Kuro turned to her husband as if for an explanation, but Edvard said nothing. He merely shook his head slightly. She turned to look back at Tsukuru, and lightly bit her lip.

What Tsukuru saw in front of him now was the healthy body of a woman who had walked a completely different path in life from the one he’d taken. Seeing her now, the true weight of sixteen years of time struck him with a sudden intensity. There are some things, he concluded, that can only be expressed through a woman’s form.

As she gazed at him, Kuro’s face was a bit strained. Her lips quivered, as if a ripple had run through them, and one side of her mouth rose. A small dimple appeared on her right cheek—technically not a dimple, but a shallow depression that appeared as her face was filled with a cheerful bitterness. Tsukuru remembered this expression well, the expression that came to her face just before she voiced some sarcastic remark. But now she wasn’t going to say something sarcastic. She was simply trying to draw a distant hypothesis closer to her.

“Tsukuru?” she said, finally giving the hypothesis a name.

Tsukuru nodded.

The first thing she did was pull her daughter closer, as if protecting her from some threat. The little girl, her face still raised to Tsukuru, clung to her mother’s leg. The older daughter stood a bit apart, unmoving. Edvard went over to her and gently patted her hair. The girl’s hair was dark blond. The younger girl’s was black.

The five of them stayed that way for a while, not speaking a word. Edvard patted the blond daughter’s hair, Kuro’s arm remained around the shoulder of the black-haired daughter, while Tsukuru stood alone on the other side of the table, as if they were all holding a pose for a painting with this arrangement. And the central figure in this was Kuro. She, or rather her body, was the core of the tableau enclosed by that frame.

Kuro was the first to move. She let go of her little daughter, then took the sunglasses off her forehead and laid them on the table. She picked up the mug her husband had been using and took a drink of the cold, leftover coffee. She frowned, as if she had no idea what it was she’d just drunk.

“Shall I make some coffee?” her husband asked her in Japanese.

“Please,” Kuro said, not looking in his direction. She sat down at the table.

Edvard went over to the coffee maker again and switched it on to reheat the coffee. Following their mother’s lead, the two girls sat down side by side on a wooden bench next to the window. They stared at Tsukuru.

“Is that really you, Tsukuru?” Kuro asked in a small voice.

“In the flesh,” Tsukuru replied.

Her eyes narrowed, and she gazed right at him.