hen Kuro first spotted Tsukuru, she looked as if she couldn’t understand what was happening. The expression on her face vanished, replaced by a blank look. She pushed her sunglasses up on her head and gazed at Tsukuru without a word. She’d gone out for an after-lunch walk with her daughters, only to come back and find a man, a Japanese man by the look of him, standing next to her husband. A face she didn’t recognize.

She was holding her younger daughter’s hand. The little girl looked about three. Next to her stood the older daughter, a little bigger and probably two or three years older than her sister. The girls wore matching flower-print dresses and plastic sandals. The door was still open, and outside the dog was barking noisily. Edvard stuck his head outside and gave the dog a quick scolding. It soon stopped barking and lay down on the porch. The daughters, like their mother, stood there silently, staring at Tsukuru.

Kuro didn’t look much different from the last time he’d seen her, sixteen years earlier. The soft, full visage of her teenage years, though, had retreated, filled in now by more straightforward, expressive features. She’d always been robust and sturdy, but now her unwavering, unclouded eyes seemed more introspective. Those eyes had surely seen so many things over the years, things that remained in her heart. Her lips were tight, her forehead and cheeks tanned and healthy-looking. Abundant black hair fell straight to her shoulders, her bangs pinned back with a barrette, and her breasts were fuller than before. She was wearing a plain blue cotton dress, a cream-colored shawl draped around her shoulders, and white tennis shoes.

Kuro turned to her husband as if for an explanation, but Edvard said nothing. He merely shook his head slightly. She turned to look back at Tsukuru, and lightly bit her lip.

What Tsukuru saw in front of him now was the healthy body of a woman who had walked a completely different path in life from the one he’d taken. Seeing her now, the true weight of sixteen years of time struck him with a sudden intensity. There are some things, he concluded, that can only be expressed through a woman’s form.

As she gazed at him, Kuro’s face was a bit strained. Her lips quivered, as if a ripple had run through them, and one side of her mouth rose. A small dimple appeared on her right cheek—technically not a dimple, but a shallow depression that appeared as her face was filled with a cheerful bitterness. Tsukuru remembered this expression well, the expression that came to her face just before she voiced some sarcastic remark. But now she wasn’t going to say something sarcastic. She was simply trying to draw a distant hypothesis closer to her.

“Tsukuru?” she said, finally giving the hypothesis a name.

Tsukuru nodded.

The first thing she did was pull her daughter closer, as if protecting her from some threat. The little girl, her face still raised to Tsukuru, clung to her mother’s leg. The older daughter stood a bit apart, unmoving. Edvard went over to her and gently patted her hair. The girl’s hair was dark blond. The younger girl’s was black.

The five of them stayed that way for a while, not speaking a word. Edvard patted the blond daughter’s hair, Kuro’s arm remained around the shoulder of the black-haired daughter, while Tsukuru stood alone on the other side of the table, as if they were all holding a pose for a painting with this arrangement. And the central figure in this was Kuro. She, or rather her body, was the core of the tableau enclosed by that frame.

Kuro was the first to move. She let go of her little daughter, then took the sunglasses off her forehead and laid them on the table. She picked up the mug her husband had been using and took a drink of the cold, leftover coffee. She frowned, as if she had no idea what it was she’d just drunk.

“Shall I make some coffee?” her husband asked her in Japanese.

“Please,” Kuro said, not looking in his direction. She sat down at the table.

Edvard went over to the coffee maker again and switched it on to reheat the coffee. Following their mother’s lead, the two girls sat down side by side on a wooden bench next to the window. They stared at Tsukuru.

“Is that really you, Tsukuru?” Kuro asked in a small voice.

“In the flesh,” Tsukuru replied.

Her eyes narrowed, and she gazed right at him.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Tsukuru said. He’d meant it as a joke, though it didn’t come out sounding like one.

“You look so different,” Kuro said in a dry tone.

“Everyone who hasn’t seen me in a while says that.”

“You’re so thin, so … grown-up.”

“Maybe that’s because I’m a grown-up,” Tsukuru said.

“I guess so,” Kuro said.

“But you’ve hardly changed at all.”

She gave a small shake of her head but didn’t respond.

