“Is there some advantage to having six fingers?” Tsukuru asked.
“From what I learned,” the stationmaster replied, “during the Middle Ages in Europe, they thought people born with six fingers were magicians or witches, and they were burned at the stake. And in one country during the era of the Crusaders, anybody who had six fingers was killed. Whether these stories are true or not, I don’t know. In Borneo children born with six fingers are automatically treated as shamans. Maybe that isn’t an advantage, however.”
“Shamans?” Tsukuru asked.
“Just in Borneo.”
Lunchtime was over, and so was their conversation. Tsukuru thanked the stationmaster for the lunch, and he and Sakamoto returned to their office.
As Tsukuru was writing some notes on the blueprints, he suddenly recalled the story Haida had told him, years ago, about his father. How the jazz pianist who was staying at the inn deep in the mountains of Oita had, just before he started playing, put a cloth bag on top of the piano. Could there have been, inside the bag, a sixth right and left finger, preserved in formaldehyde inside a jar? For some reason maybe he’d waited until he was an adult to get them amputated, and always carried the jar around with him. And just before he performed he’d put them on top of the piano. Like a talisman.
Of course, this was sheer conjecture. There was no basis for it. And that incident had taken place—if indeed it had actually occurred—over forty years ago. Still, the more Tsukuru thought about it, the more it seemed like this piece of the puzzle fit the lacuna in Haida’s story. Tsukuru sat at his drafting table until evening, pencil in hand, mulling over the idea.
The following day Tsukuru met Sara in Hiroo. They went into a small bistro in a secluded part of the neighborhood—Sara was an expert on secluded, small bars and restaurants all over Tokyo—and before they ate, Tsukuru told her how he had seen his two former friends in Nagoya, and what they had talked about. It wasn’t easy for him to summarize, so it took a while for him to tell her the whole story. Sara listened closely, occasionally stopping him to ask a question.
“So Shiro told the others that when she stayed at your apartment in Tokyo, you drugged her and raped her?”
“That’s what she said.”
“She described it in great detail, very realistically, even though she was so introverted and always tried to avoid talking about sex.”
“That’s what Ao said.”
“And she said you had two faces?” Sara asked.
“She said I had another dark, hidden side, something unhinged and detached from the side of me that everyone knew.”
Sara frowned and thought this over for a while.
“Doesn’t this remind you of something? Didn’t you ever have some special, intimate moment that passed between you and Shiro?”
Tsukuru shook his head. “Never. Not once. I was always conscious of not letting something like that happen.”
“Always conscious?”
“I tried not to view her as someone of the opposite sex. And I avoided being alone with her as much as I could.”
Sara narrowed her eyes and inclined her head for a moment. “Do you think the others in the group were just as careful? In other words, the boys not viewing the girls as members of the opposite sex, and vice versa?”
“I don’t know what the others were thinking, deep down inside. But like I said, it was a kind of unspoken agreement between us that we wouldn’t let male-female relationships be a part of the group. We were pretty insistent about that.”