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It felt inevitable, returning to Tokyo, that Haida would see Tsukuru Tazaki again.
It wasn’t inevitable, of course. It wasn’t even likely. Fifteen years ago, Haida had dropped out of college and left Tokyo and never returned—until now—and that, he knew, was something people did all the time, left places even when they appeared to be entrenched. Tsukuru Tazaki had loved train stations, centers of movement. And he had lived his whole life in Nagoya before suddenly uprooting himself to go to college; roots were not a thing that troubled him much. There was no reason for Tsukuru Tazaki to still be in Tokyo, except that Haida always pictured him there, always imagined that he still lived in that same apartment and still had Haida’s records, kept safe for him. He had liked to imagine that, when he left. It made him feel safe.
In reality, he was sure Tsukuru had gone to live somewhere else, or, if he had stayed in Tokyo, caught by the allure of the busiest train stations in the world, had moved to some new area, moved on with his life in general, and no longer remembered Haida at all. But one could be sure of one thing and yet firmly believe another, and Haida believed, deep in his heart, that if he returned to Tokyo, he and Tsukuru would surely meet again.
So it was. He returned to Tokyo, and after a day or two settling down, went for a swim in that same old pool he always used to frequent. He began his swim at five o’clock in the morning, and, having nothing to do with the day in particular, found himself still swimming at seven, at which point he spotted a man at the side of the pool who looked an awful lot like an older Tsukuru Tazaki.
The sight of the man seared into his eyes, he immediately turned and began to swim in the other direction. He was not avoiding him. He would turn around when he reached the other side, finished his lap, turn back and see who the man was. And if it really was Tsukuru, then the meeting was fate. But Haida felt, vaguely, that the man might vanish in the meantime. This prospect frightened him—he did not want his chance to meet Tsukuru to disappear—but at the same time, he felt he had to allow it to happen if it were meant to happen. For as much as he wanted Tsukuru to be here, and for things to somehow be the same as they used to be, he knew too that he did not deserve it.
He could still remember that evening as if it were yesterday. Not their last evening, in fact, but it had felt like the last, or perhaps like the climax. Everything after that was merely the slow letdown.
“I am leaving Tokyo,” he had wanted to tell Tsukuru. “My father is sick, and I must go take care of him. I’ll have to drop out of school, and I’ll be gone for a long time. I’ll miss you.”
These should have been easy things to say to Tsukuru. They would have been true, if not the whole truth.
Instead he ended up telling a long story about his father’s encounter with Midorikawa when he was young. What a stupid thing to have done, in retrospect. It was stupid because in retrospect Haida could see that it perfectly mirrored the way his father had always used the story—as a tale of a transcendent experience, meant to express all the tumultuous, tremulous emotions and deep, hidden secrets that he struggled to vocalize. His father was a philosopher, but even for him there were things hard to articulate. And for Haida, how many more.
The things he meant to say with that story—there were so many of them.
My father was a strange, distant man. In life, he was always in tune with death, or at least with some other level of reality, the level of pure platonic ideas and reason. His sickness, which should have brought him down to earth and made him seem more human, instead made him more distant than ever. He told the same story more than ever now, and sometimes wondered aloud when he would be able to see the colors Midorikawa had seen.
He wanted to ask, “Tsukuru, do you want to see those colors?” Tsukuru got odd about colors, whenever they came up, oddly attentive. As if maybe he saw them already. “Tsukuru, do you understand it? The call of the void?” Haida had never entirely understood it, but sometimes he saw a bottomless look in Tsukuru’s eyes, and caught something of a glimpse.
Tsukuru, would you understand my father better than I do? Can you help me? I don’t feel like I understand him at all.
Tsukuru, do you want to die too? (This last, with a touch of fear, of dread. For Tsukuru and Tokyo were so much the normal, solid, stable world, and for all that Haida was a leaf drifting in the wind, he liked to believe that stable things existed.)
He wanted to say, “If I vanish, if I leave this world of Tokyo and college behind, it’s just because I’m like my father. I went off to see the world and to escape the world. Disillusionment, a desire for an epiphany… If I vanish, please just assume that’s why.”
That would have been a lie, of course. His reasons for leaving were far more concrete.
He ended up lying anyway. When Tsukuru asked if his father was still alive and well, he nodded, agreed. Well, he only said aloud that he was still living, but the “well” part was implied.
