The Cat Who Saved Books(19)

Of course, the blasting sound of the Ninth Symphony only added to the weirdness of the scene. It was coming from a machine next to him on the desk. It was neither a CD nor a record player—Rintaro recognized it as an old-style cassette tape player, the kind of boom box that had seen its heyday at least a generation earlier. The only reason he recognized it was because his grandfather had owned one. There was something faintly ridiculous about the sight of the tiny spinning wheels of the cassette tape.

“Excuse me,” ventured Rintaro, but the man didn’t move. He tried again, but there was still no reaction. He took a deep breath and produced his loudest possible voice from deep in his belly. At last the man stopped what he was doing and turned around.

“Yes? What is it?” he said in a high-pitched voice.

The man had a very peculiar appearance. He wore thick glasses, his white coat was heavily wrinkled over his protruding belly, and his head was bald, save for a few stray gray hairs. The wearing of a lab coat seemed to suggest that he was some sort of scholar or researcher, but other than that there wasn’t a hint of anything intellectual or educated about him.

“We’re very sorry to bother you,” continued Rintaro.

“Oh, yeah—sorry about that,” yelled the man, loudly enough to be heard over the strident tones of Beethoven’s Ninth. “Didn’t notice you come in.”

As he spun his chair around to face his visitors, both Sayo and Rintaro flinched at the sight of a pair of scissors in one hand and a mangled book in the other.

“Rarely get any guests here,” he explained. “So sorry there’s nowhere to sit.”

His voice continued to boom over the top of the music.

“What do you want?”

Rintaro raised his voice to match.

“We came because we heard that books were being cut to pieces. Are you—”

“Huh? What’s that?”

“We heard a lot of books were being cut up—”

“Sorry, I can’t hear you. Could you speak up a bit?”

“I said, lots of books were—”

All of a sudden there was a painfully shrill noise, and the music came to an abrupt end. In its place a chilling silence filled the room. The man frowned and struggled out of his chair, reaching out toward the boom box on the edge of his desk.

“Er . . .” At Rintaro’s interruption the man froze, his pudgy hand still in midair.

“Your tape and the cassette player are pretty old. Sometimes the tape gets tangled up inside.”

The man clicked the button to open the machine and began to extract the cassette tape. If you listened to an ancient cassette tape over and over again, it was bound to get loose and eventually get caught up in the mechanism. It must have been a common occurrence for him, because with utter calm he removed the tape from the player, carefully wound it tight again, and replaced it in the player. Then he clicked the play button again. Not two seconds later, the thunderous sounds of Beethoven’s Ninth started up again.

“Tell me again what it is you want,” yelled the man.

Rintaro frowned at the booming scholar.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “Beethoven is one of my favorite composers—I especially admire his Ninth Symphony. My research always goes so much better when I listen to him.”

“Research? What research?” Rintaro spat out with disgust, but the middle-aged man didn’t seem to notice. On the contrary he nodded with delight.

“I’m very glad you asked. The focus of my research is, in short, ‘The Streamlining of Reading.’”

“You know what?” whispered Sayo in Rintaro’s ear. “I think that he’s using Beethoven to block out all the stuff he doesn’t want to hear.”

That may very well have been true, but there was nothing they could do about it. For now, Rintaro grabbed at the thread that had been dangled before him.

“What do you mean by the streamlining of reading?”

“Well, that’s simple. In short, research into how to read faster.”

The scholar grinned and made chopping motions with his scissors.

“There are so many books in the world, but we humans are so busy that we can never find the time to read them all. But when my research is complete, people will be able to read several dozen books every day. And not only the most popular bestsellers—but also complex stories and even difficult philosophical works. This is going to be one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of mankind.”

“Dozens of books a day?”

“Are you talking about speed-reading?”

Rintaro and Sayo responded simultaneously.

The scholar nodded happily.

“Speed-reading is a very important skill. But in general speed-reading doesn’t work unless you’re familiar with the kind of text you’re reading. For example, it’s extremely useful for picking out the information you need from a list of stock prices in a newspaper, but someone new to philosophy isn’t going to be able to speed-read Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology just like that. Now—”

A self-satisfied smile on his face, he added a dramatic pause and raised a thick forefinger in the air.

“I have been successful in combining a second skill with speed-reading.”

“A second skill?”