Haida drew a deep breath. “Why did you tell me all this?”

“I’ve never told anybody until now, and never planned to,” Midorikawa said, and took a drink. “I was just going to quietly vanish by myself. But when I saw you, I thought, Now here’s a man worth telling.”

“And you don’t care whether or not I believe you?”

Midorikawa, his eyes looking sleepy, gave a slight yawn.

“I don’t care if you believe it. Because sooner or later you will. Someday you will die. And when you’re dying—I have no idea when or how that will happen, of course—you will definitely remember what I told you. And you will totally accept what I said, and understand every detail of the logic behind it. The real logic. All I did was sow the seeds.”

It had started raining again, a soft, quiet rain. The rushing stream drowned out the sound of the rain. Haida could tell it was raining only by the slight variation in the air against his skin.

Sitting in that small room across from Midorikawa suddenly felt strange to him, as if they were in the midst of something impossible, something at odds with the principles of nature. Haida grew dizzy. In the still air he’d caught a faint whiff of death, the smell of slowly rotting flesh. But it had to be an illusion. Nobody there was dead yet.

“You’ll be going back to college in Tokyo before much longer,” Midorikawa quietly stated. “And you’ll return to real life. You need to live it to the fullest. No matter how shallow and dull things might get, this life is worth living. I guarantee it. And I’m not being either ironic or paradoxical. It’s just that, for me, what’s worthwhile in life has become a burden, something I can’t shoulder anymore. Maybe I’m just not cut out for it. So, like a dying cat, I’ve crawled into a quiet, dark place, silently waiting for my time to come. It’s not so bad. But you’re different. You should be able to handle what life sends your way. You need to use the thread of logic, as best you can, to skillfully sew onto yourself everything that’s worth living for.”

“That’s the end of the story,” Haida, the son, said. “In the morning, two days after that conversation, while my father was out taking care of some business, Midorikawa left the inn. Just like when he arrived, with one bag slung over his shoulder, hiking the three kilometers down the mountain to the bus stop. My father never found out where he went. Midorikawa paid his bill for the previous day and took off without a word, or any message for my father. All he left behind was a stack of mystery novels. Not long after this, my father returned to Tokyo. He reentered college and concentrated on his studies. I don’t know if meeting Midorikawa was the catalyst that ended his long journey, but hearing my father tell the story, I get the sense that it played a big part.”

Haida sat up on the sofa, reached out with his long fingers, and massaged his ankles.

“After my father got back to Tokyo, he checked to see if there were jazz pianists named Midorikawa, but he couldn’t find anyone by that name. Maybe he’d used an alias. So he never found out, to this day, if the man really did die a month later.”

“But your father’s alive and well, right?” Tsukuru asked.

Haida nodded. “He still hasn’t reached the end of his life.”

“Did your father believe that weird story Midorikawa told him? Didn’t he think it was just a clever story designed to pull his leg?”

“You know, it’s hard to say. I think for my father, at the time, it wasn’t an issue of whether or not he believed it. I think he totally accepted it as the weird tale it was. Like the way a snake will swallow its prey and not chew it, but instead let it slowly digest.”

Haida stopped at this point and took a deep breath.

“I guess I am pretty sleepy now. How about we go to bed?”

It was nearly 1 a.m. Tsukuru went to his bedroom, and Haida got the sofa ready and turned off the light. As Tsukuru lay in bed in his pajamas, he heard water rushing by in a mountain stream. But that was impossible, of course. They were in the middle of Tokyo.

He soon fell into a deep sleep.

That night, several strange things happened.

Five days after they’d talked in the bar in Ebisu, Tsukuru emailed Sara from his computer, inviting her to dinner. Her reply came from Singapore. “I’ll be back in Japan in two days,” she wrote, “and I’m free Saturday evening, the day after I get back. I’m glad you got in touch. There’s something I want to talk with you about.”

Something to talk about? Tsukuru had no idea what that might be. But the thought of seeing her again cheered him up, and made him realize once more how much he wanted her. When he didn’t see her for a while it was as if something vital were missing from his life, and a dull ache settled in his chest. He hadn’t felt this way in a long time.

The three days after this exchange, though, were hectic for Tsukuru, as a sudden, unexpected assignment came up. A plan for the joint use of a subway line ran into a snag when it was discovered that a difference in the shape of the train cars created a safety issue (why couldn’t they have told us about such a critical issue beforehand? Tsukuru asked himself), and necessitated emergency repairs of platforms at several stations. Tsukuru’s job was to create the repair schedule. He worked nearly around the clock, but still managed to free up his calendar so he could take off from Saturday evening to Sunday morning. On Saturday he set out from his office, still in his suit, to the place he and Sara were to meet in Aoyama. On the subway he fell sound asleep, nearly missing his transfer at Akasaka-Mitsuke.

“You look exhausted,” Sara said when she saw him.

Tsukuru explained—as concisely and simply as he could—the reason he had been so busy the last few days.

“I was planning to go home, shower, and change into something more comfortable, but I had to come straight from work,” he said.

Sara took a beautifully wrapped box, long, flat, and narrow, from her shopping bag and handed it to him. “A present, from me to you.”

Tsukuru unwrapped the box and found a necktie inside, an elegant blue tie made of plain silk. Yves Saint Laurent.

“I saw it in the duty-free shop in Singapore and thought you’d look good in it.”

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

“Some men don’t like to get ties as gifts.”

“Not me,” Tsukuru said. “I never get the urge to go out to buy a tie. And you have such good taste.”

“I’m glad,” Sara said.

Tsukuru removed the tie he’d been wearing, one with narrow stripes, and put on the one Sara had given him. He was wearing a dark blue summer suit and a plain white shirt, and the blue necktie went well with it. Sara reached over the table and, with a practiced hand, adjusted the knot. Tsukuru caught a pleasant hint of perfume.

“It looks very nice on you,” she said with a smile.

The old tie lying on the table looked more worn out than he’d thought, like some unseemly habit he wasn’t aware he had. The thought struck him that he should start paying more attention to his appearance. At the railroad company office there wasn’t much call to worry about clothes. The workplace was almost entirely male, and as soon as he got to work he’d take off his tie and roll up his sleeves. Much of the time he was out at work sites, where what kind of suit or necktie he wore was irrelevant. And this was the first time in quite a while he’d had a regular girlfriend.

Sara had never given him a present before, and it made him happy. I need to find out when her birthday is, he thought. I should give her something. He thanked her again, then folded the old tie and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

They were in a French restaurant in the basement level of a building in Aoyama, a restaurant that Sara had been to before. It was an unpretentious place, with reasonably priced wine and food. It was closer to a casual bistro, but the seating was generously spaced to allow for relaxed conversation. The service was friendly, too. They ordered a carafe of red wine and studied the menu.