Haida left Tsukuru for good at the end of the following February, eight months after they’d first met. This time he never came back.

The end-of-year exams were over, the grades posted, when Haida went home to Akita. “I should come back soon,” he told Tsukuru. “Winters in Akita are freezing cold, and two weeks home is about as much as I can stand,” he said. “Much easier to be in Tokyo. But I need to help get the snow off the roof, so I have to go there for a while.” But two weeks passed, then three, and Haida didn’t return to Tokyo. He never once got in touch.

Tsukuru didn’t worry too much in the beginning. He figured Haida was having a better time at home than he’d thought he might. Or maybe they’d had more snow than usual. Tsukuru himself went to Nagoya for three days in the middle of March. He didn’t want to visit, but he couldn’t stay away forever. No snow needed to be shoveled off the family roof in Nagoya, of course, but his mother had called him incessantly, wondering why, if school was out, he didn’t want to come home. “I have an important project I need to finish during the break,” Tsukuru lied. “But you should still be able to come home for a couple of days at least,” his mother insisted. One of his older sisters called too, underscoring how much his mother missed him. “You really should come home,” she said, “even for a little while.” “Okay, I get it,” he said. “I will.”

Back in Nagoya, except for walking the dog in the park in the evening, he never went out. He was afraid of running into one of his four former friends, especially after he’d been having erotic dreams about Shiro and Kuro, essentially raping them in his imagination. He wasn’t brave enough to meet them in the flesh, even if those dreams were beyond his control and there was no way they could possibly know what he’d been dreaming. Still, he was afraid they’d take one look at his face and know exactly what went on in his dreams, and then denounce him for his filthy, selfish illusions.

He refrained from masturbating as much as he could. Not because he felt guilty about the act itself, but because, as he touched himself, he couldn’t help but picture Shiro and Kuro. He’d try to think of something else, but the two of them always stole inside his imagination. The problem was, the more he refrained from masturbating, the more frequent his erotic dreams became, almost always featuring the two girls. So the result was the same. But at least these weren’t images he’d intentionally conjured. He knew he was just making excuses, but for him this explanation, basically just a rephrasing of events, held no small importance.

The contents of the dreams were nearly always the same. The setting and some of the details might change, but always the two girls were nude, entwined around him, caressing his whole body with their fingers and lips, stroking his penis, and then having sex with him. And in the end the one he always ejaculated in was Shiro. He might be having steamy sex with Kuro, but in the final moments, he’d suddenly realize he’d changed partners, and he’d come inside Shiro’s body. He’d started having these dreams in the summer of his sophomore year, after he’d been expelled from the group and lost any chance to see the two women again, after he’d made up his mind to never think of his four friends again. He had no memory, before then, of ever having a dream like this. Why he started having these dreams was a mystery, another unanswered question to stuff deep inside the “Pending” drawer in his unconscious.

Filled with desultory feelings of frustration, Tsukuru returned to Tokyo. There was still no word from Haida. He didn’t show up at either the pool or the library. Tsukuru called Haida’s dorm, and was told each time that Haida wasn’t there. He realized he didn’t know the address or phone number of Haida’s home in Akita. While all this went on, the spring holidays ended and a new school year began. Tsukuru was now a senior. On the trees, cherry blossoms bloomed, then scattered, but still no word came from his younger friend.

He visited the dormitory where Haida had lived. The dorm manager told him that, at the end of the previous school year, Haida had submitted a form requesting to move out, and had taken away all his belongings. When Tsukuru heard this, he was speechless. The dorm manager knew nothing about why Haida had left the dorm or where he might have gone. Or perhaps he knew, but was merely claiming he didn’t.

Tsukuru went to the college registrar’s office and learned that Haida had been granted a leave of absence. The reason why he’d applied to do so was confidential, and they wouldn’t tell him anything more. All he knew was that, right after final exams, Haida had stamped his seal on the leave of absence form and the form to vacate his dorm. At that point, he was still seeing Tsukuru often. They were swimming together at the pool, and on weekends Haida was visiting Tsukuru’s apartment, where they’d talk until late and Haida would stay over. And yet he had kept his plan to leave school a total secret. “I’m just going back to Akita for a couple of weeks,” he’d informed Tsukuru, as if it were nothing important. And then he had vanished from sight.

I may never see him again, Tsukuru thought. For some reason Haida was determined to leave without a word of explanation. This didn’t just happen by chance. There had to be a clear reason why he chose to act that way. No matter what the reason was, though, Tsukuru felt that Haida would never come back. And his hunch turned out to be right. At least while Tsukuru was in college, Haida never re-enrolled in school. And he never got in touch.

