Haruki Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Sometimes you’re not sure what to do with them,” the stationmaster said. “A friend of mine who runs another station turned in a Boston bag once that had a dead fetus inside. Thankfully, I’ve never had that kind of experience myself. But once, when I was a stationmaster at another station, someone brought in two fingers preserved in formaldehyde.”

“That’s pretty grotesque,” Tsukuru said.

“Yes, it sure was. Two small fingers floating in liquid, kept in what looked like a small mayonnaise jar, all inside a pretty cloth bag. Looked like a child’s fingers severed at the base. Naturally we contacted the police, since we thought it might be connected to a crime. The police came over immediately and took the jar away.”

The stationmaster drank a sip of tea.

“A week later the same police officer who’d taken the fingers stopped by. He questioned the station employee who’d found the jar in the restroom again. I was present for the questioning. According to the officer, the fingers in the jar weren’t those of a child. The forensics lab determined that they belonged to an adult. The reason they were so small was that they were sixth, vestigial fingers. The officer said that sometimes people have extra fingers. Most of the time the parents want to get rid of the deformity, so they have the fingers amputated when the child’s still a baby, but there are some people who, as adults, still have all six fingers. The ones that were found were an example—the fingers of an adult who had had them surgically removed, then preserved in formaldehyde. The lab estimated the fingers to be those of a man, age mid-twenties to mid-thirties, though they couldn’t tell how long it had been since the fingers had been amputated. I can’t imagine how they’d come to be forgotten, or perhaps thrown away, in the station restroom. But it doesn’t seem that they were connected to any crime. In the end the police kept them, and no one ever came forward to claim them. For all I know, they may still be in a police warehouse somewhere.”

“That’s a weird story,” Tsukuru said. “Why would he keep those sixth fingers until he became an adult and then suddenly decide to amputate them?”

“It’s a mystery. It got me interested in the phenomenon, though, and I started looking into it. The technical term is hyperdactyly, and there have been lots of famous people who’ve had it. It’s unclear whether it’s true or not, but there was some evidence that Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the famous leader of the Sengoku period, had two thumbs. There are plenty of other examples. There was a famous pianist who had the condition, a novelist, an artist, a baseball player. In fiction, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs had six fingers. It’s not all that unusual, and genetically it’s a dominant trait. There are variations among different races, but in general, one out of every five hundred people is born with six fingers. As I said, though, the vast majority of their parents have the extra fingers amputated before their children’s first birthdays, when kids begin to develop fine-motor skills. So we hardly ever run across someone with the condition. It was the same for me. Until that jar was found in the station, I’d never even heard of such a thing.”

“It is strange, though,” Tsukuru said. “If having six fingers is a dominant trait, then why don’t we see more people with them?”

The stationmaster inclined his head. “Don’t know. That kind of complicated stuff is beyond me.”

Sakamoto, who’d eaten lunch with them, opened his mouth for the first time. Hesitantly, as if rolling away a massive stone that blocked the mouth of a cave. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind if I venture an opinion?”

“Of course,” Tsukuru said, taken by surprise. Sakamoto was not the type of young man who voiced his own opinion in front of others. “Go right ahead.”

“People tend to misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘dominant,’ ” Sakamoto said. “Even if a certain tendency is dominant, that doesn’t mean it becomes widespread throughout the population. There are quite a few rare disorders where genetically there is a dominant gene, but these conditions don’t, as a result, become common. Thankfully, in most cases these are checked at a fixed number, and remain rare disorders. Dominant genes are nothing more than one among many elements in tendency distribution. Other elements would include the survival of the fittest, natural selection, and so on. This is personal conjecture, but I think six fingers are too many for human beings. For what the hand has to do, five fingers are all that are necessary, and the most efficient number. So even if having six fingers is a dominant gene, in the real world it only manifests in a tiny minority. In other words, the law of selection trumps the dominant gene.”

After holding forth at such length, Sakamoto stepped back into silence.

“That makes sense,” Tsukuru said. “I get the feeling it’s connected with the process of how the world’s counting systems have mainly standardized, moving from the duodecimal system to the decimal system.”

“Yes, that might have been a response to six and five fingers, digits, now that you mention it,” Sakamoto said.

“So how come you know so much about this?” Tsukuru asked Sakamoto.

“I took a class on genetics in college. I sort of had a personal interest in it.” Sakamoto’s cheeks reddened as he said this.

The stationmaster gave a merry laugh. “So your genetics class came in handy, even after you started work at a railway company. I guess getting an education isn’t something to be sneezed at, is it.”

Tsukuru turned to the stationmaster. “Seems like for a pianist, though, having six fingers could come in pretty handy.”

“Apparently it doesn’t,” the stationmaster replied. “One pianist who has six fingers said the extra ones get in the way. Like Mr. Sakamoto said just now, moving six fingers equally and freely might be a little too much for human beings. Maybe five is just the right number.”

“Is there some advantage to having six fingers?” Tsukuru asked.

“From what I learned,” the stationmaster replied, “during the Middle Ages in Europe, they thought people born with six fingers were magicians or witches, and they were burned at the stake. And in one country during the era of the Crusaders, anybody who had six fingers was killed. Whether these stories are true or not, I don’t know. In Borneo children born with six fingers are automatically treated as shamans. Maybe that isn’t an advantage, however.”

“Shamans?” Tsukuru asked.

“Just in Borneo.”

Lunchtime was over, and so was their conversation. Tsukuru thanked the stationmaster for the lunch, and he and Sakamoto returned to their office.

As Tsukuru was writing some notes on the blueprints, he suddenly recalled the story Haida had told him, years ago, about his father. How the jazz pianist who was staying at the inn deep in the mountains of Oita had, just before he started playing, put a cloth bag on top of the piano. Could there have been, inside the bag, a sixth right and left finger, preserved in formaldehyde inside a jar? For some reason maybe he’d waited until he was an adult to get them amputated, and always carried the jar around with him. And just before he performed he’d put them on top of the piano. Like a talisman.

Of course, this was sheer conjecture. There was no basis for it. And that incident had taken place—if indeed it had actually occurred—over forty years ago. Still, the more Tsukuru thought about it, the more it seemed like this piece of the puzzle fit the lacuna in Haida’s story. Tsukuru sat at his drafting table until evening, pencil in hand, mulling over the idea.

The following day Tsukuru met Sara in Hiroo. They went into a small bistro in a secluded part of the neighborhood—Sara was an expert on secluded, small bars and restaurants all over Tokyo—and before they ate, Tsukuru told her how he had seen his two former friends in Nagoya, and what they had talked about. It wasn’t easy for him to summarize, so it took a while for him to tell her the whole story. Sara listened closely, occasionally stopping him to ask a question.