Aka took a cigarette out of the box, put it between his lips, and, after a short pause, lit it.
“About half a year before she was murdered, I had to go to Hamamatsu on business. I called her and invited her to dinner. By this time the four of us had really gone our separate ways and hardly ever saw each other. We’d get in touch every once in a while, but that was it. My work in Hamamatsu was over sooner than I expected, and I had some free time, so I wanted to see Shiro for the first time in a while. She was more collected and calm than I’d imagined. She seemed to be enjoying having left Nagoya behind and living in a new place. We had dinner together and reminisced. We went to a famous unagi eel restaurant in Hamamatsu, had a few beers, and really relaxed. It surprised me that she was able to drink. Still, there was a bit of tension in the air. What I mean is, we had to avoid a particular topic.…”
“That particular topic being me?”
Aka shot him a hard look and nodded. “It still made her uneasy. She hadn’t forgotten it. Apart from that, though, she seemed perfectly fine. She laughed a lot, and seemed to enjoy talking. And everything she said sounded normal. It struck me that moving to a new place had been great for her. But there was one thing. I don’t enjoy bringing this up, but—she wasn’t attractive like she used to be.”
“Wasn’t attractive?” Tsukuru repeated the words, his voice sounding far away.
“No, that isn’t quite the right expression,” Aka said, and thought it over. “How should I put it? Her features were basically the same as before, of course, and by all standards, she was definitely still a beautiful woman. If you hadn’t known her when she was a teenager, you’d think she was pretty. But I knew her from before, knew her very well. I could never forget how appealing she was. The Shiro in front of me now, though—she wasn’t.”
Aka frowned slightly, as if recalling that scene.
“Seeing Shiro like that was very painful. It hurt to see that she no longer had that burning something she used to have. That what had been remarkable about her had vanished. That the special something would no longer be able to move me the way it used to.”
Smoke rose from Aka’s cigarette above the ashtray. He continued.
“Shiro had just turned thirty then, and she was still young. When she met me she had on very plain clothes, with her hair pulled back in a bun, and hardly any makeup. But that’s not really the point. Those are just details. My point is that she’d lost the glow she used to have, her vitality. She was always an introvert, but at her core there had been something vital and alive, something that even she wasn’t totally aware of. That light, that radiance used to leak out by itself, emerging from between the cracks. Do you know what I mean? But the last time I saw her, it was all gone, like someone had slipped in behind her and pulled the plug. The kind of fresh, sparkling glow, what used to visibly set her apart, had disappeared, and it made me sad to look at her. It wasn’t a question of age. She didn’t get that way simply because she’d gotten older. When I heard that someone had strangled Shiro, I was devastated, and felt really sorry for her. Whatever the circumstances might have been, she didn’t deserve to die like that. But at the same time I couldn’t help but feel that the life had already been sucked out of her, even before she was physically murdered.”
Aka picked up the cigarette from the ashtray, took a deep drag, and closed his eyes.
“She left a huge hole in my heart,” Aka said. “One that’s still not filled.”
Silence descended on them, a hard, dense silence.
“Do you remember the piano piece Shiro used to play a lot?” Tsukuru asked. “A short piece, Liszt’s ‘Le mal du pays’?”