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?”
“That of summary!”
Rintaro and Sayo could barely believe what they were hearing.
The moment was punctuated by the end of the symphony’s third movement. There was a fleeting silence and then the fourth movement began with its intense cacophony of wind instruments. The scholar raised his voice even louder.
“Summary, synopsis—call it what you will. Those who have mastered speed-reading can even further increase their speed by the use of extracts from the text, known as a ‘summary’ or ‘synopsis.’ Of course, we eliminate all technical terms and jargon, unique or stylish phrases or expressions, or any rich or subtle idioms. The style is free from any individuality, expressions are deliberately kept to those in common usage—the passages are touched up to achieve the utmost plainness and simplicity. In this way, a story that used to take, say, ten minutes to read can now be polished off in under a minute.”
The scholar reached down to pick up a book that had fallen on the floor. Randomly inserting his scissors, he snipped off a fragment of a page, then leaned forward to show it to Rintaro.
There was a single line of text. Rintaro read it aloud:
“Melos was furious.”
The scholar nodded contentedly.
“That’s the summary of ‘Run, Melos!’ by Osamu Dazai.”
Rintaro was dumbstruck. Meanwhile, the man began to wave around what remained of the text.
“You see, even a famous short story like this one can be summarized. All it needs is this sentence. I performed extraction after extraction and ended up with this sentence. Naturally, if you use my streamlining method, you’ll be able to read the whole of ‘Run, Melos!’ in 0.5 seconds. Novels and other longer books pose more of a problem.”
He stretched a fleshy arm toward the boom box and turned the volume up even louder. “Ode to Joy” played by the lower stringed instruments echoed exuberantly through the room.
“I’m currently working on Goethe’s Faust. The goal is to get it down to two minutes, but it’s proving to be quite a challenge.”