Junpei accepts Kirie as his second significant woman

Junpei accepts Kirie as the second of the three women who have real meaning in his life, making a quiet separation into a lasting emotional commitment. His choice changes the purpose of his father’s countdown: instead of treating love as a numerical limit to fear, he recognizes that what matters is accepting another person completely.

The Countdown and the Question

Junpei has been trying to understand his life through his father’s theory that a person has three women who truly matter. After Kirie disappears from his daily life, he cannot decide whether she belongs among them. He considers the question for some time and sets himself a further six months before reaching a conclusion. The delay reflects a genuine uncertainty: he wants to name what Kirie means to him, but cannot make the feeling fit a rule merely by counting.

The relationship ends without a confrontation. Junpei waits months for Kirie to contact him, hoping to see her and talk about many things, including the kidney-shaped stone. Her calls never come, and his attempts to reach her cannot be completed. When summer arrives, he gives up hope; the relationship has ended as quietly and naturally as his earlier relationships, through calls that simply stop. The absence of a dramatic break leaves him with no final conversation to settle what the relationship meant.

Six Months of Writing and Remembering

During the six months he has given himself, Junpei writes a large number of short stories, working with concentration at his desk and polishing their style. His thoughts return to Kirie as he writes. He imagines her alone in a high place with the wind, beyond the reach of a lifeline, and recalls her words, “Just me and the wind.” Her image is bound to a kind of concentration in which fear falls away, while Junpei remains alone at his desk.

His feeling for her takes on a clarity and weight he has not experienced with another woman. He cannot decide what to call it, but knows it cannot be exchanged for anything else. Even if he never sees Kirie again, the feeling will remain; her absence, he recognizes, will continue to inhabit him. The writing period thus does not restore the relationship or answer why it ended. It gives Junpei time to recognize what persists after contact has ceased.

Choosing Kirie

As the year ends, Junpei decides to count Kirie as number two. The decision resolves the question he has carried through the six-month wait: she is one of the women who have real meaning for him. The language of a countdown remains, but its force has changed. Junpei is no longer afraid of the remaining number, because he understands that the count itself has no meaning.

What matters, he concludes, is deciding in one’s heart to accept another person completely—and doing so as both the first time and the last. His acceptance does not depend on reunion, explanation, or possession; Kirie may never return, yet his feeling for her has become part of his life. The ending joins absence to commitment: the relationship is over, but its significance is not.

The Stone and the Open Ending

The story closes with the dark kidney-shaped stone disappearing from a woman doctor’s desk. She knows it will not come back. The disappearance gives the ending a concrete counterpart to Junpei’s own experience of loss: something can vanish without a return, while the meaning attached to it remains consequential. The narrative does not explain the stone’s final movement or connect it conclusively to Junpei’s decision; instead, its unrecoverable absence resonates with the relationship’s quiet ending.

Junpei’s acceptance is therefore a change in how he understands attachment, not a resolution that brings Kirie back. He moves from uncertainty about whether she qualifies for a place in his life to an inward decision that gives their relationship lasting meaning. The countdown’s arithmetic yields to an act of recognition: Kirie is number two, but the number is less important than the complete acceptance it names.