He visited the dormitory where Haida had lived. The dorm manager told him that, at the end of the previous school year, Haida had submitted a form requesting to move out, and had taken away all his belongings. When Tsukuru heard this, he was speechless. The dorm manager knew nothing about why Haida had left the dorm or where he might have gone. Or perhaps he knew, but was merely claiming he didn’t.
Tsukuru went to the college registrar’s office and learned that Haida had been granted a leave of absence. The reason why he’d applied to do so was confidential, and they wouldn’t tell him anything more. All he knew was that, right after final exams, Haida had stamped his seal on the leave of absence form and the form to vacate his dorm. At that point, he was still seeing Tsukuru often. They were swimming together at the pool, and on weekends Haida was visiting Tsukuru’s apartment, where they’d talk until late and Haida would stay over. And yet he had kept his plan to leave school a total secret. “I’m just going back to Akita for a couple of weeks,” he’d informed Tsukuru, as if it were nothing important. And then he had vanished from sight.
I may never see him again, Tsukuru thought. For some reason Haida was determined to leave without a word of explanation. This didn’t just happen by chance. There had to be a clear reason why he chose to act that way. No matter what the reason was, though, Tsukuru felt that Haida would never come back. And his hunch turned out to be right. At least while Tsukuru was in college, Haida never re-enrolled in school. And he never got in touch.
It’s strange, Tsukuru thought at the time. Haida is repeating his father’s fate. He leaves college when he’s around twenty, and disappears, as if retracing his father’s footsteps. Or was that whole story about his father a fabrication? Had he been trying to relate something about himself, making it sound as if it had happened to his father?
Somehow Haida’s disappearance this time didn’t confuse Tsukuru as deeply as he’d been confused before. He didn’t feel bitter about Haida abandoning him. Rather, after losing his friend, he felt a strangely neutral quiet descending over his life. At times the odd thought struck him that Haida had partially absorbed Tsukuru’s sin, his impurity, and as a result he had had to go far away.
Of course, Tsukuru felt lonely without his friend. He regretted that things had worked out this way. Haida was a good friend, one of the few he’d ever had. But maybe it was unavoidable. All he’d left behind were his little coffee mill, a half-filled bag of coffee beans, the three-LP set of Lazar Berman playing Liszt’s “Le mal du pays,” and the memory of his unusually limpid eyes, and that gaze.
That May, a month after Tsukuru learned that Haida had left campus, he had his first real sexual relationship with a woman. He was twenty-one then, twenty-one and six months. Since the beginning of the school year he’d begun an internship doing drafting at an architectural firm, and the person he slept with was an unmarried woman, four years older than he, whom he met at the office. She did clerical work there. She was on the small side, with long hair, large ears, gorgeous legs, and a taut body. More cute than beautiful. When she joked around, her smile revealed beautiful white teeth. She was kind to him from the first day he started work, and he could sense she liked him. Raised with two older sisters, Tsukuru always felt comfortable around older women. The woman was the same age as his second sister.
Tsukuru found a chance to invite her to dinner, then back to his apartment, and there he took the plunge and lured her into bed. She accepted his overtures with barely a moment’s hesitation. Though it was Tsukuru’s first time with a woman, things went smoothly—no confusion, no nervousness—from start to finish. Because of this, the woman seemed convinced that he was more sexually experienced than most young men his age, even though the only sex he’d had with women had been confined to dreams.