Eri smiled. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you really do have a very boring face and something was wrong with me. But at least for a silly sixteen-year-old girl, you were handsome enough. I dreamed about how wonderful it would be to have a boyfriend like you.”

“Can’t claim to have much of a personality either.”

“Everyone alive has a personality. It’s just more obvious with some people than with others.” Eri’s eyes narrowed and she looked straight at him. “So, tell me—how would you have replied? Would you have let me be your girlfriend?”

“Of course I would have,” Tsukuru said. “I really liked you. I was really attracted to you, in a different way from how I was attracted to Yuzu. If you had told me then how you felt, of course I would have loved for you to be my girlfriend. And I think we would have been happy together.”

The two of them would have likely been a close couple, with a fulfilling love life, Tsukuru decided. There would have been so much they could have shared. On the surface, their personalities seemed so different—Tsukuru introverted and reticent, Eri sociable and talkative—yet they both shared a desire to create and build things with their own hands, things that were meaningful. Tsukuru had the feeling, though, that this closeness would have been short-lived. An unavoidable fissure would have grown between what he and Eri wanted from their lives. They were still in their teens then, still discovering their own paths, and eventually they would have reached a fork and gone off in separate directions. Without fighting, without hurting each other, naturally, calmly. And it did turn out that way, didn’t it, Tsukuru thought, with him going to Tokyo and building stations, and Eri marrying Edvard and moving to Finland.

It wouldn’t have been strange if things had worked out that way. It was entirely possible. And the experience would never have been a negative one for either of them. Even if they were no longer lovers, they would have remained good friends. In reality, though, none of this ever happened. In reality something very different happened. And that fact was more significant now than anything else.

“Even if you’re not telling the truth, I’m happy you would say that,” Eri said.

“I am too telling the truth,” Tsukuru said. “I wouldn’t joke about something like that. I think we would have had a wonderful time together. And I’m sorry it never happened. I really am.”

Eri smiled, with no trace of sarcasm.