Still holding Tengo’s hand, Fuka-Eri guides him off the train and to the street where they hail a taxi. They arrive at a large house owned by Professor Ebisuno, a man in his 60s who is Fuka-Eri’s guardian.

Ebisuno explains that it is important for Tengo to understand Fuka-Eri’s childhood and how she came to be in his care. In the 1960s, Ebisuno and Fuka-Eri’s father, Tamotsu Fukada, were both in the anthropology department at the same university. By 1970, Tamotsu became a strong adherent to the Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong, helping to organize student radicals against the university for its support of the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. After the university fired him, Tamotsu moved his wife and two-year-old Fuka-Eri to a utopian farming commune in Yamanashi Prefecture, along with a group of his more revolutionary students. By 1974, the commune—rechristened Sakigake with Tamotsu as its leader—had amassed considerable funds and gained tax exempt status from the Japanese government.

As the commune grew, thanks to the influx of affluent, idealistic professionals, a more militant faction broke away from Sakigake in 1976 and started its own revolutionary commune in the same region. Though torn, Tamotsu chose to stay with the moderate faction.