From the middle of the academic year until its end—from July to the following January, that is—second-year student Tsukuru Tazaki lived almost with a single, solitary thought: death. In the meantime, he also passed his twentieth birthday, but the date meant absolutely nothing. At that time, he felt that by cutting the thread of his life, he would be doing the most natural and consistent thing in the world. And although the passage from life to death seemed easier to him than swallowing a raw egg, even now he could not say with certainty why he did not take the fatal step back then.
Perhaps he did not actually try to commit suicide because he had such an excessively clear and vivid image of death that he was unable to find within himself an equally intense image of a way to die. The practical side of the matter, of course, was a secondary problem. If at that time he had come across the door that led to death, he would have opened it without a second thought. He wouldn’t have been concerned; the act would have been a natural extension of his daily routine. But fortunately for him—or unfortunately—no such door appeared before him.
I wish I had died back then, Tsukuru Tazaki often thought. If I had done it, the world I live in today would not exist. He found the idea particularly tempting: since the world he now lived in would not exist, anything considered real would lose its true dimension. In other words, the world would not exist for Tsukuru, precisely because Tsukuru would not exist for the world.
At the same time, however, he did not understand why at that time he absolutely had to come so close to the edge of death. And if he had to, why did he feel such a strong desire to do it, so much so that for almost half a year the idea consumed him? The verb “consumed” was the most accurate. Like Jonah, who was swallowed by a giant whale and survived in its stomach, Tsukuru found himself in the stomach of death and spent endless days inside a bottomless and dark hole.