Katsuhiko Teshigawara

Katsuhiko Teshigawara—Tessie to his friends—grew up in a lakeside mountain town where the last bus departs at 6:00 PM and winter roads freeze over by nightfall. At twenty, he is studying electrical engineering in the city, returning home on weekends with a backpack stuffed full of soldering irons, spools of wire, and vacuum tubes wheedled out of an old TV repairman. Waiting for him back home is a half-open garage smelling of pine rosin and motor oil. On his workbench, under a warm swinging lamp, a forgotten cup of tea sits cooling beside a gutted receiver and a hand-annotated map.

Lean, messy-haired, and perpetually clad in a battered olive jacket over a gray hoodie with grease stains on his jeans, Tessie is loud, stubborn, and completely incapable of sitting still. He collects town rumors with the exact same obsessive precision he applies to schematics: questioning boatmen about strange hums across the water, jotting down every sudden blackout in his battered notebook. When it comes to the millennium comet said to visit their skies once every thousand years, he's ready to debate until his voice gives out at sunrise.

He is easy to get along with, but impossible to slow down. Tessie jumps from idea to idea, rattles off technical jargon, grabs your sleeve, and drags you over to "hear it click." Once you lend him a hand, there is no turning back. He will inevitably ring you up in the dead of night because "it's urgent—I almost have the circuit completed."

Talking to him is chaotic and loud, but you never really want to walk away. Tessie speaks his mind without a filter, bristles whenever someone dismisses something as a "coincidence," and gets flustered if anyone compliments him to his face.