What was it that made him hold back from telling Tsukuru the truth about his impending departure? He wasn’t sure. Maybe in a sense he was embarrassed. There was nothing shameful about going to take care of a sick parent, but he felt that Tsukuru would know somehow that he was secretly happy to be dropping out of college, relieved to be free of its rigid structure, of a major that didn’t really speak to him nearly as much as the study of engineering, and of train stations specifically, spoke to Tsukuru. He liked to say that as a philosophical type he couldn’t be bound to one discipline, but at heart, he knew it was commitment he lacked, commitment to either a concrete area of study or even a tightly focused abstraction. Tsukuru had said before he admired Haida’s philosophical bent; it made Haida cringe to imagine Tsukuru realizing how much of his lack of commitment to physics was more waffling than a focus elsewhere.
He told the story of his father’s wanderings, and hoped, even if he didn’t say it out loud, didn’t actually lie, that Tsukuru would assume he was more like his father than he really was.
There was another truth, too, that terrified Haida more than anything, and that he longed to say more than anything too. A truth his little story didn’t even approach, a truth he had many times bitten his tongue to keep from saying.
It was the truth that would have lain behind saying, “I’ll miss you”, which was why Haida couldn’t bring himself to say “I’ll miss you.”
(And telling Tsukuru he was leaving would have been saying “I’ll miss you” already in its own way, or at least acknowledging that he felt Tsukuru was a person who had a right to know his comings and goings, which was a different kind of confession. Perhaps not a very weighty confession, but it felt one at the time.)
Tsukuru Tazaki was, to Haida, a very striking man, striking even in his normality, a man of almost grim serenity, whose attitude at times seemed very old and other times horribly young and innocent, as if he were younger than Haida himself—Tsukuru Tazaki, who listened to Haida’s ponderings and even his strange story of his father with grave and sincere interest—Tsukuru Tazaki, who seemed as empty as Haida often felt himself, and yet whose presence made Haida’s heart feel full again—
Admitting to all these impressions of Tsukuru might not have been so bad. Tsukuru might have taken them as a compliment, might even have brushed them off. But if he had known the way Haida sometimes dreamt of him, the way his voice crept into Haida’s wildest philosophical trips of fancy and his most sordid and base fantasies alike, he surely would have flinched.
“I’ll miss you,” he could have said, but then, wouldn’t Tsukuru guess that out of all Tokyo, Tsukuru was what he would miss the most? He would think that strange, surely, because he never saw himself as anything remarkable, and would wonder what the reason could be, and then he would surely guess…
There always was something off about that Haida. Always looking for excuses to hang out with me, and then giving up on excuses altogether. I should have known something was up.
For Tsukuru to guess that really would be too much.
Unfortunately, it was only later that Haida realized: For whatever small embarrassment it would have caused him to bid Tsukuru a sentimental goodbye, having hidden his departure was one hundred percent worse. People hid things because they had secrets. Tsukuru might never guess what Haida’s secret reason for leaving without telling had been, but he would surely realize Haida had one. And if they ever met again, he was almost certain to ask.
For this reason, Haida now had to hope they would never meet again, or that Tsukuru would forget him. At the same time, he hoped Tsukuru would keep his record of Le mal du pays, and hold his memory dear as well, and that someday he and a braver, more honest Haida would be reunited.
It was not uncommon, surely, for humans to hold contradictory desires like this. If it was awkward, it might in fact even be called fortunate, since while both these desires could not be simultaneously fulfilled, he could count on the fulfillment of at least one of them.
Chlorine stung Haida’s eyes as he pulled himself up on the edge of the pool to look at a man sitting a short distance away, feet dangling in the water. His sight was blurry, therefore, which made it easier to look without commitment. Tsukuru Tazaki or a stranger—for a moment, it could be either.
Then the man spoke. “H-Haida?”
And it was Tsukuru after all.
“You still come to this pool,” Haida said.
“I do, yes. I still live in that same apartment, and it’s still the most convenient.” A pause. “Haida, is it really you?”
“Yes, it’s me. It’s been a while.”
“Years. How have you been?”
“Well. Drifting. You know me.”
“Ah. The same as ever?”
“I haven’t changed much.”
“You still swim the same way. You know, I saw a swimmer the other day who reminded me of you. The way he kicked. I thought he might be you, but he wasn’t. But today it really is you. What a coincidence—it feels like a dream. But the sudden apparition of an old friend is probably what I deserve.”