Her husband brought the coffee over and placed it on the table. A small mug, one she herself had made. She put in a spoonful of sugar, stirred it, and cautiously took a sip of the steaming coffee.

“I’m going to take the kids into town,” Edvard said cheerfully. “We need groceries, and I have to gas up the car.”

Kuro looked over at him and nodded. “Okay. Thanks,” she said.

“Do you want anything?” he asked his wife.

She silently shook her head.

Edvard stuck his wallet in his pocket, took down the keys from where they hung on the wall, and said something to his daughters in Finnish. The girls beamed and leaped up from the bench. Tsukuru caught the words “ice cream.” Edvard had probably promised to buy the girls an ice cream when they went shopping.

Kuro and Tsukuru stood on the porch and watched as Edvard and the girls climbed into the Renault van. Edvard opened the double doors in back, gave a short whistle, and the dog ecstatically barreled toward the van and leaped inside. Edvard looked out from the driver’s side, waved, and the white van disappeared beyond the trees. Kuro and Tsukuru stood there, watching the spot where the van had last been.

“You drove that Golf here?” Kuro asked. She pointed to the little navy-blue car parked off a ways.

“I did. From Helsinki.”

“Why did you come all the way to Helsinki?”

“I came to see you.”

Kuro’s eyes narrowed, and she stared at him, as if trying to decipher a difficult diagram.

“You came all the way to Finland to see me? Just to see me?”

“That’s the size of it.”

“After sixteen years, without a word?” she asked, seemingly astonished.

“Actually it was my girlfriend who told me to come. She said it’s about time I saw you again.”

The familiar curve came to Kuro’s lips. She sounded half joking now. “I see. Your girlfriend told you it was about time you came to see me. So you jumped on a plane in Narita and flew all the way to Finland. Without contacting me, and with no guarantee that I’d actually be here.”

Tsukuru was silent. The boat went on slapping against the dock, though there wasn’t much wind, and just a scattering of waves on the lake.

“I thought if I got in touch before I came, you might not see me.”

“How could you say that?” Kuro said in surprise. “Come on, we’re friends.”

“We used to be. But I don’t know anymore.”

She gazed through the trees at the lake and let out a soundless sigh. “It’ll be two hours before they come back from town. Let’s use the time to talk.”

They went inside and sat down across from each other at the table. She removed the barrette and her hair spilled onto her forehead. Now she looked more like the Kuro he remembered.

“There’s one thing I’d like you to do,” Kuro said. “Don’t call me Kuro anymore. I’d prefer you call me Eri. And don’t refer to Yuzuki as Shiro. If possible, I don’t want you to call us by those names anymore.”

“Those names are finished?”

She nodded.

“But you don’t mind still calling me Tsukuru?”

“You’re always Tsukuru,” Eri said, and laughed quietly. “So I don’t mind. The Tsukuru who makes things. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.”

“In May I went to Nagoya and saw Ao and Aka, one right after the other,” Tsukuru said. “Is it okay if I keep on using those names?”

“That’s fine. But I just want you to use Yuzu’s and my real names.”

“I saw them separately, and we talked. Not for very long, though.”

“Are they both okay?”

“It seemed like it,” Tsukuru said. “And their work seems to be going well, too.”

“So in good old Nagoya, Ao’s busy selling Lexuses, one after another, while Aka’s training corporate warriors.”

“That about sums it up.”

“And what about you? You’ve managed to get by?”

“Yes, I’ve managed,” Tsukuru said. “I work for a railroad company in Tokyo and build stations.”

“You know, I happened to hear about that not so long ago. That Tsukuru Tazaki was busy building stations in Tokyo,” Eri said. “And that he had a very clever girlfriend.”

“For the time being.”

“So you’re still single?”

“I am.”

“You always did things at your own pace.”

Tsukuru was silent.

“What did you talk about when you met the two of them in Nagoya?” Eri asked.

“We talked about what happened between us,” Tsukuru said. “About what happened sixteen years ago, and what’s happened in the sixteen years since.”

“Was meeting them also, maybe—something your girlfriend told you to do?”

Tsukuru nodded. “She said there are some things I have to resolve. I have to revisit the past. Otherwise … I’ll never be free from it.”

