Silence descended on them.

“I should have apologized to you a long time ago,” Eri finally said. “I know that very well. But I just couldn’t. I was too ashamed of myself.”

“You don’t need to worry about me anymore,” Tsukuru said. “I survived the crisis. Swam through the night sea on my own. Each of us did what we had to do, in order to survive. I get the feeling that, even if we had made different decisions then, even if we had chosen to do things differently, we might have still ended up pretty much where we are now.”

Eri bit her lip and considered this. “Will you tell me one thing?” she said after a while.

“Name it.”

“If I had come right out then and told you I loved you, would you have gone out with me?”

“Even if you’d said that right to my face, I probably wouldn’t have believed it,” Tsukuru said.

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t imagine anyone saying they loved me, or wanting to be my girlfriend.”

“But you were kind, cool, and calm, and you’d already figured out your path in life. Plus you were good-looking.”

Tsukuru shook his head. “I have a really boring face. I’ve never liked my looks.”

Eri smiled. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you really do have a very boring face and something was wrong with me. But at least for a silly sixteen-year-old girl, you were handsome enough. I dreamed about how wonderful it would be to have a boyfriend like you.”

“Can’t claim to have much of a personality either.”

“Everyone alive has a personality. It’s just more obvious with some people than with others.” Eri’s eyes narrowed and she looked straight at him. “So, tell me—how would you have replied? Would you have let me be your girlfriend?”

“Of course I would have,” Tsukuru said. “I really liked you. I was really attracted to you, in a different way from how I was attracted to Yuzu. If you had told me then how you felt, of course I would have loved for you to be my girlfriend. And I think we would have been happy together.”

The two of them would have likely been a close couple, with a fulfilling love life, Tsukuru decided. There would have been so much they could have shared. On the surface, their personalities seemed so different—Tsukuru introverted and reticent, Eri sociable and talkative—yet they both shared a desire to create and build things with their own hands, things that were meaningful. Tsukuru had the feeling, though, that this closeness would have been short-lived. An unavoidable fissure would have grown between what he and Eri wanted from their lives. They were still in their teens then, still discovering their own paths, and eventually they would have reached a fork and gone off in separate directions. Without fighting, without hurting each other, naturally, calmly. And it did turn out that way, didn’t it, Tsukuru thought, with him going to Tokyo and building stations, and Eri marrying Edvard and moving to Finland.

It wouldn’t have been strange if things had worked out that way. It was entirely possible. And the experience would never have been a negative one for either of them. Even if they were no longer lovers, they would have remained good friends. In reality, though, none of this ever happened. In reality something very different happened. And that fact was more significant now than anything else.

“Even if you’re not telling the truth, I’m happy you would say that,” Eri said.

“I am too telling the truth,” Tsukuru said. “I wouldn’t joke about something like that. I think we would have had a wonderful time together. And I’m sorry it never happened. I really am.”

Eri smiled, with no trace of sarcasm.

Tsukuru remembered the erotic dream he often had of the two girls. How they were always together, but how it was always Yuzu whose body he came inside. Not once did he ejaculate inside Eri. He wasn’t sure of the significance, but he did know he couldn’t tell Eri about it. No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.

When he thought about those dreams, and Yuzu’s insistence that he had raped her (and her insistence that she was carrying his baby), he found he couldn’t totally dismiss it out of hand as some made-up story, or say that he had no idea what she was talking about. It might have all been a dream, but he still couldn’t escape the feeling that, in some indefinable way, he was responsible. And not just for the rape, but for her murder. On that rainy May night something inside of him, unknown to him, may have slipped away to Hamamatsu and strangled that thin, lovely, fragile neck.

He could see himself knocking on the door of her apartment. “Can you let me in?” he says, in this vision. “I have something I need to say.” He’s wearing a wet black raincoat, the smell of heavy night rain hovering about him.

“Tsukuru?” Yuzu asks.

“There’s something I need to talk with you about,” he says. “It’s very important. That’s why I came to Hamamatsu. It won’t take long. Please open the door.” He keeps on addressing the closed door. “I’m sorry about showing up like this, without calling. But if I had contacted you beforehand, you probably wouldn’t have seen me.”

Yuzu hesitates, then quietly slips the chain off the lock. His right hand tightly grips the belt inside his pocket.

Tsukuru grimaced. Why did he have to imagine this horrid scene? And why did he have to be the one who strangled her?

There were no reasons at all why he would have done that, of course. Tsukuru had never wanted to kill anyone, ever. But maybe he had tried to kill Yuzu, in a purely symbolic way. Tsukuru himself had no idea what deep darkness lay hidden in his heart. What he did know was that inside Yuzu, too, lay a deep, inner darkness, and that somewhere, on some subterranean level, her darkness and his may have connected. And being strangled was, perhaps, exactly what Yuzu had wanted. In the mingled darkness between them, perhaps he had sensed that desire.

“You’re thinking about Yuzu?” Eri asked.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a victim,” Tsukuru said. “Forced, for no reason, to suffer cruelly. Deeply wounded emotionally, my life thrown off course. Truthfully, sometimes I hated the four of you, wondering why I was the only one who had to go through that awful experience. But maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe I wasn’t simply a victim, but had hurt those around me, too, without realizing it. And wounded myself again in the counterattack.”

Eri gazed at him without a word.

“And maybe I murdered Yuzu,” Tsukuru said honestly. “Maybe the one who knocked on her door that night was me.”

“In a certain sense,” Eri said.

Tsukuru nodded.

“I murdered Yuzu too,” Eri said. “In a sense.” She looked off to one side. “Maybe I was the one who knocked on her door that night.”

Tsukuru looked at her nicely tanned profile. He’d always liked her slightly upturned nose.

“Each of us has to live with that burden,” Eri said.

The wind had died down for the moment and now the white curtain at the window hung still. The boat had stopped rattling against the pier. The only thing he could hear was the calls of birds, singing a melody he’d never heard before.

Eri listened to the birds for a while, picked up the barrette, pinned her hair back again, and gently pressed her fingertips against her forehead. “What do you think about the work Aka is doing?” she asked. Like a weight had been removed, the flow of time grew a fraction lighter.

“I don’t know,” Tsukuru said. “The world he lives in is so far removed from mine, it’s hard for me to say whether it’s good or bad.”

“I certainly don’t like what he’s doing. But that doesn’t mean I can cut him off. He used to be one of my very best friends, and even now I still consider him a good friend. Though I haven’t seen him in seven or eight years.”