Rie divorced her first husband and fought for Yuto's custody

Rié’s divorce from her first husband is a prolonged effort to shape a future after the death of their younger son, Ryo. Though both parents grieve, Rié cannot accept her husband’s wish that they continue as a family; with Kido’s help, she eventually obtains a divorce and custody of Yuto. The resolution brings legal clarity to a relationship that grief and incompatible understandings of responsibility had already broken.

Marriage and Family Background

Raised in Town S, Rié left home after high school to attend university in Kanagawa Prefecture. She found steady work there and married an assistant at an architecture firm at twenty-five. The couple had two sons: Yuto and, later, Ryo. Family life was subsequently reshaped by Ryo’s diagnosis and death, which became the first profound sorrow Rié had experienced.

Ryo’s Death and the Decision to Separate

Ryo was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age two. Rié and her husband disagreed over his treatment, and the conflict remained painful for her even after their son died. The account gives particular weight to the treatment’s aftermath: Ryo lived only seven months after his first hospital visit and spent three of those months undergoing treatment that proved futile. Both parents were overcome with remorse, but their shared grief did not produce a shared way forward.

Rié’s husband urged her and Yuto to move beyond the calamity together. Rié refused and asked for a divorce—not because she held him responsible for Ryo’s death, but because she believed the death was her own fault and could not accept sharing her future with someone like her husband. Her refusal therefore arose from an irreparable difference in how she understood their relationship and its future, rather than from a simple accusation of blame.

Kido’s Representation and the Mediation

Kido sympathized with Rié but explained that, legally, her stated reason by itself would not establish a conclusive ground for divorce. He also considered her husband’s position. When Kido sought a doctor’s perspective from his brother-in-law, he was told that the treatment decision had been difficult for a layperson, that the doctor’s explanation had been flawed, and that Rié’s anger was hard to understand. What nevertheless moved Kido to take the case was his sense that Rié’s complex but pure humanity was asking him for a deeper compassion.

Meeting Rié’s husband as her attorney helped Kido see why her feelings had hardened. The husband spoke at length about his own suffering, called Rié stupid and mad for assigning responsibility to him, and appealed to Kido as a fellow rational person. He also wept over the loss of Ryo, insisted that he loved Rié, and asked Kido to persuade her to reconcile. Kido did not regard him as simply a bad person. Yet he saw how the man’s inflated sense of his own importance had wounded Rié, contributed to their young son’s anguish during his remaining time, and was now helping to ruin the husband’s own life.

Across the mediation, Kido let the husband express his complaints while trying to make clear that Rié’s love would not return. The husband began to treat Kido with something like reverence: he repeatedly restated Kido’s legal explanations in his own words, apparently finding comfort in the sense that he understood them. His efforts to establish himself as a respectable person struck Kido as desperate. The legal discussions thus became both negotiation and a means by which the husband tried to restore his injured pride.

Settlement and Its Consequences

After ten months, the husband showed impatience with the mediation and seemed unusually cheerful. Kido noticed the change, had misgivings, and hired a detective to investigate. When he showed the husband a photograph of him with the new woman he was seeing, Kido advised that the time had come to conclude the negotiations. The husband then consented, with surprisingly little rancor, both to the divorce and to giving Rié custody of Yuto—a point on which he had previously refused to yield.

The custody outcome mattered because it had been one of the principal obstacles in the negotiations. In the broader account of the divorce, the process is described as taking eleven months and as moving from one argument to another; Rié secured custody with the assistance of a capable lawyer. The difference between the ten-month point at which Kido pressed for closure and the stated eleven months for reaching agreement marks the final stretch as more than a sudden resolution: the negotiations still had to conclude after the decisive change in the husband’s position.

The divorce came amid further loss. As the settlement was taking shape, Rié’s father died suddenly, prompting her to return with Yuto to the family home in Town S. The mediation therefore separated Rié from her first husband but did not give her an uncomplicated new beginning: custody of Yuto was secured while bereavement continued to accumulate around her.

Narrative Significance

The divorce turns on a distinction between legal responsibility and emotional possibility. Kido can explain what the law will recognize, and he can hear both sides, but neither legal reasoning nor the husband’s declarations of love can restore a future Rié does not want. His work is consequently not to reconcile the couple, but to guide a drawn-out process toward an outcome that respects her decision and protects her relationship with Yuto.

The settlement also resists a simple division into a wholly innocent party and a wholly villainous one. Kido recognizes the husband’s grief and does not consider him inherently bad, while still seeing the harm caused by his self-importance and his inability to understand Rié’s position. That tension gives the mediation its emotional and ethical shape: grief is shared, but its meaning and consequences are not. For Rié, leaving the marriage is not a claim that the past can be undone; it is a refusal to make that past the basis of a future she cannot accept.