“She thinks you have some issues you need to deal with.”

“She does.”

“And she thinks these issues are damaging your relationship.”

“Most likely,” Tsukuru said.

Eri held the mug in both hands, testing how hot it was, and then took another sip of coffee.

“How old is she?”

“She’s two years older than me.”

Eri nodded. “I can see you getting along well with an older woman.”

“Maybe so,” Tsukuru said.

They were quiet for a while.

“There are all kinds of things we have to deal with in life,” Eri finally said. “And one thing always seems to connect with another. You try to solve one problem, only to find that another one you hadn’t anticipated arises instead. It’s not that easy to get free of them. That’s true for you—and for me, too.”

“You’re right, it’s not easy to get free of them. But that doesn’t mean we should leave them hanging, unresolved,” Tsukuru said. “You can put a lid on memory, but you can’t hide history. That’s what my girlfriend said.”

Eri stood up, went over to the window, opened it, then returned to the table. The breeze fluttered the curtain, and the boat slapped sporadically against the dock. She brushed her hair back with her fingers, rested both hands on the tabletop, and looked at Tsukuru, then spoke. “There could be lids that have gotten so tight you can’t pry them off anymore.”

“I’m not trying to force anything. That’s not what I’m trying to do. But at least I’d like to see, with my own eyes, what kind of lid it is.”

Eri gazed at her hands on the table. They were larger, and more fleshy, than Tsukuru remembered. Her fingers were long, her nails short. He pictured those hands spinning a potter’s wheel.

“You said I look very different,” Tsukuru said. “I think I’ve changed, too. Sixteen years ago, after you banished me from the group, all I could think about for five months was dying. Death and nothing else. Not to exaggerate or anything, but I was really teetering on the brink. Standing on the edge, staring down at the abyss, unable to look away. Somehow, I was able to make my way back to the world I came from. But it wouldn’t have been surprising if I had actually died then. Something was wrong with me—mentally, I mean. I don’t know what would be the correct diagnosis—anxiety, depression. Something like that. But something was definitely abnormal. It wasn’t like I was confused, though. My mind was perfectly clear. Utterly still, with no static at all. A very strange condition, now that I think back on it.”

Tsukuru stared at Eri’s silent hands and went on.

“After those five months were over, my face was totally transformed. And my body, too. None of my old clothes fit anymore. When I looked in the mirror, it felt like I’d been put inside a container that wasn’t me. I don’t know, maybe my life just happened to reach that stage—a stage where I had to kind of lose my mind for a while, where my looks and my body had to undergo a metamorphosis. But the trigger for this change was the fact that I had been cut off from our group. That incident changed me forever.”

Eri listened without a word.

Tsukuru went on. “How should I put it? It felt like I was on the deck of a ship at night and was suddenly hurled into the ocean, all alone.”

After he said this, he suddenly recalled this was the same description that Aka had used. He paused and continued.

“I don’t know if someone pushed me off, or whether I fell overboard on my own. Either way, the ship sails on and I’m in the dark, freezing water, watching the lights on deck fade into the distance. None of the passengers or crew know I’ve fallen overboard. There’s nothing to cling to. I still have that fear, even now—that suddenly my very existence will be denied and, through no fault of my own, I’ll be hurled into the night sea once more. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to form deep relationships with people. I always keep a distance between me and others.”

He spread his hands apart on the table, indicating a space of about twelve inches.

“Maybe it’s part of my personality, something I was born with. Maybe I’ve always had an instinctive tendency to leave a buffer zone between me and others. But one thing I do know is that I never thought this when I was with all of you in high school. At least that’s how I remember it. Though it seems so long ago.”

Eri put her palms to her cheeks and slowly rubbed them, as if washing herself. “You want to know what happened sixteen years ago. The whole truth.”

“I do,” Tsukuru said. “But there’s one thing I want to make clear. I never, ever did anything to harm Shiro. Yuzu, I mean.”

“I know that,” she said. She stopped rubbing her face. “You couldn’t have raped Yuzu. That’s obvious.”

“But you believed her, right from the beginning. Like Ao and Aka did.”

Eri shook her head. “No, I didn’t believe her from the beginning. I don’t know what Ao and Aka thought, but I didn’t believe it. How could I? There’s no way you’d ever do something like that.”

