Ryo

Ryo, Rié’s younger son, dies at two after an initially hopeful diagnosis of a brain tumor gives way to the discovery of an inoperable malignancy. The treatment chosen in the hope of recovery instead fills much of his remaining life with suffering, and his death leaves Rié with an enduring conviction that a life may be exchanged between people, but death cannot: she could not die in his place, and he could only die his own death.

Identity and Early Childhood

Ryo is the second son of Rié and her first husband, and Yuto’s younger brother. Before illness altered the family’s life, he was cheerful and energetic. He played often with Yuto and learned to speak at a striking pace. At twenty-two months he graduated from diapers, surprising Rié and his daycare teachers; his father instead took credit for the achievement, attributing it to an early-education method he had found online.

Shortly before his second birthday, Ryo began wetting the bed and having accidents at daycare. Rié and the daycare teachers reconsidered whether he had been potty-trained too early and returned him to diapers. His father interpreted the behavior as attention-seeking regression and scolded him, especially at bedtime. The symptoms were not a failure of discipline: they came from diabetes insipidus accompanying the tumor. The contrast between the adults’ initial explanations and the eventual diagnosis makes Ryo’s ordinary childhood behavior part of a tragedy that the family does not yet know how to read.

Illness and Treatment

When Ryo became ill just before turning two, the first hospital diagnosed a germinoma, a type of brain tumor with an encouraging stated prognosis: a five-year survival rate of 98 percent with radiation and chemotherapy. An MRI later confirmed a tumor in his basal ganglia. The doctor explained that his bedwetting and thirst were consequences of the accompanying diabetes insipidus, and said that treatment could bring a full recovery. Rié clung to the word “recovery,” later regretting how completely it shaped her hopes. The doctor seemed confident and had not adequately explained the possibility of glioblastoma.

The proposed surgical biopsy was canceled after Ryo’s father opposed it. The doctor had warned that biopsy carried some risk for a child so young; if the tumor was not a germinoma, the likely alternative was a malignant tumor in an inoperable location. Rié wanted the biopsy, while her husband argued that exposing Ryo to danger merely to identify an incurable disease was irrational. Unable to hold her ground in a debate about competing risks, she accepted his position. Their disagreement was not simply a dispute over medical information: neither parent could know then what the diagnosis would become, and both acted within a decision whose uncertainty was difficult to bear.

For three months Ryo underwent radiation and chemotherapy. Rié quit the bank job she had held since graduating from university, brought a folding cot to the hospital, and stayed at his bedside. His father did not do the same, and repeatedly insisted that the treatment was rational, telling Rié that she could not understand because she was a woman who had studied the humanities. As the tumor failed to shrink and instead grew, the treatment’s cost became visible in Ryo’s body: relentless vomiting, painful oral inflammation that made swallowing saliva enough to make him cry, and steadily increasing thinness. Rié held him as he thrashed in misery and continued to believe in recovery; in three months, she herself lost a fifth of her body weight.

A repeat MRI changed the diagnosis to glioblastoma, and the doctor said Ryo had less than a year to live. The family took him to another hospital, but the diagnosis was the same. Ryo died four months later, having lived only seven months after his first hospital visit. Three of those months had been spent enduring treatment that could not help him. His parents were both overcome with remorse. Rié imagined the days they might instead have spent giving him his favorite foods, taking him to the zoo he loved, and spoiling him; the recognition that they had subjected him to suffering without the promised recovery became a lasting source of grief.

Family Conflict and Loss

Ryo’s illness and death break Rié’s marriage. His father urged her and Yuto to move forward together as a family, but Rié refused and sought a divorce. She did not regard her husband as responsible for Ryo’s death; she believed, painfully, that she herself was at fault for going along with the treatment. What she could not accept was sharing her future with someone whose judgment and manner had become intolerable to her.

Her husband had tried to rally the family while emphasizing his own suffering and his love for Rié. He called her stupid and mad for holding him responsible, appealed to the lawyer Akira Kido as a fellow rational person, and asked him to persuade her to return. Kido saw that the man was not simply a bad person, yet also recognized how his self-importance had hurt Rié and contributed to Ryo’s ordeal. The conflict over treatment thus continues after Ryo’s death: for Rié, the irreparable loss cannot be resolved by her husband’s appeal to family unity.

