“Which is why all of you had to look past any sexual interest,” Sara said. “In order to preserve the harmony the five of you had together. So as not to destroy the perfect circle.”

“Looking back on it now, I can see there was something unnatural about it. But at the time, nothing seemed more natural. We were still in our teens, experiencing everything for the first time. There was no way we could be that objective about our situation.”

“In other words, you were locked up inside the perfection of that circle. Can you see it that way?”

Tsukuru thought about this. “Maybe that’s true, but we were happy to be locked up inside it. And I don’t regret it, even now.”

“Intriguing,” Sara said.

Sara was also quite interested to hear about Aka’s visit with Shiro in Hamamatsu six months before she was murdered.

“It’s a different situation, of course,” Sara said, “but it reminds me of a classmate of mine from high school. She was beautiful, with a nice figure, from an affluent family, raised partly abroad and fluent in English and French, always at the top of her class. People noticed her, no matter what she did. She was revered by everybody, the heartthrob of all the younger students. We went to a private all-girls high school, so that sort of admiration by underclassmen could be pretty intense.”

Tsukuru nodded.

“She went on to Seishin University, the famous women’s private college, and studied abroad in France for two years. A couple of years after she got back I had a chance to see her, and when I did, I was floored. I’m not sure how to put it, but she seemed faded. Like something that’s been exposed to strong sunlight for a long time and the color fades. She looked much the same as before. Still beautiful, still with a nice figure … but she seemed paler, fainter than before. It made me feel like I should grab the TV remote to ramp up the color intensity. It was a weird experience. It was hard to imagine that someone could, in the space of just a few years, visibly diminish like that.”

Sara had finished her meal and was waiting for the dessert menu.