It was a strange thing to say, that last part, but it wasn’t what caught Haida’s attention. “You were thinking of me?”
“Sure. I was swimming,” Tsukuru added, awkwardly. “Sometimes I think of you then.”
Impulsively, Haida kicked off the side of the pool. “Come in, then. Join me.”
They swam for a while, Haida stealing glances at Tsukuru now and then, Tsukuru who was still blurred in his vision, and who didn’t seem to look over at Haida quite as much. It was typical of Tsukuru to take strange events, the disappearance or reappearance of a friend, for example, with equanimity.
And after, Tsukuru was the one who suggested they have breakfast tomorrow. He didn’t interrogate Haida much, not as much as Haida expected. He didn’t ask why Haida didn’t tell him this or that or the other, only asked why he left, where he went, how he’d been. These things Haida was able to tell him easily enough (I had to take care of my father. I went back to my hometown. I’ve been well—I write these days, and sometimes tutor, and bills are paid, more or less, and I do all right), and conversation flowed as naturally between them as ever—except, as ever, there was a prickle of things not told, an edge of guilt. Haida had almost forgotten that feeling.
I wanted to be braver when we met again. More honest.
But here he was, having still no more courage to face the overwhelming question. And Tsukuru still both oppressively normal and ethereal, unreachable. With his hair half-wet, he used to recall to Haida a mermaid, though Haida had always known it would be silly to say that. Something about the smoothness of his skin and the haunted look in his eyes. Now he was older, skin no longer as smooth and eyes more present, perhaps wiser. And still untouchable, still terrifying—
“I was in love with you,” Haida blurted out. “You know.”
Tsukuru’s eyes widened.
“Did you know?”
“…no.”
Suddenly that seemed impossible. Haida had often wondered, over the years. “You had to have guessed, a little. There was a night I just stood by your bed and watched you sleep for nearly an hour. I think you were awake by the end of it, but too tactful to say anything. You had to have guessed something then.”
“…ah. I thought I imagined that.”
“Well. You didn’t.”
Tsukuru pursed his lips. “You… wanted me, then?”
“Yes.”
Painful silence. Then, “I keep on learning these things too late,” Tsukuru said. “There was another friend, recently, who told me something similar. She’s married now, and lives in another country. Maybe if I were more observant I would see these things before the chance for love passed me by.”
Which was silly. “It’s not your fault,” Haida said. “I didn’t want you to know. I hid it on purpose.”
“Still, I might have guessed. And now it’s too late.”
“Did you marry, then?”
“Me? No. I haven’t.”
“Then what’s too late about it?”
The answer to this question was perhaps obvious. Fifteen years were fifteen years. But while Tsukuru’s existence, and even the existence of Tokyo, had often seemed a distant thing to Haida’s mind, his love had always felt immediate, as if at any second it might again attack him. And here, in Tsukuru’s presence, here it was again.
Tsukuru said, “You can’t recapture the past. It comes and leaves and is gone.”
“No, I understand those times are gone. But when I came to Tokyo again,” Haida admitted, “I was hoping I might meet you.”
Tsukuru leaned back in his chair. “I, uh… I do have someone. Not a wife, not even exactly a girlfriend. A lover. She has another man. We’re a bit complicated. But I don’t think I could give her up. I wouldn’t want to.”
Haida nodded. “If she has another man… would you object to having one too?”
Tsukuru flushed. (There was always more color in him than he liked to admit.) “That’s something I’d have to think about, I guess. How long will you be in Tokyo?”
“A while.”
“You should come see me tonight,” Tsukuru said. “I’m still in the same apartment—”
“You mentioned that.”
“What I mean is, you know the way.”
“If I’m welcome, I’ll come.”
“Of course you’re welcome. You’re my friend.”
“Well,” Haida said, “I didn’t speak to you for years.”
“I’d like to talk more about that, maybe,” Tsukuru said. “But you weren’t so cruel about it, you know, and I know it was about you, not me. There were things going on in your life. I see that now.”
“I missed you,” Haida said, and suddenly it was easy to say it, so he said it again: “I missed you.”
Tsukuru smiled. (He always had a lovely smile. Now, it seemed somehow warmer than in the past.) “Oh, Haida. I missed you too.”