“What about you? You were with them all the time, so weren’t you attracted at all to Shiro or Kuro? From what you told me, they sound pretty appealing.”
“Both of the girls were appealing in their own way. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t attracted to them. But I tried as much as possible not to think of them that way.”
“As much as possible?”
“As much as possible,” Tsukuru said. He felt his cheeks reddening again. “When I couldn’t help thinking of them, I always tried to think of them as a pair.”
“The two of them as a pair?”
Tsukuru paused, searching for the right words. “I can’t really explain it. I thought of them like they were a fictitious being. Like a formless, abstract being.”
“Hmm.” Sara appeared impressed. She thought about it. She seemed to want to say something, but then thought better of it. After a while she spoke.
“So after you graduated from high school you went to college in Tokyo, and left Nagoya. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” Tsukuru said. “I’ve lived in Tokyo ever since.”
“What about the other four?”
“They went to colleges in the Nagoya area. Aka studied in the economics department of Nagoya University, the department where his father taught. Kuro attended a private women’s college famous for its English department. Ao got into business school at a private college that had a well-known rugby team, on the strength of his athletic abilities. Shiro finally was persuaded to give up on being a veterinarian and instead she studied piano in a music school. All four schools were close enough for them to commute from home. I was the only one who went to Tokyo, in my case to an engineering college.”
“Why did you want to go to Tokyo?”
“It’s simple, really. There was a professor at my university who was an expert on railroad station construction. Constructing stations is a specialized field—they have a different structure from other buildings—so even if I went to an ordinary engineering school and studied construction and engineering, it wouldn’t have been of much practical use. I needed to study with a specialist.”
“Having set, specific goals makes life easier,” Sara said.
Tsukuru agreed.
“So the other four stayed in Nagoya because they didn’t want that beautiful community to break up?”
“When we were seniors in high school, we talked about where we were going to go to college. Except for me, they all planned to stay in Nagoya and go to college there. They didn’t come out and say it exactly, but it was obvious they were doing that because they wanted to keep the group together.”
With his GPA, Aka could have easily gotten into a top school like Tokyo University, and his parents and teachers urged him to try. And Ao’s athletic skills could have won him a place in a well-known university too. Kuro’s personality was well suited to the more sophisticated, intellectually stimulating life she might have found in a cosmopolitan environment, and she should have gone on to one of the private universities in Tokyo. Nagoya, of course, is a large city, but culturally it was much more provincial. In the end, all four of them decided to stay in Nagoya, settling for much less prestigious schools than they could have attended. Shiro was the only one who never would have left Nagoya, even if the group hadn’t existed. She wasn’t the type to venture out on her own in search of a more stimulating environment.