“I’ve thought about it for sixteen years, but I have no clue.”
Ao narrowed his eyes, seemingly perplexed, and rubbed the tip of his nose—his habit, apparently, when he was thinking hard. “When I told you that back then you said, I see, and hung up. You didn’t object or anything. Or try to dig deeper. So naturally I thought you knew why.”
“Words don’t come out when you’re hurt that deeply,” Tsukuru said.
Ao didn’t respond. He tore off another piece of scone and tossed it toward some pigeons. The pigeons swiftly flocked around the food. He seemed to be used to doing this. Maybe he often came here on his break and shared his lunch with the birds.
“Okay, so tell me. What was the reason?” Tsukuru asked.
“You really don’t have any idea?”
“I really don’t.”
Just then a cheery melody rang out on Ao’s cell phone. He slipped the phone from his suit pocket, checked the name on the screen, impassively pressed a key, and returned it to his pocket. Tsukuru had heard that melody somewhere before. An old pop song of some kind, probably popular before he was born, but he couldn’t recall the title.
“If you have something you need to do,” Tsukuru said, “please feel free to take care of it.”
Ao shook his head. “No, it’s okay. It’s not that important. I can handle it later.”
Tsukuru took a drink of mineral water from the plastic bottle. “Why did I have to be banished from the group?”
Ao considered this for some time before he spoke. “If you’re saying that you have no idea why, it means—what?—that you—didn’t have any sexual relationship with Shiro?”
Tsukuru’s lips curled up in surprise. “A sexual relationship? No way.”
“Shiro said you raped her,” Ao said, as if reluctant to even say it. “She said you forced her to have sex.”
Tsukuru started to respond, but the words wouldn’t come. Despite the water, the back of his throat felt so dry that it ached.
“I couldn’t believe you’d do something like that,” Ao continued. “I think the other two felt the same way, both Kuro and Aka. You weren’t the type to force someone to do something they didn’t want to do. You weren’t violent, we knew that. But Shiro was totally serious about it, obsessed even. You had a public face and a hidden, private face, she said. You had a dark, hidden side, something unhinged and detached from the side of you that everyone knew. When she said that, there was nothing we could say.”
Tsukuru bit his lip for a time. “Did Shiro explain how I supposedly raped her?”
“She did. Very realistically, and in great detail. I didn’t want to hear any of it. Frankly, it was painful to hear. Painful, and sad. It hurt me, I guess I should say. Anyway, she got very emotional. Her body started trembling, and she was so enraged that she looked like a different person. According to Shiro, she traveled to Tokyo to see a concert by a famous foreign pianist and you let her stay in your apartment in Jiyugaoka. She told her parents she was staying in a hotel, but by staying with you, she saved money. Normally she might have hesitated to stay alone in a man’s place, but it was you, so she felt safe. But she said that in the middle of the night you forced yourself on her. She tried to resist, but her body was numb and wouldn’t move. You both had a drink before bedtime, and you might have slipped something into her glass. That’s what she told us.”
Tsukuru shook his head. “Shiro never visited my place in Tokyo once, let alone stay over.”