“Then why did you …?”

“Why did I take Yuzu at her word and kick you out of the group? Why didn’t I stand up and defend you? Is that what you’re asking?”

Tsukuru nodded.

“Because I had to protect her,” Eri said. “And in order to do that, I had to cut you off. It was impossible to protect you and protect her at the same time. I had to accept one of you completely, and reject the other entirely.”

“Her psychological problems were that severe. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, they were indeed. Truthfully, she was backed into a corner. Someone had to protect her, and the only person who could possibly do that was me.”

“You could have explained that to me.”

She slowly shook her head a few times. “There was no room to explain things then. What should I have said? Tsukuru, would you mind if for a while we say you raped Yuzu? We have to do that now. Something’s wrong with her, and we have to take care of the situation. Just be patient, things will settle down later. I don’t know, maybe in two years? I couldn’t say something like that. I knew it was wrong, but I had to let you handle it on your own. Things were that tense. You should know, though, that Yuzu actually had been raped.”

Startled, Tsukuru looked at her. “By who?”

Eri shook her head again. “I don’t know. But someone had forced her to have sex against her will. She was pregnant, after all. And she insisted that it was you who had raped her. She made it very clear that Tsukuru Tazaki was the one who did it. She described it all in depressingly realistic detail. So the rest of us had to accept what she said. Even though we knew in our hearts that you couldn’t have done it.”

“She was pregnant?”

“Mmm. There was no doubt about it. I went to the gynecologist’s with her. We went to someone far away. Not to her father’s clinic, of course.”

Tsukuru sighed. “And then?”

“All sorts of things happened, and then at the end of the summer, she miscarried. And that was it. It wasn’t a phantom pregnancy. She really was pregnant, and really did have a miscarriage. I guarantee it.”

“Since she miscarried, you mean.…”

“Yes, she planned to have the baby and raise it herself. She never considered having an abortion. She could never kill a living thing, no matter what the situation. You remember how she was, don’t you? She always hated it that her father performed abortions. We often argued about it.”

“Did anyone else know she was pregnant and that she had a miscarriage?”

“I knew. And so did Yuzu’s older sister. She was the type who could keep a secret. She got some money together for Yuzu. But that was it—there was nobody else. Her parents didn’t know, and neither did Aka or Ao. This was our secret, just the three of us. But I think it’s okay, now, to reveal it. Especially to you.”

“And Yuzu kept insisting I was the one who’d gotten her pregnant?”

“She was very insistent about that, yes.”

Tsukuru narrowed his eyes and stared at the coffee cup Eri was holding. “But why? Why did she say I did it? I can’t think of a single reason.”

“I really don’t know,” Eri said. “I can imagine a number of possibilities, none of which are very convincing. I just can’t explain it. The only plausible reason I can think of is because I liked you. That might have triggered it.”

Tsukuru looked at her in surprise. “You liked me?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“Of course not. I had no idea.”

Eri gave a wry smile. “I guess it’s okay to tell you now, but I always liked you. I was really attracted to you. Actually, I was in love with you. I always kept it secret, and never told anyone. I don’t think Ao or Aka were aware of it. Yuzu knew, of course. Girls can never hide anything from each other.”

“I never knew,” Tsukuru said.

“That’s because you were a moron,” Eri said, pressing an index finger to her temple. “We were together that long, and I tried sending out signals. If you’d had even half a brain, you would have picked up on them.” Tsukuru pondered these signals, but couldn’t come up with a thing.

“You remember how you used to tutor me in math after school?” Eri said. “It made me so happy.”

“You never could grasp the principles of calculus,” Tsukuru said. He suddenly recalled how Eri’s cheeks would blush sometimes. “You’re absolutely right. I’m a little slow on the uptake.”

Eri gave a tiny smile. “About things like that you are. And besides, you were attracted to Yuzu.”

Tsukuru was about to say something, but Eri cut him off. “No need to explain. You weren’t the only one. Everybody was attracted to her. How could they not be? She was so fresh, so beautiful. Like Disney’s Snow White. But not me. As long as I was with her, I was always a bit player, like the Seven Dwarfs. But that was unavoidable. Yuzu and I had been best friends since junior high. I just had to adapt to that role.”

