Tsukuru remembered the erotic dream he often had of the two girls. How they were always together, but how it was always Yuzu whose body he came inside. Not once did he ejaculate inside Eri. He wasn’t sure of the significance, but he did know he couldn’t tell Eri about it. No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.

When he thought about those dreams, and Yuzu’s insistence that he had raped her (and her insistence that she was carrying his baby), he found he couldn’t totally dismiss it out of hand as some made-up story, or say that he had no idea what she was talking about. It might have all been a dream, but he still couldn’t escape the feeling that, in some indefinable way, he was responsible. And not just for the rape, but for her murder. On that rainy May night something inside of him, unknown to him, may have slipped away to Hamamatsu and strangled that thin, lovely, fragile neck.

He could see himself knocking on the door of her apartment. “Can you let me in?” he says, in this vision. “I have something I need to say.” He’s wearing a wet black raincoat, the smell of heavy night rain hovering about him.

“Tsukuru?” Yuzu asks.

“There’s something I need to talk with you about,” he says. “It’s very important. That’s why I came to Hamamatsu. It won’t take long. Please open the door.” He keeps on addressing the closed door. “I’m sorry about showing up like this, without calling. But if I had contacted you beforehand, you probably wouldn’t have seen me.”

Yuzu hesitates, then quietly slips the chain off the lock. His right hand tightly grips the belt inside his pocket.

Tsukuru grimaced. Why did he have to imagine this horrid scene? And why did he have to be the one who strangled her?

There were no reasons at all why he would have done that, of course. Tsukuru had never wanted to kill anyone, ever. But maybe he had tried to kill Yuzu, in a purely symbolic way. Tsukuru himself had no idea what deep darkness lay hidden in his heart. What he did know was that inside Yuzu, too, lay a deep, inner darkness, and that somewhere, on some subterranean level, her darkness and his may have connected. And being strangled was, perhaps, exactly what Yuzu had wanted. In the mingled darkness between them, perhaps he had sensed that desire.

“You’re thinking about Yuzu?” Eri asked.