It’s strange, Tsukuru thought at the time. Haida is repeating his father’s fate. He leaves college when he’s around twenty, and disappears, as if retracing his father’s footsteps. Or was that whole story about his father a fabrication? Had he been trying to relate something about himself, making it sound as if it had happened to his father?

Somehow Haida’s disappearance this time didn’t confuse Tsukuru as deeply as he’d been confused before. He didn’t feel bitter about Haida abandoning him. Rather, after losing his friend, he felt a strangely neutral quiet descending over his life. At times the odd thought struck him that Haida had partially absorbed Tsukuru’s sin, his impurity, and as a result he had had to go far away.

Of course, Tsukuru felt lonely without his friend. He regretted that things had worked out this way. Haida was a good friend, one of the few he’d ever had. But maybe it was unavoidable. All he’d left behind were his little coffee mill, a half-filled bag of coffee beans, the three-LP set of Lazar Berman playing Liszt’s “Le mal du pays,” and the memory of his unusually limpid eyes, and that gaze.

That May, a month after Tsukuru learned that Haida had left campus, he had his first real sexual relationship with a woman. He was twenty-one then, twenty-one and six months. Since the beginning of the school year he’d begun an internship doing drafting at an architectural firm, and the person he slept with was an unmarried woman, four years older than he, whom he met at the office. She did clerical work there. She was on the small side, with long hair, large ears, gorgeous legs, and a taut body. More cute than beautiful. When she joked around, her smile revealed beautiful white teeth. She was kind to him from the first day he started work, and he could sense she liked him. Raised with two older sisters, Tsukuru always felt comfortable around older women. The woman was the same age as his second sister.

Tsukuru found a chance to invite her to dinner, then back to his apartment, and there he took the plunge and lured her into bed. She accepted his overtures with barely a moment’s hesitation. Though it was Tsukuru’s first time with a woman, things went smoothly—no confusion, no nervousness—from start to finish. Because of this, the woman seemed convinced that he was more sexually experienced than most young men his age, even though the only sex he’d had with women had been confined to dreams.

Tsukuru really liked her. She was bright and attractive, and while she didn’t provide intellectual stimulation like Haida, she had a cheerful, open personality, plenty of curiosity, and was an enjoyable conversationalist. She enjoyed making love, too, and being with her taught him much about women’s bodies.

She wasn’t good at cooking, but enjoyed cleaning, and before long she had his apartment sparkling clean. She replaced his curtains, sheets, pillowcases, towels, and bath mats with brand-new ones. She brought color and vitality into Tsukuru’s post-Haida life. But he didn’t choose to sleep with her out of passion, or because he was fond of her, or even to lessen his loneliness. Though he probably would never have admitted it, he was hoping to prove to himself that he wasn’t gay, that he was capable of having sex with a real woman, not just in his dreams. This was his main objective.

And he achieved his goal.

She stayed overnight at his place on weekends, just as Haida had done not so long before. They would make love leisurely, sometimes having sex almost until dawn. As he made love to her, he tried hard to think of nothing beyond her and her body. He focused, switched off his imagination, and chased away everything that wasn’t there—Shiro and Kuro’s naked bodies, and Haida’s lips—as best he could. She was on the pill, so he could come freely inside her. She enjoyed sex with him and seemed to be satisfied. When she orgasmed she always cried out in a strange voice. It’s okay, Tsukuru told himself. I’m normal, after all. Thanks to this relationship, his erotic dreams disappeared.

They saw each other for eight months, then mutually agreed to break up, just before he graduated from college. A railroad company had offered him a job, and his part-time work at the architectural firm was over. While she was seeing Tsukuru she had another boyfriend, someone back in her hometown in Niigata, whom she’d known since childhood (information she had disclosed from the first day they slept together). She was going to marry him in April. She planned to quit her job at the architectural firm and move to Sanjo City, where her fiancé worked. “So I won’t be able to see you anymore,” she told Tsukuru one day as they lay in bed.

“He’s a very good person,” she said, resting her hand on Tsukuru’s. “We’re well suited to each other.”

“I hate the thought of not seeing you again,” Tsukuru said, “but I suppose I should congratulate you.”

“Thank you,” she said. Then, as if writing a tiny footnote at the corner of a page, she added, “I might have a chance to see you again, someday.”

“That would be great,” Tsukuru said, though he found it hard to decipher that footnote. When she’s with her fiancé, he suddenly wondered, does she cry out in the same way? The two of them made love again.

And he really did feel bad about not being able to see her once a week. He knew that if he wanted to avoid having graphic erotic dreams, and live more in the present, he needed a regular sexual partner. But still, her marriage was, if anything, a good development for him, as he’d never felt anything for her beyond a calm fondness and a healthy physical desire. And at that point Tsukuru was about to embark on a new stage in his life.