Rié and Ryo’s mother-son relationship

Rié and Ryo’s mother-son relationship is defined by the tenderness of their brief life together and by the grief and regret that endure after his death at age two. When Ryo became seriously ill, Rié tried to act on the hope that treatment would save him; afterward, she repeatedly returned to the suffering he endured and wondered what he had understood. His absence shaped her later efforts to care for Yuto, while her growing awareness of Yuto’s own grief made Ryo’s memory part of an ongoing, if difficult, family conversation.

Family and early bond

Ryo was Rié’s younger son, born after Yuto. His illness and death became the first deep sorrow she had experienced. The loss was not an event she could set aside: even when alone, she often thought of Ryo and cried. Her memories held both the fact of his short life and the unanswered question of what was passing through his mind as he faced an illness he could not have understood as an adult might.

One memory returned with particular force. Around a month before Ryo died, Rié left his hospital ward to speak with a doctor and came back to find him quietly looking at the ceiling. She studied his profile and wondered what he was thinking or feeling. In retrospect, she imagined that the mind he might have used over many decades was instead registering the approach of death, while recognizing that he could not comprehend the terrible process taking place in his body. Whenever she recalled him in that moment, the grief could overwhelm her so completely that she had to sit down and cover her face.

Illness, treatment, and regret

Ryo became ill as he approached his second birthday. His first diagnosis was germinoma, for which the doctors described a promising outlook with radiation and chemotherapy. A biopsy was proposed, but Rié’s husband opposed it because the procedure carried risks for a very young child and might only confirm a tumor that could not be treated. Rié believed they should proceed, but found it difficult to hold her position in an argument about uncertain risks and agreed to her husband’s decision. She later regretted having trusted the assurance of recovery so completely, while also recognizing that the doctor had not clearly explained the possibility of glioblastoma.

Rié quit her bank job and stayed beside Ryo through three months of treatment. His tumor did not shrink as expected; further imaging led to a diagnosis of glioblastoma and the news that he had less than a year to live. Rié took him to another hospital, but the diagnosis was unchanged. He died four months later, having lived only seven months after the first hospital visit, three of them spent undergoing treatment that could not save him.

The outcome transformed the meaning of the hope Rié had relied on. Once she understood that recovery would not come, she imagined the time they had spent pursuing treatment differently: as days that might instead have been devoted to Ryo’s favorite foods, the zoo he enjoyed, and the pleasures of the life he had left. Her regret did not amount simply to blaming herself or her husband. It was bound up with the knowledge that both parents had wanted him to live, and that their choices had nevertheless exposed him to suffering without changing the outcome.

Loss and its afterlife

Rié’s grief took the form of questions she could not answer. She wished she could have died in Ryo’s place, but understood that she could not take his death from him: only Ryo could die his own death, and her own life would continue. That distinction made his death feel irreducibly his, rather than a loss that love or sacrifice could undo. In her wider crisis of bereavement, the question of who had died became entangled with uncertainty about the identity of the husband she had lost; the family-register name did not settle who that man had been. Ryo’s death and her husband’s death were distinct losses, but both left Rié confronting the limits of what a name could explain about a person.

Ryo’s absence also changed how Rié understood her surviving son. Yuto had been too young to grasp the meaning of his brother’s death when it happened, and Rié took comfort in his energy after they returned to Town S. Later, however, she recognized that he had lost not only Ryo but also his grandfather and the man he had thought of as his father. She had mistaken his quietness for an absence of grief and came to see that his sadness, like hers, could persist without being spoken aloud.

Yuto, memory, and care

Yuto’s relationship to the family’s losses emerged through acts and requests rather than a full explanation of what he felt. After noticing his grandmother looking at the aquarium in the shed, he asked whether he could keep goldfish and offered to care for them. Rié was moved by this thoughtfulness, and remembered that her late husband had also praised Yuto as a considerate boy. In the context of the family’s bereavements, Yuto’s care for the fish became one visible way he responded to the people around him.

His concern for Ryo’s memory became explicit when Rié said she would return to her maiden name. Yuto asked to keep the Taniguchi surname he had used at school and explained that changing names again would separate him from the name by which his friends and classmates knew him. He also asked when Rié would make a grave for his father, noting that the ashes had remained in the urn and that she rarely spoke about him. If Rié returned to Takemoto, Yuto wanted to remain Yuto Taniguchi; it did not feel right to him that his father’s family had turned away from his father and that they might forget him too. His words led Rié to ask what sort of person he thought his father had been, opening space for a conversation about the dead rather than allowing their names and ashes to stand in for remembrance.

As Yuto grew older, literature gave Rié another way to recognize what he was carrying. After reading a story he had recommended, she cried not simply out of sympathy for its boy character, but because she imagined Yuto identifying with a child separated from his father. She wondered whether he might have sensed something about his own father’s identity before she told him the truth, though she could not know what he had understood. What mattered to her was that his reading had become an indirect means of sharing a private emotional response, and that attending to it helped her feel closer to him.

Yuto’s writing likewise allowed grief to take a form he did not name directly. In a poem explanation, he described an abandoned cicada shell on a cherry tree in Burial Mound Park, the cicadas singing in the branches, and his imagining how the shell might hear the voice of the body that had lived inside it. Rié connected the tree to the one her late husband had chosen for himself and imagined Yuto alone, listening and looking. The poem made no direct mention of Ryo or his father, but Rié understood that Yuto had found, through literature, a way of coping with life’s ordeals that she could not have prescribed for him.

An enduring relationship

Ryo’s mother-son relationship with Rié ends in bereavement, but not in disappearance from the family’s life. Rié’s repeated return to the hospital memory, her remorse over the treatment, and her recognition that she could not exchange her own life for his all register the permanence of the loss. At the same time, her later attention to Yuto’s questions, care, and literary expression shows how that loss continued to shape her way of being a mother. Ryo remains present not through a resolved account of what he knew or felt, but through the memories and acts of care that his death left behind.