Rié and Yuto’s mother–son relationship

Rié and Yuto’s mother–son relationship is shaped by successive bereavements, changes of family name, and the revelation that the man Yuto knew as his father had lived under another identity. At first, Rié fears that her son is carrying grief and confusion in silence; their relationship changes when she shares the truth and recognizes that his books, his questions, and his own decisions are ways of understanding a family history she had tried to manage for him.

A family shaped by loss and obligation

The relationship unfolds against a history in which family members make choices under pressure, and the consequences reach children as well as adults. In an earlier generation, Daisuké agrees to donate part of his liver to his father. His parents and older brother want the father to survive, and Daisuké understands the urgency, but he also chooses to give freely rather than act from resentment. The episode makes family duty both a source of strain and an expression of attachment: a person can feel the unfairness of an expectation and still choose to help.

Rié’s own family life is likewise marked by painful decisions. After Ryo’s death, she seeks a divorce, while her husband urges her to move forward as a family. Kido, acting as her attorney, sees the damage caused by the husband’s self-importance, but the divorce and custody dispute also leave Yuto’s future tied to the decisions of adults. These circumstances form the background to Rié’s later effort to be more candid with her son: protecting him cannot mean assuming that she alone knows what he needs.

Names, grief, and Yuto’s claim to remember

By the time Yuto is in middle school, he has lived under three family names: Yoneda at birth, Takemoto after Rié’s first divorce, and Taniguchi after her later marriage. When Rié says she intends to return to her maiden name, he first seems to accept the news without much reaction. Then he tells her he does not want his own name changed. His reason is practical as well as personal: at school, friends and students in other years know him as Taniguchi, and he does not want to keep correcting them.

But the name is also bound to his sense of loyalty to the father he knew. Yuto asks when Rié will make a grave for him, points out that his ashes have remained in an urn, and worries that if he loses the Taniguchi name, his father’s family having turned away from him will be followed by his own family forgetting him. His appeal changes the meaning of Rié’s proposed name change. What seems to her like a return to her own former identity feels to Yuto like another possible severing of his father’s memory. His objection is not simply a wish to keep what is familiar; it is a claim that his relationship with his father should remain visible.

Care expressed indirectly

Yuto’s concern for others often appears through modest acts rather than direct explanations. Seeing his grandmother looking at an aquarium in the shed, he asks whether ordinary fish will do and offers to take care of goldfish. Rié is moved by this thoughtfulness, which recalls her late husband’s observation that Yuto was a considerate boy. The episode offers a small but telling instance of care crossing generations: the child who is himself carrying losses notices another person’s sadness and finds something concrete he can do.

Rié later watches Yuto at a field of flowers, quiet and keeping an eye on his younger sister, Hana. She considers the deaths he has experienced and realizes that he may be bearing pain without showing it. He tends the goldfish, looks after Hana, and reads; these are not proof that his grief has passed, but part of how he continues to hold himself together. Rié also recognizes that Yuto’s attachment to his second father was especially strong because of the age he was when that man was alive. She wishes she could ask her late husband how to advise him, an absence that sharpens her awareness that she must parent without the person she imagines would understand him best.

The difficult movement from protection to trust

When Rié finally tells Yuto that a lawyer has investigated his father for over a year and that she has learned why he changed his name, she has already been worrying about how much to disclose. Having revealed that their family name was fraudulent, she decides she cannot leave him with that revelation unexplained and gives him at least part of the investigation’s results. She fears both keeping him in the dark and treating him as too young to face what the truth may mean.

Her concern extends beyond one conversation. She has been trying to stop treating him like a child, while worrying that he might become too dependent on her in a household without a father figure. Yuto, entering adolescence, is also trying to find an appropriate distance from her. Rié finds the prospect of accepting him as the man of the house disconcerting, and part of her would prefer to keep caring for him as a child. Yet she recognizes that his inner life is not fully accessible to her and resolves to respect him as a person distinct from herself. Rather than speak condescendingly, she tries to explain her own feelings when she is upset, while continuing to offer honest advice.

Literature becomes a way to understand one another

Yuto’s reading gives Rié an unexpected way into feelings he does not readily put into conversation. He had told her about Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “Asakusa Park,” a story in which a boy becomes separated from his father, searches for him, and mistakes another man for him before that man eventually becomes his father. Rié struggles to understand the work, but she cries when she imagines Yuto empathizing with the lost boy. She wonders whether his interest in the story, read before she disclosed that his father was not Daisuké Taniguchi, was coincidence or a way of approaching something he had already sensed. She cannot know what he understood, but she realizes that his reading has helped her glimpse his loneliness.

Yuto’s own poem makes that indirect language more concrete. At Burial Mound Park, he describes seeing an abandoned cicada shell on a cherry tree while cicadas sang in the branches. He imagines the shell hearing the voice of the body that had lived underground for seven years, then compares the split along its back to a violin’s soundboard and the shell to a resonating instrument. The poem does not mention his brother’s or father’s death. Rié nevertheless associates its tree with the one her husband had chosen for himself and imagines Yuto alone, attending to the shell and the cicadas. Whether the account describes an actual visit or is partly invented remains uncertain; what matters to Rié is that writing has given her son a means of coping that she could not have prescribed.

A more reciprocal bond

After Yuto reads the account of his father’s life, he comes downstairs and asks whether the man ever killed anyone. Rié tells him he did not. Yuto says he feels sorry for him and understands his kindness as something the father had wanted his own father to show him. Rié adds that he was also kind because he cared about Yuto. In this exchange, Yuto does not merely receive information: he interprets the past and recognizes a pattern of care across generations.

He then breaks down in tears and apologizes. Rié cries with him, but the conversation does not end with her comforting him as though his role were only to grieve. She acknowledges that she should have kept him informed. Yuto asks whether she will tell Hana, and the two agree that they must look out for her. Before he leaves, he asks Rié to promise that she will tell him if she ever needs to talk; he responds in kind when she asks him to do the same. Rié watches him go, knowing she cannot decide how he will spend the night and that, for now, she has to let him leave the room on his own.

The relationship’s change is not a cure for grief or a resolution of every uncertainty. It is a shift in how mother and son meet one another: Rié shares what she knows, takes seriously what Yuto has understood, and accepts that his private ways of grieving may not look like her own. Their promise to speak when either needs support makes care mutual without erasing their different positions. The final image of Rié looking at photographs of her father, Ryo, and the family of four holds that change alongside absence: the father is gone, the children are growing, and mother and son must keep learning how to accompany each other.