Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage (4 page)

“As much as possible,” Tsukuru said. He felt his cheeks reddening again. “When I couldn’t help thinking of them, I always tried to think of them as a pair.”

“The two of them as a pair?”

Tsukuru paused, searching for the right words. “I can’t really explain it. I thought of them like they were a fictitious being. Like a formless, abstract being.”

“Hmm.” Sara appeared impressed. She thought about it. She seemed to want to say something, but then thought better of it. After a while she spoke.

“So after you graduated from high school you went to college in Tokyo, and left Nagoya. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Tsukuru said. “I’ve lived in Tokyo ever since.”

“What about the other four?”

“They went to colleges in the Nagoya area. Aka studied in the economics department of Nagoya University, the department where his father taught. Kuro attended a private women’s college famous for its English department. Ao got into business school at a private college that had a well-known rugby team, on the strength of his athletic abilities. Shiro finally was persuaded to give up on being a veterinarian and instead she studied piano in a music school. All four schools were close enough for them to commute from home. I was the only one who went to Tokyo, in my case to an engineering college.”

“Why did you want to go to Tokyo?”

“It’s simple, really. There was a professor at my university
who was an expert on railroad station construction. Constructing stations is a specialized field—they have a different structure from other buildings—so even if I went to an ordinary engineering school and studied construction and engineering, it wouldn’t have been of much practical use. I needed to study with a specialist.”

“Having set, specific goals makes life easier,” Sara said.

Tsukuru agreed.

“So the other four stayed in Nagoya because they didn’t want that beautiful community to break up?”

“When we were seniors in high school, we talked about where we were going to go to college. Except for me, they all planned to stay in Nagoya and go to college there. They didn’t come out and say it exactly, but it was obvious they were doing that because they wanted to keep the group together.”

With his GPA, Aka could have easily gotten into a top school like Tokyo University, and his parents and teachers urged him to try. And Ao’s athletic skills could have won him a place in a well-known university too. Kuro’s personality was well suited to the more sophisticated, intellectually stimulating life she might have found in a cosmopolitan environment, and she should have gone on to one of the private universities in Tokyo. Nagoya,
of course, is a large city, but culturally it was much more provincial. In the end, all four of them decided to stay in Nagoya, settling for much less prestigious schools than they could have attended. Shiro was the only one who never would have left Nagoya, even if the group hadn’t existed. She wasn’t the type to venture out on her own in search of a more stimulating environment.

“When they asked me what my plans were,” Tsukuru said, “I told them I hadn’t decided yet. But I’d actually made up my mind to go to school in Tokyo. I mean, if I could have managed to stay back in Nagoya, and halfheartedly study at some so-so college, I would have done it, if it meant I got to stay close to them. In a lot of ways that would have been easier, and that’s actually what my family was hoping I’d do. They sort of expected that after I graduated from college, I’d eventually take over my father’s company. But I knew that if I didn’t go to Tokyo, I’d regret it. I just felt that I had to study with that professor.”

“That makes sense,” Sara said. “So after you decided you’d go to Tokyo, how did the others take it?”

“I don’t know how they
really
felt about it, of course. But I’m pretty sure they were disappointed. Without me in the equation, part of that sense of unity we always had was inevitably going to vanish.”

“The chemistry, too.”

“It would have changed into something different. To some extent.”

Yet when his friends realized how determined Tsukuru was to go, they didn’t try to stop him. In fact, they encouraged him. Tokyo was only an hour and a half away by bullet train. He could come back any time he wanted, right? And there’s no guarantee you’ll get into your first-choice school anyway, they said, half kidding him. Passing the entrance exam for that university meant Tsukuru had to buckle down and study like never before.

“So what happened to your group after you all graduated from high school?” Sara asked.

“At first everything went fine. I went back to Nagoya whenever there was a school vacation—spring and fall break, summer vacation and New Year’s—and spent as much time as I could with the others. We were as close as always, and got along well.”

Whenever he was back home, Tsukuru and his friends had lots to catch up on. After he left Nagoya, the other four continued to spend time together, but once he was back in town, they’d revert to their five-person unit (though of course there were times when some of them were busy and only three or four of them could get together). The other four brought him back into the fold, as if there had been no gap in time. Or at least,
Tsukuru detected no subtle shift in mood, no invisible distance between them, and that made him very happy. That’s why he didn’t care that he hadn’t made a single friend in Tokyo.

Sara narrowed her eyes and looked at him. “You never made even one friend in Tokyo?”

“I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t,” Tsukuru said. “I guess I’m basically not very outgoing. But don’t get the wrong idea—I wasn’t a shut-in or anything. This was the first time I was living on my own, free to do whatever I liked. I enjoyed my days. The railroad lines in Tokyo are like a web spread out over the city, with countless stations. Just seeing them took a lot of time. I’d go to different stations, check out how they were designed, pencil out some rough sketches, jot down anything special I noticed.”

“It sounds like fun,” Sara said.

The university itself, though, wasn’t very exciting. Most of his courses in the beginning were general education classes, uninspiring and numbingly boring. Still, he’d worked hard to get into college, so he tried not to cut class. He studied German and French; he even went to the language lab to practice English. He discovered, to his surprise, that he had a knack for learning languages. Yet he didn’t meet anyone he was drawn to. Compared to his colorful, stimulating group of friends
from high school, everyone else seemed spiritless, dull, insipid. He never met anyone he felt like getting to know better, so he spent most of his time in Tokyo alone. On the plus side, he read constantly, more than he ever had before.

