Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage (21 page)

“I hope everything will work out for you. I really do,” Tsukuru said. He truly felt that way.

“You’re not angry with me anymore?”

Tsukuru gave a short shake of his head. “No, I’m not angry with you. I’m not angry with anybody.”

Tsukuru suddenly realized he was using the familiar
omae
to address Aka. It came out naturally at the end. Aka walked with Tsukuru to the elevators.

“I may not have a chance to see you again,” Aka said as they walked down the hallway. “So there’s one more thing I wanted to tell you. You don’t mind, do you?”

Tsukuru shook his head.

“It’s the first thing I always say at our new employee training seminars. I gaze around the room, pick one person, and have him stand up. And this is what I say:
I have some good news for you, and some bad news. The bad news first. We’re going to have to rip off either your fingernails or your toenails with pliers. I’m sorry, but it’s already decided. It can’t be changed.
I pull out a huge, scary pair of pliers from my briefcase and show them to everybody. Slowly, making sure everybody gets a good look. And then I say:
Here’s the good news. You have the
freedom to choose which it’s going to be—your fingernails, or your toenails. So, which will it be? You have ten seconds to make up your mind. If you’re unable to decide, we’ll rip off both your fingernails and your toenails
. I start the count. At about eight seconds most people say, ‘The toes.’
Okay
, I say,
toenails it is. I’ll use these pliers to rip them off. But before I do, I’d like you to tell me something. Why did you choose your toes and not your fingers?
The person usually says, ‘I don’t know. I think they probably hurt the same. But since I had to choose one, I went with the toes.’ I turn to him and warmly applaud him. And I say,
Welcome to the real world
.”

Tsukuru gazed wordlessly at his old friend’s delicate face.

“Each of us is given the freedom to choose,” Aka said, winking and smiling. “That’s the point of the story.”

The silver door of the elevator slid open soundlessly, and they said goodbye.

Tsukuru got back to his apartment in Tokyo at 7 p.m. on the day he had met Aka. He unpacked, tossed his laundry in the washer, took a shower, then called Sara’s cell phone. It went to voicemail and he left a message telling her he had just gotten back from Nagoya and to get in touch with him when she could.

He waited up until after eleven, but she didn’t call. When she did call back, the next day, a Tuesday, Tsukuru was in the cafeteria at work eating lunch.

“Did everything go well in Nagoya?” Sara asked.

He stood up and went out into the corridor, which was quieter. He summarized his meetings with Ao and Aka, at the Lexus showroom and Aka’s office on Sunday and Monday respectively, and what they’d talked about.

“I’m glad I could talk to them. I could understand a little better what happened,” Tsukuru said.

“That’s good,” Sara said. “So it wasn’t a waste of time.”

“Could we meet somewhere? I’d like to tell you all about our conversations.”

“Just a minute. Let me check my schedule.”

There was a fifteen-second pause. While he waited, Tsukuru gazed out the window at the streets of Shinjuku. Thick clouds covered the sky, and it looked like it was about to rain.

“I’m free in the evening the day after tomorrow. Does that work for you?” Sara asked.

“Sounds good. Let’s have dinner,” Tsukuru said. He didn’t need to check his schedule. It was blank almost every night.

They decided on a place and hung up. After he switched off the cell phone, Tsukuru felt a physical discomfort, as if something he’d eaten wasn’t digesting well. He hadn’t felt it before he’d spoken to Sara. That was for certain. But what it meant, or whether it meant anything at all, he couldn’t tell.

He tried to replay the conversation with her, as accurately as he could remember it. What they’d said, her tone of voice, the way she’d paused. Nothing seemed any different from usual. He put the cell phone in his pocket and went back to the cafeteria to finish his lunch. But he no longer had any appetite.

That afternoon and the whole next day, Tsukuru, accompanied by a brand-new employee as his assistant, inspected several stations that required new elevators. With the new employee helping him to measure, Tsukuru checked the blueprints, one by one, that they kept at the office against the actual measurements at the sites. He found a number of unexpected errors and discrepancies between the blueprints and the actual sites. There could be several reasons for this, but what was more important at this point was to draw up accurate, reliable blueprints before construction began. If errors were discovered after they’d begun construction, it would be too late, like combat troops relying on a faulty map when landing on a foreign island.

After they’d finished their measurements, they went to talk with the stationmaster about potential problems the rebuilding might cause. Repositioning the elevators would change the configuration of the entire station, which in turn would affect passenger flow, and they had to make sure they could structurally incorporate these changes. Passenger safety was always the top priority, but they also had to be certain that the station staff could perform their duties with the new layout. Tsukuru’s job was to synthesize all these elements, come up with a rebuilding plan, and include this in an actual blueprint. It was a painstaking process, but critical
because people’s safety was at stake. Tsukuru patiently managed it all. This was the kind of process that was exactly his forte—clarifying any problems, creating a checklist, and carefully making sure each and every point was handled correctly. At the same time, it provided a wonderful opportunity for the young, inexperienced new employee to learn the ropes on site. The employee, whose name was Sakamoto, had just graduated from the science and engineering department at Waseda University. He was a taciturn young man, with a long, unsmiling face, but he was a quick study and followed directions. He was skilled when it came to taking measurements, too. This guy might work out, Tsukuru thought.