“Are you saying that Yuzu was jealous? Because you liked me?”

Eri shook her head. “All I’m saying is that maybe that was one latent reason. I’m no psychoanalyst. At any rate, Yuzu insisted to the bitter end that you stole her virginity at your place in Tokyo. For her, this was the definitive version of the truth, and she never wavered. Even now I don’t understand where that delusion came from, and why she clung to that distorted version of reality. I don’t think anybody can ever explain it. But I do think that sometimes a certain kind of dream can be even stronger than reality. That’s the dream she had. Maybe that’s what it was. Please understand, I did feel awful for you.”

“Was Yuzu ever attracted to me?”

“No, she wasn’t,” Eri said tersely. “Yuzu was never interested in anyone of the opposite sex.”

Tsukuru frowned. “She was a lesbian?”

Eri shook her head again. “No, that’s not it. She didn’t have those tendencies at all. I’m positive. It’s just that Yuzu always had a strong aversion to anything sexual. A fear of sex, you might say. I don’t know where those feelings came from. The two of us were very open with each other about almost everything, but we hardly ever talked about sex. I was up-front about sexual things myself, but whenever sex came up, Yuzu quickly changed the subject.”

“What happened to her after the miscarriage?” Tsukuru asked.

“She took a leave of absence from college. In her condition, there was no way she could be around other people. She told them she had health issues, and stayed holed up at home and never went out. Before long, she developed a severe eating disorder. She vomited up almost everything she ate, and gave herself enemas to get rid of the rest. If she’d gone on that way, I don’t think she would have survived. I made her see a counselor, and somehow she was able to get over the eating disorder. It took about a half a year. At one point it was so awful that she was down to under ninety pounds, and she looked like a ghost. But she pulled out of it and reached the point, barely, where she could cling to life. I went to see her almost every day, talking with her, encouraging her, doing whatever I could to keep her going. After a year away from college, she managed to return to school.”

“Why do you think she developed an eating disorder?”

“It’s quite simple. She wanted to stop having periods,” Eri said. “Extreme weight loss stops you from having periods. That’s what she was hoping for. She didn’t want to ever get pregnant again, and probably didn’t want to be a woman anymore. She wanted, if possible, to have her womb removed.”

“Sounds pretty serious,” Tsukuru said.

“It was, very serious. That’s why the only thing I could do was cut you off. I felt really bad for you, and believe me, I knew how cruelly I was treating you. For me it was especially hard not to be able to see you again. It’s true. I felt like I was being ripped apart. Like I said before, I really liked you.”

Eri paused, gazing at her hands on the table as if gathering her feelings, and then she went on.

“But I had to help Yuzu recover. That had to be my highest priority. She had life-threatening issues she was dealing with, and she needed my help. So the only thing I could do was make you swim alone through the cold night sea. I knew you could do it. You were strong enough to make it.”

The two of them were silent for a time. The leaves on the trees outside rippled in the wind.

Tsukuru broke the silence. “So Yuzu recovered and graduated from college. What happened after that?”

“She was still seeing a counselor once a week but was able to pretty much lead a normal life. At least she didn’t look like a ghost anymore. But by then she was no longer the Yuzu we used to know.”

Eri took a breath, choosing her words.

“She had changed,” Eri finally said. “It’s like everything had drained out of her heart, like any interest in the outside world had disappeared. She no longer cared much about music. It was painful to see. She still enjoyed teaching music to children, though—that passion never left her. Even when her condition was at its worst, when she was so weak she could barely stand up, she managed to drag herself once a week to the church school where she taught piano to kids. She kept on doing that volunteer work alone. I think the desire to continue that project was what helped her recover. If she hadn’t had that work, she might never have made it.”

Eri turned around and gazed out the window at the sky above the trees. She faced forward again and looked directly at Tsukuru. The sky was still covered with a thin layer of clouds.

“By this time, though, Yuzu didn’t have that sense of unconditional friendship toward me that she’d had when we were younger. She said she was grateful to me, for everything I’d done for her. And I think she really was. But at the same time, she’d lost any interest in me. Like I said, Yuzu had lost interest in almost everything. And I was part of this almost everything. It was painful to admit. We’d been best friends for so long, and I really cared about her. But that’s the way it was. By then I wasn’t indispensable to her anymore.”