The divorce took eleven months to settle, and Rié secured custody of Yuto. Afterward, her father died, leaving her to return with Yuto to her family home in Town S. Including Ryo, she lost three of the people she most loved one after another. Her father had never raised his voice to her and had never stopped loving her; Ryo’s death, by contrast, remained bound to the decisions and remorse surrounding his care. The different losses accumulate rather than cancel one another.

Memory and the Meaning of Death

Rié’s memory of Ryo is anchored in a moment from perhaps a month before his death. After leaving his hospital room to speak with the doctor, she returned to find him quietly staring at the ceiling. She wondered what he could be thinking and feeling, and whether he could understand what was happening in his body. The thought that a mind meant to serve him across many decades could now only recognize an approaching end makes the remembered stillness especially painful. When the image returns, Rié can lose the strength to stand; she sits wherever she is and covers her face.

She also remembers Ryo’s earnest obedience. During treatment, when the doctor encouraged him to hang in there and called him a big boy, Ryo sat on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap and answered, “Yes, sir . . . Yes, sir . . .” He used that formal response because his father had drilled it into him. His hair had fallen out, and his face had swollen almost beyond recognition, yet it was this expression of tender innocence—not his crying, scowling face—that Rié recalls. The repeated assent survives in her dreams, where she hears him answering his father’s instruction again and again.

The anguish of Ryo’s final illness teaches Rié that she could not substitute her own death for his. She had genuinely wished to die for him and prayed for a miracle, but the wish could not alter the fact that only Ryo could die his own death. This understanding also gives her a way to distinguish his loss from the other deaths and disappearances that shape her life: lives may be exchanged, but death remains particular to the person who undergoes it.

Years later, Rié imagines Ryo as eleven, the age he would have been had he lived. She knows that she cannot picture her father growing older in the afterlife, and she cannot fully persuade herself that Ryo waits for her there. Yet the possibility that her dead loved ones have gone ahead for her softens her fear of death and gives her something to lean on in the present. It brings comfort and a new burden: if Ryo is waiting, she cannot bear the thought of keeping him there for another forty-odd years. More than anything, she wants to apologize for the treatment she believed had made him suffer needlessly.

Ryo’s Place in the Family’s Later Life

Yuto was too young to grasp the full meaning of Ryo’s death when it happened, and Rié initially took comfort in the energetic boy he became after their return to Town S. As he grew older, however, she began to see that his grief had not disappeared. She considers how he has also lost his grandfather and the man he thought of as his father, and recognizes that he may be enduring pain without expressing it. His care for goldfish, attentiveness to his younger sister Hana, and reading are among the things through which he keeps himself going.

Yuto’s relationship to the family’s changing names also makes memory concrete. When Rié plans to return to her maiden name, he asks to remain Yuto Taniguchi: classmates and other students know him by that name, and he fears being made to explain another change. He also objects that Ryo’s ashes have remained in an urn and that Rié hardly speaks about him. He worries that if the family turns back to Takemoto, they will do to his father what his father’s family did—turn away and forget him. His words force Rié to recognize that grieving Ryo and remembering the man Yuto regarded as his father cannot be kept separate from Yuto’s own need for continuity.

Rié comes to her son through the literature he reads. Akutagawa’s “Asakusa Park,” which Yuto had read before she told him that his father was not Daisuké Taniguchi, features a boy separated from his father and searching for him. Rié cannot determine whether Yuto had sensed the truth, but she cries when she imagines him responding to the story from within his own loneliness. Later, Yuto explains a poem through the image of an abandoned cicada shell on a cherry tree: he imagined how the shell might hear the cicada that had emerged from it, then saw in the crack along its back the soundboard of a violin. He does not mention Ryo or his father, but Rié understands that the image belongs to a world of loss and survival. Ryo’s absence is not resolved by these acts of reading and writing; instead, they help Rié recognize that her surviving son has found his own way to live with what the family has lost.

Ryo therefore remains present not through a continuing plot of his own, but through the particularity of the death that no one could take from him. His remembered gaze at the ceiling, his dutiful “Yes, sir,” and the years he never reached persist in Rié’s regret and in Yuto’s efforts to hold his family’s memory together. The story’s distinction between an exchangeable life and an unexchangeable death begins in the difference between what Ryo’s parents hoped treatment could do and what his death made irrevocable.