No one had any idea what had led to her death, why she had ended up strangled. The police investigation petered out without any suspects coming to light. Articles about the case grew steadily shorter, and finally vanished altogether. It was a sad, painful case. Like cold rain falling steadily until dawn.
“An evil spirit possessed her,” Eri said softly, as if revealing a secret. “It clung to her, breathing coldly on her neck, slowly driving her in a corner. That’s the only thing that can explain all that happened to her. What happened with you, her eating disorder, what happened in Hamamatsu. I never actually wanted to put it into words. It’s like, if I did, it would really exist. So I kept it to myself all this time. I decided to never talk about it, until the day I died. But I don’t mind telling you this now, since we’ll probably never see each other again. And you need to know this. It was an evil spirit—or something close to it. In the end, Yuzu couldn’t escape.”
Eri sighed deeply and stared at her hands on the table. Her hands were visibly shaking, rather severely. Tsukuru turned his gaze away and looked out the window, past the fluttering curtain. The silence that settled on the room was oppressive, full of a deep sadness. Unspoken feelings were as heavy and lonely as the ancient glacier that had carved out the deep lake.
“Do you remember Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage? Yuzu used to play one of the pieces a lot,” Tsukuru said after a time to break the silence.
“ ‘Le mal du pays.’ I remember it well,” Eri said. “I listen to it sometimes. Would you like to hear it?”
Tsukuru nodded.
Eri stood up, went over to the small stereo set in the cabinet, selected a CD from the pile of discs, and inserted it into the player. “Le mal du pays” filtered out from the speakers, the simple opening melody, softly played with one hand. Eri sat back down across from him, and the two of them silently listened to the music.
Listening to the music here, next to a lake in Finland, it had a different sort of charm from when he heard it back in his apartment in Tokyo. But no matter where he listened to it, regardless of whether he heard it on a CD or an old LP, the music remained the same, utterly engaging and beautiful. Tsukuru pictured Yuzu at the piano in her parlor, playing the piece, leaning over the keyboard, eyes closed, lips slightly open, searching for words that don’t make a sound. She was apart from herself then, in some other place.
The piece ended, there was a pause, then the next piece began. “The Bells of Geneva.” Eri touched the remote control and lowered the volume.
“It strikes me as different from the performance I always listen to at home,” Tsukuru said.
“Which pianist do you listen to?”
“Lazar Berman.”
Eri shook her head. “I’ve never heard his version.”
“It’s a little more elegant than this one. I like this performance, it’s wonderful, but the style of this version makes it sound more like a Beethoven sonata than Liszt.”
Eri smiled. “That would be because it’s Alfred Brendel. Maybe it’s not so elegant, but I like it all the same. I guess I’m used to this version, since it’s the one I always listen to.”
“Yuzu played this piece so beautifully. She put so much feeling into it.”
“She really did. She was very good at pieces this length. In longer pieces she sort of ran out of energy halfway through. But everyone has their own special qualities. I always feel like a part of Yuzu lives on in this music. It’s so vibrant, so luminous.”
When Yuzu was teaching the children at the school, Tsukuru and Ao usually played soccer with the boys in the small playground outside. They divided into two teams and tried to shoot the ball into the opposite goal (which was usually constructed from a couple of cardboard boxes). As he passed the ball, Tsukuru would half listen to the sound of children playing scales that filtered out the window.