It was too much trouble to search for somewhere to eat, so he went into a nearby pizzeria, sat down at an outdoor table, and ordered iced tea and a margherita pizza. He could hear Sara laughing at him. You flew all the way to Finland, and you ate a margherita pizza? She would definitely be amused by this. But the pizza turned out to be delicious, much better than he’d expected. They’d baked it in a real coal oven, and it was thin and crispy, with fragrant charcoal marks on the crust.

This casual pizzeria was nearly full of families and young couples. There was a group of students, too. Everyone was drinking either beer or wine, and many were puffing away on cigarettes. The only one Tsukuru could see sitting alone, drinking iced tea while he ate his pizza, was himself. Everyone else was talking loudly, boisterously, and the words he overheard were all (he imagined) Finnish. The restaurant seemed to cater to locals, not tourists. It finally struck him: he was far from Japan, in another country. No matter where he was, he almost always ate alone, so that didn’t particularly bother him. But here he wasn’t simply alone. He was alone in two senses of the word. He was also a foreigner, the people around him speaking a language he couldn’t understand.

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. There was nothing odd about it at all. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place. His raised his hand to summon the waiter and ordered a glass of red wine.

A short time after the wine came, an old accordion player strolled by. He had on a worn-out vest and a Panama hat, and was accompanied by a pointy-eared dog. With practiced hands, like tying a horse to a hitching post, he tied the dog’s leash to a streetlight and stood there, leaned back against it, and began playing northern European folk melodies. The man was clearly a veteran street musician, his performance practiced and effortless. Some of the customers sang along with the melodies, too, and he took requests, including a Finnish version of Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel.” His thin black dog sat there, not watching anything around it, its eyes fixed on a spot in the air, as if reminiscing. Its ears didn’t twitch or move at all.

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.