Eri stared for a while at an imaginary spot above the table, and then spoke.

“Yuzu wasn’t Snow White anymore. Or maybe she was too worn out to be Snow White. And I was a bit tired myself of being the Seven Dwarfs.”

Eri half unconsciously picked up her coffee cup, then returned it to the table.

“At any rate, by then our wonderful group—the group of four, minus you—couldn’t function the way it had in the past. Everyone had graduated from school and was busy with their own lives. It’s an obvious thing to say, but we weren’t high school kids anymore. And needless to say, cutting you off left behind emotional scars in all of us. Scars that weren’t superficial.”

Tsukuru was silent, listening intently to her words.

“You were gone, but you were always there,” Eri said.

Once more, a short silence.

“Eri, I want to know more about you,” Tsukuru said. “What brought you to where you are now—that’s what I’d first like to know.”

Eri narrowed her eyes and tilted her head slightly. “From my late teens until my early twenties, Yuzu had me totally under her sway. One day I looked around me and realized I was fading. I’d been hoping to get work as a writer. I always enjoyed writing. I wanted to write novels, poems, things of that nature. You knew about that, right?”

Tsukuru nodded. Eri had carried around a thick notebook, always jotting down ideas when the urge came over her.

“But in college I couldn’t manage that. Taking care of Yuzu constantly, it was all I could do to keep up with my schoolwork. I had two boyfriends in college but not much came of it—I was too busy spending time with Yuzu to go on dates very often. Nothing worked out for me. One day I just stopped and asked myself: What in the world are you doing with your life? I had no goals anymore and I was just spinning my wheels, watching my self-confidence disappear. I know things were hard for Yuzu, but you have to understand that they were hard for me, too.”

Eri’s eyes narrowed again, as if she were gazing at some distant scene.

“A friend from college asked me to go to a pottery class and I went along, kind of as a lark. And that’s where I discovered what I’d been searching for, after so long. Spinning the potter’s wheel, I felt like I could be totally honest with myself. Focusing on creating something helped me to forget everything else. From that day on, I’ve been totally absorbed in pottery. In college it was still just a hobby, but after that, I wanted to become a full-fledged potter. I graduated from college, worked part-time jobs for a year while I studied, then reentered school, this time in the industrial arts department. Goodbye novels, hello pottery. While I was working on my pottery, I met Edvard, who was in Japan as an exchange student. Eventually we got married and moved here. Life is a total surprise sometimes. If my friend hadn’t invited me to the pottery class, I’d be living a completely different life now.”

“You really seem to have a talent for it,” Tsukuru said, pointing to the pottery on the shelves. “I don’t know much about pottery, but I get a wonderful feeling when I look at your pieces, and hold them.”

Eri smiled. “I don’t know about talent. But my work sells pretty well here. It doesn’t bring in much money, but I’m really happy that other people need what I create.”

“I know what you mean,” Tsukuru said, “since I make things myself. Very different things from yours, though.”

“As different as stations and plates.”

“We need both in our lives.”

“Of course,” Eri said. She thought about something. The smile gradually faded from her lips. “I like it here. I imagine I’ll stay here for the rest of my life.”

“You won’t go back to Japan?”

“I’ve taken Finnish citizenship now, and have gotten a lot better at speaking the language. The winters are hard to get through, I’ll admit that, but then it gives me more time to read. Maybe I’ll find I want to write again. The children are used to Finland now and have friends here. And Edvard is a good man. His family’s good to us, too, and my work is going well.”

“And you’re needed here.”

Eri raised her head and looked fixedly at Tsukuru.

“It was when I heard that Yuzu had been murdered by somebody that I decided I could stay here the rest of my life. Ao called and told me. I was pregnant with my older girl then and couldn’t attend the funeral. It was a terrible thing for me. I felt like my chest was about to be ripped apart. Knowing that Yuzu had been killed like that, in some unknown place, and that she’d been cremated and was nothing more than ash. Knowing that I’d never see her again. I made up my mind then and there that if I had a girl, I’d name her Yuzu. And that I’d never go back to Japan.”

