“I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t,” Tsukuru said. “I guess I’m basically not very outgoing. But don’t get the wrong idea—I wasn’t a shut-in or anything. This was the first time I was living on my own, free to do whatever I liked. I enjoyed my days. The railroad lines in Tokyo are like a web spread out over the city, with countless stations. Just seeing them took a lot of time. I’d go to different stations, check out how they were designed, pencil out some rough sketches, jot down anything special I noticed.”

“It sounds like fun,” Sara said.

The university itself, though, wasn’t very exciting. Most of his courses in the beginning were general education classes, uninspiring and numbingly boring. Still, he’d worked hard to get into college, so he tried not to cut class. He studied German and French; he even went to the language lab to practice English. He discovered, to his surprise, that he had a knack for learning languages. Yet he didn’t meet anyone he was drawn to. Compared to his colorful, stimulating group of friends from high school, everyone else seemed spiritless, dull, insipid. He never met anyone he felt like getting to know better, so he spent most of his time in Tokyo alone. On the plus side, he read constantly, more than he ever had before.

“But didn’t you feel lonely?” Sara asked.

“I felt alone, but not especially lonely. I guess I just took that for granted.”

He was young, and there was so much about the world he still didn’t know. And Tokyo was a brand-new place for him, so very different from the environment he’d grown up in, and those differences were greater than he’d ever anticipated. The scale of the city was overwhelming, the diversity of life there extraordinary. There were too many choices of things to do, the way people talked struck him as odd, and the pace of life was too fast. He couldn’t strike a good balance between himself and the world around him. But there was still a place for him to return. He knew this. Get on the bullet train at the Tokyo station and in an hour and a half he’d arrive at an orderly, harmonious, intimate place. Where time flowed by peacefully, where friends he could confide in eagerly awaited him.

“What about now?” Sara asked. “Do you feel like you’re maintaining a good balance between yourself and the world around you?”

“I’ve been with this company for fourteen years. The job’s fine, and I enjoy the work. I get along with my colleagues. And I’ve been in relationships with a few women. Nothing ever came of it, but there were lots of reasons for that. It wasn’t entirely my fault.”

“And you’re alone, but not lonely.”