Haruki Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“The voice is the woman’s husband, I think,” Olga said. “Last Friday they left their apartment and went to their summer cottage. They won’t be back until the middle of August. He gave the phone number for the cottage.”

“Is it far away?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t say where it is. What we know from the message is just the phone number, and that it’s in Finland. If you call the number, you should be able to find out where it is.”

“If you could do that for me, I’d really appreciate it. But I do have one request,” Tsukuru said. “I don’t want you to mention my name on the phone. If possible, I’d like to visit her without her knowing that I’m coming.”

Olga seemed curious.

Tsukuru explained. “She’s a really good friend of mine from high school, but I haven’t seen her for a long time. I don’t think she has any idea that I came to see her. I’m hoping to surprise her.”

“A surprise,” she said, opening her hands on her lap palms up. “That sounds like a lot of fun.”

“I hope she’ll agree.”

“Was she your girlfriend?” Olga asked.

Tsukuru shook his head. “No, it wasn’t that kind of relationship. We belonged to the same group of friends. That’s all. But we were very close.”

She inclined her head a bit. “Good friends in high school are hard to come by. I had one good friend in high school. We still see each other often.”

Tsukuru nodded.

“And your friend married a Finnish man and moved here. You haven’t seen her for a long time. Is that correct?”

“I haven’t seen her for sixteen years.”

Olga rubbed her temple with her index finger a couple of times. “I understand. I’ll try to get her address without mentioning your name. I’ll think of a good way. Can you tell me her name?”

Tsukuru wrote down Kuro’s name in her memo pad.

“What’s the name of the town your high school was in?”

“Nagoya,” Tsukuru told her.

Olga took his cell phone again and dialed the number given on the answering machine. The phone rang a few times, and then someone answered. Olga spoke to the person in Finnish, using a friendly tone. She explained something, the other person asked her a question, and again she gave a concise explanation. She said the name Eri several times. After a few rounds of this, the other person seemed convinced. Olga picked up her ballpoint pen and noted something down. She politely thanked the person and hung up.

“It worked,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

“Their last name is Haatainen. The husband’s first name is Edvard. He’s spending the summer at their lakeside cottage outside a town called Hämeenlinna, northwest of Helsinki. Eri and the children are with him, of course.”

“How did you find that out without mentioning my name?”

Olga smiled impishly. “I told a tiny lie. I pretended to be a FedEx delivery person. I said I had a package addressed to Eri from Nagoya, Japan, and asked him where I should forward it. Her husband answered the phone and didn’t hesitate to give me the forwarding address. Here it is.”

She passed him a sheet from her memo pad. She stood up, went over to the concierge desk, and got a simple map of southern Finland. She spread the map open and marked the location of Hämeenlinna.

“Here’s where Hämeenlinna is. I’ll look up the address of their summer cottage on Google. The office is closed now, so I’ll print it out tomorrow and give it to you then.”

“How long would it take to get there?”

“Well, it’s about 100 kilometers, so from here by car you should allow about an hour and a half. The highway runs straight there. There are trains, too, but then you’d still need a car to get to their house.”

“I’ll rent a car.”

“In Hämeenlinna there’s a lovely castle by the lakeside, and the house where Sibelius was born. But I imagine you have more important matters. Tomorrow why don’t you come by the office whenever’s convenient for you? We open at nine. There’s a car rental place nearby, and I’ll take care of renting a car for you.”

“You’ve been a big help,” Tsukuru said, thanking her.

“A good friend of Sara’s is a friend of mine,” Olga said, and winked. “I hope you can meet Eri. And that she’ll be surprised.”

“I hope so. That’s really why I came here.”

Olga hesitated for a moment, then said, “I know this is none of my business, but is there something very important that made you come all the way here to see her?”

“Important to me, perhaps. But maybe not to her. I came here to find that out.”

“It sounds kind of complicated.”

“Maybe too complicated for me to explain in English.”

Olga laughed. “Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”

Tsukuru nodded. Coming up with witty sayings about life seemed, after all, to be a trait shared by all Finns. The long winters might have something to do with it. But she was right. This was a problem that had nothing to do with language. Most likely.

She stood up from the sofa, and Tsukuru stood up too and shook her hand.

“Until tomorrow morning, then,” she said. “I imagine you’re jet-lagged, and with the sun staying out so late at night, people who aren’t used to it sometimes have trouble sleeping. It’d be a good idea to ask for a wake-up call.”

“I’ll do that,” Tsukuru said. Olga slung her bag over her shoulder and strode off through the lobby and out the entrance. She didn’t look back.

Tsukuru folded the paper she’d given him, put it in his wallet, and stuffed the map in his pocket. He left the hotel and wandered around the city.

At least now he knew Eri’s address. She was there, along with her husband and two small children. All that remained was whether she would see him. He might have flown halfway around the world to see her, but she might well refuse to meet him. It was entirely possible. According to Ao, it was Kuro who had first taken Shiro’s side regarding the rape, the one who’d pushed them to cut off Tsukuru. He couldn’t imagine what sort of feelings she had for him after Shiro’s murder and the breakup of the group. She might feel totally indifferent toward him. All he could do was go see her and find out.

It was after 8 p.m., but as Olga had said, the sun showed no signs of setting. Many stores were still open, and the streets, still as bright as day, were crowded with pedestrians. People filled the cafés, drinking beer and wine, and chatting. As he walked down the old streets lined with round paving stones, Tsukuru caught a whiff of fish being grilled. It reminded him of grilled mackerel in Japanese diners. Hungry, he followed the smell into a side street but couldn’t locate the source. As he searched the streets, the smell grew fainter, and then vanished.

It was too much trouble to search for somewhere to eat, so he went into a nearby pizzeria, sat down at an outdoor table, and ordered iced tea and a margherita pizza. He could hear Sara laughing at him. You flew all the way to Finland, and you ate a margherita pizza? She would definitely be amused by this. But the pizza turned out to be delicious, much better than he’d expected. They’d baked it in a real coal oven, and it was thin and crispy, with fragrant charcoal marks on the crust.

This casual pizzeria was nearly full of families and young couples. There was a group of students, too. Everyone was drinking either beer or wine, and many were puffing away on cigarettes. The only one Tsukuru could see sitting alone, drinking iced tea while he ate his pizza, was himself. Everyone else was talking loudly, boisterously, and the words he overheard were all (he imagined) Finnish. The restaurant seemed to cater to locals, not tourists. It finally struck him: he was far from Japan, in another country. No matter where he was, he almost always ate alone, so that didn’t particularly bother him. But here he wasn’t simply alone . He was alone in two senses of the word. He was also a foreigner, the people around him speaking a language he couldn’t understand.