace, both because they matter to him and because they matter to Fukaéri.

Permission to Rewrite the Novel

Pr Ébisuno gives Tengo explicit permission to rewrite La Chrysalide de l’air. He acknowledges that Fukaéri trusts Tengo and believes that the work has value because Tengo has immersed himself in it. He asks to read the revised version, but otherwise gives Tengo freedom over the work. His consent turns the proposed rewrite into an authorized collaboration rather than a decision made solely by Tengo and Komatsu.

That authorization sits within a complicated chain of authorship. Fukaéri tells her story orally; Azami records and prints it, submits it for the newcomer’s prize, and apparently chooses its title. Tengo is then asked to transform the prose while preserving the story’s core, and the plan is for Fukaéri alone to receive public credit. Pr Ébisuno’s assent helps make this arrangement possible, while his request to see the revision keeps him connected to the work’s development.

Protection and Moral Resolve

Pr Ébisuno’s protective commitments extend beyond his guardianship. In another strand of the narrative, a woman who has been protecting abused women says that he and Tamaru cannot resolve every case themselves, particularly when the law offers no help. Her account places him within a discreet support network built around a safe house for women and children escaping domestic violence. The woman also describes a survivor whose injuries include fractures and possible lasting hearing loss, and insists that people who inflict such treatment must be dealt with. The evidence establishes Pr Ébisuno’s connection to this protective world, though it does not detail his precise role in each intervention.

His care for Fukaéri is similarly firm. When she has escaped the Pioneers and has nowhere else to go, the woman vows to take responsibility for her and never return her to those who might reclaim her. The network’s protective purpose is inseparable from its willingness to act outside ordinary legal remedies: the woman says that Fukaéri’s abuser must eventually be removed, but stresses patience and extreme caution. Pr Ébisuno’s presence in this larger network places guardianship, investigation, and practical protection in the same moral landscape, where care responds to failures of institutions but also carries serious risks.

Narrative Significance

Pr Ébisuno links the novel’s literary plot to its unresolved history. He authorizes the rewrite not merely as a literary experiment but as a possible means of finding the Fukadas, accepting that publication may bring scrutiny to Fukaéri and to himself. His strategy depends on turning publicity toward a private disappearance, even as publicity threatens to expose the very people he has tried to protect.

The novel’s ending complicates that strategy. Fukaéri tells Tengo that she does not want to become a novelist or write another book: once her story is written, she says, it is no longer hers. She acknowledges that Tengo changed the written version exceptionally well, while distinguishing his accomplished text from the story she had told. The gap between oral telling, recorded manuscript, rewrite, and public authorship gives Pr Ébisuno’s permission a lasting ambiguity: it enables a search for truth, but the means of that search alter the story and place its speaker under the gaze of others.