He woke up, his body quaking. It took a while before he understood that it had been a dream. He tore off his sweat-soaked pajamas and dried himself with a towel, but no matter how hard he wiped the sweat away, he couldn’t rid himself of that slimy feeling. And he came to a realization. Or maybe felt it intuitively. So this was jealousy. The body or the heart of the woman he loved, or maybe even both, were being wrested from him by someone else.

Jealousy—at least as far as he understood it from his dream—was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn’t make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.

Tsukuru grabbed a carton of orange juice from the fridge and drank glass after glass. His throat was bone dry. He sat down at the table and, watching through the window as the day slowly dawned, willed himself to calm down. This surge of overpowering emotion that had struck him had his heart and body trembling. What in the world could this dream mean? he wondered. Was it a prophecy? A symbolic message? Was it trying to tell him something? Or was this his true self, unknown to him until now, breaking out of its shell, struggling to emerge? Some ugly creature that had hatched, desperate to reach the air outside?

Tsukuru Tazaki only understood this later, but it was at this point that he stopped wanting to die. Having stared at his naked form in the mirror, he now saw someone else reflected there. That same night was when, in his dreams, he experienced jealousy (or what he took for jealousy) for the first time in his life. And by the time dawn came, he’d put behind him the dark days of the previous five months, days spent face-to-face with the utter void of extinction.

He speculated that, just as a powerful west wind blows away thick banks of clouds, the graphic, scorching emotion that passed through his soul in the form of a dream must have canceled and negated the longing for death, a longing that had reached out and grabbed him around the neck.