He could see them through the windows of the train. He’d inherited the watch from his father. One of the few tangible things he’d received. It was a beautiful antique, from the early 1960 s. If you didn’t wear it for three days, the mechanism would wind down and the hands would stop. An inconvenience, but that’s what Tsukuru liked about it. It was a purely mechanical device, a piece of craftsmanship. No quartz or a single microchip inside, everything operated by delicate springs and gears. It had been working faithfully, without a rest, for a half century and was, even now, surprisingly accurate.
Tsukuru had never bought a watch himself, not once in his whole life. When he was young, someone inevitably gave him a cheap one, which he used without much thought. As long as it kept the right time, he didn’t care what he wore. That was the extent of his feelings for watches. A simple Casio digital watch did the trick. So when his father died, and he was given this expensive wristwatch as a keepsake, again it aroused no special feelings one way or the other. He had to make sure to wear it regularly, so it didn’t wind down, but once he got used to this, he found he had a great fondness for the watch. He enjoyed the weight and heft of it, the faint mechanical whir it made. He found himself checking the time more often than before, and each time he did, his father’s shadow passed, faintly, through his mind.
Truth be told, he didn’t remember his father all that well, nor did he have particularly warm memories of him. He could not recall ever going anywhere with his father, from the time he was small until he was grown up, or even having a friendly talk, just the two of them. His father was basically an uncommunicative person (at least, at home, he barely spoke), and besides, work kept him so busy that he was rarely around. Only now did Tsukuru realize that his father might have been keeping a mistress somewhere.
To Tsukuru he felt less like his real father than like some well-placed relative who often visited. Tsukuru was essentially raised by his mother and his two older sisters. He knew next to nothing about what sort of life his father had led, his thoughts and values, and what he actually did day to day. What he did know was that his father had been born in Gifu, had lost both parents while still a boy, was taken in by a paternal uncle who was a Buddhist priest, managed to graduate from high school, started a company from scratch, had tremendous success, and ultimately built up a substantial fortune. Unlike most people who had struggled in life, he preferred not to dwell on the trials he’d gone through, perhaps not wishing to relive the hard times. At any rate, it was clear that his father had an extraordinary head for business, the talent to immediately obtain what he needed, and jettison everything he didn’t. Tsukuru’s oldest sister had, in part, inherited this talent for business from her father, while the younger sister had also, in part, inherited her mother’s cheerful sociability. Neither of these qualities had been passed on to Tsukuru.
His father had smoked over fifty cigarettes a day, and had died of lung cancer. When Tsukuru went to visit him at the hospital in Nagoya, he could no longer speak. His father seemed to want to tell him something, but couldn’t do so. A month later he died in his hospital bed. His father left him the one-bedroom condo in Jiyugaoka, a bank account with a fair amount of money in his name, and this Heuer self-winding wristwatch.
No, there was one other thing his father had left him. His name—Tsukuru Tazaki.
When Tsukuru announced that he wanted to study at an engineering college in Tokyo, his father seemed deeply disappointed that his only son had no interest in taking over the real estate business he had worked so hard to build. Still, he fully supported Tsukuru’s desire to become an engineer. “If that’s what you want,” his father had told him, “then you should go to the college in Tokyo, and I’ll be happy to pay for it. Learning a technical skill and building real objects is a good thing. It contributes to society. Study hard,” he’d said, “and build as many stations as you like.” His father seemed pleased that the name he’d chosen—Tsukuru—had turned out to be so appropriate. This was probably the first and last time Tsukuru had made his father happy, certainly the only time he had seen his father so openly pleased.