“But didn’t you feel lonely?” Sara asked.

“I felt alone, but not especially lonely. I guess I just took that for granted.”

He was young, and there was so much about the world he still didn’t know. And Tokyo was a brand-new place for him, so very different from the environment he’d grown up in, and those differences were greater than he’d ever anticipated. The scale of the city was overwhelming, the diversity of life there extraordinary. There were too many choices of things to do, the way people talked struck him as odd, and the pace of life was too fast. He couldn’t strike a good balance between himself and the world around him. But there was still a place for him to return. He knew this. Get on the bullet train at the Tokyo station and in an hour and a half he’d arrive at an
orderly, harmonious, intimate place
. Where time flowed by peacefully, where friends he could confide in eagerly awaited him.

“What about now?” Sara asked. “Do you feel like you’re maintaining a good balance between yourself and the world around you?”

“I’ve been with this company for fourteen years. The job’s fine, and I enjoy the work. I get along with my colleagues. And I’ve been in relationships with a few women. Nothing ever came of it, but there were lots of reasons for that. It wasn’t entirely my fault.”

“And you’re alone, but not lonely.”

It was still early, and they were the only customers in the bar. Music from a jazz trio played softly in the background.

“I suppose,” Tsukuru said after some hesitation.

“But you can’t go back now? To that orderly, harmonious, intimate place?”

He thought about this, though there was no need to. “That place doesn’t exist anymore,” he said quietly.

It was in the summer of his sophomore year in college when that place vanished forever.

This drastic change took place during summer vacation of his sophomore year, between the first and second semesters. Afterward, Tsukuru Tazaki’s life was changed forever, as if a sheer ridge had divided the original vegetation into two distinct biomes.

As always, when vacation rolled around he packed his belongings (though he did not have very many to begin with) and rode the bullet train back home. After a short visit with his family in Nagoya, he called up his four friends, but he couldn’t get in touch with any of them. All four of them were out, he was told. He figured they must have gone out together somewhere. He left a message with each of their families, went downtown to a movie theater in the shopping district, and killed time watching a movie he didn’t particularly want to see.
Back at home, he ate dinner with his family, then phoned each of his friends again. No one had returned.

The next morning he called them again, with the same result: they were all still out. He left another message with each family member who answered the phone. Please have them call me when they get back, he said, and they promised to pass the message along. But something in their voices bothered him. He hadn’t noticed it the first time he called, but now he sensed something subtly different, as if, for some reason, they were trying to keep him at arm’s length. As if they wanted to hang up on him as soon as possible. Shiro’s older sister, in particular, was curt and abrupt. Tsukuru had always gotten along very well with her—she was two years older than Shiro, and though not as stunning as Shiro, still a beautiful woman. They often joked around when he called—or if not a joke, at least they exchanged a friendly greeting. But now she hurriedly said goodbye, as if she could barely wait to end the conversation. After he had called all four homes, Tsukuru was left feeling like an outcast, as if he were carrying some virulent pathogen that the others were desperately trying to avoid.

Something must have happened,
something
had taken place while he was away to make them create this
distance. Something inappropriate, and offensive. But what it was—what it could possibly be—he simply had no clue.

He was left feeling like he’d swallowed a lump of something he shouldn’t have, something he couldn’t spit out, or digest. He stayed home the whole day waiting for the phone to ring. His mind was unfocused, and he was unable to concentrate. He’d left repeated messages with his friends’ families, telling them he was in Nagoya. Usually his friends would call right away and cheerfully welcome him back, but this time the phone remained implacably silent.

Tsukuru thought about calling them again in the evening, but then decided not to. Maybe all of them really were at home. Maybe they didn’t want to come to the phone and instead were pretending to be out. Maybe they had told their families, “If Tsukuru Tazaki calls, tell him I’m not here.” Which would explain why their family members sounded so ill at ease.

But
why
?

He couldn’t imagine a reason. The last time the five of them had been together was in early May, during the Golden Week holidays. When Tsukuru had taken the train back to Tokyo, his four friends had come to the station to see him off, giving him big, hearty, exaggerated waves through the window as the train pulled
away, like he was a soldier being shipped off to the ends of the earth.

After that point, Tsukuru had written a couple of letters to Ao. Shiro was hopeless with computers, so they normally relied on letters, and Ao was their contact person. Tsukuru always addressed the letter to Ao, who made sure that the letters circulated among the others. That way Tsukuru could avoid writing individual letters to everyone. He mainly wrote about his life in Tokyo, what he saw there, what experiences he had, what he was feeling. But always, no matter what he saw or did, he knew he would be having a much better time if the four of them were there to share the experience with him. That’s how he really felt. Other than that, he didn’t write anything much.

The other four wrote letters to him, jointly signed, but there was never anything negative in them. They just reported in detail on what they’d been up to in Nagoya. They’d all been born and raised there, but they seemed to be enjoying their college lives. Ao had bought a used Honda Accord (with a stain on the backseat that looked like a dog had peed there, he reported, the kind of car five people could easily ride in, as long as none of them was too fat), and all of them piled into the car to take a trip to Lake Biwa. Too bad you couldn’t go with us, Tsukuru, they wrote. Looking forward to seeing you
during the summer, they added. To Tsukuru, it sounded like they meant it.