The ache in his heart returned. Not an intense pain, but the memory of intense pain.
What did you expect? Tsukuru asked himself. A basically empty vessel has become empty once again. Who can you complain to about that? People come to him, discover how empty he is, and leave. What’s left is an empty, perhaps even emptier, Tsukuru Tazaki, all alone. Isn’t that all there is to it?
Still, sometimes they leave behind a small memento, like Haida and the boxed set of Years of Pilgrimage. He probably didn’t simply forget it, but intentionally left it behind in Tsukuru’s apartment. And Tsukuru loved that music, for it connected him to Haida, and to Shiro. It was the vein that connected these three scattered people. A fragile, thin vein, but one that still had living, red blood coursing through it. The power of music made it possible. Whenever he listened to that music, particularly “Le mal du pays,” vivid memories of the two of them swept over him. At times it even felt like they were right beside him, quietly breathing.
At a certain point the two of them had vanished from his life. Suddenly, without warning. No—it was less that they had left than that they had deliberately cut him off, abandoned him. Of course that had hurt Tsukuru deeply, and that wound remained to this day. But in the end, wasn’t it the two of them—Shiro and Haida—who had, in a real sense of the term, been wounded or injured? Recently, that view had taken hold of his mind.
Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, if even for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place. If that were true, then maybe he should be happy he was hollow.
The final strains of “Petrarch’s Sonnet 47” vanished in the air, the recording ended, and the needle automatically lifted, moved to the side, returned to the armrest. He lowered the needle back to the beginning of the B side of the LP. The needle quietly traced the grooves of the record and once more Lazar Berman was playing, beautifully, ever so delicately.
He listened to the whole side again, then changed into pajamas and got into bed. He switched off the light beside his bed, and once more felt grateful that what had taken hold of his heart was a deep sorrow, not the yoke of intense jealousy. That would have snatched away any hope for sleep.
Finally sleep came, wrapping him in its embrace.
For several fleeting moments he felt that familiar softness throughout his body. This, too, was one of the few things Tsukuru felt thankful for that night.
In the midst of sleep he heard birds calling out in the night.
As soon as he arrived at the Helsinki airport, Tsukuru exchanged his yen for euros, found a cell phone store, and bought the most basic, prepaid phone they had. This done, he walked out of the terminal, his carry-on bag hanging from his shoulder, and walked to the taxi stand. He got into a taxi, an older model Mercedes-Benz, and told the driver the name of his hotel in the city.
They left the airport and drove onto the highway. Though this was Tsukuru’s first trip abroad, neither the deep green woods they passed nor the billboards in Finnish gave him the sense he had come—for the first time ever—to a foreign country. Obviously it took much longer to come here than to go to Nagoya, but he felt no different than when he’d gone back to his hometown. Only the currency in his wallet had changed. He wore his usual outfit—chinos, black polo shirt, sneakers, and a light brown cotton jacket. He’d brought the bare minimum when it came to extra clothes. He figured if he needed anything more, he could always buy it.
“Where are you from?” asked the taxi driver in English, shooting Tsukuru a glance in the rearview mirror. He was a middle-aged man with a full, thick beard.
“Japan,” Tsukuru replied.
“That’s a long way to come with so little luggage.”