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.”

“But isn’t that unnatural? If boys and girls that age get close to each other, and are together all the time, it’s only natural that they start to get interested in each other sexually.”

“I wanted to have a girlfriend and to go out on dates, just the two of us. And of course I was interested in sex. Just like anybody else. And no one was stopping me from having a girlfriend outside the group. But back then, that group was the most important part of my life. The thought hardly ever occurred to me to go out and be with anyone else.”

“Because you found a wonderful harmony there?”

Tsukuru nodded. “When I was with them, I felt like an indispensable part of the whole. It was a special feeling that I could never get anywhere else.”