Tengo meets the Master at his secluded mountain residence after traveling with Fukaéri to Futamatao, a station he does not recognize. Their meeting turns the proposed revision of Éri’s La Chrysalide de l’air from an editorial scheme into a question of trust and responsibility: the Master asks whether Tengo will help present Éri as the author, hears why Tengo has agreed despite his reservations, and identifies facts about Éri’s reading disability and childhood that Tengo needs to know.

Journey to the Mountain Residence

The visit begins at Futamatao, a small, old wooden station where only five other passengers get off the train. They are the sort of travelers who have come to climb mountain paths and breathe the clean air, not to visit urban entertainment or restaurants. Outside, there is no substantial shop and almost nothing moving: one taxi waits, apparently for the arriving train. Fukaéri taps on its window, gets in, and briefly tells the driver where to go; Tengo follows her lead.

The taxi ride is short but difficult. It climbs steep hills and descends sharply over narrow roads more like farm tracks than regular streets, with tight bends and little room for passing. The driver does not slow much at the curves, leaving Tengo anxious and holding the door handle. After an especially steep ascent, the taxi stops at the top of a small mountain. The remote approach, with its contrast between the quiet station and the arduous climb, marks the meeting as a departure from Tengo’s familiar world.

The Master’s Arrival

After Fukaéri and Tengo reach the residence, they wait in silence. Fukaéri remains absorbed in her private world, while Tengo tries to stay calm by breathing steadily. A distant bird occasionally breaks the quiet. Tengo looks at his watch and out at the landscape, but feels that time is barely moving; the stillness becomes an experience in its own right before anyone explains why they have come.

About ten minutes later, a slender man of roughly sixty-five enters quickly. He is short, but his upright, energetic posture resists any impression of frailty. Thick eyebrows and large black-framed glasses give his face a severe cast; his precise movements seem economical, as if every part of a compact mechanism works without excess. When Tengo starts to rise, the man gestures for him to sit, then takes the chair opposite and studies him in silence. His eyes seem sharply perceptive without being inquisitorial. The old, well-worn clothes and the sparse, exact manner of his movements present a figure whose attention is directed less toward appearances than toward the matter before him.

The Rewrite and Tengo’s Reasons

The Master frames the proposal plainly: Tengo and Komatsu intend to revise the novel Éri wrote, make it more finished, and submit it for a new-writers’ prize, presenting the girl as its author. Tengo accepts that this is the substance of the plan, but distinguishes his part from Komatsu’s responsibility for the scheme. He describes himself as a technician whose task is to retouch the style of La Chrysalide de l’air, and admits that he does not know whether the plan will happen or whether it is morally right.

Asked why he has entered a risky undertaking, Tengo says that reason, common sense, and instinct all told him to withdraw. He considers himself cautious rather than adventurous, and says that with any other manuscript he would have refused Komatsu immediately. What changed his answer was the text itself: La Chrysalide de l’air captivated him. His explanation puts the work’s literary force beside the ethical uncertainty of presenting a rewritten novel under Éri’s name. The Master listens, then checks whether Tengo is approaching the project chiefly through the deep interest of revising the text rather than through its potentially fraudulent aspect.

Éri’s Choice and the Conditions of Trust

The Master turns to Fukaéri and asks what she thinks of the proposal. After fixing her gaze on a point in the air, she answers only that it is all right. Tengo notices her small fists clenched; her brief assent is not expanded into an argument, but the Master treats it as a decision with weight. He says that Éri appears to trust Tengo, though he does not claim to know her reasons, and makes his own position explicit: he trusts Éri and will accept her choice to entrust the work to Tengo.

That trust does not make the project simple. The Master tells Tengo that Éri is dyslexic, a condition he believes is probably congenital. Because of it, her school long regarded her as developmentally delayed, although, in his account, she is in fact highly intelligent and full of ideas. He cautions that the disability remains real even if others minimize it, and asks whether it could have adverse consequences for the plan. The conversation thus separates Éri’s ability and authorship from the difficulty she has with reading, while making clear that a public literary undertaking cannot responsibly ignore that difficulty.

The Unfinished History

The Master’s consent is conditional in an important sense: before Tengo can carry the project through, he must learn more than the facts of Éri’s dyslexia. The Master says he will explain what kind of childhood she had, where and under what circumstances he took charge of her upbringing. He acknowledges that this may be a long story. Tengo says he is listening, and Fukaéri adjusts her position beside him, keeping her hands joined behind her neck and gripping the collar of her cardigan.

The meeting ends at the threshold of that account rather than with the history itself. Its sequence moves from an obscure mountain journey, through the Master’s scrutiny and Tengo’s defense of his motives, to the disclosure of a condition that changes the practical meaning of the rewrite. The Master’s trust in Éri’s decision authorizes the collaboration, while his promise to disclose her past establishes that the literary work is inseparable from the circumstances of the person whose name it will bear.