“So your daughter’s name is Yuzu?”

“Yuzu Kurono Haatainen,” she said. “A part of Yuzu lives on, in that name, at least.”

“But why did Yuzu go off by herself to Hamamatsu?”

“She went there soon after I moved to Finland. I don’t know why. We wrote letters to each other regularly, but she didn’t tell me anything about the reasons behind her move. She simply said it was because of work. But there were any number of jobs she could have had in Nagoya, and for her to move to some place she’d never been before, and live all alone, was the same as committing suicide.”

Yuzu was found inside her apartment in Hamamatsu, strangled to death with a cloth belt. Tsukuru had read the details in old newspapers and magazines. He’d searched online, too, to find out more about the case.

Robbery wasn’t involved. Her purse, with cash still in it, was found nearby. And there were no signs she’d been assaulted. Nothing was disturbed in her apartment, and there were no signs of a struggle. Residents on the same floor had heard no suspicious sounds. There were a couple of menthol cigarette butts in an ashtray, but these turned out to be Yuzu’s. (Tsukuru had frowned at this. Yuzu smoked?) The estimated time of death was between 10 p.m. and midnight, a night when it rained till dawn, a cold rain for a May night. Her body was discovered in the evening, three days later. She’d lain there for three days, on the faux tile flooring of her kitchen.

They never discovered the motive for the murder. Someone had come late at night, strangled her without making a sound, not stolen or disturbed anything else, and then left. The door locked automatically. It was unclear whether she had opened it from the inside or if the murderer had a duplicate key. She lived alone in the apartment. Coworkers and neighbors said she didn’t seem to have any close friends. Except for her older sister and mother, who occasionally visited from Nagoya, she was always alone. She wore simple clothes and struck everyone who knew her as rather meek and quiet. She was enthusiastic about her job, and was well liked by her students, but outside of work, she seemed to have no friends.

No one had any idea what had led to her death, why she had ended up strangled. The police investigation petered out without any suspects coming to light. Articles about the case grew steadily shorter, and finally vanished altogether. It was a sad, painful case. Like cold rain falling steadily until dawn.

“An evil spirit possessed her,” Eri said softly, as if revealing a secret. “It clung to her, breathing coldly on her neck, slowly driving her in a corner. That’s the only thing that can explain all that happened to her. What happened with you, her eating disorder, what happened in Hamamatsu. I never actually wanted to put it into words. It’s like, if I did, it would really exist. So I kept it to myself all this time. I decided to never talk about it, until the day I died. But I don’t mind telling you this now, since we’ll probably never see each other again. And you need to know this. It was an evil spirit—or something close to it. In the end, Yuzu couldn’t escape.”

Eri sighed deeply and stared at her hands on the table. Her hands were visibly shaking, rather severely. Tsukuru turned his gaze away and looked out the window, past the fluttering curtain. The silence that settled on the room was oppressive, full of a deep sadness. Unspoken feelings were as heavy and lonely as the ancient glacier that had carved out the deep lake.

“Do you remember Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage? Yuzu used to play one of the pieces a lot,” Tsukuru said after a time to break the silence.

“ ‘Le mal du pays.’ I remember it well,” Eri said. “I listen to it sometimes. Would you like to hear it?”

Tsukuru nodded.

Eri stood up, went over to the small stereo set in the cabinet, selected a CD from the pile of discs, and inserted it into the player. “Le mal du pays” filtered out from the speakers, the simple opening melody, softly played with one hand. Eri sat back down across from him, and the two of them silently listened to the music.

Listening to the music here, next to a lake in Finland, it had a different sort of charm from when he heard it back in his apartment in Tokyo. But no matter where he listened to it, regardless of whether he heard it on a CD or an old LP, the music remained the same, utterly engaging and beautiful. Tsukuru pictured Yuzu at the piano in her parlor, playing the piece, leaning over the keyboard, eyes closed, lips slightly open, searching for words that don’t make a sound. She was apart from herself then, in some other place.

The piece ended, there was a pause, then the next piece began. “The Bells of Geneva.” Eri touched the remote control and lowered the volume.

“It strikes me as different from the performance I always listen to at home,” Tsukuru said.

