Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage (36 page)

What kind of person this other man was, what sort of relationship they had, how long they’d been seeing each other—all of this Tsukuru had no way of knowing. And he didn’t want to know, either. One thing he could say at this point was this: he had very little he could give her. Limited in amount, and in kind, the contents negligible. Would anybody really want the little he had to give?

Sara said she has feelings for me. He had no reason to doubt it. But there are countless things in the world for which affection is not enough. Life is long, and
sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.

If Sara doesn’t choose me tomorrow, he thought, I may
really
die. Die in reality, or die figuratively—there isn’t much difference between the two. But this time I definitely will take my last breath. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki will lose any last hint of color and quietly exit the world. All will become a void, the only thing that remains a hard, frozen clump of dirt.

It doesn’t matter. The same thing has nearly happened a few times already, and it wouldn’t be strange if it actually did this time. It’s just a physical phenomenon, no more. The spring on a wound watch gets steadily looser, the torque grows closer and closer to zero, until the gears stop altogether and the hands come to rest at a set position. Silence descends. Isn’t that all it is?

He slipped into bed just before the date changed, and switched off the bedside lamp. How nice it would be to dream of Sara, Tsukuru thought. An erotic dream. Or one that wasn’t—either would be good. If possible, though, a dream that wasn’t too sad. A dream in which he could touch her body would be more than he could ask for. It was, after all, just a dream.

He longed for her more than he could say. It was a wonderful thing to be able to truly want someone like this—the feeling was so real, so overpowering. He hadn’t felt this way in ages. Maybe he never had before. Not that everything about it was wonderful: his chest ached, he found it hard to breathe, and a fear, a dark oscillation, had hold of him. But now even that kind of ache had become an important part of the affection he felt. He didn’t want to let that feeling slip from his grasp. Once lost, he might never happen across that warmth again. If he had to lose it, he would rather lose himself.

Tsukuru, you need to hang on to her. No matter what. If you let her go now, you might not ever have anyone else in your life
.

Eri was right. No matter what, he had to make Sara his. But this wasn’t something he could decide on his own. It was a question decided by two people, between one heart and another. Something had to be given, and something had to be accepted. Everything depends on tomorrow. If Sara chooses me, accepts me, he thought, I’m going to propose to her right away. And give her everything I’m capable of giving—every single thing. Before I get lost in a dark forest. Before the bad elves grab me.

Not everything was lost in the flow of time
. That’s
what Tsukuru should have said to Eri when he said goodbye at the lakeside in Finland. But at that point, he couldn’t put it into words.

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something—with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish
.

He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of the night, where it disappeared. All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees.

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.