“It’s not like I have doubts about him as a person. I have doubts about what he does. There’s a difference.” Ao sounded like he was convincing himself. “Maybe ‘doubts’ is the wrong word. I just don’t feel—comfortable with his way of thinking. Anyway, he’s become pretty famous in this town. He’s been on TV, in newspapers and magazines, as a real wheeler-dealer entrepreneur. He was featured in a women’s magazine as one of the ‘Most Successful Bachelors in Their Thirties.’ ”

“ ‘Most Successful Bachelors’?” Tsukuru said.

“I never saw that coming,” Ao said. “I would never have imagined him appearing in a women’s magazine.”

“Tell me—how did Shiro die?” Tsukuru said, changing the subject.

Ao came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the street. He stood stock-still, like a statue. The people walking behind him nearly crashed into him. He stared straight at Tsukuru.

“Hold on a second. You honestly don’t know how she died?”

“How should I? Until last week I didn’t even know she was dead. Nobody told me.”

“Don’t you ever read the newspaper?”

“Sure, but I didn’t see anything about it. I don’t know what happened, but I’m guessing the Tokyo papers didn’t give it much coverage.”

“Your family didn’t know anything?”

Tsukuru shook his head.

Ao, seemingly unnerved, faced forward again and resumed his quick pace. Tsukuru kept up with him. A moment later Ao spoke.

“After Shiro graduated from music college she taught piano for a while from her house. She moved out, finally, to Hamamatsu, and was living alone. About two years later she was found, strangled to death, in her apartment. Her mother had been worried because she hadn’t been able to reach Shiro. Her mother was the one who found her. She still hasn’t recovered from the shock. And they still haven’t arrested anyone.”

Tsukuru gasped. Strangled?

Ao went on. “Shiro’s body was discovered six years ago, on May 12th. By then we rarely got in touch with each other, so I don’t know what sort of life she led in Hamamatsu. I don’t even know why she moved there. When her mother found her, Shiro had already been dead for three days. She’d been lying on the kitchen floor for three days.

“I went to the funeral in Nagoya,” Ao continued, “and I couldn’t stop crying. I felt like a part of me had died, like I’d turned to stone. But like I said, by this time our group had pretty much split up. We were all adults, with different lives, so there really wasn’t much we could do about it. We weren’t naive high school students anymore. Still, it was sad to see what used to be so fundamental to our lives fade away, and disappear. We’d gone through such an exciting time together, and grown up together.”