“Which pianist do you listen to?”

“Lazar Berman.”

Eri shook her head. “I’ve never heard his version.”

“It’s a little more elegant than this one. I like this performance, it’s wonderful, but the style of this version makes it sound more like a Beethoven sonata than Liszt.”

Eri smiled. “That would be because it’s Alfred Brendel. Maybe it’s not so elegant, but I like it all the same. I guess I’m used to this version, since it’s the one I always listen to.”

“Yuzu played this piece so beautifully. She put so much feeling into it.”

“She really did. She was very good at pieces this length. In longer pieces she sort of ran out of energy halfway through. But everyone has their own special qualities. I always feel like a part of Yuzu lives on in this music. It’s so vibrant, so luminous.”

When Yuzu was teaching the children at the school, Tsukuru and Ao usually played soccer with the boys in the small playground outside. They divided into two teams and tried to shoot the ball into the opposite goal (which was usually constructed from a couple of cardboard boxes). As he passed the ball, Tsukuru would half listen to the sound of children playing scales that filtered out the window.

The past became a long, razor-sharp skewer that stabbed right through his heart. Silent silver pain shot through him, transforming his spine to a pillar of ice. The pain remained, unabated. He held his breath, shut his eyes tight, enduring the agony. Alfred Brendel’s graceful playing continued. The CD shifted to the second suite, “Second Year: Italy.”

And in that moment, he was finally able to accept it all. In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tazaki understood. One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

“Tsukuru, it’s true. She lives on in so many ways.” Eri’s voice, from the other side of the table, was husky, as if forced from her. “I can feel it. In all the echoes that surround us, in the light, in shapes, in every single …”

Eri covered her face with her hands. No other words came. Tsukuru wasn’t sure if she was crying or not. If she was, she did so silently.

While Ao and Tsukuru played soccer, Eri and Aka did their best to keep the other children from interrupting Yuzu’s piano lessons. They did whatever they could to occupy the kids—they read books, played games, went outside, and sang songs. Most of the time, though, these attempts failed. The children never tired of trying to disrupt the piano lessons. They found this much more interesting than anything else. Eri and Aka’s fruitless struggle to divert them was fun to watch.

Almost without thinking, Tsukuru stood up and went around to the opposite side of the table. Without a word he laid his hand on Eri’s shoulder. She still had her face in her hands. As he touched her, he felt her trembling, a trembling the eye couldn’t detect.

“Tsukuru?” Eri’s voice leaked out from between her fingers. “Could you do something for me?”

“Of course,” Tsukuru said.

“Could you hold me?”

Tsukuru asked her to stand up, then drew her to him. Her full breasts lay tightly against his chest, as if testimony to something. Her hands were warm where she held his back, her cheek soft and wet as it pressed against his neck.

“I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Japan again,” Eri murmured. Her warm, damp breath brushed his ear. “Everything I see would remind me of Yuzu. And of our—”

Tsukuru said nothing, only continued to hold her tightly against him.

Their embrace would be visible through the open window. Someone might pass by and see them. Edvard and his children might be back at any moment. But that didn’t matter. They didn’t care what others thought. He and Eri had to hold each other now, as much as they wanted. They had to let their skin touch, and drive away the long shadow cast by evil spirits. This was, no doubt, why he’d come here in the first place.

They held each other for a long time—how long he couldn’t say. The white curtain at the window went on flapping in the breeze that came from across the lake. Eri’s cheeks stayed wet, and Alfred Brendel went on playing the “Second Year: Italy” suite. “Petrarch’s Sonnet 47,” then “Petrarch’s Sonnet 104.” Tsukuru knew every note. He could have hummed it all if he’d wanted to. For the first time he understood how deeply he’d listened to this music, and how much it meant to him.

They didn’t speak. Words were powerless now. Like a pair of dancers who had stopped mid-step, they simply held each other quietly, giving themselves up to the flow of time. Time that encompassed both past and present, and even a portion of the future. Nothing came between their two bodies, as her warm breath brushed his neck. Tsukuru shut his eyes, letting the music wash over him as he listened to Eri’s heartbeat. The beating of her heart kept time with the slap of the little boat against the pier.