They spent an hour at an express-train station with the stationmaster, going over the details of the rebuilding project. It was lunchtime, so they ordered in bentos and ate together in the stationmaster’s office. Afterward they chatted over tea. The stationmaster, a friendly, heavyset middle-aged man, told them some fascinating stories about things he’d experienced in his career. Tsukuru loved going to sites and hearing these kinds of stories. The topic turned to lost property, more specifically to the huge amount of lost-and-found items left behind on trains and in stations, and the unusual, strange items among them—the ashes of cremated people, wigs, prosthetic legs, the manuscript of a novel (the stationmaster
read a little bit of it and found it dull), a neatly wrapped, bloodstained shirt in a box, a live pit viper, forty color photos of women’s vaginas, a large wooden gong, the kind Buddhist priests strike as they chant sutras …

“Sometimes you’re not sure what to do with them,” the stationmaster said. “A friend of mine who runs another station turned in a Boston bag once that had a dead fetus inside. Thankfully, I’ve never had that kind of experience myself. But once, when I was a stationmaster at another station, someone brought in two fingers preserved in formaldehyde.”

“That’s pretty grotesque,” Tsukuru said.

“Yes, it sure was. Two small fingers floating in liquid, kept in what looked like a small mayonnaise jar, all inside a pretty cloth bag. Looked like a child’s fingers severed at the base. Naturally we contacted the police, since we thought it might be connected to a crime. The police came over immediately and took the jar away.”

The stationmaster drank a sip of tea.

“A week later the same police officer who’d taken the fingers stopped by. He questioned the station employee who’d found the jar in the restroom again. I was present for the questioning. According to the officer, the fingers in the jar weren’t those of a child. The forensics lab determined that they belonged to an adult. The reason they were so small was that they were sixth, vestigial fingers. The officer said that sometimes people have
extra fingers. Most of the time the parents want to get rid of the deformity, so they have the fingers amputated when the child’s still a baby, but there are some people who, as adults, still have all six fingers. The ones that were found were an example—the fingers of an adult who had had them surgically removed, then preserved in formaldehyde. The lab estimated the fingers to be those of a man, age mid-twenties to mid-thirties, though they couldn’t tell how long it had been since the fingers had been amputated. I can’t imagine how they’d come to be forgotten, or perhaps thrown away, in the station restroom. But it doesn’t seem that they were connected to any crime. In the end the police kept them, and no one ever came forward to claim them. For all I know, they may still be in a police warehouse somewhere.”

“That’s a weird story,” Tsukuru said. “Why would he keep those sixth fingers until he became an adult and then suddenly decide to amputate them?”

“It’s a mystery. It got me interested in the phenomenon, though, and I started looking into it. The technical term is hyperdactyly, and there have been lots of famous people who’ve had it. It’s unclear whether it’s true or not, but there was some evidence that Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the famous leader of the Sengoku period, had two thumbs. There are plenty of other examples. There was a famous pianist who had the condition, a novelist, an artist, a baseball player. In fiction, Hannibal Lecter of
The Silence of the Lambs
had six fingers. It’s not all that unusual, and genetically it’s a dominant trait. There are variations among different races, but in general, one out of every five hundred people is born with six fingers. As I said, though, the vast majority of their parents have the extra fingers amputated before their children’s first birthdays, when kids begin to develop fine-motor skills. So we hardly ever run across someone with the condition. It was the same for me. Until that jar was found in the station, I’d never even heard of such a thing.”

“It is strange, though,” Tsukuru said. “If having six fingers is a dominant trait, then why don’t we see more people with them?”

The stationmaster inclined his head. “Don’t know. That kind of complicated stuff is beyond me.”

Sakamoto, who’d eaten lunch with them, opened his mouth for the first time. Hesitantly, as if rolling away a massive stone that blocked the mouth of a cave. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind if I venture an opinion?”

“Of course,” Tsukuru said, taken by surprise. Sakamoto was not the type of young man who voiced his own opinion in front of others. “Go right ahead.”

“People tend to misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘dominant,’ ” Sakamoto said. “Even if a certain tendency is dominant, that doesn’t mean it becomes widespread throughout the population. There are quite a few rare disorders where genetically there is a dominant
gene, but these conditions don’t, as a result, become common. Thankfully, in most cases these are checked at a fixed number, and remain rare disorders. Dominant genes are nothing more than one among many elements in tendency distribution. Other elements would include the survival of the fittest, natural selection, and so on. This is personal conjecture, but I think six fingers are too many for human beings. For what the hand has to do, five fingers are all that are necessary, and the most efficient number. So even if having six fingers is a dominant gene, in the real world it only manifests in a tiny minority. In other words, the law of selection trumps the dominant gene.”

After holding forth at such length, Sakamoto stepped back into silence.

“That makes sense,” Tsukuru said. “I get the feeling it’s connected with the process of how the world’s counting systems have mainly standardized, moving from the duodecimal system to the decimal system.”

“Yes, that might have been a response to six and five fingers, digits, now that you mention it,” Sakamoto said.

“So how come you know so much about this?” Tsukuru asked Sakamoto.