Professor Ébisuno

Professor Ébisuno, a retired ethnologist and guardian to Fukaéri, gives her a home after she escapes the Pioneers and later entrusts Tengo with rewriting Air Chrysalis. His care is defined by restraint: he gives a silenced child time rather than demanding an account, while his hope that Tengo can interpret her manuscript turns that patience into a search for what happened to her family.

Identity and Background

Professor Ébisuno has stopped working as a researcher, but he says he remains deeply shaped by ethnology. He describes the discipline as a way to compare the particular images humanity has created, look for what they share universally, and consider their consequences for individuals. In his account, a person can be understood both as autonomous and as belonging to another order. He recognizes a related ambition in Tengo’s literary work, linking the proposed rewrite to inquiry into how a story’s images might connect individual experience with larger patterns.

His scholarship is not merely a professional credential. It informs the way he approaches Fukaéri’s story: he does not assume that its meaning can be extracted by questioning her directly, but considers whether the form of Air Chrysalis may hold a concealed key to events that remain inaccessible by other means.

Refuge and Care for Fukaéri

Fukaéri arrives at Professor Ébisuno’s mountain home after a difficult journey. Though isolated by her upbringing and unable to express herself, she has a little money and a slip of paper bearing his address, and manages to make the necessary connections between different forms of transport. At first sight, Professor Ébisuno understands that something terrible has happened to her. A woman who helps at the house and his daughter, Azami, take care of the child.

After Fukaéri has settled for a few days, Professor Ébisuno tries to contact Fukada through the Pioneers. He is told that Fukada cannot speak, and receives no explanation when he asks why. His attempt to reach Fukada’s wife also fails: neither parent is available to speak. He does not announce that he has taken Fukaéri into his care, judging it better to remain silent until he can speak directly with Fukada. Later efforts to make contact by every means he can find lead nowhere.

Fukaéri seems neither frightened nor visibly distressed at being separated from her parents; Professor Ébisuno remembers her instead as almost entirely unresponsive. Still, she adapts to the household more easily than he expected. He decides not to force her to open her heart or question her about what has happened. He believes she needs time, so he acts as though her silence does not alarm him. She spends much of her time with Azami: when Azami returns from school, the two eat and then shut themselves in a room together. Professor Ébisuno does not know what they do there and does not intrude. Fukaéri does not attend school because she cannot speak, but he describes her as intelligent and attentive, and says she and Azami become inseparable.

This care combines attention with deliberate non-interference. Professor Ébisuno recognizes the limits of what he knows about the child, gives her room to form a bond with Azami on her own terms, and declines to treat her silence as permission to press her for disclosure.

Search for the Past and the Rewrite

Seven years after Fukaéri’s arrival, Professor Ébisuno tells Tengo that he has struggled alone to discover what happened to her among the Pioneers and what became of the Fukadas. His investigations have reached no answer: he describes solid walls blocking every route of inquiry. He hopes the story of Air Chrysalis may contain a hidden clue, however slight, and says he will follow that possibility as far as it goes.

Professor Ébisuno considers Tengo suited to the task because Tengo has recognized the manuscript’s value and immersed himself in it. When Tengo asks for a clear yes-or-no authorization to rewrite Air Chrysalis, Professor Ébisuno agrees. He asks to read the revised version, noting that Fukaéri trusts Tengo completely and trusts no one else apart from Azami and himself. He gives Tengo full freedom with the work. Fukaéri brings tea just as their conversation concludes, and the decision settles the next stage of the manuscript’s history: Tengo is now permitted to reshape it, while Professor Ébisuno waits to see what the new version may reveal.

Relationships and Ethical Commitments

Professor Ébisuno’s bond with Fukaéri is both protective and trusting. He does not claim to know what happened to her, and his inability to reach her parents leaves that uncertainty unresolved; instead, he offers stability without making speech or explanation the price of belonging. His confidence that Fukaéri trusts Tengo becomes the basis for extending that same trust to Tengo’s work.

Elsewhere, Professor Ébisuno’s ethical concern appears in the older woman’s response to abuse. When she sees photographs documenting injuries to a victim—including three fractures and possible lasting deafness in one ear—she insists that those who inflict such treatment must be dealt with and that action is necessary. Her stance echoes the book’s broader concern with protection when ordinary remedies seem inadequate, though the evidence does not establish Professor Ébisuno’s involvement in the older woman’s separate refuge or actions.

Narrative Role and Significance

Professor Ébisuno connects two kinds of uncertainty: the unanswered history of Fukaéri’s childhood and the obscurity of the story she brought out of that experience. His own investigations fail where direct access to the Pioneers and the Fukadas is blocked; the manuscript offers a different, interpretive route. By authorizing Tengo to rewrite it, he turns a literary collaboration into a possible means of understanding a hidden past, without claiming in advance that it will solve the mystery.

His conduct as a guardian also establishes a contrast between care and interrogation. Fukaéri’s silence is not overcome by force; it is met with time, privacy, and the companionship of Azami. Professor Ébisuno’s patience does not erase the unanswered questions, but it makes trust possible—and that trust is precisely what allows the manuscript to pass into Tengo’s hands.