“I read it, too,” Komatsu said after a short pause. “Right after you called me. The writing is incredibly bad. It’s ungrammatical, and in some places you have no idea what she’s trying to say. She should go back to school and learn how to write a decent sentence before she starts writing fiction.”

“But you did read it to the end, didn’t you?”

Komatsu smiled. It was the kind of smile he might have found way in the back of a normally unopened drawer. “You’re right, I did read it all the way through-much to my own surprise. I never read these new writer prize submissions from beginning to end. I even reread some parts of this one. Let’s just say the planets were in perfect alignment. I’ll grant it that much.”

“Which means it has something, don’t you think?”

Komatsu set his cigarette in an ashtray and rubbed the side of his nose with the middle finger of his right hand. He did not, however, answer Tengo’s question.

Tengo said, “She’s just seventeen, a high school kid. She still doesn’t have the discipline to read and write fiction, that’s all. It’s practically impossible for this work to take the new writers’ prize, I know, but it’s good enough to put on the short list. You can make that happen, I’m sure. So then she can win next time.”

“Hmm,” Komatsu said with another noncommittal answer and a yawn. He took a drink from his water glass. “Think about it, Tengo. Imagine if I put it on the short list. The members of the selection committee would faint-or more likely have a shit fit. But they would definitely not read it all the way through. All four of them are active writers, busy with their own work. They’d skim the first couple of pages and toss it out as if it were some grade school composition. I could plead with them to give it another try, and guarantee them it would be brilliant with a little polishing here and there, but who’s going to listen to me? Even supposing I could ‘make it happen,’ I’d only want to do that for something with more promise.”